The Global Circulation of

African Fashion
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Dress, Body, Culture
Series Editor Joanne B. Eicher, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota
Books in this provocative series seek to articulate the connections between culture and
dress which is defined here in its broadest possible sense as any modification or
supplement to the body. Interdisciplinary in approach, the series highlights the dialogue
between identity and dress, cosmetics, coiffure, and body alterations as manifested in
practices as varied as plastic surgery, tattooing, and ritual scarification. The series aims,
in particular, to analyze the meaning of dress in relation to popular culture and gender
issues and will include works grounded in anthropology, sociology, history, art history,
literature, and folklore.
ISSN: 1360-466X
Previously published titles in the Series
Helen Bradley Foster, New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the
Antebellum South
Claudine Griggs, S/he: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes
Michaele Thurgood Haynes, Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas
Anne Brydon and Sandra Niesson, Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational
Body
Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and
the Body
Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff, Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa
Linda B. Arthur, Religion, Dress and the Body
Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography
Fadwa El-Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance
Thomas S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and
Exotic Uniforms
Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and
Fertility
Kim K.P. Johnson and Sharron J. Lennon, Appearance and Power
Barbara Burman, The Culture of Sewing
Annette Lynch, Dress, Gender and Cultural Change
Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men
David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style
Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the
Italian Fashion Industry
Brian J. McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: The Uniformity of Self-Presentation in Japan
Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Mens Dress in the Twentieth
Century
Kate Ince, Orlan: Millennial Female
Nicola White and Ian Griffiths, The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image
Ali Guy, Eileen Green and Maura Banim, Through the Wardrobe: Womens
Relationships with their Clothes
Linda B. Arthur, Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-
Cultural Perspective
William J.F. Keenan, Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part
Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson, Body Dressing
Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset
Paul Hodkinson, Goth
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DRESS, BODY, CULTURE
The Global Circulation
of African Fashion
Leslie W. Rabine
Oxford New York
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First published in 2002 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 100034812, USA
Leslie W. Rabine 2002
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85973 593 2 (Cloth)
1 85973 598 3 (Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants
Printed in the United Kingdom by MPG Books, Cornwall
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To
Bea Wahl
and
the memory of
Henry Wahl
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Glossary xi
1 Global Suitcases: The Informal African
Fashion Network 1
2 Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition in
Senegal 27
3 Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya 73
4 The World Bank, JCPenney, and Artisanal African
Fashion in Los Angeles 107
5 Fact, Fabrication and Material Misreading: The
Genealogy of Authentic African Print Fabric 135
6 The Entanglements of Exchange, the Pleasures
of Production, and the Ethics of Export 169
Bibliography 197
Index 209
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Acknowledgements
I owe deep gratitude to the dozens of people who contributed to researching
and writing this book. Susan Kaiser, Laura Kang, Liise Malkki, Hudita
Mustafa, Mark Poster, Mark Rabine, Merle Rabine, Gabriele Schwab, and
John Smith took time to read earlier versions and offer thoughtful comments.
I thank Joanne Eicher, editor of the Dress and Fashion Studies series at Berg
Publishers for her helpful comments and her support. Kathryn Earle, Editorial
and Managing Director at Berg, and Sara Everett, Production Director, were
also very helpful and supportive along the way.
Grateful thanks to all the craftspeople and vendors who generously gave
their time, their talent and their spirit to this project and whose names are
mentioned throughout this book. Special thanks to the people who worked
as research assistants: in Senegal Daouda Bocoum, Mame Binta Diop, Nabou
Diop, Aliou Ly, Demba Sylla, and Badou Kane; in Kenya John Magu, Mugure
Mahinda, and Wairimu Wachira. In California, Rick Tran edited the photos
and assisted with manuscript preparation. Babacar Ndiaye went out of his way
to help me at the Archives nationales du Sngal, as did Mr. Peterson and Mrs.
Akhaabi at the Kenya National Archives. The West Africa Research Center
in Dakar and its president Oumar Ndongo also provided many valuable
resources. With grateful appreciation to the many people who offered generous
and warm hospitality in Africa, I would especially like to thank Salome and
Albert Lenana, and Bocar and Gnilane Ly.
Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the fellowship assistance that allowed me
to do the research and much of the writing. Fellowships from the UC Irvine
Academic Senate, the UC Presidents Fellowship Program, the Ross Street
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the UC Humanities Research Institute provided for travel to Africa and
much needed time for writing.
i x
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Glossary
Boubou (French; mbubb in Wolof): Classic Senegalese robe for both men and
women, made from a single piece of fabric with a neck opening . The fabric
is sewn up the sides to create armholes and draped sleeves. Often hand-dyed
and heavily embroidered. The most voluminous and majestic style is the
grand boubou (gran mbubu in Wolof) made from a piece of cloth three meters
long and 150 cm wide.
Caftan (Wolof): Senegalese garment adopted from Arab culture, usually worn
by men. A straight tunic, hip-length or ankle-length, with straight wide
sleeves.
Gomesi: National dress of Uganda. A long cotton dress, with a fitted bodice
and voluminous puffed sleeves, inspired by late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century British colonial dress.
Kanga: Vividly printed cotton rectangular cloths, often imprinted with slogans,
150 110 cm, popular in East Africa since the beginning of the twentieth
century, especially on the west coast and coastal islands of Kenya and
Tanzania. Usually worn in pairs.
Kikoi: Hand-woven Kenyan fabric, of cotton and rayon done in a loose, coarse
weave, usually 150 cm long, and 50 cm wide. Colors most often are whites,
browns, and black.
Kitenge: East African version of African print cotton fabric with bright colors
and bold figures. Usually cheaper and of poorer quality than West African
prints.
Lgos (French): West African cotton print fabric, also called le fancy (fancy
cloth) or imi-wax. In vivid colors and bold prints, it originated as an imit-
ation of Holland or Java wax prints. The most famous brand in the US is
the Sotiba fabric made in Senegal.
Kente: The general name given to several categories of hand-woven cloth done
in the Asante region of Ghana. The most prestigious African cloth in the
African American community, Kente or Asante cloth is woven of silk, rayon
or fine cotton. It combines warp stripes, weft facing, and weft floats in
complex patterns. The patterns are widely reproduced in printed cloth.
Korogho: Korogho storytelling cloth is hand-woven and hand-painted by
lepers in the town of Korogho, Cte dIvoire. Large figures of mythological
people and animals are painted in black on a natural background.
xi
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Marinire (French): A hip-length, loose cotton top, usually with wide sleeves.
Worn with a pagne as casual dress by Senegalese women.
Mudcloth or bogolan: Hand-woven cloth from Mali, painted with a mud rich
in ferric oxide, usually in geometric designs. Originally used in rough rural
garments and for traditional ritual practices, bogolan was launched as a
fashion in the 1980s by Chris Seydou, a Malian designer in Paris.
Ndoket (Wolof): Also called a camisole (in French) or mame boye (darling
grandmother in Wolof), the ndoket is a loose-fitting dress, invented by the
Signares, mtisse descendants of eighteenth-century unions between Wolof
women and French officers in the Senegalese trading posts of Saint-Louis
and Gore. As a contemporary fashion in Senegal, the ndoket has volum-
inous, multi-tiered sleeves, and is usually embroidered or heavily trimmed
with ribbon and lace.
Pagne (French): A square of cloth, usually worn as a wrap skirt under a boubou
or ndoket.
Sru rbbal (Wolof): Hand-woven strip cloth of Senegal.
Shuka: Upper body wrap worn in Kenya by precolonial Kikuyu, and still worn
by Maasai and Samburu. Originally of animal skins, the modern shuka is
cotton.
Taille basse (French): West African fitted top, with hip flounce, low neck and
wide sleeves. Worn with a pagne.
Tak: Stitch-resist dyeing technique used by Soninke, Wolof and Peul dyers in
Senegal.
Xosi: Flour-resist dyeing technique used in Senegal. The xosiist spreads a thick
paste on a 3-meter length of fabric and engraves designs into it with combs.
Glossary
xii
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1
Global Suitcases: The Informal
African Fashion Network
In her North Hollywood apartment, Synovia Jones designs and sews childrens
clothing of fabric from Senegal and Cte dIvoire. In 1993, she sells them at
black cultural festivals such as the LA African Marketplace, and from her home
under the label Al-Kebu-Ian, Designs by the Goddess Synovia. Her
business cards are printed on multi-colored construction paper cut in the shape
of the African continent. She in fact started her business by doing hand-
painted T-shirts of the continent of Africa because I didnt want to work in
corporate America. I had already resigned myself to that. Its like no, no I
cant. She thought of the map T-shirts as a teaching tool from which children
could learn the different countries, and from there, I went to the childrens
styles. She taught herself to sew through trial and error, giving up for
several months when her used sewing machine broke. She slowly found organ-
izations and seminars for helping minority women entrepreneurs. By 2000,
she still prefers to do most of the sewing herself even though it means she
cannot expand much. Although she now employs some Latina seamstresses
under contract, she still sees herself as a teacher, and would like to train young
people so that theyll understand: You dont have to, you know, get off into
corporate America.
Isiolo, a dusty town in Kenya, marks the boundary named the Western
Frontier, between the area settled by British colonialists and the area left to
the scattered villages of Turkanas and Samburus. Jewelry-maker Aliki/Alice
Marete has inherited the Frontier Lodge from her father, an enterprising
Kikuyu who built the only place in town where settlers could stay while waiting
for their convoys. In 1997, Alice, who has also inherited her fathers head for
business, runs the dilapidated lodge and caf, as well as its cavernous night
club where people from the different ethnic groups who inhabit this crossroad
Kikuyus, Turkanas, Samburus in their shukas and ornaments, and Somali
immigrants in their long dresses come to dance at night. One room in the
Frontier Lodge houses Alices jewelry workshop, in which she employs ten
1
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
workers. She manufactures jewelry for a small American designer near the
Mendocino, California, coast and also her own designs based on pre-colonial
Turkana, Maasai and Kikuyu motifs. These designs, however, did not come
to her directly from tribal ornamentation. Rather, the Anglo-American Alan
Donovan adapted them to commercial use in the 1970s. The Kenyan workers
he trained in his workshop disseminated the designs to other local Black
craftspeople. Periodically, Alice fills a specially outfitted suitcase on wheels,
and travels around in the United States selling her jewelry. She also supplies
her sister who has a kiosk stocked with African, Asian and Latin American
trinkets in a mall in Maryland.
In the Medina section of Dakar, Senegal, originally the native quarter
of this former colonial city on the west coast of Africa, Oumou Sy in 1995
designs custom fashions in her high-ceilinged, tile-floored home. She also
creates costumes for the film-maker Djibril Diop Mambety, and the singer
Baaba Maal. Like other Senegalese designers who are able to do so, she also
exports some of her clothing and jewelry to France, Switzerland and Tunisia.
Although Sy is one of the most famous and admired tailors in Dakar, she
prefers to export by taking her things to the airport herself and shipping them
to friends who sell out of their homes. Although she has been approached twice
by American companies, she has refused to market through them, because they
want exclusive rights as well as possession of all her models. This is my
childrens inheritance, she explains, and adds: Africa has sold everything.
On the relation between clothing and Senegalese culture, she said: I tell myself
that fashion has no borders . . . Men have created borders. But God himself
did not create borders. He put the world here, and men created it all: passports,
borders. Men created all that. Visas, all that, created by men. But as for fashion,
it has no borders. When youre an artist, you have to keep that in mind all the
time, because when you have to create, you cant be blocked by any point or
stop at any point. You have to go forward without stopping. By 1998, Sy was
selling her fashions in French boutiques, and with her husband had put her
designs on a sophisticated web site. They had combined her design business
with a cyber caf and internet service provider in Dakar called Mtissacana.
Consumers and Producers: Agency and Oppression
Studies of globalization usually focus on dominant, high-tech networks of
the mass media, the Internet, or mass-marketed consumer culture produced
and disseminated by corporate capitalism. But this does not tell the whole story
of transnationally disseminated culture. In the interstices of these high-tech,
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Global Suitcases
3
big capitalist webs are other, subordinate global networks that pass unnoticed
to most of us in the dominant culture. Through such networks, peopled by
suitcase vendors who transport their goods with them in suitcases and trunks,
producers and consumers create transnational popular cultural forms. Their
modes of production, exchange, and signification differ from those of mass-
mediated culture.
The vignettes that began this chapter suggest some of those differences. In
fact, one of them is that the methods and motives, with all their ambiguities,
of Synovia Jones, Alice Marete and Oumou Sy also differ from each other. In
yet another way, then, they contrast to giant retailers carving out ethnic niche
markets through uniform standardized production and marketing procedures.
If I have begun this book with scenes of individual producers rather than
general statements, its because the informal African fashion network, as the
image of the suitcase traveling through global circuits suggests, defies abstract
representation. Jones, Marete and Sy do not represent the dozens of producers
I studied. Instead, the vignettes are intended to let readers envision the activities
of artisans and vendors in an informal network of production and exchange
that the totalizing web of mass-mediated consumer culture, as it engulfs us,
makes difficult to imagine. Despite its multiple differences, however, the
informal African fashion network does not lie beyond or outside global capit-
alism. This book seeks instead to explore how it is otherwise enmeshed, how
we might take this shadow circuit as point of departure for understanding
globalized culture rather than as an afterthought.
The informal African fashion network foregrounds what Stuart Hall calls
a serious lacuna in the post-colonial episteme (1996: 258), by which he
means the absence of studies that connect culture to the workings of global
capital (see also Ahmad 1992: 5). Making such connections becomes unavoid-
able in a study of African artisans. Culture and economics, like production and
consumption, intertwine indivisibly in the experiences of designer/producers
I studied in the Kikuyu area of Kenya, urban Senegal, and the African American
community of Los Angeles. That indivisibility appears as contradiction the
contradiction between creative power and economic oppression.
A strong tendency in mass-consumer cultural studies theorizes liberatory
consumer practices, especially around clothing, which subvert objects of
mass-consumption. Cultural studies risks trivializing the notion of creative
agency within the realm of consumption, if it does not, at the same time and
in the same frame, account for the widening gap of inequality in the realm of
capitalist production. As Angela McRobbie says of feminist cultural studies:
Recent scholarship on consumption has been weakened by an inattention
to questions of . . . the production of consumption . . . Attention instead has
been paid to the meaning systems which come into play around items of
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4
Global Circulation of African Fashion
consumption. This has led to a sense of political complacency as though
consumption is not a problem (1997: 730).
One reason for this omission is historical. Feminist fashion critics of the
1980s were reacting against a moralistic trend in 1970s feminism. Elizabeth
Wilson, in her 1985 work Adorned in Dreams, contests the simplistic view
that fashionable dressing did nothing else for women but confine them to
the status of the ornamental or the sexual chattel (13). Jennifer Craik refers
to the pleasures fashion offers as an alternative to patriarchal domin-
ation . . . (1994: 9). In the early 1990s, queer studies explored the subversive
potential of butch-femme and gender-bending dress practices (Berlant and
Freeman 1992; Butler 1990; Case 198889; Garber 1992). But in a reaction
to this trend in the 1990s, scholars of fashion and of material culture generally
have found that such celebratory defenses of subversive consumption simplify
the complex social relations between consumers and capital (Jameson 1991:
211; McRobbie 1997; McRobbie 1998; Miklitsch 1998: 81; Smith 1997: 48;
Willis 1991: 1314).
Yet even with this recognition, most studies of consumer culture still exclude
the ways that workers experience the meaning of commodities, and so continue
to separate cultural from economic production. Dorinne Kondo makes explicit
the infeasibility of including the garment workers experience in her study of
symbolic production in Japanese fashion:
Ideally, further inquiry should be extended to include the processes of production
and consumption. Who is it, for example, who is sewing those clothes, and under
what conditions? At best, the answer is likely to be problematic, as it would be
throughout the garment industry. On the other hand, it is on the plane of reception
where possibilities for contestation often lie . . . (1997: 1456).
She mentions that production processes were off limits (146) to her as
researcher, and so suggests the social constraints that maintain the separation
of economic production from meaning production in fashion studies.
The lack of scholarship that joins the experiences of consumers and workers
in the same frame does not imply some kind of moral failure on the part of
culture scholars. It reflects rather the structural effects of commodity fetishism
on the very discipline that studies it. Defined here as the mechanism which
throws a conceptual barrier between exchange and production in capitalism,
erasing the traces of labor from a product, commodity fetishism seems to place
a similar barrier within our own studies of capitalist culture (Amariglio and
Callari 1993: 195; Miklitsch 1998: 126; Spivak 1999; Willis 1991: 185). From
within the capitalist realm of consumption, the realm of production is indeed
an other scene (Jameson 1981: 22; Schwab 1993). Even in studies of these
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Global Suitcases
5
incommensurate experiences, they defy fusion. Workers produce objects while
marketers produce their meaning (Scoggard 1998).
In the African fashion network, however, with its informal, small-scale
production, the intersections between culture and economics demand attention.
1
These appear first as a space where artisans exercise creative energy within a
frame of economic oppression, and second, as a space where they join symbolic
and material production in the same process. If cultural studies dismiss such
spaces of difference within globalized culture as mere nostalgic remnants, we
risk forgetting, as Jameson says, that the culture of consumption is an infernal
machine . . . in which we ourselves are plunged to the point of not being able
to imagine anything else (1991: 2067). Artisanal African fashion allows
imagining the possibility of something else without which we risk essential-
izing, universalizing, and in the process romanticizing, the culture of corporate
consumption.
Yet this different space is not the utopian alternative Jameson suggests. On
the contrary, it is born of a devastating exclusion of most African communities
from the benefits of capitalist globalization. Therefore, whatever value the
overused terms subversion or resistance may have for studies of mass-
market consumer culture, they and the logic they connote do not apply here.
The coalescing of symbolic and material production in artisanal African
fashion economies follows rather the logic of contradiction, that between
creative agency and economic exclusion by capitalism. Given this difference,
African fashion bears evidence of a continued, and crucial, distinction between
popular and mass cultures.
The informal network of African fashion producers is not, moreover, the
quaint, romantic remnant of a disappearing past. On the contrary, the artisanal
production of African fashion has grown under the pressures of economic
devastation. As the economic crisis of African communities has deepened,
the fields of clothing, fabric, and jewelry design in the informal economy
have expanded greatly, drawing people who would not traditionally enter
them, since they present opportunities to make a living. The African fashion
network may impress one with its precariousness, but it is not, as neo-liberal
NGOs are fond of saying, in transition toward mass-production. In its
inexorable drive to absorb the whole world, financial globalization also works
by exclusion. Fueled by economic desperation, the informal African fashion
network is not, however, solely a world of constraints. It is also a world of
creative power not only in the objects and meanings it produces but also in
its modes of exchange between producers and consumers.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Traveling Fashion: Codes of Tradition, Authenticity,
and Modernity
Globally transmitted African fashion, inspired by the flowing garments and
woven, dyed or brilliantly printed fabrics whose home is Senegal and other
Muslim areas of coastal West Africa, takes on distinctly different looks and
meanings in Dakar, Nairobi, and Los Angeles. Yet each of these fashion systems
develops only through constant exchange within these and similar nodes of
encounter. A study of globalization like this one excludes by necessity many
fashion systems from the enormously diverse continent of Africa. It omits from
its focus the embroidery, weaving and dyeing arts of Nigeria, the kente weaving
of Ghana, the French-inspired, ultra-sharp masculine fashion, known as le
sape, in the Republic of Congo, the high-fashion styles of African print in
Abidjan, even the Arab-inspired hybrid fashions on the Indian Ocean coast
of eastern Kenya. In order to trace the circulation of fashion looks, techniques
and meanings broadly across transnational networks, and at the same time
to focus deeply on specific locations, Ive limited my study to the three sites
mentioned above. Each of them is an active crossroads of exchange in the
informal network. Each incorporates a wide variety of African ethnic styles
into its own specific codes, developed through particular and tellingly con-
trasting historical encounters with colonialism and slavery.
West Africa is the capital of this fashion world, and one of its most influential
centers is Dakar. There, contemporary interpretations of the traditional boubou,
ndoket and caftan follow their own rhythm of fashionable change in which
tailors vie with each other to create original, intricate embroidery and ribbon
patterns (Figures 1, 2 and 3).
2
Senegalese tailors, reputed the best in many parts
of West Africa, draw customers from all over the world and have themselves
immigrated throughout Africa, Europe, the US and Asia.
Where Senegalese fashion draws elements from Western, Arab and Asian
dress into its own historically sedimented system, African fashion in Los
Angeles draws African influences into the particular sartorial system developed
in the American Black community. Designers incorporate hand-woven strips
of kente from Ghana or sru rbbal from Senegal, or mudcloth from Mali,
mainly as appliqus and patchwork on everything from sweatsuits to evening
gowns (Figure 4). They use brilliant cotton prints from Cte dIvoire or the
Sotiba factory in Dakar, or their lower-quality imitations from India, Pakistan
or Korea.
Kenya itself includes an enormous amount of cultural diversity within its
borders, and Ive focused on the Kikuyu area of urban central Kenya, in
contrast to the rural communities of the Maasai and Samburu or the urban
coastal cities of the Swahili. In the cities of Nairobi, Nakuru and Nyeri, African
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Global Suitcases
7
Figure 1 Embroidered boubou by Senegalese tailor Abdou Niang. Custom-made
for Wairimu Wachira, 1998.
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8
Global Circulation of African Fashion
Figure 2 Hand-dyed, embroidered ndoket in cotton damask fabric (left) and tie-
dyed, embroidered grand boubou (right). Dakar, 1995.
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Global Suitcases
9
Figure 3 Senegalese caftan in wax print. 2000.
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10
Global Circulation of African Fashion
styles come not from the traditional dress of Kikuyu or other urbanized ethnic
groups, since the British missionaries and colonialists banned its use. They
come rather from West African fashions, often through the detour of reinter-
pretations in the United States. Jewelry of wood, amber and bone beads are
made for export or tourists. Young people of urban central Kenya readopted
it, but not until the late 1990s.
The styles and fabrics coded traditional in the Senegalese fashions system
enter the code of modernity in the urban Kenyan fashion system, and the
code of the authentic in the African American fashion system. These three
fashion codes revolve around the most problematic of terms inherited from
colonial discourse. Postcolonial scholarship on African culture has criticized
the tradition/modernity binary as it was used by missionaries, colonialists and
anthropologists to oppose an Africa deemed traditional in the sense of primitive
and static to a modern Europe as transmitter of enlightened values (Baizerman,
Cerny and Eicher 1993; Blier 198889: 11; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992;
Hansen 1994; H. Hendrickson 1996; Hountondji 1983; Kaiser 1997:
558; Michelman and Erekosima 1992; Mudimbe 1988: 158; Mudimbe 1999:
31; Torgovnick 1990). Scholars have similarly criticized stereotypes of an
authentic African culture as closed in upon itself in an unchanging purity
(Appiah 1992; Eicher and Erekosima 1995; Enwezor 1999; Hassan 1999;
Figure 4 Dress, coat and hat ensemble in Malian mudcloth or bogolan by African
American designer Ahneva Ahneva. Los Angeles African Marketplace,
Los Angeles, 1994.
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 10
Global Suitcases
11
C. Hendrickson 1996; Kasfir 1992; Oguibe 1999; Phillips and Steiner 1999;
Picton 1999; Steiner 1994). Much of this book is concerned with the way that
the three fashion systems, and in fact the very process of their transnational
dissemination, redefine the tradition/modernity binary and the notion of
authenticity beyond and against colonial and neo-colonial meanings.
Indeed, certain Eurocentric trends of fashion scholarship have treated fashion
as a particular category of dress that exemplifies this tradition/modernity
binary. Lipovetsky writes: It [fashion] has become . . . a sociohistorical reality
characteristic of the West and of modernity itself. From this standpoint, fashion
is . . . a way out of the world of tradition (1994: 4; see also Hollander 1994:
14). This view of fashion maps the modern/traditional binary on to the
opposition between the West and the primitive other: Completely centered
on respect for the past, . . . primitive society cannot permit . . . the aesthetic
autonomy of fashion (Lipovetsky 1994: 18). The African fashion systems of
Senegal, Black America and urban central Kenya, each in its own way, chal-
lenge this binary. For one thing Senegalese fashion does not oppose modernity
and tradition, even as it fulfills the conditions that distinguish fashion from
other forms of dress, or as Polhemus and Procter say, fashion from anti-
fashion (1978). Scholars of fashion almost unanimously define these conditions
as based on constant change, both for the sake of pure, self-perpetuating play
and also to fuel the consumer market, of which fashion itself is historically a
motivating force. As a semiotic system, fashion is defined as autonomous or
self-referential (Hollander 1994: 26; Lipovetsky 1994: 18). Dress may mark
the gender, class, status or role, even the fantasy selves, of its wearer within
the larger social system. But dress as fashion and within the fashion system
ultimately signifies its own fashionability. Beyond its myriad meanings, fashion
signifies, as Barthes says, the very Law of Fashion (1967: 271).
3
In their respective processes of self-perpetuating, self-referential change,
Senegalese and African American fashions intertwine modernity and tradition
each in its own way. In African American fashion, traditional styles and fabrics
circulate into and out of the system, while in Senegal they form the systems
foundation, the ground for the play of fabric design, ornamentation and
variations in cut. Thus in the United States, when kente prints inspired by
weaves from Ghana became overused, they went out of fashion, and mudcloth
from Mali came into fashion. In Senegal, the fabrication and decoration
of boubous, ndokets and caftans are much more subject to the policing of
fashionability than Western-style dresses and suits. While I was in Senegal in
1998, the hot weather arrived, and the lightweight Mauritanian voile used in
hot-season boubous suddenly appeared with a hand-dyed new design. Clients
take their fabric to be individually dyed at the home of a dyer before they take
it to the tailor. The new dyeing design faded from a lighter color on the top of
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the boubou to a darker color on the bottom. Each piece, dyed individually,
posed risk of aesthetic disaster, and so was quite painstaking for the dyer and
quite expensive for the customer. But every dyer had to do them, and every
fashionable woman had to have one.
The African fashion systems studied here, especially those of African America
and Kikuyu Kenya, challenge not only the tradition/modern dichotomy but
also the opposition between Western fashion and other forms of dress. They
combine the semiotic logic of fashion with the symbolic logic of ethnic dress.
According to Eicher and Erekosima, ethnic dress does not preclude change:
Ethnicity combines both cultural stability and change in dynamic inter-
play . . . Dress as a demarcation of ethnicity is not merely a static product of
an ethnic group, but allows ethnic group members to provide solutions to
problematic situations . . . (1995: 144). Yet unlike fashion, ethnic dress
changes in response to external political, social, or cultural influences rather
than follow its own autonomous rules and rhythms. And where the meanings
of fashionable dress emerge through the internal play of signifiers within the
autonomous semiotic system itself, the meanings of ethnic dress come from a
social referent outside the clothing system. Ethnic dress signifies both internal
cohesiveness for the group and distinctiveness from other social groups
(Eicher and Erekosima 1995: 144). Throughout this book, the term sign and
its act of signifying will denote fashion as an autonomous semiotic system
in which dress items produce meaning through interplay with each other. The
term symbol will denote ethnic, gendered, class, religious or national dress
items whose meanings are motivated by social, cultural and political referents.
4
But in the African fashion systems studied here, sign and symbol are tightly
intertwined. Elements of dress that symbolize ethnicity do double duty as
signifiers in the internal play of a fashion system.
By functioning as both fashion and ethnic dress, these African fashion
systems also complicate the thorny problem of authenticity. Scholars of African
art have shown how colonialist presumptions of authenticity as originary
purity can fall apart in many ways. In their study of ethnic dress in the Kalibari
community of southern Nigeria, Eicher and Erekosima revise the view that
what is ethnic must be completely indigenous (1995: 144). Rather, ethnic
dress and textile items come from many sources (ibid.: 151), often through
trade. Through a process of cultural authentification (ibid.: 145), they come
to symbolize ethnic identity. Eicher and Erekosima argue that elements of
ethnic dress can become authentic by being assimilated into an already existing
system. Taking the process in an opposite direction, art historians have main-
tained that African artworks produced as commodities for tourists or export
can be authentic, even as they travel away from their origin, if their production
engages the creativity, talent and technical virtuosity of the artist (Cohodas
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1999; Ettawageshik 1999; Jules-Rosette 1984; Kasfir 1992; Kopytoff 1986;
Phillips 1999). Categories of authentic African art and inauthentic tourist
art are continually shifting and being modified (Steiner 1999: 96). In yet
another vein, however, Appadurai and Clifford point out (as my research
confirms) that the very term authenticity comes into play only when African
art objects have left their places of original daily or ritual use to circulate in
international markets. Authenticity is the term that Westerners deploy to
add value to an object as commodity (Appadurai 1986: 567; Clifford 1988:
215, 228).
African fashion participates in all these modes of producing the authentic,
and complicates them as well, because fashion so intimately blends with and
so powerfully influences bodies, selves and identities. Certain dress items can
come to bear auras of authenticity when consumers see them as conferring on
their bodies and themselves a much desired authentic identity. In this charged
fusion of people and things, self and object, the meaning of the term becomes
slippery indeed, especially when it travels across cultures, political structures
and economic domains. Authentic identity is defined against the context of
neo-colonialism and ruling-party-instigated tribal violence in Kenya (Chapter
3); it is defined against the quite different historical and political context of
white racism and the mass-commodification of blackness in the United States
(Chapter 4). In yet another register of slippage in meaning, there is a world of
difference between the authentic African fashion (Biggs et al.1994) that
JCPenney mass-produces in sweatshops in Asia (Chapter 4) and the authentic
African print fabric designed in Dakar for export (Chapter 5). In all these
geographical locations and economies, the notion of the authentic entangles
African fashion in endless plays of paradox. Chapter 3, on Kenyan African
fashion, Chapter 4 on JCPenney and African American artisanal fashion, and
Chapter 5 on African print fabric trace the chains of self-negating displacement
in the paradoxes of authenticity. Chapter 2, on Senegal, does not treat this
topic, since there, where many of the styles and fabrics originate, as one might
expect, it did not come up in my field research.
The African Fashion Network: Globalization and
Structural Adjustment
The transnational circulation which fosters these fashions is born of both
the post-colonial political pressures that intensify demands for ethnic identity
and the transnational market pressures that intensify the sale of clothing as
fashion. Taken together, these historical forces make up the contradictory
union between two forms of globalization. One concerns the emergence of
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varied post-colonial identity politics. Clothing, with its power to transform
the body into a symbolic medium, to aestheticize and eroticize the body, and
to place the body in social interactions, became a choice material for efforts
to construct new identities. The other concerns the structural adjustment
programs that the World Bank imposes on African countries as part of the
global restructuring and deregulating of capital (Amin 1994; Anderson et al.
2000; Brecher and Costello 1994; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Wallerstein
1996).
In the same period that African clothing, like other African aesthetic forms,
was expanding in creative power and recognition, African communities entered
a new phase of increased economic and social misery. In the 1970s, the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund responded to the development
crises in African countries with a solution dictated by the growth of finance
capital. They lent massive amounts of money to the very neo-colonialist
governments whose officials were involved in looting the national economies
in the first place (Boone 1992: 17282). When, in the late 1970s and early
1980s, foreign debt became unmanageable, while public revenues dried up and
poverty deepened, the World Bank and IMF imposed structural adjustment
programs on African nations (Sandbrook 1993: 32). This so-called solution
has generate[d] results that are as brutal as they are ineffectual in terms of
its stated goals (Bernstein 1990: 3; see also Triulzi 1996: 80). The SAPs
dismantled state economic controls on basic necessities and social programs
for health, education, housing and sanitation, in favor of neo-liberal market-
reform strategies and austerity measures. The restructuring of capital in
dominant countries and the structural adjustment programs which force
African communities to develop informal economies are interrelated and
mutually reinforcing (Aina 1997: 3). As infrastructures crumble and govern-
ments appear to their citizens to exist only for the purpose of siphoning public
revenues into the pockets of officials, people become more desperate but more
ingenious and skillful in organizing daily collective life to make it livable.
The globalization forces that brought crisis to African countries in the 1980s
and 1990s also further decimated the African American inner cities. In South
Central Los Angeles as in other African American communities, a version
of structural adjustment brought privatization, the shifting of wealth from
governments and publicly funded programs for the benefit of people and
communities to corporate profits (Carby 1992: 189 and 196; Malveaux 1992:
200; Natambu 1992: 185). The Los Angeles African Marketplace and Culture
Faire had to seek corporate sponsorship, to adopt corporate jargon, and thus
to promote the shoestring operations of the craftspeople as entrepreneur-
ship. But this euphemism only means that like their counterparts in Senegal
and Kenya, African American designers had been forced into the informal
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economy. In South Central Los Angeles, as in Dakar and Nairobi, informal
economies are as much a part of globalization as the massive flows of finance
capital, commodities, and electronic media coming from the dominant powers
(Castells and Portes 1989; Coombe and Stoller 1995; Sassen 1991).
Born of exclusion from these large-scale circuits, the African fashion network
re-enters the global economy/culture as an informal import-export network,
dependent upon but different from the dominant networks of production and
trade. The African fashion network provides a striking example of the displace-
ment of center and periphery to the point that they are dissolved into unequal,
interlacing global networks. Even as structural adjustment policies brought
about devastating effects, they led to the expansion of artisanal work, along
with the informal export of clothing, fabric and jewelry. This greatly expanded
activity and competition fostered intensified creativity, as artisans vied with
each other to find something new that would sell in the quickly saturated
markets. Artisans and vendors have also developed forms of economic ingen-
uity and knowledge that differ from the neo-liberal orthodoxies of the World
Bank and IMF. The Los Angeles African Marketplace, like the African Market
on Lennox and 125th in New York, le March Sandaga and le March H.L.M.
in Dakar, le Festival du Jazz de Saint-Louis du Sngal, the Maasai Market
and the Blue Market in Nairobi, developed as nexi of exchange for informal
traders from all over Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and Latin
America. In these facets of a global kaleidoscope, artisans and traders exchange
identities, signs and commodities. Just as the deepening economic crisis intensifies
creativity, so does it bring people from different African cultures together in
their quest for economic survival. Their meeting has as an unintended effect
the enhanced production of sartorial identities, aesthetics and meanings through
informal networks of exchange.
Dakar, Los Angeles, Nairobi: Nodes of Exchange, Zones of
Meaning, Paths of Identity
In the 1990s, these two forms of globalization a post-colonial politics of
identity and a burgeoning informal export economy fostered each other. In
the United States, a whole institution of swap meets, music festivals, church
bazaars, Black History Month expositions and African Marketplaces, like
the Los Angeles African Marketplace and Cultural Faire (where I volunteered
for two summers), grew up. For the three weekends leading to and including
Labor Day, the dusty, sun-baked fields of Rancho Cienega Park in the heart
of African American South Central Los Angeles become a maze of colorful
booths housing artisans and vendors such as those whose names follow. Bass
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Lo, trained in the venerable tailor apprenticeship system in Senegal, creates
classic boubous and Western-style swing coats of basin (cotton damask) with
appliqus of hand-woven narrow strip cloth sent from his home country.
Nigerian Christopher Nnadede makes warm-up suits with peace sign appliqus
of kente print dedicated to Rodney King. Olujimi King, who first learned
dyeing from his grandmother in Nigeria, creates a unique fabric that overlays
silk-screen designs on tie-dye. He also silk screens giant mythological figures
from Korogho cloth of Cte dIvoire on to t-shirts. Aboubacar Sissoko, an
artist from Senegal, also silk-screens versions of his brilliantly colored mask
paintings on to t-shirts. In the hands of African American Gloria McGhee, the
masks become ceramic pins, miniature sculptures with stylized faces sporting
the latest look in dreadlocks, geometrics, or asymmetrical Afros, and an earring
or nose ring. African American designer Ahneva Ahneva creates the most
elegant, glamorous cocktail dresses and tuxedos of mudcloth and kente. While
she has her kente custom woven in Ghana, Ghanaian couturire Beatrice Afful
adopts the Senegalese and Nigerian designs. The Senegalese boubous, ndokets
and caftans become in Ghana bobos, kabas, and slits.
In my interviews with designers who sell at the African Marketplace, I found
desires for political, creative or aesthetic agency on the one hand and responses
to economic necessity on the other intertwining to overdetermine each other
in tangled webs. The most successful and complex in this respect is Karimu,
who has lived in South Central Los Angeles all her life and has her workshop
in a garage behind her mother-in-laws house off Martin Luther King Blvd (see
Figure 23 on p.127). Like the African immigrant tailors, Karimu sees her
commitment to the aesthetics and techniques of fashion starting at a very young
age. She began sewing at the age of 6, and at 14 started working for a dress-
maker friend of her parents. Unlike the Africans who began as apprentices,
Karimu was a member of the high school cheerleading squad that made its
own outfits: And a thing that made us really different is that we . . . had our
tennis shoes covered out of the same material as the uniform. As homecoming
princess in 1970, she was the only one that had an African outfit. Yet as an
adult, she and her husband developed an office supply business, and it was
only after the stock market crash of 1987 forced her into the informal economy
that she returned to fashion. So, caught in the need to survive global restruct-
uring, Karimu developed a fashion line that includes one-of-a-kind graphic
design appliqus in kente print, and mudcloth patchwork jackets. Still doing
the festival scene and doing the street scene, she also does trade shows and
wholesales to shops in Southern states and New York.
For Brazilian artist Bakary Santos, aesthetic desire and economic necessity
combine in another way. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, where metalworkers
from Spain taught him their craft, Bakary does acid etchings of gods, animals,
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and mythological figures on large sheets of metal. When he moved to the
United States, he could no longer live simply and cheaply off his art as he had
done in Latin America. He therefore adapted his etchings to copper, nickel and
brass earrings, and silk-screened his trademark black and white sun mask
on to t-shirts. For Bakary, as for several immigrant designers, this experience
of the United States as the dominant, universalizing economy and culture
put the designs and production techniques of their home locality into a con-
text that changed and intensified their meaning. In the interstices of the US
economy/culture as vast homogenizing force, the connections forged among
marginalized peoples and practices created for Bakary a different and competing
sense of universalism. As he looks back on Brazil from this context, he says
that he first became aware of race, . . . of culture, of Black culture, when
he moved to the Brazilian city of Bahia. There he found African culture so
strong, so evident. In Bahia, he said,everything is preserved from the time
the Portuguese brought the slaves. The Yoruba rituals left a deep and enduring
impression on him as a great source of inspiration, and a rich store of visual
images and symbology. For two and a half years, he traveled all over South
America, living with the rural people, visiting museums, and absorbing the
ritual symbols and images. But despite this complex multi-cultural involve-
ment, it was only after he came to the United States in 1978 that I realized,
yeah, Im an African . . . When I got here, I started learning a lot about Africa.
Before I didnt know nothing about Africa. His identification as an African
came about because since this is the United States, the society here is very
separate. Blacks on one side of town. Whites on the other side of town. And
by being Black, you know, I got to know Black people, and I . . . started getting
involved in their struggles, everything. In the United States, he said, I realize
that . . . your background is important for you to locate where you are in this
planet. He also realized that as part of the African diaspora were [i.e.
Brazilians] such a unique culture. The realization of uniqueness and particular
background that emerged within the US also brought the sense of alternative
universalism: because of my travels and the way I incorporate, you know,
the whole universe of symbols, of cultures into one art, into one thing. This
sense of an alternative universalism can serve as emblem of the shadow net-
works haunting the dominant webs of globalization.
But when sartorial meanings transform themselves as artisans cross geo-
graphic and cultural borders, misreadings can occur. Having heard by word
of mouth from family members or friends that the American festivals represent
a badly needed economic opportunity, African tailors, fabric designers and
jewelers are often anxious to find out what will sell. But what sells as symbol
of a mythic Africa in the United States can differ from the Senegalese sartorial
aesthetic. When NGalla Ndiaye, a tailor in Dakar, was just beginning to work
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
on export and tourist clothing, an African American friend of mine visiting
Senegal wanted to make him some business cards for the project, and wanted
to put on them a logo of something African, meaning something that would
communicate the ideal of Africa to a distant diasporic community. I was
commissioned to find out what he wanted as a logo. A group of university
students, lounging that afternoon at his place, had a more mundane inter-
pretation of Africa and quickly came to the consensus that the logo could
be anything since everything in Africa is African. Having, hopefully,
crossed this gap between the two meanings of African, the diasporic and
the local, the mythic and the quotidian, the artisans or their vendors cross the
Atlantic Ocean.
The more privileged ship their goods by boat, but most pack them in their
suitcases for their trip to the United States. For several months they travel
across the United States by car, doing the festivals. Between these, they may
sell their goods through informal networks of family and friends, or try to
pick up customers in the small boutiques of the cities they visit. At places like
the L.A. African Marketplace, they meet their American counterparts, and
exchange with them commodities, but more importantly, looks they can
incorporate into their own styles. Yet we should not assume that African
fashion simply flows in one direction from its home continent to the American
inner cities. Having immersed themselves in the US Afrocentric sartorial scene,
tailors and designers from Africa take ideas on what is African from the
United States back home with them, and hope to introduce something new
into their own national fashion system. The travels of African fashion form
a kaleidoscopic movement in which each urban African locality becomes a
point of appropriating, hybridizing and redisseminating with respect to the
others.
To acquaint myself with the multi-directional influences in this unmappable
African fashion network, in 1995 I first accompanied a Kenyan designer/
vendor, Wairimu Wachira, from her adopted home in Los Angeles to Nairobi
and throughout the Kikuyu area of Kenya. She took with her to Kenya two
trunks filled not only with trendy American shoes and coveted Chicago Bulls,
L.A. Lakers and Malcolm X baseball caps, but also with vests she had made
of West African fabrics. Although Wairimu had studied in fashion college in
Kenya in the 1980s, she did not start making African fashions until she moved
to L.A. and came into contact with African Americans. In the first half of
the twentieth century, English colonialists had destroyed Kikuyu material
culture and had instilled Christianized Kikuyus with the conviction that it was
savage and devilish (Rabine 1997b). It was when Wairimu came to the
United States that she began to investigate African identities through clothing
and art. Like her fellow designers, she purchased her West African fabrics in
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the L.A. garment district in stores owned by Iranian Jewish refugees who
became the major distributors in this Pacific coast city.
On the Sunday morning of Wairimus arrival at her sisters house in Nairobi,
sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces and nephews crowded into her bedroom for
the unlocking of the trunks. The reactions of her twelve-year-old niece and
nephew to the baseball caps demonstrate some of the reversals in the flow of
fashion influences. While we ordinarily conceive the flow in terms of dress
items from Africa entering the African American system to symbolize an
African ethnic identity, here items that symbolize stable American cultural
identities are transformed into the arbitrary signs signifying in-fashion/out-of-
fashion in Nairobi. Over the difficult decision of which baseball cap to choose,
one twelve-year-old cousin solemnly informed the other that the Bulls is out
of fashion. So what is in fashion? his mother asked. Lakers, said the
other cousin. Lakers is out, affirmed the first cousin, White Sox is in. And
Malcolm X? asked the second cousin. Malcolm X will never be out of
fashion, Malcolm X will never be out, said the first. The basketball logos that
often symbolize an Americans undying loyalty to the home team lose this
referent when they migrate to the fashion system of Kenyan youth. On the
other hand, the name of Malcolm X emblazoned on a cap partakes of the
double life of African fashion items. The cap remained both the symbol of
ethnic identity and the commodified sign of fashionability that the young
Kikuyu wanted to share with Black Americans, even as they transformed
symbolic and semiotic meanings in a context where identity, consumption and
fashion had wholly different historical determinants. (On the transnational
circulation of Malcolm X insignia, see Coombe and Stoller 1995.)
In Kenya, Wairimus sisters helped her retail her goods out of their homes
or wholesale them to the local shops of Indian merchants. After the excitement
of the first day, sales were slow and discouraging. In addition to selling,
Wairimu also searched out in the maze of blue-painted booths called the Blue
Market, in downtown Nairobi, and in the weekly Maasai Market on a vacant
lot at the edge of town, craftspeople from whom she might obtain the Kenyan
bone, wood and brass jewelry to sell at festivals in California.
Although she had sewn only conservative Western clothing when she worked
at her familys tailor shop in Nyeri at the foot of Mount Kenya, she was greeted
upon returning to the shop in 1994 with the surprising sight of a tie-dyed
Nigerian butterfly dress or abaya displayed in the place of honor. Her sister-
in-law Lydia, who had taken her place in the shop, had been recruited into a
UN program designed to offer women tailors self-sufficiency through micro-
enterprise entrepreneurship. The training included instruction in creating
African i.e., West African styles, adapting that regions resist-dye tech-
niques to sell to the East African tourist market and to export to festivals in
neighboring Tanzania.
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Lydias experience illustrates a third level of global circuitry, this one mediat-
ing between the dominant and informal economies. The explosion of the
informal economy from being practically unknown in Africa in the 1960s
(Office 1996: 14) to accounting for 60 percent of urban employment in Africa
(ibid.: 1), and an estimated 90 per cent of the labor force in Dakar (Chidzero
1997: 196), has attracted the attention of NGOs ranging from grass-roots
womens organizations to dominant institutions like USAID and the World
Bank. This latter has appropriated the new informal economy into a structural
adjustment-inspired form of development. A study done for USAID calls
microenterprise development a major tool for the fight against poverty
(Webster and Fidler 1996: 8). The World Bank discourse here refers of course
to its own fight against poverty, not to the ingenious and desperate enterprises
by which Africans have compensated for the failure of every national and
international institution. In the World Bank imaginary, the fault for poverty
lies with the artisans while the established institutions are the heroic actors
in this struggle. Citing dressmaking as exemplary of informal enterprise,
the study says that in general a lack of technical training and reliance on
apprenticeship produces a sure recipe for noncompetitive production
(ibid.: 18). In the meantime the World Bank study tells us, governments
and donors struggle with spiraling unemployment rates in cities and deepening
poverty in the countryside (ibid.: 18). Given these top-down assumptions
underlying microenterprise development, it is not surprising that the program
which recruited Lydia proved economically ineffective. But on the cultural
front the program, brought from the outside and intended to produce clothing
for the tourist market, made African clothing fashionable for the inhabitants
of Nyeri.
Lydias experience also suggests how the two global forces of post-colonial
identity politics and economic structural adjustment encounter and recip-
rocally influence each other in different local situations. During Wairimus
absence, Kenyan tailors had involved themselves in efforts to create through
clothing a new national identity as a liberating alternative to both colonial
identities and tribal identities forged by neo-colonial politics. The attempt to
create a national outfit to this end had actually begun on a small scale at
the time of Independence, but had been forgotten. The emergence of the global
circulation of African fashion had given this effort a new, expanded life with
fashion shows and newspaper write-ups. Although The UN program to help
seamstresses in the informal garment economy was inspired by the new popu-
larity of African fashion in other countries, it inadvertently contributed to the
quest for a Kenyan national outfit. Lydias experience suggests how African
fashion develops in different locales through fortuitous conjunctions rather
than unidirectional influences.
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Wairimu found that other members of her family had also adopted African
fashion. Her cousin Wakarema, also a seamstress with a shop in downtown
Nairobi, had recently started using West African printed fabrics, but got them
from New York through traveling family members rather than from Dakar.
Even Wairimus teen-age nephew had adopted African fashion, but with a
generational twist. For the most part, he longed to emulate the hip hop styles
of his Black American brothers, and even overlaid his clipped British accents
with Black American phrasing. The African mask pendant he wore around his
neck belonged to the style imported from the United States, since masks have
never been used in the Kikuyu culture of his forebears. He wore it with his
hip-hop outfits but not with the West African embroidered caftan and trousers
his mother had purchased from a Ghanaian immigrant who sold Ghanaian
clothing out of her home. The nephew thus performed alternately his mass-
marketed hip-hop and informally disseminated African identities.
Wairimu, Lydia and their nephew had all plugged into the global informal
African fashion network, but in markedly different ways. Each had taken
different points of entry and paths of circulation: Wairimu through leaving
home and entering the African American community, Lydia through a UN
program that came from without to her shop near Mount Kenya, and their
nephew through commercial exchange with West African immigrants to his
East African home. Each was making different connections both within so-
called peripheral networks and between this and the dominant economy.
Together, they illustrate that, as Homi Bhabha says, the very concepts of
homogeneous national culture, the consensual or contiguous transmission of
historical traditions, or organic ethnic communities as the grounds of
cultural comparativism are in a profound process of redefinition (1994: 5).
Dissolution and Hardening of Borders
Through the suitcase trade in African fashion, members of each community,
itself in a profound crisis, seek to create, perhaps contradictorily, more stable
identities by borrowing symbolic materials from other communities, equally
in crisis and similarly borrowing. The experience of another Kenyan at the L.A.
African Marketplace can illustrate one version of this process. Father Raphael
Sarone Kishare, a young Catholic priest in his mid-twenties and a member of
both the Kikuyu and Maasai ethnic groups, had been sent by the Church,
directly after his seminary training, to establish a parish in a poor rural area
near Mount Kenya. When I first came by chance to his newly created parish
in 1996, he showed me the surplice his aunt, a Maasai craftswoman, had
designed for him, using the famed Maasai appliqu- and bead-work. When I
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
visited him again in 1997, he took me to the Ngong Hills to meet his aunt and
purchase some of her bead-work necklaces, bracelets, and belts for sale in the
United States. As we hiked across the wild flower-studded hills he told me that
he was exhausted and stressed-out from building the parish, its dispensary and
its home for retarded children, with no help from the diocese. As he told me,
he could not continue to draw funds from the poor farmers of the parish, I
realized, from accumulated experience, that he was about to ask me to help
him come to the United States. (In fact, people had so often asked me to help
them emigrate that I could almost instantaneously make two assessments: (1)
given the complexities of my on-going relationship with Father Kishare, I could
not refuse; and (2) since the Church would be able to procure him a visa, my
efforts would not be futile, and I could easily accept.)
After two months in a South Central L.A. parish, Father Kishare seemed
more stressed-out than when he arrived. Living in the shadow of South Centrals
Interstate-10, the most heavily traveled section of freeway in California, and
ministering in a kind of urban poverty and turmoil he had not expected, he
remained in a state of dismay. On the last weekend of his stay, Wairimu and
I tried to alleviate his gloom by taking him to the African Marketplace. We
found him at the parish in a state of shock. He had just returned from the
retirement home, and could not recover from the spectacle of elder people
abandoned and warehoused away from their families. Once at the African
Marketplace, we wandered through the maze of booths selling batik caftans,
mudcloth coats, lgos baby clothes, masks, carvings, beads, paintings, baskets,
incense, earrings, greeting cards, and books until we came to a large space with
a clearing and several booths that had been rented by California Native
Americans. They had come to gather support for a ballot initiative on Indian
gambling, and were spending the afternoon exhibiting their dances and holding
contests for the best dancers. Father Kishare, fascinated by the colorful dancers,
insisted on staying to watch them when I went off to find some of the crafts-
people I had been studying. Knowing the Fathers remarkable abilities and
charisma, I was only slightly surprised when I returned to find him already
ensconced with a clipboard as the judge of the contests.
