(ማስታወቂያ)
Ethiopia is a land of diverse cultures and traditions. Although it is hard to say they have been peaceful all along, those different cultures have managed to coexist for a very long time. Ethiopia is a country with a wide variety of ethnic groups and a plethora of traditional dress cultures. Every nation has managed to keep its identity intact and manifest its own cultural values and practices to date. One of the ways they do that is through their garment design. Cotton is the most commonly used raw material in Ethiopian cultural clothing designs, as it is used by almost all nationalities. Traditional hand-woven cotton fabrics are beautiful and comfortable to wear. Animal skin and fur are also fairly common. Below, we’ll see some of the nationalities in Ethiopia and their traditional clothing.
Located in southern Ethiopia, the Gamo is a zone accommodating multiple ethnicities. The administrative center of this zone is Arba Minch, which is located around 490 KM to the south of Addis Ababa. The cultural cloth of the Gamo people is typically made from a fabric called “Dinguza” (ድንጉዛ). It is a textile that is typically made of cotton and designed using the colors red, yellow, and black in a horizontally repetitive pattern.
The pattern can be a combination of ninety-degree zigzags, checkered and horizontal repetition of the three colors, or just a fully horizontal pattern. Dinguza is traditionally manufactured by using an Ethiopian weaving technology known as Shemane (ሸማኔ), a technology that is highly mastered by the Dorze community of the Gamo people. Dinguza is designed into different clothing fashion styles ranging from simple scarves and capes to the original, magnificent, and signature traditional men's clothing, which is traditionally worn by warriors and elders.
Nowadays, Dinguza is also being adapted to modern fashion clothing, and as a result, it is slowly gaining the attention and appreciation it deserves. Dinguza is also a traditional clothing of the Wolayta people, who are neighbors of the Gamo people.
The Awash River on the north, Gilgel Gibe River (a tributary of the Omo River) on the southwest, and Lake Ziway on the east define the boundaries of the Gurage ethnolinguistic group, which lives in a rich and semi-mountainous region about 240 km south and west of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. The ethnic groups that fall under the umbrella word "Gurage" are descendants of military conquerors from the Aksumite Empire, who conquered the Tigray area of Ethiopia. The Gurage people’s clothing is made using both modern synthetic fibers and traditional textile fabrics.
Unlike the Gamo Dinguza, the Gurage clothing design is not made of a specific garment, rather any combination of fabrics is used. The uniqueness and beauty of the Gurage traditional clothing is found in its beautiful simplistic yet elegant design.
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Clean garments, usually white (but they can be any color of the designer’s preference), that only has a pattern at their two ends are used to design the Gurage cloths. How the women wear their head-tie (Amharic “Shash” - ሻሽ) is also what makes the Gurage traditional cloth design different. Typically, the head tie is put over the head with the longer ends running parallel with the forehead, and then they are crossed at the back of the head and brought to the front. Then above the forehead, a knot is made by crossing them again and they are taken to the back once more, finally tying is done at the back of the head.
Both the Sidama people and their homeland go by the name Sidama. Sidama is surrounded by Oromia Region on the south (except for a brief section in the middle where it shares a boundary with the Gedeo zone in SNNPR), the Bilate River on the west (which divides it from the Wolayita zone in SNNPR), and the Oromia Region on the north and east. Hawassa, the capital of Sidama and SNNPR, Yirgalem, Wondogenet, Chuko, Hula, Bona, Bursa, Bensa, and Aleta Wendo are just a few of the towns in Sidama. In the Sidama culture, the females have a dressing style that indicates whether they are young girls or women. This will be covered in the next article. For this article, we will look at the fabric with which the Sidama people make their clothes. The Sidama cultural clothing is made using a cotton garment that has its own identifiable design just like the Gamo Dinguza. The Sidama people make their clothes from white garment that has horizontal stripes of black, yellow and brownish-purple color at regular intervals.
The brownish-purple color gives the garment its signature style. These three colors can also be put in a checkered pattern. Traditionally, only two pieces of clothing are made using this garment. The first one is a short-sleeved shirt, and the second one is a short pair of trousers for males or a long skirt for females. But due to the aesthetic appeal and cultural value of the fabric, it is also being integrated into modern fashion styles and the results are lovely.
The two regional states, Amhara and Tigray, are both located in northern Ethiopia. Being neighbors, these two share a lot of traditions. One of these shared traditions is their clothing.
White chiffon is the common fabric used to make traditional clothing in the Amhara and Tigray regions. Fashion designers love to show their creativity and talent when designing these clothes as they allow flexibility in design while still maintaining the cultural value and identity of their people.
Oromia is the largest Region in Ethiopia. The Region covers 34% of Ethiopia's total area and stretches from East to West across the country, housing more than 37 million people. The traditional clothing of the Oromo people is easily identified by its White, black and red signature colors which also constitute the region’s flag. The white color is dominant in the garment design.
From clothing as simple as head-ties and capes to as complex as complete suits and gowns are made using this fabric and the result always looks astonishing.
An ethnic group known as the Hadiya is found in southern Ethiopia, about 161 kilometers south-southwest of Addis Abeba, in the Gurage, Kambaata, and Hadiya region between the Omo and Billate rivers, in and around Hosaina (also Hossana or Hossanna) town. Just like the Gamo, Sidama, and Oromo people’s clothing discussed above, the Hadiay also have their own signature fabric from which they make traditional clothes.
The Hadiya people’s traditional clothing is made from a fabric that is designed with a horizontal stripe pattern of equally distributed black and red colors, with white also appearing at somewhat wider yet regular intervals.
