The Global Circulation of African Fashion (Dress, Body, Culture)

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 Men’s 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: Women’s Relationships with their Clothes Linda B. Arthur, Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a CrossCultural 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 10003–4812, 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 2 3 4 5 6

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Global Suitcases: The Informal African Fashion Network

1

Fashion and the Meanings of “Tradition” in Senegal

27

Fashioning Postcolonial Identities in Kenya

73

The World Bank, JCPenney, and Artisanal African Fashion in Los Angeles

107

Fact, Fabrication and Material Misreading: The Genealogy of “Authentic African Print Fabric”

135

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 Sénégal, 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 President’s 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.

ix

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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. Légos (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 imitation 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, Côte d’Ivoire. Large figures of mythological people and animals are painted in black on a natural background. xi

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Glossary

Marinière (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, métisse descendants of eighteenth-century unions between Wolof women and French officers in the Senegalese trading posts of Saint-Louis and Gorée. As a contemporary fashion in Senegal, the ndoket has voluminous, 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. Séru ràbbal (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.”

xii

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1 Global Suitcases: The Informal African Fashion Network In her North Hollywood apartment, Synovia Jones designs and sews children’s clothing of fabric from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. 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 “handpainted T-shirts of the continent of Africa” because “I didn’t want to work in corporate America. I had already resigned myself to that. It’s like no, no I can’t.” 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 children’s styles.” She taught herself to sew “through trial and error,” giving up for several months when her used sewing machine broke. She slowly found organizations 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 they’ll understand: “You don’t 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 father’s head for business, runs the dilapidated lodge and café, 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 Alice’s jewelry workshop, in which she employs ten

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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 children’s 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 you’re an artist, you have to keep that in mind all the time, because when you have to create, you can’t 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 café and internet service provider in Dakar called “Métissacana.”

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, 2

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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 massmediated 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, it’s 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 capitalism. 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 unavoidable 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 3

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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 domination . . .” (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 1988–89; 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: 13–14). 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: 145–6).

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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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: 206–7). Artisanal African fashion allows imagining the possibility of “something else” without which we risk essentializing, 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 massmarket 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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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, I’ve 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 contrasting 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 séru ràbbal from Senegal, or mudcloth from Mali, mainly as appliqués and patchwork on everything from sweatsuits to evening gowns (Figure 4). They use brilliant cotton prints from Côte d’Ivoire 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 I’ve 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 6

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Figure 1 Embroidered boubou by Senegalese tailor Abdou Niang. Custom-made for Wairimu Wachira, 1998.

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Figure 2 Hand-dyed, embroidered ndoket in cotton damask fabric (left) and tiedyed, embroidered grand boubou (right). Dakar, 1995.

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Figure 3 Senegalese caftan in wax print. 2000.

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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.

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 reinterpretations 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 1988–89: 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; 10

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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, challenge 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 “antifashion” (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 system’s 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 11

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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 interplay . . . 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 maintained 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 12

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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: 56–7; 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 13

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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: 172–82). 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 “marketreform” 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 governments 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 “entrepreneurship.” But this euphemism only means that like their counterparts in Senegal and Kenya, African American designers had been forced into the informal 14

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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 displacement 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 ingenuity 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 Marché Sandaga and le Marché H.L.M. in Dakar, le Festival du Jazz de Saint-Louis du Sénégal, 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 15

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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 appliqués of hand-woven narrow strip cloth sent from his home country. Nigerian Christopher Nnadede makes warm-up suits with peace sign appliqués 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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 couturière 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-law’s 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 dressmaker 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 restructuring, Karimu developed a fashion line that includes one-of-a-kind graphic design appliqués 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, 16

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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 context 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 involvement, it was only after he came to the United States in 1978 that “I realized, yeah, I’m an African . . . When I got here, I started learning a lot about Africa. Before I didn’t 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 “we’re [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 networks haunting the dominant webs of globalization. But when sartorial meanings transform themselves as artisans cross geographic 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 N’Galla Ndiaye, a tailor in Dakar, was just beginning to work 17

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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 interpretation 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 18

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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 Wairimu’s arrival at her sister’s 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-offashion 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 American’s 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, Wairimu’s 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 family’s 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 sisterin-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 microenterprise entrepreneurship. The training included instruction in creating “African” – i.e., West African – styles, adapting that region’s resist-dye techniques to sell to the East African tourist market and to export to festivals in neighboring Tanzania. 19

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Lydia’s experience illustrates a third level of global circuitry, this one mediating 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 women’s 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. Lydia’s experience also suggests how the two global forces of post-colonial identity politics and economic structural adjustment encounter and reciprocally influence each other in different local situations. During Wairimu’s 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 popularity of African fashion in other countries, it inadvertently contributed to the quest for a Kenyan “national outfit.” Lydia’s experience suggests how African fashion develops in different locales through fortuitous conjunctions rather than unidirectional influences. 20

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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 Wairimu’s 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 massmarketed 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 socalled 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 appliqué- and bead-work. When I 21

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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 Central’s 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, légos 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 craftspeople I had been studying. Knowing the Father’s 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 identified 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 appliquéd 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 22

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Americans by Europeans. Adopted through a process of “cultural authentication” (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 historically 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 “articulation between local and global” (1996: 6), neglecting the richer possibility of articulations within a subordinate global network. The local–global 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 reproduction 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 massmarket 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 23

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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 massconsumer 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 Wairimu’s two-year-old daughter reacted to this strange situation by screaming and insisting on being held in her mother’s 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. 24

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I did not know if Wairimu had seen the sign, but before I could say anything to her, she said to me: “Here, you’d 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 Wairimu’s 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, you’re 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 massconsumerism. 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 25

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this contrast, so thoroughly occluded in mass-consumption, insistently foregrounded 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 methodological 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 women’s 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 metaphor (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 communication” (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: 35–8; and Kristeva 1980: 38–41.

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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 midthirties, 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 women’s, and often the men’s, 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-dimensional art form” (Perani and Wolff 1999: 25). Even, and perhaps especially, in times of economic desperation, Senegal’s 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). Senegal’s sartorial art, arising from the region’s long, rich history as nodal point of Atlantic and trans-Saharan trade routes, makes it a major

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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 prière. 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 (“traditional 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 européenne” (“European wear”) and “tenue traditionelle.” The flowing garments, as well as hand-dyed, hand-woven and colorful print fabrics, are coded traditional. Far from embodying the timeless, closed society evoked by colonialist notions of tradition (Kasfir 1992: 42–3), 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, attachments 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 circulation 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 Senegalese fashion at the meeting ground between history and myth-making.

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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 [colonialist] 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 crosscultural 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, Senegalese 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 29

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French) or séru ràbbal (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: 212–14; 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 marinière. 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 highquality 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 à la française” (Biondi 1987: 52) – was invented by the Signares. These métisse descendants of eighteenth-century unions between Wolof women and French officers in the trading posts of Gorée and Saint Louis established fashion in general as a major corporeal art. The marinière 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 marinière (see Figure 5 on p.31). This hip-length tunic with wide, often multitiered 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 marinière. One such style is the threepiece deux pagnes, composed of marinière, 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, 30

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Figure 5 Couturière Aby Bâ in her atelier hanging one of her marinières in wax print, and wearing a marinière with pagne. Dakar, 1999.