Finally, he seemed relaxed, happy and exuberant. He told me that he iden-
tified with the Native Americans and intended to write an article about their
similarity to the Maasai. His sense of identification came not just from their
brilliant appliqud robes that recalled the surplice done by his aunt, nor just
from the similarity between Maasai and Native American bead-work, but from
the struggles to redefine and recreate endangered cultures to which these
bore witness. The tiny glass beads in Maasai bead-work are the same as those
used in Native American craft. Originally manufactured in Yugoslavia, and
now made in India, they were introduced to both the Maasai and the Native
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 22
Global Suitcases
23
Americans by Europeans. Adopted through a process of cultural authent-
ication (Eicher and Erekosima 1995), the beads evince in both groups the
creative innovations through which they transform cultural traditions that
have always been in historical process. The similar dress evokes yet another
struggle that Father Kishare had spoken of again and again during our trip to
Maasai Country. They are like us, he told me. They are also having their
land taken from them. He asked me to photograph the Native Americans in
their ethnic garments so that he could have the images in Kenya.
The way in which Father Kishare renewed his Maasai identity as a histor-
ically changing one, through his contact with Native Americans in the middle
of an African American community, suggests some of the unexpected routes
through which Africans of one community redefine their own culture through
contact with other marginalized cultures. His experience presents yet more
unexpected links in the process of redefinition that confound any notion of a
linear passage between center and periphery or local and global. Even so, critics
can assume that these cross-cultural changes in marginalized cultures occur
only through contact with the dominant global culture rather than among the
former in the interstitial spaces of the latter. David Howes, talking about
creolization as the product of a conjuncture mentions only the articul-
ation between local and global (1996: 6), neglecting the richer possibility of
articulations within a subordinate global network.
The localglobal model assumes a bipolar opposition between the dominant
global and subordinate dependent cultures, always presumed to be local. Yet
signifying objects circulate not just from the centers to the peripheries but also
through connections among various peripheries. Lawrence Grossberg criticizes
the model that sees globalization producing homogeneity and local repro-
duction producing difference and transformation. The local site, usually
located in so-called peripheral nations (or in communities within the core
nations), constantly inflects global practices, resulting in a kind of syncretism
or creolisation (1996: 173; see also Ong 1995: 4). My research suggests a
different model, that of a tension-filled web joining several forms of global
transmission, with their different kinds of circuits and power dynamics. It
suggests the necessity of taking as point of departure the so-called peripheries
rather than the centers of global economy and culture in order to understand
the workings of the whole.
No overarching, homogenizing media incorporate sites of the African fashion
network. It does not extend its transnational influence through TV as do mass-
market youth styles. Nor does it, with notable exceptions, spread through
professional advertising. No central institutions bind it together. No one is in
charge. Its connectors are usually the craftspeople and suitcase vendors
traveling across national borders by plane or train and disseminating their
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 23
24
Global Circulation of African Fashion
wares through informal networks that have a distinctive form in each site. In
the case of mass-mediated culture, people in different locales may receive,
interpret and incorporate cultural artifacts differently, but they receive them
from the same homogeneous media. In the African fashion network, the media
of transmission in each site are organized differently as well.
Circuits of an informal fashion network are not independent of mass-
consumer capital, but imbue its airplane routes, roads, and urban centers
like a shadow. Ironically, this shadow is invisible from within the frame of
the dominant networks because of the very quality which makes it more
visible to its consumers its low-tech means of transmission. In the dominant
instance, the linkages that actually bind together localities to make up a
global network, either instantaneous electronic transmissions or freight planes
carrying containerized goods, are far less visible. In this shadow network, some
cargo travels in containers by boat, but most linkages are created by traveling
people. They take symbolic objects, ideas and images back and forth from one
African community to another.
My travels with Wairimu allowed me to see some of the difficulties they
undergo in carrying out this project, especially at official borders where the
dominant and suitcase networks intersect in a charged power relation. In these
border-crossing encounters both the fragility of the shadow network and its
resilience become palpable. Upon our arrival at Jomo Kenyatta Airport,
Wairimu and I loaded our trunks and suitcases on to two luggage dollies while
Wairimus two-year-old daughter reacted to this strange situation by screaming
and insisting on being held in her mothers arms. In this state, we approached
the customs desk, where I passed through with my dolly, while Wairimu was
stopped for extensive it seemed interminable questioning. The customs
agent had insisted on a bribe of fifty dollars. Wairimu had the presence of mind
to convince him that he would be better off meeting her in the cafeteria than
taking fifty dollars in public view. She then passed through into the arms of
her huge family who whisked her away.
The incidences of me passing freely into places that were not open to Wairimu
repeated itself so consistently within Kenya that it added yet another thread
of tension to the dense dynamics of our continuing relationship. Indeed, one
incident early in our field study showed that we had begun to think alike about
how to use this injustice to our mutual advantage even though each of us had
been too reticent to speak to the other about it. We took turns carrying a
backpack that contained the photographic and video equipment. One day,
while Wairimu was carrying it, we approached a bookstore whose window
bore the following sign: Customers must check all bags and backpacks upon
entering. I started thinking that I did not want to risk theft by checking the
backpack and that the salespeople would not stop a middle-aged white woman.
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 24
Global Suitcases
25
I did not know if Wairimu had seen the sign, but before I could say anything
to her, she said to me: Here, youd better take this backpack. The incident
broke the barrier of silence between us, and I found out that she had noticed
many more incidents of this egregious discrimination than I had and was
totally outraged by them. (In fact she still talks about them.)
The inequality was glaring at international borders. When we got to Jomo
Kenyatta Airport for the trip home, Wairimu asked me to go with her to
exchange her Kenya shillings for dollars, because, as she said, she always got
hassled while I got away with murder. And that, figuratively speaking, was
true. Our husbands had joined us in Kenya, and we were all traveling back
together. Upon arrival at Kenyatta, Wairimu and her African American husband
had had to open all the suitcases they were carrying, while my white husband
and I had passed through. Later, passing through the metal detector to the
boarding lounge, they had to open the hand luggage for a thorough search
while we passed through. At the stopover in Rome, my husband and I did not
have to open our passports, but an official scrutinized Wairimus for several
minutes.
At LAX immigration, racism and xenophobia were more invisible because
more efficiently mechanized and naturalized. The citizens line and the
aliens line were so separated that I completely lost sight of Wairimu. But
I did wait a long time for her to get through customs. In my line, the young
immigration official asked me why I had been to Kenya and where I was a
professor. When I answered UC Irvine, his face broke into a broad grin: Oh,
youre an Anteater! he exclaimed, welcoming me to the club with this insiders
reference to the UC Irvine mascot, as he absolved me from customs with a thud
of his stamp. After the experiences of the trip home, I was not in the mood
for the warm, fuzzy cuteness of American icons and marketing images. I had
even more reason to mistrust them than before. Lures shielding the privileged
few embraced in their cozy familiarity, they allow us to disavow the systematic
exclusion of most people in the world from the enveloping cushion of mass-
consumerism. Wairimu did not have the good fortune to be an Anteater, so
she emerged from customs long after I did.
Even Wairimu is in some sense among the more lucky members of the
suitcase network in African fashion. I have met many who are repeatedly
denied American visas altogether. Given these arbitrary barriers of race, class,
and influence peddling, not to mention the serious material difficulties and
setbacks artisans encounter, it is all the more remarkable that they produce
not only commodities but also significant popular cultural forms and sartorial
aesthetics. In my interactions with the producers, what struck me forcibly
was the conjunction between creative wealth and its frame of political and
economic vulnerability. And what came to strike me just as much was the way
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 25
this contrast, so thoroughly occluded in mass-consumption, insistently fore-
grounded itself here. Chapters 2 and 3 explore this conjunction, first in Dakar
and then in urban central Kenya. Chapters 4 and 5 track the circulation of
African fashion between the informal economy and the dominant economy
of mass production, while Chapter 6 investigates the ethical and method-
ological implications of this research.
Notes
1. See McRobbie 1998, which concerns small-scale fashion producers, and which
extensively analyzes symbolic and material production in the same frame.
2. The boubou is the classic Senegalese robe made from one piece of fabric and worn
by both men and women. The ndoket, a hybrid of the boubou and Western dress, is
a loose-fitting womens dress. The caftan is an Arabic tunic, worn mostly by men but
also borrowed by women.
3. McCracken contests the fact that fashion is a language by dismissing it as a meta-
phor (1988: 62) and contends it leads to imprecision (58). But from the perspective
of a literary critic, his own analysis of language and semiotics lacks precision. He
erroneously conflates language with an expressive medium and a means of com-
munication (64) without considering, in the words of Roman Jakobson, the whole
variety of its functions (Jakobson 1963: 213). McCracken assumes confusedly that
ideas exist separately from language, and that language then comes along to express
or reflect them after the fact. As a semiotic system, fashion has similarities to poetic
language, where the poetic function subordinates the referential function, and
thereby signifies less an external referent than the palpable side of signs (Jakobson
1963: 218). Similarly, in fashion the metalinguistic function (Jakobson 1963: 217)
predominates, so that fashionable dress signifies less an external referent such as
identity than its own code of fashionability. Linguistic and semiotic systems have,
moreover, other aspects than those of communication and expression. They also
function to produce meaning. Scholars of dress and fashion have exhaustively studied
their power to fabricate, express and communicate identities. This study differs
somewhat in that it attempts to explore instead the production of sartorial meaning
in three fashion systems.
4. In his influential work on clothing as communication, McCracken confuses the
highly distinct systems of sign and symbol and therefore of fashion and other kinds
of dress (1988: 64). For the difference between sign and symbol, see Barthes 1967:
358; and Kristeva 1980: 3841.
663(01).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 26
27
2
Fashion and the Meanings of
Tradition in Senegal
The Importance of Fashion in Senegal
The Zone A district of Dakar, where I lived in 1999, is built around a plot
of sandy wasteland called le jardin public. My neighbor, a man in his mid-
thirties, told me that in his teens it had been a truly beautiful garden, bordered
with white shells, dotted with park benches, filled with plants and flowers, a
gathering spot for the whole neighborhood. Now, all that is gone. In the park
of this devastated middle-class neighborhood, loose sand and bits of refuse
float in the wind. Sheep pick through the debris. Huge puddles from the rains
breed malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The paved surfaces of surrounding streets
have crumbled to rubble or completely reverted to sand. At one end of le jardin
public a neighborhood family, trying to survive the economic crisis by selling
small items, has set up a ramshackle booth of old boards and tar paper. Yet
on most afternoons one can see the woman merchant step out of her booth in
a beautiful flowing hand-dyed boubou (classic Senegalese robe; see Figure 1
on p.7) of brilliant orange or green cotton brocade, embroidered at the neck
in vibrant hues. On the streets of Dakar the womens, and often the mens,
boubous, caftans (long tunics) and ndokets (loose, voluminous dresses; see
Figures 2 and 3 on pp.8 and 9) stand out vividly as spots of aesthetic visual
pleasure against the somber wreckage of an urban landscape in crisis.
In contemporary Senegal, clothing is the major visual aesthetic practice, and
cloth, as in West Africa generally, is the most important major two-dimens-
ional art form (Perani and Wolff 1999: 25). Even, and perhaps especially, in
times of economic desperation, Senegals venerable art of dressing well
(Heath 1992: 19; see also Mustafa 1997: 171) remains an inviolable custom,
at once praised and condemned by the elegant citizens of Dakar, Saint-Louis
and Kaolack. A child of Saint Louis with any self-respect must know how
to dress well, says Modou Faye in the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil (Faye
1991: 11). Senegals sartorial art, arising from the regions long, rich history
as nodal point of Atlantic and trans-Saharan trade routes, makes it a major
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 27
28
Global Circulation of African Fashion
capital in the contemporary transnational circuits of African fashion. To the
extent that a global network can be said to have a center, Senegalese fashion
makes us realize that the global circulation of African fashion as cultural flow
is otherwise centered than the mass-consumption networks dominated by the
United States
Several Kenyans I interviewed about fashion mentioned, with a hint of
longing, that Senegal is rich in culture. I too, during my stays in Dakar, felt
immersed in a sea of sartorial opulence where currents and eddies swirled in
layerings and overlappings of styles, fabrics, dyeing techniques and embroidery
designs from different moments in Senegalese history. The sense of cultural
richness was heightened by the coexistence of multiple dress codes, also from
diverse historical moments, marking the same garments. Fashionable uses of
traditional African dress mingle with obligatory uses. For example, Friday is
the Muslim day of la grande prire. On the streets one sees crowds of men
gathered at the mosques in the obligatory caftans, and other groups of men
praying outside their work places in jeans and t-shirts. Middle-aged women
wear the boubous that are obligatory for their age status, while since the late
1980s, younger women wear their Friday-best, tenue traditionnelle (tradit-
ional wear) in the latest colors, dyeing motifs and sleeve shape, whether or
not they will be praying, and even whether or not they are Muslim.
One role of fashion in general is to make the body a bearer of cultural myth,
and for Senegalese fashion one such myth, spun by its own practitioners as
well as by outsiders, involves notions of tradition. The semiotic system of
Senegalese fashion revolves around the opposition between tenue euro-
penne (European wear) and tenue traditionelle. The flowing garments,
as well as hand-dyed, hand-woven and colorful print fabrics, are coded tradi-
tional. Far from embodying the timeless, closed society evoked by colonialist
notions of tradition (Kasfir 1992: 423), however, these fashions result from
a centuries-old history of weaving together influences from many African,
European and Arabic cultures. The production and consumption of African
fabrics and garments in Senegal become focal points for the anxieties, attach-
ments and criticisms that attend the ever-changing status of tradition in a
society in crisis. An exploration of the ways that tradition encodes Senegalese
fashion will help us then, to appreciate its preeminent role in the global circul-
ation of African fashion. How do Senegalese African fashion and its meaning
production change as they interact with other fashion systems? The vexed
notion of tradition places the symbolic and material production of Sene-
galese fashion at the meeting ground between history and myth-making.
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 28
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
29
Re-Inventing Tradition
This notion of tradition, with its fluid and multiple meanings, does not fit into
the dichotomy distinguishing tradition and modernity whereby the [colon-
ialist] episteme of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . invented
the concept of a static and prehistoric tradition (Mudimbe 1988: 189).
1
An indispensable element of modernity, tradition, according to V. Mudimbe,
defies the pervasive evolutionary assumption underlying the ethnocentric,
expansionist paradigm of Western history (ibid.: 49, 193). The tradition/
modernity dichotomy further obfuscates the fact that this region where the
Senegal and Gambia Rivers flow to the Atlantic Ocean has been home to cross-
cultural trade routes since at least the tenth century (Curtin 1984: 25). In the
production and exchange of Senegalese fashion, tradition signifies rather
the layers of an alternative model of historicity and change. From the time
of Arabic Islamization beginning in the ninth century, through the tragic
encounters with the slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism and globalized
capital, the Senegalese have continued to build a rich, uniquely hybrid culture,
incorporating and transforming other cultures, including those of migrating
African ethnic groups. Influences from elsewhere are not perceived to fill an
absence, as in Kikuyu Kenyan and Black American African fashion, but to be
threaded into an ongoing cultural project that for centuries has been building
even as it is unraveling, and continues, tragically, to do so. This history then,
with its differently centered global circuits, follows a different logic from a
universalizing model of necessary capitalist expansion.
In this latter model, as articulated specifically in World Bank documents,
tradition does indeed connote backwardness and stasis. In one such document
Senegalese dressmaking epitomizes the nature of informal enterprises that
imply a traditional mode of production (Webster and Fidler 1996: 5). This
traditional mode of production includes apprenticeship where, says the
study, skills based on emulation rather than innovation are a sure recipe for
noncompetitive production, and where traditional technology . . . turns out
noncompetitive products (ibid.: 14). Competitive in this and other World
Bank documents is shorthand for mass-producing the greatest amount of
garments in the least amount of time with the lowest possible pay to producers
(Biggs et al. 1994: see this book, Chapter 4). From within this orthodox model,
economists can see only emulation precisely where the tailors and dyers I
studied saw originality and creativity. By contrast to this official view, Sene-
galese tailoring and dyeing enjoy high prestige within the informal circuits
linking African communities.
Even a brief description of traditional Senegalese dress suggests layers and
knots of historic transformation. Basic to Senegalese dress is the pagne (in
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 29
30
Global Circulation of African Fashion
French) or sru rbbal (in Wolof), a word which itself sediments a history of
changing meanings. One meaning is cloth itself. Hand-woven cloth dates to
pre-colonial times and was used as a unit of value in economic exchange
(Biondi 1987: 59; Curtin 1975: 21214; Picton and Mack 1989: 56, 89). By
extension, a pagne is any rectangle of cloth, and by further extension, the
garment that women wrap around their hips and wear under a boubou, caftan,
ndoket or marinire. The boubou itself is the classic Senegalese robe, made of
a three-meter-long rectangle with a neck opening; it is sewn up the sides to
make armholes, and draped over the body. The embroidery that graces its most
elegant version comes from Arabic society. Since at least the seventeenth
century, the cloth and embroidery threads of choice come from Europe,
but now cheaper threads come from Asia. Cheaper Asian imitations of high-
quality European cotton damask or basin flooded the market in the 1980s and
1990s, and by 2000 a Nigerian imitation of the Asian imitations became
ubiquitous. The ndoket also called a camisole (in French), mame boye
(darling grandmother in Wolof) or, as one historian says, an mboube la
franaise (Biondi 1987: 52) was invented by the Signares. These mtisse
descendants of eighteenth-century unions between Wolof women and French
officers in the trading posts of Gore and Saint Louis established fashion in
general as a major corporeal art. The marinire is a hip-length top resembling
a short version of the ndoket.
This traditional dress is also coded Islamic, and worn by both Moslems
and Christians in Dakar for Islamic holidays, while European dress is also
coded Christian, and worn by both Moslems and Christians for Christian
holidays. This coding of Muslim dress as traditional shows how clothing
inscribes the floating and sometimes conflicting meanings that have accrued
to the notion of tradition, especially in its relation to Islam. Within their own
periodization of history, Senegalese social scientists have differentiated Islam
from tradition, and talk of Islam as replacing and appropriating traditional
religions and traditional social organization (Diop 1981: 111, 206, 213; Amin
1985: 11).
Yet another slippage in the meaning of the term tradition concerns the
marinire (see Figure 5 on p.31). This hip-length tunic with wide, often multi-
tiered sleeves, worn with a matching pagne, is the garb of young girls. Women
also wear it as casual dress. But high-fashion styles imported from other West
African countries also incorporate the marinire. One such style is the three-
piece deux pagnes, composed of marinire, pagne and a second pagne wrapped
tightly around the hips. Resembling this is the taille basse, created during
colonialism throughout West Africa (Diallo 1975: 82). The top, worn over a
pagne, is low-cut with wide sleeves, a tight bodice and a flounce over the hips.
These two garments belong to the traditional term of the fashion system,
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 30
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
31
Figure 5 Couturire Aby B in her atelier hanging one of her marinires in wax
print, and wearing a marinire with pagne. Dakar, 1999.
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 31
32
Global Circulation of African Fashion
in part because they are worn with a pagne and made of African print fabrics,
and also because they do not resemble European dress. Nevertheless the deux
pagnes and taille basse are to varying degrees recent inventions or importations,
and definitely worn to make a fashion statement rather than for religious
purposes.
Traditional Dress as a Modern Fashion System
These styles illustrate first that tenue traditionnelle is an autonomous fashion
system, different from its Western counterpart. It fulfills the two standard
definitions, sociological and linguistic, of fashion as a particular form of dress.
Fashion is classically defined as the clothing system governed by the demands
of the consumer capitalist market. Its main quality is rapid and constant change
in order to renew its market appeal (Appadurai 1986: 32; Lipovetsky 1994;
Simmel 1904). In semiotic theories the fashion system is distinct from other
clothing systems as sign systems are distinct from symbols (see Chapter 1).
Dress as symbol reflects the wearers social status. Dress as sign within
a fashion system signifies in fashion or out of fashion (as well as the
oppositions that flow from this, like chic/dowdy, or beautiful/ugly). As symbol
a grand boubou says that its wearer is Muslim. As sign, the grand boubou made
of the latest fabrics and fabric designs signifies that its wearer, who might
belong to any religion, is in fashion. The sociological and semiotic definitions
of fashion are connected, since any article of dress in the system rapidly changes
its meaning from in fashion to out of fashion, and one gains a kind of
status by ones ability to read these arbitrary shifts in meaning. Fashionable
Senegalese women pride themselves on being adept readers.
2
Traditional clothing in Senegal forms a modernist sign system even as it
continues to function as a symbolic system. It presents a historicity not reduc-
ible to Western evolutionary paradigms. In her study of Senegalese dress in
the city of Kaolack, Heath writes that tradition and modernity serve as
interdependent symbolic resources for an urban elite (1992: 24). To these
insights I would add that in fashionable dress, tradition is not just intertwined
with modernity but the governing term of a meaning system that is itself
modern, in the sense that it is a fashion system. But even as symbolic dress,
tenue traditionnelle is imbued with the power of modern meaning systems to
strike all signs and symbols with ambiguity and deceptiveness. In the daily
spectacle of sumptuous dress on the streets of Dakar, one sees a solemn,
haughty gentleman. His voluminous, starched white boubou, encrusted with
gold embroidery, symbolizes his status as el hadj, a Muslim who has accom-
plished the pilgrimage to Mecca, with all this connotes not only for piety but
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 32
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
33
also for prestige and wealth. He passes an elegant woman, her costly ndoket
(loose voluminous dress) richly dyed and worked with interlocking appliqus
of ribbon and eyelet lace. Her stately gait and fashionable dress also connote
prosperity and prominent social standing. In this scene, it is highly possible
that neither dignified gentleman nor regal woman has the means to provide
his or her children with three meals a day.
3
In post-colonial Senegal clothing encodes contradictory messages. These,
moreover, may or may not reflect reality. In a crumbling physical, social and
economic environment dress can provide a reassuring faade of illusory social
stability and prosperity, a visual and sensorial shield against anxiety. But at
the same time it also evokes anxiety. People often talk of the large expenditures
on hand-dyed and hand-tailored clothing as a reckless dissipation of scarce
resources that furthers the unraveling of the social fabric. But perhaps, given
Senegals history, fashion has encoded similarly contradictory messages since
its inception during the slave trade (Barry 1985; Brooks 1976). The Senegalese
fashion system of the late twentieth century emerged from a particularly
fraught knot of economic and social calamity in the 1980s.
Fashion in a Culture of Socio-economic Crisis
One designer, Fadieye Gaye, told me in 1995: If you had known Dakar ten
years ago, it was not at all as it is now. In every neighborhood, on every street
corner, you now find a tailor who makes nothing but embroidered boubous
[classic Senegalese robe] . . . Before, for gala parties everyone wore suits and
long gowns. Like several other people, she explained to me that in the 1960s
and 1970s, when Senegals first president, Lopold Senghor, banned tenue
traditionnelle for official audiences, it was not high style. The clothing was
worn by older people and devout Muslims. Its return to fashion during the
1980s was in several ways the visible sign of a set of crises that had forced the
resignation of Senghor in 1980. His resignation resulted from an economic
crisis of unprecedented proportions (Boone 1992: 209) that also precipitated
the end of the nationalist period (B. Diouf 1991: 54) with its particular
notion of tradition enmeshed in Senghors philosophy of Ngritude.
4
Para-
doxically, the break with this nationalist mythology of tradition was part of
the same set of historical forces that brought about the explosion of tenue
traditionnelle as fashion.
In 1981, under the new president Abdou Diouf, an aggressive structural
adjustment program pushed by the World Bank and the IMF resulted
in disastrous impoverishment and the loss of social services (M. Diouf
1992: 49). Families in the disintegrating middle class found that African fabrics
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 33
34
Global Circulation of African Fashion
and styles provided a cheaper way to appear stylish when new European
clothing became unaffordable. At the same time the collapse of the neo-colonial
economy brought thousands of people into tailoring and dyeing as viable
professions in the informal economy. Tailoring became the largest productive
occupation (Mustafa 1997: 11, 122).
By the end of the 1980s, a new fashionability of African dress coincided with
the eruption of a new youth movement. In 198990, young Dakarois began
a drive to clean up their ruined city. The Set/Setal (be clean/make clean)
movement they unleashed expanded into a cultural force. Working in their own
neighborhoods, they covered the walls of the city with a new kind of mural
art whose styles and images produced, according to Mamadou Diouf, a new
historical memory which broke with that of the nationalist generation(1992:
41). Nationalist ideology, based on Senghors interpretation of Ngritude,
celebrated an idealized version of traditional legitimacies (ibid.: 48). Senghors
doctrine gave great importance to the arts, but at the same time imposed an
official national aesthetic that dictated images of masks, imaginary spirits,
wildlife, traditional artifacts, generic urban scenes, landscapes, rural life and
ritual, traditional mythology and folktales (Ebong 1999: 130, 132).
The new mural art exploded this orthodoxy, adapting its subject matter to
the people and places of particular neighborhoods, de-idealizing orthodox
images and introducing new domains of imagery. Scenes of urban life included
violence and filth as well as counter-images of healthy, hygienic practices, often
in a comic-strip format. Rural scenes portrayed the grueling life of women in
villages, and landscapes protested against the destruction of forests. From
Senegals past came images from the slave trade and references to heroes
who resisted French colonialism. Senghor and other leaders of the indepen-
dence generation were enfolded into a new heteroclite pantheon that included
local boxers and soccer players, leaders of the Muslim brotherhoods, singers
Youssou Ndour and Jimmy Hendrix, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy,
and most popular of all, Nelson Mandela (Bugnicourt and Diallo 1991).
Rather than simply abandon Ngritudes injunction to adhere to ancestors
and heritage, the young Set/Setaliens reinvented Senegals tradition, ancestry
and heritage as a means to fight their marginalization and impoverishment
(Diouf 1992: 41).
Like the fashionable use of traditional clothing, this revision of ancestral
memory constructed new urban identities. In response to the brutality of the
crisis, the youth movements transformed not only the Ngritude myth but
also its aesthetic vision (ibid.: 47). As the return to fashion of tenue tradition-
nelle was in part an aesthetic reaction against the fashions of the nationalist
period, so did Set/Setals artistic practices challenge the interpretive logic of
nationalist symbolism. In the murals on city walls, symbols were diverted
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 34
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
35
from their functions, especially religious functions (ibid.: 50). An ancient
water goddess could signify traditional nostalgia or the contemporary signif-
icance of water to clean and purify streets littered with garbage and feces.
Images of the Mouride founder Amadou Bamba could signify religious morality
or political resistance to colonial occupation. A replica of the Stature of Liberty
could be tied, as one observer noted, to the City of New York, a brand of
cigarettes, the desire for liberation, or the Enlightenment (Bugnicourt and
Diallo 1991: 29). Like the untraditional use of tenue traditionnelle, religious
and political mural images were diverted from the logic of fixed meanings to
the free decoding of the sign (Diouf 1992: 51). In this way, the explosion
of African or traditional fashion shares with this cultural movement a
new aesthetic of the city, and participates in building a new urban culture
(ibid.: 50) born of the political, economic and cultural crises of the 1980s.
In 1990, the national government co-opted the Set/Setal movement to clean
up the city, and the people withdrew. The city resettled into its course of
physical degradation, but traditional fashion continued to expand and to
flourish aesthetically, given the needs of consumers to remain stylish in econ-
omic hard times, and the needs of craftspeople to earn a living in the informal
economy. Perhaps in the absence of opportunities to affect their disintegrating
urban environment, the Dakarois focused even more on the limited realm they
could affect, their bodies. They conferred beauty and order on the city by
making their bodies the bearers of beautiful fabrics and fashions. As for fashion
producers, their work, like the impulses and images of Set/Setal, also responds
to the new forces of globalization. The tailors, dyers and fabric designers have
seen their professions in some ways expanded and in other ways limited as a
result of structural adjustment. And structural adjustment is the most intrusive
and immediate of forces that now enmesh their professions in webs of globaliz-
ation. Within these webs they must negotiate between the demands of their
crafts and the demands of the globalized economy which both makes possible
and degrades the craft. In Senegal, the meanings of African fashion emerge in
and through these negotiations.
Tailors
The economic arrangements of tailoring establishments, from fashionable
shops and mini-sweatshops (Mustafa 1997: 156) in Sandaga Market that
employ as many as 30 tailors, to struggling tailors working alone, defy categ-
orization within the heterogeneous economy. At one end, Sngal Broderie and
the glamorous Douma Diakits Shalimar Couture make embroidered boubous
for an international clientele. A small group of elite designers who make hybrid
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
clothes have gained a toe-hold in the dominant global economy of high fashion,
show in Paris, and even have participated in a World Bank-sponsored style-
show in Washington. These include the fashion designer Oumou Sy, Coll Sow
Ardo and the former model for Yves Saint-Laurent Sadyia Gueye. At the other
end of a wide-ranging spectrum, single tailors produce custom-made clothing
in tiny stalls or even their own living quarters. As the ongoing economic crisis
both brought into being the massive expansion of these micro-enterprises and
also makes their existence extremely precarious, many tailors struggle with
the contradiction between attachment to their craft as an aesthetic practice
and the desperate quest for money.
One distinction between aesthetic practices and economic practices, both
of which have long histories, suggests how they might conflict today. By
contrast to the unruly mix of economic arrangements, the aesthetic categories
and their corresponding techniques are highly formalized. Tailors specialize
in one of three styles: tailleurs-brodeurs who make the intricately embroidered
boubous and caftans; tailors who make ndokets elaborately trimmed with
ribbon and eyelet in a process called le simple; and tailors who make the
European styles. Each style calls upon a different set of skills that can take
as long as twelve years of apprenticeship to learn. While larger shops hire
tailors from different disciplines, and tailors themselves may collaborate, no
tailor masters them all.
These technical categories show how garments like the deux pagnes are,
despite their recent invention, traditional not only because they use a pagne
and fabric coded African, but also because they have certain techniques of
construction. Anne Hollander traces Western fashion, as distinct from other
clothing systems, to the development of curved seams and darts that permit
the construction of inset sleeves, lapel folds and fitted jackets (Hollander 1994:
90). Boubous and pagnes, which have their origins in draping and wrapping,
use exclusively straight seams. So do ndokets and marinires. The taille basse
lends itself to either method. To make an ndoket or marinire, the tailor cuts
a piece of cloth into trapezoids and triangles. He or she makes little use of a
measuring tape, determining the dimensions of the flared body and the multi-
tiered sleeves by folding the fabric. The tailor sews the sleeves of the garment
first and then attaches the bodice to them. To construct a Western style, the
tailor spreads the fabric on a cutting table, traces the outline of the garments
form on the fabric with chalk, using a tape measure and a rgle, a strip of wood
straight on one side, and curved on the other. Instead of using a paper pattern,
tailors apply their knowledge of the basic cuts they have learned during their
apprenticeship, and draw them directly on to the fabric.
If methods of construction determine whether a garment belongs to tenue
traditionnelle or tenue europenne, the two methods have certain traditional
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 36
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
37
and modern elements in common. Both use the small sewing machines intro-
duced in the nineteenth century by the French colonialists. And both kinds of
tailors, even in the ready-to-wear workshops, make garments one at a time,
contrary to the imperatives of mass-production efficiency in development
discourse. But rather than the symptom of arrested development, these methods
suggest that in Senegalese fashion, the visual and symbolic richness that place
it at the heart of the global circulation of African fashion are inseparable from
its process of production and exchange. Like the fashions, the production
process weaves together strands of traditional practices that are in fact various
moments in its historical encounters with different cultures.
Whether they make traditional or European clothing, most tailors
follow the seemingly casual economic practices of the informal economy. Most
do not keep records and do not know exactly how much they earn. When you
ask about the real price of a garment, almost everyone will tell you: There
is no real price. One tailor whom I studied intensively over a period of two
years, told me: For a simple dress, the normal price for young women is
3,000 to 4,000 francs CFA (100 francs CFA = 1.00 French franc, 0.13 US
dollar, 0.1 British pound Sterling). I found that wealthier clients in more elegant
shops can be expected to pay CFA 7,000 to CFA 10,000 for the same dress.
But at all levels, clients and tailors engage in bargaining, with the price being
determined not only by some so-called objective value of the garment, but also
by the social relation between buyer and seller (Diop 1981: 77; Appadurai
1986: 47). Once I asked Gnouma Diagana, a dyer I was working with, why
Srinte, a fabric designer who excelled in xosi, the flour-resist motifs applied
before dyeing, had quoted me a higher price than the one another dyer paid
her xosiist. She answered with a bit of condescension: There is no sign when
you enter the country that says in Senegal xosi is such and such a price, as if
this were an absurd idea, and concluded: Cest linformel (its the informal)
as if this totally explained it.
Although official economic discourse opposes informal economies to the
modern sector, the informal economy, like the fashion system enmeshed in
it, defies such a dichotomy between traditional and modern. The informal
economy stands, for better or worse, as an alternative modernity, both in the
sense that it is produced by, enmeshed within and subordinated to global
capitalism, and also in the sense that historically it supersedes and challenges
neo-colonial arrangements.
5
Although a handful of the more successful tailors
belong to a tailors association which has links to a USAID-sponsored NGO,
most tailors work within an informal economy much more diffuse and unorg-
anized. Whatever their status and connections, most of the tailors that I have
studied rely for their personal and professional survival on personal networks
of dependency and mutual obligation, and are guided by the traditional
ethics that these imply (Thioub et al. 1998: 89).
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38
Global Circulation of African Fashion
Within linformel, shops can be large enough to have separate rooms for
clients and cutting and another crammed with five to ten sewing machines,
or they can have space for only one machine (Figure 6). They are everywhere.
They can be tucked into corners of busy commercial streets, hidden in narrow
alleys, or located in residential areas, often within homes whose owners have
turned the exterior wall of a room into an opening onto the street. As one
passes, one can watch the tailors cutting, sewing, ironing, or else gathered
around the common bowl for lunch, sleeping, kneeling on their prayer rugs,
or brewing strong syrupy Mauritanian tea. Many shops are concentrated in
Dakars legendary markets: the enormous March Sandaga in the center of the
city, the long narrow back-street March Nguelao in an unpaved sandy alley
stretching between the rear borders of two working-class districts, and the
seemingly endless, intricate maze of the March H.L.M., devoted almost
entirely to tailors, fabrics, notions and dyeing supplies.
Itinerant photographers, young men lucky enough to receive a snapshot
camera from an overseas relative and enterprising enough to put it to use,
photograph new ndoket styles displayed on the walls of one atelier and then
offer the photos to other tailors. Their customers tend to be a new breed of
woman entrepreneur (Mustafa 1997: 1516, 1457) who hire tailors not to
make custom clothing, but to sew ndokets for export to neighboring African
countries. These photos provide one means of the rapid spread of fashion. But
Figure 6 Individual tailor stalls at the March H.L.M. Dakar, 1995.
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 38
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
39
in a city with abundant street life, and where fashion production goes on in
public, plainly visible to every passer-by, women say they find on the street
the looks they want to copy.
Gender and Tailoring
Before independence, according to Professor Oumar Ndongo (personal com-
munication), only men could be tailors because only men could perform
remunerative work, and one still reads as late as 1990 that tailors are invariably
male (Heath 1992: 20). Yet, according to Senegalese women memorialists,
women couturires existed at least as far back as the 1950s (Diallo 1975;
Ndoye 1999). Historically, women have worked and received clients inside
their homes. But the new women entrepreneurs open workshops and hire
tailors to sew for them. Many of these specialize in ndokets, although some
elite women use their creativity to combine the ndoket and marinire into new
hybrid styles. This reorganization of the profession also causes male tailors
to violate the old categories of style. A young tailor devoted to tenue euro-
penne, who cannot find the means to establish his own atelier, may end up
doing le simple for one of these entrepreneurs. At one end of this entrepren-
eurial spectrum, wives of well-placed officials, professionals or businessmen
make original, exquisite garments for clients they gather through their social
circles. At the other end, middle-class women who have amassed sufficient
funds hire one tailor to sew ndokets for export. Although the ndokets are
multiply produced in that the tailor makes many identical garments, he cuts,
sews and trims each one by hand, individually. The deepening economic crisis,
then, has brought more and more women into the profession, and not only
the entrepreneurs who hire male tailors. Even more unheard of, young women
are now apprenticing for male tailors.
The contrast between a woman entrepreneur, a couturire who works at
home and a young woman apprentice can illustrate not only the weave of
Senegalese past and present but the irresolvable contradiction between devotion
to craft and need for money. Mabouya Tandian is a woman entrepreneur born
in a Soninke village on the Mauritanian side of the Senegal River. After her
marriage, she joined about 50 per cent of Senegals population in Dakar.
Having, like many women, studied computer skills without finding a job in
this area, Mabouya did find financing through her husband, an engineer and
one of the few people with a job in a private corporation. Her atelier in the
March H.L.M. hired one tailor. Tall and beautiful, with a regal bearing and
a dramatic manner, she would saunter through her domain, the uncharted
labyrinth of the March in her hand-dyed ndoket, head wrap and sandals (she
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40
Global Circulation of African Fashion
never wore the poor quality ndokets that she sold for export). At ease and at
home, she disdainfully bargained with the fabric merchants. Like many, though
not all, of these entrepreneurs, and unlike any of the tailors I interviewed,
Mabouya professes a complete boredom for tailoring, design or quality.
Aby B, a shy quiet woman in her thirties, works alone at home where
she makes ndokets and marinires (see Figure 5 on p.31). In the early 1980s,
she could learn only by taking lessons in a school. She then worked for two
years as an embroiderer in a center. In 1994, she opened an atelier in her fathers
house, in a large working-class section of Dakar known as Grand Dakar. About
eight feet by twelve feet, equipped with a low table for cutting and three small
machines, her room has a cement floor and a wide door cut into the exterior
wall that opens onto the quiet unpaved street, unfrequented by anyone but
neighbors. Unlike the tailors who cut and sew ndokets as rapidly as possible
for the entrepreneurs in the March H.L.M., Aby sews her ndokets very slowly
and with impeccable precision, the quiet of her atelier contrasting strikingly
with the din and commotion of ateliers in the markets.
I ask her if she wants to sell large quantities like other women couturires.
Without a thought for the entrepreneurs in the March H.L.M., she apparently
assumes I am referring to the unique and glamorous Douma Diakit, whose
large, elegant, mirror-lined shop sells the most exquisite and expensive boubous
to fashionable clients from all over the world. She says she lacks the means
to expand her business. But when I ask more directly if she wants to be like
the couturires at the March H.L.M. who are interested only in selling, she
gives the kind of answer that in general distinguishes the craftspeople from
those who are purely merchants. Speaking from within the contradiction
between attachment to the craft and the need for money in time of economic
devastation, she says: I dont want to sew in order to sell.
Abys younger sister, as well as her next-door neighbor, both women in their
early twenties, apprentice outside the home for male tailors, and, also contrary
to traditional gender roles, are learning to make the tenue europennne that
is so much in fashion with young women. The sister is reputed to be a rebel
and is almost never at home. Her neighbor, on the other hand, must, like most
young women, help to prepare the mid-day meal in the morning, and so can
only apprentice between 3:00 PM and 7:00 PM, while the male apprentices work
from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM. When I asked her master tailor NGalla Ndiaye why
he allowed Astou to stay away in the morning but fired another apprentice,
Abys sixteen-year-old brother, for spending the morning at soccer practice,
he only answered: Women must do domestic tasks in the morning, as if no
more need be said. One day, while the young woman was making a boubou,
the elderly woman who had ordered it passed by, noticed the work, and came
in to complain that she wanted her boubou made by a man and not a woman.
The men found this very amusing, but Astou just continued sewing.
663(02).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 40
Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
41
The Social Life of Ateliers
Weaving traditional social practices into its ongoing history, Senegalese fashion
production, like the meaning of the clothing, also conforms to a different logic
than that of mass production. This might in fact seem like a lack of logic within
a World Bank frame that sees efficiency, productivity, competitiveness,
and purely quantitative criteria for the accumulation of capital as absolute
values (see Chapter 4). This other mode of production can in many ways be
presented as an alternative modernity, but its historically constructed entangle-
ment in the larger global system can make it problematic as well. Key to its
logic is that Senegalese fashion joins consumers and producers. The process
produces simultaneously a garment and its meaning because ateliers are not
only sites of production but also social gathering places, where friends and
family are sure to find companions, exchange gossip, or alleviate the boredom
and disappointment of unemployment.
On a typical afternoon, in July, 1999, at NGallas atelier, there are at least
six people filling the eight- by twelve-foot room. While activity centers around
the cutting table, the room also contains four sewing machines, an ironing table
holding piles of fabric and an overlock machine, a tea burner, bags of remnants,
a rolled up prayer rug and two white plastic garden chairs for clients. Double
iron doors take up the entire exterior wall. They are opened to the wide, paved,
tree-lined residential street of a middle-class neighborhood built shortly after
independence, but now falling under the pressures of the economic crisis.
NGalla rents the atelier from the family who lives in the house. The residents
of the house next door have turned their exterior room into a telephone center.
Outside this house, they have set up a table where the sons sell matches, candy,
and tissues. Next to this, a peanut vendor spoons her wares over a burner, and
chats with the women of the family who have come to sit on the little bench
built into the wall of the house. The women of the house where NGalla works
sit in chairs on the sidewalk and crochet in their own little group. Across the
street, another tailor has an atelier where several members of his family live
and work.
As a newcomer to the neighborhood, NGalla is able to join considerable
powers of charm to exceptional tailoring talents and has no trouble attracting
the fashionable young women of the district as clients. The people in the tiny
atelier on this July afternoon are, aside from NGalla, four apprentices (includ-
ing the young woman Astou and Abys brother) and a teenage neighbor of
NGallas in Grand Dakar. He is a lyce student spending his summer vacation
helping out at the atelier. When I ask if the apprentices are paid, people laugh
at my naivet, and say, but they are his pupils! NGalla pays for the meals
and carfare of Malal, and oldest and most experienced of the apprentices. Only
Malal, in his mid-twenties, is skilled and experienced enough to help NGalla.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
In an economy where not all values are reduced to exchange value, exploi-
tation takes more personal forms. It is also reciprocal. If NGalla exploits the
labor of the apprentices, he is in turn exploited by their families. The two
teenaged men are slow learners and unmotivated. NGalla has tried to fire
each of them on various occasions, but their mothers always force him to take
them back. When NGalla came from his rural village to Dakar as a young
apprentice, members of these womens extended family boarded him. Still
practicing the time-honored values of the village, he feels tied to these women
through bonds of reciprocal obligation. She [one of the mothers] told me if
I did not take him back he would just become a delinquent, said NGalla with
a shudder. He did not want to be guilty of such a fall. These webs of personal
interdependency, hierarchy and sociality envelop the work of the atelier.
On this afternoon, NGalla and Malal pass a garment-in-progress back and
forth. NGalla cuts, Malal sews a seam and gets up to iron it, NGalla checks
its measurements and does finishing while Malal sews and irons the next piece.
The teen-age apprentices are sent to buy a spool of thread, trim for the dress,
or a bottle of Coke. But most of the time, as pupils of the master-tailor, they
watch the work. The lycen keeps the two teenage male apprentices company
and, as a student, writes down the measurements when NGalla measures a
client for a new garment. He also brews the sweet, strong tea which the tailors
pass around to each other and to the many visitors.
One of the regular visitors is NGallas friend Moussa who spends much of
his time off work there. Another regular is a small, wiry young woman with
uncontainable energy who flies around the tiny atelier to stand first with Malal
and then with NGalla, talking all the while in rapid Wolof. Moussa teases her
mercilessly, telling me loudly, this is Malals girlfriend, his future wife. Malal
spins around from the ironing table with an enthusiastic, I accept! NGalla
examines the garment Malal has just handed him, finds the measurements are
not right and hands it back to be redone. Malal jokingly scolds the young
woman for forcing him to spoil his work. Moussa teases her until she leaves
in a huff. While this is going on, Paulina, a neighbor and client from Grand
Dakar, has come in about an order, and then another woman, passing and
recognizing Paulina, comes in to chat. In the meantime, the prayer rug has been
rolled out in the narrow space in front of the cutting table. People take turns
going out to the curb with a small kettle of water to perform their ablutions,
and then kneeling on the rug for the afternoon prayer to Allah while the radio
blares a French soccer game.
Though more sedate, Abdou Niangs three-room atelier with six hired
tailors on a street corner in le Mdina also hosts a steady stream of friends and
family. Another tailor I frequented, Abdou comes from an old and prominent
Saint-Louis Wolof family that counts Signares in its prior generations. His
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
43
accountant father played saxophone in the first jazz group of that city now
famous for its jazz. His uncle is Senegals President Abdoulaye Wade. Abdous
urbane charm contributes to his aura as a successful, well-established tailor.
He is active in a tailors association formed by an arm of USAID. Through
this association, he entered the minority of Senegalese artisans who keep
account books, and is now the president of an offshoot group that extends
credit to members of the association. He once had an American partner, and
has experimented with all manner of creative fashion design, including weav-
ing, embroidery and leather work. Connected to many artists in Dakar, he
bridges the gap between fashion and artistic creation. Thus, among the visitors
who fill his reception room are clients whom my impressed assistant called
bourgeois, and who include Americans, both white and black, as well as
Senegalese who now live in the United States. Other visitors who gather here
are Abdous artist friends.
The more formal organization and atmosphere of his shop do not preclude
its social role in le Mdina. One habitu is the Commissaire de Police of
the le Mdina, a lonely man who comes to confide in Abdou, and who came
in one evening to collapse from malaria in his reception room. Abdou, who
was in the tailors room working on an outfit for me, hastened to call the
gentlemans doctor. As the waiting client, I was an integral part of the group
offering sympathy and was enlisted to accompany the Commissaire when my
assistant drove him to the hospital. Even Abys secluded atelier is a gathering
place in the afternoon, where one sister brings her son, and another receives
her boyfriend, while the mother brings the rice to sort and listens to the daily
obituaries on the radio.
At NGallas atelier the livelier scene associated with a tailor who is both
male and marginal can also stage with greater clarity the contradiction between
devotion to ones craft and the difficulties of economic survival. Since tailors
without wealthy clients must accept too many clients, orders are consistently
late. In the summer of 1999, the electrical company which had never modern-
ized its generators, and which was going through a contentious process of
acquisition by private foreign investors, was rationing electricity. The daily
random electrical blackouts interrupted the artisans work for hours at a time
and magnified the problem of late orders. One way for a client to get her
garment is to go and sit in the atelier, sometimes for several hours, while the
tailor sets aside other work to finish hers.
One afternoon, when I came to NGallas atelier at 5:30 PM to pick him
up for the 6:00 karate class at the dojo where he taught and I was a student,
such a client had just come in. NGalla usually makes European clothes, but
this client needed a simple boubou and pagne of lightweight cotton. While
NGallas scissors slashed through the fabric, Malal and a tailor who frequently
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
visited the atelier after his work at a uniform workshop were already sewing
the cut pieces at top speed. NGalla, who had already been up all night the
night before working on late garments for angry clients, cut with one hand
while with the other he drank a cup of strong coffee and then a glass of strong
tea which the apprentices were preparing for him. Moussa, without being
asked, held the fabric in place so that NGalla could cut faster, while another
apprentice ironed. Working in perfect synchrony without even having to speak
to each other, the men finished the boubou and pagne in time for NGalla to
go to the 6:00 karate class. The episode calls into question the World Bank
notion that Senegalese tailors need to learn to be more efficient and suggests
rather the need for a more relaxed framework in which to perform. The tailors
version of productivity is based neither on rationalizing the work into an
assembly-line nor on the World Banks perceived need to expand the accum-
ulation of world capital. It is based rather on bonds of interpersonal relations
among tailors, workers, clients, neighbors and family members.
The episode illustrates as well certain unresolved imbalances in the social
process of production. Since the institution of the slave trade in the fifteenth
century, the fit between Senegalese culture and global economic systems has
been a painstaking weave of tradition, history and modernity but simul-
taneously, its painful unraveling. While we were walking along the dark path
to the dojo, NGalla, momentarily between his public roles as charming master
tailor and karate teacher with their webs of social obligation, expressed his
exhaustion and discouragement. Im having a lot of difficulty with my clients.
What should take five minutes takes an hour. They dont let me work. The
social gathering aspect of the atelier, so necessary to drawing clients and so
continuing the precarious craft, was threatening to engulf the production
aspect. The fashionable young women of the Libert VI neighborhood, noisy
and rambunctious, were enjoying their fittings too much to leave.
The next day at 5:30 PM, the tiny atelier was bursting with visitors. Besides
NGalla, the four apprentices, and the lyce student, Malals girlfriend had
brought fabric for a dress and was flitting all over the room before coming to
rest behind the cutting table where NGalla was trying to work. Also present
were a friend she had brought with her and Angel, a neighbor from Grand
Dakar, who had brought fabric to NGalla two months previously and needed
the garment immediately. Another neighbor came in with her son and sat at
one of the machines waiting to be measured. A karate friend came in and sat
at another machine. She had come there to wait for the electricity to go back
on in the nearby stadium where the Senegal national team was supposed to
train.
That night the tailors decided to create a spatial separation that would
maintain the sociality but separate it from the work. They moved the cutting
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
45
table, built with solid sides like a counter, across the front of the room, as a
kind of barrier, creating, they hoped, two psychologically separate spaces, a
work area and a reception area containing the two plastic garden chairs and
the catalogues. But the next day, an exuberant group of young clients simply
went behind the barrier. One sat at Malals machine, so that Malal had to move
his work to the reception area, where he sat on a low stool to stitch a hem.
But when the number of people in the atelier is reduced to its core group,
another kind of sociality shapes the work. The learning process goes on, some-
times by informal consultation but mostly by watching. Cutting a garment,
therefore, is always a performance. On one occasion, when only Moussa, the
four apprentices, the lycen and I were in the shop, NGalla began to cut a
pair of trousers, and an oddly uncommon quiet settled on the usually noisy
room, as the adults stood around the table caught in the hypnotic effect that
watching artisanal work can have. Suddenly Moussa broke the mood to
resume the traditional role of an older person exercising authority over youth.
He turned to the teenagers on their low stools by the tea burner, and scolded:
And they want to be tailors! The professor gives lessons, and the pupils dont
want to learn. At that, NGalla began to explain to me, while he cut, the
technical details so that I could learn to cut too. Moussa was in fact learning
by watching on his days off from his night watchman job, so much so that one
afternoon, when NGalla and I went downtown for a few hours, we came back
to an excited Moussa who showed us a tiny A-line tank dress he had cut for
his baby daughter from a fabric remnant and given to Malal to sew.
The seeming informality of the work process, the fun that people have while
it goes on, NGallas pleasure in performing his cutting, and Moussas delight
in his rough baby dress, all make this scene seem, within a Western framework,
not serious. For us, crafts are usually either a childrens activity or a trivial hobby.
