THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES
There is a common refrain in history books and museum exhibits of subscribing to a primitivism trope with regards to the history of African textiles and I would contend that another way this has manifested is via the emphasis placed upon textiles over clothing.
Textiles fall colloquially under the umbrella of ‘crafts’ which are characterized by handiwork, pre-industrialization and folklore. I believe that the emphasis on crafts is a means of positioning Africa’s clothing traditions at the embryonic stage of a fictitious Darwinian framework.
There is a tacit acceptance of a hierarchy in Western culture (analogous to the ‘design v art’ debate) whereby textile crafts are designated the lowest status, the broad category of clothing is afforded intermediate status, and fashion is awarded the highest status. A parallel hierarchy seems to exist on a functional level with regards to the rank of un-sewn, minimally sewn, or fully tailored garments.
Pictures of clothing are typically considerably smaller than pictures of textiles which de-emphasizes clothing:
Double page spread: African Textiles: Color and Creativity Across a Continent, pp 82 - 83
Double page spread: The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex, pp 68 - 69
I investigated three under-represented styles (adire, tie-dye and akwete cloth) as a means of evaluating biases evident in the image selection process. These three styles presented opportunities for authors and publishers to select images of either (A) textiles in isolation, (B) fabrication techniques, (C) textiles wrapped around the body as apparel, or (D) garments constructed from textiles.
A tally of image choices revealed unmistakable discrimination in the image selection process. To my surprise the distribution was uniform for all three textiles therefore the results are presented below as a combined average. The chart illustrates the allocation of adire, tie-dye and akwete cloth imagery according to the following themes: textiles, craftsmanship (such as printing, dyeing, weaving, or the tools for these activities), and clothing.
DISTRIBUTION OF IMAGES ACROSS THEMES
Data taken from my personal collection of books and journal articles
The collection contained 13 images of clothing out of 390 total images, of which there were twelve women pictured and one man. Six of the clothing images were adire, five were akwete cloth and two were tie-dye.
The single picture of a man showed him wearing an oversized kaftan (made from a folded rectangle with an opening at the neck and one seam down each side). The 12 pictures of women comprised of 9 wearing only wrappers, 2 wearing wrappers with a coordinating blouse (a simple construction made by sewing together one large folded rectangle of fabric for the body and two smaller folded rectangles for the sleeves with a hole cut out for the neck), and 1 woman wearing a tailored pencil skirt and fitted top (both pieces requiring a pattern, darts, zippers and hems).
Lady in an adire wrapper (undated)
Nigerian Handcrafted Textiles, plate 12a
Lady in an adire-eleko wrapper 1974
Cloth Only Wears to Shreds, p 23
Lady in an adire wraper 1970’s
African Textiles: Color and Creativity Across a Continent, p 83
Lady in an akwete wrapper 1978.
Cloth is the Center of the World, p 17
Lady in an akwete cloth ‘up and down weave’ (undated)
Nigerian Handcrafted Textiles, plate 7
Clothing represented only 4% of all images. Of those the majority depict textiles worn wrapped around the body in a manner which required no cutting or sewing whatsoever, a minority depict garments requiring minimal cutting and sewing and only one image (<1% of all images) showed an outfit requiring the kind of tailoring ubiquitous in the West.
I believe it is no coincidence that the images were almost exclusively of women. Menswear in the region consists of shirts and trousers made from the same textiles but tailored clothes are more advanced on the clothing hierarchy and they resemble western clothing which renders them less exotic. Women’s wrappers, on the other hand, are comparatively alien and uncivilized to the Western eye. I am also suspicious of the coincidence that every dated photo of textiles worn as clothing was taken in the 1970’s when fashions were more antiquated, despite appearing in books published between 1995 and 2004. [1]
This photo, taken in the Congo around 1920, encapsulates the western/ethnic, modern/tribal dialectic inherent to womenswear versus menswear
Postcard, personal collection
It is completely implausible that no tailored garments or pictures of tailored garments could have been located during the intervening decades, which leads me to conclude their absence is deliberate. It is almost as if academics collectively agreed that garments (especially tailored) were too progressive and urbane to fit the sanctioned vision of Africa therefore they had no place in the chronicles of African textile history. This categorical exclusion of clothing from the narrative is comparable to publishing books on the history of denim which make no mention of jeans; the oversight is absurd. Consequently, history books and museum exhibits have been reporting a version of African textile history so ripe with omission it almost becomes fiction.
[1] The akwete cloth outfit featured in Nigerian Handcrafted Textiles by professor Joanne Eicher of Michigan State University, a renowned authority in the field, was exceptional not only because it was the sole example of tailoring but also because the book was published by The University of Ife Press in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. This is one of the only books on African textile history published in Africa that I’ve been able to find, in light of which perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that this is also the only book to include cosmopolitan clothing within the context of these very traditional textiles since those responsible for content curation presumably had a different perspective on the subject than publishers in the West.
AN ADDENDUM ON MONOGRAPHS
The three textiles I surveyed were west African (a region with an immense variety of textiles to choose from), can be worn in different ways (draped, minimally sewn garments or fully tailored garments) and under-represented in the literature. Out of curiosity I decided to do a quick comparison with a contrasting textile. Kuba cloth is the only textile from the Democratic Republic of Congo in the history books, it is made from raffia so it is only worn draped, and widely published because it is much sought after by collectors.
I have two monographs dedicated to these raffia textiles of the Bakuba kingdom:
The Textile Art of the Bakuba has 400+ photos, of which 0% show people wearing kuba textiles as clothes. There are two pictures of women holding textiles in their hands, both are black and white photos and at least 70 years old time of publishing while the photos of textiles are all in color.
Shoowa Design has 102 photos (plus 800 small illustrations of geometric patterns and maps). 3% of the photos show people wearing kuba textiles as clothes, they are black and white while the pictures of textiles are color. The author mentions doing research in DRC over a two-year period in the early 80’s but this did not translate to a single contemporary photo in the publication.
The images of people in both books are unflattering and appear to have been selected to personify a “primitive” aesthetic, a gratuitous gesture given the abundance of respectful alternatives to choose from (plenty of monochrome and color photos of people wearing kuba cloth were in circulation long before these books were published).
These results corroborate my suspicions about image selection and the devaluation of clothing, they also introduce the additional component of using color or black and white photo selections to create a needless and unsavory taxonomy which elevates crafts while denigrating the people and cultures who produced them. This symbiotic relationship is an intrinsic characteristic of the colonial value system whereby foreign is only appreciated if chaperoned by exoticism and the closer the unfamiliar moves towards familiarity, the less it is revered.
J Eicher, Nigerian Handcrafted Textiles, University of Ife Press, Nigeria 1976
R Abiodun, U Beier and J Permberton III, Cloth only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Beier Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison 2004
J Picton, The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex, Barbican Art Gallery 1995
J Gillow, African Textiles: Color and Creativity Across a Continent, Thames and Hudson, 2003
S Tontore (ed.), Cloth is the Center of the World: Nigerian Textiles, Global Perspectives, The Goldstein Museum of Design 2001
S Hilu and I Heresy, The Textile Art of the Bakuba: Velvet Embroideries in Raffia, Schiffer Books 2003
G Meurant, Shoowa Design: African Textiles from the Kingdom of Kuba, Thames and Hudson 1986