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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 wearer’s 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 one’s 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 reducible 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 accomplished the pilgrimage to Mecca, with all this connotes not only for piety but 32

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also for prestige and wealth. He passes an elegant woman, her costly ndoket (loose voluminous dress) richly dyed and worked with interlocking appliqués 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 façade 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 Senegal’s 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 Senegal’s first president, Léopold 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 Senghor’s philosophy of Négritude.4 Paradoxically, 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 33

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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 1989–90, 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 Senghor’s interpretation of Négritude, celebrated an idealized version of “traditional legitimacies” (ibid.: 48). Senghor’s 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 Senegal’s past came images from the slave trade and references to heroes who resisted French colonialism. Senghor and other leaders of the independence 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 Négritude’s injunction to adhere to “ancestors” and “heritage,” the young Set/Setaliens reinvented Senegal’s 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 Négritude myth but also its “aesthetic vision” (ibid.: 47). As the return to fashion of tenue traditionnelle was in part an aesthetic reaction against the fashions of the nationalist period, so did Set/Setal’s artistic practices challenge the interpretive logic of nationalist symbolism. In the murals on city walls, symbols were “diverted 34

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from their functions, especially religious functions” (ibid.: 50). An ancient water goddess could signify traditional nostalgia or the contemporary significance 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 economic 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 globalization. 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 categorization within the heterogeneous economy. At one end, Sénégal Broderie and the glamorous Douma Diakité’s Shalimar Couture make embroidered boubous for an international clientele. A small group of elite designers who make hybrid 35

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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 styleshow in Washington. These include the fashion designer Oumou Sy, Collé 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 marinières. The taille basse lends itself to either method. To make an ndoket or marinière, 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 multitiered 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 garment’s form on the fabric with chalk, using a tape measure and a règle, 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 européenne, the two methods have certain traditional 36

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and modern elements in common. Both use the small sewing machines introduced 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 Sérinte, 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: “C’est l’informel” (“it’s 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 unorganized. 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). 37

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Figure 6 Individual tailor stalls at the Marché H.L.M. Dakar, 1995.

Within “l’informel,” 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 Dakar’s legendary markets: the enormous Marché Sandaga in the center of the city, the long narrow back-street Marché Nguelao in an unpaved sandy alley stretching between the rear borders of two working-class districts, and the seemingly endless, intricate maze of the Marché 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: 15–16, 145–7) 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 38

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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 communication), 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 couturières 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 marinière 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 européenne, 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 entrepreneurial 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 couturière 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 Senegal’s 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 Marché 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 Marché in her hand-dyed ndoket, head wrap and sandals (she 39

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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 Bâ, a shy quiet woman in her thirties, works alone at home where she makes ndokets and marinières (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 father’s 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 Marché 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 couturières. Without a thought for the entrepreneurs in the Marché H.L.M., she apparently assumes I am referring to the unique and glamorous Douma Diakité, 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 couturières at the Marché 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 don’t want to sew in order to sell.” Aby’s 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 européennne 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 N’Galla Ndiaye why he allowed Astou to stay away in the morning but fired another apprentice, Aby’s 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. 40

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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 entanglement 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 N’Galla’s 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. N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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, N’Galla 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 N’Galla, four apprentices (including the young woman Astou and Aby’s brother) and a teenage neighbor of N’Galla’s in Grand Dakar. He is a lycée student spending his summer vacation helping out at the atelier. When I ask if the apprentices are paid, people laugh at my naiveté, and say, “but they are his pupils!” N’Galla 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 N’Galla. 41

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In an economy where not all values are reduced to exchange value, exploitation takes more personal forms. It is also reciprocal. If N’Galla exploits the labor of the apprentices, he is in turn exploited by their families. The two teenaged men are slow learners and unmotivated. N’Galla has tried to fire each of them on various occasions, but their mothers always force him to take them back. When N’Galla came from his rural village to Dakar as a young apprentice, members of these women’s 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 N’Galla 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, N’Galla and Malal pass a garment-in-progress back and forth. N’Galla cuts, Malal sews a seam and gets up to iron it, N’Galla 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 lycéen keeps the two teenage male apprentices company and, as a student, writes down the measurements when N’Galla 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 N’Galla’s 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 N’Galla, talking all the while in rapid Wolof. Moussa teases her mercilessly, telling me loudly, “this is Malal’s girlfriend, his future wife.” Malal spins around from the ironing table with an enthusiastic, “I accept!” N’Galla 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 Niang’s three-room atelier with six hired tailors on a street corner in le Médina 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 42

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accountant father played saxophone in the first jazz group of that city now famous for its jazz. His uncle is Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade. Abdou’s 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 weaving, 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 Abdou’s artist friends. The more formal organization and atmosphere of his shop do not preclude its social role in le Médina. One habitué is the Commissaire de Police of the le Médina, 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 gentleman’s 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 Aby’s 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 N’Galla’s 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 one’s 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 modernized 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 N’Galla’s 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. N’Galla usually makes European clothes, but this client needed a simple boubou and pagne of lightweight cotton. While N’Galla’s scissors slashed through the fabric, Malal and a tailor who frequently 43

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visited the atelier after his work at a uniform workshop were already sewing the cut pieces at top speed. N’Galla, 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 N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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 Bank’s perceived need to expand the accumulation 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 simultaneously, its painful unraveling. While we were walking along the dark path to the dojo, N’Galla, momentarily between his public roles as charming master tailor and karate teacher with their webs of social obligation, expressed his exhaustion and discouragement. “I’m having a lot of difficulty with my clients. What should take five minutes takes an hour. They don’t 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 Liberté 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 N’Galla, the four apprentices, and the lycée student, Malal’s girlfriend had brought fabric for a dress and was flitting all over the room before coming to rest behind the cutting table where N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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 44

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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 Malal’s 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, sometimes 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 lycéen and I were in the shop, N’Galla 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 don’t want to learn.” At that, N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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, N’Galla’s pleasure in performing his cutting, and Moussa’s delight in his rough baby dress, all make this scene seem, within a Western framework, not serious. For us, crafts are usually either a children’s 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 garment’s 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 1976–7, “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 anxiety45

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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 “creativity.” 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.” Serinté 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 commercialization 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 woman’s 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 46

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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 somewhat hesitatingly that the “substance” is being lost. Mariama offered that the color is not as even, that outsiders can’t do suppu kànja (a marbleizing technique, literally “okra soup” or “gumbo”) right. Finally, Drahmane said in a definite tone, “et puis, elles créent” (“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 commercialization. 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 distinguishing tenue traditionnelle from tenue européenne 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 women’s 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 47

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Figure 7 Dyer Awa Ly mixing dyes with a straw whisk in the courtyard of her Pikine house. Dakar, 1998.

members gather either to help or to watch and talk. In Gnouma’s setting, based on ancient practices, only the women family members help, while in Awa’s 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 Gnouma’s and Awa’s 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, commercial 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 everything from face tissues to electric room fans. These young men are enmeshed in networks headed by wealthy businessmen. As a women’s craft, dyeing lies 48

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Figure 8 Dyer Awa Ly hanging her dye work to dry in the street outside her house. Pikine, Dakar, 1998.

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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 Gnouma’s 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. Gnouma’s 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 revolutionized 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 Gnouma’s (and Drahmane’s) 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 50

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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 impossibility 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 tradition, 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 kànja 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 Gnouma’s mother’s 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. Drahmane’s father had by the end of his life lost 51

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Figure 9 Tappeurs beating fabric with wooden clubs to make it smooth and lustrous. Dakar, 2000.

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 traditional 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 couldn’t 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: 77–9; Heath 1992: 22). In this economy, 52

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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 Drahmane’s 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 nègres (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. Drahmane’s 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 “à 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 53

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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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whose circumferences trace a zig-zag pattern, achieved by sewing rather than tying. After the Festival mondial, said Drahmane, “Soninke dyeing houses flourished” and had many clients. Up to the early 1990s, his mother’s 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.” Exercising 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 bride’s 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 connoisseurs, she has the reputation as “une grande artiste.” As a young mother, Gnouma left a forced marriage in the family’s village and came to Dakar. Here she married, as third wife, the brother of her mother’s 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 women’s 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 55

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Figure 11 Fabric designer Sérinté spreading flour paste on cotton damask fabric for xosi or flour-resist dyeing. Dakar, 1998.

illusion quickly dispelled. Gnouma’s daughter had been to the university, and she herself was running for the National Assembly as an activist in an oppositional 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 Gnouma’s 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 56

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Figure 12 Sérinté engraving the design in the xosi paste with one of his plastic “combs.” Dakar, 1998.

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 interlocked 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 créent” (“they create”), Gnouma’s daughter told me with pride. This kind of tak, done for a wedding or a daughter’s 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 57

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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 don’t 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 Gnouma’s on my first visit, the women told me I could buy the indigo palmann tak piece, because it had been made for Gnouma’s daughter’s 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, Gnouma’s 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 58

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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 Gnouma’s 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 couturière from the Marché H.L.M. The position of Gnouma’s 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. Gnouma’s 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 Gnouma’s mother’s 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, Gnouma’s clients would arrive, sit on her mattresses and show her their fabric. These clients are women and take much more time than her mother’s 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 59

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me xosi, after watching Sérinte’s 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. “It’s too difficult,” she told me. “It’s dirty,” and then, adding the clincher, “It’s men’s 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. Historically, 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 men’s 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 N’Galla 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 client’s description or copied/adapted from a European or American catalog, becomes in this shuttle a source alternatively of pleasurable pride and anxious exhaustion. N’Galla 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 60

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Figure 14 Tie-dye by Sékou Diakité. Dakar, 1998.

