A Permanent Record of a Living Tradition
How the Registry Works
The Kente Registry is a permanent record of the weavers, families, and cloths that carry one of West Africa’s oldest living traditions. Every entry begins with a person — a master weaver, a community elder, a family custodian, or a member of the public who has come into possession of a cloth and wants its story preserved. This page explains how a submission becomes a registered record, and how anyone, anywhere in the world, can search what we have recorded.
A Plain-Language Overview
From submission to permanent record
There are three stages. A submission is made. A researcher verifies it. The verified record is published to the public registry under a unique Kente Registry number, which stays with that weaver, pattern, or cloth permanently. Searching the registry is free and always will be.
The Registry does not buy, sell, or value cloths. It does not adjudicate ownership. It records — carefully, slowly, and in plain view — so that the knowledge held by master weavers and weaving families is not lost when those who carry it are no longer with us.
Stage One
Submission
Submissions come from three kinds of people, and the Registry treats each pathway differently.
Pathway One
Master Weaver Profile
For weavers themselves, their families, or community researchers documenting a weaver’s life and practice. The submission captures the weaver’s name, place of training, lineage, the patterns and techniques they are known for, and where possible their voice and image. For master weavers no longer living, the profile draws on the testimony of those who learned from them or wove alongside them.
Pathway Two
Weave Pattern Documentation
For the patterns themselves. Many Kente patterns carry names, proverbs, and meanings tied to specific communities and historical moments. This pathway records a pattern’s name in its original language (Ewe, Asante Twi, or other), its English description, the community it belongs to, and the master weavers known to weave it.
Pathway Three
Cloth Authentication
For individual cloths. Members of the public who own a cloth — whether bought in a market in Kumasi, inherited from a grandparent, or acquired from a museum or private sale — can submit it for documentation. The submission captures the cloth’s photographs, dimensions, weave structure, the pattern or patterns it carries, and any provenance the owner can describe. The Registry does not require provenance to be complete; partial information is recorded as partial, and the record reflects what is known.
A submission is made through a guided form on this site. There is no fee.
Stage Two
Research and Verification
Every submission is reviewed by a researcher before it is added to the public registry. The Registry’s researchers are based both in Ghana — in and around the weaving centres of Bonwire, Agotime-Kpetoe, and Agbozume — and internationally. Their work is to confirm what can be confirmed, to record what cannot, and to make sure no cloth or weaver is published under a claim the evidence does not support.
Behind that single sentence sits a deliberate three-station workflow. A submission first lands in KoboToolbox, where a reviewer reads every field, opens every photograph at full size, and either corrects the record or marks it Not Approved. Only when the entry is clean does it cross into WordPress, where a permanent KR number is atomically reserved and a draft profile is created. Only then, after a final human review, is the record published to the public site. Nothing flows downstream automatically; each handoff is a deliberate human gate.
The full procedure — including the safeguards that make the registry sequence auditable, the handling of edge cases, and the prohibitions that protect the integrity of every certificate — is published as a citable technical note: How the Kente Registry Validates Weavers and Cloths (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19984280).
For a Master Weaver Profile, verification means corroborating the weaver’s identity, training lineage, and known work with at least one independent source — a community elder, a former apprentice, a trader who handled their cloths, or in some cases an existing institutional record.
For a Weave Pattern, verification means tracing the pattern’s name and meaning to its community of origin, and where possible recording variant names and interpretations from different traditions. Patterns rarely belong to a single voice.
For a Cloth Authentication, verification means assessing the weave itself. The Registry distinguishes between authentic woven Kente — strip-woven on a traditional loom, with the structural fingerprints of hand weaving. Cloths that are not authentically hand-woven are not eligible for registration.
Verification can take days or it can take months. Where a submission cannot be verified — because evidence is missing, because a community cannot be reached, or because the claim itself is contested — the Registry will say so, in writing, in the record. Honest gaps are part of the archive.
Stage Three
The Permanent KR Number
Once a submission is verified, it is assigned a permanent Kente Registry number and published to the public registry. The number stays with that weaver, pattern, or cloth for as long as the Registry exists. There are three formats:
KR-W-XXXX
Registered Weaver
e.g. KR-W-0042
KR-D-XXXX
Registered Design
e.g. KR-D-0117
KR-C-XXXX
Registered Cloth
e.g. KR-C-0306
A Kente Registry number is a permanent identifier. It is not a certificate of value, a guarantee of monetary worth, or a transferable asset. It is a record that the Registry has examined the submission and published what it found. The number allows that record to be cited in scholarship, referenced in museum collections, linked to from elsewhere on the web, and found again decades from now by someone who never met the people who created it.
A Public Archive
Searching the Registry
The public registry is free to search. There is no account, no paywall, no membership tier. Anyone with an internet connection can look up a weaver by name, search for a pattern by its meaning, or check whether a cloth has been registered. Researchers, journalists, museum curators, students, and members of weaving families can all use the registry on the same terms.
You can search by:
- Weaver name — full name or partial, in either English or original language spelling.
- Community or weaving centre — Bonwire, Agotime-Kpetoe, Agbozume, and others.
- Pattern name — in Ewe, Asante Twi, or English translation.
- Kente Registry number — direct lookup if you already have one.
- Cloth provenance — for cloths held in named collections.
Every public record shows what was submitted, what was verified, what could not be verified, and when the record was last updated. The Registry’s standard for what it publishes is set out in the Global Kente Registry Standard, which is itself a public document. You can also verify a specific record directly by Registry ID or weaver name.
A Note on Funding
Why it is free, and how that is sustained
The Registry treats Kente as cultural heritage, not as a marketable asset. Charging members of the public to search a record of their own heritage, or charging weavers to document their own traditions, would defeat the point. Submission is free. Verification is free. Searching is free.
The Registry is being established as a not-for-profit. It is funded through grants, institutional partnerships, and individual donations. None of its income comes from the sale, valuation, or trade of registered cloths or patterns.
Begin
Begin a submission
If you are a weaver, a member of a weaving family, or a custodian of a cloth whose story should be preserved, start here.