African beaded necklaces are not just pieces of jewelry; they are cultural treasures that embody the traditions and stories of diverse African tribes. Each necklace is a work of art, meticulously handcrafted by talented artisans using a variety of materials such as glass, bone, seeds, shells, and stones.
Beads hold immense meaning in African culture. They represent beauty, tradition, culture, strength, marital status, age, power, and even warrior-hood. Across different tribes, beads are used to convey messages, tell stories, and celebrate important milestones.
The history of African beads is intertwined with the continent's rich past. Trade beads, in particular, have a fascinating story. Dating back to the 15th century, European trading ships brought glass beads to West Africa, where they were highly valued by the African elite.
Tribal African Jewelry was made from natural materials such as ivory, amber, bone, wood, shells, metal, hair and stone. These various materials were fashioned into necklaces, waist chains, bracelets, ankle chains and head adornments. The jewelry of Africa is not just ornamental. For each group, rituals and religion play a major part in the adornment of jewelry. Each piece is represented and worn for a particular reason, ranging from aesthetics to identifying marks of a society or group. The climate also has a lot to do with the materials used to make the jewelry.
Tribal jewelry in West Africa was traditionally used to tell a story. Depending on the culture and times, jewelry has been appreciated as a status symbol or designated as a cultural affiliation.
Read also: History of African Necklaces
African jewelry dates back thousands of years and the oldest jewelry known is some shell beads discovered in a cave in South Africa believed to be about 75,000 years.
Let's explore the unique characteristics of African beaded necklaces from different tribes across the continent.
The Maasai: A Culture Defined by Beadwork
If you’ve ever seen pictures of Kenya’s Maasai people, you likely spotted the beautiful bead jewelry they wear. Admired by tourists and designers alike, colorful beadwork is one of the tribe’s most notable handicrafts.
Step into the world of the Maasai tribe in Arusha, Tanzania. The Maasai beadwork is synonymous with the tribe's culture and a part of their identity since the last hundred years.
Beaded jewelry is not just decorative, but a vital aspect of Maasai culture. Jewelry is made and worn to indicate age and social status as well as to mark important events. For example, when a woman becomes engaged, she’s gifted a special engagement necklace consisting of two intertwined beaded strands. For her wedding day, she receives a wide collar necklace made by her mother to wear for the ceremony.
Read also: The Meaning Behind African Necklaces
Though both men and women wear jewelry, women are primarily in charge of making it. Traditionally, it was considered a social duty for women to learn how to make beaded jewelry.
The Maasai tribe, known for their vibrant and distinctive culture, is highly associated with beadwork in Kenya. Maasai beaded necklaces are instantly recognizable with their multilayered designs and bold colors. These necklaces are worn by both men and women and hold deep cultural significance.
Maasai women wearing traditional beaded necklaces.
A Colorful History
While the Maasai have been crafting jewelry for hundreds of years, they didn’t start using the tiny beads we’re now familiar with until the 19th century. Before, jewelry was made of local materials sourced from nature, including twigs, horn, and bone. To make beads, women used seeds or clay, which were then dyed to achieve a specific color.
In the nineteenth century, beads were produced mostly from local raw materials, like clay, shells, ivory, bone, wood, charcoal, copper, or brass.
Read also: Explore African Cloth Necklace Styles
European traders later introduced colored glass beads from Italy. At the time, glass bead making technologies were more sophisticated in Europe, which made these colourful beads very attractive and highly valued to the African elite who were willing to accept the beads as a form of exchange. The Maasai started using these glass beads to make their necklaces, bracelets, and other jewellery.
One of the most striking aspects of the jewelry is the variety of colors.
The colours of Maasai beadwork represent wealth, beauty, strength, warriorhood, marital status, age, social status, and other important cultural elements. They are also presented at ceremonies, at rites of passage, and to visitors as a sign of gratitude and respect.
Color Symbolism:
- Orange: Denotes warmth, friendship, and hospitality.
- Yellow: Symbolizes fertility, health, and growth.
- Black: Symbolizes unity and solidarity.
- White: a symbol of peace and purity.
Today, glass beads with a shiny and smooth exterior are the primary components of Maasai jewellery. Apart from glass beads, other materials used are cowrie shells, silver discs, leather and wires for binding. The recycled thread from old grain bags is rolled to create a strong thread for beading, and pieces of recycled plastic from yogurt pots are used to hold the thread in place.
Cowrie shells are also believed to be a symbol of peace.
The beautiful Maasai necklaces are worn as everyday adornments.
The Maasai started using these glass beads to make their necklaces, bracelets, and other jewellery. Maasai women replaced the older beads with newer materials. The colourful beads also led to a more elaborate color schemes in the beadwork designs.
Today, several small businesses have employed Maasai women to make jewellery that they sell through online platforms. As a result, Maasai jewellery has become very popular in international markets.
For years the Maasai practised pastoralism. Livestock was their only source of income. But hot and arid conditions affected the pasture land. Faced with drought and unproductive drylands, Maasai communities turned inward, to women, and looked to repurpose one of their most celebrated traditions-beadwork.
The Samburu: Stories in Every Bead
The Samburu tribe, also from Kenya's Great Rift Valley, is renowned for their intricate beaded necklaces. These necklaces are often worn as chokers, beautifully adorning the necks of Samburu women. The Samburu people use beads as a form of self-expression, and each necklace tells a unique story.