An effect of the necessary partition between production and consumption in
capitalist fashion is the axiomatic assumption that production is the total
negation of pleasure, and that pleasure takes place only in consumption
(Kondo 1997: 5, 16, 106; Harvey 2000: 112). But in Senegalese fashion
production, as we have seen, an effect of the logic connecting producers and
consumers is that pleasure is an important part of the production process, for
both the tailors and their clients. Pleasure in the social relations that accompany
and enfold the work, and more importantly pleasure in the work itself are
inherent parts of the process. That the pleasure of production forms part of
the garments meaning, for both tailor and client, suggests one reason why
custom tailoring has been able to compete with the immeasurably cheaper used
clothing market, given that by 19767, friperie [used clothing] imports
exceeded locally made goods by a volume of 10 to 1 (Boone 1992: 226). We
have also seen the dialectic by which this pleasure can turn into its anxiety-
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
provoking opposite, given the irresolvable contradictions of craft production
in an economy different from, but embedded within global capitalism.
Contradiction Between Economic Subordination and
Creative Power
Performance, pleasure, sociality, networks of reciprocal obligation, the anxiety
about being on the edge of an economic abyss, all are integral to the production
not only of clothing but also its meaning. The clothing inscribes for the wearer,
as for the producer, the memories of its being produced, and more deeply, the
implicit assumption that, except for the economic worries, this is the way one
should do things. Also integral to this knot of meaning is the notion of creat-
ivity. Creativity is as pivotal to the meaning system of Senegalese fashion as
is tradition, and bound up with it. Tailors talk of themselves as creating
rather than making a garment, as do many of the dyers and fabric designers
I interviewed. The words imagination and inspiration belong to the same
set of values as creation. A weaver, whose ancient craft predates by several
centuries the tailoring shaped by European colonialism, told me he creates his
designs through inspiration. Serint the master xosiist told me he creates
his fabric designs through imagination.
In the current crisis, creativity, inspiration, and imagination belong
to a discourse that attempts to ward off the unresolved contradiction between
the craft and its inscription in a global economy that threatens on the one hand
to degrade the craft or on the other to destroy the possibility of making a living
from it. The artisans must seek large export orders and/or too many custom
clients in order to continue practicing their craft, but this very commercial-
ization can degrade the craft. The discourse of creativity, in seeking to hold
together the threatened cultural fabric, can inadvertently point to its unraveling.
This discourse expresses the impossible dilemma in an especially vivid way
among Soninke (or Saraxole in Wolof) fabric dyers, who consider their craft
an ancient tradition. Where tailoring is deemed a male profession and developed
within the economy brought by European colonialism, dyeing is a womans
craft. It developed in the pre-colonial agricultural communities of Soninke
women who used indigo and kola plants for designing and coloring cloth, from
at least the sixteenth century, before they migrated to the Senegal River valley
(Curtin 1975: 212).
6
Where tailoring is a focus of national pride, dyeing is a
source of ethnic pride.
Drahmane Tandian, second-generation member of the most prominent of
the Soninke dyeing families in Dakar, fears the loss of traditional Soninke
dyeing. A well-educated man in his thirties, he is composing its history. When
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
47
I asked Drahmane and his wife Mariama Keita just how Soninke dyeing
differed from the dyeing recently taken up by non-Soninke for commercial
purposes, they had trouble pinpointing the answer. Drahmane first said some-
what hesitatingly that the substance is being lost. Mariama offered that
the color is not as even, that outsiders cant do suppu knja (a marbleizing
technique, literally okra soup or gumbo) right. Finally, Drahmane said
in a definite tone, et puis, elles crent (and then, they create). In traditional
Soninke dyeing the women constantly create new designs. Creation is the most
important difference, said Drahmane, and Mariama agreed. Contrary, then,
to stereotypes of tradition, creativity in this discourse can only be exercised
through tradition and through a path that extends back before mass commer-
cialization. The notion of creativity here serves discursively to stabilize the
border between an older economy in which the Soninke women sold their dyed
fabrics and the economy born of structural adjustment where dyeing threatens
to be engulfed by commercialization. But we are about to see that this is a very
unstable border, porous, precarious and, perhaps, to a certain extent imaginary.
Dyers
It is mainly through textiles, both the hand-dyed and the prints from factories
such as Sotiba (see Chapter 5) that Senegalese, and more broadly West African,
fashion has disseminated itself both eastward to Kenya and westward to the
African American community. These textiles also play a key role in distin-
guishing tenue traditionnelle from tenue europenne in Senegal. Soninke dyers,
as they have migrated through West Africa and settled in the Senegal River
Valley, before coming to Dakar in the 1930s, have, like the tailors, woven a
variety of external influences into their traditional practices. They use the weave
of those practices, even as it is in constant danger of unraveling, as a response
to the economic crisis brought by globalization. Incorporating influences of
global capitalism into their craft both keeps it viable and threatens to destroy
it. As both an ancient practice and a commercial response to the crisis of the
1980s, dyeing is layered with conflicting meanings. Of the two dyers I worked
with most closely, one, Gnouma Diagana is a member of the huge Soninke
family which, as Drahmane says, introduced dyeing to the world in the
1960s, and the other, Awa Ly, belongs to a large Peul family whose women
took up dyeing in the mid-1990s. Their practices of producing both the fabric
and its meaning differ in significant ways
As a womens craft, dyeing takes place, with a few exceptions, in the home.
Gnouma and Awa both work in the courtyards around which are constructed
the houses for their extended families (Figure 7, p.48). While they dye, family
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
members gather either to help or to watch and talk. In Gnoumas setting, based
on ancient practices, only the women family members help, while in Awas
house, the men also lend a hand, and her brother Aliou is even learning the
craft. Like the vast majority of their fellow dyers, both hang their dyeing to
dry on lines in front of the house as a method of advertising (Figure 8, p.49).
The dyers receive their clients in the home. The expansion of informal trade
in dyed fabric (called thioup) since the late 1980s has unsettled the boundaries
between the domestic realm and the public commercial realm. Commercial
dyeing employs, adapts and thereby transforms the structures of the extended
family home that Gnoumas and Awas families, like most Dakarois, brought
from rural villages and recreated in the city (Ndione 1993: 20, 60, 61). A way
of creating jobs and making money for the family in the absence of viable
employment for men in official government or business institutions, com-
mercial dyeing reorganizes relations within families, affording women new
economic and social roles.
The informal economy in Senegal covers, as we have seen, a vast range
of levels. At one end of the spectrum are the armies of young male street
peddlers. They offer to motorists stalled at the mammoth traffic jams every-
thing from face tissues to electric room fans. These young men are enmeshed
in networks headed by wealthy businessmen. As a womens craft, dyeing lies
Figure 7 Dyer Awa Ly mixing dyes with a straw whisk in the courtyard of her Pikine
house. Dakar, 1998.
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
49
Figure 8 Dyer Awa Ly hanging her dye work to dry in the street outside her house.
Pikine, Dakar, 1998.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
in large measure at the other end of the spectrum, and takes place through
networks of the extended family. Dakar hosts a few dyeing enterprises that
have spilled out of the family home to take over neighboring public space a
sandy lane between apartment buildings in the working-class suburb of Pikine,
a small former park at the end of Avenue Bourguiba. But these more public
dyers, working several vats at once, are men, and these enterprises remain the
exception. Yet even among the women who work out of their homes, there is
a spectrum of more and less organized business. The enterprises of Awa,
Gnouma and Gnoumas mother differ from each other in regularity and
stability. More importantly, their contrasting stories show that intertwining
tradition and modernity takes a variety of forms.
Gnouma and her mother have married into a branch of their extended family
that migrated from their village on the Mauritanian side of the Senegal River
to Dakar in the 1930s. Gnoumas mother married, as her second husband, the
head of this branch, who had amassed considerable wealth through commerce,
but lost his business in the late 1980s. He was, according to family legend, the
first trader to import chemical dyes from Europe to Senegal, and so revolu-
tionized dyeing. The Dakar branch of the family has become so huge and
remained so tightly knit that it inhabits two three-story buildings across from
each other on a busy intersection, where it constitutes almost a village in itself.
The house of Gnoumas (and Drahmanes) mother is set back from the busy
thoroughfare by a wide stretch of land, formerly a garden but now reduced
to sand though still dotted with trees. At the end adjacent to the street, people
park their cars, and two small tables are set up where women sell mangoes or
the small packets of Maggi seasoning used in cooking rice. Closer to the house,
wet dyeing hangs on a line along with the family laundry. On a concrete bench
built into the wall, one usually finds the mother and her co-wife with assorted
sons and daughters, their spouses, and a group of children from the two houses.
One wife might be doing a domestic chore like stripping mint leaves for tea
into a bowl, while the other takes care of their joint business. Clients, often
men, bring their cloth and sit on the bench to discuss color and price.
As an old dyeing establishment the first, according to Drahmane, to bring
dyeing into fashion in Dakar, and which counts government ministers among
its clients the house specializes in the luminous pale blue (called baxa and
originally obtained from the indigo plant) traditionally favored by men for
ceremonial garb. Since the wives deceased husband, although illiterate, had
owned a print shop offered to him in lieu of a debt payment, they have, extreme
rarity in the dyeing trade, an old-fashioned receipt book printed with their
names. They also make the client write his name, along with his fabric color,
on a small tag which will be encased in a tiny plastic bag and hung on the
garment until he picks it up. In these two ways, the dyeing business of the two
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
51
older women is more highly organized, more rationalized and thus to Western
eyes more modern than the businesses of either Gnouma or Awa, both of
a younger generation, more in touch with Western influences, and more
absorbed in the global economy. This is yet one more example of the impos-
sibility of separating tradition and modernity into distinct, evolutionary
categories.
As if to lend orchestral accompaniment to this non-separation, two sounds
intertwine in the air around the house. One has been transmitted from trad-
ition, the other is a result of globalization. On the street is the deafening roar
of the cars rapides, brilliantly painted, dilapidated vans, owned mostly by
Mouride Muslim businessmen, that have taken the place of the now almost
defunct public bus system. The once tranquil corner has become a major
transfer point, where apprentice drivers, who ride precariously on the back
step when the vans are in motion, jump off to direct the huge traffic snarls,
then shout and bang on the rear fender of the van to let the driver know that
all the passengers are stuffed in. As if oblivious to this noise and commotion,
two men seated on the ground, under a large tree next to the clothes line,
perform la tappe, the traditional process that uses wooden clubs to impart
smoothness and brilliance to the dyed but still wrinkled fabric. The tappeurs
sit cross-legged facing each other, between them a two-foot log cut in half
lengthwise, its flat side resting on the ground, and its rounded surface polished
to a smooth sheen by years of beating (Figure 9, p.52). From a pile of cloth,
mostly the light blue, but also salmon, violet and suppu knja in orange and
yellow, they take a piece, sprinkle it with water, fold and shake it, lay one end
across the log and rub its length with a cake of wax. They then repeatedly strike
it with their wooden clubs, alternating with each other in loud rhythmic beats,
as they move the fabric across the log. They stretch it between them, fold it
into a smaller rectangle, and repeat the process until the fabric is a stiff, lustrous
packet folded in customary thirds, like the gift package that it will frequently
become.
At Gnoumas mothers house, after one greets the tappeurs and the people
gathered at the bench, one enters the building. The central courtyard, smelling
of the sheep that many Dakarois families keep, contains the gas burners for
family cooking and dyeing. Off the courtyard are the two-room suites common
to polygamous houses, and at its back the cavernous staircase, always dark
and treacherously steep and uneven. Ordinarily I come to the house to visit
Drahmane and Mariama, the only outsider married into the family. They live
in the most remote two-room suite, in the far corner of the third floor, where
they also have their own refrigerator and gas burner for cooking and dyeing
in the hall. One climbs the stairs to the accompaniment of la tappe and finds
Drahmane in his small salon. Drahmanes father had by the end of his life lost
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
most of his business in trading and printing, but Drahmane has taken up the
printing business again. Worried, however, that the secrets and knowledge of
traditional Soninke dyeing, now held by the women he calls les mamans,
will die out, Drahmane spends his spare time researching it. He has sent his
assistant, the journalist Arona Sognane, to all the libraries of Dakar. Over a
period of several months, Drahmane has been telling me the history of trad-
itional dyeing in his family.
According to him, in the agricultural villages, the women discovered indigo
with its medicinal powers to protect and heal the skin. They also found, he
says, that the juice of kola nuts left indelible orange stains on their husbands
clothing. With these two plants the women developed ranges of colors from
the palest blue to a purple almost black, and from pale salmon to deep reds
and browns. When some of the families started migrating to the cities, the
women couldnt go to school or work in factories, but they had to work. They
did dyeing and introduced it to the world. They had to begin to sell their
products. His story, then, revolves around a floating, nebulous border that
tries to keep apart two economies of commodity exchange always threatening
to flow together. In the economy of the older women, a place where history
and myth come together, wealth is a symbol of honor and the ability to be
generous to dependents (Diop 1981: 779; Heath 1992: 22). In this economy,
Figure 9 Tappeurs beating fabric with wooden clubs to make it smooth and
lustrous. Dakar, 2000.
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
53
commodity exchange complements a love and protection of traditional craft.
In the economy of structural adjustment, exchange value threatens to engulf
both the integrity of the craft and its social relations.
Thus Drahmanes mother and her co-wife enjoyed a monopoly in the dyeing
trade from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, and amassed considerable wealth.
Each bought a house and gold. They have remained, along with Soninke
women generally, the guardians of the traditions, while people from other
ethnicities, who have taken up dyeing recently, have, according to Drahmane,
taken out its substance. Drahmane explains that in the village, Soninke
women welcomed strangers by offering them fabric with designs symbolizing
hospitality. These designs were made through a stitch-resist technique called
tak. It consists of sewing thousands of tiny stitches into the fabric to make a
pattern. When the fabric is soaked in the dye bath, the myriad stitched areas
resist the dye (Figure 10, p.54). Each design was named after an element of
hospitality it symbolized: a road, a house, a cloth on which to serve food, a
musical instrument; a chess game. In addition, each shade of blue [from
indigo] had a name and represented something. Now, says Drahmane, people
reproduce the designs without meaning.
It was in 1966, according to Drahmane, at the first Festival mondial des arts
ngres (World Festival of Pan-African Arts) held in Dakar, where, as he said,
the whole world assembled, that the Soninke women introduced dyed
fabric to Senegal and to the world. Hand-dyeing with indigo had existed
in the region since pre-colonial times. As Joanne Eicher says of Nigeria: It is
not known when Nigerian peoples began practicing the craft of indigo dyeing,
but the importance of dyeing in the ancient Yoruba area is illustrated by the
fact that it was practiced everywhere, even in the smallest villages (1976: 58).
The same could be said of the Soninke, but by the 1960s dyed fabric was not
fashionable. Drahmanes story suggests that in 1966, the Soninke women
relaunched it in Senegal as an item of fashion, as a design process open to
infinite innovation and as a commercial venture. Using indigo and kola, the
women of his family created a new, dramatic design called festival mondial.
The festival mondial design used not the tiny stitches of traditional tak, but
large stitching to separate wide areas for coloring, where the dye was spooned
onto the fabric. The boubou festival mondial became la mode all over
Senegal, and the Soninke women made a lot of money. Brought through
the informal international circuits of the 1960s to the United States, from
Senegal or from other parts of West Africa, this dyeing became fashionable
of course not in the Black community, but in the hippie community, where it
was called, as in Nigeria, tie-dye.
7
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the
trademark rainbow circle of hippie tie-dye resembles a simplified version
of the festival mondial design. The latter is a starburst in concentric circles
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Figure 10 Grand boubou of dudu tak or very fine stitch-resist dyed fabric, designed
with thousands of tiny stitches, and dyed in indigo palmann. 2000.
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
55
whose circumferences trace a zig-zag pattern, achieved by sewing rather than
tying.
After the Festival mondial, said Drahmane, Soninke dyeing houses flour-
ished and had many clients. Up to the early 1990s, his mothers house had
ten workers, all men since only men could work outside the home. They
became specialists in different colors or in different design techniques. I did
visit several times a male dyer who had been trained in the house, and he was
indeed a master at folding and stitching fabric to create new, dramatic designs.
Now, says Drahmane, only the old clients remain faithful. Les Mamans
are almost retired. And the old ways are also succumbing to changing tastes.
Les Mamans like the old colors, derived from indigo and kola. When Mariama
joined the family, she learned to dye, but brought another formula. Exer-
cising the analytic skills she gained at the university to mix colors in new,
creative combinations, she brought, Drahmane said, modernity.
Thus combining tradition and modernity from a variety of moments in their
history, the Soninke dyers have brought dyeing into contemporary life where
it has difficulty holding the value of wealth in balance with the values of
tradition, meaning and substance, where all value threatens to collapse
into exchange value. The older women have been able to carry on both a
successful business in a monetary economy and also the fading older practices
from a time when it was still the case that for Soninke women, as people often
said, their fabric is their wealth. Even the daughters of the family who had
married in France, like one who represented Senegal in the Olympics and ended
up marrying her running coach, still have to come back for the traditional
nuptial ceremony of opening trunks full of dyed fabric. This is the brides
dowry, which the mother began to amass before the daughter was born.
Drahmane said, it constitutes a wealth for her, her very own work. But the
ceremony is also a time of melancholy nostalgia, as the expatriate daughters
do not value the cloth as repository of aesthetic and economic wealth in the
same way their mothers did.
Gnouma, however, continues to transform the weave of past and present
she has inherited from her mother. Within her family of experts and connois-
seurs, she has the reputation as une grande artiste. As a young mother,
Gnouma left a forced marriage in the familys village and came to Dakar. Here
she married, as third wife, the brother of her mothers second husband, and
so lives in the house diagonally across the street from that of les mamans. With
a powerful personality and a gift for leadership, she was the center of a womens
community that gathered in her room. As frequently happened to me in
Senegal, in contrast to my experience in Kenya, I had the initial sensation the
first time I entered the dim room, with its circle of women in boubous seated
on floor mats, that I was stepping back into a distant time, only to have that
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Figure 11 Fabric designer Srint spreading flour paste on cotton damask fabric
for xosi or flour-resist dyeing. Dakar, 1998.
illusion quickly dispelled. Gnoumas daughter had been to the university, and
she herself was running for the National Assembly as an activist in an oppos-
itional political party. Such experiences convinced me that what we assume
to be traditional cultures in contrast to the universalizing model of Western
history are alternative modernities developing according to their own historical
forms.
On my first visit in 1998, the group of women sitting in Gnoumas room,
hoping to sell me fabric and enthusiastic about explaining their craft, brought
out samples of the different design techniques: xosi, tak and bougie. Xosi is
flour-resist, done by spreading a paste of flour, water and caustic soda on a
three-meter piece of cotton damask stretched over a plywood board, and then
drawing designs into the paste (Figure 11). Long ago, the designer ran his
fingers through the paste, and later used combs cut from a calabash. Now
he cuts the combs from old plastic buckets with a hot razor (Figures 12 and
13, pp.57 and 58). But a new technique requiring no artistry also came into
fashion in the 1990s. The xosiist spreads a European lace curtain over the
fabric, then smears the paste over this and peels off the curtain. Bougie is a
process of wax-resist in which Gnouma had great expertise. As the name
suggests, she would melt old candles in a pot over her gas burner, lay one end
of the fabric over a small table, dip a hand-carved wooden stamp with a long
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
57
handle in the wax, and apply it to the fabric with a resounding thud. She would
repeat the process in rows across the fabric (as shown on the cover of this
book). The stamps were usually carved so that the edges of their motifs inter-
locked with each other.
The most valuable fabrics were the tak done with thousands of tiny stitches.
The women told me these pieces were stitched in the village, since it takes
three months to stitch designs into a three-meter piece, and in the city life is
too fast. The stitched fabric is then sent to Dakar to be dyed in the city house.
After the dyeing, it takes three months to cut each of the stitches with a razor.
One older woman brought in an especially lovely tak design, done in the
lustrous dark bronze indigo palmann that bleeds palest blue into the undyed
motifs. Tak is done in squares or stripes of different motifs (see p.54, Figure
10). The women explained to me several times that the village stitchers make
up the patterns as they are sitting with the fabric and do not know what they
will do beforehand. Elles crent (they create), Gnoumas daughter told
me with pride.
This kind of tak, done for a wedding or a daughters dowry trunk, is not
made for commercial sale. But in the impossible balancing act of honoring craft
and surviving the economy of globalization, for sale and not for sale also
have porous boundaries on a treacherous terrain. In another Soninke dyeing
Figure 12 Srint engraving the design in the xosi paste with one of his plastic
combs. Dakar, 1998.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Figure 13 Xosi or flour-resist fabric after it is dyed and the paste washed out.
Dakar, 1998.
house I visited, the dyers were aggressively anxious to sell. They brought out
several old pieces of indigo palmann tak, but one woman told me firmly and
repeatedly that certain ones, made by her mother for her wedding, were not
for sale. Other ones, equally old and finely worked, and also not for sale, she
would sell. Soninke dyers call these not for sale fabrics dudu or duga (see
pp.63 and 64, Figures 15 and 16). One person described dudu as done not
for money, but for the family. Another defined it by saying, You cannot
estimate the value of it. It is made for love. And a third person said, You
make it very slowly and put it down when you dont feel like working on it.
One makes these tak dudu boubous, as someone else said, only for someone
you love. Yet this distinction can also be a fuzzy one. At Gnoumas on my
first visit, the women told me I could buy the indigo palmann tak piece, because
it had been made for Gnoumas daughters recent wedding, but the wedding
was already over by the time it was finished. This turned out to be a fairly
common occurrence.
On that first visit, Gnouma agreed to give me dyeing demonstrations, which
she interpreted as teaching me how to dye. Usually I would arrive at her house,
directly on the sidewalk of a fairly busy residential street, at 10:00 in the
morning. Like many families, Gnoumas had cut a door from one room onto
the street and made it into a telephone center. By 10:00 AM, a group of family
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59
members and neighbors had already settled themselves into chairs on the
sidewalk outside the door. A little further on, by the main entrance to the house,
a few women were doing crocheting or embroidery. Across the street a huge
ram bellowed, and a peddler came by with wares on his head hawking matches
(very much in demand with the electrical rationing). One enters the house
through a small courtyard, with its dyeing buckets, water jars and gas burner,
and at the far end the curtained door leading to Gnoumas two-room suite
which she shared with her daughter and grand-son before they left to join the
husband in France. By turning right at the end of this courtyard, one enters
the large common courtyard, around which, like a village in itself, are arrayed
the rooms for the other co-wives and their children, various nieces and nephews
of the family head, and the stairs leading to the rooms of other family members
including Mabouya, the couturire from the March H.L.M.
The position of Gnoumas room was special. It afforded her both a modicum
of privacy as well as a surplus of sociality and knowledge about the doings of
the house. Anyone who entered or left the house passed by her door, and most
often stopped to greet her. Gnoumas little courtyard was a bustling place, filled
with the comings and goings of family members, clients, the occasional griot
come to sing her praises, vendors selling everything from fresh fish in a bucket
to sun glasses guaranteed to come from the United States, and the sons of
Gnoumas mothers co-wife. They floated from one courtyard to another in
search of a dye bath to conduct their experiments in batik, according to the
logic of gender the occupation of men. If Gnouma was around, she would give
them help and advice.
Although our lessons were set for 10:00, Gnouma would usually be heating
the water over her gas burner for breakfast, waiting, with her best friend Leena
whose family rented rooms in the house, for the young people sent to fetch it
at the local shop. After breakfast, Gnoumas clients would arrive, sit on her
mattresses and show her their fabric. These clients are women and take much
more time than her mothers male clients. They exchange gossip, and Gnouma
shows them the work she is doing. They discuss at length and with relish the
possibilities for sumptuous colors and their combinations. The scene again
suggests the pleasure inherent in the work as joint endeavor, where producer
and client jointly plan and fantasize. By the time Gnouma goes out to her little
courtyard, begins heating the water for dyeing over her gas burner, arranges
her plastic tubs for the series of dye baths, and sorts through her little plastic
bags of colors, solvent and fixative, her courtyard is crowded with family
members coming home for the midday meal.
Like tailoring, dyeing is a performance, which includes, if appropriate,
techniques of fabric design. Gnouma likes to perform bougie, and the kinds
of tak that take large folds and pleats. But when I tried to persuade her to teach
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me xosi, after watching Srintes athletic performance of spreading the paste
over an entire three-meter piece of fabric and combing in the designs with large
sweeping gestures, she demurred. Its too difficult, she told me. Its dirty,
and then, adding the clincher, Its mens work. Yet as we have seen, gender
divisions within the crafts are not historically firmly drawn. Like the borders
between formal and informal economies, or between commodity exchange and
guarding certain products outside of exchange, the borders are fluid. Histor-
ically, women work at tailoring if their ateliers are in the home, and when
dyeing spreads outside the home, men perform it. But even this historic pattern
now blurs as young women become apprentices in mens ateliers, and men in
non-Soninke families lend a hand at dyeing in the home. More threatening than
gender-bending in my conversations with the artisans is the possibility that the
globalized economy will engulf artisanal values altogether.
From the Mystique of the Craft to Transnational
Commercial Circuits
As if to protect their techniques and values from the degrading effects of the
globalized economy, dyers, even more than tailors, wrap their work in a
mystique that includes both the technical secrets of the craft as well as the
ethical and aesthetic values associated with it. They narrate this mystique into
their performances as if to envelop both artisan and product in a protective
spell, even as the artisans are caught in the bind between having to give up
their craft entirely and sacrificing its values. Both tailors and dyers engage in
a discourse that shuttles back and forth between the pleasure of the craft and
the anxiety over money. As the tailor NGalla has said to me on many occasions
when he remembers the time he was so destitute that he had to stop tailoring,
Can you imagine what it means to give up your profession? When he was
finally able to open his atelier in 1999, he was hopeful and happy, and told
me in July of that year that he had gone back to experimenting with improving
his craft. I love my profession, he said, I want to make beauty. He took
my note pad and showed me how he had altered the details of his trouser cut
to improve the fit. But by the beginning of 2000, he was worried, discouraged,
worn out and looking for an order to make uniforms to keep himself solvent.
The practice of making for each client a differently styled garment, either
sketched from the clients description or copied/adapted from a European or
American catalog, becomes in this shuttle a source alternatively of pleasurable
pride and anxious exhaustion. NGalla was proud to be able to figure out the
technique for cutting a mysteriously draped neckline that suddenly appeared
on the evening gowns in all the American catalogs, and for whose secret other
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tailors came to his atelier. But at the same time electrical rationing was at its
height, and he was staying up several nights a week to finish clothing for his
many clients. Having to remember which of the many styles he had to make
for each client was becoming mentally exhausting. The price of each dress, CFA
2,500 to CFA 3,000, was not bringing him enough money to cover his minimal
expenses of CFA 100,000 each month for the atelier, its water and electricity
(CFA 30,000), his own room (CFA 15,000) and daily food for himself and his
apprentice. In his forties, he wants to get married, but like many men of his
generation, cannot save the funds for dowry and wedding. When he is in his
enthusiastic mode, he constantly reminds me that tailoring is not easy in a
contented tone that contrasts with the discouraged tone he uses to talk about
the many difficulties of surviving.
The artisans mystique often consists of emphasizing the arcane difficulties
of the craft along with the notion that the artisan does not, in essence, do it
for money. This is quite frequently juxtaposed to concerns about the desperate
search to make more money. The clash between the two discourses expresses
an unraveling of the profession even as it continues to weave a new version
of tradition, modernity, innovation and history. Skou Diakit is a male dyer,
trained as a worker in Gnoumas mothers house, and reputed to be a creative
master, le meilleur in the art of dramatic large-patterned tak (Figure 14).
Contrary to stereotypes of gender, he works at home, often on orders for
merchants. When I would go to his house for my appointments, he would
usually be away on his business selling dyeing supplies, or about to eat lunch,
Figure 14 Tie-dye by Skou Diakit. Dakar, 1998.
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and I would be ushered into a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room and invited to rest
on the bed, where a baby or two were also napping. A corner table was piled
with fabric stitched into impossibly small neat bundles large orders for
merchants.
The tak Diakit demonstrated for me, however, used the whole six meters
for motifs, and took two or three hours to fold and stitch. Diakit did the
folding and stitching seated on the floor, spreading the cloth across the room
into the court to fold it lengthwise, crosswise and diagonally, pounding it on
the cement floor to create fold marks. He used these marks as reference points
for sewing in the curves, circles and angles of the resist motifs. He used his feet
and his toes to anchor the cloth in order to pull the sewing string more tightly,
and searched for his work equipment needles, string, pens in the same
cupboard that held the baby bottles. As when I watched the other artisans, I
found myself having to rid my mind of the Western prejudice, consonant with
the neo-liberal economic assumptions that grant legitimacy only to compe-
titive standardized production, that he presented the image of playing at a
joyful game of crafts, rather than performing serious work.
The dyeing itself Diakit did in the family courtyard. While he dyed, he also
used the water to wash one of the many toddlers playing there. In the hot
afternoons, the court would be filled with the four women of the house,
composed of young brothers and their wives, Soninke immigrants from Guinea.
Three women sorted the rice and played with the children while the fourth, a
young woman named Ramatoulaye Drame, was always at work on a very fine
piece of tak, dudu for the family. Since Diakit could speak little French, and
I little Wolof, his cousin would be called upon to translate. But instead of
translating, the cousin narrated the performance with a running commentary,
invoking the spectacular difficulty of every detail, and also its values: presque
pas pour argent (almost not for money). Yet, in spite of Diakits many
orders and attachment to his craft, he wrote me a letter after my return asking
me to help him emigrate: There is nothing for me here. (On my side, I knew
from many such attempts that, as I reluctantly wrote back, there was nothing
I could do.)
Gnouma expressed the two sides of the contradiction between the pleasures
and values of her craft and the anxiety of economic survival in a single conver-
sation, slipping without transition from one aspect to the other:
When the work is a work of the memory [points to her head], when its a work of
the heart [points to her heart], thats good. When its not a work of the memory,
when its not a work of the heart, thats not good. For Gnouma, it is always a work
of the memory and a work of the heart. If the work is not good, Gnouma is not
happy. Her heart is as if sick . . . Other people work for money. Senegalese are always
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Figure 15 Cloth designer Ramatoulaye Drame with dudu tak fabric before the
stitches are removed. Dakar, 1998.
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working, but the money isnt there. I work a lot, but the money isnt there. There
are not always clients. When clients order a lot of boubous, and there is money,
Gnouma is happy.
When competition is too high and prices too low, one tactic is to invoke the
arcane nature of their work, to point to its special difficulty. Aminata is a
Bambara dyer from Mali living temporarily in Senegal. Like the Soninke, the
Bambara are famed for their dyeing skills, and Senegalese fashion connoisseurs
are proud of their expert knowledge in distinguishing Soninke from Bambara
dyeing. As Drahmane told me, his family, like all dyers, came originally from
Mali before migrating to Mauritania. But, he said, the Soninke take pride in
tradition while the Bambara are more innovative. The Bambara are known
for their ability to create rich colors that give the fabric depth and to apply to
the finish a luster whose secret outsiders, even Soninke, have not been able to
imitate or penetrate. A warm, generous woman, Aminata expressed delight
at having me watch her demonstrate dyeing. As she dyed, she talked about
her mother, who had taught her the craft at the age of fifteen, and her teen-
age daughter, whom she was now apprenticing.
Each dyer I studied had a different technique for the order of combining
dyes, solvents and fixatives in the dye bath, for using hot or cold water, for
Figure 16 Ramatoulaye Drame with her tak fabric after the stitches are removed.
Dakar, 1998
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composing colors, for immersing the fabric and for removing wax after dyeing.
Aminata narrated the importance of each step in her own technique. For the
pice de rsistance, at the end of each bath, Aminata would urge me to come
over from my chair to peer into the water and observe how clear it was
proving that the dye was fixed and would not run. This is what amazes the
Senegalese women, she announced triumphantly, and assured me that many
of them came to observe her dyeing and learn her craft from her. Conscious
of her mystique, she chided her daughter whose work included shifting water
from one basin to another or taking a live coal from the fire to start a second
fire. Apprenticed for a year, the daughter insists that she knows how to dye.
I know how to do it, she asserts. The mother chuckles, she doesnt know
anything. Indeed, given the rapidity with which colors go in and out of
fashion, it takes a great deal of experience to achieve a new hue by mixing
colors with Aminatas expertise. Her colors are limpidly clear and brilliant,
unmatched by most of what one sees on the streets or in the market.
For the Soninke, the mystique includes the notion that the arcane knowledge
must be passed from generation to generation, preferably from mother to
daughter. The people of Gnoumas family are fond of saying: We Soninke
have dyeing in our blood. When I asked Diakit when and how he learned
dyeing, he said, I found my parents doing dyeing. One Soninke dyer, who
lived on the other side of the city from Gnoumas compound, but who turned
out to be a distant relative, told me with great intensity as she stood with her
small daughter on the boulevard outside her house, dramatically clasping her
breast with one hand and her childs head with the other: We have nursed
our children on dyeing.
One dyer who does not insist on spinning this mystique around the craft of
dyeing is Awa. A Peul, and therefore not born in the art of dyeing, she does
not share the conviction that a great talent for dyeing is an inherited trait, nor
that its secrets are arcane. She began to learn the craft in 1994 when her older
sister and another woman, who was born in the art of dyeing, decided to
do something about the urgent need to provide for their families after the 50
per cent devaluation of the franc CFA. They organized a dyeing collective in
the working-class suburb of Guediawaye. Calling themselves the Bemtare
(Peulaar for rising up) cooperative, they learned the methods of design and
color, produced collectively, and marketed their products by forming tontines.
Tontines are womens collective credit groups of long standing, historically an
important part of the Senegalese economy. African women invented them to
save and invest money, given the refusal of male-dominated banks to give them
credit. Each member of Bemtare would form one or more tontines to which
the ten or twelve members would contribute a sum of money each month, and
each month a different member would receive the pool to buy a boubou from
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Bemtare. The cooperative invited a woman from a Belgian NGO to complete
their training, and in 1997 Awa began dyeing on her own, apprenticing her
daughter and the nieces of her many brothers and sisters in the extended family
home in the giant working-class suburb of Pikine (Figure 17). Awa contends
there is no mystery to the craft. It just takes a lot of money, she says, because
to get a brilliant, deep, rich color, you just have to put a lot of high-quality
European dyes into the bath.
Just as Gnoumas craft practices and values are understandable only in the
context of her family, ethnic and social history, so too are Awas. One day, her
brother Aliou, joined by Moussa, spent the afternoon vigorously persuading
me that a great social divide separated middle-class Dakar from both Grand
Dakar and Pikine, with their unpaved roads, cheaper houses and lack of
drainage system. The Dakarois, they told me, were bourgeois and prejudiced
against the residents of Grand Dakar and Pikine, whom they regarded as
vagabonds. We were sitting outside NGallas atelier in the middle-class
district of Libert VI, just a few blocks from the lyce where Aliou had studied
in the 1980s, and where, he was saying, no one would talk to him because they
thought him a vagabond from distant Pikine. Our conversation was of
course interrupted when Aliou, having been recognized and enthusiastically
hailed by a passing former school mate, made plans to meet with him. The
Figure 17 Awa leading members of the Ly family in removing the tak stitches from
dyed fabric. Pikine, Dakar, 1998
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one difference between Grand Dakar and Pikine in this conversation was that
Moussa and NGalla were anxious to move away from the noise, overcrowd-
ing and crime of Grand Dakar, while Aliou was fiercely loyal to the place where
he had lived since birth, defending it against claims that it was crime-ridden
or unsafe.
He is proud to state that his father built the first house in Pikine. Even in
2000, police and government officials would come to Aliou to ask him to find
a certain address in the vast suburb. Aside from the postmen, only he holds
the code of Pikines impenetrable address system, having inherited and practic-
ally memorized its only map from his father. Although the family of Awa, Aliou
and their eight other brothers and sisters did not have the former wealth of
Gnoumas and Drahmanes family, it was relatively well off. From a village
on the Senegalese bank of the Senegal River, their father came to Dakar before
independence and remained a functionary in the government. During the
waning days of colonialism, he owned a house in le Mdina, then called the
native quarter of Dakar. When the colonial government wanted the land,
they took the house and gave him land in Pikine. At that time a forested area
about ten miles from Dakar, and now a vast sweep of sand, it houses a popu-
lation greater than that of Dakar. The father eventually built three houses there.
The arrangements of Gnoumas household seem based on the deep assump-
tion that they have been done this way for a long, long time. The arrangements
of Awas household seem based on adapting selected traditions as a creative
response to the economic crisis and also out of a well-articulated desire to live
collectively. Although Abdoulaye-Bara Diops study of the Wolof family (1985)
reports that already in the 1970s, and even in villages, it was rare for brothers
to share a household, this is somewhat the case in Awas house. Here, though,
the adults include two sisters, one married, and three brothers, two of them
married, who all live together with their mother. In addition to their sons and
daughters, the more than twenty juvenile residents include several nieces and
nephews. Their parents decided, for economic or emotional reasons, that they
would be better off in the collective house. In one case, Awas daughter Bundau
became so attached to a cousin born out of wedlock that although only a
teenager, she convinced her grandfather to let her companion live in the family
house. Also living there is a neighbor child who was so attached to Awas
mother that she stayed when her own family moved. The nieces in their late
teens and twenties regard with sympathy the children of the eldest brother who
went to a great deal of trouble to build for his family a beautiful, nuclear
family-style house on the ocean. There are hardly any people around, they
tell me, nothing happens. This is certainly not the case in the lively Pikine
house, in whose courtyard one group cooks and another dyes, while an adult
plays with children and in yet another corner the young boys chant their Koran
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lesson. The boys have become so numerous that instead of going to Koranic
school they have the master come to the house. Although full of boisterous
activity, the house is tightly organized and smooth-running. In the household
division of labor, one sister-in-law is la Prsidente of the kitchen, while Awa
has the responsibility of organizing and educating the children, especially the
girls.
In addition, Awa worries and works constantly to try to raise income for
herself and her daughter as well as contribute to the household. When her
dyeing is not bringing in enough income, Awa grills a local legume to sell to
children at the neighborhood school during recess. Aliou too picks up different
projects in the informal economy. In spite of their economic difficulties, they
find themselves lucky within their neighborhood in being able to feed, house,
clothe and educate everyone. They always keep a portion of food for neighbors
who do not have the means to feed their families. When I came back to the
Pikine house in 1999, there were a pair of new, very young dyeing apprentices.
One of them, dressed only in an old lgos pagne, had the reddish hair of a
vitamin deficiency. Awa and Aliou explained that she lived in the rental house
next door, that the father earned only CFA 60,000 to CFA 70,000 (US$ 100.00)
per month, for the families of his two wives, each of whom rented two rooms
with numerous children in different places. They often went two days without
a meal. So the little girl came over to Awas house as soon as she woke up,
spends her days, ate her meals there, and joined the ever-expanding group
of apprentices. Living in this neighborhood has also meant that Awa has
difficulty building her dyeing business and giving it stability. Her clients are
her neighbors. Like many vendors at this end of the informal economy, Awa
sells on credit, and it can take her more than six months to collect any of the
money. When I visited her after my arrival in 1998, she was so discouraged
about not being paid by her clients that she had given up dyeing for several
months.
Although Awa does not have dyeing in her blood, she does live in the
ambiance of the rich history handed down for generations and driving con-
temporary creativity. She must therefore vie with the dyers who have inherited
the craft, and create fabrics as rich and varied as theirs. In this respect her
dyeing differs from that of the dyers in Kenya. In Kikuyu Kenya, woven fabric
itself was first introduced by British colonialists at the turn of the twentieth
century, and the art of African fabric dyeing came to Kenya, via UN and other
NGO development or self-help projects, as an import from West Africa
in the 1980s (See Chapters 1 and 3). For this reason, it has taken a different
form, without the variety and complexity of West African dyeing, and without
the passion both artisans and consumers attach to it. Awa practices all three
major techniques of dyeing, tak, xosi and bougie, and when she was teaching
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69
me to do xosi, was able to experiment with the temperamental paste to make
it come out just the right consistency. In spite of her distance from the mystique
of dyeing, she does not consider this simply a money-making venture.
Like Gnouma and the other artisans, Awa expresses anxiety over the work
not turning out to be beautiful, and pleasure when it does meet her aesthetic
expectations. When Gnouma gets into her dyeing, she sings songs of praise
to Allah while she works. Once I asked her why she sings while she works.
She told me: When the dyeing goes well, Gnouma sings. When the dyeing
does not go well, Gnouma does not sing. She yells Leena! [her best friend],
and Leena or her niece Fatou rush anxiously to help. Awas attachment to the
techniques and aesthetics of dyeing are also intense. At the end of the xosi
lessons I did at her house in 1999, Awa and her team of apprentices dyed
several boubous that Aliou and I had designed in starch-resist. I wanted to give
them as gifts both to the young women of her family who had prepared my
midday meal several times a week and for friends in the United States. We
decided on several colors, including a deep rose, and bought the dyes in small
packets at the Pikine market. But the one that was sold to us as deep rose came
out a feeble pink. When Awa took it out of the dye bath, her face expressed
deep distress. She threw the wet piece into a bucket as quickly as she could
and refused to look at it. When Aliou and I tried to comfort her, she said Im
sick about it. Later, when the boubou was dried, we took it to her room to
show her that even though it had not come out as expected, it was in its own
way pretty as a delicate dusty pink. She was lying on her bed and simply said,
Im sick about it. But more moving and emotionally powerful to me were
the words she spoke when I came for my farewell. When I apologized for
turning the house topsy-turvy with my summer of xosi experiments, she simply
answered, We are proud of your work.
The fact that dyeing signifies myths of family and ethnic tradition does not
prevent dyers from weaving technical innovations into the old practices. Again
the balance is precarious between furthering the craft and threatening to
destroy it. Gnoumas husband and his older brother introduced European
chemical dyes in the 1960s, thus making it possible for dyers to infinitely
expand their repertoire and make their products continually popular in a
fashion system that by definition requires constant change to maintain its
market. The chemical dyes have thus, ironically, also contributed to the com-
mercialization that threatens to destroy the craft and the ability of the family
women to make their living from it. Today, although dyers articulate the need
to protect their craft from industrialization, their craft depends on industrial
products. Even though the dye shops, a booth or stall in every market, still
weigh the colors, solvents and fixatives on a brass balance with counter-
weights, they also sell sheets of imported plastic for dyers to wrap the sections
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of the fabric that will resist the color. The plastic takes the place of thick thread
wound very tightly and densely around sections of the fabric and then cut and
unwound after the dyeing. Hardly unself-conscious beings of hippie nostalgia
for a simpler life closer to nature, the dyers have made technical innovation
part of their mystique. Also well aware of the legendary status of Soninke and
Bambara dyers, they weave the mystique of that legend around their work as
a strategy for preserving it, promoting it, and passing it on to their daughters
and nieces within the intrusive grasp of the globalized economy.
Serint the master xosiist told me that his own techniques in xosi changed
around 1980, perhaps in response to the changes brought by chemical dyes.
He also told me that before this time, people could not wash their dyed cloth-
ing, and so just kept them for weddings, baptisms and Muslim holidays.
Although his memory may have rearranged the dates, these changes fit in with
the other threads of change that contribute to African fashion in Senegal at
the turn of the twenty-first century. The introduction of chemical dyes, struct-
ural adjustment, the end of neo-colonialism and the nationalist period, the
resignation of Senghor, the cultural revolution culminating in Set/setal, are all
threads that come together to weave the current fashion system. What this
chapter describes then, is one version of a distinctive African modernity
(Hendrickson 1996: 13; Ong 1999: 23) and just one moment in a long history.
Notes
1. Senegalese fashion myths (like my own myth about it) incorporate their own
version of tradition. This version transforms the tradition/modernity opposition
of colonialist ideology that organized itself around a whole series of such oppositions:
Europe/Africa, same/other, evolving/static, historical/prehistorical, civilized/primitive,
open society/closed society (Torgovnick 1990: 8, 19). But the tradition/modernity
couple was in a crucial way anomalous. Where African thinkers and activists rejected
the description of their cultures as undifferentiated other, static, prehistoric, primitive
or closed, many took seriously the notion of their own traditions, but only if seen from
within rather than referred to an external European model of rationality (Hountondji
1983: 139). Some African scholars criticize tradition not as a term with an absolute
meaning, but by questioning the meanings that accrue to it within Western oppositional
structures. According to M. Towa, nineteenth-century European ethnophilosophy,
based on the primitive/civilized series of dichotomies, alters and disfigures traditional
reality. (Essai sur la problmatique philosophique dans lAfrique actuelle, Yaound:
Cl 1971: 32, quoted in Mudimbe 1988: 158). Some scholars have sought to reconceive
this process of tradition as an alternative mode of change and innovation by referring
the word back to it Latin roots of traditio and tradere. Rey Chow resignifies tradition
as translation (1995: 91), and as we have seen, Senegalese fashion translates tradition
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Fashion and the Meanings of Tradition
71
from one meaning system to another, from a symbolic system to a sign system. Mudimbe
finds that one cannot justify the static binary opposition between tradition and
modernity, for tradition (traditio) means discontinuities through a dynamic contin-
uation and possible conversion of tradita (legacies). As such it is part of a history in
the making . . . (1988: 189; see also Hountondji 1983: 145; Picton 1999: 118)
2. This use of traditional clothing and fabric to construct a fashion system differs
not only from the Western fashion system, but also from the self-conscious return to
tradition that make[s] dress the bearer of refashioned ethnic identities in colonial and
postcolonial contexts analyzed by Jean Comaroff (1996: 34). For a history of the uses
and combinations of European and traditional dress in Senegal, see Rabines essay
Dressing Up in Dakar (1997a). For a history of such uses in Nigeria, see Betty Wasss
study of Yoruba dress in five generations of a Nigerian family (1979).
3. For an analysis of this role of dress, see Mustafa 1997: 178. For the role of illusion
and fantasy in Nigerian fashion, see Bastian 1996.
4. On the crisis of state legitimacy in the 1980s, see Diop and Diouf 1990.
5. The informal economy now accounts for the majority of employment in Dakar
(Webster and Fidler 1996: 12, 75; Chidzero 1996: 196). Many of the Senegalese
peddlers one sees not only in the streets and markets of Dakar, but also in Paris, Rome
and New York, are embedded in networks of personal dependency to merchants who
have made huge fortunes from this informal trade (Ebin 1993). This new business elite,
through its networks, has mounted an effective challenge, both political and economic,
to the neo-colonial business class and state (Thioub et al. 1998). In Dakar, some of
the grandes fortunes who lead the informal trade networks are the Mouride Muslim
leaders who continue to expand the wealth and power they had enjoyed under the
colonial and neo-colonial arrangements. Their power derives from an independent
political base organized through their networks of peddlers, boutique operators,
canteen owners and others in the informal urban sector tied to them by credit and
business relations as well as family and religious ties (ibid.: 71; see also Cruise
OBrien 1996: 60). Within Senegalese import distribution networks, those at the top
not only advance credit and merchandise to distributors, petty traders and micro-
traders, but also often lodge and feed dependents (Thioub et al. 1998: 79).
6. See Eicher 1976 for the development of indigo-dyeing in Nigeria.
7. For a different history of tie-dyeing in Nigeria and its dissemination in the 1960s,
see Eicher 1976: 76; Kasfir 1992: 43.
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3
Fashioning Postcolonial
Identities in Kenya
Memory and History in the Text of Clothing: Kenya and
Senegal, English and French Colonialism,
Rupture and Continuity
As African fashion circulates from West Africa to urban central Kenya in East
Africa, it enters a mode of meaning production resting, paradoxically, on a
multiple rupture with the past. Signifying the desire of Kikuyu (as well as urban
Luo and Luhya) informants to heal this break with pre-colonial culture,
African fashion also, inevitably, conjures up the very separation and loss it aims
to overcome. By incorporating these opposed meanings, African fashion of
urban central Kenya differs from Senegalese fashion with its references to
continuity and tradition. This contrast opens up issues of cultural and historical
diversity within the African continent, of what distinguishes pre-colonial
coastal West Africa from inland East Africa, and French colonialism from
English colonialism.
Stories from my research in Senegal provide entry into these multiple differ-
ences. The elite, glamorous Senegalese designer Coll Sow Ardo concluded her
interview with me by explaining why she makes her chic city suits and cocktail
dresses from a modernized version of traditional Senegalese hand-woven sru
rbbal. In an emotion-filled voice she invoked the memory of her grandmother,
who always used the fabric. Nafissatou Diallos autobiography also concludes
with an emotionally charged image of the narrator opening the deceased
grandmothers trunk to discover its hidden treasure of sru rbbal (1975). In
a dress system where one of the major items of clothing, the ndoket, is also
called by the Wolof name mame boye (darling grandmother), the connection
between clothing styles and emotional ties to a shared past resonates strongly
(see Figure 2 on p.8). As the name of a style, mame boye calls forth collectively
recognized photographic images of elegant post-Second World War Dakaroises
and Saint-Louisiennes (Figure 18 on p.74). Abdou, a successful Senegalese
tailor in Harlem, New York, tellingly misinterpreted my research project.
When I told him I was interested in how African fashion goes back and forth,
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Figure 18 Senegalese fashion model Gaye Ciss in an ndoket in a photo circa
1950. Photo property of Gaye Ciss.
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
75
he became quite enthusiastic: Thats what fashion is. You see this [showing
me a red ndoket embroidered in gold]. This is very, very old. Now its a
fashion. He talked about remembering his mother wearing on ndoket in the
1950s. Although Abdou had a deep economic and cultural involvement in the
circulation of fashion across space, he immediately brought up instead its
circulation in time.
The contradictory, shifting symbolism of Kikuyu African dress works other-
wise. Wairimu Wachiras sister Salome Lenana (see Chapter 1), who hosted
me in Nairobi in 1994, said that she remembered older relatives in the village
wearing traditional Kikuyu clothing during her childhood, but had no desire
to be a part of their dress. Both she and Wairimu said that as children the
traditional clothing they saw had no connection to them, was not a part
of them. They wore only the Western clothing prescribed by the Christian
missionaries and adopted by the modern Kenyans. When I asked a Luhya
safari driver if his people had any special clothing or ornaments, he said: We
have lost our culture. People just dress like the Western men. They are not
themselves. Questions about local African dress to Kikuyu people also brought
forth these themes of cultural loss and the quest for an elusive identity.
The sartorial contrast between Senegal and urban central Kenya highlights
the heterogeneity of African cultures and experiences with colonialism. The
fashion histories of Atlantic coast Dakar and inland Nairobi are in contrast
not only to each other but also to those of former French colonies in Central
Africa, to those of coastal East Africa, and even to those of the pastoral Maasai
and Samburu in Central Kenya itself. Like the Senegalese, the Congolese of
French colonial Brazzaville adopted and transformed French fashion. But
where the Senegalese tended more to incorporate the French art of fashionable
elegance into their own Arab-influenced dress, the people of colonial Brazzaville
tended more toward using European styles to create their own fashion system
(Martin 1995: 15472). Another telling contrast distinguishes Kikuyu sartorial
history from that of Africans in Zanzibar. When African slaves to the Arabic
and Shirazi upper classes freed themselves, they adopted as symbol of their
autonomy and rising status the dress of their masters, attire that had formerly
been forbidden to them (Fair 1998: 656). The Kikuyu, in their contrasting
historical accounts, find that their own indigenous dress was forbidden to them
as English missionaries had them adopt European clothing. In contrast then,
to cultures in West Africa, Central Africa, and even other parts of Kenya, the
discourse of fashion becomes a way for the Kikuyu, known for their early and
fierce struggles against colonialism, to express their anti-colonial traditions.
