Adanwomase is a town in the Kwabre East District of Ghana’s Ashanti Region. About 27 kilometers northeast of Kumasi is Adanwomase. Kente weaving with towns like Bonwire, which is roughly 2 kilometers away, is well-known. The Adanwomase Secondary School is also well-known in the town. A miniature Kente weaving museum is also located in the town.
In 1697, the Ashanti King commissioned one of his sub-chiefs, the Akyimpimhene, to send individuals from the towns of Adanwomase, Asotwe, Bonwire, and Wonoo to Bontuku, a small settlement in modern-day Ivory Coast, to study strip-weaving. The apprentices were given swatches of fabric with specific patterns on them when they returned, which they were instructed to study and be ready to reproduce on demand. These designs were known as Sesea and are said to be the first real Ashanti Kente Cloth. The original Sesea swatches, which date back centuries, are still kept in the Kente Chief’s residence in Adanwomase.
Adanwomase has been the Ashanti King’s royal weaving settlement since the first apprentices returned from Bontuku. The apprentices passed on the craft of Kente weaving to their friends and relatives, adding their own designs and colors in the process, resulting in the Ashanti Kente cloth we know today.
Adanwomase continues the centuries-old Kente weaving heritage to this day. Adanwomase weavers continue to weave textiles for the Ashanti King, royals, and everyone who understands the historical and cultural value weaved into Ashanti Kente under the direction of the Kente Chief. The Adanwo tree is the source of the town’s name. In Asante Twi, the name Adanwomase means “neath the Adanwo tree.”
Traditional Kente textile weaving is also popular in Adanwomase. Despite the fact that many oral accounts exist about the beginnings of Kente Cloth, historians and researchers agree that the manufacture of Kente Cloth is a continuation of millennia of strip-weaving in West Africa. Since the 11th century, West Africans have been strip-weaving. The art form is thought to have originated in the present-day Bonoman or Brong-Ahafo Region and expanded throughout West Africa through trade and migration, according to most scholars.
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Website: https://www.adanwomase.com/