Dyeing and Tanning Plants in East Africa

Abstract

This list, arranged in an alphabetical sequence, is the outcome of a request for information about plants that might be of value as sources of dyes and tannins in East Africa. On consulting the very mixed and limited literature of East African economic botany one is forced to the conclusion that the arts of dyeing and tanning are not now known to the East African native, and there is little evidence that they have been forgotten as a result of European influence. A search in the books written from 1885 onwards by J. Thomson, H. H. Johnson, A. C. Hollis, M. Merker, E. Werth and others is fruitless, and the handbook of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum at Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, quotes only two dyes under the native names of the trees from which they are derived. This is in contrast with West Africa, where local cloth is, or was, dyed extensively by the natives.