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. Sékou Diakité is a male dyer, trained as a worker in Gnouma’s mother’s 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, 61

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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 Diakité demonstrated for me, however, used the whole six meters for motifs, and took two or three hours to fold and stitch. Diakité 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 “competitive” standardized production, that he presented the image of playing at a joyful game of crafts, rather than performing serious work. The dyeing itself Diakité 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 Diakité 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 Diakité’s 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 conversation, slipping without transition from one aspect to the other: When the work is a work of the memory [points to her head], when it’s a work of the heart [points to her heart], that’s good. When it’s not a work of the memory, when it’s not a work of the heart, that’s 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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Figure 16 Ramatoulaye Drame with her tak fabric after the stitches are removed. Dakar, 1998

working, but the money isn’t there. I work a lot, but the money isn’t 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 teenage 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 64

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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 pièce de résistance, 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 doesn’t 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 Aminata’s 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 Gnouma’s family are fond of saying: “We Soninke have dyeing in our blood.” When I asked Diakité 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 Gnouma’s 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 child’s 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 women’s 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 65

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Figure 17 Awa leading members of the Ly family in removing the tak stitches from dyed fabric. Pikine, Dakar, 1998

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 Gnouma’s craft practices and values are understandable only in the context of her family, ethnic and social history, so too are Awa’s. 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 N’Galla’s atelier in the middle-class district of Liberté VI, just a few blocks from the lycée 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 66

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one difference between Grand Dakar and Pikine in this conversation was that Moussa and N’Galla were anxious to move away from the noise, overcrowding 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 Pikine’s impenetrable address system, having inherited and practically 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 Gnouma’s and Drahmane’s 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 Médina, 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 population greater than that of Dakar. The father eventually built three houses there. The arrangements of Gnouma’s household seem based on the deep assumption that they have been done this way for a long, long time. The arrangements of Awa’s 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 Diop’s 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 Awa’s 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, Awa’s 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 Awa’s 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 67

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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 Présidente 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 légos 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 Awa’s 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 contemporary 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 68

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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. Awa’s 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 “I’m 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, “I’m 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. Gnouma’s 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 commercialization 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 counterweights, they also sell sheets of imported plastic for dyers to wrap the sections 69

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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. Serinté 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 clothing, 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, structural 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 problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle, Yaoundé: Clé 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” 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 continuation 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 Rabine’s essay “Dressing Up in Dakar” (1997a). For a history of such uses in Nigeria, see Betty Wass’s 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 O’Brien 1996: 60). Within Senegalese import distribution networks, those at the top not only “advance credit and merchandise to distributors, petty traders and microtraders,” 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 differences. The elite, glamorous Senegalese designer Collé 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 séru ràbbal. In an emotion-filled voice she invoked the memory of her grandmother, who always used the fabric. Nafissatou Diallo’s autobiography also concludes with an emotionally charged image of the narrator opening the deceased grandmother’s trunk to discover its hidden treasure of séru ràbbal (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, 73

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Figure 18 Senegalese fashion model Gaye Cissé in an ndoket in a photo circa 1950. Photo property of Gaye Cissé.

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he became quite enthusiastic: “That’s what fashion is. You see this [showing me a red ndoket embroidered in gold]. This is very, very old. Now it’s 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 otherwise. Wairimu Wachira’s 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: 154–72). 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: 65–6). 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 Nairobi’s sartorial street scene is itself a text that invites questions about the particular history that produced it. On the street, most people wear loosefitting Western clothing from the vast used-clothing markets (Hansen 1994; 75

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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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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 organization. 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 traditional dress, the missionaries severed people’s bodily access to the traditional symbolic order. By contrast to Kikuyu Kenya, Senegal was open to major currents in transcontinental trade from at least the tenth century (Curtin 1984: 32), and continually 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 neighboring 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 Cagnolo’s 1933 ethnography, a series of photographs documents the change. What strikes attention in the transition from 77

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highly ornamented traditional dress to utilitarian European dress is the progression 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 Cagnolo’s 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). Therefore, 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 nonexperiential, 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 colonialism, 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 embodying 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 appearance could cover the dire economic straits of the ruined middle class, whereas 78

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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, 53–6, 68–9, 130–1; Shaw 1995: 122–3, 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 people’s needs. The result is a vast and grinding urban poverty and a polarization 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 country’s roads, electricity, telecommunications, health systems, education, and economy, along with ruling party-instigated interethnic 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 symbolically, 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 Wairimu’s many couturière 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 Nairobi’s 79

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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 Wairimu’s search for items to sell in the American node of the transnational fashion circuit. The Market’s 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 Kenya’s 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, 80

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Figure 20 Simon Njoroge of the Pikanjoh Jewelry Company outside the Curio Market or “Blue Market.” Nairobi, 1997.

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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. Allen’s” 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, alternative 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 82

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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 won’t 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 Wakarema’s 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 can’t pass in an aisle because of mud puddles. The air is bad, and it’s 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 don’t 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 83

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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 Wairimu’s 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. Afterwards the site was burned. When the people at Third World Handarts commiserated 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 doesn’t want to sell handicraft. They bribed our chairman, and he cheated us, told us, ‘we are giving you another place.’ But it’s 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 Councilmen’s 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 one’s 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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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 couturières 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 couturières 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. Donovan’s African Heritage fashion shows tour European countries, and the sartorial meanings are oriented toward that audience. After the preview of his 1994 show at Nairobi’s 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 show’s 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 85

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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: 69–73), 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, Donovan’s 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 McCreath’s company KikoRomeo, invest the clothing with the meanings of desire particular to central Kenya by doing production work with Maasai, Turkana, and church-organized self-help women’s 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 selfsufficiency for the women in this impoverished district. 86

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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 I’ve done one blazer jacket. And it’s just the same same same same thing . . . And it’s just the same straight skirt . . . I’m 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 engineering, 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 Rialto’s 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 it’s 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. They’re 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 women’s cooperatives. The photos from her 1995 fashion show at Nairobi’s Grand Regency Hotel present a broadly eclectic mix: a wrap skirt with matching bra top made of kanga fabric from Kenya’s eastern Swahili coast, a kitenge wrap skirt with a calabash bra top, a men’s 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 Lucy’s 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 wouldn’t 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 seamstresses 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. It’s 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. I’m 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 month’s 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 originally by doing what I enjoy, and now if I don’t do well, I’m affecting lives. If I don’t do it well, this is real life. I set out to have fun . . . but I’ve been overtaken by events.

In Lucy’s 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.” 88

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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 N’Galla 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 we’ll do a study of 900 customers and establish a general pattern to plan ways of improving. We influence customers. Customers don’t know what looks good on them. You know what suits them. You talk to the customers, you know them . . . Most don’t 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 we’re never stressed. They tell us their problems, we’re 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 . . . It’s 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 it’s an uphill task, a threat to my survival. In one way or another, I’ll find a way.

Lucy’s words imply the assumption that African fashion is synonymous with originality. Like Lucy, Sally Karago assumes for African fashion the meanings of originality 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. Sally’s 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 89

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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 Kenya’s 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 don’t like going different. They want what they’ve 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, we’d 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 Sally’s 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 Carole’s 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 appliquéd green leaves to symbolize, Sheena Round Turner told me, being “liberated from the cocoon.” It was Sally’s 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 90

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quills. She needed 800 quills. “I didn’t 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: “It’s 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 don’t even think of marketing it. I do something, no matter how wild, for the chance to do something different.” 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. There’s 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, “It’s purely fantasy. 91

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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 encourage 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 it’s on T.V. or in catalogues, . . . 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 92

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Figure 21 Alice Marete in Nefertiti crown of her own design. Nyeri, Kenya, 1994.

