Last November I spent two weeks in Mpigi district, thirty kilometres west of Kampala, watching a family of bark cloth beaters work through the rainy season. The mutuba fig trees lining the hillside had been stripped of their outer bark six months earlier, and the inner cambium had grown back thick enough to harvest. Ssenkumbi, the family patriarch, told me that his grandfather once counted over forty active workshops in this parish alone. Today there are three.
The Groove and the Grain
The beating process itself is almost musical. Each mallet carries a different groove pattern — fine, medium, coarse — and the beater moves through them in sequence, stretching the bark in alternating directions. A single sheet takes four to six hours of continuous work under the open-sided workshop roof. The rhythm carries across the valley in the early morning, before the midday heat makes the bark brittle and the mallets fall silent.
“My father used to say that a beater who listens to the bark will never waste a stroke. You can feel where it wants to stretch.” Ssenkumbi Wasswa, master beater, Mpigi