1
Nairobis sartorial street scene is itself a text that invites questions about
the particular history that produced it. On the street, most people wear loose-
fitting Western clothing from the vast used-clothing markets (Hansen 1994;
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Figure 19 Two-piece West African-style taille basse outfit, locally made in Nairobi,
Kenya for Salome Lenana. Nairobi, 1994.
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
77
Hansen 2000). The scene of 1994 is punctuated by the rare occurrence of a
smart looking cotton straight skirt and smock jacket or fitted two-piece dress,
in tie-dye wax resist, or kitenge, the East African version of brightly colored
African print fabric (Figure 19, p.76). Made by local tailors, the outfits give
the wearer a chic, proud look. In Kenya for the most part, African fashions
like these constitute an elegant form of dress. They are not used as everyday
wear. Dress codes relegate them to cultural occasions, ceremonies or weddings.
The fashions called African are worn for dress-up or for leisure, but not for
work. Many offices, especially banks, did not permit African fashion, and
Salome, who owns her own business, was one of the very few women who
wore the two-piece suits of African fabric to work. Even the rare sightings of
such dress on the street, people tell me, had begun only about three years
previously. What historical specificity might explain this dress code?
In pre-colonial Kikuyu society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, traditional dress played a central role in bringing together the
collective powers of aesthetic expression, sexual attraction, and social organiz-
ation. It was rapidly wiped out by the British missionaries and colonialists in
the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (Cagnolo 1933; Hobley 1967; Kenyatta 1987;
Leaky 1977; Rabine 1997b; Routledge 1910).
2
Clothing itself, made of animal
skins, violated English codes of nudity because it did not always cover the penis
or the breasts (Huxley 1959).
3
But the Kikuyu did not consider themselves
naked as long as they were adorned on every part of the body, and most
especially the ears, with ornaments made of metal, beads, wood, seeds, and
just about any other thing they could find to produce an endlessly renewed
array of creative distinction. The ornaments symbolized differences in tribe
membership, gender, rank, age grades, and marital status. They also created
the personal differences by means of which young men could attract a future
wife. As inscription upon the body, dress was also a crucial means by which
the Kikuyu wrote their historical and cultural records. In proscribing trad-
itional dress, the missionaries severed peoples bodily access to the traditional
symbolic order.
By contrast to Kikuyu Kenya, Senegal was open to major currents in trans-
continental trade from at least the tenth century (Curtin 1984: 32), and contin-
ually incorporated aspects of Arabic and European dress into its own symbolic
order. The inland Kikuyu, before the late nineteenth century, had limited
contact with Arab and Indian traders, and major interactions only with neigh-
boring groups (ibid.: 26). Rather than incorporating elements of European
culture, the Kikuyu adapted abruptly, in part willingly and in part under great
duress, to the culture of the invaders (Cagnolo 1933: 258; see also Comaroff
1996: 24). In Father Charles Cagnolos 1933 ethnography, a series of photo-
graphs documents the change. What strikes attention in the transition from
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highly ornamented traditional dress to utilitarian European dress is the pro-
gression from exuberant diversity and originality to dull uniformity. In the
photos of traditional dress, each person wears a different headdress, neck yoke,
set of bracelets, and shield. The photos of the Christianized Kikuyu show all
the people dressed exactly the same as each other. Like the clothing at the
end of Cagnolos book, the everyday clothing on the Nairobi streets seemed
insignificant in the double sense that it did not draw attention and that literally,
it did not signify a strong message. Rather it marked a rupture, a break with
sartorial creation of meaning.
Colonialists (and slave owners) historically used Western clothing for disparate
purposes, among them to create an indigenous elite separate from the people,
as in French-ruled Senegal, or to create a symbol of inferiority and to separate
people from their culture, as in English-ruled Kenya (Edgerton 1989: 34). There-
fore, post-colonial sartorial practices work out differently in Kenya than in
Senegal and in African America. In Kikuya Kenya, the aesthetic and symbolic
practices of African fashion embody, for many dressmakers and middle-class
consumers, desires for a better social and political future, but are very little woven
into daily life. As a result, this African fashion, as the non-everyday, the non-
experiential, becomes a series of disconnected canvasses upon which designers
and consumers project dreams, a fragmented text that weaves wish images
(Benjamin 1999: 4; Buck-Morss 1989: 114). The fashions signify desires for
beauty, and for much needed prosperity and peace, on both a personal and a
national political level. Having embraced the modernity brought by colon-
ialism, middle-class Kikuyu do not seek through African fashion a return to
the lost culture. This fashion seeks to heal the rupture with the past by embody-
ing a symbolic national identity beyond the corruption of the post-colonial
state and the violent divisiveness of Kenyan politics in the 1990s.
The difference between the unity and historical depth of Senegalese African
fashion and its dispersal in central urban Kenya into future-oriented fragments
that refract off each other led to a difference in my research methods. In
Senegal, I remained for the most part in Dakar concentrating my studies on
a select few dense networks of producers. In Kenya, I constantly traveled
between Nairobi, Nakuru in the Rift Valley, Nyeri at the foot of Mount Kenya,
and small rural towns in the Kikuyu and Maasai areas, wherever a tip or lead
about interesting design work would take me. My research and writing about
Kenya were also more fragmented, yielding isolated images. Each of these will
crystallize the contradictions and paradoxes that distinguish African fashion
in Kikuyu Kenya, and that connect the fragments.
The relation between dress and its context in urban central Kenya and
Senegal also contrasts on a social level. In Senegal a wealthy sartorial appear-
ance could cover the dire economic straits of the ruined middle class, whereas
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79
in urban central Kenya the middle class remained prosperous well into the
1990s. Myriad historical factors enter into the contrast. Since Kenya was a
settler colony, British colonizers invested capital to develop the country. Many
Kikuyu went into business, and at the time of independence middle-class
Kikuyu were able to buy back tribal stolen lands in the form of small farms.
Although the colonial settlers were brutal to the Kikuyu and drove them off
the land, they carefully husbanded the fertile, breathtakingly beautiful lands
around Mount Kenya, unlike the French in Senegal who laid the land to waste
(Sandbrook 1985: 4, 7, 36, 536, 689, 1301; Shaw 1995: 1223, 144). With
its well-run farms in the Central Highlands, and its tourist attractions, Kenya
ought to be prosperous. Yet post-independence Kenya adopted the political
and economic structures of colonialism instead of changing them to meet
the peoples needs. The result is a vast and grinding urban poverty and a polar-
ization between rich and poor much worse than one sees in Senegal (Sandbrook
1985: 8, 12; Dianga 1997). Under a corrupt ruling party, the rapid and dramatic
disintegration of the countrys roads, electricity, telecommunications, health
systems, education, and economy, along with ruling party-instigated inter-
ethnic violence, has had devastating effects on tourism, agriculture, and
business, not to mention the social fabric itself. The Kenyan node of the
informal transnational African fashion network revolves therefore around
efforts to create aesthetic beauty, economic prosperity and symbolic national
unity within and against this context.
The Search for Origins: Kenyan Jewelry and the
Invention of Tradition
The story of my research on this intermittent fashion scene begins and ends
at a craft market in downtown Nairobi nicknamed the Blue Market. In Kenya
the transnational African fashion network bifurcates into parallel circuits.
Metal and beaded jewelry crafted by Kenyans, some of it based on traditional
tribal designs, some of it dating from the urban 1970s, flows outward to the
tourist and export markets (Jules-Rosette 1984). African fashion for urban
Kikuyu flows inward from West Africa or African America. The place where
the two circuits came into close proximity, both geographically and symbol-
ically, was a small downtown street off Biashara Street, where a row of chic
boutiques faced the ramshackle Blue Market. Since one of these boutiques
belonged to Wakarema, who counted herself among Wairimus many couturire
cousins, both it and the Blue Market were sites of my research. Giving graphic
testimony to the social web that embedded these disconnected nodes of global
exchange, the street between them was populated by a group of Nairobis
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derelict street boys. Wairimu, whose indignation about the disintegration of
her country increased every time we returned to Kenya, expressed her greatest
outrage over the fact that no one except a few charity organizations seemed
to care about the street children or to do anything about the internal corruption
and international neglect that created them.
In 1994, I went to Kenya with Wairimu for the first of four month-long field
studies in that country. At the time I was really ignorant about the variegated
histories and modern cultures in Africa. Although I had traveled to West Africa
twice, my fieldwork in fashion had taken place solely in Black Los Angeles. It
was necessary, I thought, to travel to Africa in order to study the original,
traditional styles, and I chose Kenya because I had asked Wairimu to be my
research assistant.
After looking around Nairobi, we went to the Blue Market to further my
quest for authentic African fashion and Wairimus search for items to sell in
the American node of the transnational fashion circuit. The Markets 350 tiny
wooden stalls create a maze of alleys about 18 inches wide and blot out the
sun. The stalls are packed with metal and bead jewelry, soapstone carvings,
baskets and sisal bags, leather goods, and also antiques from Kenyas ethnic
groups. In 1994, wares were very plentiful, and customers very few. Owners
used the stalls mainly to store their wares, while beaders and soapstone painters
used them as workshops.
The outer booths form the faded blue plank walls of the exterior, through
which there is no visible entrance to the market (Figure 20, p.81). One enters
through a crack between the booths at each of the four exterior corners. With
its lack of light and its slippery, muddy alleys, the Blue Market had an almost
sinister atmosphere for a stranger. A man approached and extracted from
Wairimu what she was looking for. He led us through twists and turns to one
of the darker corners. In a stall there, every square inch of wall, doors and
ceiling was covered with jewelry cowry shells, trade beads, amber beads,
silver Ethiopian beads, hammered metal shapes. The necklaces and earrings
were indeed prettier than any we had yet seen. But we were mistrustful of the
Pikanjoh Arts and Jewelry Company. Did they really make all this jewelry
themselves? To prove their claim, a craftsman seated by the side of the stall
worked so fast on a pair of bead and wire earrings that he was done by the
time we were ready to go. In the meantime, the eldest brother and head jewelry
designer, frail, gentle Pappius, arrived, and as we conversed, several more men
gathered around the stall. They agreed to take us to their workshop outside
Nairobi. Finally, I thought, I was about to see the real thing.
A few days later we drove to a rural area where paved roads disappeared,
deeper and deeper, it seemed, toward my goal authentic African dress. In the
tiny workshop, we found four workers, another younger brother of Pappius,
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
81
Figure 20 Simon Njoroge of the Pikanjoh Jewelry Company outside the Curio
Market or Blue Market. Nairobi, 1997.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
and the quick-working master jeweler. The men were cutting shapes out of
metal and hammering designs into them. But the shapes were disappointingly
untraditional: the Kenyan national crest, Ethiopian crosses, maps of Africa in
demand in the tourist and African American export markets. While we were
there, Pappius told me he had learned to make jewelry when he was working
at African Heritage, a famous store for wealthy tourists. He had learned from
a Mr. Allen (or was it Alan? I wrote in my field notes) who, said Pappius,
was very talented. Pappius told us that he had copied some of Mr. Allens
designs, and also made designs of his own.
My quest to get to the heart of authentic African jewelry had thus led to
Alan Donovan, a white American from Colorado. Although Donovan is a
controversial figure among Kenyan jewelry makers and clothing designers,
almost all agree that he is enormously talented and credit him as the originator
of what is considered Kenyan jewelry and woodcarvings. The venerated
director of African Heritage, Donovan told me that he saw the possibilities
for exporting African jewelry when he was working for USAID in the 1960s,
and took it on tour for the first time in 1971. Several of the jewelry makers in
the Blue Market were among the 300 workers he had trained.
In spite of its decrepit appearance, the Blue Market was not old. In the early
1980s, Maasai women had taken over an abandoned parking lot to sell their
beadwork. Although the government succeeded in moving the women to a site
on the edge of downtown (now the Maasai Market), other craftspeople had
begun to drift in and by 1984 were beginning to construct booths around the
perimeter. At first, a road ran through, but more craftspeople came and filled
the interior with several blocks of booths. The market had no electricity,
running water or telephones.
After 1994, Wairimu and I did not see the Pikanjoh jewelers again until
1997, as my research and her business ventures had focused on other things.
But although Wairimu had by 1997 given up exporting, I had become involved
in supplying African fashions to Third World Handarts, the non-profit, alter-
native trade organization run by Sue Fenwick in California (see Chapter 6).
So Wairimu and I once again went through a crack in the wall of the Blue
Market. As we walked past stalls where artisans were stringing beads and
painting soapstone carved animal figurines, they called out to us in desperate
tones to come see their wares. It was supposed to be high tourist season, but
in 1997, the rains, with their flooding, and the upcoming election, with its
ruling party-instigated violence, had put quite a damper on tourism, and thus
on the tourist market.
We stopped at a booth with necklaces of trade beads, amber and silver mixed
together in striking ways. It was run by a charming, earnest young man. We
stopped again at a second booth with equally lovely beadwork, and the same
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
83
man stepped behind the counter. I asked him where he had learned to make
jewelry, expecting to hear yet another story of Alan Donovan and African
Heritage. But he said: My brother taught me how to make these to look nice.
When we inquired about wholesaling, he said, you have to ask my brother.
As we jumped from stone to stone through the flooded maze, the route seemed
familiar.
To our great surprise, Pappius remembered us, treated us to a joyful reunion,
and immediately produced the photos I had taken and sent him in 1994, when
Simon, the earnest young man, had been too young to work at Pikanjoh. He
told me that Pappius, who did not talk much, designed the bead necklaces by
sketching them, and then trying them out. He invents new designs. You wont
find another like it. The designs were indeed unusually pretty , although still
in the heavy style established by Donovan in the 1970s of stringing large beads
close together. Pikanjoh still sold to African Heritage, and also to other kiosks
in the Blue Market. At one time or another, their clients have included the Lake
Nakuru Lodge and Mount Kenya Safari Club, as well as two importers in
Scandinavia. They told me, as did other vendors, that since June of 1996,
business has been going down. The brothers had had no inquiries for three
or four days.
One of the women who gathered daily in Wakaremas boutique across the
street told me that business in the Blue Market had started to drop off around
1990, when it became overcrowded with kiosks. When the aisles became
narrow, people avoided it, for fear of mugging. Two cant pass in an aisle
because of mud puddles. The air is bad, and its too congested. But Joffrey,
the Pikanjoh brother who ran the main kiosk, and who had the perspective
of a Market denizen, saw it differently. To him it was a protective environment.
The market people work like a community. The real selling went on at the
Maasai Market on Tuesdays, or on Fridays in the parking lot of the Village
Market, a posh mall in the suburbs. Most people have workshops, but most
dont sell in the Blue Market. They stored all their jewelry, their valuable beads
and their antiques in the Market, as a secure place, a haven in an extremely
insecure country where violence and robbery are endemic. And indeed, as I
spent more time there, I discovered that a mugging would be almost impossible,
given the atmosphere of reciprocal aid.
This atmosphere seemed precarious, since the political corruption could not
help but seep into business relations. Therefore I was all the more moved and
surprised, when I left the Blue Market at the end of my stay in 1997, that
everyone from the booths near to Pikanjoh gathered around to say good bye
and shake hands. Simon continued calling good bye, thank you even as I
turned the corner into another alley. Six months later I received a letter from
Simon, telling me that gentle, talented Pappius had died, and that secondly
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the world famous blue market was demolished on July this year. We lost
everything because they did not give us any notice and during the demolition
there broke out a fire that burnt all of our things. It was during the night and
so we saved nothing. One of Wairimus jeweler cousins who had come to sell
her work in the United States around that time told us that leaders of the
neighboring mosque had wanted the property. They arranged to have the
market bulldozed in secret at night, thus scattering and burying all the jewelry,
sculptures, weavings and antiques, so that these could not be identified. After-
wards the site was burned. When the people at Third World Handarts commis-
erated with the cousin about the loss of so many valuable wares, she responded
with the phrase that invariably punctuated Kenyan discourse on fashion: Even
more important, she said, was the loss of our culture.
Already, during my previous field visit, Richard Nromo, the most successful
jeweler in the Blue Market, and one of its original occupants, had told me
angrily that the City Council wanted to sell the land to the mosque adjacent
to the Market. The mosque doesnt want to sell handicraft. They bribed our
chairman, and he cheated us, told us, we are giving you another place. But
its not their land. The owner came out, the President came here and intervened.
He told the City Council they can allow us to stay . . .
The whole tragedy, including the betrayal by President Daniel arap Moi and
the City Councilmens sale of land they did not own, fits into an endless series
of such occurrences. To cite just a few examples: During my stay in 1996, a
student was killed by police at Egerton College, and the next day two more
were killed at Kenyatta University. The students had been demonstrating
against the theft of their fee reimbursements by corrupt college administrators.
During my stay in 1997, a cholera epidemic devastated a poor neighborhood
of Nairobi. Five thousand people were sharing one latrine because a private
developer had destroyed the other. The government response was to distribute
posters on the necessity of washing ones hands. The paper reported that the
public health system had collapsed. But this was during the elections and on
Saturday mornings lines of ruling party campaigners, unemployed people,
waited at Statehouse, the official government headquarters, to collect their pay.
Stopping in the market town of Keratina near Mount Kenya, we encountered
a truck loaded with young male campaigners, very drunk, and the next day
heard that shortly afterward a woman had been killed in the fight between
rival groups of paid campaigners. A common occurrence. Yet because the story
of the Blue Market concerns the destruction of jewelry and other craft, it
illustrates the context within and against which craftspeople weave meanings
of collective desire for change, and by extension reminders of the tragedies that
need changing, into their fashions.
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
85
Production of Political Meanings across Race and Class
Clothing designers invested their work with these desires more ardently and
complexly than the jewelry makers. In contrast to Senegal, where clothing
design and couture is pervasively woven into the culture, in Kenya it forms
eloquent fragments dispersed throughout the dominant scene of Western garb.
Different kinds of fragments are dispersed in the outbound and incoming circuits.
Alan Donovan organizes an elite circle of designers who create for the tourist
circuit. Another group of white women couturires makes exquisite up-scale
fashions for export and for the white communities of East Africa. But the largest
group is also the one most tightly woven into urban central Kenyan society,
and most concerned to make good the perceived loss of culture. Most complexly
involved with producing African fashion and its meaning, this group consists
of the black women couturires who sew for the middle-class women of Kenya.
While all these groups share the notion of fashion as material symbol of beauty,
prosperity and national unity, each employs a different mode of meaning
production and a different interpretation of these meanings themselves.
Donovans African Heritage fashion shows tour European countries, and
the sartorial meanings are oriented toward that audience. After the preview
of his 1994 show at Nairobis Intercontinental Hotel, where ambassadors and
delegates from the EEC were the honored attendees, he did a critical screening
of the video for his models and invited me to come along. Most of the clothes,
beautiful but unwearable, looked more like costumes, and the show was
sponsored, not by the Ministries of Commerce, Labor or Culture, but by the
Ministry of Tourism and Wild Life. The purpose of the show, Donovan explained
to me, was not to market the clothing but to attract tourism to Kenya, to
counteract the negative publicity that Africa is only about famine, war and
poverty. The costumes, to which the fashion shows announcer lent meanings
to counter these stereotypes, were made by Donovan and the designers in his
circle. His own designs included a dramatic backless bra top, made from West
African Malian mudcloth, and sporting the enormous puffy sleeves of the
gomesi, national dress of neighboring Uganda.
The most beautiful and striking garment in the show was a floor-length,
backless gown with graceful, sweeping cut, train and bustle, made of unhemmed
and unevenly cut brown Ugandan bark cloth, trimmed with porcupine quills.
It had been designed not by an elite member of his design circle, but by the
young Kenyan designers Carole Wahome and Sally Karago. When I later met
Sally, she talked about the complex meanings she invested in the gown, but
the fashion show announcer called it a Maasai bride dress. The Maasai
bride dress was a staple in every fashion show oriented toward the tourist
market, although none bore any resemblance to anything worn by the Maasai
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or included in their fashion system. A nomadic group of herders, the Maasai
have maintained a distinctive culture with its own dress (Mazrui 1970: 22; see
also Kasfir 1999: 6973), and so have become commodified emblems of exotic
tribal dressing in tourist and to some extent local romance.
In this way as in others, the African Heritage fashion show illustrates
the authentic as a paradoxical loss of local specificity. The fashion show
announcer repeated several times the refrain Dazzling Display of Authentic
Traditional Costumes, and at one point announced the dance of an authentic
Maasai warrior. After the screening, while I was being driven back to Nairobi
in a truck filled with African Heritage workers, all were anxious to tell me that
they were Luhyas and very proud of it. One of them mentioned in passing that
he had been the authentic Maasai warrior in the fashion show. A Kenyan
newspaper article about the show reported: In its characteristic fashion,
African Heritage laid on an array of designs from various parts of the continent
including those from Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali, Zaire, and Tanzania
(Mudasia 6 August 1995). As the article suggests, hybridization of African
cultures, especially when appropriated by Westerners for a dominant global
market, can turn out to be rather a homogenizing. Like other African fashion
in urban central Kenya, Donovans European-oriented show signifies desires
for a better reality. But it abstracted those significations of desire into the realm
of mass-media euphoria. In this abstracted realm, meanings float free from
the particular, and often tragic, historical contexts in which craftspeople make
their fashions, and to which these fashions by necessity also refer. For Kenyan
dressmakers, as we will see, fashionable meaning marks the mournful distance
between fantasy and reality. The African Heritage fashion show collapses the
distance, as if to convince its audience that the euphoric fantasy signified by
the fashions is the African reality.
Giving this set of meanings a different interpretation, white women designers
such as Ann McCreath, Yolanda de Orue or Sian Daniel use local materials:
Maasai beads in unusual colors, fine, soft leathers and suedes, Swahili phrases
silk-screened on t-shirts. These designers, and most particularly Ann McCreaths
company KikoRomeo, invest the clothing with the meanings of desire partic-
ular to central Kenya by doing production work with Maasai, Turkana, and
church-organized self-help womens handicraft groups. They also do fashion
shows to raise funds for NGOs, charities and local human rights organizations.
Susan Mwenda, a black Kenyan and wife of a former government minister,
has similarly organized the women of her home district, Ukambani, to make
sisal bags of an extraordinarily fine weave, beautifully colored with vegetable
dyes. In her interviews with me, these bags signify an elevated aesthetic and
technical standard in sisal weaving, as well as the promise of economic self-
sufficiency for the women in this impoverished district.
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87
Women Fashion Designers of Nairobi: Lucy Achieng Rao
and Sally Macharia Karago
For the black Kenyan dressmakers involved with the fashions called African,
especially the dressmakers endowed with imagination, creativity and technical
skill, meanings revolve around a much longed-for creative freedom. Two of
the most successful, and the most frustrated, such dressmakers in Nairobi are
Lucy Rao and Sally Karago. For them, the subdued, conservative Western
clothing their clients must wear comes to signify the obstacle to creative work.
As Sally Karago said, For the last five years, I think Ive done one blazer
jacket. And its just the same same same same thing . . . And its just the same
straight skirt . . . Im fed up of that. Conversely, Lucy expressed the ardent
desire to devote herself to the African fashions that I imagine, free and wild.
As a focal point for the projection of fantasies, African fashion marks its
separation from the clothing of daily life. For designers like Lucy and Sally this
separation is frustrating because they lack opportunities to work on African
fashion in their own daily work. This very absence, however, magnifies its
association with creative freedom. It becomes one term of a discourse in which
Western clothing again appears as a signifier of cultural loss, conformity to
an imposed standard and the boring drudgery of the daily work world.
Unlike most Nairobi dressmakers, Lucy has a degree in agricultural engin-
eering, and started fashion design as a hobby. Things she made for friends, she
said when I met her in 1996, grew into a business. Rialto Fashion was atop
several flights of stairs in a downtown office building. The only sign of Rialtos
presence when one stepped out of the dark, narrow staircase was a Visa card
decal in a small high window. The door was around the corner across an
exterior walkway. In 1996, Lucy expressed the desire to specialize, as she said:
In bridal clothing with an African touch, but its difficult to convince people. They
want Victorian. You can stretch your imagination much, much more when you
are using African than with the more normal. But most Kenyans are very, very
conservative. Theyre more interested in Western clothes. They believe that what
comes from the West is better.
To give that African touch, Lucy prides herself on using fabric from local
factories, as well as tie-dyes from local womens cooperatives. The photos from
her 1995 fashion show at Nairobis Grand Regency Hotel present a broadly
eclectic mix: a wrap skirt with matching bra top made of kanga fabric from
Kenyas eastern Swahili coast, a kitenge wrap skirt with a calabash bra top, a
mens outfit of locally woven kikoi, a West African-style embroidered boubou,
overalls in local Kenyan tie-dye fabric, a leopard velvet outfit that evoked the
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robes worn by the Kenyan leaders who went to negotiate independence in
London in 1960. The show mixed the practical and the unwearable.
All of Lucys clothes are custom-made. She finds the possibilities for success
by mass-production boring. Contrary to the white designers I interviewed
who were very frank about both their economic difficulties and their successes,
Lucy, like most black designers I talked to, was more reticent. When I asked
her about her business, she said: I wouldnt say it is doing badly. The business
is doing reasonably well. But the first time I saw her again in 1997, she had
done six weddings the previous weekend. There were eleven seamstresses
working in her shop, and several others working outside. Each of the seam-
stresses specialized in a particular type of garment, and each made the whole
garment in consultation with the others. Lucy did all the cutting.
The very success of her business intensified her sense of an African/Western
opposition in clothing styles as a fantasy/reality opposition with respect to her
products, her clients and her workers:
I want to do just African but I have to do what people want in order to survive. Like
at the wedding, suddenly it hit me: this is real life. Its not a game. These people are
depending on me to make their wedding clothes. Then it hits me from the other side.
This is real life. Im responsible for all these employees who have families.
The expression of this conflict focuses on responsibility for workers and clients
while not mentioning profits. It illustrates ways that African fashion artisans
can approach business differently than corporate retailers and manufacturers
with an exclusive concern for profits (see Chapter 4).
Yet in addition to being gifted with a vivid imagination, Lucy is a shrewd
businesswoman, always looking for new opportunities. As in the previous year,
however, she expressed a complete lack of interest in making money without
the excitement of creativity. But the growth of her business was putting her
in a double bind. For about two weeks during my months stay in 1997, Lucy
seemed extremely tired. When I asked her if she were still doing African
fashion, she said:
I would rather design clothes that I imagine, free and wild, but African fashion
appeals to few people. I have quite a number of employees. All these people have
their families, are married with children and depend on what I give. I started origin-
ally by doing what I enjoy, and now if I dont do well, Im affecting lives. If I dont
do it well, this is real life. I set out to have fun . . . but Ive been overtaken by events.
In Lucys discourse, as in that of other designers I studied, creating African
fashion becomes associated with freedom, wildness, enjoyment, and fun, while
making Western garments becomes associated with the worries of real life.
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Like the Senegalese tailors (in Chapter 2) Lucy had a deep involvement
with her clients as well as her employees that both limited and enabled her
creativity. In her case, it kept her from the boredom of mass-production but
also from the freedom of doing African fashion. Although her relations to
clients, employees and business methods differ in important details from those
of Senegalese tailor NGalla Ndiaye (Chapter 2), this involvement produces,
as in his case, both her success and her exhaustion:
People come here because of extra advice about dressing fabrics, colors, weather.
We keep records. We establish a pattern for each individual, for the sort of clothes
they order, the times when they come, their colors, when they pay. In the long run
well do a study of 900 customers and establish a general pattern to plan ways of
improving. We influence customers. Customers dont know what looks good on
them. You know what suits them. You talk to the customers, you know them . . .
Most dont know what they want. I talk to them, an idea crystallizes, I interview
them and sketch their idea. My clients work hard and have stressful jobs. Our job
is stressful, we pretend were never stressed. They tell us their problems, were good
friends.
But when I again asked her about mass-production, she still found it boring.
The subject did bring up, however, the contradiction of a business that both
allowed and prevented her creativity:
I have one basic [paper] pattern for most of my clothes, I grade as I cut, add the flair,
draw on the fabric . . . Its frightening. We must soon do something about me having
less work . . . What I would really like to do is African [fashion]. Kenyans need to
be original, can be original, but its an uphill task, a threat to my survival. In one
way or another, Ill find a way.
Lucys words imply the assumption that African fashion is synonymous with
originality.
Like Lucy, Sally Karago assumes for African fashion the meanings of origin-
ality and a fantasized freedom from the stress of work. She had co-created with
fellow designer Carole Wahome the bark cloth and porcupine quill gown
featured in the African Heritage fashion shows. Sally and Carole had also
revolutionized the venerable institution of the national Smirnoff fashion
contest in 1993, with the first African-inspired design to win first prize.
Sallys workshop was a large flat in a residential building with a waiting room,
office, cutting room, and workroom containing eight machines. It was favored
by light and space.
When Wairimu and I first went to her workshop, a waiting client said that
Sally was the only dressmaker who could be really trusted to make a good
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blazer jacket. But Sally turned out to be extremely bored and frustrated by this.
Trained at Evelyn College, reputed to be Kenyas premier fashion school, in
1987 Sally went to the American College in London, where, as she said, she
was encouraged to try to be creative. Sally came back to Kenya in 1992,
and started a business with Carole Wahome: But we realized that in Nairobi
everyone wants the same same same same same same same SAME same
things . . . People dont like going different. They want what theyve seen on
other people. In her discourse, African fashion signifies being different for
the wearer and play rather than work for the designer. I asked her how she
got her ideas and she said: What I used to do, when we [she and Carole] were
not too busy, wed walk into the markets of Kenya, and we go picking things
that are different, you know just picking African artifacts, take them to the
office and play around with them, and see what we can come up with. In
addition to bark cloth, and porcupine quills, as well as tiny brass masks on a
black evening gown, Sally also used sisal to make a corset for a dress in a
Smirnoff show. The reason that she uses African artifacts is simply that we
wanted to look for something that was different. Other young designers have
followed their lead.
At the Nairobi Smirnoff offices, the publicity director in charge of the
Kenyan Smirnoff national fashion contest, Sheena Round Turner, told me that
only in the past three years, i.e. since Sallys prize-winning gown, had the outfits
in the Smirnoff competition begun to reflect, what she called local traditions.
Yet it is in not reflecting tradition, but rather as we have seen, in reflecting a
rupture with tradition, that African fashion in urban central Kenya emits its
complex visual and semiotic charge. In the photo album that Sheena Round
Turner showed me, many of the featured designs that followed in the wake
of Sally and Caroles bark cloth gown stretched the concept of local African
fashion to the point of unconscious self-parody. The 1995 winner was an outfit
of bark cloth covered with coffee beans, an important agricultural crop, dipped
in gold. The most recent was a kind of pixie dress and hat in bark cloth covered
with appliqud green leaves to symbolize, Sheena Round Turner told me, being
liberated from the cocoon.
It was Sallys aesthetic power that remained inimitable. Her experiments
incorporating African objects such as bark cloth, sisal and masks into dresses
were beautiful. She is able to pull off what in the hands of others becomes
grotesque. When she was in Europe she saw designers using sequins, heavy
decorations and very, very expensive things. When she came back to Kenya,
Sally did not have those resources, so she translated the look into a Kenyan
idiom: What I did was small researches in the markets. In 1997, she was
invited to do the opening scene in a Faces of Africa fashion show. Each of
the dresses was half black and half cream, and was trimmed with porcupine
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quills. She needed 800 quills. I didnt know where to get them . . . so I went
into the real, real market in Nairobi, which is Kicumba (the enormous, rough
and tumble used-clothing market). There she found some Kamba men, who
went back to Machacos overnight and brought her the quills. Concluding the
story, Sally laughed and said: Its amazing what people will do, as if the
memory of this ingenious and unorthodox procurement compensated for
the better-endowed but more conventional and less adventurous setting of
Europe.
Like other Nairobi dressmakers seriously investigating African fashion, Sally
used both local materials and also styles and fabrics borrowed from West
Africa. Her artistry could even rival that of the famed West Africans in the use
of their own fabrics. An evening gown she was in the process of making when
we visited her in 1997 combined the basin riche cotton damask from Holland,
traditionally used in the finest West African boubous, with machine-woven
kente cloth from Nigeria. The strapless Western-style fitted gown of blue and
yellow kente had a yellow brocade overskirt. Countering the codes of West
African dress, Sally paired the European style of the gown with a voluminous
West African headscarf. I would prefer to do this all the time, Sally said with
a wistful expression as she arranged the unfinished gown on the mannequin.
Everybody had a dream when we left college and came home. You know how
you just have this dream.
Fashionable Fragments of a Political Dreamscape
The themes that Lucy and Sally articulate of dream, fantasy and wildness are
generally woven through discussions about African fashion production. The
journalist Sylvia Mudasia entitles one of her articles on an African Heritage
fashion show: The African Dream (August 6, 1995: 6). Even Alan Donovan
told me, When I design something for a show, I dont even think of marketing
it. I do something, no matter how wild, for the chance to do something differ-
ent. While Western high-fashion shows give reign to similar longings and
fantasies, in Kenya, as we have seen, fashion shows are intensely inflected by
the context of social and political disintegration. They are also mapped onto
the sartorial opposition between African and Western dress.
Jennifer Sharp, a white designer from Scotland, and Principal of Woodgrove
Fashion College when I interviewed her, said: African fashion is not done here.
Theres a lot of copying, not much originality. Implicit in her words, as in
those of Lucy and Sally, is the assumption that African fashion connotes
originality, and Western fashion conformity. Of her design that won first prize
for professional work in a Smirnoff competition she said, Its purely fantasy.
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Smirnoff gives you a chance to be wild. The strapless leather mini-dress had
an intricate cummerbund made entirely of hundreds of red Maasai beads.
Jennifer had gone to the Maasai market several weekends in a row to procure
that quantity of red beads. Like Rebecca Tarus, a young fashion instructor at
Egerton College in Nakuru, Jennifer uses African fashion as the way to encour-
age creativity in her students.
For these Kenyan designers then, so-called African fashion remains elusive.
On the one hand it draws together and focuses in one unit the disparate desires
for creative freedom, cultural plenitude and economic improvement. On the
other hand, however, these units of fashion do not form a semiotic system
within a historically constructed collective unconscious, as in Senegal and other
African communities. Although the designers mix elements from different
African cultures for individual, and often beautiful, hybrid looks, these do not
produce a common Creole language. Either, as in the case of the African
Heritage fashion show, the result can homogenize African cultures, or else, as
in the case of the black Kenyan designers, it forms a kind of fragmented
dreamscape, where each designer follows his or her own inspiration.
Creating Originality from Cross-Cultural Borrowing
A series of paradoxes flows out of the necessity to borrow from other African
dress systems in order to create modern national Kenyan identities. In 1994,
Wairimu said that the popularity of African fashions was very recent, about
three years old, and that the idea came from the United States. People here
copy what they see coming from America, especially if its on T.V. or in cata-
logues, . . . and now the Essence and Homeland catalogues are popular (for
Homeland, see Chapter 6). One of her jeweler cousins, Alice Marete (see
Chapter 1) wore an outfit that illustrated this particular path in the global
network. She met me for her interview in Nyeri, heart of the area where the
Mau Mau rebellion had been fought and where her family had lived for several
generations. For the interview she wore a boubou of vivid purple Nigerian
hand-dyed fabric. The boubou was accompanied not by a matching headscarf,
as West African dress codes would dictate, but by a Nefertiti crown (Figure
21, p.93). This fashion item was invented in the African American community.
Borrowed from ancient Egyptian imagery, it symbolized the ancestral ties of
black Americans to a distant, mythic, and generalized Africa most of them had
never seen. Alice in turn had borrowed both the crown and its symbolic value
to express the desire to regain a connection to her own heritage, but in the very
specific place on the African continent, steeped in a very particular, charged
history, where her family had long abided. Her outfit inadvertently signified
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93
Figure 21 Alice Marete in Nefertiti crown of her own design. Nyeri, Kenya, 1994.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
at the same time the winding, disconnected historic and geographic route by
which it had come to Kenya.
More commonly the contradictions surfaced in loans from rival West Africa.
Lucy said:
The West Africans, they have so much background, such strong and ancient civili-
zations, that its been impossible for Westerners to influence it. With Kenyan culture
here, we have quite a problem. Quite a bit of it [culture] was wiped off by colonial
times. Very little is left. We have to start afresh. Kenyans dont know which direction
to go. Thirty years ago you couldnt talk Kiswahili in school.
For people of urban central Kenya interested in African fashion, its positive
meanings economic, aesthetic and cultural are ineluctably imbued with their
opposite, articulated as an abiding sense of cultural loss. Two cultural domains
consistently evoked this discourse. One was clothing, as the symbolic system
which constructs the body as means of communication. The other was language
per se. It is not a coincidence that Lucys discussion of fashion led to the issue
of Kiswahili. Conversely my questions about clothing frequently led adults to
express the worry that their children would lose the Kikuyu language. In ten
years, Salomes husband commented, there wont be any Kikuyu culture
left.
Even more than to West Africans, Kikuyu compared themselves to the
Maasai, traditional neighbors and rivals with whom they had intermarried,
and who currently exemplify authentic Kenya in tourist marketing. As
Wairimus cousin Wanjiku said, The Maasai have kept their culture. The
Kikuyu have forfeited theirs. Although Wanjiku said this with some longing,
the comparison is caught in ambivalence. Kikuyu informants were proud of
their modernity, and their proven ability to adapt quickly and skillfully not
only to the British culture, but to any culture in which they would find them-
selves. As Christopher Wanyama, Senior Lecturer in Design at Egerton College
said, The Kikuyu lost what he had, but is adaptable to the larger world. You
cannot stop culture from moving. Kikuyu informants also criticized Maasai
refusal of modern hygiene and education, as well as their treatment of women.
Yet with all that, Kikuyu still remain in awe of the Maasai peoples fidelity to
a culture apart.
The most striking visual image of this fidelity is Maasai dress. Considered
traditional, this dress is composed entirely of cloths and beads brought to
Kenya by European colonizers and the Indian traders who came at their behest.
The clothing consists for the women of colorfully printed cotton wraps, usually
in the form of a skirt, a shuka (upper-body wrap tied at one shoulder), and a
cape. The women also cover neck, arms, ankles and ears with jewelry of
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95
colored glass beads. For the men, a red shuka and earrings in very enlarged
earholes are de rigueur. In pre-colonial times, both Kikuyu and Maasai had
worn shukas of animal skin, not necessarily tied over the shoulder to cover
the whole torso, but worn in numerous ways. The British made the shoulder
tie obligatory to fulfill their codes of modesty, and introduced cotton to replace
the animal skins.
Where the cotton, shoulder-tied shuka functioned for the Kikuyu as a transit-
ional garment toward European dress, the Maasai developed it into a distinctive,
elaborate fashion system with an aesthetic and a look utterly different from
those inspired by West Africa or the Western mainstream. Where the Kikuyu
gave up their brass and iron jewelry, the Maasai developed it into an abundance
of new shapes done in colorful glass beads. The beads are woven in zigzag
patterns on intricate wire structures. The same as the beads used by Native
Americans, they came originally from what is now the Czech Republic. In
addition to wearing this beadwork, the Maasai women sell it on the tourist
market. They also sell the loose beads to other craftspeople. While the urban
dressmakers sometimes use Maasai materials or even make a modern version
of the Kikuyu shuka, these are novelties and do not catch on with their clients.
Clients adopt, even while remaining ambivalent, the West African-influenced
fashions
Perceptions of Cultural Loss Across Different
Generations of Designers
It is people in their thirties, forties and even fifties who express the most
concern to develop fashions that signify a distinct Kenyan national identity.
When I interviewed fashion students in their late teens and early twenties from
Evelyn Fashion College, Egerton College in Nakuru, and Ebony Grove Fashion
College, also in Nakuru, they saw African dress styles and fabrics as being for
older people, partly because they were expensive, and partly because they were
not fashionable in mass-mediated youth culture. But the students were split
between those who said they loved African fashion and dreamed of promoting
it as future designers despite the lack of economic opportunity, and those who
emotionally favored Western form-fitting clothing. A few wanted to mix
cultures from all over the world.
In some ways the students have a more complex connection to African
fashion than the adults. One of these has to do with the jewelry circulating
exclusively in the tourist and export market, and that remained outside the
dressing practices of urban Kenyans. Several of the young students had started
frequenting the Maasai Market, and in the mid-1990s had adopted this jewelry,
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
especially the bead, soapstone and wooden earrings, into their own fashion.
Susan Achieng, a fashion student at Egerton College said: When I noticed
them was early last year . . . Everyone was rushing for them, because initially,
what you can say is that the production of these things was made for the
tourists, not really for us, as Africans . . . Then suddenly, they said, what, you
people, this is our culture . . . Lets try to show that . . . its for us first. Her
words, like those of the Njorogo brothers at Pikanjoh, Wairimu Wachira, Sally
Karago, and others, do not suggest nostalgia for an invented tradition. They
speak rather to the dialectic by which tourist fashion interacts with local
peoples historically conscious practices of creating their own modernity (Kasfir
1999; Phillips and Steiner 1999; Jules-Rosette 1984).
Even in their stated reasons for not wearing African fashion, the students
render more complex the adults analysis of colonial legacies as a constraining
force. Comments of the younger students link African dress to more intangible
and amorphous but equally powerful anxieties about appearing out of
fashion. As one Evelyn student said: God! Im seeing someone my age wearing
that, ooh that would be the talk! . . . Yeah, its like youre really losing it. . . .
Youd be getting all sorts of comments. While fashion, as we have seen,
expresses deeply held desires and fantasies, it has, as this students words
suggest, other powers as well. As the medium through which we appear first
and most visibly to others within a social structure, dress is also a conduit
through which the judging, controlling gaze of that structure is internalized.
Although historically far from classic colonialism, the students illustrate by
their words why British colonialists and missionaries found dress such a
powerful tool of domination. By coding our bodies, our selves, our appear-
ances, and our relations to social others, dress can internalize subjection to
political control in a way that formal legal codes cannot.
Another student evoked the power wielded by this internalized gaze when
she said of wearing African dress: Everybody would be staring. Everybody
would be wondering what is wrong with that girl. Beatrice, an Evelyn student
from Uganda, on the western border of Kenya, expressed the internal conflicts
around African fashion as her words performed a struggle against the power
of this gaze: Im a Ugandan. I feel so proud. We have a culture . . . At least
we have a traditional dress [the gomesi]. At least you can distinguish them.
They have a mode of dressing in opposition to the Kenyans. But in spite of
her stated pride, it came out in the interview that Beatrice did not wear the
national Ugandan dress before coming to Kenya: I started wearing Ugandan
clothes here in college . . . Now I have the guts to wear my own proper thing.
I know the meaning. I know what it symbolizes . . . I dont wear African
clothing, but Im going to start because I have been in school . . . Ive never
actually worn them. I could wear them when Im acting. In plays. Here
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the image of the actor in theatrical performance disarms the all-powerful,
internalized, disembodied gaze of the social structure by externalizing and re-
embodying it as an audience of mere people. The actress gains the power to
pull off her non-conformist sartorial display by placing herself at a distance
from these people on a theatrical stage, that is to say on what the audience
communally recognizes as the framework for what is just a fantasy, just
play-acting, not part of everyday life. In other words, Beatrices metaphor of
the theater describes the actual status of African fashion in urban central
Kenya as a space of fantasy separate from daily life.
For some of the students, as for the designers in their thirties and forties,
African fashion differs from Western fashion in its power to open up the space
of fantasy. To be sure, the students border that space with a frame borrowed
from mass-mediated global youth culture. As Evelyn student Emma said:
Can you imagine, if you just wear something African, and maybe you just wear
make-up on, youll be smart. Maybe youll even be driving a car to work. Then when
you just step out of the car, people will be like, oooh, shes AFRICA. You know. . .
If you have that African touch in you, and maybe a scarf on your head, you actually
look unique . . . and you actually inspire people.
Emmas African fashion is bathed in an aura of prestige by an imaginary gaze
unmistakably resembling that of TV spectators framing in turn the adoring
gaze of on-site, awe-struck fans as their favorite celebrity steps out of her car
to the popping of photo flashbulbs.
Her scenario brings up another generational difference in attitudes toward
African fashion. The students discourse foregrounded the amorphous, ubiquit-
ous power of dress as conduit of interaction between unconscious fantasies
and the outer world in ways that the adults discourse did not. But on the other
hand, the adults recognized with more sophistication the complex processes
by which African fashion circulates and thereby gains power to create identities.
When I asked students where design ideas for Western fashions and for African
fashions come from, they saw the pathways very differently. Ideas for Western
fashion, they said, came from magazines, video, TV, the internet and
movies. While they saw ideas for Western fashion as highly filtered through
global mass media, they did not for the most part see African fashion thus
mediated. Despite Emmas framing device borrowed from global electronic
media imagery, the students saw ideas for African fashions as coming directly
from their source in an unmediated way. Ideas for African fashion come from
countries national dress, from an outfit thats been worn for days and days
and time and time, from indigenous cultures, our forefathers, parents
and grandmothers, our traditions. Emma and Susan, who had thought a
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lot about their interest in African fashion, did see ideas for African fashion as
coming through filters of commercial mediation but of a different kind from
those of Western fashion. Ideas for African fashion come from postcards and
books, or from exhibitions, the Maasai Market, and African Heritage.
Adult informants on the other hand, saw not only African fashion, but the
very notion of reclaiming African dress as modern fashion, circulating to Kenya
through intricate, recursive routes of external mediation. Nancy Openda-
Omar, a graduate student in her thirties, who had written her Masters thesis
at Egerton on the history of Kenyan dress, said: There are influences from
Zaire, Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia to some extent, and of course Uganda
and Tanzania [neighboring countries]. When people read magazines, when
they travel, you stop taking your culture for granted. Wairimu also said that
she started appreciating African art and fashion when she went away from
home. Before she took it for granted. Christopher Wanyama, who had for
many years worked as a graphic designer in the fabric industry, said that
African dress had recently become fashionable for elite women because they
travel and see others have it.
It is by taking a distance from urban Kenyan culture that these women arrive
at the desire to construct through fashion a particularly Kenyan national
identity. Doing scholarly research, immigrating or traveling to international
meetings become diverse routes by which people see their own culture from
the outside. Spaces of observation outside Kenyan culture often lie inside the
spaces of mass-media and mass-commodity consumption that encode trans-
national difference in the new age of globalization. The discourses of discon-
nection from ones own sartorial traditions and of compensating for this
through pan-African fashion are themselves filtered by Western-inspired
consumerist ideology. It is through this ideology that the general practice of
using clothing to create identities circulates in both dominant and shadow
global networks.
In adopting, however, this mass-mediated notion of identity construction,
Kenyan designers and their clients transform it dramatically (see Hall 1997:
289; and King 1997: 15). There are in Kenya, to be sure, shops full of mass-
produced products from the West and Asia, but shopping for them does not
constitute a form of life (Hannerz 1997: 123) as it does in the West. And
the vast majority of Kenyans remain excluded from the products and benefits
of corporate consumerism. More to the point, Kenyan African fashion is
not materially produced and consumed within the mass-production and
mass-consumption networks of corporate capitalism, but in the shadow net-
works of craftspeople and their customers. The fabrics, beads, ideas for using
them, and the craftspeople themselves travel to Kenya through informal
commodity circuits linking marginalized African communities. The ideology
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of commodified identities is resignified within a realm of artisanal production
where small tailors, mostly women, engage in the creative production of both
dress and its meanings.
The Unfinished Quest for a National Outfit
When they come to Kenya from West Africa, the boubous and caftans, tie-dyes
and lgos prints enter a very different mode of meaning production. In both
Kenya and Senegal the symbolic and aesthetic values of dress emerge, as we
have seen, out of relations joining artisans to their materials, to their workers
and to their clients. Beyond that, artisans, materials, workers and clients
are embedded together in dense social, political and historical networks. In
Dakar, people mention in passing the French legacy as a strong influence on
the institution of fashion, but foreground continuities with their own past
(Rabine 1997a). In Senegal, complaints about lack of support from a stagnant
government punctuate discussions about fashion, but for myriad reasons, the
government, elections and political processes do not arouse the intense concern
that infuses discussions of fashion by people I studied in Kenya.
In Kenya in 1997, and in Senegal in 1998, my fieldwork visits coincided with
the national elections. Although almost no one I talked to in Kenya intended
to vote in what they saw as a blatantly rigged election, almost everyone was well
informed. They engaged in endless, detailed and angry discussions about
President Daniel arap Moi, his party KANU, and the way they had looted the
country: Eight billion Kenya shillings per month are collected for road taxes,
Wairimus brother-in-law John fumes as he drives me over crumbling or dis-
appeared roads and points out the road-building equipment left idle on the
roadside for months. The Njorogo brothers at Pikanjoh are among the rare
people who intend to vote, and they emphatically want KANU out. They say
they want services for the fees, not to mention the bribes, they pay for their
license to run a kiosk at the Blue Market. They want running water and
electricity in the Blue Market, clean roads, and security, so that tourists will
return and buy their jewelry. They blame KANU for the widespread violence
and the slashing attacks at Mombasa that have scared the tourists away.
By its very separation from daily life and the state politics of ethnic divisive-
ness and corruption that shapes this, African fashion can become a rallying
point for the counter-ideal of a peaceful nation. Fashion joins aspirations for
political harmony with desires to heal cultural loss in the notion of a Kenyan
national outfit. As Wairimus cousin Wanjiku said: We have no national outfit.
We need to come up with one . . . a symbol of Africanness. Colonialism destroys
rich cultures. Weve been told that anything that comes from outside is better
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. . . Now we are starting to say that in ten years, we wont have anything, so
we have to grab on to what we have.
The idea of the national outfit presents itself as the solution to a double
problem. On the one hand, the Mo government has employed intertribal
violence as a strategy for keeping itself in power (Otieno 1998; Sandbrook
1985: 51, 77; Shaw 1995: 6), and a national outfit, several people said, would
create an image and feeling of internal unity. On the other hand, as Wairimus
aunt Mugure Mahinda said, when people go to international meetings, they
go as a nation. [The Kenyans] thought that just as Nigerians and Ugandans
have a national dress, they should represent a nation, and not just a group.
Fashion shows to promote a national outfit go back to the early independ-
ence period. Both Mugures husband and Nancy Omar located the first such
event in 1971, when the Minister of Culture and Social Services formed a
committee made up of representatives from the different tribes to come up with
a national dress. A skilled seamstress and former sewing teacher herself,
Mugure took the history of a national outfit back even further. Talking to me
in the dark days before the election in 1997, she connected dress to Kenyas
independence struggle: In the long run people wanted an identity. They
reached a time when the time of subservience had to go. You want to make a
mark of your identity. Starting in 1958, leaders began to wear [skin clothing]
as a sign of rebelling. For the Uhuru [the first independence celebration] people
felt they couldnt wear a skirt and blouse. They had to look African. She
herself made for the occasion a green dress of Holland wax fabric imported
from a shop in Nairobi. The big flounce had since gone to make clothes for
her children, but the dress itself still fit. In Mugures history, shaped perhaps
to fit the rebellious mood of 1997 (and to fit as well the needs of my research),
modern African dress surfaced first to rebel against colonialism, then to mark
Uhuru, and finally in the present to come into its own as fashionable and
elegant garb. Other fashion competitions for the elusive national outfit followed
the first one in 1971, and Mugure had once created a winning outfit.