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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 civilizations, that it’s 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 don’t know which direction to go. Thirty years ago you couldn’t 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 Lucy’s 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,” Salome’s husband commented, “there won’t 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 Wairimu’s 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 themselves. 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 people’s 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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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 transitional 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, 95

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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 . . . Let’s try to show that . . . it’s 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 people’s 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! I’m seeing someone my age wearing that, ooh that would be the talk! . . . Yeah, it’s like ‘you’re really losing it.’ . . . You’d be getting all sorts of comments.” While fashion, as we have seen, expresses deeply held desires and fantasies, it has, as this student’s 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 appearances, 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: “I’m 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 don’t wear African clothing, but I’m going to start because I have been in school . . . I’ve never actually worn them. I could wear them when I’m acting. In plays.” Here 96

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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 reembodying 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, Beatrice’s 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, you’ll be smart. Maybe you’ll even be driving a car to work. Then when you just step out of the car, people will be like, oooh, she’s 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.

Emma’s 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, ubiquitous 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 Emma’s 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 that’s 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 OpendaOmar, a graduate student in her thirties, who had written her Master’s 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 transnational difference in the new age of globalization. The discourses of disconnection from one’s 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: 28–9; and King 1997: 15). There are in Kenya, to be sure, shops full of massproduced 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 networks 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 98

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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 légos 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,” Wairimu’s brother-in-law John fumes as he drives me over crumbling or disappeared 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 divisiveness 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 Wairimu’s cousin Wanjiku said: “We have no national outfit. We need to come up with one . . . a symbol of Africanness. Colonialism destroys rich cultures. We’ve been told that anything that comes from outside is better 99

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. . . Now we are starting to say that in ten years, we won’t 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 Moí 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 Wairimu’s 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 independence period. Both Mugure’s 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 Kenya’s 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 couldn’t 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 Mugure’s 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, furthermore, 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. 100

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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 contradictions. In an article entitled “Search for National Costume Continues,” Mudasia quotes Gould as saying: “Kenyans should get away from dressing in other people’s 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 Nariobi’s Intercontinental 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 one’s own” can only come from exposure to and therefore borrowing from “other people’s 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 homogeneous 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 101

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of capitalism (Appadurai 1986: 32–3; 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 one’s 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, Kenya’s 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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Figure 22 Lucy Rao’s custom-made “Kenyan national outfit” blazer of navy gabardine with kente print trim. Nairobi, 1996

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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: “I’ve been trying to come up with something African yet Kenyan. You see Kenyans have a problem. We haven’t come up with a national dress, something that other countries can recognize. We don’t want to copy West Africa.” Her solution was a classic double-breasted navy blue men’s 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. “I’ve 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 Lucy’s 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 historically 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 producing 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 Kenya’s 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. 104

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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 concealment” are culturally determined (1978: 45–6). 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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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 community 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 JCPenney’s 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 HudsonDayton quickly followed suit. Some of Penney’s merchandise for 1992 was produced in a small factory in Senegal, and enjoyed strong sales.1 But JCPenney’s endeavor to produce African fashion in Senegal failed. Africa Can Compete! is the World Bank’s 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 production 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 JCPenney’s 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, Penney’s “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 communication with Abdoulaye Njiw; see Chapter 5) 108

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As an extension to the World Bank’s pollyannish view of third-world sweatshops from above and afar, the third issue concerns the slide from the paper’s 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 everyone’s 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: l l

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: 1–2)

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. 109

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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 2000:110–13). 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 “concentration 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: 115–16). The text of Africa Can Compete! describes, without recognizing it is doing so, how this polarization occurs. According to the paper, Penney’s “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 contracting 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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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 producers, 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 Penney’s “authentic African” program, consumers and producers of African fashion were already helping each other in informal circuits. African American consumers 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 Penney’s intervention. Another sign of growing cultural awareness in the African American community, which bodes well for retailers trying to capitalize on this heightened cultural awareness, 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 “capitalized” upon. Africa Can Compete! makes visible the habitually invisible process of separating producers from consumers that is at the heart of capitalism. 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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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 clothing’s 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 community’s 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 commodified 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 handwoven 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 112

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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. JCPenney’s “authentic African merchandise,” like the World Bank document’s 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 Penney’s/World Bank project is to destroy artisanal production 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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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 massproduction and commodification. In contrast to this, a 19-year-old African American university student articulates the contradictions within authenticity, especially in its relation to massproduction. Chinayera Black works in her mother’s 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 it’s fashionable right now, those people aren’t going to continue. I don’t think those people have accepted it as a way of life . . . To be African American, I think, is really trendy right now. But it’s going to fade and I hope everyone knows who they are . . . I guess just like any other trend, it’s fading and it’s going to die. And that’s 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, Chinayera’s 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 mother’s 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 114

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festivals for her son-in-law’s import business. She too refers to the double life of the cultural objects she sells: Since I’ve been affiliated with Bede, . . . I’ve learned a lot about different fabrics and how they are put together, and so forth, with jewelry, and to me that’s . . . it’s authentic, you know. You can’t duplicate it . . . and it’s an art within itself. Yet to them [Africans in Africa], this is their air, their way of life. To us, it’s awesome, because we don’t see that, we can’t see that . . . Like I say, since I’ve met [Bede], and been around him, I’ve 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 don’t try to get into that mode so much, you know. I like clothes, but I also like stuff that’s 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 “can’t 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. Virginetta’s 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. Virginetta’s 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 children’s clothing, maintain her work on a tightrope between selling fabrics as commodities and respecting their other life: It’s nice to know . . . what the different cloths were used for . . . The fabric [mudcloth] comes from Mali. And I asked him [my daughter’s 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 something 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 anticommodity 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 Synovia’s 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 what’s the word I’m trying to think of, oh shoot, oh man, I can’t think of the word. The word I’m trying to think of is they’re basically looking for the profits, exploiting, that’s what I’m trying to think of . . . I guess I try to just stay aware of what I’m doing and not just, okay, I’ve 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, it’s 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 don’t know why that question is difficult for me to answer. And then it just keeps getting away from me too.

Jones’s 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, it’s been really trendy to wear the African cultural dresses and outfits and that kind of thing. So I guess it’s looked at as a trend just as the baggy pants and the 116

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bell-bottoms are coming back into style.” But she predicted: “It’s going to fade because it was just fashionable . . . I think it’s going to die.” She predicted correctly. Chinayera here describes the dynamic of the fashion cycle. In Georg Simmel’s 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 Simmel’s except that the elite in question consists of culturally aware African Americans, and the filteringdown 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 légos which cannot simply be replaced by new kinds of fabrics. In launching this dynamic, JCPenney’s 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 betterpaid workers out of work (Anderson et al. 2000: 28–31, 39–43; Brecher and Costello 1994: 19–29; 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).4 117

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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 sweatshops 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 Disney’s 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 Wachira’s 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 exploitation 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 eventually 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 paper’s rosy view, from above and afar, of small African producers entering global competition under the aegis of corporate retailers. Wairimu had designed children’s ski parkas in West African print fabric. 118

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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 didn’t 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 children’s 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 don’t understand why.” Wairimu’s 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 producing 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 patternmaking, 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 you’re not good enough so they don’t have to pay you a lot. It’s 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 Bank’s 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 macroeconomic 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 Bank’s terms “assisting,” African producers to “compete” in the international economy. The paper in fact presents evidence of the failure of these policies. A foreword 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 incentives 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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The World Bank Years of structural adjustment policies including the adoption of a market determined 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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 Côte d’Ivoire, 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 Africa’s 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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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 “technical 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 JCPenney’s “‘authentic African’ garments” authentic. The deficiency is the producers’ “business culture.” Describing it in the above passage simply as having “differences” 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. 122

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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 clichés of early colonialists going into a wild place in order to carry out their civilizing mission. The image connotes JCPenney’s 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 instrumentalist 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 Bank’s “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 necessarily 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 124

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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 opportunity.” 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 awareness 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 don’t know most of the time. The only thing that this is about is money – even though back home also you have to pay. What’s 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 didn’t 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 you’re 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, it’s more of a business. 125

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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 microenterprise to a business poised to enter the formal economy. Although she still sewed in her mother-in-law’s garage, by 1999 she had orders from several boutiques in several states and had much of her work done by three seamstresses 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 that’s 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 you’re just out of it. And they will continue to make money – without involving you. That’s what happened with Hallmark.” Hallmark, as we have just seen, provides a positive example of Afrocentric marketing in Africa Can Compete! Karimu’s 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 Karimu’s career, she abided with a craftperson’s 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 appliqués she had done in the early 1990s, “I don’t 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 handwoven, hand-dyed Malian mudcloth, even though she must sew with a mask 126

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Figure 23 African American designer Karimu with her graphic art appliqué 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 can’t 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 can’t just get a piece of mud and sew it up and expect it to sell. It doesn’t 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, there’s no warmth . . . Whereas the boutiques, there’s warmth, there’s individuality, there’s creativity. You can get one-of-a-kind items. They’re more personal . . . As a designer, you can be more creative with the small boutiques. Because when you’re dealing with those big stores, . . . you basically gotta get the material, cut out a style, sew it up, and it’s out there. Whereas with the boutiques you might put a little hand something on it . . . or add a little something to it.

