Fashion

By Prosper Mene

For nearly a decade, Hajar Saaid’s work took her across West Africa as an environmental consultant, assessing watersheds and the impact of projects on land and communities. Today, her impact looks different — it comes in the form of hand-dyed cloth, intricate stitching, and a fashion brand that bridges two homes.

Saaid, who was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, is the founder of Burdah, a slow fashion brand born out of her time living in Ghana and traveling across the continent.

Her story is rooted in two cultures where fabric holds meaning.

“In my family, as in so many Moroccan families, a kaftan is not simply bought and worn. It is made, adjusted, admired, and remade,” she says.

After training in sustainability, Saaid relocated to Ghana nearly ten years ago when an Australian firm she worked with in Rabat asked her to move to West Africa. The move led to years of project work in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and beyond.

While on site, she found herself paying attention to more than just the land.

“Everywhere I went, I looked at the land, and I looked at the fabric,” she says. Trained to ask what a project gives and what it takes away, she began asking the same question in market stalls — noticing textiles made entirely by hand, rich with generational knowledge, that rarely traveled beyond their country of origin.

The turning point came in Nigeria in 2022.

Saaid found a hand-dyed fabric she couldn’t leave behind. She took it home and made a few pieces for herself, then for her mother and sisters. What started as a personal experiment quickly drew attention, with people constantly asking where the pieces were from.

Without a formal business plan, she produced a small run and tested the response in Ghana and Morocco.

“What I saw was recognition. Women from West Africa, from Morocco, from Europe, from Asia, from America, all seemed to find something of themselves in the same garment,” she says.

That recognition became the foundation of Burdah — a brand built on what Saaid calls hybrid design. Her pieces merge the geometry of Moroccan zellige tiles with the vibrant colour and rhythm of West African Kente and batik.

“I did not invent either tradition. I only refused to choose between them,” she explains.

The name Burdah, Arabic for cloak or mantle, is also the title of one of the most beloved poems in the Muslim world — a poem about a cloak given as an act of grace and healing.

For Saaid, the name captures her own journey between two homes.

Drawing from her environmental background, Burdah operates as a slow fashion brand. Each piece is made by hand in small runs — often only one or two in a given colour — with no factory or mass production. Saaid works directly with artisans and tailors in Ghana and Morocco, keeping the entire production chain on the continent. Even offcuts are saved for reuse.

“People sometimes ask whether it is strange to move from environmental consulting to fashion. To me, they are the same work in different clothing. Both are about what we leave behind,” she says.

Now splitting her time between Rabat and Accra, Saaid says Burdah has become her answer to belonging.

“It is a cloak wide enough for two homes. And every time someone new puts it on, in a city I have never been to, I am reminded that culture was never meant to have borders. It was meant to be worn.”