Decorative paperwork on a Gambian fanaal

In The Gambia small lanterns, called fanaals, used to be built and paraded informally each night between Christmas and New Year. They always depicted ships and were covered in intricately cut paperwork designs.

The paperwork in this photograph was designed and cut by hand to fit the fanaal made by a group called Suturanteh Vous in Dippa Kunda (a neighbourhood in Serrekunda a little west of Banjul, the capital of The Gambia). It has been embellished with different coloured tissue paper. The design was originally drawn in pencil on the top piece of a wad of paper and then cut out through the whole wad using a razor blade or a sharp nail. This resulted in multiple paper sheets with an identical design. Repeated many times, enough decorative paperwork was produced to cover the whole fanaal.

Lantern builders in Sierra Leone employed this exact technique to produce the decorative paperwork that was still used by some clubs in the 1990s to cover their ship and mosque lanterns.