Karimu’s 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 paper’s 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. People’s 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: “There’s 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 motherin-law, Virginetta Turner expressed this idea more definitely: I’m telling you, it made me angry. Anything to get in on the money . . . It’s not so much the culture, it’s the money. And as soon as it’s not fit to be in vogue, they’ll drop it . . . I guess they have a right to make money . . . just as we have a right. But it’s more or less for us, it’s a need. Because we can’t 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 don’t think they were sensitive to what people wanted. It was more money, money-type thing.” But on the other hand, the JCPenney’s ventures make her “feel good” because “at least they see what we’re 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 that’s 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 they’re businesspeople too so they’re not going to let something go by without them reaping the benefits of it. It’s 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 paper’s 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. JCPenney’s 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 experimental 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 129

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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 business, 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 “authenticity,” 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 Marx’s 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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The World Bank 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 presumption 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 Penney’s 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. JCPenney’s “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. It’s as if the object as isolated fetish magically contained “authenticity” as its indestructible essence. If I have, in turn, seemed to romanticize 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 Chinayera’s predictions had come to pass. Wairimu and I spent several depressing Saturdays scouting out 131

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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 Angeles’s garment district, and found a similarly depressed scene. Their sales in Senegalese légos 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 Angeles’s Crenshaw District, the heart of the city’s 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 population 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 simultaneously. 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 132

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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 massproduced 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 Supervision 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 can’t.” 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 aren’t making as much money as they thought they would, so it’s 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 don’t want to spend the money. Which is O.K. with me because I’m 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 hasn’t of course within our culture . . . The way I look at it, the people that still come to me for African attire . . ., it’s more than just a fad for them. It’s 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 I’m 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: “I’m not pressured to compete . . . I don’t have to compete.”

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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 JCPenney’s at the time of that program and was still producing for them. There also exist in Dakar’s 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 Palast’s 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 Bank’s economism, see Ferguson 1995.

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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 “authentically” 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 fabric’s “authenticity” is not the spurious, free-floating signifier of mass-marketing, completely disconnected from processes of production and distribution. Albeit ineluctably and unceasingly displaced in the play of paradox and oxymoron, this authenticity is inseparable from the fabric’s production at the factory in Dakar and its dissemination in the transnational circuits of African fashion. And deeper than this, 135

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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, appliquéd 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 légos, l’imiwax 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 légos print. Dakar, 1987.

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Figure 25 Sotiba imi-wax or légos print. Dakar 1987. Note that each fabric has a different crack mark in the background.

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 transformed 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,” Sotiba’s original and ongoing mission, it also copies every kind of fabric process. It reproduces in print form hand-woven Ashante kente cloth and Senegalese séru ràbbal, hand-woven and hand-dyed Malian mudcloth, hand-dyed wood-block wax stamping called in Senegal le bougie, 137

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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 oldfashioned 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 informant in the factory, called the prints that connote a mythic “Africa” in the United States “not typically African,” because their figures are small with comparatively 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 138

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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), l’imi-wax, or as it is commonly called, le légos. 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: 34–6). 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 manipulations of prices and credit terms” for an impoverished peasantry became “the scandale permanent of rural Senegal” (Boone 1992: 46). 139

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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 “Senegal’s 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 légos 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 industry’s direct contribution to government revenues to almost zero” (Boone 1992: 119). Given these privileges, the European manufacturers generally kept their investments 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 légos 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 140

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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 O’Brien 1971: 71; Diop 1981: 321–35). 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, L’Union 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 141

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enthusiasm with which people talked about their work as designers, dyers, researchers or printers of légos 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 Léopold Senghor’s dedication 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 everything’s gone to hell.” (“C’était le beau temps. Maintenant tout est foutu en l’air.”) Imprinted at regular intervals directly on the selvedge of each légos fabric is the name SOTIBA and the proud declaration: “GARANTI VÉRITABLE 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 “légos” 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 142

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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. It’s our family.” Mr. Menan, the Managing Director of the factory, said of the design department: “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, Sylla’s words are not a contradiction. “We ourselves can create on the basis of another fabric,” Lamine told me. Many légos fabrics incorporate or recombine design elements from older légos or wax prints. Lamine had said in 1998: “Fabric is a perpetual process of beginning 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, “It’s 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 Marché H.L.M., with Chaouki Haidous, one of Sotiba’s 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 Sotiba’s 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 it’s 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. It’s not oneself. It’s the good God. I say, is it myself who made that?” For the design team, however, Sotiba’s 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 photomultiplied 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 légos 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 144

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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 handdone 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, 480–1). Sotiba staff and connoisseurs among its consumers emphasize the fact that Sotiba’s colors also come out equally intense on both sides of the cloth. Additional design procedures allow légos 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 145

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printed with one of the colors (Nielsen 1979: 477). Here too then, le crack in légos 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, I’m 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 cashier’s 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 impression 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 légos, he said: “That’s a good question. The very origin of the textile, the technique we use, was developed by the English from Indonesian wax. They modernized it . . .” Lamine’s answer implies that the “origin” of légos 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 légos 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: “It’s almost craft. There is an aspect of craft.” 146

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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 l’africain”). He then added that this more “African” fabric was “much more sold in the United States than in Dakar,” while the more “European” 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 can’t 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 légos, Sotiba also dyes guinée, 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 Sotiba’s 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, “c’est top secret.” In the guinée 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 père 147

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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 guinée room tells me that the Moors like to smell and taste the sulphurous flavor of guinée to make sure it is genuine. “As long as it does not stain, those people won’t buy it,” he says. “It protects against the UV rays.” In the guinée 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: “It’s 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 Baroud’s Rodin pattern, wherein this Ghanaian stool was combined with images of the Thinker, creates a mix that 148

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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 Cléopatre, 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 Fatou’s 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 incorporate 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 popularity 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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 149

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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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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 légos and touristic designs, Sotiba also has hundreds of what it calls tissus événementiels 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 Guèye, 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 Senegal’s most popular singer, Youssou N’Dour, Sotiba had created small abstract prints named after each of his songs. The singer’s signature was included on the fabric selvedge alongside the “GARANTI VERITABLE IMI-WAX” imprint. In honor of Youssou N’Dour 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. Barroud’s background had stripes of masks and checks of imitation hand-woven séru ràbbal. 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 containing 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 unaccountably: “This is very pretty as a design.” Most prevalent were a variety of crescent and star fabrics, like a Haidous design named “Vérité,” for this majority Muslim country. Another kind of occasional series contained fabrics with the 151

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photo of each African president who had visited Senegal. But the most elaborate 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 coopération Américano-Sénégalaise,” 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, l’imi-wax or le légos, 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 Lamine’s terminology, called the variant with le crack “typiquement wax” and the one without it “typiquement légos.” Here again, in her terminology le légos 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, légos, 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. It’s 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 contemporary 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 timesaving devices, upholding the Senegalese values of creativity and inspiration: “In the matter of creation putting two designs together comes from the inspiration 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 craftswomen 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 guinée 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 can’t be the same. They only use vat dyes.” Then after explaining in some detail the process, he said “You don’t need all these technical details for the working classes. The women won’t understand this.” When I later told the tailor Abdou Niang that dyers at Sotiba claimed to have the secret of indigo, he said: “They’re telling you stories. It’s the women of Fuuta who hold the secret of indigo. It’s 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 153

