African Style

African Style for Men

Africa is a vast place, so there are many styles of dress there. In addition there are also differences based on various time periods in Africa.

Africans seem to start wearing clothes about 180,000 years ago, not long after Homo sapiens appeared. Initially people make clothes from animal skins. They also make jewelry from shells, birds' eggs, and poultry feathers.

A few years later, people started making lighter and cooler clothes. The first type of clothing in Africa can be made of bundled and tied bark fibers. In Uganda, Central Africa, for example, people use figskin. This type of bark cloth may be related to the development of Egyptian apus. People also use mashed fabrics from palm raffia, as Herodotos reported in Persian explorers Sataspes.

The bark fabric is colored to produce a variety of colors. The most important dye is indigo, which is now used to color blue jeans. Africans use dyed lettuce to make nuances on the fabric. In some places, women make clothes and elsewhere men do it. Nonetheless, early Africans continued to wear animal and skin feathers, poultry head feathers, and jewelry from shells, eggs, feathers, and grasses.