Yet from the mid- to the late 1990s, no one I met in Kenya, except the
teenagers who changed their hip hop outfits several times a day, seemed to
construct their identity centrally through dress. African fashion represented,
then, not a construction of identity but the quest to do so. Because they keenly
felt the absence of a national identity visible and palpable in the material signs
and symbols integrated with the body, Kenyans I interviewed on this issue had
a decidedly anti-essentialist notion of identity. The sense of rupture from their
own pre-colonialist histories led people to articulate the way in which identities
are historically and consciously constructed. For these informants, further-
more, the desire to construct a national identity comes out of a consciousness
of the state as responsible for fomenting tribal hostilities out of what had been
fluid, interconnecting ethnic groups in pre-colonial times.
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
101
The very practice of articulating identity in an anti-essentialist way contributes
to a mode of sartorial meaning that cannot escape self-contradiction. The words
of two leaders in the movement to create a national outfit, newspaper reporter
Sylvia Mudasia and businesswoman Margaret Gould, illustrate these contra-
dictions. In an article entitled Search for National Costume Continues, Mudasia
quotes Gould as saying: Kenyans should get away from dressing in other
peoples designs and come up with something that is truly our own. (Mudasia,
October 8, 1995). Gould had organized a National Dress Competition, the
second national dress competition in recent months, at Nariobis Interconti-
nental Hotel. Mudasia wrote: In a bid to come out with something authentically
Kenyan, the competing designers entered outfits that were [a]ll attractive,
wearable, made of Kikoi material . . . loose and flowing but modern . . . Part
of the unfolding paradox is that, as we have seen, the whole idea of something
truly ones own can only come from exposure to and therefore borrowing
from other peoples designs. Gould was inspired with the idea of a Kenyan
national outfit when she worked at the United Nations Environmental Program
building in Nairobi, and executed the project of photographing the African
women delegates in their national dress.
Both this exposure and its attendant paradoxes entered Kenyan fashion
schools in the mid-1990s, when schools started using African fashion to come
out of an established conservatism and encourage students to be creative. At
Egerton College in 1994, students of Rebecca Tarus modeled their senior
projects, most made of kitenge. Each said that she had made the garment
because she wanted to be a bit different or unique or original. Tarus,
a young teacher who had played a major role in revolutionizing the fashion
department, made beautiful, delicate tie-dyes by folding the cloth into large
rectangles and dipping the merest edges in the dye bath. But Wairimu was most
surprised and impressed by the way that Tarus had stimulated her students.
In her experience as a fashion student in the 1980s, you are always taught
to think that you are not good. Mrs. Tarus seems to teach her students to have
confidence in their talents.
As rhetorical figures, difference, uniqueness and originality can and do
inspire the students with confidence. As sartorial signifiers, on the other hand,
they plunge the quest for a Kenyan national outfit into a chain of paradoxes. In
the transnational codes of commodified identities, authenticity can be attained
only through imitation, and the very idea of originality comes from copying.
From its very beginning, fashion as an institution, in order to function as a
semiotic system, produces difference through a play of contrasts among homo-
geneous elements within a code. By bringing into sharp relief these paradoxes,
the quest for a Kenyan national outfit, in all its historical particularity, vividly
illustrates the double binds of fashion as an institution foundational to the rise
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
of capitalism (Appadurai 1986: 323; Breward 1995). Fashion offers its
producers and consumers both the creativity of aesthetic self-expression and
bondage to the consumerism that fuels expansion of an economic system
beyond ones control (see chapter 4).
The self-defeating nature of fashion does not, as one might think, derive from
conformity to narrow dictates and codes of style. On the contrary, the rules
of conformity to a code are the very conditions for fashion to work as a form
of original self-expression, much like the sonnet form in poetry, the formal rules
of rhythm and harmony in music composition, or the physical constraints of
architecture. Fashion continually undermines its own aesthetic power through
its historic function to generate ever-expanding demand for new commodities
and thus fulfill the need for ever-expanding capital accumulation (see Chapter
4). As Lydia Mahinda ruefully reminded me about the UN project to teach
rural women how to make and market tie-dye products (see Chapter 1), as
soon as everyone starts wearing them, they stop being different, and it is
necessary to go on to something else. The authentic, the different, the
unique and the proper encapsulate that which the capitalist commodity
system both produces and makes impossible.
The national dress competitions unfold a series of contradictions. Since the
idea of a national outfit comes from West Africa, for that very reason, West
African styles and fabrics must be rejected:
Designers are trying hard to find a dress that would portray the identity of a Kenyan
. . . Interestingly though, a few designers missed the boat coming out with very
interesting designs, but done on fabrics that are widely considered to be West African.
Also to miss out on the theme of the show were some designers who picked out very
good fabric but went on to design outfits that were immediately identifiable with
West African designs like the popular bubu worn by Nigerian, Ghanaian and
Senegalese women (Mudasia October 8, 1995).
Winners were a kikoi three-piece dress for women and for men a fiery red
and black loose top worn over black trousers, also in kikoi. Yet kikoi comes
to Kenya from Somalia, Kenyas neighbor to the north (Christopher Wanyama,
personal communication), while the styles come from a general ethnic look
popular in the West.
In an interview with me, Sylvia Mudasia said that this was the first year
(1995) that Kenyans were using kikoi for dresses, waistcoats and hats. So in
spite of having to signify the inevitably and inherently paradoxical movement
of the authentic, the simplicity and clean lines of kikoi actually did go beyond
and improve upon the African Heritage and Smirnoff pastiche of African
creativity. In addition, Margaret Gould also chose as winners designs that, as
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103
Figure 22 Lucy Raos custom-made Kenyan national outfit blazer of navy
gabardine with kente print trim. Nairobi, 1996
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
she told me, had nothing tribal and nothing ethnic at a time when KANU
was inciting tribal violence.
While Margaret Gould situated Kenyan African fashion outside of both local
tribal and West African influences by using kikoi, Lucy Rao adopted another,
also simple and elegant, method for the same goal. She told me: Ive been
trying to come up with something African yet Kenyan. You see Kenyans have
a problem. We havent come up with a national dress, something that other
countries can recognize. We dont want to copy West Africa. Her solution
was a classic double-breasted navy blue mens blazer, except instead of having
lapels and pocket flaps, it bore around the neck and front opening a thin border
of West African kente print fabric that was repeated on the pockets (Figure
22, p.103). The jacket is Kenyan and the borders are African, Lucy explained.
Ive been reading a lot about European fashion and trying to tone down
African fashion, so if I got a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it will be
unique and will be identified as Kenyan. The jacket was indeed smart and
bore Lucys trademark originality. It placed the viewer in an irresolvable double
perception evoking at the same time classic conservatism and eccentric whimsy.
4
Yet neither the pure simplicity of kikoi nor the ingenious combination of
navy gabardine and kente ribbon could become the Kenyan national dress,
because no garment could emerge from a shared history and speak to a histori-
cally produced collective unconscious. Thus the wise old printer Gakaara wa
Wanjau, who in the 1950s had printed the Mau Mau hymn book, had been
arrested with Kenyatta, and after independence had devoted himself to pro-
ducing books in the endangered Kikuyu language on his ancient linotype
presses, simply said of the quest for a national outfit: They will never come
up with one.
The garments produced in the endeavor to create a national dress end up
signifying the very contradictions they set out to resolve. But by their very
contradiction, they incorporate complex, rich cultural meanings that go well
beyond cultural loss. They embody Kenyas insertion in both the informal
global circuits of African fashion and in the dominant circuits of commodity
capitalism. They bring to Kenya artisanal African fashion production on the
one hand, and desires to fashion identities on the other. This rich metaphorical
garment inexorably unfolding contradictions, paradoxes, tragedy and the
efforts to go beyond these, ends up signifying a Kenyan national identity as
this ceaseless movement of unfolding. Cultural loss in Kenya is not located only
in ruptures of the past but, as we have seen, is woven continuously into its current
life, reintegrated into the construction of culture and identity as an ongoing
process of contradiction. Far from being insignificant, each fragment of Kenyan
fashion transforms copies, borrowings, and imitations to weave an original
text about the nature of all our identities in the new age of globalization.
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Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya
105
Notes
1. For the history of English colonialism and the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, see
Barnett and Njama 1966; Edgerton 1989; Kaggia 1975; Maloba 1993; Otieno 1998;
and Shaw 1995.
2. In a detailed record of Kenyan dress, Joy Adamson painted all the costumes of
all the ethnic groups (Adamson 1967). The originals are on display at the Kenya
National Museum. For a different history of colonialism and clothing in Kenya, this
one in the Luo community, see Hay (1996).
3. Polhemus and Procter note that modest exposure and immodest conceal-
ment are culturally determined (1978: 456). Other historians of fashion have noted
the cultural relativity of modesty and definitions of nudity (Rudofsky 1971; Hollander
1978).
4. Ironically, instead of being adopted as Kenyan national dress, it was adopted by
my California Jewish husband, who had this jacket custom made and has been wearing
it to professional banquets ever since.
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107
4
The World Bank, JCPenney,
and Artisanal African Fashion
in Los Angeles
From Informal to Dominant Economy
In 1993, when the popularity of African fashion in the African American com-
munity was at its height, the World Bank published a Discussion Paper in its
Africa Technical Department Series, entitled Africa Can Compete! Export
Opportunities and Challenges for Garments and Home Products in the US
Market. The centerpiece is a case study of JCPenneys attempt to produce
garments in Senegal for its authentic African merchandise program. This
program, geared to attract African American consumers, began in 1991, when
JCPenney sought to appropriate the increasing popularity of African fashions
among Black consumers (A market for ethnic pride 1992; Goerne 1992;
Miller 1994; Underwood 1993). The fashions were already being made by
small producers and sold in the United States at festivals, on the informal
market and in boutiques. Penney sold the garments in twenty selected stores
in predominantly Black shopping areas as well as through a special catalogue
called Fashion Influences. K-Mart, Sears, Montgomery Ward and Hudson-
Dayton quickly followed suit. Some of Penneys merchandise for 1992
was produced in a small factory in Senegal, and enjoyed strong sales.
1
But
JCPenneys endeavor to produce African fashion in Senegal failed. Africa Can
Compete! is the World Banks attempt to analyze and rectify the failure. This
book has been tracking the contrasts between popular culture as produced in
informal networks and mass culture as produced in circuits of corporate
capitalism. Where previous chapters have explored the former, this chapter
begins by looking at the perspective of the latter.
A major theme of this book has been the relation between the production
of clothing as material objects and the production of their meaning. Chapters
1, 2 and 3 have explored this double process as it engages the interactions
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among producers, consumers, materials of production and their social-historical
context. We have traced these interactions as African fashion circulates in
marginal economies among different African communities. What happens,
then, to these interactions when African fashion circulates from informal
economies to the dominant economy of global capitalism? It is unusual for a
technical study of the World Bank to take the issue of cultural appropriation
for its subject, and thereby to engage in cultural analysis. Africa Can Compete!
thus offers enlightening insights into the discourses whereby giant retailers and
powerful financial institutions relate material production and meaning pro-
duction in consumer goods. This textual analysis of the World Bank document
explores in particular its treatment of the signifiers compete, competition
and competitiveness as traits of the capitalist process, and of clothing as sign
of the authentic.
Separating Producers from Consumers
Although JCPenneys effort to produce authentic African fashions in Africa
failed, the World Bank paper hangs on to its a priori hypothesis: The a
priori hypothesis at the beginning of the study was that the US Afrocentric
market might provide the springboard for African manufacturers to move into
the production of standardized manufactured goods, such as mainstream
garments (Biggs et al. 1994: 6).
2
The document creates the illusion of realism
by basing this project on the example of Asia: In Asia, and elsewhere, catalytic
agents in the form of foreign investors, trading companies and buyers have
assisted developing country exporters to manage entry into international
markets (ibid.: 6).
This hypothesis immediately raises three troublesome issues: The first concerns
projecting on to Africa the model of Asia without considering specific
cultural, historical, or economic differences between and within these two
vast regions of the globe. They are both simply, vacantly and samely, other.
Ironically, by 1997, Penneys authentic African fashions were, in fact, being
produced in Pakistan and by immigrant Indian producers in the United States.
The second issue concerns the pervasive and impenetrable euphemisms by
which the example of Asia in the paper describes, as if from another plane of
reality, the notorious subcontracting system by which giant retailers have their
clothing manufactured (Bonacich et al. 2000). After 1993, JCPenney also
continued to order from two American companies owned by Senegalese in
New York, but one of them ended the contract by 1998 because he refused to
reduce his labor costs to the degree the retailer demanded (personal commun-
ication with Abdoulaye Njiw; see Chapter 5)
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As an extension to the World Banks pollyannish view of third-world sweat-
shops from above and afar, the third issue concerns the slide from the papers
claim to be a scientific study to what it actually is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
The document swings from what Paul Smith calls instrumental rationalism
to an irrational oneiric wish fulfillment (1997: 26), encapsulated in its
anxiously euphoric title: Africa Can Compete! This paper, as James Ferguson
says of a 1981 World Bank report, violates its own economism. Its discourse
could be called inconsequential in the sense that the World Bank does not
have to face the consequences of its policies, as do the people on whom it
imposes these policies (Ferguson 1995: 17; see also Escobar 1995:165). Although
four authors signed the document, I will be treating its author rather as a
particular economistic discourse whose speaking subject is consistently the
World Bank. As one journalist mentioned, the paper was adopted and promoted
by the World Bank (Back in the USA 1995: 8).
Why, one might ask, does the World Bank find it so important that Africans
produce for export on the international market? The passage quoted above
suggests a desire to assist impoverished countries: foreign investors, trading
companies and buyers have assisted developing country exporters to manage
entry into international markets (Biggs et al. 1994: 6). But underneath this
pretension of helping developing countries, another reason expresses itself
throughout the paper. It takes as axiomatic, in a fatalistic economic determinism
beyond the most outlandish caricatures of Marxism, that everyones purpose
on this earth is to serve and further the expansion and accumulation of capital.
3
Moreover, as part of the fiction this paper constructs, the most powerful within
the system have the least freedom to determine their actions, and the least
powerful are the most favored by their very vulnerability:
The competitive intensity of the US retailing industry has increased significantly in
response to several fundamental changes in its operating environment . . . Retailers
have been forced, as a consequence, to rethink their strategic objectives. Their new
emerging retail strategies reflect:
the necessity to offset stagnant general consumption patterns by building a niche
market for African Americans;
the drive to offer more value oriented, low priced goods to their customers,
utilizing a global sourcing network that increasingly favors low wage, quota free
countries, including selected African nations. (Biggs et al. 1994: 12)
In the syntax of this passage, the main active agent of the process, as well as
the obsessively pervasive theme of the study, is competitive intensity. Retailers,
i.e. giant corporations such as JCPenney and Walmart who control the whole
chain of contractors, subcontractors, workers and consumers (Bonacich et al.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
2000), are the passive objects of competitive intensity. They have been
forced to do whatever they can to make African Americans consume as much
as possible from them and to make African workers produce for them for
as little pay as possible (23 cents an hour in a factory in Kenya I visited), so
that consumers and producers can help the beleaguered retailers win the
competition (Harvey 2000:11013). In contrast to the corporate capitalists,
cast as powerless under the weight of force and necessity, economically
desperate African countries are favored, and have a competitive advantage
which is based on low labor costs (Biggs et al. 1994: 3, 41). Africa Can
Compete! states repeatedly and clearly, even while using euphemisms and
fantasies to deny what it is saying, that export manufacturing does not assist
or benefit African countries. It is the corporate retailer who receives the help.
To well-informed people this may not be news. What is noteworthy, however,
is the way that a World Bank document constructs the rationale for this.
In the World Bank fantasy world, tiny manufacturing and craft enterprises
subcontracting to giant foreign corporations, with their increasing concen-
tration of control . . . across organizational and national borders (Harrison
1994: 54) can close the yawning and growing income gap between first
and third worlds in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. This arrangement
has historically exacerbated the inequality between wealthy and poor economies
(Amin 1994: 43, 61; Payer 1982; Sandbrook 1985: 4). Although representing
a tiny proportion of its total, American foreign investment in Africa has
systematically increased the profits of the investors while actually imped[ing]
the development of the Third World (Hirst and Thompson 1996: 11516).
The text of Africa Can Compete! describes, without recognizing it is doing
so, how this polarization occurs. According to the paper, Penneys authentic
African project was part of a new strategy to overcome a glut of retail
outlets (Biggs et al. 1994: 8) and a decline in consumer demand (ibid.: 9)
in the 1980s:
This [strategy] entails having low cost structures, which enables [sic] retailers to
lower their prices and drive sales ahead at a higher rate. This, in turn, gives them
higher volumes, greater economies of scale and market power on both the buying
and selling sides, which lets them keep their costs down and profits high, and the
cycle continues (ibid.).
While making it impossible for the smaller retailers to compete, the strategy
gives the corporate retailers market power over both the buying side
i.e. African producers, from whom, in the deceptive language of this contract-
ing system, the giant retailer is said to be buying wholesale goods and the
selling side i.e. African American consumers to whom the retailer sells these
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111
goods. The strategy thus seeks to separate the consumers and producers from
each other for the purpose of gaining market power over both.
Maintaining low cost structures through less than living wages to pro-
ducers, and raising its profits through the increased revenue from African
American consumers, it widens the gap between corporate capitalism and
the marginalized economies of African and African American designers and
vendors. It thus intensifies their struggle both to create and to survive. This in
short is the rationale for why Africans must gear their economy toward export
production for multi-national corporations.
But the particular case of African fashion makes this process of separating
consumers from producers to gain economic power a process deeply invisible
and naturalized in consumer capitalism extraordinarily clear. Before Penneys
authentic African program, consumers and producers of African fashion
were already helping each other in informal circuits. African American con-
sumers were helping African fashion producers develop economically while
African producers of fashion, both in Africa and in the United States, were
helping Black people construct an African American cultural identity. To be
sure, this reciprocal help was in large degree the result of disparate interests
between consumers and producers inadvertently finding common ground. Yet
that common ground, jointly developing consumers cultural awareness,
producers economic survival, and the creativity of both, was hurt rather than
helped by Penneys intervention.
Another sign of growing cultural awareness in the African American community,
which bodes well for retailers trying to capitalize on this heightened cultural aware-
ness, is the celebration of Kwanzaa . . . Until recently, Kwanzaa cards and gifts were
sold primarily by small Afrocentric shops, but mainstream retailers have now begun
to take Kwanzaa seriously, as shown by the fact that Hallmark, a major greeting
card company, recently introduced of [sic] a line of cards celebrating the holiday
(Biggs et al. 1994: 14).
In this passage, African American consumers actually find their growing
cultural awareness stopped in its growth, contained as an object to be capit-
alized upon. Africa Can Compete! makes visible the habitually invisible
process of separating producers from consumers that is at the heart of capital-
ism. In this process of commodity fetishism, determined social relations
between humans themselves . . . assume here, for them, the phantasmagoric
form of a relation between things (Marx 1977: 165).
Africa Can Compete! discursively transforms both consumers and producers
into objects of capital. It adopts a series of reductive rhetorical moves in which
consumers become opportunities for new consumer markets (Biggs et al.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
1994: 12), while producers, never mentioned as such, become units of labor.
Reducing and objectifying a resurgence of cultural identity among African
Americans to something that provides a marketing opportunity for retailers
in the Afrocentric products category (ibid.: 2), the paper assumes that African
American consumers welcome their new identities as a market waiting to be
wooed. Just as it sees impoverished economies as favored, the World Bank
paper projects on to both consumers and producers the fantasy assumption
that they want to join in saving capital accumulation from danger. Rather than
continue to trade with each other, they should want to join in helping a giant
retailer solve its own problem of the glut of retail outlets (ibid.: 8) and
decline in consumer demand (ibid.: 9). The World Bank paper represents a
utopian vision of this triangle among consumers, factory workers, and informal
economy producers, in which consumers with cultural awareness happily
sacrifice workers and informal producers in order to become opportunities
for retailers to capitalize on such `niche markets (ibid.: 16).
The Meaning of Authenticity
How does this separation of producers from consumers affect the production
of the clothings meaning, especially its status as signifier of authenticity?
Authenticity is inherently an impossible paradox even in the artisanal
informal economy. An object say a boubou, or a piece of mudcloth or kente
cloth becomes a sign of the authentic only as it moves outside of its original
context as an object of use in the daily life of a community and passes into
industrialized society, either into a museum or into the world of commodities.
Where production of the object forms part of a communitys life, its users have
no concern for whether or not it is authentic (Appiah 1992: 223, 5; Clifford
1988: 215, 228). Having entered a transnational commodity circuit, such a
symbolic object promises to connect the consumer to an idealized traditional
world that never existed. One of its paradoxical qualities lies therefore in the
fact that the exchange value and desirability of an authentic commodity
inheres in its non-commodity status. For consumers who seek an authentic
object, it is this mythical outside of commodity consumption that they seek
to purchase when they buy this commodity.
African fashion as authentic cultural symbol was of course already com-
modified in the informal network even before JC Penney and the World Bank
took it up. But there is a difference. In order to be authentic among culturally
conscious consumers in the informal network, an African fashion such as hand-
woven kente cloth, or even Sotiba printed fabric, must be (or at least believed
to be) also produced for local use and through processes guided by aesthetics
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113
and respect for craft, as well as by economic gain (see Chapter 5). Authentic,
then, connotes in the informal network a particular kind of commodity,
one that lives a double existence in American commodity exchange and in a
particular African context, perhaps also of commodity exchange but not of
mass-consumption marketing.
This chapter will contrast the inscription of authenticity in the different
discourses, or rather discursive worlds, of artisanal African producers, their
suitcase vendors and consumers on the one hand, and the World Bank on the
other. That of the former is both irreducibly ambiguous and also precarious.
Ambiguous, it maintains its hold on the double life of the authentic cloth
or garments, keeping the paradox in movement even as, precarious, the
discourse threatens to collapse the object into the single status of the pure
commodity. The fragility of paradoxically authentic fashion in the discourse
of the informal network is akin to the precarious status of the artisanal and
informal businesses themselves. JCPenneys authentic African merchandise,
like the World Bank documents discourse, immediately effaces this tension in
the same way that World Bank Policy destroys the precarious space of the
informal suitcase networks. After all, consumers will buy from the informal
producers and suitcase vendors rather than from JCPenney only if they too
recognize the double life of the authentic garment.
Here is how Africa Can Compete! defines the authentic:
There is . . . a resurgence of cultural identity among African Americans, which
provides a marketing opportunity for retailers in the Afrocentric products category.
The authenticity of the products the fact that they are sourced in Africa has
proven to be a key selling point (Biggs et al. 1994: 2).
As in most definitions, the authentic is here an outside, an other exotic
place, but in this passage the place is a completely empty abstraction. What
the World Bank document here calls sourcing i.e. subcontracting through
cheap, standardized labor destroys precisely what is African about the
Africa that culturally aware Black consumers desire to have when they buy
the clothing. The Penneys/World Bank project is to destroy artisanal pro-
duction and set up sweatshops in export-processing zones that have no physical
or cultural resemblance to the African life in the rest of the country. In this
definition, the emptiness, the void of this place called Africa allows the
World Bank to project upon it fantasies of workers wanting to help capital,
and, as we will see, also allows the Bank to impose those fantasies.
If clothing communicates cultural meaning, then this definition of
authenticity implies, moreover, a certain philosophy of meaning. Just as the
World Bank document articulates the necessity of separating producers from
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
consumers, so that corporations can gain market power over both to make
them serve its profits, so does it see the meaning of authentic clothing as
separate from any connection to a lived social relation which would produce
that meaning. Completely disregarding its inherently paradoxical nature, the
World Bank document treats the signifier of the authentic as if it had an
immutable, self-enclosed, isolated being that transcends processes of mass-
production and commodification.
In contrast to this, a 19-year-old African American university student artic-
ulates the contradictions within authenticity, especially in its relation to mass-
production. Chinayera Black works in her mothers informal fashion design
business, and I interviewed her in 1994, at the height of corporate retailing of
African fashion. Her words maintain clearly the double life of African fashion.
African American attire . . . [is] going to fade just like any other style, but those
people that were doing it initially and have the authentic things and were interested
in going to Africa and interested in reading the books about Africa and interested
in all those things, those people are going to continue to do that. But those people
that just want to wear it because its fashionable right now, those people arent going
to continue. I dont think those people have accepted it as a way of life . . . To be
African American, I think, is really trendy right now. But its going to fade and I hope
everyone knows who they are . . . I guess just like any other trend, its fading and
its going to die. And thats a shame though because I think it was a good thing that
people were finally becoming proud of being black instead of looking down on
themselves and feeling sorry for themselves. I think it was a good thing that people
were becoming excited about being African Americans, but I think it was just like
a superficial thing. I think they were just excited just because everyone else was
excited.
The fashions that her mother Sarah Black custom sews at home are high style,
but are not trendy in the sense of mass-produced and mass-marketed.
Although the authentic African fashions Chinayera speaks about also
partake of commodification and mythification, Chinayeras words walk the
fine, unstable line between trendy and authentic clothing. Her notion of
the authentic, contrary to that of the World Bank document, signifies an
Africa with a complex, specific culture that one must learn about with some
effort and is opposed to a superficial relation to blackness and symbolic
dress. This fragile distinction between authentic and mass-market African
fashion resembles the fragile space in which her mothers business exists. It
could easily disappear, on the one side by becoming part of mass-market
production or on the other side by failing to make enough money to survive.
Another interviewee is the African American mother-in-law of Ugandan
immigrant suitcase vendor Bede Ssensalo. Virginetta Turner helps sell at
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115
festivals for her son-in-laws import business. She too refers to the double life
of the cultural objects she sells:
Since Ive been affiliated with Bede, . . . Ive learned a lot about different fabrics and
how they are put together, and so forth, with jewelry, and to me thats . . . its
authentic, you know. You cant duplicate it . . . and its an art within itself. Yet to
them [Africans in Africa], this is their air, their way of life. To us, its awesome,
because we dont see that, we cant see that . . . Like I say, since Ive met [Bede], and
been around him, Ive learned to appreciate the arts, and some of the definitions
and some of the backgrounds and so forth. It makes you very aware of where you
came from. And the European style is . . . can be trendsetters, but I dont try to get
into that mode so much, you know. I like clothes, but I also like stuff thats authentic
and styles that are going to be basic, and not trendsetting from year to year.
She suggests that even if we traveled to the community where the object was
their way of life rather than an authentic commodity, we still cant see
that, because our vision of the object is filtered through a deeply internalized
consumerist ideology. Even if we see the object in its original community, we
relate to it by desiring to alienate and appropriate it by either photographing
or purchasing it. Virginettas words point to the fact that an object becomes
authentic when it enters this alienation. Informal traders and their consumers
are engaged in this process. The very practices of using these commodities to
construct authentic identities is also thereby an act of constructing alienated
identities. These identities are as paradoxical as the commodities which signify
them.
Virginettas words, however, also imply a difference between the informal
and dominant trade network where the paradoxical tension disappears. For
JCPenney and the World Bank, desire for identity, like anything else, exists
unambiguously to serve the end of corporate profit. According to Africa Can
Compete!: Interest in these products is driven by profitable opportunities in
the African American consumer segment of the market (Biggs et al. 1994: 1).
The words of Synovia Jones, an African American designer of childrens
clothing, maintain her work on a tightrope between selling fabrics as com-
modities and respecting their other life:
Its nice to know . . . what the different cloths were used for . . . The fabric [mudcloth]
comes from Mali. And I asked him [my daughters African godfather], did they [the
Malians] take offense to the fact that we were using it for . . . clothing and different
things like that . . . Because I felt that was very important, because if there is some-
thing spiritual behind the different cloths and fabrics, then am I being disrespectful
by using it in a different way? . . . The more I tell people about the cloths and the
different functions, the more they tend to respect it . . .
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Holding the two lives of the fabric is not here merely a thought, but an act
that involves self-questioning. It involves a constant attempt to narrow the
gap between using an object for pure monetary gain and respecting its anti-
commodity value, even as one remains aware that one cannot close this gap.
The many-leveled awareness required to keep the two separate lives together
is reflected in the hesitations by which Synovias discourse contrasts to the easy
complacency of World Bank abstraction.
It also leads her to articulate a distinction, of whose very possibility the
World Bank is unaware, between the two modes of defining the authentic:
The only problem that I have is the larger chain stores like the May Co. and the
Broadway, etc., selling the clothing because it is done as far as, oh whats the word
Im trying to think of, oh shoot, oh man, I cant think of the word. The word Im
trying to think of is theyre basically looking for the profits, exploiting, thats what
Im trying to think of . . . I guess I try to just stay aware of what Im doing and not
just, okay, Ive got to go for the buck, go for the buck. I try to keep aware of, okay,
why am I doing this?
She notes, however that maintaining this awareness is difficult, because it
requires not only thought but also cultural and economic practices that the
dominant culture disdains and the dominant economy forecloses.
So I guess with that, its just to continue to learn about what I am selling and educate
as I go along. So for me, that helps me stay in balance. I dont know why that
question is difficult for me to answer. And then it just keeps getting away from me
too.
Joness interview speaks to the difficulties of keeping this precarious balance,
in her business and herself, from collapsing into pure unmixed capitalism.
How then does the production of meaning differ in the two economies? In
the semiotics of crafted fashion, the clothing or fabric as material signifier and
its signified authenticity together compose a sign. Like any sign, it requires
the absence of its referent, which is in this case the traditional community and
way of life in which the clothing is (imagined to be) a ceremonial adornment
or utilitarian object outside of the mass-market commodity system. In the
corporate/World Bank economy the production of signs of authenticity requires
rather the destruction of their referent, not just a romanticized or mythified
tribal Africa, but modern African communities with their urban modes of craft
production and the values that surround these.
As Chinayera pointed out: right now, say like last year and this year, its
been really trendy to wear the African cultural dresses and outfits and that kind
of thing. So I guess its looked at as a trend just as the baggy pants and the
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bell-bottoms are coming back into style. But she predicted: Its going to fade
because it was just fashionable . . . I think its going to die. She predicted
correctly. Chinayera here describes the dynamic of the fashion cycle. In Georg
Simmels classic essay Fashion (1904), the cycle begins when the social elite
adopts a style. It then filters down from haute couture through the middle and
working classes. When the style becomes generalized throughout society, the
elite drops it and introduces something new.
Chinayera describes a cycle somewhat like Simmels except that the elite in
question consists of culturally aware African Americans, and the filtering-
down process occurs as crafted clothing becomes mass-produced, and thereby
cheapened for the culturally aware consumers. In this way African clothing
goes out of fashion. Here, however, what goes out of fashion is not just one
style, but a whole field of dress based on fabrics such as kente, mudcloth and
lgos which cannot simply be replaced by new kinds of fabrics. In launching
this dynamic, JCPenneys very effort to mass-produce and standardize the
authentic through competitive outsourcing destroys the very authenticity
it sets out to produce. JCPenney could not resolve in practice the contradiction
between authenticity and mass-market profitability. The World Bank cannot
resolve this contradiction in its discourse.
The Meaning of Competition
Central to the discursive world of Africa Can Compete! is the unambiguously
positive, even euphoric connotation of competition and competitiveness
for African producers in the global economy. Like authentic, the sign
compete is disconnected from any context in social reality, and like Africa
it is emptied of any specific content. Yet examples of such context and content
abound. They tell the by now familiar story of corporate retailers pitting
their contractors against each other, driving down wages and forcing better-
paid workers out of work (Anderson et al. 2000: 2831, 3943; Brecher and
Costello 1994: 1929; Kang 1997; Kang 2002; Ross 1997). In 1997, Southern
California came to lead the nation in garment production. By 1999, wages for
garment workers in Los Angeles had dropped below minimum wage of $5.75
to as little as the equivalent of $3.00. Manufacturers, union officials and
government labor inspectors all cited competition as the motor (Cleeland
1999). In 1996, JCPenney itself received a rare rebuke from the US Labor
Department against a large retailer for receiving garments from a sweatshop
in Los Angeles where, according to investigators, some of the workers made
as little as $3.10 an hour, well below the minimum wage of $4.25, while
working as many as 55 hours a week (Silverstein and White 1996: 1).
4
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In one Los Angeles Times article, the California Labor Commissioner is
quoted as saying: Global competition results in a feeding frenzy in which local
producers compete against one another and against foreign factories in a brutal
race to the bottom (McDonnell 1998: 33). He was speaking on the occasion
of a garment-factory closure in Los Angeles. The factory, source of a Disney
contract, owed $200,000 in unpaid wages. Not one of the fly-by-night sweat-
shops that enter and exit the Southern California garment industry at a
dizzying pace (ibid.: 33), it was a factory of long standing with a stable work
force. To meet Disneys contract, it had been operating on a razor thin profit
margin and accelerated production schedules. The private inspector hired by
Disney failed to notice that the workers were not being paid. As the Labor
Commissioner said, They are interested in the quality of the product not the
quality of the workers lives, and, as the article notes: Companies are insulated
from the liability of subcontractors for worker abuses.
Such insulation further allows corporate retailers and World Bank officials
to inhabit their fantasy projections. Africa Can Compete! claims: An African
worker can produce shirts within the globally acceptable range of 16 to 24
shirts per day, confirming that with proper management African workers can
compete in the global economy (Biggs et al. 1994: 3). The presumption that
so competing is desirable for African workers fits into the monumental and
unconscious arrogance of this passage to speak for fantasized African workers.
With no analysis or definition of what constitute acceptable production
rates, the paper simply assumes whatever output corporate retailers decide is
acceptable for their profits, as in the example of Disney cited above, becomes
globally acceptable. Likewise, the surveillance used to force workers to
produce at that speed is immediately assumed to be proper management
with no further explanation. In the patronizing tone of this fantasy projection
surfaces a contempt for the fantasized African workers.
The ups and downs of Wairimu Wachiras career in fashion has followed
this dynamic of competition. When I first interviewed her in 1993, she was
making African fashions at home. Like many designers of African fashion in
Los Angeles, she was caught in the ambiguous and complex relations of exploit-
ation of the informal economy. While sewing her own designs, she was also
involved in the underground labor market both sewing for another designer
at home and hiring someone to come to her apartment and help her sew her
designs. Her ambition was to perfect her skills as a pattern-maker and event-
ually to open a small factory in Kenya.
During this period, she accepted an offer to do a trunk show for Nordstrom.
Her experience supplies a bit of concrete content to the World Bank papers
rosy view, from above and afar, of small African producers entering global
competition under the aegis of corporate retailers. Wairimu had designed
childrens ski parkas in West African print fabric.
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I had gone and met with a buyer and . . . she said that she really liked the jackets so
. . . shes going to give me a trunk show. . . At first she was very excited when she
gave me the dates for when we were going to do it. It was the perfect time [autumn]
for it too. So I went ahead and got the jackets made. Initially she had told me to
have 25 jackets for each store, because she was going to do three trunk shows in
three different stores . . . but I didnt have that kind of money . . .
So Wairimu scaled down the project:
I contracted the work . . . I bought the fabric, had the patterns made, had them cut
and had everything made. Then she decided to cancel the date that she had given
me. At first she was supposed to have . . . October. And we didnt do the trunk show
. . . until I think it was . . . the end of November, beginning of December.
Wairimu ended up having only four hours in which to sell her jackets. They
did sell well, because as she said, the other childrens jacket in the department
was priced at over $70, while mine was a reversible jacket, and it had pants,
and they were only going for $60. I dont understand why. Wairimus refusal
to understand refers not to the power relation, of which she has a sophisticated
understanding, but to the lack of logic in this price disparity.
Partly because of this experience, Wairimu became discouraged with produc-
ing African fashion. For a couple of years she did alterations and custom
designs in a bridal shop, intermittently working as my research assistant and
taking night classes in pattern-making. After a course in computerized pattern-
making, she secured a position at $850 a week as production pattern-maker
for a clothing manufacturer contracting to Walmart. Her future seemed secured
as the Los Angeles garment industry rose to become the largest center of
fashion production in the United States. Then, in March of 1998, she lost her
job when the company could no longer operate under the prices Walmart was
paying its contractors, and moved many of its operations to Mexico. When a
second employer also went out of business, Wairimu began calling around for
work in the fall of 1998, but employers were offering only $650 a week. It
feels like rejection, she told me. They try and make you feel like youre not
good enough so they dont have to pay you a lot. Its really a bad feeling. So
I decided to do my own things. With the experience she had gained, Wairimu
went back into making samples of African fashions for children that she hoped
to sell to small shops. In the meantime, she did find a production pattern-maker
job at $850 a week except that she was put on salary, and so made to work
ten-hour days for this wage. She found out that the sewing-machine operators
were, with more blatant illegality, also put on salary, so that in addition to
the ten-hour days without overtime pay, they could also be forced to work on
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weekends. By 2000, the factory was experiencing rejections of merchandise
and pay-backs to Walmart, and had to cut its work force, so Wairimu was now
doing two jobs for the same salary.
The competitiveness that the World Bank promotes for African workers,
however, is not just this garden variety of competitiveness, but structural
adjustment enhanced competitiveness (Biggs et al. 1994: 1). Enhanced is
one of the euphemistic words that help build the wish-fulfillment fantasy in
which corporate and World Bank policies improve conditions in the Africa
of their dreams. Such up-beat words help create, moreover, the illusion that
the project of the World Bank to bring African workers into the global economy
is internally logical, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. So let us leave
aside for the moment the extreme misery that structural adjustment policies
have caused African populations (Chapters 1 and 2) and focus instead on the
World Banks denial of its own faulty logic. Africa Can Compete!, summing
up its study, reports: By highlighting supply side constraints, the study makes
clear that macroeconomic policy reforms in an export oriented direction . . .
are necessary but not sufficient to induce a domestic supply response in Africa
(Biggs et al. 1994: 4). The study has cited no evidence to show that its macro-
economic policy reforms local currency devaluation, deregulation of labor
and environmental protections, abolishment of social programs, austerity, and
emphasis on export are necessary, or even the least bit effective in forcing,
or in the World Banks terms assisting, African producers to compete in
the international economy.
The paper in fact presents evidence of the failure of these policies. A fore-
word to the paper, by Kevin Cleaver, Director of the Technical Department
for the Africa Region, states:
By highlighting supply side constraints to the growth of manufactured exports in
Africa, the study pinpoints an important problem facing many African economies
today. Even in countries where policy reforms have changed the structure of incent-
ives in favor of exports, the proportion of manufactured exports to Gross Domestic
Product continues to be small (Biggs et al. 1994: vii).
The framework of the paper assumes as foundational truth precisely that
which is disproved by the facts. The fact that exports remain small in spite
of structural adjustment policy reforms does not make the World Bank
restudy and rethink this kingpin of its strategy for Africa. It concludes, without
evidence, that the problem must lie elsewhere, in deficiencies in the African
enterprises.
In order to avoid questioning neo-liberal economic assumptions, the paper
contorts the evidence of failure through its fantasy lens so as to imply success:
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Years of structural adjustment policies including the adoption of a market deter-
mined exchange rate, simplification of regulations covering the import of raw
materials and export of finished goods, and liberalization of labor regulations have
resulted in pockets of competitiveness that are beginning to draw the attention
of international investors in the garment industry. Of the five countries that formed
part of the survey, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ghana are now offering conditions that
are starting to become comparable to some of the successful garment exporting
countries in Asia. However, Senegal and Cte dIvoire have failed to eliminate the
main obstacles that continue to hamper the development of a competitive garment
export industry. (ibid.: 53)
Again, let us leave aside for the moment the merit of the policies mentioned
here which, translated from neo-liberal economic jargon, mean devaluation
of local currencies, neo-colonial tax concessions to foreign investors, and lifting
what the paper sees as the main obstacles: ending rights and protections for
workers.
Let us ask instead what, according to the evidence of this passage, has been
achieved in exchange for so much sacrifice on the part of the people in these
countries. The passage tries to create the impression that the policies are
actually achieving their projected goals, but is actually saying that no progress
has happened. Investors are beginning to be interested, but have not invested.
Conditions of suffering, lowered wages and desperation exist but have not
achieved their result. In addition, the passage creates the impression that
Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ghana are succeeding substantially more than Senegal
and Cte dIvoire, but later belies this: Just a one percent growth in US apparel
imports would represent . . . more than ten times the current apparel exports
of all five African countries combined! (ibid.: 54). After five centuries of thus
developing West Africas participation in international markets, through the
slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism, this is not a great record of
success.
Corporate and African Business Cultures: The
Production of Objects and the Production of
their Meaning
The World Bank document blames the failure on the African producers:
There are five fundamental issues which contributed in varying degrees to difficulties
in the pilot phases of authentic African garment programs at JCPenney . . .: (a)
mismatch between the scale and technical competence of the African exporter and
the US buyer; (b) inability on the part of the African exporter to negotiate a realistic
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price; (c) lack of familiarity on the part of the African exporter with financial
institutions and instruments in international trade; (d) differences in business
culture, and (e) an inexperienced intermediary. (Biggs et al. 1994: 234)
Using the rhetorical method already described, in which the document presents
euphemistic language as scientifically neutral, it calls the failure difficulties.
These difficulties are attributed to lack and inability on the part of the
African producers to conform to the economistic and rationalistic standard
of the American corporation. The document assumes at such a deep level the
universal, unambiguous moral correctness of this standard that its exemplarity
need not be defended, let alone even stated.
5
In the assumption that only standardized mass-production qualifies as tech-
nical competence, the paper dismisses the craft skills and values which its
authors do not even see as technical competence. In the same vein, the paper
identifies the most pervasive deficiency in the African producers precisely in
what is African about Africa, or in other words, what would make JCPenneys
authentic African garments authentic. The deficiency is the producers
business culture. Describing it in the above passage simply as having differ-
ences from corporate capitalism, the paper later specifies that African business
culture is the major deficiency that must disappear for African producers to
export cultural objects:
The issue of business culture differences does not suggest that JCPenney or any
other company cannot source in Africa, nor that companies should reduce their
orders to lower levels. If anything it is the other way around: African producers are
going to have to learn to change their ways if they are going to be successful in
international markets. However, those companies making initial forays into Africa
must realize that early-stage development problems exist and be prepared to deal
with startup delays. (ibid.: 30)
Previous chapters have argued that African business cultures the nexus of
social relations, ethical values, shared emotions, technical processes, through
which people produce and exchange garments are inseparably and intricately
diffused in the general culture. Business culture is culture. Here I focus on
another business culture which the World Bank does not examine: its own.
That culture produces and is also produced by the discursive devices we have
been analyzing, including an impersonal, fragmented, and falsely neutral
language. In the above passage the World Bank paper makes clear it intends
to continue the colonialist practice of forcing cultures outside the dominant
system to destroy themselves (chapter 3). Now, however, in its fragmenting
way, it calls culture business culture, delimiting it and rhetorically reducing
its import to early-stage development problems that will simply go away.
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Previous chapters have argued that the meanings of the clothing and fabric
sold in the informal African fashion network, and their ability to signify the
paradox of authenticity or to redefine tradition and modernity, depend
upon the business cultures in which people produce and exchange them. The
notions that producers are going to have to learn to change their ways and
that these early-stage development problems will disappear mean that
Africans can succeed in producing culture only when they get rid of their
culture. The project thus places the African producers in a double bind.
The historically charged image of companies making initial forays into
Africa evokes clichs of early colonialists going into a wild place in order to
carry out their civilizing mission. The image connotes JCPenneys corporate
outsourcing project not just as an economic venture, but as a moral venture.
Continuing to place the African producers in a double bind through morally
inflected language, the paper sums up the lessons learned from the project:
Mainstream buyers have made it clear that they are prepared to source Afrocentric
products in Asia if African country supply problems cannot be sorted out. This
would indeed be unfortunate if African producers are unable to capitalize on a
market trend inspired by their own culture . . . (ibid.: 53)
In this account, the African producers failed to objectify their culture as a
marketing trend because of their culture. They therefore deserve to have
their cultural artifacts taken from them.
JCPenney did succeed in producing some of its African fashions through two
Senegalese manufacturers who owned American companies in New York, until
1997 and 1998 respectively. The Vice-President of Homeland, Abdoulaye
Djiw, had the clothing made in small workshops run by Senegalese immigrant
tailors in New York. He told me he worked with them to devise a method of
clothing production that combined craft construction of the garments with
mass-production. But in 1997 Homeland ended its contract with Penney
because, Djiw told me, it did not want to reduce the pay of its workers to the
level demanded by the contract.
The second contractor, Massata, had been educated at couture schools in
France and then had for several years owned a factory on Seventh Avenue in
New York. After producing for both JCPenney and the Essence mail order
catalogue for a few years, he moved his factory to Dakar because he thought
the labor costs were cheaper. He told me that in fact they were not. He did
not hire tailors, but machine operators with no tailoring experience. The
reasons, he told me in his office, from where he was watching his workers
through closed-circuit video, was that mass-producing clothing had nothing
to do with tailoring. Clothing had become an abstract object substitutable for
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anything else. He insisted emphatically that he could be producing anything.
Indeed, when I went back to Dakar in 1999, I found that he was manufacturing
ice for the British-owned convenience stores there.
So far in this chapter, we have seen that the language of Africa Can Compete!
alters the meaning of authentic African clothing by effecting three kinds of
separation. It separates producers from consumers; it separates clothing as
symbolic object from its cultural and historic context; and in these last passages
it separates dress as the expression of a culture from the very cultural relations
and practices so expressed. The World Bank document can operate these
separations because it is itself a fragmented discourse. For the most part, it talks
about producers and consumers in separate sections of the paper, so that on
the one hand, it can say cheap labor is the determining factor in locating a
garments factory (ibid.: 3, see also 53), and on the other that African
Americans are likely to spend more for authentic Afrocentric items (ibid.: 16),
without having to recognize the exploitative implications of putting these two
dicta together.
One implication is that JCPenney and the World Bank, in separating African
American consumers from African workers, are setting them against each
other. In this view, American consumers are supposed to be complicit in
keeping the wages of black workers low. Conversely, in yet another fragment,
Africa Can Compete! projects on to the African producers its own instru-
mentalist view of the consumers: From the point of view of African exporters,
the single most important demographic change has been what is commonly
referred to as the browning of America (ibid.: 11). Leaving aside the fact
that the offensive and racist phrase browning of America is not commonly
referred to, especially by African Americans, the passage does not at all represent
the point of view of African exporters. It is yet another example of the World
Bank economists fantasy, made possible by first representing Africa as an
empty space, waiting to receive the one-sided viewpoint of the economists
themselves.
Into the blind spot between these fragmented observations on consumers
and producers fall two problems that become invisible within this economistic
discourse. The first concerns the dynamic whereby a fashion must necessarily
die out, and the second concerns the World Banks business culture, i.e. its
culture, as performed by Africa Can Compete! The African Americans who,
as the paper says, are the targets of JCPenney because they are likely to be
willing to spend more for authentic Afrocentric items are precisely that
minority of culturally aware people who see the authentic garment as neces-
sarily produced in a more expensive, less efficient process of work. In this
process (whatever its own myths and romances of authenticity) the artisans
and the customers have a closer relation to each other. Therefore, the consumer
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cannot efface the producer as a unit of low labor costs (ibid.: 53), just as
the producer cannot totally objectify the consumer as a marketing opport-
unity.
Seeking the lowest labor costs and the highest efficiency, JCPenney ends up
attracting customers who seek the cheapest commodities and do not want to
know about the producers. Instead of the cheap, mass-produced garment
taking on the aura of authenticity, the authentic garment becomes absorbed
into the transitory trendiness of the mass-produced garment. Subordinating
every other consideration to the need for lowest labor costs and highest profits
is itself a cultural value incompatible with the culture that produces authentic
garments. Severing the object from its cultural context and placing it as an
isolated fragment in this corporate cultural context, as JCPenney did, had to
affect its meaning. It becomes a different object, inscribed with a different
process of production and exchange, even if it could look the same. But, as
we will see, this process also cheapened the appearance of the fashions. Through
the logic of this dynamic the economic project fails and the cultural objects
risk destruction.
How Discourses in the Informal Economy and the
Dominant Economy Represent Each Other
In the United States, both American-born and immigrant Africans take Western
business culture as their point of reference, and so gain a heightened aware-
ness of their own as different. Where the World Bank sees a deficiency or lack
that giant corporations must correct, African informants see complex and
valuable practices that pose an implicit criticism of the Western model. For
Emilie Ngo Nguidjol, a Cameroonian immigrant, an interview with me about
African clothing flowed into talk about African hairstyles. Her commentary
on the practices that produce the hairstyles is consonant with my experiences
of clothing production:
Here when I go get braids done, I go get them from people I dont know most of
the time. The only thing that this is about is money even though back home also
you have to pay. Whats the difference? I remember the first time I went to get my
hair braided. I think I was in Compton [Los Angeles] or somewhere. I was shocked.
These people were eating, and they didnt offer any food to me. It was the most
unfriendly place. Back home, if you were to get your hair braided, everything that
goes on in that house youre part of it . . . The dynamics are such that this person
walks out of your house really knowing you very much. Even if you are not eating,
you offer a drink, you offer food, if they are tired, you can ask them to lie down a
little bit before you continue the hairstyle. But here, its more of a business.
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She describes not a mythic pre-capitalist Eden, but simply a different mode
of symbolic and material exchange.
The discourse of the informal African fashion circuit has, of course, its own
myths and self-interest. How could it not? But it contrasts to the insistently
reductionist view of the World Bank, as performed in Africa Can Compete!,
by the very language it uses to describe corporate capitalism as its other. Where
the World Bank discourse remains blind to African producers and African
American consumers as anything but instrumentalizable abstractions, people
I interviewed in the informal African fashion network have an ambiguous view
of the corporate retailers.
Of the designers I interviewed and followed in Los Angeles, Karimu seems
the most persistently and successfully in transition from a very informal micro-
enterprise to a business poised to enter the formal economy. Although she still
sewed in her mother-in-laws garage, by 1999 she had orders from several
boutiques in several states and had much of her work done by three seam-
stresses in the informal economy. In keeping with her transitional, ambiguous
and precarious position, she expressed ambivalence about the large retailers.
In order to attract African American, Asian and Latino customers, she says,
the big stores want to show the public that they are affording . . . designers
[from those ethnicities] opportunities to grow. On the one hand, she says: I
think thats pretty good. On the other hand: But if your contract is not
written real tight, they will take your product, copy it, pay you off, and market
your product you designed to those particular customers. And then youre just
out of it. And they will continue to make money without involving you.
Thats what happened with Hallmark. Hallmark, as we have just seen,
provides a positive example of Afrocentric marketing in Africa Can Compete!