Thousands of glass beads colored cobalt, orange, emerald, and inky black sit in a bowl at Judia Lalampaa’s side. With the skill of a spider spinning prey, her long fingers dart between the bowl and the metal frame on her lap, twisting each bead into place with precision and purpose. The careful construction of a mporo, a traditional beaded necklace of Kenya’s Samburu people, has begun. It’ll take her all day to complete just this one, but its jewel-like beads tell stories descended from time immemorial: those passed from mother to daughter.
Today Lalampaa wears several mporo necklaces from her vast personal collection, each displaying radiant hues of turquoise, green, luminous yellows, and more. “Each shade signifies something sacred to the Samburu,” she says as she runs her fingers through the bowl.
For the Samburu, whose roots run deep throughout the north-central plains of Kenya, green is the symbol of grass, nourisher of cattle. A lighter green ensures a healthy pregnancy. White represents milk, on which all new life depends; bright blue brings energy.
“We always wear them, even when we sleep. If we are not wearing them, we don’t feel right,” an elderly Samburu woman explains. She is referring to the dazzling layers of beaded neckpieces that she and her counterparts are wearing.
Their traditions date back centuries. Beads are to the Samburu, in northern Kenya, what words are to a story - each color, pattern, and arrangement communicates status, identity, and life’s milestones.
The Mporo necklace, for example, is a symbol of marital status worn by Samburu wives. It stands out from the other neckpieces. These beads were produced in Venice from the 1880s through the early 20th century, specifically for trade with African communities.
The incorporation of Venetian beads into the Mporo necklace underscores a marriage of traditional Samburu craftsmanship with materials introduced through historical trade.
At 21, Anastasia, who started beading when she was 10, is the youngest among the group of women before us. They chose her to represent them because she is also the most educated. “I was watching my mother since I was a young child,” she explains.
Anastasia uses her background in business studies to strengthen her beading business. According to the women, it can take up to two weeks to make a single neckpiece, depending on the style.
Traditionally, seeds, ostrich eggshells, and cowrie shells were used to make Samburu bodily adornments. Nowadays, small glass beads are the most prominent feature, with red, orange, yellow, turquoise, white, and black as the favored colors. Traditional creations include the neckpieces, which are wide collars that cover much of the neck and chest area, headpieces, bracelets, bangles, and earrings.
“We feel beautiful and special when we wear our beads,” Anastasia affirms.
Indeed, hearing the Samburu speak and watching them at work makes it clear that beading is much more than just a cultural practice for this community. It is their way to exhale and relax at the end of a long day tending to the homestead. It is their way to commune with fellow women. It is their way of expressing love for their family and friends.
At the thousand-year-old burial sites of Nilo-Saharan communities, from which the Samburu are descended, beads honed from marine shells and animal bones were found. Excavations in modern-day Kenya uncovered 9th-century beads made from carnelian, agate, crystal, and coral, materials that were likely imported. Today, beads are sometimes crafted from painted seeds, such as those of the wild banana or whistling thorn.
But by far the most popular material is glass, lending beads a variety of bright colors and tinkling acoustics. “The color and sound of the beads is important to us,” says Lolosoli.
Beyond their use as an instrument, mporos can be harbingers of good luck, a statement of social status, or simply decoration. Traditionally, young Samburu boys receive a beaded armband, amulet, or headdress when they reach the right age for circumcision. Meanwhile, girls are often shrouded in cascading crimson necklaces from chin to chest.
Gifted by an admiring moran, it signifies the commencement of a non-marital sexual relationship-one to which her parents consented, but not the girl herself. The relationship ends when menstruation begins-a woman now, she’s circumcised in preparation for marriage.
Samburu women wearing traditional beaded necklaces.
Umoja: A Sanctuary Built on Beadwork
Lalampaa is one of many villagers living in Umoja, a tiny village nestled beside the Ewaso Ng’iro River in central Kenya. Umoja is much like its neighboring villages-but it’s unlike them in one important sense.
“Umoja is a sanctuary for Samburu women,” Rebecca Lolosoli states with pride from beside Lalampaa. “Any woman in Kenya is welcome to live here as long as she wishes.
Settled beneath the shade of a gnarled acacia, Lolosoli is the lion-hearted matriarch whose presence exudes as much defiance as the wizened tree that hovers over her. As Umoja’s founder, Lolosoli’s battle for equality began decades ago when she was gifted the beads for her own mporo marriage necklace by her then-husband.
As per Samburu tradition, beads are gifted to young women by their betrothed so that they can begin their necklace collection. The more elaborate the gifted beads and subsequent necklace, the greater her husband’s wealth and status.
But the women of Umoja no longer need a man to make their mporos. After her marriage ceremony, Lolosoli endured continuous abuse from her husband.
“To beat your wife is a symbol of masculine strength among the morans [young men],” she says. “My husband beat me and raped me. I fought back and told other women that they should not tolerate this treatment. Because of this, I was attacked even more.
Lolosoli’s courage led her to found Umoja, which translates to “unity” in Swahili, in 1990, alongside a 14-strong team of other women whose goal was to achieve autonomy and economic agency.
Word quickly spread. Women and young girls arrived seeking sanctuary from male violence, including that perpetrated by British colonial forces, as well as harmful cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation and child sexual slavery.
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