A long history of cloth trade

The kanga emerged from the century-long practice of Swahili-Indian Ocean trade (see map), during which cloth was widely requested by East African customers.

For a long time, indigo-dyed cloth and natural, white cloth from India were common dress among East African women. But preferences and fashion changed, and women started demanding colorful, patterned cloth. In the mid-19th century, new printing techniques were invented in Europe, as were synthetic dyes. As a result, the price of such printed cloths dropped significantly, which made them widely available and affordable for East African women. MacKenzie Moon Ryan, “Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century", in Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth, ed. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 259-262

At first, small printed cotton handkerchiefs, called leso, were brought into the region by the Portuguese. The interest for those cloths increased rapidly and shortly after, women began to sew several of the small cloths together to create a large wrapping cloth to wear around the body (Figure 7). As a response, European producers began to print and export such large, rectangular cloths - the kanga was born. MacKenzie Moon Ryan, “Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth, ed. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 266-269