About ten years ago, my youngest daughter and I took a vacation trip to Paris. If you’ve never been there, you might be surprised to learn that a lot of African people and people of mixed African and French backgrounds live in Paris.

So after our visit to Paris was over, we waited to board our plane to come back to the US, and in the airport, we sat across from two beautifully clad women from Senegal. (I speak fluent French, so I asked them where they were from and where they were headed.)

If I remember correctly, one lady was dressed to the nines in a long dress that was made of bright cobalt blue fabric dotted with yellow geometric shapes; the other wore a brilliant red garment made of un-patterned fabric. My gosh! Their outfits were so eye-catching!

I wish I had taken a photo, but I was having such a lively conversation with them, that alas, I didn’t ask them if I could take their picture. And of course, they were waiting for a different plane than my daughter and myself.

Each of them wore an elaborate head-tie made of the exact same fabric as their garments. Of course I asked them, “Did you make your dresses?” And they seemed honored by the question because they had, indeed sewn their own garments, head tie and all.

Later in this Black History Month series, I’m going to look more closely at the head ties worn as traditional African accessories, but for now, let’s stick to the story of the two Senegalese ladies in the airport in Paris.

In doing my research for Black History Month, I’ve decided that the garments these ladies were wearing were most likely variations on the boubou. According to Wikipedia, “The boubou or grand boubou is a flowing wide-sleeved robe worn across West Africa, and to a lesser extent in North Africa, related to the dashiki suit.”

When you use Google Images to find pictures of “women in bright boubou” several words come up as related to the boubou (concepts that may help you with further research), including abayas, kaftans, embroidery, and African dresses.

So let’s start with a look at the abaya.

It wouldn’t be Black History Month without reflecting upon at how Islam has shaped the fashion of African people, and the abaya is a robe-like garment that we sometimes see Muslim people wearing. Now I’m using Canva to help me search out the graphic images I’m uploading into my blog posts, so keep in mind that the links I’m providing will give you a better idea of what these traditional African clothes look like in photographs, than my limited digital graphics do.

But with that caveat in mind, here’s an image of an abaya, which I found in the archives of Canva:

That’s not what the two ladies in the Paris airport were wearing, by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly is relevant to Black History Month. So let’s go down that road for a moment.

The BBC had a radio series called “The Story of Africa.” In an online document from this series, it says, “According to Arab oral tradition, Islam first came to Africa with Muslim refugees fleeing persecution in the Arab peninsula. This was followed by a military invasion, some seven years after the death of the prophet Mohammed in 639…”

So we can surmise that Islam has a very long history in Africa.

Later in this document, it tells us that “By the 1880’s, Islam had taken root in one third of the continent.”

But I digress. Let’s get back to the story of the two ladies in a Paris airport… Were they wearing abayas? No. That doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t Muslim though.

Going back to my search on Google Images, another word that was associated with the “boubou” was the word kaftan. Were the women in the Paris airport wearing kaftans?

When I look at the image I found of the male version of a boubou, yes, a kaftan does come to mind. Being a doll clothing designer, when I hear the word “kaftan” the image that pops into my head is Brad and Skye wearing the red and off-white kaftan set from Simplicity 7737!

But this isn’t quite what the ladies in the Paris airport were wearing either. The placket down the front of Skye’s dress was missing from the Senegalese ladies’ garments.

Instead, their clothing had more of a rounded collar with an edging to it, like you see in the photo below (which I found on Canva when I searched for “Senegal”):

If I were to collect and organize images of African garments, though, kaftans and a woman’s boubou would likely be sorted together as similar in style.

Wikipedia describes the boubou thus: “The boubou or grand boubou is a flowing wide-sleeved robe worn across West Africa, and to a lesser extent in North Africa, related to the dashiki suit.” When you google “dashiki suit,” you do get images of gentlemen wearing something akin to the outfit Brad is wearing in View 6 of the Simplicity 7737 pattern, but with a longer tunic.

So I think the image that I’ve used for my male version of the boubou is probably pretty close (look below for that).

There’s even an image on Wikipedia’s “Boubou (clothing)” article of Niger President Mamadou Tandja wearing a grand boubou, and his boubou looks a lot like this!

But President Mamadou Tandja’s boubou, in the photo on Wikipedia, seems to have an over-wrap of some sort. I found a few places (including Wikipedia) where this was referred to as an “over-gown,” and it seems to be associated with the grand boubou, as opposed to a regular boubou.

Also, a woman’s boubou is quite different from a man’s. Where the woman’s boubou is more of a single-garment dress or gown, a man’s boubou has many parts.

“Boubou as a full formal attire consists of three pieces of clothing: a pair of tie-up trousers that narrow towards the ankles (known as a ṣòkòtò pronounced “shokoto” in Yoruba), a long-sleeved shirt and a wide, open-stitched sleeveless gown worn over these. The three pieces are generally of the same colour. It is made from cotton and richly embroidered in traditional patterns.”

That must be why the word “embroidery” was associated with my Google Image search for the boubou. But when did the boubou come into fashion?

The article on Wikipedia talks about the different boubou styles for various regions of North and West Africa. “The use of the boubou/babban-riga as clothing became widespread… in and around Muslim regions of West Africa in the 1400s and even more rapidly in less Islamized areas after… French and British colonization.”

There’s a whole history there that we could explore, but for now, let’s see how the boubou relates to modern-day African Americans. Today this garment is widely worn across regions stretching from Senegal to Niger in West Africa, and that’s the area from which many African Americans can trace their ancestry.

According to an article published by The History Channel, during the slave trade, “Of those Africans who arrived in the United States, nearly half came from two regions: Senegambia, the area comprising the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and the land between them, or today’s Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali; and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon.”

We can imagine that some earlier form of the modern-day boubou was worn by at least some of those people before they came to America. And personally, I’m left to wonder how the fashion history of early African Americans helped to shape the styles worn by people throughout the North American continent today.

I mean, enslaved people must have done some sewing — if not most of the sewing — after they arrived here, right? So I wonder what traces of their ancestors’ sewing techniques still reside in the fashion styles Americans love most in the modern United States. It’s an interesting question to ponder…

Feel free to leave a comment related to this.

Sources:

Blyden, Edward W. “The Story of Africa : Islam.” BBC.co.uk, BBC World Service. 2014. Web. Accessed 21 January 2024.

Pruit, Sarah. “What Part of Africa Did Most Enslaved People Come From?” History.com, A&E Networks. 18 July 2023. Web. 21 Jan. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Abaya.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Jan. 2024. Web. 21 Jan. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Boubou (clothing).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Jan. 2024. Web. 21 Jan. 2024.

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