Karimus perspective challenges the World Bank contentions that giant retailers
can ultimately assist small ethnic producers, and that the fault for failure to
conduct business properly lies with these producers.
Throughout the nine years in which I followed Karimus career, she abided
with a craftpersons values, even as she struggled with the contradictions
between craft and increasing production. When I saw her in the summer of
1998, she was struggling over having to give up some aspects of her creative
handwork with African fabric and wanting to retain others. She said sadly of
the individually created kente print graphic art appliqus she had done in the
early 1990s, I dont have the feel for that now (Figure 23, p.127). She was
doing a lot of trade shows and selling to small boutiques, but she still said:
JCP and Nordstrom does not interest me AT ALL.
Karimu discussed as a difference between the two business cultures the
relation between the producer and her product. She works with the hand-
woven, hand-dyed Malian mudcloth, even though she must sew with a mask
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Figure 23 African American designer Karimu with her graphic art appliqu evening
gown, in her South Central Los Angeles workshop. 1993.
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to prevent its dust from irritating her lungs, and even though her cutting
machine can cut only 10 coats at a time as opposed to the 100 pieces of other
fabric it can cut. She explains:
Dealing with mudcloth, you cant just throw it together . . . You have to be able to
design it and mesh the material into each other. You know it has to say something,
you have to feel for the fabric. You cant just get a piece of mud and sew it up and
expect it to sell. It doesnt work that way. You have to create something that . . . has
a flair to it.
Although Karimu has plans and hopes for leaving the informal economy, she
does not seek contracts with giant retailers:
The big stores, theres no warmth . . . Whereas the boutiques, theres warmth, theres
individuality, theres creativity. You can get one-of-a-kind items. Theyre more
personal . . . As a designer, you can be more creative with the small boutiques.
Because when youre dealing with those big stores, . . . you basically gotta get the
material, cut out a style, sew it up, and its out there. Whereas with the boutiques
you might put a little hand something on it . . . or add a little something to it.
Karimus remarks provide a concrete content to the small-scale production
process the World Bank document represents as empty, not to mention deficient.
In contrast to the World Bank papers unambiguous designation of African
American identity as a marketing opportunity, the people I interviewed in
Los Angeles had differing views on the corporate retailing strategy. Some
resented the marketing tactics as exploitation while others saw them as a
recognition of African culture. Peoples responses reflect the internal diversity
of thought within the African American informal economy. They also reflect
the position of a group historically both caught within and excluded from
consumer capitalism.
Bede Ssensalo, who had been importing African fabrics from Ghana and
Nigeria on the informal market since 1977, and who knew a lot about them,
said of a Los Angeles company that mass-produced Afrocentric youth style:
Theres just no comparison. They are like a basic American company to make
money, and to exploit the needs of . . . what do you call it, trend. His mother-
in-law, Virginetta Turner expressed this idea more definitely:
Im telling you, it made me angry. Anything to get in on the money . . . Its not so
much the culture, its the money. And as soon as its not fit to be in vogue, theyll
drop it . . . I guess they have a right to make money . . . just as we have a right. But
its more or less for us, its a need. Because we cant walk into a corporation and
write out a check.
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By contrast, Gloria McGhee, a jewelry-maker and social worker, expressed
undecidability. On the one hand she says: I think they [K-Mart] just picked
up on the market . . . I dont think they were sensitive to what people wanted.
It was more money, money-type thing. But on the other hand, the JCPenneys
ventures make her feel good because at least they see what were about
and what our needs are.
Karimu calls this the double-edged sword of mass-marketed African
fashion. On the one hand, as a competing businessperson, she expresses much
the same anger as Virginetta:
The thing that really makes me mad is that black people have always been the ones
to bring them out of the slump and they will wait around for years before they start
marketing to us. But whenever they get in a slump and they see that our market is
flowing then they will try to take it over. And they have the money to swamp the
market and thats going to hurt the small businesspeople like us.
Yet seeing the issue from the point of view of a businessperson, she can adopt
her competitors perspective: But whenever they see a need, you know, because
theyre businesspeople too so theyre not going to let something go by without
them reaping the benefits of it. Its just that they can really reap the benefits
of it a lot faster because they have so much cash infusion.
Ironically, her precarious, transitional position, which gives her multiple
points of view, presents the corporate retailers in a more favorable light than
the World Bank papers uncritical approval. In Africa Can Compete!, the large
retailers see Afrocentric marketing solely as appropriation and by no means
as recognition:
African designs are hot! . . . Facing slumping sales and changing demographics, US
retailers are beginning to pursue a number of new strategies to boost revenues,
including targeting previously ignored demographic groups and market segments.
African Americans, the largest ethnic group in America representing nearly
30 million consumers, are being wooed with marketing campaigns and specialty
products, reflecting African American culture and heritage. JCPenneys efforts in this
respect were hailed in the media as an important strategic innovation: Buying
Black JCPenney . . . discovers the benefits of targeting when it set up 20 experi-
mental boutiques with products imported from Africa. (Time: August 31, 1992).
(Biggs et al. 1994: 5)
This celebration of adventurous innovation and experiment neglects the
fact that small vendors infinitely less well-cushioned than JCPenney were
already carrying on such intrepid commercial activities. Afrocentric marketing
was already serving the consumer, but not serving the capital-accumulation
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
problems of the big corporations. One irony is that while the corporate retailer
appropriates the merchandise of small Black vendors it is driving out of busi-
ness, the corporate media organ Time appropriates their slogan. Black vendors
coined Buy Black to encourage support of their small enterprises, and as a
political strategy, albeit with its own ambiguities, of bringing prosperity and
economic independence to the Black community. Buying Black is precisely
what the Penney strategy is destroying.
As it travels from one economy to another, this slogan, like the sign authen-
ticity, changes its mode of signification. From signifying an absent referent,
it too signifies the destruction of a referent. Africa Can Compete! notes, though
without recognizing it does so, the way in which the meaning of cultural
awareness changes into its opposite: The significance of all of these events
[Kwanzaa, Black History Month] is that by raising cultural awareness among
African-Americans, there is now a large pool of consumers who are willing
to spend on Afrocentric merchandise (ibid.: 15).
Analyzing Marxs critique of this kind of reversal, William Pietz writes: The
drive to extract ever more surplus labor in order to accumulate more exchange
value in the fetishized form of invested capital becomes an end in itself
(1993:147). Performing this transformation of African American culture into
such a fetish, Africa Can Compete! says: As it falls in February, a traditionally
slow retail period, Black History Month is viewed by mainstream market
corporations as an opportunity to strengthen their marketing and public
relations strategies directed at African American consumers (Biggs et al. 1994:
15). Black history here suffers the same fate as Africa, becoming an empty
abstraction subsumed to the production of exchange value. It becomes so not
only in the discourse of mainstream market corporations, but in marketing
practices that repress complex versions of black history to make way for
passive consumption.
It could be argued that since identities like African American are already
commodified in the very process of their construction, JCPenney and the World
Bank are only taking this commodification to its logical conclusion. But there
is a difference in the varied processes that produce not only the clothing and
its meanings, but the cultural identities of the consumers as well.
Separating the Production of the Clothing From the
Production of Its Meaning
Of the corporate retailers relation to these differential processes, Africa Can
Compete! says:
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Retailers have few of the romanticized notions about the product that a small
Afrocentric boutique owner might have, but view these niches as new businesses
(with the normal startup delays and costs) which they expect should eventually
function normally with minimal handholding. Thus merchandise managers expect
to eventually treat this business like any other from a sourcing perspective, with
competitive costs, good quality and timeliness of delivery. (ibid.: 16)
Let us once more set aside in examining this passage its unquestioned pre-
sumption to impose a universal standard of how to function normally, its
denigrating image of childish African producers needing handholding, and
its euphemism of competitive costs for poverty wages. Let us focus instead
on the flaws in its internal logic. One must confess that Afrocentric designers
and vendors do, as the passage disdainfully remarks, romanticize their product.
Postmodern critiques of the authentic have also disdained this romanticism
as an ahistoric essentialism. But it is far more historical and less essentialist
than Penneys notion of authentic African fashions whose authenticity
transcends mass-production, and which are made in an abstract Africa
reduced to a lack of Western rationalist values.
The romanticized notions that large retailers eschew are the very ones they
encourage in their customers. Such notions are the selling point of the fashions
and determine their presentation in the advertising. JCPenneys primary
objective, the World Bank paper says without recognizing the cynicism it
expresses, is to get greater loyalty from African American consumers (ibid.:
16). Elsewhere, as we have seen, the paper implies that the large retailers are
not to be expected to return this loyalty, either to the consumer or the producer,
but use it as a means of gaining market power over them. The attempt to
leave intact in the garment a romantic meaning of authenticity for the buyer
while disdaining it in the process of production and exchange essentializes the
meaning far more than do the romanticizing craft producers and culturally
aware consumers. Its as if the object as isolated fetish magically contained
authenticity as its indestructible essence. If I have, in turn, seemed to roman-
ticize the informal producers, it is nonetheless the case that in their very ambiguity
and precariousness, these enterprises, their work and their discourse denaturalize
and de-essentialize global corporate capitalism. They also denaturalize its
historically produced structures of time and competition which we have come
to accept as a second nature, itself a universal and inescapably fated essence.
From Dominant to Informal Economy
In the fall of 1997, there were definite signs that Chinayeras predictions had
come to pass. Wairimu and I spent several depressing Saturdays scouting out
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
the African fashion scene. Things had changed a lot since I had started my
research in Los Angeles in 1993. The few Afrocentric fashions on the racks at
JCPenney in Pasadena were drab, limp affairs, mostly from Pakistan. The
Senegalese grand boubou drapes any body in regal splendor because it falls
in voluminous folds of heavy starched cloth, but these skimpy garments hung
more like house coats. We visited the two main merchants of West African
fabric in Los Angeless garment district, and found a similarly depressed scene.
Their sales in Senegalese lgos prints had fallen about 50 to 75 percent. The
competition is too high from the low-quality imports from China, Pakistan,
Korea and India, one told us. There is too much competition from India and
Pakistan, said the other.
After hearing these less euphoric comments on competition, we went to the
little Africa zone of small shops clustered around Leimert Park in Los
Angeless Crenshaw District, the heart of the citys Black community. Tucked
between Crenshaw Boulevard and an upper-middle-class Black residential
neighborhood, the reclaimed Old Town shopping center enjoys lots of
customers only on the rare occasions of a special street celebration. Its normally
sleepy ambiance gives little hint of the noise and bustle of overflow crowds
just a half-mile away in the Baldwin Hills Mall that caters to the Black popu-
lation of the area. Wairimu and I found a newly opened little store, Ashanti
to Zulu, a hopeful sign that African fashion inside the African American
community was still dynamic. But we found two merchants sharing space, one
of whom had previously, for several years, run a very well-known African
fabric store. He had had to close in 1996, and was now displaying limited stock
in his half of this shop.
Yet we also found signs that in the wake of the passage of Afrocentric
clothing through the dizzying death spiral of mass-market fashion, there
remained the informal African fashion network as a cultural space. With its
ambiguities, its creative pleasures and economic anxieties, its struggle for
symbolic autonomy from and its dependence upon/complicity with capitalist
exploitation, it still wielded a precarious but enduring influence on African
American popular culture.
While Wairimu was renewing her acquaintance with the fabric merchant,
my eye caught some activity among three women in the back room behind the
shop, and I stepped into that by now familiar world in the shadow of corporate
mass-marketing where clothing and its meanings were produced simultan-
eously. One woman was working at the sewing machine and another was
standing at the cutting table, while an adolescent sat and watched the two,
occasionally adding a comment to the intense conversation about a friend. The
standing woman crossed over to the woman laboring at the sewing machine,
and as they together handled the fabric, said, No, do it on the other side. I
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discovered, contrary to appearances, that the seated woman was the owner
of the business and the standing woman her assistant. Like Karimu and other
Los Angeles designers, Stephanie Askins had weathered the storm of mass-
produced African fashion. In 1991, she had given up a career as a systems
analyst, working in aerospace firms and then in the US Office of Thrift Super-
vision during the savings and loans debacle. She left that world and went into
fashion design full-time because I had a great conviction . . . I love it . . ., and
I even tried to stop doing it several times, but I just cant. She had been
working out of her home in an affluent suburb thirty miles away until two
months previously when she had rented this space in South Central Los Angeles.
Although suburban customers could pay more for her elegant, custom-made
cocktail dresses, evening gowns and business outfits than the maximum $250
her customers in Baldwin Hills and South Central could pay, she had opted
for Leimert Park. In the suburb, she said, I could really make a lot of money,
but the African Americans where I live are not into the culture as much as
the people in the inner city. She was making elegant two-piece suits with
flounces, based on the taille-basse style of West Africa, and dresses with
matching coats, in the heavy embroidered silk popular in Nigeria. They were
finished with intricate handwork. Stephanie said she would like to sell to
department stores in the future, but currently had no time because of the
demand for her custom work. As a person who had chosen to situate herself
in the informal African fashion network, her approach contrasted at many
points with the Africa Can Compete! discourse.
When I said it seemed that the department stores were carrying a lot less
African fashion, she commented on that historical dynamic:
They arent making as much money as they thought they would, so its not a big
priority. I think it has a lot to do with the more expensive the fabrics are, the nicer
the clothes, they just dont want to spend the money. Which is O.K. with me because
Im just going to make some money . . . It was just a fad. I think it was just real hot
for a minute, and then I think it just died down within the high fashion world. But
it hasnt of course within our culture . . . The way I look at it, the people that still
come to me for African attire . . ., its more than just a fad for them. Its kind of like
who they are, like a way of life . . . I think it will be better for my business in the
long run, because I can still design very beautiful clothes . . . and I can charge what
Im worth.
Now she feels that she can do the elegant clothes that she really wanted to
do. She no longer does the cheap, quick things she had to make when
African fashion was a fad. She added: Im not pressured to compete . . . I dont
have to compete.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Notes
1. A manufacturer who was born in Senegal and owned an American company told
me, in 1998, that he had already been producing African clothing for JCPenneys at
the time of that program and was still producing for them. There also exist in Dakars
downtown Sandaga Market, mini-sweatshops employing about 30 tailors who make
boubous for local use. They remain outside the purview of the World Bank study.
2. For analyses by some of its senior economists of the systemic failure of the World
Bank, see The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly (2001), senior advisor
in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, and Greg Palasts interview
with Joseph Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Laureate in economics and former World Bank Chief
Economist (Palast 2001). See also Stiglitz 2002.
3. For detailed critiques of this overriding policy of the World Bank, see Escobar
1995: 156; Ferguson 1990; and Amin 1994: 80.
4. California law requires that after 40 hours of work in one week, workers receive
overtime pay of time-and-a-half.
5. On the moralizing discourse of the World Banks economism, see Ferguson 1995.
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135
5
Fact, Fabrication and Material
Misreading: The Genealogy
of Authentic African
Print Fabric
The Problem of Authenticity
A sign outside a store in the Los Angeles garment district reads: ASHANTI
Authentic African Print Fabrics. On his website, a Senegalese immigrant tailor
in the South Street District of Philadelphia writes: At Sandaga USA we offer:
Authentic fabrics from Sotiba, manufacturers in Dakar, Senegal (Sandaga
USA 2001). At the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Southern California,
the gift shop sells shirts of Sotiba African print. The shop manager tells me
that the designer used authentic fabrics, and adds that she went to Africa
herself to get them, as if to lend weight to this claim. These fabrics, however,
inscribed with masks, drums, and a generous overlay of gold embossing, are
designed in New York by American clients of the Sotiba factory in Dakar, and
printed there especially for export to the United States. In the global circulation
of African fashion, the beautiful, brilliantly-colored Sotiba cotton fabrics have
emblematic status in the United States, and even in Kenya, as the authentic-
ally African. But the designs most popular here as authentic are dubbed
touristic at the Sotiba factory in Senegal.
Nevertheless, the authenticity ubiquitously ascribed to Sotiba print fabric
is situated in an other social and semiotic world from the authentic African
fashions (Biggs et al. 1994) that multinational retail corporations produce in
subcontracted sweatshops (Chapter 4). Sotiba fabrics authenticity is not
the spurious, free-floating signifier of mass-marketing, completely disconnected
from processes of production and distribution. Albeit ineluctably and unceas-
ingly displaced in the play of paradox and oxymoron, this authenticity is
inseparable from the fabrics production at the factory in Dakar and its dissem-
ination in the transnational circuits of African fashion. And deeper than this,
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
to arrive at its august but self-contradictory status, the fabric as traveling text
has had to go through an arduous series of transformations criss-crossing
terrains of colonial and post-colonial history. As the most important medium
for the transnational circulation of African fashion, cloth hand-woven, dyed,
appliqud or printed epitomizes the process by which imitations enter the
status of the authentic as artifacts cross borders in space and time.
1
In addition,
Sotiba fabric epitomizes the ways in which the transnational African fashion
network differs from and can serve to denaturalize the all too normalized
processes of global corporate capitalism.
Among African print fabrics in the United States, Sotiba holds the foremost
position, and also claims among its official markets Togo, Benin, Ivory Coast,
Mauritania, Ghana, Republic of Congo, Gambia, Guinea Conakry, Niger,
Mali and South Africa, as well as France, Japan and at one time Brazil (Sotiba
2001). Sotiba alters designs to suit the tastes of different countries. In contrast
to the symbolic mask, drum, and cowry shell designs for American consumers,
the designs destined for the local Senegalese market, and called le lgos, limi-
wax or le fancy, are in large measure imitations of le wax, or Holland wax
prints, in large beautiful patterns of flowers, birds, or abstract figures (Figures
24 and 25). These imitation wax designs have bigger figures and incorporate
more colors than the American designs. Designs for Benin and Togo are bigger
Figure 24 Sotiba imi-wax or lgos print. Dakar, 1987.
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Fact, Fabrication, and Material Misreading
137
and more multi-colored still. Designs destined for the different cultures also
differ in the finish applied to the printed fabric. Prints for American export
go through a heating process that creates a lustrous stiff finish, while the
designs for Senegal and neighboring countries tend to have a matte finish. In
addition, designs for Senegalese markets do not have the gold embossing.
The metaphor of a text as textile is usually based on the notion of weaving.
But Sotiba fabric appropriates through imprinting, as a form of writing, every
possible image and symbol from every culture, and produces new meaning by
combining and recombining them, as well as by circulating them through
different social contexts. It is literally a text. By incorporating and recombining
design elements in ever new permutations, this text has continuously trans-
formed the meaning of its own status as imitation or authentic. As it
circulates through different social worlds in space and time, each new imitation
achieves the status of authentic original which is elsewhere copied. In addition
to imitating le wax, Sotibas original and ongoing mission, it also copies
every kind of fabric process. It reproduces in print form hand-woven Ashante
kente cloth and Senegalese sru rbbal, hand-woven and hand-dyed Malian
mudcloth, hand-dyed wood-block wax stamping called in Senegal le bougie,
Figure 25 Sotiba imi-wax or lgos print. Dakar 1987. Note that each fabric has a
different crack mark in the background.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
and Senegalese embroidery. The prestigious wax prints of the South African/
Ivoirian Woodin company also find their way slightly altered onto Sotiba
fabrics. Just as mudcloth has strong identifications with Mali and kente cloth
with Ghana, so is Sotiba identified with Senegal. But Sotiba also appropriates
all these other local icons as well. In addition, the fabric, like the text of African
cultural and political history that it is, incorporates any sign or symbol:
sculptures, sculptured combs, Baule, Dogon and Korogho mythological figures,
huts, wood fires, cowry shells, peasants, dancers, and elephants, to name a few.
Any and every object can, in fact, find itself on a Sotiba fabric. One fabric
sported giant cell phones printed to look as if they were wax stamped on old-
fashioned hand-dyed indigo. Another was imprinted with something that
looked remarkably like, and probably were, the soles of athletic shoes, also
on a background of faux hand-dyed indigo.
One could attribute simply to climate some differences between fabrics
destined for US and for Senegal markets. In the heat and humidity of Senegal,
the gold embossing mixed with perspiration just turns an unattractive black.
Yet other differences have to do with historically sedimented codes of elegance.
For people in the United States, the gleaming fabrics may connote luxury and
glamour. For Senegalese the dramatically colored and figured matte surfaces
imitate the prestigious and expensive wax prints imported to Senegal from
Holland, England, or Switzerland since the early twentieth century (European
wax print costs CFA 5000 per meter, while Sotiba prints cost CFA 1000 per
meter). The very cloth that symbolizes for African Americans a connection to
their heritage also signifies on another level a separation from the historical
culture of their homeland.
For the designers and technical workers at the Sotiba factory, what is African
about the fabric is not a particular image of authenticity imprinted on the cloth,
frozen in time and confined in space. It is rather a mobile social history and
an open geography that produce the cloth. Creativity, imagination and beauty
are central values in Senegalese culture (see Chapter 2 and Mustafa 1997;
Mustafa 1998). If designers have the highly prized gift of being able to
materialize these values in fabric and clothing, it comes from a long and
ongoing history of importing and exporting fashion to and from many lands.
Thus Lamine Mbodj, head designer at Sotiba until 2001, and my main inform-
ant in the factory, called the prints that connote a mythic Africa in the United
States not typically African, because their figures are small with compar-
atively few colors. Other Sotiba workers called these fabrics European
because they are made for the fabrication of Western-style shirts, skirts and
suits, and are unsuitable for the long flowing grands boubous that require large,
dramatic figures. What is African, Lamine told me, has a tendency to
border on batik, and then specified Indonesian batik. In a Senegalese
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Fact, Fabrication, and Material Misreading
139
historical context, it is not a contradiction that Indonesian-influenced designs
look more African than icons of Africanity.
Lamine explained that batik was in the beginning Indonesian and the
English brought it to Europe. According to historians, it was the Dutch who
first brought Javanese batik to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and later
sold it to the English who destined it for their African market in the 1820s
(Pedler 1974: 241). Dutch manufacturers began manufacturing wax stamped
cloth in the 1880s, and British fabric manufacturers in Manchester then
developed their own print designs, equipment, dyes and techniques for an
industrialized version of Indonesian wax stamping to be sold in English-ruled
West Africa. (Nielsen 1979: 470-474, 482; Pedler 1974: 242). As Lamine said,
Wanting to copy, they found le wax. In factories within Africa, British
manufacturers began to make printed imitations of industrialized wax, and
the French followed their example. In the 1930s, the French began bringing
this cotton printed cloth, manufactured in its territories in India, to its colonies
in West Africa. The French version went by the names of le fancy (fancy cloth),
limi-wax, or as it is commonly called, le lgos. Sotiba fabric began not simply
as a copy of a copy of Indonesian batik, but as the French copy of the English
imitation wax.
Sotiba, Colonialism and Neo-colonialism
Yet a greater irony of this history is that the process by which Sotiba became
authentic African fabric began as part of a larger project by France to exploit
its colonial subjects. The cloth formed an integral component in a system of
colonial economics called le Pacte colonial (Boone 1992; Webster et al.
1967). Having crushed a class of Senegalese merchants that had been very
active since the nineteenth century by denying them access to credit, large
French trading companies established their monopoly. They had control over
both the purchase for export of the groundnut crop produced by African
peasants and also the import for sale of consumer goods for these very same
peasants. Eighty-five per cent of all French exports were sold in these protected
markets of the overseas territories, where textiles were the leading category
of imports and Senegal the largest consumer of French textiles. French West
African peasants spent on these textiles 30 to 40 percent of the monetary
revenue they gained from the equally controlled sale of their groundnut crop
to these same importers (Boone 1992: 346). Even after independence, and
well into the 1970s, the large trading houses were able to make this system
survive (Boone 1992: 45; Pedler 1974). The speculative and usurious manip-
ulations of prices and credit terms for an impoverished peasantry became the
scandale permanent of rural Senegal (Boone 1992: 46).
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
After the Second World War, the same kinds of protections from competition
were offered to manufacturers investing in the French colonies, and among
these ventures, a few small textile firms were created and survived until the
1960s and 1970s. Sotiba, which became Senegals most powerful textile
manufacturer after independence (Boone 1992: 74), began in 1951 as a
dyeing workshop for a large French client. He and a Swiss financier became
the majority owners by 1952. Under the economic control of the large French
trading houses as its only clients, Sotiba began printing cotton lgos fabrics
in 1958.
Even after the independence of 1960, manufacturing firms in Senegal remained
French subsidiaries selling commodities to captive African consumers. In the
1960s tax concessions granted to French firms reduced the industrys direct
contribution to government revenues to almost zero (Boone 1992: 119).
Given these privileges, the European manufacturers generally kept their invest-
ments to a minimum. Yet between 1965 and 1975, when the Swiss wax print
manufacturer Basel Trading Company became a part-owner, Sotiba did invest
money to increase ten-fold its printing capacity, and to make high-quality cloth
that still gives Sotiba the reputation for being the most durable and beautiful
of African prints. In 1966 the owners installed a new production unit for le
wax itself.
The protected monopoly guaranteed European textile manufacturers high
prices and high profits. Still controlling the peasant market for both buying
groundnuts and selling cloth, the maisons de commerce could count on overall
markups of 45 to 50 percent for lgos fabric. And as late as 1972, 35 percent
of total wages and salaries paid in the Senegalese textile industry went to
Europeans, while large profits went to parent firms and shareholders. Sotiba
was part of a neo-colonial system that, like the colonial system it continued,
laid the basis for the collapse of the Senegalese economy by the late 1970s
(Boone 1992: 127, 159).
This neo-colonial scheme protected markets through a system of government
patronage and licensing. It also effectively excluded Senegalese businessmen
until the 1970s. Senegalese businessmen finally entered this system at the same
time as it was contributing to the disintegration of the official economy.
Government administrators, especially in the ministry of commerce, exploited
patronage for personal profit and political power, granting licenses and other
privileges in such large numbers that they lost their power of monopoly control.
One effect was a new class of wealthy businessmen connected to well-placed
government officials and the Muslim religious elite. Another effect was that
vast parallel markets for textile goods and extensive circuits of fraudulent
importation develop with stunning speed (ibid.: 211). By 1981 an estimated
70 percent of imports were smuggled onto the Senegalese market. The leaders
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Fact, Fabrication, and Material Misreading
141
of the contraband circuits were and are the Mouride Muslim leaders who
had amassed enormous wealth and power through controlling the peasant
economy and politics under the indirect rule of the French (Cruise OBrien
1971: 71; Diop 1981: 32135). Contraband leaders included as well the very
government officials responsible for managing the official economy.
By 1980, the loss of captive markets, along with a foreign debt of one billion
francs CFA (at the time 50 francs CFA = 1 French franc) had devastated the
neo-colonial economy, not to mention the textile industry. As the Senegalese
economy unable to survive colonial and neo-colonial trade monopolies,
internal corruption and foreign debt collapsed, Sotiba was the only textile
factory left by 1979. Beginning in 1980, the government attempted to salvage
the textile industry but in a way that only deepened its disintegration. The very
officials who were ruining the local textile industry by granting excessive
import and trade licenses and by themselves engaging in parallel markets, also
began offering government export subsidies to local manufacturers. Rather
than investing in modernizing the antiquated machinery, the foreign owners
collected subsidies on exports to neighboring Gambia. These fabrics came back
to Senegal through contraband channels.
The owners pulled out of their investment with a handsome buyout from
the government in 1980, and Serigne Ndiaye, a cousin of then President Abou
Diouf, acquired 25 percent of the company. The new owners, who also included
another Senegalese businessman and a French man named Fleuret, received
government loans of 2 billion francs CFA to modernize the decrepit machinery
in 1986, but made no investments (Boone 1992: 244). The more expensive
production of le wax was shut down in 1983 or 1984. Despite the continued
production and sales of beautiful cloth, the company lacked funds to pay
its workers on time, and a series of wildcat strikes broke out in the 1980s (ibid.:
245; Mbodj personal communication). Company finances descended into a
chaos that no one could penetrate. Ndiaye tried to sue Fleuret for embezzling
9 billion francs CFA, but Ndiaye was also embezzling enormous amounts and,
with his Senegalese partner, putting the funds in a holding company registered
in Monaco. They also bought a bank that they embezzled until it was driven
out of business. Ndiaye secured another government loan of 2 million francs
CFA (Mbodj, personal communication) just before Sotiba closed in August,
1993.
It reopened in December, 1994. When I first visited the factory in 1995 and
then spent two weeks there in 1998, the workers were still angry about Ndiaye
and the closure. The new owner, LUnion des Brasseries, a London company
owned by Indians, is a liquor company trying to diversify into paints and
textiles. At the Sotiba factory, I noticed, as in the divided discourse of Senegalese
fashion and fabric artisans (see Chapter 2), a marked contrast between the
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enthusiasm with which people talked about their work as designers, dyers,
researchers or printers of lgos fabric, and the gloom that marked their talk
about the economic life of the factory. Sotiba was losing markets, and although
the new owners talked about investing in modernization, the workers were
still using the original machines from the 1950s, for which they themselves
were making new parts. One day, after taking me to visit the building that
housed the unused and rusting machinery for printing le wax, Lamine paused
by a plaque on the wall commemorating President Lopold Senghors dedi-
cation of this plant. He pointed out the plaque, which read: Dedicated in 69
by Senghor The First in Francophone Africa Real Wax Print. Those were
the good times, Lamine said wistfully. Now everythings gone to hell.
(Ctait le beau temps. Maintenant tout est foutu en lair.)
Imprinted at regular intervals directly on the selvedge of each lgos fabric
is the name SOTIBA and the proud declaration: GARANTI VRITABLE
IMI-WAX (guaranteed genuine imi-wax). These few self-contradictory
words suggest the many reversals of the ironic history by which a fabric
originating in colonial exploitation as the ersatz of a counterfeit goes through
a process of authentification (Eicher and Erekosima 1995) as it travels
through different political and cultural regimes. The names given to this fabric
also participate in this dialectic. The Senegalese dubbed the fabric lgos
because the first of these fabrics was manufactured in and imported from the
English colonial city of Lagos, Nigeria. But now, in Guinea Conakry sotiba
has become the generic name for all imi-wax and thus assumes the status of
the presumptive original.
An Intermediate Space Between Craft and
Mass Production
As a capital node in the global circulation of African fashion, the Sotiba factory
is in many ways a space where opposites come together and are transformed.
The place where imitation and originality turn into each other, Sotiba is also
a crossroads between the craft practices of the Soninke dyers (Chapter 2) and
the mass-production practices of the global corporate economy (Chapter 4).
This mediating position holds in matters of technique, business relations and
value systems. Among the departments of the factory, the design room is at
the heart of this intermediacy.
The office wing of the Sotiba factory in Dakar, with its slate floors, dark
wood paneling, air conditioning, leather chairs, and glossy photos of models
wearing traditional and European dress in Sotiba fabrics, recalls the luxuries
of corporate office buildings in any major city. In sharp contrast is the cavernous
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factory floor, with its bolts of fabric rolling off huge presses, its uneven cement
floor perilously puddled with water, oil, and dyes, its dirt, odors, steamy air,
and deafening noise. Mediating between this luxury and this squalor is the
hangar-like design room, with large windows, drafting tables along the sides
and light tables in the middle. Lamine, who came to Sotiba in 1968, and
supervises the designers, has a desk at the front of the line. Like the production
wing, the design room has remained unaltered since the 1960s. The most
notable change has been the addition of four young women designers to the
all-male staff which itself includes many men from the 1960s. Monsieur Sylla,
the manager of the design department, brought out an old photo in which these
men, barely recognizable as their younger selves in bell bottoms and Afros,
were gathered in an identical but decidedly newer version of the design room.
As Lamine said: This is all we know. Its our family.
Mr. Menan, the Managing Director of the factory, said of the design depart-
ment: This is the heart of Sotiba, the most important department. It is here
that issues of originality and copying come together with issues of craft and
mass production in practice and theory. To define le fancy, for me, Sylla said,
the origin of le fancy was the copy. The original cloth was le wax. Yet we
have seen that le wax as original was itself the copy of Indonesian batik. Within
the codes of the design room, Syllas words are not a contradiction. We
ourselves can create on the basis of another fabric, Lamine told me. Many
lgos fabrics incorporate or recombine design elements from older lgos or
wax prints. Lamine had said in 1998: Fabric is a perpetual process of begin-
ning again. When he took me on my first tour of the factory in 1995, he
emphasized, like other Senegalese craftspeople, the value of creativity. As we
watched a fabric coming off one of the presses, he said: I created that. Of
another, he said, Its a creation from my own head, and to emphasize the
matter, pointed to his head with both hands. That is my creation. His words
signify a set of values that suggest the contrast between codes of authenticity
among American consumers and codes of creativity widely recognized by
Senegalese artisans. Where the consumers tend to invest value in the isolated
object as symbol, the producers tend to see in the cloth the process that produces
it, and which includes social relations surrounding it.
The Design and Production Process
As when it first opened, Sotiba in the 1990s still produces for large wholesale
clients, but they are a much more diverse group. For historical reasons, all
of the Dakarois clients are Lebanese men, whose families came to French
West Africa after the First World War as employees of or intermediaries for
the maisons de commerce, and who are now in the wholesale business for
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themselves. Clients in Benin and Togo are the legendary West African Mama
Benz, women traders who have amassed great wealth through their own
enterprise. The American clients, about which more later, are Sotiba USA
(Afriland, Inc.), IBN (Homeland) and Massata.
The day before I began research in the Sotiba factory, Lamine had gone to
the huge fabric market in Dakar, the March H.L.M., with Chaouki Haidous,
one of Sotibas biggest clients among the Lebanese fabric wholesalers. They
had purchased several pieces of the imported wax in a style that had just
recently become very fashionable. These new designs were in a single color,
dark blue, black or brown, against a natural background. The next day, several
of the designers had each received one of the fabric pieces. At each drafting
desk, a designer was copying the fabric meticulously. Lamine and the youngest,
newest male designer, Cheikh, assured me that artistry was required in copying
another fabric design to correct the distortions and make it fit the dimensions
of Sotibas printing cylinders. But later Cheikh criticized the work for falling
short of the core values of creativity, imagination and inspiration: With my
imagination, I would be able to create a wax design . . . I want to create but
there is a block. Every time its the client who wants something. He criticized
having to copy always on the basis of a wax or summer fabrics . . . I have
inspirations. Inspiration is something else. Its not oneself. Its the good God.
I say, is it myself who made that?
For the design team, however, Sotibas archaic machinery means that even
the mechanical production or reproduction processes demand, if not artistry,
artisanal practice and a great deal of ingenuity. Before the printing, the design
process consists almost completely of hand-done work for which the designers
display a great deal of concern. For the many designs not copied from another
fabric, either Lamine or a designer employed by the client makes a rough sketch
(le croquis), and then a more elaborate sample of the design in colored ink on
paper (la maquette, see Figure 28, p.167). A designer transfers onto graph
paper each main motif, which is then photographed to create repetitions
on a large piece of plastic film. The outline of each design element is photo-
multiplied on a different piece of film. The designers, working at light tables,
fill in the outline of each motif with paint on each piece of film.
This over-painting of the photographed motifs has to do with the craft that
transforms imitation into its own genre. The designers, printers and technicians
at Sotiba repeatedly pointed out with pride that le lgos approaches le wax in
as much detail as possible. In this part of the process, each of the identically
photographed motifs is filled in by hand to create the exact amount and kind
of irregularity that will make them look like hand-crafted and hand-applied
wood-block stamps. And in fact the motifs are hand-crafted and hand-applied,
but on to a film. The painted film is then transferred by a photogravure process
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to a copper printing cylinder that will mechanically reproduce the series
of irregularities at regular but intentionally inconspicuous intervals on the
fabric.
Actual industrialized wax printing included, when it first began to be copied
from batik, hand-stamping with wooden or copper blocks dipped in molten
wax. As the fabric passed on a conveyor belt, workers would stamp it. In hand-
done batik the wax permeates both sides of the fabric to which it is applied,
and the fabric is dyed rather than printed. Therefore the colors are equally
intense, and the motifs equally clear on both sides of the fabric. As industrial
wax became more mechanized, a printing cylinder would apply hot wax to
the parts of the fabric not to be colored, and then the fabric would be printed
on both sides of the fabric. The process would be repeated for each color.
(Vieux Dia, personal communication; Nielsen 1979; 477, 4801). Sotiba staff
and connoisseurs among its consumers emphasize the fact that Sotibas colors
also come out equally intense on both sides of the cloth.
Additional design procedures allow lgos to imitate more perfectly le wax.
Each element of the design is traced on a separate film and then etched on a
separate cylinder. The first element is the outline of the main motif, to be
printed in an inconspicuous black or brown. This is followed by a second
version of the outline, often in dark blue, called le misfit. To explain it, Lamine
used the made-up French verb misfiter : Its purpose is to misfit, to border
the black with blue in order to give the impression of le wax. In the design
room, Cheikh showed me how to trace the misfit on its film, by throwing
the negative off on to the positive. The displaced second outline, a very
sketchy version of the first, imitates the leaky border between motif and
background that results from wax-resist dyeing technique. The third element,
the colored interior of the imitation wax stamps themselves, is called les covers.
These are the films that the designers paint so painstakingly to make them fit
irregularly on the design outline. They do this in just the right way to make
the design look handcrafted, which in fact it is. But it is handcrafted to create
the illusion of a different handcraft process.
The final design element is le crack, usually the same color as le misfit. Le
crack, Lamine explained, creates the effect of impurities to imitate le wax.
In batik and hand-dyed wax stamping (called le bougie in Senegal), the dye
vats are very small, and so the dyer must fold the fabric as she crumples it into
the vat. The folding and crumpling cracks the wax, allowing a bit of the dye
to leak through in faint, random background marks. Since in industrial wax
printing the fabric is run through a printing press, such cracks would not result.
The crackle, sign of authenticity that gives African wax print its prestige
(Pedler 1974: 241), has to be created in a separate part of the process. Before
the designs are applied, the whole cloth is waxed, falls into folds, and is then
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printed with one of the colors (Nielsen 1979: 477). Here too then, le crack in
lgos printing copies another copy.
Le crack thereby provides a noteworthy example of how copying produces
its own form of originality and creativity. During my first visit to Sotiba, we
were watching a fabric pass under its series of printing cylinders, and Lamine
pointed out the last one, which was applying le crack. That one, Im the
person who invented it, he said proudly. It took him a whole month and many
frustrating tries to produce a realistic representation of dye bleeding through
a wax crack. With the first attempts, the boss was not happy, but in the
end . . ., and here Lamine performed the act of kissing someone on both
cheeks as in an official French award ceremony. He concluded: He [The boss]
said, come to the cashiers desk, and he gave me a gift. Lamine had also
figured out that he had to print le crack on to the cloth from a different-sized
cylinder than those used in the rest of the design in order to create the impres-
sion of randomness. Therefore, when a design is prepared for printing, the
designers do not make a separate film for le crack but choose one of several
designs that are already on cylinders. Over the years the design of le crack
has evolved and transformed. Now there are many different kinds of crack
designs, some of which do not realistically imitate wax crackle at all, but are
quite abstract. They have become design elements in their own right. So much
so, that some of the designs exported to the United States incorporate an
abstract crack embossed in gold. This gold version finally signifies a historic
rather than mimetic relation to the cracked-wax marks in batik.
When I asked Lamine why he used English terms for the design elements of
lgos, he said: Thats a good question. The very origin of the textile, the
technique we use, was developed by the English from Indonesian wax. They
modernized it . . . Lamines answer implies that the origin of lgos is not
its origin. In his answer, the origin is not English, as my question would have
suggested, but a web of global colonial transfers between England, Holland,
Asia and Africa. And second, the origin of lgos for Lamine is not batik itself,
but rather a technique, and a process of modernization. A multiple origin,
geographical/historical movement, technical innovation and modernity fit into
a different value system than that of authenticity and heritage which Sotiba
fabrics connote in the United States. Insofar as Sotiba prints embody African
culture for both Senegalese and African Americans, it signifies those two very
different versions of culture.
For the designers at Sotiba the concept of Africa which the fabric is
supposed to embody floats unstably, all the more so since it is intertwined with
production techniques that also float, as we have seen, between industrialized
processes and craft. While Cheikh was drawing his pattern, another designer
approached and commented: Its almost craft. There is an aspect of craft.
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This comment was a regular refrain in the Sotiba factory. Drawing the outline
figures to put in certain irregularities, Cheikh was drawing circles without a
compass. The second designer brought over a piece of fabric whose covers had
been painted by hand. But both outlines and covers had been painted clean
and even. Of the first fabric the designer said, You feel the African in it
(On sent lafricain). He then added that this more African fabric was
much more sold in the United States than in Dakar, while the more Euro-
pean fabric was sold in Dakar. Cheikh said of the design he was working on,
the client wanted a feeling of the hand, of hand work.
In fact, almost all the work, from beginning the design to mounting it on
the print cylinders, is done by hand with the help of huge rolls of cellophane
tape, themselves symbolic of the workers efforts to keep the old factory
equipment patched together. Lamine winds each film around a copper cylinder
attached to a lighted rotating device, fixes it with tape, and cuts the overlap
with a single, long swath of a mat knife whose blade the men repeatedly
sharpen. For le cover Lamine has to cut around the design rather than in a
straight line. To make the two ends meet correctly, he calculates the proportions
and the amount by which to reduce or expand a photo-multiplied design with
a small hand calculator. When the two ends of the design do not fit exactly,
he repaints the film at the joint. At this point the mechanical process takes over.
A photogravure machine turns the cylinder as light-sensitive acid engraves the
filmed design onto it. The cylinder is then plunged into a bath that washes off
the acid, and the figures appear in thousands of tiny holes. Lamine checks the
cylinder on the lighted rotator to make sure the joint cant be seen.
On the factory floor, giant machines first prepare the gray cloth for printing,
burning away its down with walls of flame and then bleaching it in multiple
baths. In the printing process, the cylinders, now filled with colored ink, are
attached to a huge machine above the conveyor belt. As the fabric passes under
the series of rollers, they imprint it successively with the outline, le misfit, les
covers, le crack and the background color.
In addition to printing lgos, Sotiba also dyes guine, or indigo fabric, for
the legendary Blue Men of the Sahel Desert to the north of Senegal. The
indigo cloth is what makes their skin blue. In the 1950s Sotiba produced an
inferior version of chemically dyed indigo. The higher-quality cloth prized by
the Sahelian Moors was imported from Pondicherry, the French territories in
India. In 1955 political troubles there motivated Sotibas European suppliers
to invest a large amount of capital in the Dakar indigo dyeing firm, and to bring
the dye master to Dakar (Boone 1992: 74). Chemical indigo-dyeing is now a
source of fierce pride for the Sotiba staff. Lamine tells me, cest top secret.
In the guine room, the director says: The Chinese and Hindus have copied
it, but Sotiba is the only one to have it in the world. Old Menan (le pre
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Menan [the dye master from India]) invented indigo the true indigo and
only Sotiba has it. By true indigo, they mean the chemical version, since
the women dyers of West Africa, whom most of the men dismiss, had been
using indigo from the plant for several centuries.
The chemical indigo, like the organic variety, rubs off the fabric on to the
skin and protects it from heat and light. Old Menan, Lamine told me, was a
genius in chemistry, and could cure any skin disease from his jar of indigo.
Another designer recounted that the legendary Menan cured people with skin
diseases like eczema with the same techniques that he used in dyeing. The
therapeutic qualities of indigo are what make it so necessary to the desert
dwellers. And so, a different set of foreign consumers from the African Americans
seek from Sotiba yet another definition of authenticity. The Director of the
guine room tells me that the Moors like to smell and taste the sulphurous
flavor of guine to make sure it is genuine. As long as it does not stain, those
people wont buy it, he says. It protects against the UV rays. In the guine
room, the indigo fabric, moved along by dozens of rollers suspended overhead,
goes through five purple dye baths, coming out a blue-black color of great
depth. It is then stretched and rinsed, and the rayon variety is heated to give
it shine, while the cotton variety is mangled. The Director told me: Its tapped
(see Chapter 2), practically artisanal but on a machine. Our Western romantic
images of the Blue Men of the Desert, legendary warriors in flowing robes and
turbans of indigo, do not include images of their emblematic dress being
fabricated in a big-city factory.
The Archive of Designs
When Fleuret was part owner, he instituted an archive room that preserves a
piece of every fabric printed by Sotiba. Rows of rods hold closely hung hangers,
each with a two-yard piece of fabric whose label contains the name of the
client, the name of the design and the date of production. Lamine and Fatou
Dieydiou, the director of the sample room, each have the same information
hand-written in a school exercise notebook.
The majority of the samples belong to the nine Lebanese wholesalers in
Dakar. Each specializes in either wax or touristic designs, but there is much
overlap and adaptation of design elements from one genre to another. One
client named Baroud specializes in so-called touristic cloth, but even his scenes
of dancers, musicians and palm trees, a hut with cooking fire, or one named
Senghor I imprinted with tigers and hunters, are much more exuberantly
crowded with figures and colors than the more minimalist fabrics for the
American clients, like one monocolor cloth imprinted simply with Ghanaian
stools embossed in gold. By contrast Barouds Rodin pattern, wherein this
Ghanaian stool was combined with images of the Thinker, creates a mix that
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would be jarring indeed in North American aesthetics. Of a Sotiba USA pattern
with small maps of Africa in red and green, Fatou said, they adore the designs
that are typically African, once again suggesting the separation between iconic
motifs of Africa for them, the distant Americans, and fabrics which form
part of West African culture.
The Sotiba USA fabrics also included several Egyptian motifs, with names
like Nefertiti II and Clopatre, adorned with gold-embossed ankh symbols
and hieroglyphics. I mistakenly thought at the time that they referred to the
Black American philosophy of Afrocentrism with its theory, traceable to the
early twentieth-century Senegalese anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop, of the
Egyptian origin of African civilization (1965). The most common motif on
touristic and export designs were masks in every form. Their adaptation to
the local market once again suggested the cultural divide between the Africa
of Dakar and that of New York. In Haidous shop in 1995, the masks on a
fabric for the local market were decked out with cravats and pearl chokers.
Fabrics for Senegalese consumption confirmed Fatous claim that Senegalese
tend to like designs laden with lots of motifs, as well as what she called
insignificant designs, by which she meant designs that did not have symbolic
or iconic figures. The Dakarois clients do appropriate these figures, but incorp-
orate them into designs laden with many motifs so that they shed their symbolic
meaning and assume the status of abstract figures. One such genre divided the
fabric into several stripes or squares, each recirculating a motif from an older
Sotiba fabric, and thus increasing the number of different motifs the fabric
could hold. For example, an enormous design for Dakarois client Yazbak
combined touristic pots and stools, vines, mudcloth print, birds, and small
figures that had never been anything but abstract. On the other hand, flowered
or abstract wax designs could be adapted to the American market by the
addition of gold embossing.
Motifs came not only from American designs but from every imaginable
source. For Dakarois client Wazni, a design named Bobines had big hearts,
spools, and threaded needles. Spool-needle-thread motifs were popular and
appeared in a multitude of variants and combinations. But while their popul-
arity could be explained by their obvious symbolic value, referencing the fabric
itself and the widespread practice of sewing, fork-knife-and-spoon motifs were
equally, but more inexplicably, popular in a country where most households
did not use forks or matching flatware. Certain kinds of African motifs, not
representing a general Africanity but coming from specific cultures, were not
made for export but rather found great favor on the Senegalese market. Lamine
had copied out of a book from Cte dIvoire the same Korogho mythological
figures that the Nigerian designer Jimi King had used on t-shirts (see Chapter 1).
Large-sized versions of these figures were scattered across one fabric design, where
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Figure 26 Senegalese caftan of Sotiba print with mythological figures from Ivoirian
Korogho story cloth. Los Angeles African Marketplace, 1993.
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151
miniature versions of them were placed closely together on another (Figure
26, p.150). Their popularity, evoking for consumers the famed hand-woven
and hand-painted Korogho story cloth, caused them to be recirculated in many
guises.
As a further addition to its thousands of lgos and touristic designs, Sotiba
also has hundreds of what it calls tissus vnementiels or occasional fabrics,
depicting every event and institution, and demonstrating once again the power
of fabric as text to incorporate, imprint and recombine every aspect of cultural
and political history. For example, a major event in 1998 was the Senegalese
wrestling championship between Tapha Gueye, le Tigre de Fass (Tiger of Fass,
a neighborhood in Dakar) and a fighter calling himself Tyson, and whose
original name was Mouhamed Ndao. For this fight of the century Sotiba
had made two fabrics, one in a tigerskin print with a huge photo of Guye,
the other in American stars and stripes with the photo of Tyson. Because of
their flamboyance they found favor with some of the young griot drummers
at the political election rallies in the months following the fight.
In a cooperative venture with Senegals most popular singer, Youssou NDour,
Sotiba had created small abstract prints named after each of his songs. The
singers signature was included on the fabric selvedge alongside the GARANTI
VERITABLE IMI-WAX imprint. In honor of Youssou NDour singing the
Anthem at the 1998 World Cup Soccer Tournament, Sotiba had made for each
of its Dakar clients fabrics printed with a photo of the singer ensconced in a
soccer ball. The image was laid over striped combinations of smaller designs
that had been well circulated and recirculated. Each client had the right to
choose a single background design with the photos. Barrouds background had
stripes of masks and checks of imitation hand-woven sru rbbal.
But these occasional designs were not just for Dakar. One that sold well
in Paris had crossed tennis racquets. Others ran the gamut of commercial,
political and religious messages. One had jars of Nivea hand cream in two color
variants. Another, rolling off the presses during the electoral campaigns at the
time of my 1998 field work, was inscribed with Parti Socialiste, and contained
photos of President Diouf and the party secretary, with the red and green party
symbol as overall background. UNICEF had a fabric with images and slogans
for Planning Familial, hung in the Sample Room not far from fabrics contain-
ing images of saints and churches with Christian slogans for Catholic feasts.
One fabric coming off the presses had large images of the Virgin Mary standing
on a map of Africa inscribed with the dates and places where the immaculate
conception had occurred around the world. Lamine commented unaccount-
ably: This is very pretty as a design. Most prevalent were a variety of crescent
and star fabrics, like a Haidous design named Vrit, for this majority
Muslim country. Another kind of occasional series contained fabrics with the
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photo of each African president who had visited Senegal. But the most elab-
orate of the presidential fabrics commemorated the recent visit of Present Bill
Clinton in March of 1998. It contained large photos of the American President
and the Senegalese President, a photo of black and white hands clasped, the
words Vive la coopration Amricano-Sngalaise, the seals of the two
countries, and the maps of the two countries, against the background of a small
African print.
For the most common fabric genre, limi-wax or le lgos, each design came
in several color variants, including variants both with and without le crack.
Fatou, who had developed her own naming system for the different types of
design, often at odds with Lamines terminology, called the variant with le
crack typiquement wax and the one without it typiquement lgos. Here
again, in her terminology le lgos separates itself from le wax as its mere
imitation to stand on its own as an independent genre. Summing up this
abundance of imi-wax, lgos, symbolic, abstract and occasional designs, Fatou
said to me almost the same thing that Lamine had said in 1995 when I first
met him: You know, imagination is the specialty of the Senegalese. Its the
resources that we lack.
