Women in East Africa appear to be in a unique position worldwide: their everyday dresses are not only significant in their habitual textile codes, but also as textures exhibiting meaningful verbal elements in complex density and seemingly endless variety These textual elements are proverbs or proverbial phrases written in Swahili, which seem to interact with the colour and design of the cloth (termed kanga), being either abstract or figurative in ornament, which the female wearer may choose according to cunent personal and interpersonal dispositions The paremiologist will find a traesury of signs, texts and contexts, which extend the conventional notions of literature and the verbal arts It appears rather curious to the reviewer that the Swahili proverb cloths have only recently come into scholarly focus, perhaps because of the meanwhile more advanced studies in gender relations and popular culture (though, for instance, truck slogans as another medium of proverb-like sentences were already recorded some 30 years ago)