Cecilia Akpene Yevu

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Biography

In a craft held almost entirely by men, Akpene Yevu is one of the few women at the loom. In a craft that seems to demand a weaver’s eyes above all else, she is blind. She works by touch, reading the colour of a thread with her fingertips, and the cloth that comes off her loom gives no sign of the dark she weaves it in.

She was not born blind. Akpene was born in 1988 in Agotime-Kpetoe, into a farming family, and for the first decade of her life she saw as any child sees. The trouble began when she was about ten or eleven — an ailment that settled in her eyes and would not leave. One eye went first, and it took her out of school. “I was attending school,” she says, “but after some time one of my eyes started losing its sight. Because of that, I stopped going to school, since I could no longer see what the teachers wrote on the blackboard.” She left the classroom and went to work: farming, and a little trading in Ho. Then the second eye began to fail. By her late twenties the darkness was complete.

The road to that darkness was longer than it needed to be. Her family could not meet the hospital bills, and so they carried her from one prayer camp to another, hoping for a healing that never came. By the time a doctor examined her properly, the years had already decided. Her sight was gone, and nothing could restore it. She stayed at home, without work. Farming was no longer possible for her, and Akpene needed a way to live.

What drew her was not the obvious choice. It was weaving — the very work that appears to belong to the sighted. “I was really sad when I lost the sight in one eye, and then the second,” she says. “Even so, I could not think of doing any other work apart from weaving.” The idea came to her, she has said, in a dream. She saw people weaving on the loom, and each time the weavers rose to rest, she took their place and practised. She woke certain that what she had done in sleep she could do awake.

It was the search for healing, in the end, that put her within reach of a loom. She heard of a camp called Celestial, and a friend took her there. She stayed, and prayed. Weavers worked at the camp, and one of them offered to teach her son. Ernest was about ten. The family was struggling — school fees, food, the ordinary weight of not enough — and so the boy went to the loom after school, and on days when there was no school he spent the whole day there. One afternoon the weaver sent Ernest on an errand, and Akpene sat down at her son’s loom. “I tried my best, and before my son returned, I had completed part of the work,” she says. “When he came back, he congratulated me and told me I had done it correctly.”

From that day she kept at it. Ernest corrected her when she went wrong, and in time she asked him to build her a loom of her own. Her method was her hands. “I used my hands to feel the threads and check the pattern, comparing it with how it was before I started weaving. That helped me know whether I was doing it correctly,” she says. “Sometimes I asked people nearby to check my work, and they corrected me whenever I made a mistake.” By her own account, mastery took less than a month. She learned spinning alongside weaving, and spinning came first as a living. She spun thread for other people until she had saved enough to buy her own; then she paid a man to warp it, and wove it herself. Later she set the spinning down. Today she pays others to spin and to warp, and keeps the weaving for her own hands.

That was more than six years ago. She weaves now in humble surroundings, and her speed at the loom is a thing to watch. Every so often she pauses to run her hands over the cloth as it grows, reading her own work back to herself. She is a deeply tactile weaver, present in the thread in a way that sighted hands rarely are.

She has four children. Her husband takes on much of the housework so that she can give herself to the loom, and friends and family help where sight is needed. Ernest, now seventeen, is often the one who sets up the thread and dresses the loom — and the one who carries finished cloth to market. She sells mostly in bulk to shop owners; people in town who know her work come to buy directly, and when they do not, Ernest takes the cloth to the shops on her behalf. “Since I cannot see, I cannot move around freely anymore,” she says. “Most of the time I stay at my loom weaving. If I am not at the loom, it means I am either tired or not feeling well.” Then, more quietly: “I wish I could see again, so I could cross the road and do things like everyone else. But that is no longer possible.”

The loss has not taken the work from her. Akpene Yevu weaves as a sighted weaver weaves, with a little help at the edges, and the cloth answers for her skill.

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The Cecilia Yevu Kente Design

Most Ewe designs already carry names, and Akpene Yevu weaves them as they come to her. One does not. She spun the thread for it herself, and Ernest made the first sample; no one had woven that particular design before, and it had no name, so she gave it hers — Cecilia Yevu Kente. People admired how it looked, and the family kept weaving it. Other weavers took it up, and now she is no longer the only one producing it, which is its own kind of authorship. It is a deeply personal expression of identity, resilience, and craft, woven by a woman who cannot see it, and made no less beautiful for that.

Distinguishing features: alternating horizontal bands of soft pink-red mélange, bright white, deep navy blue, and vibrant green; fine blue pinstripes separating the wider colour bands, adding precision and visual definition; green ribbed stripes that provide strong contrast and rhythm throughout the cloth; a balanced, repeating arrangement of colours that creates a calm and harmonious visual flow; and exceptional weaving consistency, with remarkably even strip widths and tight selvedges, demonstrating extraordinary technical skill despite the weaver’s visual impairment.

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Public Interview

An interview with the Blind Kente Weaver in Kpetoe

Date

16 July 2026

Conducted by

Phillip Nyakpo

Duration

11:00