Debates About Industry, Craft, and Art
After the designs are etched on to the copper cylinders, and before they go into
printing, they go to the Testing Room, where workers make samples of the
design in different color variants from which the client can choose. Workers
lay pieces of fabric about two yards by four on a large table, and imprint the
designs either by applying silk screens for each element or by filling the cylinders
with ink and pushing each one by hand very slowly on a conveyance above
the table. Under the table piles of rags on the puddled floor absorb the ink that
spills out of the cylinders. Vieux Dia, an artist who heads the department,
describes his job as doing new research in color. For the samples, he mixes
small amounts of viscous color by hand in old plastic household pitchers or
used food cans at a tiny desk. Measuring with a small copper balance, he
creates new colors whose recipes the printers will multiply for industrial
printing. As the workers wait for more designs to sample, they brew tea. While
they work, one of them, a griot chanteur named Mame Rane Samb, sings
Muslim songs in a booming voice. It is in this department, which by contemp-
orary standards is almost bereft of modern technology, that Sotiba does the
R&D to create new colors and printing techniques.
We have seen how World Bank documents (Biggs et al. 1994; Webster and
Fidler 1996) simply assume that corporate mass-production is superior to and
should replace craft. The designers, dyers, printers and managers at Sotiba
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defend the importance of craft. An even more important contrast with World
Bank discourse, however, is that the staff constantly debates issues of craft and
industry. The Director of Marketing, like most senior executives an Indian,
maintained that Sotiba fabric was not a mass product in the export market.
He said, How an African designer develops and conceives a design is different
from an Asian. If the fabric were mass produced, its exclusivity or uniqueness
would be devalued.
Vieux Dia dwelt most thoughtfully on the mediation between craft and
industrial process. He expressed the strong belief that the values one brought
to the production process made themselves visible in the finished product, and
commented that he did not use his full artistic talent in his work: When you
go into industry, you lose a lot. Dia defended the expensive cost of the research
and spoke against computers in the design process simply as cost- and time-
saving devices, upholding the Senegalese values of creativity and inspiration:
In the matter of creation putting two designs together comes from the inspir-
ation of the artist himself. Like the other designers, Dia did acknowledge that
in processes of color reproduction and fabrication computers could be useful.
After showing me his batik paintings, the most beautiful I had seen in
Senegal, he touched upon another much debated issue at Sotiba, the relative
superiority of either formally educated professionals (mostly male) or crafts-
women who learned from their mothers (see chapter 2). In this debate, questions
of craft were mapped on to questions of gender. Dia advised me to stay away
from academic settings while doing my research and to frequent craft people
who had learned through practice. He said, You must frequent the groupings
of women, who have less technique and are more artisanal. There is much more
artistic and cultural value in the world of craft than in industry.
But another manager expressed contempt for the mamans or bonnes
femmes who had inherited the knowledge of hand dyeing (see chapter 2). The
son of the man revered for inventing chemical indigo had recently been appointed
Production Manager. Educated as a chemist and formerly the head dyer, he
told me that the dye for the guine was his personal formula, a trade
secret. When I asked if the Soninke women had not done true indigo, he said,
What women do in pots cant be the same. They only use vat dyes. Then
after explaining in some detail the process, he said You dont need all these
technical details for the working classes. The women wont understand this.
When I later told the tailor Abdou Niang that dyers at Sotiba claimed to have
the secret of indigo, he said: Theyre telling you stories. Its the women of
Fuuta who hold the secret of indigo. Its a leaf from trees. (Indeed, Bakary,
one of the men in the vast Tandjan family of Soninke dyers, had told me that
as a boy he had he prepared the leaves of the plant for his mother, but the plant
no longer grows in the drought-stricken Fuuta Tooro.) According to some of
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the men at Sotiba, the women dyers cannot exactly reproduce the same color
twice, and therefore have no real knowledge of dyeing, but Dia expressed
another view. As the person responsible for creating new colors at Sotiba, he
said: He [a chemist] cannot have their [the women dyers] richness and
originality of colors. In the industrial world, one works with a recipe. For them
[the women] its from the senses, the emotions. Its always sensorial. They could
have a personal recipe. In this long-standing historical gender division,
knowledge for Dia was inseparable from art and rested on the feminine side.
These debates arise from Sotibas mediating position between corporate
industry and informal craft, and concern class as well as gender. They concern
not only the male workers rivalry with the craftswomen, but in another
dimension, their relation to the factory owners. In this latter debate moderniz-
ation and artistic values do not conflict with each other but come together
in criticism of the owners for not investing in the design and printing mach-
inery, and for not buying the best gray cloth and dyes. As intermediaries
between craft and mass-production, the designers and technicians share not
only the values of artisans, but also a broad and detailed knowledge of all the
production processes in the factory. Lamine once commented: I know [this
factory] like my pocket.
It would be a mistake to see the concerns of the designers and technical
workers at Sotiba simply reflecting an earlier, more backward, outdated mode
of production. While they have a different perspective than that of the World
Bank economists quoted elsewhere, several of them have given a lot of thought
to the problems of maintaining their artistic and production values while
introducing computerization into both design and color mixing. In their
analysis, the new owners have been lax about issues of quality while at the
same time not modernizing enough. During my field study at Sotiba, Lamine
took me into a tiny room at the end of the hallway behind the design room,
where he was researching design motifs. The room had been a library stocked
with leather-bound sample books of beautiful wax prints from Switzerland,
brought to Sotiba in the 1960s when one of the owners was Swiss. The ledgers,
containing thousands of old wax prints, were now ruined and mildewed,
covered with a thick coat of dust, and strewn about on shelves and floor with
old pieces of film and other discarded objects. Lamine expressed distress with
the way the owners were letting these ledgers go to ruin, as well as with their
indifference to preserving Sotibas thousands of old films that he said should
be stored in computers.
Staff also expressed concern for the quality of the dyes and gray cloth. Dia
said that on occasion the cylinders produce thick signs because they had been
reused too many times. Alice, the head of quality control, said that the colors
imported from India were less brilliant and less stable than those formerly
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imported from Europe. Like other staff people, she expressed regret that the
owners did not put more resources into developing Sotibas shrinking markets
in Togo, Benin and Cte dIvoire. Under the new owners, Sotiba no longer
delivers the fabrics to its clients in Dakar, nor does it extend credit to them,
and so sales in Dakar have fallen. During my second week of field study in
the factory, Lamine expressed dismay at the fact that the design department
had sent in an order for developer fluid a week before, and that the financial
director had not released funds for it. The work was stalled. Despite these
issues, the staff still expressed pride in and took care to preserve the quality
of the fabric. Fatou Fall, the head of the color archive room said: Thats why
there are still clients who remain.
Sotibas need to modernize the design and production process, and at the
same time maintain the artistic and cultural values of the staff, becomes
especially acute as the veteran designers and printers from the 1960s approach
an age when they can no longer work. Several people, both inside and outside
the factory, repeated the commonly held view that in the absence of investing
in modernization, the new owners are relying on these veterans with the skill,
knowledge and devotion to keep the decrepit design equipment and production
machines functioning. While in the factory, I encountered almost universal
concern among the staff for maintaining aesthetic and production quality as
well as the Sotiba reputation. Even Dia, who was wary of certain kinds of
modernization, commented: The policy of UB is to make men work instead
of modernizing. He voiced here yet another concern I encountered throughout
my field study, a concern on the part of department heads for aging workers.
On one occasion, while I was talking to Lamine and the head of the guine
department, an old skilled machine operator left his machine and asked another
worker to relieve him. He is a little tired, said Lamine in a sympathetic tone.
All of those, theyre the old ones, the people who have been around here a
long time.
Between Corporate and Informal Business Cultures
These comments by Lamine suggest how Sotibas intermediate position applies
not only to artistic, technical and economic values, but also to what the World
Bank document Africa Can Compete! calls business culture (Biggs et al.
1994: 24, see Chapter 4). This document itself represents a business culture
whose primary concern is to maximize the profits of the multinational corp-
orations. In regard to the workers, it expresses only the concern that their labor
be as cheap as possible and their output as rapid as possible. In this matter as
well, the department heads and supervisors at Sotiba mediate between corp-
orate industry and informal craft. When I first met Lamine as supervisor of
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design in 1995, the Senegalese economy was in the process of restructuration
after the 50 percent devaluation of its currency, the franc CFA. He talked about
how upset he was after some recent layoffs, and took me to visit one of the
young laid-off designers, now trying to free-lance in his crowded and shabby
apartment in the popular suburb of Pikine. Thats what the restructuring is,
Lamine fumed. They laid off 250 without understanding that these people
are really necessary.
While I was visiting the cutting department in 1998, the department head
said in a sympathetic tone in front of a worker: Its the most painful work in
the department. There is a disease of the hands that occurs. But it was Syllas
words which most vividly distanced this business culture from the corporate
values expressed in World Bank documents, because he was speaking in his
official capacity as a Sotiba manager. I asked him what he did as head of the
design department when a client wanted a fabric design in bad taste, and he
replied: There is no good or bad taste. What sells well has good taste. I have
500 employees. I have to pay them every month. Accustomed to a business
culture that does not question downsizing, outsourcing, and laying off
workers to increase profits and enhance competition (the policy of UB itself),
I found it striking that Sylla mentioned paying the workers as the first concern,
rather than profits and competing.
The difference between business cultures can be illustrated by way of contrast
between these managers and one of Sotibas large American clients, Massata.
Although I interviewed Massata at his factory in Dakar, and although he is
Senegalese, his company is in reality an American-registered manufacturing
and retail corporation, at that time on Seventh Avenue in New York, where
he had lived since about 1978. In 1998, Massata manufactured in the Industrial
Zone of Dakar strictly for export to his American boutiques, for the Essence
catalog, and for the authentic Afrocentric line of JCPenney. He had started
producing for JCPenney in 1991 or 1992 before moving his factory to Senegal.
In addition he produced for TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and for his own Massata
label, marketed through a glossy catalog, distributed he told me, in one and
a half million copies. Unlike the tailors of Dakar, Massata has his patterns made
by computer in the United States, and sent to the Dakar factory, where a
machine lays the patterns and cuts the cloth. He told me proudly that he has
400 machines. He is the largest clothing manufacturer in Senegal and the only
one who does assembly-line work.
Massata could be an illustration of the exemplary African garment producer
as fantasized by the World Bank in Africa Can Compete! (Chapter 4). In his
discourse the notion of the authentic realizes the World Bank ideal of
becoming purely the means of increasing profits. Massata advertises on the
cover of his Afrocentric American fashion catalog that he uses authentic
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fabrics made in Senegal, meaning Sotiba fabric. Yet during our interview, he
said, I dont give a hoot to where it [the fabric] comes from. I dont care if
youre my grandpa. Thats the bottom line. Here they dont care that we are
in hard competition with the States. His fabric motifs include maps of Africa,
elephants and pots, all embossed with gold, and have nostalgic names like
African source. He defended his practice of highlighting the use of authentic
fabrics made in Senegal by saying, African fabric is our trademark. Like
World Bank documents, Massata expressed disdain for the craft production
of clothing as inefficient and therefore uncompetitive. He explained the failure
of JCPenneys venture with another African manufacturer as follows:
[He] had a bad experience with JCPenney. In Africa we dont know about clothing.
We can make a nice piece for Mr. David, but we cant make a hundred-and-fifty-
thousand and make it right . . . People have no idea how to make a style, put it to
form, duplicate it and make a good sample. They dont use a pattern. All they know
is tailoring. They dont know about production . . . In the States they teach me time
is money. Here time is time.
Given Massatas utter dismissal of the possibility that time not totally sub-
sumed to increasing capital could have any other value, it is not surprising that
his treatment of workers fits this unquestioned World Bank model as well.
After taking me into his office, he turned on a computer monitor that surveys
the factory floor, and said: An audio signal will tell me if a guy is making a
wrong turn on an outfit. In another year I can see them from New York. He
barked at a young woman employee to model the fashions for me. Perhaps
this surveillance and intimidation constitute the proper management that
World Bank economists assert with great authority (Biggs et al. 1994: 3), but
some of Massatas neighbors think otherwise. Two tailors who work in a
uniform workshop in the Industrial Zone told me that he has the reputation
of being nasty to his workers.
Yet with all this, Massata is still at some remove from the business culture
of multinational corporations. Rather than subcontracting his production to
distant sweatshops, he knows his workers, his factory is light and clean, and
he supplies the workers their noon meal according to Senegalese custom. In
contrast to the giant American corporate retailers, moreover, Massata is proud
of his fashion-production skills, and still brings to the work the Senegalese
value of creativity: Im the designer, teacher, sewer. I sew the machine faster
than anyone . . . I dont look at fashion magazines. I bring my own creativity.
And he shared the insiders consensus about the state of Sotiba: For dyers
and printing its the best in the world. Its technically baloney but the workers
have so much experience.
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Sotiba in the United States: An Intermediate Space
Between Senegalese and American Business Cultures
Sotibas other two major American clients, Sotiba USA and Homeland, both
owned by Senegalese immigrants, occupy, like Sotiba itself, a hybrid space
between American corporate culture and the values of the Senegalese artisanal
economy. But since these companies are located in the United States, their space
of economic and cultural hybridity differs from that of Sotiba. Where the staff
people of Sotiba negotiate the cross-currents between industrial production
and the technical, creative and aesthetic values of Senegalese craft, the American
clients negotiate the elusive paradoxes of the authentic. In fact, of all the nodes
in the global circuits through which Sotiba fabric travels, New York is the point
which historically engendered it as authentic African cloth. For the two
American clients, the authentic does not take the form of a pure marketing
strategy as for JCPenney and Massata, nor the form of willful ignorance as in
the Bowers Museum Gift Shop and Africa Can Compete! The authentic is
instead a sign, born of diasporic displacements, with an impossible referent.
Like the Kenyans whose desire for their own national dress emerges from
leaving Kenya and seeing from the outside their national identity (Chapter 3),
the two major American importers have also arrived at the necessity to articulate
an identification with Senegalese culture through their geographic separation
from it.
Exiled from immersion in the culture of ones birth as second invisible nature,
one identifies with it through its necessarily commodified objects, of which
fabric and fashion are prime examples. Sotiba fabric in this case embodies
the oxymoronic status of objects named as authentic. Objects are called
authentic when they are removed from an original context in which they
are an integral part of daily life (Clifford 1988: 215). The label authentic
signifies the former unity with its users, its producers and its environment that
the object no longer enjoys. When it did exist within this unity, in the words
of Virginetta Turner, as their air, their way of life, or as her son-in-law Bede
Sssensalo says, taken for granted, there is no reason to single out an object
as authentic. To be called authentic means to have suffered the loss of
authenticity.
For the two major American importers of Sotiba fabric, negotiating the
paradoxical authenticity of African print fabric is even more complex. It serves
on the one hand the cultural quest for a valued identity. At the same time the
marketing of authentic African print fabrics serves the business necessity of
carving out a unique niche in a very competitive and fickle market. Given the
economic pressures to compete in global markets by reducing the cultural
significance of commodities while speeding up and cheapening their production,
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these two endeavors can come into conflict. The importers construct, each in
his own way, a balance in the cross current between the two necessities
cultural and economic as they create a bridge between potentially conflicting
sets of values.
Sotiba USA
Started by Sotiba Marketing Director Salla Tour in 1991, and originally
owned by Sotiba, Sotiba USA is now a subsidiary of Afriland Inc. Tour
purchased it during the 199394 closure of Sotiba, and by 1998, had sold all
his shares in Sotiba Dakar. Tour is still a client of Sotiba and remains on
friendly terms with them, but he also buys fabric from Benin and Cameroon,
whose prints on heavier cotton have more subdued colors than those from
Senegal. He also manufactures clothing and gift items, as well as Afrocentric
furniture.
The Afriland, Inc./Sotiba USA store on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan is a
long, narrow two-story room, with a loft running along one side, and on the
other thirty-foot lengths of lgos fabric in all patterns and colors festooned
down the wall. Tables and shelves hold rolls and packets of fabric, each bound
by a paper band emblazoned with the motto a piece of our culture. This play
on words in Wolof piis means cloth graphically performs the engendering
of the authentic when tangible objects are split off from a culture as lived
process and thereby come to stand for it as synecdochal fragments. As piece
or fragment that reflects the lost culture as in a magnifying, idealizing mirror,
an object becomes authentic. The Sotiba motto also serves to negotiate the
juncture between cherished cultural values and economic necessity. When I
asked Tour about the problem of Indians in New York making cheap copies
of Sotiba, he said: Its not right because it is supposed to come from Africa,
as a piece of our culture. When I asked if the motto and the idea of fabric
coming from Africa were personally important to him for cultural reasons or
a marketing strategy or both, he said with conviction: I am proud to prove
that whatever I sell comes from Africa. I target the ethnic market. Whatever
I carry is from Africa. My customers need to know. So I can prove it.
In recounting the history of Afriland, Inc. and Homeland, Tour unknotted
and rewove the threads of the history by which Sotiba lgos shed its status as
colonialist imitation through a transformative diasporic journey, and came into
its own as a sui generis authentic fabric. Im the person who brought African
fabric to the US, he told me, and explained that before he began importing,
the fabric for the dashikis of the 1960s and 1970s was supplied by black
Americans who brought fabric in their luggage. But in 1989 for the first time,
Tour, as Marketing Director for Sotiba, exhibited at the fabric trade show
in the Javits Center. Muhammed Diop [at that time an art dealer, now owner
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of Homeland] was in my booth. He sold peinture sous verre. I asked him to
join me. I wanted him as a client. He became my first major client.
Tour became very enthusiastic as he recounted the bygone days of Sotibas
introduction to the United States. He fetched an old file folder containing photos,
newspaper articles, documents and letters, each successive item a key to how
lgos attained its status as authentic African fabric. An article on his exhibition
from the New York Times of October 16, 1989, had the headline: Where is
Senegal? Womens Wear Daily also wrote an article. I have all the mails
between him [Diop] and me . . . I believed in this market. My boss was skeptical.
The Managing Director said, You will lose all of Sotibas money in your
American adventure. Ironically, this was at the very time that the owners
were embezzling millions and driving Sotiba into bankruptcy and closure.
Tours old folder also contained his handwritten consumer survey. During
that first show he knew he had to change the fabric for the American market,
and he had each visitor rate 55 fabrics according to size of the design, presence
or absence of le crack, and color combinations, precisely those differences
between fabrics for the American and African markets that had been pointed
out to me again and again in the Dakar factory. Tour had done such surveys
in Guinea and Sierra Leone. I did not learn about surveys in marketing books.
[In Africa] I would go to the main street of the Capital. The first 100 women
I pass in a new dress, I ask what type of motifs and what color combinations
they like. I did the same in the US. The logic is the same anywhere. Now tastes
have changed and consumers dont know what they want. With apparent
nostalgia, Tour told me about his first order to Diop for $1,200, five pieces
of one design, three pieces of another. He laughed about these tiny quantities.
In 1998, his own company had three to four thousand yards of each design,
and between 100 and 120 designs in stock at any given time.
The part of this interview that most challenged my assumptions about the
Sotiba fabrics for the American market was Tours story about the origin of
gold embossing. It did not originate in some perceived taste for shiny fabric
among African Americans. Around 1992, Pakistanis in New York started
making cheap copies of the fabric, and, according to Tour, his client Homeland
told him, You have to fight. So he supplemented the reactive dyes used in
the color printing with the pigment dye for metallic gold. The additional
process made it difficult for the Pakistanis to copy right away, and as an added
benefit, the gold embossing increased his sales. By 1998, ninety-nine percent
of his Sotiba designs had this gold.
Homeland
A small Senegalese tailor shop on Eighth Avenue, in Harlem, New York, bears
the sign Abdous Homeland Fashion and Embroidery, a tribute in the
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Senegalese style that names small businesses after august places to the iconic
status of Homeland as purveyor of African fashion in the United States.
Homeland itself, the public name of Muhammed Diops International Business
Network, occupies part of a building on Seventh Avenue. It has no showroom,
but simply a bare hall, lined with racks of clothing, leading to a large office.
Homeland is run by Diops nephew Abdoulaye Djiw. Warm and charming,
Abdoulaye has a Masters degree from Paris in geography, and worked on a
dam in West Africa before coming to New York.
In the interview with me, Abdoulaye connected his work with the fabric to
his passion for Wolof culture and language. To preserve our heritage, he
insisted on speaking a pure Wolof with no French mixed in, something unheard
and unheard of in post-colonial Dakar, and so perhaps the mark of a desire
for the authentic born of distance from the community and culture where the
language is a second nature. Like Sotiba lgos as authentic African fabric, the
pure Wolof language was an offspring of New York. And indeed, Abdoulaye
had created a fabric design incorporating the origins of his language. With
evident enthusiasm, he pulled out of his briefcase a book on Egyptian art and,
leafing through it, discussed at length the connections between Egyptian and
Wolof vocabulary. As I looked at the images and listened to Abdoulaye,
I realized where the Nefertiti, ankh and hieroglyphic motifs on the fabric in
the Sotiba factory had come from. Contrary to my preconception that they
had been inspired by American Afrocentric philosophy, they had come from
Abdoulayes passionate linguistic studies.
Of the family business that he had been running for nine or ten years,
Abdoulaye said, The business has been my entire life. You know how difficult
it is to start something. His uncle, who was already a successful businessman
when he became a client of Sotiba, rented an office and installed a phone for
Abdoulaye. I barely spoke English . . . We started selling Sotiba and fabric
from Cte dIvoire at trade shows and flea markets . . . Both wholesale and
retail, whatever worked. The first show was at Boys and Girls High School,
and I sold off a table because I could not get a booth. In 1998, Homeland
was ordering much less from Sotiba, and was also buying from factories in
Ghana, Nigeria, Cte dIvoire and North Carolina. For the past five years, they
were mainly using the fabric for their own manufacture of clothing, hats, bags
and more recently umbrellas. The Homeland catalog goes to 800,000 people
and businesses. Homeland also sold to Sears, but had discontinued its contract
with JCPenney. Abdoulayes explanation of this brings into focus differences
between the notion of authentic African fashion that he had been so influential
in establishing, and that of JCPenney and the World Bank.
The difference concerns the way that Abdoulaye negotiates African artisanal
and American mass-production modes of fashion manufacture. Contrasting
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Homeland to the manufacturer African Village, an Indian company which also
sells to JCPenney, he said, African Village is made with cheap labor overseas.
Our garments are manufactured right here. The tailor shop is right here [in
the building]. We used to have 40 tailors. He then made the distinction
between tailoring and clothing production, as Massata had done, but in a
different tone and with a different analysis. We hired Senegalese who sew
well. But to sew well and to produce are two different things. We didnt know
that for a long time. My uncle is a banker, and I am a geographer. What did
we know? Once they realized they had to change, they did not, however, set
up an assembly line. Instead, Homeland devised a novel compromise: We split
the machinery among the tailors that wanted their own shop. We couldnt pay
the rent and salaries. We gave them work by the piece. They proposed the price
and if we agreed, we gave them work. In order to ensure uniformity, the
garments are cut by specialists in the garment district. Each tailor has three
or four people working for him. In addition, five tailors continue to work
directly for and are paid by Homeland.
They design the sample. Then the marking and grading are done in the garment
district. The cutting as well. We only cut the most difficult items. Then the five guys
cut and sew the most difficult garments. The five guys design together. We all have
ideas of what we want for our next catalog. Everyone brings input. The five make
samples without a pattern. We shoot the samples. If a photo is picked, it goes [into
production and] into the catalog.
Through this production process, Abdoulaye has adopted features of tailoring
in the Senegalese informal economy that have the potential, in certain social
contexts, to provide an alternative to corporate mass-production, and has
shaped them into a production process with the expressed intent to be both
ethical and businesslike.
Sotiba: From Imitation to Imitated
Abdoulaye said: In 1990, we were the only ones selling this authentic fabric
in the US. Initiated by Homeland and Sotiba USA, lgos fabric was reborn
in the United States into the paradoxically august status it now enjoys. As
evidence of their authenticity, the American designs have become the object
of imitation by Asian manufacturers. Korean producers in Los Angeles and
Pakistani or Indian producers in New York scan the Sotiba fabrics on to a
computer and either print them or email them to relatives in Asia. (A side irony
attending the self-contradictory meanings of the authentic is that both the
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owners of the Sotiba company in Dakar and the imitators in New York are
Indian.) The mass-produced copies have duller colors and do not print on the
reverse side of the fabric. In the Dakar factory, as we have seen, duplicating
as closely as possible le wax includes ensuring that the colored designs show
equally on both sides of the fabric. The Managing Director Menan, himself
an Indian, did not know that Indians copy Sotiba designs in the United States
and was surprised to hear it: But are they able to make the double-sided
prints? he asked. For him, this was the sine qua non of a successful copy. And
connoisseurs of African fabric in the United States check the color of the
underside to make sure that the fabric is authentic African print. The low-
quality copies have the double effect of driving the more expensive Sotiba
fabric off the market, and also of cheapening the designs themselves so that
they cease to be popular.
As we have seen, in Abdoulaye Djiws notion of the authentic, there is an
attempt to materialize in the printed fabric ethical and aesthetic values of the
production process. He said:
JCPenney is so cheap they would rather buy from African Village one size fits all.
Homeland will never do that. It makes several sizes starting at size 8. Some people
are aware of the authenticity of the goods. But some people dont care or cant afford
it. If they buy the imitation, they wear it once and thats it . . . Homeland does not
do cheap garments. The fact that this market is flooded by cheap garments is [why]
the market has shrunk.
Two fabric merchants in Los Angeles expressed the same view in even more
emphatic terms. Both Abdoulaye Djiw and Salla Tour worry that customers
confuse them with the imitators who are also their competitors. Abdoulaye
said: Sometimes people call and ask if its African Village. I just say This aint
African Village. Salla Tour called the cheap imitations a tragedy. They
fool the consumer. When African Village started selling imitation cloth, I got
nasty comments from customers. The fabric carries their roots. They are proud
to wear it. They thought they had been cheated. They thought the garments
came from us.
On the other hand, one could argue that, in certain limited ways, the circula-
tion of African print fabric into the factories of American Asian manufacturers
just continues the epic in which imitations are reclaimed to a more original
status. In 1996, several small Korean manufacturers in the Los Angeles garment
district were producing African clothing. One of them, on Ninth Street, was
called Kos. When I returned to the store a few months later, the Ko family
had changed the name of their establishment to Koko Collection, even creating
a trendy logo that inscribed the name on an African mask. The young man in
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
the showroom said to me of the other Korean manufacturers on Ninth Street,
These other people just do it for the money, but we are really into it.
In this vein, one could also argue that the Asian manufacturers are merely
doing what Sotiba has done to wax prints, and by extension to batik. After
all, lgos is a descendant of fabric that the Europeans brought from Asia. Yet
this fabric that imitates Sotiba has muddy colors and blurred designs. At stake
are issues of identification, on the part of Sotiba workers, importers and
consumers, with the creativity and care that go into the fabric design and the
quality of the finished product. There exist, of course high quality lgos fabrics
produced in Asia. They have been imported to Senegal since at least the 1960s
(Boone 1992; Nielsen 1979: 477). While much of this cloth is smuggled into
Senegal through the parallel economy, some of it is also designed in Dakar for
Lebanese wholesalers who have it printed in Asia. For many years, Lamine
designed cloth at the Sotiba factory for Haidous, but at a certain point he also
started designing cloth at his home for this client, who had it printed in Asia.
In addition, Lamine designed cloth at his home for the brother of Haidous,
who lived in Detroit, sent the designs to be printed in India, and sold them in
Togo. In 1999, the lgos in Haidouss store on the Avenue Lamine Gueye was
mostly printed in India, and Haidous had his own name imprinted on the
selvedge (Figure 27, p.165). The cloth differed from the cheap knock-offs
produced in Asia for sale in the United States in that it displayed original
designs in vibrant colors on high-quality fabric. But Haidous Indian lgos was
the symptom of a new kind of crisis in Sotibas troubled history.
A New Fabric Printing Factory in Dakar
When I revisited the Sotiba factory in August, 1999, the designers were work-
ing on several beautiful designs, but on the main printing floor, only one
machine was printing. In the Guine Department, the men had not worked
for a week, because no fabric had arrived. Lamine told me that things at Sotiba
were going in the direction of affairs before the closure of 1993. Owners
still had not invested in new machinery, and Lamine had not received developer
fluid in ten days. Theyre cheats! But he also took me to a building site on
the Rue de Rufisque outside Dakar, where Haidous, with whom he had worked
for twenty-five years, was building a new fabric-printing factory called Cosetex.
Lamine was deeply involved in the planning, in working with the architect,
and in researching computer equipment for designing and etching. He was very
matter of fact about his researches, although he said: There are certain aspects
that you can only do by hand. He also showed me his diagrams for a machine
he was devising that would print on both sides of the fabric.
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Fact, Fabrication, and Material Misreading
165
Figure 27 Lgos fabric from the Sotiba Dakar factory and from India in the fabric
shop of Chaouki Haidous, Rue Lamine Gueye. Dakar, 1999
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By the summer of 2000, Lamine had left Sotiba and was designing for the
new, as yet unopened factory in a small studio in downtown Dakar, where he
was busy creating a historically new intermediate space. On the draft tables
were piles of beautiful maquettes for lgos and wax designs (Figure 28, p.167).
He had crafted his own photocopy machine to make the silk screen stencils
for sample fabrics. On a table in the middle of the room, as yet unused and
uninstalled, sat three new computers with scanner waiting for the factory to
open. In the cavernous unfinished factory itself, Lamine showed me the design
room he had copied from Sotiba, and the room for printing le wax on a
machine crafted by Lamine and a co-worker.
In this space, a cultural and technological crossroads like Sotiba but symbol-
izing a different historic juncture, the testing room had a machine genre
photocopie for making samples, but also a table for doing them by silkscreen
or hand-pushed rollers as at Sotiba. Similarly, the room for engraving the
copper cylinders had computers, scanners, and lasers for electronic engraving,
but also equipment for designing the films by hand, taping them to cylinders
and etching the designs by photogravure process as at Sotiba. Like Sotiba, but
again with historic differences, the factory serves to denaturalize the social
organization of manufacturing in global capitalism. Instead of closing a local
factory to subcontract in an Asian sweatshop, Haidous reversed this process
by bringing his production from Asia to his own locality. As long-standing
custom of personal clientage requires, the factory has a refectory for the
workers noon meal, Senegals main and for many people only meal.
Sotiba responded to this new competition in 2001 by once again going into
production of wax prints called SOSO Super-Wax. The new rival factory, how-
ever, has a promising future, since Haidous is a savvy businessman who not
only prospered as a fabric merchant but became the co-owner of a powdered
milk company that successfully displaced the all-powerful Nestl in the local
market. Furthermore, he has a built-in clientele among the Lebanese whole-
salers of Dakar. As Lamine said before the factory opened, All the Dakar guys
are already clients. Theyre just waiting. They know that a relative is putting
up a factory. But much more crucially, when I visited the factory, Lamines
best friend for the past thirty years, the technician who had kept the machines
at Sotiba running, was supervising the installation of Cosetexs machines. Two
people from Sotibas testing room and two more from the design department
joined Lamine when the factory opened. As we saw above, the key to Sotibas
continued survival has been the veteran designers and technical workers,
possessed with concern for aesthetic and technical quality as well as the skills
to make beautiful fabric in very difficult conditions. Whether Sotiba can
survive without these veterans remains an open question. But authentic
African print will certainly continue to metamorphose into new forms.
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Fact, Fabrication, and Material Misreading
167
Figure 28 Maquettes (colored ink sample drawings) by fabric designer Lamine
Mbodj for Cosetex. The desk of Lamine Mbodjs downtown Dakar
workshop. 2000.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Note
1. For the importance of cloth in general, see Schneider and Weiner 1989; Weiner
1992. For the significance of African cloth, see Adler and Barnard 1992; California
Afro-American Museum 1986; Eicher 1976; Kent 1971; Mbow 1998; Picton and
Mack 1989; Picton 1995; Reboussin 2001; Sieber 1972; Sieber et.al. 1992; Wahlman
and Chuta 1979; Wahlman 1993.
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169
6
The Entanglements of Exchange,
the Pleasures of Production,
and the Ethics of Export
From Literary Criticism to Ethnographic Method
When I began the research for this book, I had no intention of interacting with
artisans in fieldwork. With a background in textual criticism, I had originally
planned a purely semiotic analysis of African fashion images from texts,
magazines and archival photos. But as many researchers have found, a project
can take on a life of its own, controlling the researcher more than she controls
it. This final chapter recounts the often exhilarating and pervasively troubling
intellectual detours of the project, with their ethical roadblocks. My slow and
unexpected odyssey from nineteenth-century French literature and history to
ethnographic fieldwork in Africa led to ethical contradictions I still have not
resolved as it led to the unavoidable blurring of boundaries between academic
research and helping artisans export their products.
1
My research, I had to
realize, was, like the artisans work it was studying, enmeshed in global capital-
ism and the Structural Adjustment Programs which gear African economies
to export. Stories in this chapter of some of these export activities attempt to
sort out the double binds that invade the work of the artisans, my relations
with them, and the integrity of the research.
But first, back to the beginning. Conference presentations of my earliest
work drew from African American colleagues the advice that I find out how
African and African American people thought and felt about these fashions.
That meant doing fieldwork in the African American community, something
for which my lack of methodological training made me doubtful. Colleagues
in social sciences gave me generous help in field methodology.
2
But still mindful
of my inexperience in the mysterious methods of ethnographic research, not
to mention my positions as a white woman and a Westerner, I remained
determined to focus only on things as opposed to people in their migration
through different zones of meaning. The artisans I was interviewing and
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
gradually spending a lot of time with, however, came to the encounter with
other ideas. They brought me to understand that the social life of things
cannot be separate from the social life of people.
With no formal training in fieldwork, I fell back on the only methodological
resources at my disposal. Among them was my literary training. Doing field-
work placed me in a similar mental/emotional space as that for reading a novel,
but the terms had shifted. No longer a critic, I was now, or so it seemed,
immersed in a contradictory narrative that unfolded before me. This narrative
was enmeshed in the tragedy of post-colonial society. But within that, on the
other hand, went the unfinished story of each informant. The question of where
their creative energies and hopeful plans would lead them in their lives aroused
my constant curiosity. As I followed the Ariadnes thread of fieldwork, artisans
in Los Angeles led me to other artisans, who in turn led me through unexpected
turns in the global maze of the African fashion network in Kenya and then
Senegal. The artisans drew me into areas where familiar intellectual borders
disappeared. Here, symbolics and survival, culture and economics, production
of meanings and production of objects, pleasure and oppression could not be
pulled apart into separate conceptual categories. Boundaries that still emphat-
ically wall off spaces into disciplines and departments in the American university
did not exist in the workshops, homes and marketplaces of the African fashion
network. Moreover, the artisans and I had very different methods of navigating
the gap between the map that guided their struggles for creativity and survival
and the disciplinary and methodological map that was supposed to be guiding
my research.
Most unnerving to me was the way in which, or so it seemed from my point
of view, many artisans insisted on erasing the boundaries between my map and
theirs or put another way, they insisted on seeing our exchanges from their
point of view rather than from mine. As people caught in a desperate economic
situation and immersed in rich cultures still beyond my understanding, they
indeed brought a different point of view. The very subject of my research, the
inseparable relation between cultural and economic exchange, carried on
with people involved in commercial exchange in the informal economy, was
rebounding back on my research and expanding it into directions out of my
control. Where I as scholar was seeking a symbolic exchange of information,
the artisans saw in addition an opportunity for economic exchange (as well
as cultural exchange of another sort). At a basic level, each researcher-artisan
encounter comprised at least two wholly different realms of exchange, from
two different worlds. The (to me) often confusing, uneasy and painstaking
negotiations determined how these two levels of exchange would mesh, and
how each would reshape the other.
My association with Wairimu Wachira comprises the first and most long-
lasting of these negotiation processes. From the very beginning, she did not
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171
separate research activities and selling. When we set up our first trip to Kenya,
we struck the following deal. She would be my research assistant, and I would
be the investor in her import project. In exchange for my lending her money
to buy merchandise before we set off, she would use the proceeds from her
sales in Kenya to supply me with Kenyan currency during my stay. When,
during our research in Nairobi, we first met the jewelers from the Pikanjoh
company in the Blue Market (Chapter 3), I overheard her setting up the
research visit to their workshop and inquiring about export opportunities in
practically the same breath. (Ironically, she did not buy jewelry for export from
Pikanjoh, while three years later, I brought an export order from them for Third
World Handarts.)
But our different agendas, given the time constraints, did not mesh so easily.
During the trip, we both felt internal conflicts and reciprocal remorse. Wairimu
repeatedly expressed worry that I was not finding what I was looking for, and
that she was not helping me enough because she spent so much time trying to
sell the fashions she had brought. I worried that I was taking her away from
her selling and forcing her to place a priority on my research. I worried whether
our reciprocal taking advantage of the other was remaining in balance. Yet
we did manage to negotiate the conflicts that have threaded their pattern
through our relationship, as we have since 1993 done research and exporting,
and have jointly fantasized setting up a small design business.
Gift Exchange and Commodity Exchange
In Senegal, however, the already perplexing misfit between research and
commercial exchange was complicated by further cultural differences. Both
exchanges took place within the Senegalese system that incorporated a system
of gift exchange into a capitalist economy.
3
It was the dyer Gnouma Diagana
and her large, prominent Soninke family in Dakar (Chapter 2) that began my
education in its intricacies. Proud of her talents and conscious of her reputation
as a grande artiste, Gnouma was one of several artisans from whom I studied
dyeing techniques for several months in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Women dyers
in Senegal work at home. They boil the water, mix the chemicals, dip and wring
the fabric in courtyards at the center of houses inhabited by their extended
families, and often amounting to villages within the city. Clients bring their
own fabric to the house and engage in lengthy discussions over the colors they
want to order.
The first time I arranged to observe Gnoumas work, I would have liked to
simply pay for some custom work in return, as had been my practice with
craftspeople in South Central Los Angeles. But I did not have sufficient know-
ledge to quickly buy fabric and place an order. I photographed and took notes
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while she did work on another order. Afterwards we joined a couple of cousins
on the mattresses in her sitting room, and she talked to them at length about
how much more interesting it was to have the person than to have the money.
A person, she said, was always at the other end of the phone when one called,
and one could always talk to that person, whereas money disappears quickly
and you cant talk to it when you call on the phone. The next day, she spoke
similarly to the people gathered in her room. But this time, having pondered
her words the previous night, I said that although I realized she did not want
payment, I wanted to give her a gift. She repeated that she had not asked me
for anything, and I said that I knew this, but that I really wanted to give her
a gift. An ancient economic system, in Wolof and Soninke society, gift exchange
has become an integral, and much debated element of the crisis-ridden modern
economy in urban Senegal.
More than a year later, when I had returned to Dakar, Gnouma was teaching
me how to do the method of flour-resist fabric design called xosi. The large
size of the three-meter length of fabric made us shift our work from the court
to the street in front of her house. My novice work thus became subject to
comments not only by the host of relatives coming and going in her court, but
by the stream of passersby, some of them neighbors who had also brought me
into their household. One old man stopped to ask Gnouma in Wolof why she
was teaching xosi to a Toubab. Because shes my friend, answered Gnouma.
When we were finished and lounging in her room, she recounted to a visiting
cousin: An old man came by and asked why I was teaching xosi to a Toubab.
I told him I did it because she was my friend. Turning to me, she elaborated:
Were friends. Were comrades. Now initiated, I immediately insisted on
giving her a gift, something which I had planned to do all along, while she
insisted that she would teach me xosi even if I did not give her anything,
although, as she confided to me, she would make any other Toubab pay by
the hour.
When I gave something to the craftspeople in exchange for demon-
strations and even the fabric and clothing they made for me, the money that
passed between us was not a payment. For one thing, tailors and dyers often
told their clients to give what you want rather than quote them a fixed
price. But more important, contrary to the practice of Western capitalism, my
obligation did not end with the act of payment. Rather, it drew me into an
ongoing, and seemingly more limitless, relation of reciprocal obligations.
Even before Gnouma and her family initiated me into the practices of gift
exchange, her half-brother and daughter theorized it for me. The first morning
I spent in Gnoumas room, waiting for her to give me that first dyeing demon-
stration and watching the stream of relatives entering and exiting, I tried
to understand the scene by fitting it into familiar categories. I thus had an
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Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
173
experience, not uncommon for a fieldworker, in which she finds her informants
more sophisticated than she in analyzing their experience according to the
concepts she thought were her own. I was thinking about a theory by University
of Dakar Professor Malick Ndiaye, according to whom the apparently urban
facades of Dakarois houses turn out to mask, upon deeper acquaintance, structures
and practices of village life, reproduced in the city. I was thinking, though never
having been to a Senegalese village, that this house must be what Ndiaye was
talking about. At this moment, Gnoumas younger half brother entered and
introduced himself to me. He turned out to be a student of Ndiayes at the
university, and more knowledgeable than I on this theory. He asked me about
my research, and when I told him I was there studying the global circulation
of African fashion, he said: Oh, then youre studying exchange, like in Marcel
Mausss work on the gift. He and Gnoumas daughter proceeded to offer my
already dazed brain a detailed comparison of the finer points of gift exchange
in Wolof and Soninke marriages. It was later that night that I saw the connection
between this general description and Gnoumas indirect references to money.
The Wolof and Soninke systems of gift exchange, traditionally based on the
core values of hospitality, nobility and generosity, regulated relations between
casted artisans and their noble patrons well into the twentieth century. They
have intertwined with a capitalist economy as these have developed together
from the time of the slave trade. In the current economic crisis, people see gift
exchange, depending on their situation, as an exploitative obstacle to healthy
development or as a healthy buffer against the depredations of post-colonial
structural adjustment programs. The author Sembne Ousmane, for instance,
shows in Le Mandat, his novella and film about economic desperation in post-
colonial Dakar, a tradition of reciprocal generosity between neighbors
dialectically transformed into an inescapable practice of reciprocal exploitation
(1966). But it can also maintain solidarities and obligations that help people
survive when all the official economic and governmental institutions have
failed them.
Clients often say of their tailor: I dont pay him; I give him what I want.
Tailors speak similarly of their helpers. The tailor NGalla Ndiaye engaged a
friend of his to assist him with a large order, and I asked if this helper was his
employee. Almost, he answered in a surprised tone. How much are you
paying him? I asked, and he quickly corrected me: I dont pay him; I give
him something. The melding of two exchange systems in Dakar has made
for ambiguous artisan/worker and artisan/client relations.
In his history of Wolof society, Abdoulaye-Bara Diop describes a system of
socio-economic circulation of gifts and counter-gifts (1981:51) as character-
izing economies where interpersonal relations play an important role (77),
as they continue to do in urban Senegal. The traditional relations of clientage
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
between noble landholders and casted artisans were neither of (political)
domination nor of (economic) exploitation . . . but of (socio-economic)
dependence marked by the hierarchical character of a system of castes . . .
In such exchanges, the amount given did not, and in its modern form does not,
depend on a fixed price but on the nature of the relations of clientage (A.-
B. Diop 1981: 79; see also S. Diop, 1995: 230). Their salient factor for A.-B.
Diop is a double inequality wherein the receiver gains material wealth and the
giver noble position: This inequality . . . always goes to the material profit
of the [artisan] constituted by the inferior caste. Inversely, [the inequality] goes
socially to the advantage of the partner of superior rank. For his part, there is
no exploitation of [the artisan]; there is even a counter exploitation, contrary
to what one observes . . . in class relations in capitalist or feudal society (79).
In the 1990s and 2000s, however, the importance of this exchange system lies
not in relations of caste, although they still exist, but in the way the system
has generalized to hold the informal economy together, for better or for worse
(Thioub et al. 1998).
As a person of relative wealth, especially a toubab from the United States,
I was expected to be generous. Although I learned to limit demands from
strangers, my relations with several people, including Gnouma, bound me in
complex ties of interdependence (though not nearly as complex as those within
her extended family). Even though I was an opportunity for economic gain,
her relation to me never reduced itself to the purely monetary. In a society
where economic and personal relations were not separate, her claims extended
to my person. She was jealous, and her entourage often teased her about being
possessive of me. Even she laughed at herself for referring to me as my Leslie
and alleging that no one else had to the right to invite me to dinner. Since she
was so adept at extracting money from me, I always suspected that her claims
of friendship were in large measure subterfuge. Therefore, I was surprised,
moved and temporarily relieved upon returning to Dakar in 2000, when one
of the first things she did when she saw me was to take out of her purse a little
perfume bottle which I had sent her several months previously. Although it
was now empty, she always carried it with her.
In the Dakar of the artisans I studied, economic relations were at the same
time personal, and therefore involved a web of obligations. Even for me, whose
relations were always imbued with the uncomfortable post-colonial polarities
between American affluence and local economic need, these obligations did
not stop with monetary exchange. They could include remaining faithful as a
customer, visiting often and spending the day, or, in the case of Gnouma,
accompanying her to the election rally of her political party. A leader in her
neighborhood, Gnouma was Councilwoman for her Dakar district and was
campaigning for a seat in the National Assembly in the elections of 1998. She
had organized a busload of women from her enormous household, all dressed
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Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
175
to the teeth in hand-dyed or glittering boubous and headscarves. As custom
required, she had even hired a drum-beating young griot to accompany
them in the rented bus. Despite the fact that the American Embassy strongly
discourages American citizens from attending such political rallies, and despite
my own belief that the company of a white North American would be a liability
to an opposition candidate, she insisted, for reasons I could not fathom, that
I be videoed at her side as she made her grand entrance into Iba Mar Diop
Stadium.
But beyond that, for many craftspeople, including Gnouma, the obligations
included helping them export. And so, precisely through what seemed the most
traditional practices of gift exchange, I was drawn with the informants into
circuits of the new global economy. Given their own precarious economic situ-
ation and the relative prosperity of the few people they know who do succeed
in exporting, and given the World Bank pressures in the 1990s to export, many
artisans express the dream of finding a market in the United States.
In the early stages of the research in Africa, I sometimes worried that an
interview exchange would expand according to cultural rules and customs,
of which I was perhaps ignorant, to limitless obligations. They might include
lasting financial obligation, long-term export projects, bringing a family
member to the United States. All of these have come to pass. The trajectory
of the fieldwork unfolded, and along with it, the ethical problems invisibly
nested in it from the beginning. My research topic, the indivisibility of econ-
omic and symbolic exchange, had led me into a hybrid exchange system that
involved varied commodity and gift relations. It led me into a realm where
intellectual and economic exchange also knotted together. It would be more
than inaccurate to say intellectual from my point of view and economic from
that of the artisans. They were just as anxious to teach me about their crafts
and to demonstrate the knowledge in which they were steeped, as they were
to make money. On the other hand, my research certainly is enmeshed in the
economic circuits of university promotion and academic publishing. For many
reasons, to which Ill return later, the export projects were, and are, the most
ethically problematic of the many issues that pervade this research. Continuing
and expanding the research, however, depended on doing the export projects.
Expanding the exchange relations with the artisans risked dissolving the
research into more important and more pressing levels of exchange. Thus my
research depended on what could destroy it.
Intertexts of Exchange and Production
Ever the researcher, however, I sought a framework in which to think about
these issues. Without the formal training in anthropology or sociology, I have
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
brought a critical perspective that is basically literary to these tangles of
symbolic and economic exchange. Through this lens of literary criticism, the
African fashion network appears as an intertext (Kristeva 1980: 36), a web
of intersecting semiotic and symbolic systems that assimilate the same sartorial
signifiers but produce meanings according to different logics.
Throughout this book, I have discussed dress in terms of the difference
between the logic of the sign and the logic of the symbol (Chapters 1 and 2).
A particularity of African fashion in each of the three communities I studied
makes dress both symbol of status and sign of fashionability. The symbolic
and semiotic systems combine differently in each site according to the different
historical and social frameworks of Senegalese, Kikuyu Kenyans and Black
Americans. Each relates differently to the European or Western clothing
system also practiced in the country, and each changes, as an autonomous
fashion system, according to its own rhythms.
Yet the difference in signifying logics that most forcibly imposed itself upon
me was not between sign and symbol. It was rather between that of African
fashion in artisanal economies and that of mass-consumer fashion. In the latter,
marketers and consumers produce the celebratory meanings of fashion in a
realm divorced from and disavowing oppressive processes of material prod-
uction. In the artisanal economies, by contrast, meaning production and
material production go on together in the same process.
4
In both mass-consumer
and informal fashion networks, meaning production and material production
enter into contradictory unity. The contradiction takes contrasting forms.
The Fusion of Culture and Economics in Mass-Produced
and Artisanal Fashion
In mass-consumer fashion, transactions do fuse economics and symbolic
practices, but the fusion remains obfuscated. Corporate mass-production and
mass-distribution in the new global economy make fashionable clothing
cheaper and more accessible to more people. But the very conditions of prod-
uction that thereby democratize cultural expression through fashion have
made the global assembly line more anti-democratic. Giant retailers like Wal-
Mart and JCPenney now dominate garment production through a vast network
of contractors and subcontractors (Bonacich et al. 2000; Chapter 4). By setting
these in fierce competition with each other, they have pushed labor costs to
far below a living wage. Garments workers in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin
America, whose families have lost the possibility of continuing to cultivate the
land, earn as little as a dollar a day (Anderson et al. 2000: 30; Bonacich et al.
2000; Brecher and Costello 1994). A customer who wants to buy and enjoy
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Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
177
a Disney T-shirt does not want to know that it might have been made in a
Los Angeles factory where the workers had not been paid for two months
(McDonnell 1998).
A common trend in cultural studies refers to the ways in which consumers
can subvert mass-produced clothing to emancipatory ends. Yet as we have seen
in Chapter 4, capital must constantly expand in order to survive, and it can
do so only by making us expand our consumption. At the same time, this
expansion of capital has worked, especially in the new age of globalization,
to an increasing polarization of wealth and power (Anderson et al. 2000: 18
25, 30, 527; Harvey 2000: 27). Therefore, subversive uses of mass-marketed
clothing remain in dialectical unity with the invisible mechanism by which
mass-consumerism expands the power of corporations at the expense of both
consumers and workers. The subversive meanings are produced through a
disavowal of that dialectic. This union between consumers expressive empower-
ment and the very act of consumption that increases our social disempower-
ment, combined with the disavowal of that union, could be called the signifying
logic of meaning production in mass-market fashion. Consumers learn to read
euphoric meanings of fashion according to powerful conventions that suppress
any mark of the process of production.
The informal artisanal economies of African fashion also fuse economic
oppression and the production of celebratory meanings, but in different forms.
In the widest sense, imported undyed cloth and trims are mass-produced, often
in Asia, and so the informal craft economy branches into the signifying logic
of industrialized mass-production. Yet its internal relations work differently.
The producers often have a direct relation with their customers, all the more
so in that tailors very frequently, and in Senegal and Kenya almost always,
make custom designs for their clients. In this case the customer visits the
producers home or studio, brings her own cloth and a specific fashion image.
