GEOGRAPHY
The composition of African textile history is exceptionally lopsided, out of fifty four countries in Africa* a sliver of West Africa constitutes the bulk of all print material.
Most publications chronical either a single country (Sierra Leone weaving) or textile classification (kente cloth) which, being the cultural products of individual tribes, also correspond with specific countries. Less frequently the theme will be a region (North African weaving) or material (silk in Africa). Publications presenting an overview of the entire continent are the least common. The chart below was compiled from my personal library of predominantly English language history and anthropology publications. Each entry indicates that the country in question was the focal point (or featured prominently) in a book, a chapter, or a journal paper.
REPRESENTATION BY COUNTRY
* The chart shows 54 countries plus the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar and the disputed dependency of Western Sahara. Wax print and kangas are listed separately since they are associated with regions rather than individual countries
The disparity in the distribution is striking; Nigeria, Ghana and Mali collectively make up 40% of all printed material, meanwhile 60% of the countries in Africa appear a maximum of only two occasions, and 40% of countries are absent.
Prior to colonization customary dress in the interior of South, East and Central Africa was principally clothing fabricated from animal hides or textiles made from plant matter. Body modifications (stretching, scaring) and decorations (paint, feathers, jewelry) precluding the need for clothing were also fashionable in many areas. European and American missionaries considered these modes of dress barbaric and coerced local communities to abandon them in favor of standard western garments such as shorts, button-down shirts and smocks.
In West Africa colonial sensibilities converged with an already established practice of wearing hand-woven cotton textiles of varying sizes draped around the body which missionaries doubtlessly considered more congenial. In addition to conventional striped wrappers worn by both genders, most West African cultures also produced enormous embroidered robes and impressively large textiles with intricately woven patterns worn by men, which were revered by Europeans. I believe it was the perceived merit of this clothing, relative to attire in other parts of the continent, which tamed the colonial compulsion to convert local behavior.
Embroidered robe, Liberia c. 1860
Prior to colonization West African women wore wrappers tied at the waist in a manner which resembled a skirt leaving their breasts exposed (sometimes adding a second, smaller wrapper on top covering the breasts), or tied just below the armpits in a manner which resembled a dress.
With this existing dress practice as the departure point, when Europeans later encouraged west African women to wear Victorian-inspired tailored blouses with their wrappers it was a modification of their manner of dress rather than a complete transformation.
During the 20th century Victorian embellishments fell out of favor and the blouse transformed into the simple boxy buba which is still worn today.
Women wearing wrappers, Nigeria c. 1880’s
Woman wearing an Ewe kente wrapper and Victorian inspired blouse, Togo 1910 – 1915
Photo by Alex Agbaglo Acolatse. Property of The Met
Woman wearing a contemporary buba made from hand woven aso-oke, Nigeria c. 1970
This type of transformation would have been impractical in places where people wore animal hide, bark or raffia (and I think it is also safe to say that the option to assimilate ‘decorated nudity’ never entered colonial minds) leaving little leeway for a process of gradual hybridization to take place. Consequently, traditional attire in the south, east and center was systematically abolished while west African clothing traditions continued to evolve and flourish.
The boundaries defining nations and subsequently north/south/east/west quadrants were concocted through a complex rubix cube of topology, climate, European politics, geometry, and race with insufficient attention paid to the cultures being circumscribed. In the context of clothing and textile history Cameroon belongs in the western region, given how closely related their customs are to Nigeria, instead of the center. Swahili dress, endemic to the coastal regions of east Africa, is more closely affiliated with Yemen and Oman across the gulf than with adjacent nations on land (or even interior zones of the same countries). The Democratic Republic of Congo could theoretically be considered a region unto itself by virtue of kuba cloth; a raffia woven textile unique to the Bakuba kingdom which has been unilaterally admired for its artistic merit (unlike other plant-based textiles in the region) since first encountered by early EuroAmerican explorers and ethnographers. If we reexamine the graph from the perspective of cultural regions rather than geographic regions the distribution of academic attention starts looking even more inequitable, for example central Africa’s presence in textile history would evaporate (absent Cameroon and DRC) if regions were organized in a more plausible manner:
This exploration of geographic imbalance is one ingredient in an elaborate recipe of discrimination, and evidence of the enduring dissemination of a colonial value system. An accurate portrayal of African clothing history should include clothing made from organic material, body modifications, Swahili dress, and European dress, to name only a handful of omissions. Because these are absent, a huge expanse of the continent is also absent.
The photos on the lefthand side show Luo menswear in Kenya and northern Tanzania, the photos on the right show Swahili menswear in Zanzibar (off the coast of northern Tanzania) during the 19th century. These two groups are culturally distinct, and their fashions have been voided from history for disparate reasons. Both groups are assigned the geographic classification ‘east Africa’.
Just as missionaries removed forms of dress which failed to meet their aesthetic and moral standards from African bodies, it seems their descendants have removed forms of dress which fail to meet their aesthetic and cultural standards of African authenticity from the collective body of historical knowledge. The highly selective and preferential geographic allocation of scholarship leads me to view the academic corpus as less a true and accurate history and more a myopic account of commodities endorsed by western historians, publishers, and curators. It does not reflect “the history of clothing in Africa” so much as the “the history of African clothing that westerners like and respect”.
History, Design, and Craft in West African Strip-Woven Cloth, Papers Presented at a Symposium Organized by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution February 18-19, 1988
E Schildkrout and C Keim (eds.), The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, Cambridge University Press 1998
M J Hay, ‘Changes in Clothing and Struggles over Identity in Colonial Western Kenya’ in J Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, Indiana University Press 2004
B Plankensteiner, N M Adediran, Africa Lace: A History of Trade, Creativity and Fashion in Nigeria, Snoeck 2010
V Lamb and A Lamb, Sierra Leone Weaving, Roxford 1984
D Idiens and K Ponting, Textiles of Africa, The Pasold Research Fund Ltd 1980