The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora

The First Makers: West Africa and the DiasporaThis edition is different from every other one in this series.Every tradition we’ve covered so far came to us through a written documentary record (the Kojiki, the Rigveda, Hesiod). The traditions in this edition travelled through the worst thing human beings have ever done to each other. And they survived.In this episode I cover:Anansi (ah-NAHN-see) – the Akan spider trickster of Ghana, whose web became the origin of kente cloth. The Dogon of Mali – whose sage Ogotemmêli described the loom as a living body through which divine word enters the world. To weave at night would be to weave silence and darkness into the cloth. Oshun (O-shun) – Yoruba goddess of freshwater, fertility, and the creative arts. When the other gods failed to populate the Earth, it was Oshun who succeeded.Yemoja (yeh-MOH-jah) – Yoruba mother of waters, mother of many gods, whose presence in the Americas is one of the most remarkable stories of religious survival in human history.Because then the Middle Passage happened. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from their homes and forced onto ships crossing the Atlantic. They arrived with nothing except what they remembered and they kept it alive.In Brazil it became Candomblé. In Cuba, Lucumí. In Haiti, sacred textile flags were made inside Vodou temples to honour the spirits. This is the First Makers thesis in its fullest form. A tradition that survived the unsurvivable because the people who carried it refused to let it die.The First Makers is part of the Goddess Project – a long-form series tracing the history of draped cloth as political act, culminating in the Esther sewing pattern in August/September 2026.Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles. https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/diasporic-threads-black-women-fibre-textiles-revised-edition