She becomes, to a degree, a participant in the work, as did the customers of
nineteenth-century artisans in the West. On the one hand, customers can thus
witness certain forms of labor exploitation that take place. They can even play
their own role in it by bargaining the tailors down to the point where the tailors
cannot sustain an atelier. On the other hand, consumers can also witness the
ways in which producers are themselves agents of political and aesthetic
expression.
In Dakar, one sees 15-year-old apprentices in cramped, uncomfortable
spaces, bending over the hem of ones own dress. Yet one also sees in Dakar,
as well as Los Angeles and Nairobi, the workers, including young apprentices,
of an atelier freely moving around and conferring with each other about
the garment in animated, thoughtful ways, and trying out their own ideas.
Their independent manner contrasts sharply with the dead look in the eyes of
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assembly-line garment workers I saw seated slackly at their machines, from
which they could not move, in an American-owned factory in Nairobi. To take
another contrast, I witnessed a French teenager upbraid her adult Black tailor
in Dakar. Yet I also witnessed clients treat the same tailor, once he gained his
reputation, with great respect. At the atelier of yet another creative, original
tailor who catered to young, fashionable Senegalese women, clients would sit
in a row along the uncomfortable bench that lined his wall for several hours,
even a full day, waiting for the garments to be finished.
The melding of different exchange systems in Dakar has made for ambiguous
labor and client relations indeed. The historian Penda Mbow, currently writing
on the caste system in Senegal, sees the modern system of gift exchange as the
remnant of a feudal system based on inequality. In contemporary Senegalese
society, she says, other systems and other values counterbalance money
(personal communication). These other systems, she says, are complicitous in
blocking development. They also contribute to corruption and stagnation
within established institutions, where there is no law. According to her,
these systems that are not capitalist are also systems of exploitation. But
for her, as for Abdoulaye-Bara Diop, it is the customer who ends up being
economically exploited by an artisan with whom one has a relation of friend-
ship or blood. The special price he quotes you, she says, amounts in the
end to that of a stranger, and you are obliged in the end to give more than to
a stranger. In my own, albeit limited experience, this system of exchange could
sometimes work this way and other times show more concern for human
relations than for money. Although one dyer I worked with took advantage
of our friendship to charge me more money than the customary rate, another,
less effusive about the friendship in words, asked less money than the customary
rate. Still a third refused to quote me a price altogether and insisted I decide
what to give her.
But it is not only on the African continent that the informal African fashion
network relies on personal relations not enforced by state regulations. In the
United States as well as in continental African communities, these informal
economic relations have become increasingly ambiguous as global restruct-
uring has expanded informal fashion production. The importation of African
fashions to the United States has carried with it informal modes of production
and exchange, with predictably ambiguous results. In Los Angeles, designers
engage Latina seamstresses from the vast so-called underground economy of
garment homework. They tap into this link in the mass-production chain
that ordinarily filters from the giant retailers through their manufacturers,
the contractors, and subcontractors to the seamstresses. Forms of garment
work laden with illegal conditions have led to notorious violations of minimum
wage and working condition laws. Artisanal African fashion designers I have
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interviewed in Los Angeles are well aware of these abuses since they hear stories
of its underpaid and all-too-frequently unpaid piece-work from the very
seamstresses they engage. The designers are therefore at pains to distance
themselves from the corporate manufacturers. One designer has engaged for
several years three seamstresses, two Latina and one African American, while
she also does much of the sewing at home herself. The seamstresses also sew
for Guess and JCPenney. I dont pay slave wages, she told me emphatically,
and said she pays minimum wage or above. Of the large manufacturers lower-
ing wages in the name of global competition, she said, I could understand
that in a business sense, but I think its wrong. Because youre not supposed
to work people like that, for nothing. Thats horrible. I could never do that.
In talking about their relations to their seamstresses, the African American
designers seek, within the frame of economic necessity, to counter the dehum-
anizing treatment of the immigrant seamstresses in the Los Angeles garment
industry. Another designer has worked with the same seamstress for several
years with just a verbal contract. In time, she says, they have become friends.
At the beginning of their relation, the seamstress, much more experienced than
her boss, would criticize the sewing of the designer. She taught me, says the
designer. The attitudes these designers express toward the seamstresses they
engage suggest the anomalous nature of their position in the Los Angeles
fashion industry with its colossal disavowal of worker mistreatment.
These differences in material production are linked to the difference in
signifying logic between mass-produced and artisanal African fashion. In mass-
consumer fashion, the production of the garment and the production of its
meaning take place in wholly separate spheres. Consumers may engage in
subversive meaning production, but the producer generally has no share in
making that meaning. In the informal mode of production, clothing signifies
differently. From my point of view as a client, the clothing from NGalla
Ndiaye, as from Wairimu Wachira, Lucy Rao, Oumou Sy, Karimu, Ahneva
Ahneva, Bass L and others, inscribes of course the sartorial signifiers of an
established fashion code, but something else as well. The memories of the
tailors pleasure and difficulties in making it, our discussions about it, the
tailors delight in its prettiness and also images of labor exploitation that one
would rather forget, are all inscribed in the garment.
Characterized by custom work on a small-scale or sales to clients the designers
come to know personally, the informal economies of African fashion, both in
the United States and on the continent, contain features of artisanal economies
in pre-industrial Europe. But it is important to emphasize their status as
decidedly modern economies. We should not see them according to an evolu-
tionary model in which our own pre-industrial past necessarily and inevitably
develops into our assembly-line present. These are economies that have already
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been developing, but in a different direction. They do not constitute backward
economies, but as Fatou Sow says, dominated systems of production within
the global economic system (1982: 245).
As such, they illustrate the paradoxes of being excluded from, while com-
pletely embedded in, capitalism. Michael Watts points out that in a polarized
world, not all actors have, of course, an equal capacity to determine mean-
ings, to nominate, to define symbolic forms and hence to act (1992: 16). Such
are the paradoxes of the unequal effects of globalization that producers most
marginalized into economic desperation can also be those with heightened
possibilities to define and determine symbolic form. Attentiveness to their work
and their words can also denaturalize a capitalist economy so overwhelming
that it does indeed seem a second nature more all-encompassing and eternal
than the first. Consideration of these artisanal circuits can lead us to another
at least conceptual space.
Yet artisanal economies are far from utopian spaces, and one would
have to disagree with J. K. Gibson-Graham that they allow representations
of capitalist hegemony and homogeneity [to] be disrupted and called into
question (1996: 31). On the contrary, as elements of informal economies, they
serve to illustrate the power of the global system over even that which it
excludes. A sign of undermined third-world national economies, informal-
ization cannot solve an economic crisis, but ultimately rebounds on it to make
it worse (Bangura 1995: 923). Keeping these economic caveats in mind, we
can examine how, on a conceptual level, the artisanal African fashion network
can denaturalize a system of consumer capitalism that has indeed engulfed vast
regions of the globe like a second, unquestionable nature.
Exclusion can also open up spaces where every act of production is not
immediately and totally reduced into the service of capital accumulation. It
allows for other values to play alongside commodification. Participating in a
system of commodity exchange where accumulation is not the all-consuming
goal, the artisans, as we have seen throughout this book, act in the global
market differently than would a purely profit-oriented businessperson.
Ethical Impasses of Artisanal Export in Global Capitalism
This different way of relating to the global economy is what has given me the
most troubling ethical doubts about my research. Among the doubts I have
encountered in fieldwork, the export projects have been the most intense. For
one thing, I am convinced that as a whole, microenterprise projects, along with
the Western microfinancing which aids them, are self-defeating. They feed right
back into the vicious circle of World Bank policy and its mechanisms for
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181
intensifying the polarizing inequalities between first and third worlds. Yet I
cannot expect to have the craftspeople help me in my research with their
knowledge unless I help them in return in the areas where I might have resources
they see as useful to them. Taking information from people and using it for
ones academic/economic gain when they were not really getting much in return
is just as unethical and also contributes to the polarizing inequality.
So I became an import-export suitcase vendor, and more ethically dubious
still, a de facto microfinance donor. From doing research about the effects
of World Bank/IMF policy on African fashion, I became, together with my
research subjects, caught up in performing the effects of those policies. The
following stories about two export projects relate the way in which, during
the process, such ethical impasses unfolded out of each other like links in a
chain.
A few weeks after I met the women of Gnoumas circle in 1998, Mabouya,
the cousin of Gnouma who exported ndokets from a small atelier in Dakars
March H.L.M. (see Chapter 2), asked me to help her find something that
would sell well in the United States. Soon thereafter she invited me to tea with
her husband. Within the house of Gnoumas husband, Mabouya kept separate
quarters and did separate cooking for her husband and family, which also
included her sister-in-laws family. We are few in number, Mabouya had said
of this mini-extended family unit within the larger extended family unit. When
I arrived on the appointed Sunday afternoon, Gnouma was dressing to go to
a political meeting. So I climbed the steep, narrow, uneven stairs and followed
the corridor to a second-floor terrace lined with rooms. Mabouyas husband
spread a mat for us to sit on the terrace floor, and he engaged me in conver-
sation while she sat on a low stool and applied makeup with the aid of a lethal-
looking fragment of mirror. During our conversation, various women of the
house dashed in and out of the rooms, then drifted off in filmy summer boubous
and ndokets, waving good-byes as they departed for the political meeting.
While Mabouya put on her makeup, she rekindled the discussion about finding
a clothing product that would sell to Americans. When I reminded her that
her ndokets had sold well in New York, her husband intervened to tell her to
prciser what she meant by Americans. Another cousin, a young man who
had a batik atelier, asked me the same question later, but was very business-
like about saying he meant white Americans.
By 1998, I had already started exporting products from Kenya and Senegal
for Third World Handarts, a non-profit alternative trade organization in
Orange County, California. I had found that consumers in this market wanted
not what the Senegalese made and wore for themselves, but items that would
fit into the Western marketing category of the authentic (Chapters 4 and 5).
I tried to explain this to Mabouya. Although uneasy about jumping into this
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project, I suggested that she make scarves of wax-stamped, hand-dyed cotton
voile that the dyers in her family made, and that looked so richly beautiful as
flowing hot-season boubous.
In order to show her what I meant by these authentic scarves, I had
brought along two very dog-eared pages from a catalog put out by an American-
based Alternative Trade Organization called The Marketplace (Littrell and
Dickson 1998; 1999). It trains women and organizes womens cooperatives
in India and New Mexico to make fashions for socially conscious US women.
Although the catalog contains a great deal of material attempting to raise the
consumers consciousness about the producers, and even a section in which
consumers and producers communicate with each other, these were not the
reasons I had the catalog pages with me. About a year previously, Sue Fenwick,
the director of Third World Handarts, had given me these pages. I had gone
to her shop because another craftsperson in Senegal had written me proposing
an export project. She had torn the pages out of the Marketplace catalog
because they had images of a skirt and vest she was interested in having him
produce. I had mailed the pages to him several months previously and, having
made the clothing, he had saved the pages and given them back to me upon
my arrival in Senegal. By coincidence these pages also contained images of light
cotton scarves similar to those I wanted to suggest to Mabouya. Thus her
authentic African scarves would be an adaptation of scarves that came from
India and were designed by North Americans to have an unspecified ethnic
look.
Embarrassed to find myself in the colonial role of the Westerner who knows
and explains, I told her that products which sold well reflected a certain
mythic idea of Africa. Since Africa had no particularly mythic aura for her,
and since the word artisanal that I used to describe that look did not ring
a bell, her husband supplied traditionnel and fait la main. We discussed
photographing the dyeing process so as to increase the products cultural value
for the consumers, and Mabouya, who was in fact enthusiastic about dyeing
and its traditions, talked about photographing the dyeing in their Mauritanian
village when she took the kids there after school term ended. As the now
glamorously made-up Mabouya and her sister-in-law rushed off to the political
meeting, I tried to sort out the ethical issues entangled in my engagement with
this project.
As with all of the export projects I have engaged in, these issues are at once
economic, political and cultural. Called upon to inform the craftspeople about
what will sell in the American market, I assumed precisely the role of expert,
and advisor or culture broker (Schoss 1996: 159) one is at pains to avoid.
Equally problematic is intervening into production processes when research
criteria of objectivity would dictate that I merely observe them.
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183
Even more potentially harmful is the way the export projects, and in part-
icular this one, brought me to enter disruptively into very complex family
relations beyond my understanding. Having settled on the price of the work,
Mabouya and I had fixed a Sunday for her to do the dyeing. But when I arrived
at the house, I found Gnouma buying vegetables at a stall across the street. I
almost did not recognize her since I had never met her outside her house before,
but ensuing events made me wonder if she had gone out to meet me. After we
had installed ourselves on her mattresses, she took the undyed fabric I had
brought, and set it by her side away from me. In the course of a tense conver-
sation, I told her that I was going up to Mabouyas quarters to work on dyeing
the fabric for a scarf project. Gnouma adopted the majestic tone and posture
she assumed in her leadership roles. She told me that God had sent me to her,
that she made no distinction between black people and white people and had
always treated me as an equal. In that house, she said, a client could have only
one dyer among the women, and I was her client. I could not take my dyeing
to anyone else.
In the meantime Mabouyas sister-in-law had come into Gnoumas room,
presumably passing by and stopping to chat. I asked her to tell Mabouya that
I would come up shortly. Continuing the conversation, Gnouma told me that
she was not a businesswoman and knew nothing about commerce in the United
States, but only a simple dyer who cared about nothing but her dyeing and
that she would do the dyeing for the scarf project. When I rushed upstairs to
consult Mabouya, her immediate, rapid reaction was a hearty cest trs bien.
I still worried about how my handling of the situation might have contributed
to jeopardizing Mabouyas position in the complex power structure of this
household.
More general ethical issues continued to imbue all the projects. And they
were further confused by an additional twist. The export projects that threat-
ened the integrity of the research also had the opposite effect of deepening it.
Aihwa Ong, writing about the ethnographers anxiety (1995: 353) over the
unequal power relations between American academic researcher and third-
world subject, concludes: However, if one considers power as a decentralized,
shifting and productive force, animated in networks of relations rather than
possessed by individuals, then an ethnographic subject can exercise power in
the production of ethnographic knowledge(ibid.). If, in the course of the
export projects, I intervened with more blatant power in the artisans work,
they intervened more actively in my research, determining in important ways
its shape and direction. They determined, for instance that I would be studying
export projects in which I came to have more at stake than I had originally
intended. They thus determined that I would be more anxiously concerned and
observant about the outcome of the work.
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In turn, this deeper stake, which included my responsibility toward both the
artisans and the American activists whose organizations in the United States
would be selling the products, made me insist that the colors in the dyeing
process be exactly those which would sell, the cuts, styles and sizes precisely
those that would suit American taste. With the stakes higher and the dangers
multiplied of my betraying the artisans not only as researcher but also as
intermediary in their business, I thus became more critically aware of details
in fashion craft production. Before, I might have been disappointed if a dyer
produced a tone of blue different from the one I had requested. But now, for
(what had become) Gnoumas scarf-export project, for instance, I insisted she
repeatedly work with the dye bath until her blue matched exactly the blue of
Helen Hunts Academy Awards gown in the only American fashion magazine
I had brought with me. (I had figured that if Helen Hunt wore the color to
accept her Academy Award, and if Vogue was featuring it, the color would
be all the rage that fall.) It was with a triumphant smile that, determining the
time had come, Gnouma held up the image from the Vogue Magazine to her
wet fabric. These export projects, their compromising effect on the research
notwithstanding, sharpened my understanding of dyeing and tailoring. Where
before I took reputations and claims of superiority at face value, I now could
gauge more critically their relation to actual performance.
Yet if one inserts Ongs remarks about the micropolitics of ethnographic
research, where power is decentralized and shifting between informants and
researcher, into the larger context of global capitalism, the ethical issues take
on a harsher tone. In this perspective, the power of global financial institutions
is not so decentralized and shifting but holds researcher, consumer and producer
in its grip. In Dakar, I went to an NGO for advice on how to play better my
role as mediator in the export projects. The director of this NGO, which
specialized in organizing market women into self-help groups, told me emphat-
ically that her only advice was to find markets. Mainly, she said, craftspeople
needed markets for their goods. I already knew that this would be a big
problem for the projects, because if my research had taught me anything, it
was that the markets for African crafts became quickly saturated.
But her advice only intensified my theoretical misgivings about micro-
enterprise export from a macro perspective. Why intentionally bring crafts-
people into a transnational economic strategy that throws them into another
vicious cycle, that of making products for which there are no markets, creating
the market, seeing it get quickly saturated and having to make new products
that no one needs? The strategy also made us, both myself and the craftspeople,
adopt the ideology of the all-encompassing vicious cycle of the global economy,
that of celebrating markets for the sake of markets, competition for the sake
of competition, growth for the sake of growth, in the spiraling whirlwind of
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Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
185
consumer capitalism. In its benign mode, such micro-enterprise craft export
becomes an ideology of virtuous consumerism. It encourages socially conscious
buyers to consume these craft products as if participating in more consumption
could solve the problems of first world/third world economic inequality, which
come in large measure from overproduction and overconsumption on the part
of Westerners . By agreeing to help craftspeople establish export projects, I of
course placed myself in that benign form of consumerist ideology.
A second story of an export project can illustrate the many sides of this
contradictory space. The tailor NGalla Ndiaye was admired by clients and
fellow tailors alike for his technical mastery, aesthetic sense and fashion
sophistication. But even in terms of the economic crisis that had devastated
the middle class, he was marginalized and financially impoverished when I first
met him in Dakar, in 1998. His marginal state was initially mysterious consid-
ering that both children and adults in his neighborhood sought his company.
But in a society where people survived by living together in large extended
families, he had no family to back him. He lived, atypically, alone, in a small
rented room in the maze of crowded, sandy lanes known as Grand Dakar.
At the age of twenty, he had come from an agricultural village to Dakar to
apprentice. He had lived in the tailor shop, worked during the day and practiced
cutting by himself at night. After his twelve-year apprenticeship, without a
family to help him establish an atelier, he had tried to make it in various jobs,
earning, like many journeyman tailors, fifty dollars a month if he were lucky.
Finally, at about the age of forty, he decided to try and set up on his own. He
borrowed a 32-year-old Singer sewing machine and squeezed it into his room,
along with all the rest of his possessions a bed, his ironing board, a suitcase
containing his clothes, and his water jar. On the walls were hung other clothes
on nails, a poster of Bob Marley, his aikido black belt, and his karate green
belt. With no room for a cutting table, he did his cutting on the floor. In this
room, he lived, worked, and received his clients.
His room was always full of people unemployed young men, students,
neighbors, friends, children who gravitated toward him. Clients came by to
greet him, even when they were not ordering or picking up clothes. They all
sat around the circumference of his bed, twisting into the center to talk to each
other, or sat on the floor when there was no more room on the bed. NGalla
would sew through the commotion. Out of so-called self-exploitation, he
usually worked seven days a week until about 10:00 at night, often as he
told me later, without a hundred francs CFA (about fifteen cents) in my
pocket and discouraged with my life. When I first interviewed him, he had,
like many of the craftspeople I interviewed, two contrasting ways of conver-
sing. He spoke in often bitter tones about his experiences working for other
tailors and trying to survive on his own. But he became exuberant when he
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
was absorbed in his work, showing its products, or talking about its aesthetics
and techniques. My photos of him working in his room repeat this contrast
in a visual register between the realm of creative freedom in aesthetic pleasure
and the realm of economic realities where survival in crisis is precarious.
NGalla was not making enough to cover his CFA 13,000 ($22) per month
rent, and the signs of long-term hardship visible in the shabby room contrasted
sharply with the high-fashion elegance emerging from the sewing machine.
Tailors in the informal fashion network exercise power over production
as a creative process. NGalla, like other tailors and fabric designers, held
strong values about how the clothing should be made and about its aesthetics.
Their absorption in these values belies the contempt with which a dominant
economic institution can dismiss them (see Chapter 5). World Bank documents
assume that an informal craft mode of production is simply backward and
waiting to be developed because it is not, narrowly speaking, cost effective:
African producers are going to have to learn to change their ways if they
are going to be successful in international markets (Biggs et al. 1994: 30).
Couched in terms of lack and inability (ibid.: 234) with respect to
Western garment production, such statements assume that no explicit system
of values guides the tailors work.
Yet tailors and fabric designers I met often articulated strong attachment
to commonly held technical and aesthetic values of production. In one of his
previous jobs, NGalla had worked for a large atelier, almost a small factory,
that like most establishments its size made uniforms. He had quit that job,
partly because the pay was unstable, but in large part because, as he once
remarked, almost offhand as if it went without saying, if you cut fifteen shirts
at the same time, that shows you have no respect for the job. After quitting,
he had existed for several months on one petit pain per day. In 1998, he had
progressed to borderline survival as a tailor working on his own. Most of his
clients came from his neighborhood and did not pay much for tailoring.
Structural adjustment had led them to hard bargaining and driving down the
price of tailoring.
Pleasures of Production
About the third time I visited him, he asked me, very abruptly and very urgently,
to help him find an export market. I was not all that surprised, since by this
time in my research, various export projects had already engaged me. This was
the same day that I had discussed the scarf project with Mabouya. But NGalla,
to an even greater extent that Gnouma, confounded my expectations over how
African craft would fit into American markets.
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187
Especially in Senegal, in my newly found role as culture broker to the
artisans, I found myself anxious or dismayed in instances when they invested
the production process with ethical and aesthetic values that took precedence
over money, profit, cost-effectiveness and economic competition. But through
the course of these export projects, during both production and the placing
of products in the United States, I began to change this view. The artisans own
notions of how exchange, both symbolic and economic, should be carried out
is a form of knowledge, but one that a North American might not recognize.
I became convinced of the need to take seriously this knowledge as a challenge
to what we think we know about cultural production under capitalism. In the
micropolitics of fieldwork, therefore, the artisans who pulled me into export
projects eventually exercised power, as Ong says, not only over the know-
ledge my research would produce, but even over what I would consider to be
knowledge.
NGalla joined his efforts with those of the dyer Awa Ly (Chapter 2), whose
family had helped me a lot and who had also requested my assistance in finding
American buyers. The first time NGalla met with Awa and her brother Aliou
to explore the project, he told them that he sewed because it gives me much
pleasure to make beautiful things. I wouldnt want to make money by making
ugly things. Recognizing this value system, Awa and Aliou nodded in approval
and accepted NGalla into their confidence. Once Awa and NGalla finally had
the export order each had for so long sought, each offered to lower rather than
raise their price of production. But it was in much deeper ways that working
on this and similar projects convinced me of the need to take seriously the
informal craft economy and the culture it produces as incommensurate with
capitalism.
NGalla and Awa settled on childrens overalls and draw-string bags as the
export items they would make. Hand-dyed West African fabric is expensive,
more than most Americans, lacking the Senegalese appreciation for the process,
are willing to pay. I thought that by combining different kinds of hand-dyed
fabrics with the colorful African printed lgos from the Sotiba factory (Chapter
5), NGalla and Awa could make affordable export items that were also
original (Figures 29 and 30, pp.188 and 189). In order to make sure that
realistic selling prices would cover the costs of materials and labor, Awas
brother Aliou carefully calculated every detail again and again. In order
to make his production more efficient, NGalla even allowed himself to be
persuaded to make a paper pattern. (To be accurate, no one ever saw him or
the three other tailors, who crowded into his room for the occasion to work
for him, ever use it.)
But the production dynamic burst out of these constraints. A dynamic
evolved in which NGalla and his main assistant began vying with each other
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
Figure 29 Tailor NGalla Ndiaye marking lgos fabric with a rgle and chalk in
preparation for cutting the fabric to make overalls. Dakar, 1998.
to create a different and more original appliqu design for each bag and set
of overalls. They became all the more immersed in the pleasure of producing
these designs as the stream of friends and clients who habitually flocked
through NGallas room voiced their admiration and desire for the objects. The
pleasure of production had inundated the practical pecuniary goals. Any
proportion between labor time and selling price had to be abandoned as the
price of the pieces in the United States could never cover the cost of production.
On the Saturday night that NGalla and three other tailors were supposed
to put the finishing touches on the overalls and bags, the room had filled with
clients and young people even before the tailors arrived. Knowing that NGalla
would be home working on a Saturday night, they had stopped by to pay their
respects, and sensing a party in the making, decided to stay. By the time the
tailors started work, there were so many people that newcomers had to stand
outside and lean in the open window to converse. As night fell, animated
conversations and music from NGallas second-hand tape player filled the
dark room. To save expensive electricity, all light had been turned off save the
single bulb attached to the old Singer. There was, of course, no food at this
party, since no one could afford any, and no alcohol in this Muslim gathering.
In lieu of alcohol, the assembled engaged in a raucous debate about it, their
voices crescendoing to a roar as NGalla bent over his speeding, humming
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Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
189
Figure 30 NGalla Ndiaye putting the pieces of lgos and stitch-resist hand-dyed
fabric together for a pair of overalls. Dakar, 1998.
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
machine through the din, one time turning to remark to me that things were
beginning to heat up. Under the noise, NGallas assistant questioned me,
testing my rudimentary Wolof, about my opinion of the bags prettiness. As
the crescendo ebbed, the friends gradually left, and the four tailors worked
through the night to finish the export pieces.
From Artisanal to Dominant Economy: From the Pleasures
of Production to the Authentic
This scene of production suggests the contradiction between the producers
attachment to the technical and aesthetic values of their craft, as these are
enmeshed in social relations, and the demands of exchange in the international
export market. After I returned to the United States, NGalla and members
of Awas family asked me several times what the buyer thought of the pieces,
but never how much she paid. I sold them not on the African American market
but on the more formalized market of alternative trade organizations. The
buyer, director of the non-profit organization dedicated to helping impover-
ished third-world artisans, told me to advise the producers to simplify their
products since they would sell just as well anyway. A potential buyer, devoted
director of a non-profit charitable organization that sold crafts through a
catalog, told me that in order for the products from Awa and NGallas project
to sell, the customers had to be able to order not just a bag similar to the one
in a catalog photo, but the exact bag in the exact same fabrics and appliqu
design. In other words, the production process had to be standardized, rational-
ized, and deprived of the pleasure in the unexpected detours of a creative
process in order to sell as craft in the alternative American market.
My experiences on the American consumer side of the production/consumption
cycle thus raised new ethical problems. In Africa, I had become convinced that
this kind of import helps a few people to survive better, even while doing
nothing to improve the increasing polarization between wealthy and poor
societies on a structural level. But in the United States, I began to recognize
how it can also destroy artisanal values and practices that can compensate for
economic marginalization. Transmitting crafted commodities from informal
economies to the formal global economy, even to its most socially aware alter-
native site, tends to repress creative agency from craft design and production.
When the sartorial signifiers move from one mode of signification to another,
they change their signifying logic. That is, they change not only what they
mean, but how they convey meaning. The producers meanings lost in trans-
mission have nothing to do with the authentic or the recovery of lost use
value. On the contrary, authenticity is a category of the American market
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 190
Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
191
for consumers seeking a utopian outside (Appadurai 1986: 567; Appiah 1992:
2235; Clifford 1988: 215, 228; C. Hendrickson 1996). NGalla, like Mabouya,
had expressed himself to be thoroughly mystified by the idea of the authentic
and ideas of African heritage that export items were supposed to represent.
The meanings he invested in the items had to do with his expressed desire that
the American customers would find the things as lovely as the people around
him did, and also that they would appreciate the hand-crafted labor, the
imaginative efforts of the creative process, and the exuberant happiness in
production he and his assistant had put in them.
In other words, both the objects meaning and their signifying logic were
different from those they would have in the American market. In Dakar, they
signified the techniques, aesthetics, and emotions that had gone into their
making. In this intertext, meanings are produced in and through the social
production process. This signifying logic contrasts sharply with that of the
disarticulated discourses of mass-produced fashion marketing where, accord-
ing to Ian Scoggard, the commodity [in this case athletic shoes] can stand for
everything and anything savvy marketers wish to make of it (1998: 58). In
the intertext of corporate production, the successful marketing of fashion lies
in divorcing the product from any referent to its actual production and the class
relations involved in its manufacturing (ibid.).
The signifying logic of alternative trade organizations lies between those of
mass-consumer marketing and informal artisanal production. On the one
hand, consumers gravitate to ATOs precisely because they want to know that
the producers are well treated and well paid. But projecting on to these items
fantasies of the authentic in our hyper-rationalized mass-consumer economy
cannot help but repress the meanings of pleasure and their inscription in social
production. Even alternative sites, embedded in the economic logic of neo-
liberal capitalism, must structure consumption so that consumers inscribe
meanings that foreclose the producers role in meaning production. So power-
ful are the reading conventions of mass-consumerism that they even influence
the reading of artisanal objects by socially conscious consumers. Transforming
objects of popular culture into exemplars of the authentic transforms them into
objects of mass-culture.
The artisanal meanings lost in the transit to the United States do not concern
some kind of originary essence. They concern rather a set of values that revolve
around beauty, technique and creativity. Artisans, especially in Senegal, learn
these values through a historically constructed and thoroughly contemporary,
even though not formal, education process the tailors apprenticeship which
grew out of complex encounters between colonial and West African customs
and technologies. Far from static, they continue to change, seeking their own
historical trajectory, not the one that World Bank economists consider to be
universal.
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 191
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Global Circulation of African Fashion
For NGalla, the export work had value in the sense that it served this
trajectory. It would allow him to develop and improve his profession along
the historical lines of artisanal custom work he had learned from his masters.
This goes contrary to the World Bank position in Africa Can Compete! (Biggs
et al. 1994) and The Informal Sector and Microfinance Institutions in West
Africa (Webster and Fidler 1996: 14). By the time I went back to Dakar the
year after the first export project, NGalla had been able to establish himself
in a minuscule atelier in a middle-class neighborhood whose residents were
caught in the economic crisis. Along with the same old friends and clients who
had previously gathered in his room, he had a host of new clients. Boisterous
and flirtatious, these fashionable young women from the new neighborhood,
who took over the atelier with their adolescent energy, brought him abundant
but low-paid work.
In the predictable bind between coping with expanded business and main-
taining his craft values, NGalla was having trouble organizing his work
process and finances. (He could have perhaps benefited from management
training that situated itself within his cultural and historic framework.) Though
inundated with work, he did find time to do a more simplified, standardized
export order of place mats, napkins and vests. In fact, he found pleasure, at
this moment of his career, in the peaceful and quiet interval of repeating 30
replicas of the same item and not having to deal with the demands of his clients.
Yet this change in the source of his pleasure did not lead him to adopt the
framework, values and attitudes promoted in the World Bank documents. One
of his former employers, a glamorous, stylish member of the recently estab-
lished profession of woman entrepreneur, who did only exporting, and for
whom NGalla still did some sewing on a contracting basis, strenuously advised
him to stop doing custom work and focus solely on export. She said to me:
You have to cut each garment, you have to do a different thing for each client,
and they hardly pay anything. Doing lgos shirts for boutiques in Harlem
would be a lot simpler and therefore more lucrative. I asked NGalla if he
preferred custom work or export orders. I wouldnt want to give it up (custom
work), he said emphatically, and then and I wouldnt want to give up the
other. It allows me to make a little extra money. Now I can buy another
machine and take on another tailor. Implied is that the new tailor would help
him develop his custom trade.
But in addition to allowing him an interlude of peace, a large part of the
pleasure NGalla derived from this second export project came from another
source. The seemingly simpler place mats actually presented a greater
technical challenge in creating the prototype than the earlier appliqud items.
After puzzling over this creative task for a whole day, a jubilant NGalla told
me the next morning that he had found the solution the previous night in
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 192
Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
193
something like a dream though not exactly a dream. Although he did not allude
to any traditional visionary practices, his solution corresponds to a method
by which creative innovations have traditionally occurred in West Africa.
Even the tailor Abdou Niang, who in fact worked with a USAID (United
States Agency for International Development) project to teach management
skills to tailors (see Chapter 2), used the skills to continue custom work in his
three-room atelier with five tailors. Although he told me the first time I inter-
viewed him that he had done an export project of vests to the United States
and had a contract with a local airline for uniforms, he talked about this work
with a distinct lack of enthusiasm and quickly changed the subject. On the
other hand, he spoke at length and with excitement about the custom-made
outfits hanging in his shop, and even tried on for me a sari he had fashioned
to show me how he had devised its complex folds.
Both he and NGalla had strong ideas about the direction in which tailoring
should develop, and about the need to maintain the tailoring values and
standards they had learned: NGalla through more traditional apprenticeship,
Abdou first through self-teaching, and later through a course set up by the
USAID-sponsored NGO. Once NGalla moved to his atelier, he lost his former
self-effacing manner. He now took seriously his new role as master tailor for
his young apprentices and for other tailors who came to him for instruction.
The authentic as a category of commodity in the American craft market disavows
the historically constituted and ongoing process that translates Senegalese
tailoring values and standards into material form. Translating the meaning of
artisanal African fashion to the mass-consumer codes of the United States does
not imply romantic notions of a loss of wholeness. It suggests our disregard for
aesthetic and social values as valid as those in the Western category of authentic
African craft.
This disregard suggests in turn Aihwa Ongs advice on the advisability of
telling our informants stories despite the risk of betraying their words: The
greater betrayal lies in refusing to recognize informants as active cultural
producers in their own right, whose voices insist on being heard and can make
a difference in the way we think about their lives (1995: 354). While part of
me wholeheartedly agrees with Ongs insight, the other part of me wishes I
could share her confidence. The ethical impasses I found in the world of
fieldwork have repeated themselves in the writing of this book. My enthusiasm
and sense of urgency for putting into writing the stories, words and experiences
that I heard and observed with delighted wonder coexists insolubly with other
emotions. This writing also repeats the dismaying post-colonial power relations
that also permeated the fieldwork. Whose story am I really telling here? The
informants would certainly not write these pages as I have written them. But
more to the point, what I really experienced, and the only story I can really
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 193
194
Global Circulation of African Fashion
write about, indeed the only knowledge I can have, is that of the relation
between us. My knowledge cannot extend beyond that mobile, tension-filled
relation to a more truthful version of the artisans lives and thoughts.
The Fashion Commodity as Text of Contradiction
Needless to say, my insights into the loss of the artisans meaning and creativity
as their work travels to the United States market comes from my own role in
effecting the transfer. The ethical issues involved have followed not only the
export projects of Gnouma and NGalla to the non-profit trading organization,
but my few forays into the commercial market as well. I did succeed, or rather,
Wairimu succeeded, in placing some of Awas dyed fabric with an African
American artisan/merchant in South Central Los Angeles. And here lies yet
another ethical problem. Wairimu and I, in our efforts to cross over into the
market of another ethnic group, have used each others racial/national position.
When, in 1994, Wairimu was trying to sell American shoes and clothing in
Nairobi, she had me approach the Indian boutique owners (although I had no
better success than she). Conversely, when I was trying to market the clothing
and fabrics of Gnouma, NGalla and Awa in the African American boutiques
of South Central Los Angeles, I asked Wairimu to come with me. Her standing
as a long-time member of that fashion community and her selling skills were
indispensable to the one order we were able to attain. Having adopted the
concern to make the project of NGalla and Awa succeed, she appealed to the
artisan/vendor by speaking Swahili with him. Her extensive experience in the
intricacies of intercontinental suitcase trade, as a Kenyan immigrant to the
United States, had given her a sophisticated understanding of the authentic
as an inescapable means of survival.
Yet my dubious role as culture broker has allowed me to understand some
of the ways in which the informal African fashion network is incommensurate
with the global capitalist system on which it is nonetheless dependent. Theories
of global culture that seek critical distance from the values of the culture
industry need to take into account the multiplicity of global networks in all
their incommensurability with each other. Cultural studies scholars have
sought this critical distance in complicated theories that invest progressive
political meanings in the pleasures of mass-market consumption. Critics often
oppose the pleasure of consumption to the oppression of production in a binary
that we take as axiomatic. We also need to consider the ways that popular
cultures invest pleasure and meaning in production, or as Dorinne Kondo says,
the artisans pleasure of creation (1990: 238). In both cases contradiction
pits creative cultural agency against economic powerlessness.
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 194
Entanglements, Pleasures, and Ethics
195
The beginning of this book showed how cultural critics can evoke this
contradiction as an alibi to focus exclusively on consumers agency. The course
of the book has illustrated the myriad ways that producers power and oppres-
sion fuse insistently in the informal African fashion network. If, as John Fiske
maintains, the commodity fetish is deeply conflicted (1992: 157), we can
read its warring intersections in their breadth and historical depth only if we
read the commodity in different economies of production and exchange that
coexist today.
The conflicts in the informal African fashion network between economic
marginalization and cultural power, between the authentic and the aesthetic/
technical values inscribed in the fashions, between mass-production and craft,
and within the ethical double binds of craft export have unfolded throughout
this book. Through their unfolding, African fashion emerges not as symbol
of authentic identities and mythical places, but as text generating the social and
aesthetic contradictions that embrace producers, consumers and researchers
alike.
Notes
1. In doing the fieldwork and thinking through the ethical issues, I have been greatly
influenced by writings on feminist methodology in the social sciences. Among the
works that have guided my thinking are Borland 1991; Joseph 1996; Ong 1995; Stacey
1991; Stack 1996; and Visweswaran 1994.
2. Among the colleagues who tutored me in field methods, I am particularly grateful
to Adele Clarke, Liise Malkki, Nancy Naples, and Patti Lather.
3. A vast literature that traces itself back to The Gift by Marcel Mauss 1990 (original
version 1925) and after him to Claude Lvi-Strauss 1969, includes work by Derrida
1992; Godelier 1999; Sahlins 1972; Schrift et al. 1997; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992.
For work on the meshing of capitalist and gift-exchange economies, see Davis 2000;
Gregory 1982; Werbner 1990.
4. Ironically, the very difference between artisanal and mass production made
methods of analysis seemingly more textual than those devised by cultural studies
actually more useful. Cultural studies methods that divorce symbolic practices of
consumers from material production proved limiting for the study of a fashion network
different from mass-consumer networks. Semiotic theories like those of Kristeva, on
the other hand, can help make detailed connections between symbolic and socio-
economic processes. Through the analytic tool of symbolic economies (Goux, 1973;
Irigaray 1974; Kristeva 1974), they can account for both the difference between and
the relation between production of meaning and production of objects. One problem
with them is that semiotic theory has tended to treat these two elements of an economy
as rigid structural homologies (DAmico 1981: 40), and so cannot account for conflicts
between symbolic economies and political economies. Another problem concerns the
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 195
196
Global Circulation of African Fashion
way that literary critics have reinterpreted the early work of theorists such as Goux,
Kristeva and Irigaray as a means of re-isolating the text. Literary critics have used the
metaphor of symbolic economies to collapse social production and exchange into
symbolic or textual production and exchange, so that the substitute term language,
the phallus, gender rather than displacing the social term workers, exploitation,
class struggle simply effaces it. But the critical tool of symbolic economies can also
be used to bridge the study of theory and concrete symbolic and economic practices.
663(06).p65 9/19/02, 11:19 196
197
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209
Abdou, 735
Achieng, Susan, 96
Adamson, Joy, 105n2
Afful, Beatrice, 16
African Americans
as consumers, 10812, 1245, 130
informal economy, 12530, 17880
African fashion
authenticity, 1011, 1213, 11217
competitiveness, 10712
cross-cultural links, 925
global networks, 1521
Kenya, 6, 10, 1921, 77, 78, 85104
originality, 89, 912
Senegal, 6, 1112, 2735, 701n1, 735
students views, 958
in United States, 6, 18, 1078, 1323,
134n1
African Heritage, Kenya, 82, 856
African Marketplace, Los Angeles, 1415,
22
African Village, 162, 163
Afriland, Inc., 159
Ahneva, Ahneva, 10, 16
alternative trade organizations, 1901
Aminata, 645
apprentices, Senegal, 412
Ardo, Coll Sow, 36, 73
artisanal fashion
and consumer culture, 25
and mass-production, 17680, 191,
1956n4
Ashanti to Zulu, 1323
Asia, competition from, 108, 132, 1624
Askins, Stephanie, 133
ateliers, Senegal, 416
authenticity
African fashion, 1011, 1213
meaning of, 11217, 158, 163
Sotiba fabrics, 1359, 142, 1567
B, Aby, 31, 40, 43
B, Astou, 40
Bambara dyeing, 64
batik, 1389
bead-work, 223
Bhabha, Homi, 21
Black, Chinayera, 114, 11617
Black History Month, 130
Blue Market, Nairobi, 15, 19, 7984, 81, 99
borders, crossing of, 246
boubous, 6, 7, 1112, 26n2, 30, 36
bougie wax-resist, 567
Brazzaville, fashion, 75
business cultures, 1215, 1557
caftans, 6, 9, 26n2
Cagnolo, Charles, 778
capitalism, and Africa, 10812
Cheikh, 144, 1467
Chow, Rey, 701n1
Ciss, Gaye, 74
Cleaver, Kevin, 120
colonialism
Senegal, 13942
and traditional dress, 759
commodity fetishism, 4
competitiveness
African fashion, 10712
meaning of, 11721
consumer culture, 25
consumers, African American, 10812,
1245, 130
cooperatives, dyeing, 656
Cosetex, 1646, 167
Craik, Jennifer, 4
creativity
dyeing of fabric, 467
fabric design, 143
creolization, 23
cultural identity, 223
Daniel, Sian, 86
design process, Sotiba fabrics, 1438
Dia, Vieux, 1525
Diagana, Gnouma, 37, 478, 50, 5560,
624, 6970, 1715, 183
Diakit, Douma, 40
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations
663 index.p65 9/19/02, 11:20 209
210
Index
Diakit, Skou, 612, 61, 65
Diallo, Nafissatou, 73
Dieydiou, Fatou, 148, 152
Diop, Abdoulaye-Bara, 67, 1734
Diop, Muhammed, 15960
Diouf, Abdou, 33
Diouf, Mamadou, 34
Djiw, Abdoulaye, 123, 1612, 163
Donovan, Alan, 2, 82, 85, 91
Drame, Ramatoulaye, 62, 63, 64
dudu tak, 54, 58, 62, 63, 64
dyeing
cooperatives, 656
history of, 525
indigo, 1478, 1534
mystique of, 605
Senegal, 4670
techniques, 6970
Egerton College, 956, 101
Eicher, Joanne, 12, 53
Erekosima, Tonye V., 12
ethical issues, export projects, 1806, 194
ethnic dress, authenticity, 1213
Evelyn Fashion College, 958
export projects
artisanal meanings, 1904
ethical issues, 1806, 194
production process, 18690
fabrics
authenticity, 1359, 1567
see also dyeing; Sotiba fabrics
Fall, Fatou, 155
fashion
definition, 11, 26n3
and feminism, 34
political meanings, 856
prices, 37, 61
see also African fashion
Faye, Modou, 27
feminism, and fashion, 34
Fenwick, Sue, 182
Ferguson, James, 109
Festival mondial des arts ngres, 53
Fiske, John, 195
Fleuret, 141, 148
France, colonialism, 13942
Gaye, Fadieye, 33
gender divisions
dyeing, 60, 1534
tailoring, 3940
Gibson-Graham, J.K., 180
gift exchange, 1715, 178
globalization, 1315
informal networks, 25, 234
Gould, Margaret, 101, 1024
grand boubou, 8, 32, 54
Grossberg, Lawrence, 23
Gueye, Sadyia, 36
guine fabric, 1478
Haidous, Chaouki, 144, 1646, 165
Hall, Stuart, 3
Heath, Deborah, 32
Hollander, Anne, 36
Homeland, 123, 1602, 163
Howes, David, 23
indigo dyeing, 1478, 153
Indonesian batik, 1389
informal economy, 1415, 20, 17880
African Americans, 12530
global networks, 25, 234
Senegal, 378, 71n5
Islamic dress, as traditional, 30
Jakobson, Roman, 26n3
Jameson, Fredric, 5
jewelry, Kenya, 12, 804, 956
Jones, Synovia, 1, 11516
Karago, Sally, 856, 87, 8991
Karimu, 16, 1269, 127
Keita, Mariama, 467, 51, 55
Kenya
African fashion, 6, 10, 1921, 77, 78,
85104
colonialism, 779
jewelry, 12, 804, 956
national outfit, 20, 99104, 103, 105n4
racism, 245
traditional dress, 758, 105n2
Western fashion, 19
women fashion designers, 8791
kikoi, 1024
KikoRomeo, 86
Kikuyu
culture of, 94
traditional dress, 758, 945
King, Olujimi, 16
Kishare, Raphael Sarone, 213
Kondo, Dorinne, 4, 194
Korogho story cloth, copies of, 16, 14951,
150
Kwanzaa, 111, 130
663 index.p65 9/19/02, 11:20 210
Index
211
lgos prints, 1369, 136, 137, 140, 142,
1438, 152, 1626, 165
Lenana, Salome, 75, 76, 77
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 11
Lo, Bass, 1516
Los Angeles
African designers, 1518, 12630
African fashion, 6, 18, 1323
African Marketplace, 1415
informal economy, 1789
sweatshops, 11718, 177
Ly, Awa, 478, 48, 49, 6570, 66, 187
Maal, Baba, 2
Maasai
clothing, 856, 945
cultural identity, 223
Mahinda, Lydia, 1920, 21, 102
Mahinda, Mugure, 100
Malcolm X, 19
Mambety, Djibril Diop, 2
mame boye, 73
March H.L.M., Dakar, 38, 38, 3940
Marete, Alice, 12, 92, 93
marinires, 30, 31, 36
mass-production, and artisanal fashion,
17680, 191, 1956n4
Massata, 123, 1567
Mbodj, Lamine, 1389, 142, 1438, 1546,
1646, 167
Mbow, Penda, 178
McCracken, Grant, 26nn3,4
McCreath, Ann, 86
McGhee, Gloria, 16, 129
McRobbie, Angela, 3, 10
Menan, Mr, 143
microenterprise development, 1920
Moi, Daniel arap, 99, 100
Mudasia, Sylvia, 91, 101, 102
Mudimbe, V., 29, 71n1
Mwenda, Susan, 86
mystique, of dyeing, 605
Nairobi, Blue Market, 15, 19, 7984, 81, 99
national outfit, Kenya, 99104, 103, 105n4
Native Americans, cultural identity, 223
Ndiaye, Malick, 173
Ndiaye, NGalla, 40, 415, 601, 173,
1856
export projects, 1718, 18690, 188, 189,
1924
Ndiaye, Seringe, 141
ndokets, 6, 8, 26n2, 30, 36, 39, 74, 75
Ndongo, Oumar, 39
NDour, Youssou, 151
Nefertiti crown, 92, 93
Ngritude, Senegal, 33, 34
neo-colonialism, Senegal, 1402
Nguidjol, Emile Ngo, 1256
Niang, Abdou, 7, 423, 153, 193
Njoroge, Simon, 81, 834
Nnadede, Christopher, 16
Nromo, Richard, 84
Omar, Nancy, 100
Ong, Aihwa, 183, 184, 193
Openda-Omar, Nancy, 98
originality, of African fashion, 89, 912
Orue, Yolanda de, 86
Ousmane, Sembne, 173
pagnes, 2930, 32, 36
Pappius, 802, 83
Penney, JC, 10712, 113, 117, 1215,
12931, 134n1, 1567, 176
Pietz, William, 130
Pikanjoh Arts and Jewelry Company, 804,
99, 171
prices, informal, 37, 1715
productivity, World Bank notions of, 20, 29,
44
racism, 245
Rao, Lucy, 879, 94, 103, 104
research project
commodity exchange obligations, 1715
methodology, 16971
Rialto fashion, 87
Samb, Mame Rane, 152
Santos, Bakary, 1617
Scoggard, Ian, 191
Senegal
African fashion, 107, 134n1
colonialism, 13942
creativity, 467
dyeing, 4660
export projects, 2, 1816
gender and dyeing, 60, 1534
gender and tailoring, 3940
gift exchange, 1715, 178
household arrangements, 678
informal economy, 378, 71n5
Pikine, 667
Set/Setal movement, 345
social life of ateliers, 416
663 index.p65 9/19/02, 11:20 211
212
Index
socio-economic crisis, 335
tailoring methods, 359
traditional/modern fashions, 6, 1112,
2735, 701n1, 735
see also Sotiba fabrics
Senghor, Lopold, 33, 34
Serint, 37, 56, 57, 70
sru rbbal, 30, 73
Sharp, Jennifer, 912
shuka, 945
sign and symbol
definition, 12, 26n4
in fashion, 323, 176
Simmel, Georg, 117
Sissoko, Aboubacar, 16
Smirnoff fashion contest, 8990, 912
Smith, Paul, 109
Sognane, Arona, 52
Soninke dyers, 467, 525, 65
Sotiba fabrics
archive of designs, 14852
authenticity of fabrics, 1359, 142, 158,
163
business culture, 1557
clients, 1434
and colonialism, 13942
craft or industry, 1525
imi-wax prints, 1369, 136, 137, 142,
152
imitations of, 1624
indigo dyeing, 1478, 153
occasional fabrics, 1512
production process, 1428
touristic designs, 14851
in United States, 15862
Sotiba USA, 15960
Sow, Fatou, 180
Ssensalo, Bede, 11415, 128
structural adjustment programs, 1415,
334
students, and African fashion, 958
suitcase vendors, 1819, 236
Sy, Oumou, 2, 36
Sylla, Monsieur, 143, 156
taille basse, 302, 76
tailors
relations with clients, 1778
Senegal, 3546
tak dyeing, 53, 54, 578, 612, 63, 64, 66
Tandian, Drahmane, 467, 50, 515, 64
Tandian, Mabouya, 3940, 1813
tappeurs, 51, 52
Tarus, Rebecca, 92, 101
tenue europenne, 28, 367
tenue traditionelle, 28, 323, 367
Third World Handarts, 82, 84, 1812
tie-dye, 19, 53, 61, 102
tontines, 656
Tour, Salla, 15960, 163
tourism, and fashion, 856
Towa, M., 70n1
tradition, meaning of, 2932
tradition/modernity binary, 1011
dyeing, 55
Senegal fashions, 6, 1112, 2735,
701n1, 735
traditional dress, and colonialism, 759
Turner, Sheena Round, 90
Turner, Virginetta, 11415, 128, 158
United Nations (UN), tie-dye training
project, 19, 102
United States
African fashions, 1078
Sotiba fabrics, 15862
see also African Americans
USAID, 20, 193
values
of dyed fabrics, 624
of tailored garments, 37, 61
Wachira, Wairimu, 1821, 245, 7984, 92,
11820, 1312, 1701
Wahome, Carole, 85, 8990
Wakarema, 21, 79
Walmart, 119, 176
Wanjau, Gakaara wa, 104
Wanjiku, 99100
Wanyama, Christopher, 94, 98
Watts, Michael, 180
wax prints, 1369
West Africa, influences of, 94, 102
Wilson, Elizabeth, 4
women
as dyers, 478, 1534
fashion designers, 8791
as tailors, 3940
World Bank
Africa Can Compete!, 10733, 155
productivity notions, 20, 29, 44, 186
structural adjustment programs, 14
xosi dyeing, 37, 56, 56, 57, 58, 60, 69, 70,
172
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