Bolga bag

This u-shaped shopper with round handles offers plenty of space for your belongings – the perfect basket for your market shopping, summer beach trips and so many other occasions. The hand-woven bolga basket bag comes in a simple and pure design. Like other bolga baskets, this basket bag is also woven by Frafra artisans in the villages around Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The Frafra (also called Gurune or Gorse) are an ethnic group in the northern part of Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, but live mostly in the north-eastern part of the Upper East Region in Ghana. The Frafra in the Bolgatanga district have passed down the technique of basket weaving for generations, using the local veta vera straw. For the bolga baskets, the veta vera straw, also called elephant grass, is collected from the tips of the grass stalks and then each piece is split vertically into two halves. Each half of the split straw is then tightly twisted by rolling it together to give it strength. Once the material has been prepared, the basket weavers start with the bottom of the basket and build up the sides towards the top. The basket handles are made using a robust wrapping technique around a grass core.