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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] it’s from the senses, the emotions. It’s 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 Sotiba’s 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 modernization 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 machinery, 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 Sotiba’s 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 154

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imported from Europe. Like other staff people, she expressed regret that the owners did not put more resources into developing Sotiba’s shrinking markets in Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. 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: “That’s why there are still clients who remain.” Sotiba’s 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 guinée 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, they’re 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 Sotiba’s 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 corporations. 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 corporate 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. “That’s 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: “It’s the most painful work in the department. There is a disease of the hands that occurs.” But it was Sylla’s 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 Sotiba’s 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 156

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fabrics made in Senegal,” meaning Sotiba fabric. Yet during our interview, he said, “I don’t give a hoot to where it [the fabric] comes from. I don’t care if you’re my grandpa. That’s the bottom line. Here they don’t 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 JCPenney’s venture with another African manufacturer as follows: [He] had a bad experience with JCPenney. In Africa we don’t know about clothing. We can make a nice piece for Mr. David, but we can’t make a hundred-and-fiftythousand 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 don’t use a pattern. All they know is tailoring. They don’t know about production . . . In the States they teach me time is money. Here time is time.

Given Massata’s utter dismissal of the possibility that time not totally subsumed 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 Massata’s 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: “I’m the designer, teacher, sewer. I sew the machine faster than anyone . . . I don’t look at fashion magazines. I bring my own creativity.” And he shared the insiders’ consensus about the state of Sotiba: “For dyers and printing it’s the best in the world. It’s 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 Sotiba’s 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 one’s 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, 158

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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 Touré in 1991, and originally owned by Sotiba, Sotiba USA is now a subsidiary of Afriland Inc. Touré purchased it during the 1993–94 closure of Sotiba, and by 1998, had sold all his shares in Sotiba Dakar. Touré 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 légos 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 Touré about the problem of Indians in New York making cheap copies of Sotiba, he said: “It’s 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, Touré unknotted and rewove the threads of the history by which Sotiba légos shed its status as colonialist imitation through a transformative diasporic journey, and came into its own as a sui generis authentic fabric. “I’m 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, Touré, 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 159

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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.” Touré became very enthusiastic as he recounted the bygone days of Sotiba’s 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 légos 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?” Women’s 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 Sotiba’s 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. Touré’s 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. Touré 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 don’t know what they want.” With apparent nostalgia, Touré 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 Touré’s 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 Touré, 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 “Abdou’s Homeland Fashion and Embroidery,” a tribute – in the 160

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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 Diop’s 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 Diop’s nephew Abdoulaye Djiw. Warm and charming, Abdoulaye has a Master’s 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 légos 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 Abdoulaye’s 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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, Côte d’Ivoire 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. Abdoulaye’s 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 161

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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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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, légos 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 lowquality 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 Djiw’s 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 don’t care or can’t afford it. If they buy the imitation, they wear it once and that’s 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 Touré worry that customers confuse them with the imitators who are also their competitors. Abdoulaye said: “Sometimes people call and ask if it’s African Village. I just say ‘This ain’t African Village.’” Salla Touré 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 circulation 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 Ko’s. 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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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, légos 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 légos 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 légos in Haidous’s 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 légos was the symptom of a new kind of crisis in Sotiba’s troubled history.

A New Fabric Printing Factory in Dakar When I revisited the Sotiba factory in August, 1999, the designers were working on several beautiful designs, but on the main printing floor, only one machine was printing. In the Guinée 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. “They’re 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. 164

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Figure 27 Légos 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 légos 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 symbolizing 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, Senegal’s 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, however, 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 Nestlé in the local market. Furthermore, he has a built-in clientele among the Lebanese wholesalers of Dakar. As Lamine said before the factory opened, “All the Dakar guys are already clients. They’re just waiting. They know that a relative is putting up a factory.” But much more crucially, when I visited the factory, Lamine’s “best friend” for the past thirty years, the technician who had kept the machines at Sotiba running, was supervising the installation of Cosetex’s machines. Two people from Sotiba’s testing room and two more from the design department joined Lamine when the factory opened. As we saw above, the key to Sotiba’s 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. 166

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Figure 28 Maquettes (colored ink sample drawings) by fabric designer Lamine Mbodj for Cosetex. The desk of Lamine Mbodj’s downtown Dakar workshop. 2000.

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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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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 capitalism 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 169

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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 fieldwork 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 Ariadne’s 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 emphatically 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 longlasting of these negotiation processes. From the very beginning, she did not 170

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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 Gnouma’s 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 knowledge to quickly buy fabric and place an order. I photographed and took notes 171

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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 can’t 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 she’s 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: “We’re friends. We’re 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 demonstrations 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 Gnouma’s room, waiting for her to give me that first dyeing demonstration 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 172

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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, Gnouma’s younger half brother entered and introduced himself to me. He turned out to be a student of Ndiaye’s 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 you’re studying exchange, like in Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift.” He and Gnouma’s 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 Gnouma’s 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 Sembène Ousmane, for instance, shows in Le Mandat, his novella and film about economic desperation in postcolonial 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 don’t pay him; I give him what I want.” Tailors speak similarly of their helpers. The tailor N’Galla 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 don’t 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 characterizing economies where “interpersonal relations play an important role” (77), as they continue to do in urban Senegal. The traditional relations of clientage 173

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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 174

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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 situation 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 economic 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 I’ll 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 175

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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 production. 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 production that thereby democratize cultural expression through fashion have made the global assembly line more anti-democratic. Giant retailers like WalMart 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 176

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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, 52–7; 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 empowerment and the very act of consumption that increases our social disempowerment, 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 producer’s 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 one’s 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 177

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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 friendship 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 restructuring 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 178

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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 don’t pay slave wages,” she told me emphatically, and said she pays minimum wage or above. Of the large manufacturers lowering wages in the name of global competition, she said, “I could understand that in a business sense, but I think it’s wrong. Because you’re not supposed to work people like that, for nothing. That’s 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 dehumanizing 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 massconsumer 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 N’Galla Ndiaye, as from Wairimu Wachira, Lucy Rao, Oumou Sy, Karimu, Ahneva Ahneva, Bass Lô and others, inscribes of course the sartorial signifiers of an established fashion code, but something else as well. The memories of the tailor’s pleasure and difficulties in making it, our discussions about it, the tailor’s 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 evolutionary model in which our own pre-industrial past necessarily and inevitably develops into our assembly-line present. These are economies that have already 179

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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: 24–5). As such, they illustrate the paradoxes of being excluded from, while completely embedded in, capitalism. Michael Watts points out that in a polarized world, “not all actors have, of course, an equal capacity to determine meanings, 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, informalization cannot solve an economic crisis, but ultimately rebounds on it to make it worse (Bangura 1995: 92–3). 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 180

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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 one’s 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 Gnouma’s circle in 1998, Mabouya, the cousin of Gnouma who exported ndokets from a small atelier in Dakar’s Marché 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 Gnouma’s husband, Mabouya kept separate quarters and did separate cooking for her husband and family, which also included her sister-in-law’s 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. Mabouya’s husband spread a mat for us to sit on the terrace floor, and he engaged me in conversation while she sat on a low stool and applied makeup with the aid of a lethallooking 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 “préciser” what she meant by Americans. Another cousin, a young man who had a batik atelier, asked me the same question later, but was very businesslike 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 181

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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 Americanbased Alternative Trade Organization called The Marketplace (Littrell and Dickson 1998; 1999). It trains women and organizes women’s 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 à la main.” We discussed photographing the dyeing process so as to increase the product’s 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. 182

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Even more potentially harmful is the way the export projects, and in particular 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 conversation, I told her that I was going up to Mabouya’s 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 Mabouya’s sister-in-law had come into Gnouma’s 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 “c’est très bien.” I still worried about how my handling of the situation might have contributed to jeopardizing Mabouya’s 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 threatened the integrity of the research also had the opposite effect of deepening it. Aihwa Ong, writing about the ethnographer’s “anxiety” (1995: 353) over the unequal power relations between American academic researcher and thirdworld 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. 183

