Kuba raffia cloth is central Africa's most geometrically sophisticated textile, woven on vertical looms from raffia-palm-leaf fiber by the Kuba Kingdom of modern Democratic Republic of Congo and embellished with cut-pile, plush, and appliqué embroidery in irregular squares, parallelograms, herringbone, and asymmetric color-blocks.

Picasso, Matisse, Braque, the Bauhaus, and Paul Klee all cited Kuba cloth as ground for their abstract-geometric vocabularies. The aesthetic principle is deliberate: a perfect symmetry is incomplete, and the small irregularity is the mark of life. The palette stays strictly earth-tone — cream raffia ground, chocolate brown, rust, ochre, umber.