Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (African Expressive Cultures)

256 Pages·2004·4.75 MB·English

by  Jean Marie Allman

Fashioning Africa
African Expressive Cultures
Patrick McNaughton, general editor
Associate editors
Catherine M. Cole
Barbara G. Hoffman
Eileen Julien
Kassim Koné
D. A. Masolo
Elisha P. Renne
Z. S. Strother
EDITED BY JEAN ALLMAN
Fashioning Africa
Power and the Politics of
Dress
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fashioning Africa : power and the politics of dress / edited by Jean Allman.
p. cm. — (African expressive cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34415-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21689-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Clothing and dress—Symbolic aspects—Africa. 2. Clothing and dress—Political aspects—Africa. 3. Women’s
clothing—Africa. I. Allman, Jean Marie. II. Series.
GT1580.F37 2004
391′.0096—dc22
2004000694
1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress 1
Jean Allman
part one: fashioning unity: women and dress; power and
citizenship
1. Remaking Fashion in the Paris of the Indian Ocean: Dress,
Performance, and the Cultural Construction of a Cosmopolitan
Zanzibari Identity 13
Laura Fair
2. Dress and Politics in Post–World War II Abeokuta (Western
Nigeria) 31
Judith By¤eld
3. Nationalism without a Nation: Understanding the Dress of Somali
Women in Minnesota 50
Heather Marie Akou
part two: dressing modern: gender, generation, and invented
(national) traditions
4. Changes in Clothing and Struggles over Identity in Colonial
Western Kenya 67
Margaret Jean Hay
5. Putting on a Pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Nation and
Dress in Late Colonial Luanda 84
Marissa Moorman
6. “Anti-mini Militants Meet Modern Misses”: Urban Style, Gender,
and the Politics of “National Culture” in 1960s Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania 104
Andrew M. Ivaska
part three: disciplined dress: gendered authority and
national politics
7. From Khaki to Agbada: Dress and Political Transition in
Nigeria 125
Elisha P. Renne
8. “Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume”: Nation,
Gender, and the Politics of Cloth-ing in Nkrumah’s Ghana 144
Jean Allman
9. Dressing Dangerously: Miniskirts, Gender Relations, and Sexuality
in Zambia 166
Karen Tranberg Hansen
part four: african “traditions” and global markets:
the political economy of fashion and identity
10. Fashionable Traditions: The Globalization of an African Textile 189
Victoria L. Rovine
11. African Textiles and the Politics of Diasporic Identity-Making 212
Boatema Boateng
Afterword 227
Phyllis M. Martin
List of Contributors 231
Index 235
vi Contents
Acknowledgments
From the very beginning, this project has been an extraordinary collective effort.
It started as a rather vague idea early in 2001, as I puzzled over the intersections of
culture, fashion, and politics in Ghana. It then came together in a wonderful set of
papers presented on two panels at the 2001 meeting of the African Studies Asso-
ciation in Houston, Texas. I owe my most profound gratitude, therefore, to the con-
tributors to this volume—a most extraordinary group of interdisciplinary scholars
who generously shared their expertise with me and with each other, and whose
meticulous work and respect for deadlines kept this project on time and on target
from the very beginning. Together, we owe much to the support, dedication, and
enthusiasm of Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press, and to the diligence and
care of Jane Lyle and Shoshanna Green. What a pleasure it has been working with
all of them. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Uni-
versity of Illinois Research Board and the Mellon Faculty Fellows Program, which
has afforded me the time and the resources to complete the collection before you.

Fashioning Africa: Power and
the Politics of Dress
Jean Allman
In July 1953, a short piece in the Accra Evening News entitled “Hats Off to Nkru-
mah” remarked on the rather sudden disappearance of men’s headwear from the
capital city:
In the Gold Coast today, hats have become a rarity.
The youngmen walk through the sun, bareheaded, wearing their hair the Nkrumah
way, and ladies have taken to the turban and the headkerchief.
For years Gold Coast citizens spent vast sums on hats & became so used to them
that going about in the sun without a hat on became unbearable.
Meanwhile, the men who introduced this in¤rmity were gradually discarding
their hats.
Eventually, they were to have become acclimatised to the tropics, while the African
became a weakling in his own home.
Then came Nkrumah on the scene. He opened the eyes of his people to the danger
and off went the hats. . . . But this is just one of the positive affects of Nkrumahism.
Hats off to Nkrumah. He is a dynamic leader.1
To some, the Evening News report may seem a rather frivolous human interest story
set during the most tumultuous years of Ghana’s struggle for independence from
British colonial rule—a marginal slice of life tangential to the central stories of
mass nationalist politics and the devolution of political power. For the contributors
to this volume, however, the case of the disappearing hats is no fanciful aside. It is
very much the central story—a story that is, at once, an assertion of citizenship, a
call for nationalist unity against colonial domination, and a condemnation of the
anglophilia of some urban elites.
Fashioning Africa is concerned with the ways in which power is represented,
constituted, articulated, and contested through dress. It seeks to understand bodily
praxis as political praxis, fashion as political language. Each chapter explores dress
practice as it is embedded in ¤elds of power—economic, political, gendered, or
generational—in order to probe the ways in which modi¤cations of the body
through clothing have been used both to constitute and to challenge power in Af-
rica and its Diaspora. Together, the chapters foreground the power of dress, the
power of fashion as an incisive political language capable of unifying, differenti-
ating, challenging, contesting, and dominating. As Joanne Entwistle has remarked,