Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa 9780226397368

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Patterns in Circulation

Togolese cloth trader at her market stand handling a classic pattern called “Otopa,” or “Gillette.” Photo by Bruno Zanzoterra.

Patterns in Circulation Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa

N i n a S y lva n u s

The University of Chicago Press  Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­39719-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­39722-­1 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­39736-­8 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226397368.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sylvanus, Nina, author. