Economic Botany Collections

Bark cloth dress from Uganda

J. Mahon, Acting Curator of the Botanic Gardens, Entebbe Uganda Protectorate, presented this toga style dress to Kew in 1901. It is a dress of the Waganda people. Mahon claimed that he never saw the natives wearing this ornamented cloth, as bark-cloth attire was falling into disuse by men at this point and was the badge of the Mashenji or lowest labouring classes. Women, though, were predominantly still clothed in such garments. It would have been worn wrapped around the body from armpits to ankles, always leaving the arms free. Men wrapped huge folds around their trunks, giving them, as Mahon wrote, “a grotesque and invariably awkward appearance.”

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