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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) Gnouma’s scarf-export project, for instance, I insisted she repeatedly work with the dye bath until her blue matched exactly the blue of Helen Hunt’s 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 Ong’s 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 emphatically 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 microenterprise export from a macro perspective. Why intentionally bring craftspeople 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 184

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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 N’Galla 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 considering 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. N’Galla 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 conversing. 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 185

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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. N’Galla 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. N’Galla, 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.: 23–4) 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, N’Galla 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 N’Galla, to an even greater extent that Gnouma, confounded my expectations over how African craft would fit into American markets. 186

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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 knowledge my research would produce, but even over what I would consider to be knowledge. N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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 wouldn’t want to make money by making ugly things.” Recognizing this value system, Awa and Aliou nodded in approval and accepted N’Galla into their confidence. Once Awa and N’Galla 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. N’Galla and Awa settled on children’s 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 légos from the Sotiba factory (Chapter 5), N’Galla 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, Awa’s brother Aliou carefully calculated every detail again and again. In order to make his production more efficient, N’Galla 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 N’Galla and his main assistant began vying with each other 187

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Figure 29 Tailor N’Galla Ndiaye marking légos fabric with a règle and chalk in preparation for cutting the fabric to make overalls. Dakar, 1998.

to create a different and more original appliqué 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 N’Galla’s 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 N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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 N’Galla’s 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 N’Galla bent over his speeding, humming 188

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Figure 30 N’Galla Ndiaye putting the pieces of légos and stitch-resist hand-dyed fabric together for a pair of overalls. Dakar, 1998.

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machine through the din, one time turning to remark to me that things were beginning to heat up. Under the noise, N’Galla’s 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, N’Galla and members of Awa’s 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 impoverished 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 N’Galla’s 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 appliqué design. In other words, the production process had to be standardized, rationalized, 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 alternative 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 transmission 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 190

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for consumers seeking a utopian outside (Appadurai 1986: 56–7; Appiah 1992: 223–5; Clifford 1988: 215, 228; C. Hendrickson 1996). N’Galla, 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, according 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 neoliberal capitalism, must structure consumption so that consumers inscribe meanings that foreclose the producer’s role in meaning production. So powerful 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 tailor’s 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. 191

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For N’Galla, 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, N’Galla 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 maintaining his craft values, N’Galla 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 established profession of woman entrepreneur, who did only exporting, and for whom N’Galla 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 légos shirts for boutiques in Harlem would be a lot simpler and therefore more lucrative. I asked N’Galla if he preferred custom work or export orders. “I wouldn’t want to give it up (custom work),” he said emphatically, and then “and I wouldn’t 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 N’Galla 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 appliquéd items. After puzzling over this creative task for a whole day, a jubilant N’Galla told me the next morning that he had found the solution the previous night in 192

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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 interviewed 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 N’Galla 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: N’Galla through more traditional apprenticeship, Abdou first through self-teaching, and later through a course set up by the USAID-sponsored NGO. Once N’Galla 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 Ong’s 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 Ong’s 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 193

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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 N’Galla 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 Awa’s 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 other’s 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, N’Galla 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 N’Galla 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 artisan’s “pleasure of creation” (1990: 238). In both cases contradiction pits creative cultural agency against economic powerlessness. 194

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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 oppression 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 Lévi-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 socioeconomic 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 (D’Amico 1981: 40), and so cannot account for conflicts between symbolic economies and political economies. Another problem concerns the 195

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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.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations Abdou, 73–5 Achieng’, Susan, 96 Adamson, Joy, 105n2 Afful, Beatrice, 16 African Americans as consumers, 108–12, 124–5, 130 informal economy, 125–30, 178–80 African fashion authenticity, 10–11, 12–13, 112–17 competitiveness, 107–12 cross-cultural links, 92–5 global networks, 15–21 Kenya, 6, 10, 19–21, 77, 78, 85–104 originality, 89, 91–2 Senegal, 6, 11–12, 27–35, 70–1n1, 73–5 students’ views, 95–8 in United States, 6, 18, 107–8, 132–3, 134n1 African Heritage, Kenya, 82, 85–6 African Marketplace, Los Angeles, 14–15, 22 African Village, 162, 163 Afriland, Inc., 159 Ahneva, Ahneva, 10, 16 alternative trade organizations, 190–1 Aminata, 64–5 apprentices, Senegal, 41–2 Ardo, Collé Sow, 36, 73 artisanal fashion and consumer culture, 2–5 and mass-production, 176–80, 191, 195–6n4 Ashanti to Zulu, 132–3 Asia, competition from, 108, 132, 162–4 Askins, Stephanie, 133 ateliers, Senegal, 41–6 authenticity African fashion, 10–11, 12–13 meaning of, 112–17, 158, 163 Sotiba fabrics, 135–9, 142, 156–7 Bâ, Aby, 31, 40, 43 Bâ, Astou, 40 Bambara dyeing, 64

batik, 138–9 bead-work, 22–3 Bhabha, Homi, 21 Black, Chinayera, 114, 116–17 Black History Month, 130 Blue Market, Nairobi, 15, 19, 79–84, 81, 99 borders, crossing of, 24–6 boubous, 6, 7, 11–12, 26n2, 30, 36 bougie wax-resist, 56–7 Brazzaville, fashion, 75 business cultures, 121–5, 155–7 caftans, 6, 9, 26n2 Cagnolo, Charles, 77–8 capitalism, and Africa, 108–12 Cheikh, 144, 146–7 Chow, Rey, 70–1n1 Cissé, Gaye, 74 Cleaver, Kevin, 120 colonialism Senegal, 139–42 and traditional dress, 75–9 commodity fetishism, 4 competitiveness African fashion, 107–12 meaning of, 117–21 consumer culture, 2–5 consumers, African American, 108–12, 124–5, 130 cooperatives, dyeing, 65–6 Cosetex, 164–6, 167 Craik, Jennifer, 4 creativity dyeing of fabric, 46–7 fabric design, 143 creolization, 23 cultural identity, 22–3 Daniel, Sian, 86 design process, Sotiba fabrics, 143–8 Dia, Vieux, 152–5 Diagana, Gnouma, 37, 47–8, 50, 55–60, 62–4, 69–70, 171–5, 183 Diakité, Douma, 40

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Index Diakité, Sékou, 61–2, 61, 65 Diallo, Nafissatou, 73 Dieydiou, Fatou, 148, 152 Diop, Abdoulaye-Bara, 67, 173–4 Diop, Muhammed, 159–60 Diouf, Abdou, 33 Diouf, Mamadou, 34 Djiw, Abdoulaye, 123, 161–2, 163 Donovan, Alan, 2, 82, 85, 91 Drame, Ramatoulaye, 62, 63, 64 dudu tak, 54, 58, 62, 63, 64 dyeing cooperatives, 65–6 history of, 52–5 indigo, 147–8, 153–4 mystique of, 60–5 Senegal, 46–70 techniques, 69–70 Egerton College, 95–6, 101 Eicher, Joanne, 12, 53 Erekosima, Tonye V., 12 ethical issues, export projects, 180–6, 194 ethnic dress, authenticity, 12–13 Evelyn Fashion College, 95–8 export projects artisanal meanings, 190–4 ethical issues, 180–6, 194 production process, 186–90 fabrics authenticity, 135–9, 156–7 see also dyeing; Sotiba fabrics Fall, Fatou, 155 fashion definition, 11, 26n3 and feminism, 3–4 political meanings, 85–6 prices, 37, 61 see also African fashion Faye, Modou, 27 feminism, and fashion, 3–4 Fenwick, Sue, 182 Ferguson, James, 109 Festival mondial des arts nègres, 53 Fiske, John, 195 Fleuret, 141, 148 France, colonialism, 139–42 Gaye, Fadieye, 33 gender divisions dyeing, 60, 153–4 tailoring, 39–40

