Barkcloth Making

Barkcloth is made from the inner bark of the mutuba fig, stripped from the trunk in a single sheet, steamed, and then beaten for hours with grooved wooden mallets until it spreads to several times its original width and softens to a terracotta-coloured fabric. The tree survives the stripping and is wrapped in banana leaves to regrow, giving another harvest each year. It clothed Buganda before cotton, and it remains in ritual and funerary use. UNESCO recognised the craft in 2005.

What you actually see

• The bark stripping - a single sheet taken from the trunk without killing the tree.
• The beating - hours of work with grooved mallets to spread and soften the sheet.
• The regrowth - the tree wrapped in banana leaves to heal and crop again.
• The ritual use - the cloth's continuing role in funerals and kingdom ceremony.

When to go

Year round; workshops in the Buganda region take visitors by arrangement. Harvest and beating happen when a maker is working rather than to a schedule. Kingdom ceremonies are when it is most visible in use.

Honest expectations

Workshop visits need arranging in advance rather than dropping in. Cotton has displaced barkcloth for everyday use and the number of makers has fallen. Much sold to visitors is machine-finished rather than fully hand-beaten.

Nearby

Mpigi district has several workshops, and Kampala is northeast.