Waist beads have conquered the African traditions and rituals since the 15th Century. A mix of small glass beads on a string or wire has been worn around by women of the continent after 600 years.
The waist beads originated amongst the women of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. It proved to be a dominant source of womanhood, femininity, spirituality, and protection amongst the women. The trend slowly began to grow in other parts of Europe. In Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and other West African countries, it carved many purposes, one being the rites of passage. Rites of passage are known as a ceremony held in honor of an individual leaving one group to enter another, which had a considerable amount of impact on his/her status in the society.
From being a stylistic custom or causing awareness of how much weight has been lost, it uplifted feminine values for the women of the Motherland. A beautiful aspect of waist beads is the prominence of individuality when choosing the colors and materials of the beads. When we look towards West Africa, Ghanaian girls may be presented with waist beads as a token of their “coming-of-age” onto womanhood. They also represent what class a woman belongs to, her economic status, and fertility. Traditionally unmarried women of the Yoruba tribe wear a waist bead. It was famous among unmarried women to use it as a mode of attraction.
In East Africa, women add essential oils to their beads to promote healing stages, while some women used it for the same purpose as women of West Africa did, i.e., class, puberty, and fertility. The outbreak soon hit the Caribbean as women of the South in Zambia and Malawi started using them to announce their pregnancy or seduce their husbands.
As time aged the beads, even colors started giving meaning to the beads. Black symbolized power and protection; blue sent out loyalty and truth, gold became a trademark for wealth, power and good health, purple exhibited royalty, and wisdom, white portrayed purity, while green represented nature and fertility. It is wild to imagine a single article of ornament serving so many meanings to the Black continent, even in the early times of the 15th Century. Moreover, as it begins to grow amongst modern people, it now serves a wider variety of meaning for an individual based on how he/she perceives it.
