Rwandan Patterns and Imigongo

1The wall that made Uwase stop walking

Uwase travelled east with her aunt to Nyakarambi, in Kirehe. Outside a small workshop, a wooden board was hanging on the wall. Black, white and red shapes marched across it, over and over.

The shapes stood up off the board. Uwase could feel every ridge with her fingers. That art is called imigongo — and by the end of this lesson, you will be able to design your own.

2First, look at Keza's beads

You said red. And nobody told you! You knew because the beads follow a rule, and the rule keeps coming back.

That is what a pattern is: a design that repeats by a rule. If you know the rule, you always know what comes next.

3The motif: the shape you repeat

Look at Keza's beads again. The piece that keeps coming back is red, blue. Then red, blue. Then red, blue.

That small piece has a name. It is the motif.

• The motif is the one small design you repeat.
• The pattern is what you get after you have repeated it.

One motif, repeated many times, makes a pattern. Keza's motif is two beads. An artist's motif might be a triangle, a diamond or a spiral.

Worked example: build a border, box by box

• Box 1: triangle pointing up
• Box 2: triangle pointing down
• Box 3: up
• Box 4: down
• Box 5: up
• Box 6: down
• Box 7: up
• Box 8: down

Now look hard at what he made. Every odd box (1, 3, 5, 7) points up. Every even box (2, 4, 6, 8) points down.

So Mugisha already knows, without drawing anything, that box 9 would point up and box 10 would point down. The rule told him.

That is the power of a pattern: you can always work out what comes next.

4Imigongo: the art you can feel

Imigongo comes from the east of Rwanda, from the old kingdom of Gisaka. Today the most famous imigongo workshops are around Nyakarambi, in Kirehe District, where women work together in cooperatives and sell their boards to visitors from all over the world.

Now, here is the surprising part. Imigongo is built from cow dung mixed with ash. The artist spreads it onto a flat wooden board and shapes it into thin ridges that stand up like tiny walls. Then it is left to dry hard. Once it is dry and painted, it is clean and hard, like the wall of a house.

Long ago, women used imigongo to decorate the inside walls of their homes.

5Four things you will always see in imigongo

• Geometric shapes only. No people, no cows, no trees. Just shapes: triangles, diamonds, squares, zigzags and spirals.
• Ridges you can feel. The raised lines catch the light and throw small shadows, so the pattern seems to move as you walk past it.
• Bold colours. For a long time artists used mostly black (from ash), white (from white clay) and red (from red earth). You may also see grey and yellow. Some artists add more colours today, but black, white and red are still the heart of imigongo.
• Symmetry. One half of the board often matches the other half, like a face in a mirror.

Worked example: design your own imigongo square

You do not need cow dung. You can build your ridges from clay, from thick mud, or from string and thin rolls of paper glued down. But first, design the pattern. Follow along on a page.

1. Draw a big square and fold or rule it into four smaller squares.
2. Choose one motif. Let us choose a diamond with a zigzag through the middle.
3. Draw the motif in the first small square.
4. Repeat it in the other three squares, but turn it a quarter turn each time, so that all four motifs point towards the middle. Now your square has symmetry: cover one half, and the other half still tells you exactly what is hiding.
5. Colour with a rule. A strong rule: black, white, red — and never let two of the same colour touch.
6. Add a border of small triangles all the way round: up, down, up, down.

Say your rules out loud while you work. When the rule is clear, the pattern comes out clean and bold — exactly like imigongo.

Try it yourself

Try each one on paper first, then tap Show answer to check. No peeping until you have had a go!