Gibson-Graham, J.K., 180 gift exchange, 171–5, 178 globalization, 13–15 informal networks, 2–5, 23–4 Gould, Margaret, 101, 102–4 grand boubou, 8, 32, 54 Grossberg, Lawrence, 23 Gueye, Sadyia, 36 guinée fabric, 147–8 Haidous, Chaouki, 144, 164–6, 165 Hall, Stuart, 3 Heath, Deborah, 32 Hollander, Anne, 36 Homeland, 123, 160–2, 163 Howes, David, 23 indigo dyeing, 147–8, 153 Indonesian batik, 138–9 informal economy, 14–15, 20, 178–80 African Americans, 125–30 global networks, 2–5, 23–4 Senegal, 37–8, 71n5 Islamic dress, as traditional, 30 Jakobson, Roman, 26n3 Jameson, Fredric, 5 jewelry, Kenya, 1–2, 80–4, 95–6 Jones, Synovia, 1, 115–16 Karago, Sally, 85–6, 87, 89–91 Karimu, 16, 126–9, 127 Keita, Mariama, 46–7, 51, 55 Kenya African fashion, 6, 10, 19–21, 77, 78, 85–104 colonialism, 77–9 jewelry, 1–2, 80–4, 95–6 national outfit, 20, 99–104, 103, 105n4 racism, 24–5 traditional dress, 75–8, 105n2 Western fashion, 19 women fashion designers, 87–91 kikoi, 102–4 KikoRomeo, 86 Kikuyu culture of, 94 traditional dress, 75–8, 94–5 King, Olujimi, 16 Kishare, Raphael Sarone, 21–3 Kondo, Dorinne, 4, 194 Korogho story cloth, copies of, 16, 149–51, 150 Kwanzaa, 111, 130

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Index Ndongo, Oumar, 39 N’Dour, Youssou, 151 Nefertiti crown, 92, 93 Négritude, Senegal, 33, 34 neo-colonialism, Senegal, 140–2 Nguidjol, Emile Ngo, 125–6 Niang, Abdou, 7, 42–3, 153, 193 Njoroge, Simon, 81, 83–4 Nnadede, Christopher, 16 Nromo, Richard, 84

légos prints, 136–9, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143–8, 152, 162–6, 165 Lenana, Salome, 75, 76, 77 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 11 Lo, Bass, 15–16 Los Angeles African designers, 15–18, 126–30 African fashion, 6, 18, 132–3 African Marketplace, 14–15 informal economy, 178–9 sweatshops, 117–18, 177 Ly, Awa, 47–8, 48, 49, 65–70, 66, 187

Omar, Nancy, 100 Ong, Aihwa, 183, 184, 193 Openda-Omar, Nancy, 98 originality, of African fashion, 89, 91–2 Orue, Yolanda de, 86 Ousmane, Sembène, 173

Maal, Baba, 2 Maasai clothing, 85–6, 94–5 cultural identity, 22–3 Mahinda, Lydia, 19–20, 21, 102 Mahinda, Mugure, 100 Malcolm X, 19 Mambety, Djibril Diop, 2 mame boye, 73 Marché H.L.M., Dakar, 38, 38, 39–40 Marete, Alice, 1–2, 92, 93 marinières, 30, 31, 36 mass-production, and artisanal fashion, 176–80, 191, 195–6n4 Massata, 123, 156–7 Mbodj, Lamine, 138–9, 142, 143–8, 154–6, 164–6, 167 Mbow, Penda, 178 McCracken, Grant, 26nn3,4 McCreath, Ann, 86 McGhee, Gloria, 16, 129 McRobbie, Angela, 3, 10 Menan, Mr, 143 microenterprise development, 19–20 Moi, Daniel arap, 99, 100 Mudasia, Sylvia, 91, 101, 102 Mudimbe, V., 29, 71n1 Mwenda, Susan, 86 mystique, of dyeing, 60–5

pagnes, 29–30, 32, 36 Pappius, 80–2, 83 Penney, JC, 107–12, 113, 117, 121–5, 129–31, 134n1, 156–7, 176 Pietz, William, 130 Pikanjoh Arts and Jewelry Company, 80–4, 99, 171 prices, informal, 37, 171–5 productivity, World Bank notions of, 20, 29, 44 racism, 24–5 Rao, Lucy, 87–9, 94, 103, 104 research project commodity exchange obligations, 171–5 methodology, 169–71 Rialto fashion, 87

Nairobi, Blue Market, 15, 19, 79–84, 81, 99 national outfit, Kenya, 99–104, 103, 105n4 Native Americans, cultural identity, 22–3 Ndiaye, Malick, 173 Ndiaye, N’Galla, 40, 41–5, 60–1, 173, 185–6 export projects, 17–18, 186–90, 188, 189, 192–4 Ndiaye, Seringe, 141 ndokets, 6, 8, 26n2, 30, 36, 39, 74, 75

Samb, Mame Rane, 152 Santos, Bakary, 16–17 Scoggard, Ian, 191 Senegal African fashion, 107, 134n1 colonialism, 139–42 creativity, 46–7 dyeing, 46–60 export projects, 2, 181–6 gender and dyeing, 60, 153–4 gender and tailoring, 39–40 gift exchange, 171–5, 178 household arrangements, 67–8 informal economy, 37–8, 71n5 Pikine, 66–7 Set/Setal movement, 34–5 social life of ateliers, 41–6

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Index socio-economic crisis, 33–5 tailoring methods, 35–9 traditional/modern fashions, 6, 11–12, 27–35, 70–1n1, 73–5 see also Sotiba fabrics Senghor, Léopold, 33, 34 Serinté, 37, 56, 57, 70 séru ràbbal, 30, 73 Sharp, Jennifer, 91–2 shuka, 94–5 sign and symbol definition, 12, 26n4 in fashion, 32–3, 176 Simmel, Georg, 117 Sissoko, Aboubacar, 16 Smirnoff fashion contest, 89–90, 91–2 Smith, Paul, 109 Sognane, Arona, 52 Soninke dyers, 46–7, 52–5, 65 Sotiba fabrics archive of designs, 148–52 authenticity of fabrics, 135–9, 142, 158, 163 business culture, 155–7 clients, 143–4 and colonialism, 139–42 craft or industry, 152–5 imi-wax prints, 136–9, 136, 137, 142, 152 imitations of, 162–4 indigo dyeing, 147–8, 153 occasional fabrics, 151–2 production process, 142–8 touristic designs, 148–51 in United States, 158–62 Sotiba USA, 159–60 Sow, Fatou, 180 Ssensalo, Bede, 114–15, 128 structural adjustment programs, 14–15, 33–4 students, and African fashion, 95–8 suitcase vendors, 18–19, 23–6 Sy, Oumou, 2, 36 Sylla, Monsieur, 143, 156 taille basse, 30–2, 76 tailors relations with clients, 177–8 Senegal, 35–46 tak dyeing, 53, 54, 57–8, 61–2, 63, 64, 66 Tandian, Drahmane, 46–7, 50, 51–5, 64 Tandian, Mabouya, 39–40, 181–3 tappeurs, 51, 52

Tarus, Rebecca, 92, 101 tenue européenne, 28, 36–7 tenue traditionelle, 28, 32–3, 36–7 Third World Handarts, 82, 84, 181–2 tie-dye, 19, 53, 61, 102 tontines, 65–6 Touré, Salla, 159–60, 163 tourism, and fashion, 85–6 Towa, M., 70n1 tradition, meaning of, 29–32 tradition/modernity binary, 10–11 dyeing, 55 Senegal fashions, 6, 11–12, 27–35, 70–1n1, 73–5 traditional dress, and colonialism, 75–9 Turner, Sheena Round, 90 Turner, Virginetta, 114–15, 128, 158 United Nations (UN), tie-dye training project, 19, 102 United States African fashions, 107–8 Sotiba fabrics, 158–62 see also African Americans USAID, 20, 193 values of dyed fabrics, 62–4 of tailored garments, 37, 61 Wachira, Wairimu, 18–21, 24–5, 79–84, 92, 118–20, 131–2, 170–1 Wahome, Carole, 85, 89–90 Wakarema, 21, 79 Walmart, 119, 176 Wanjau, Gakaara wa, 104 Wanjiku, 99–100 Wanyama, Christopher, 94, 98 Watts, Michael, 180 wax prints, 136–9 West Africa, influences of, 94, 102 Wilson, Elizabeth, 4 women as dyers, 47–8, 153–4 fashion designers, 87–91 as tailors, 39–40 World Bank Africa Can Compete!, 107–33, 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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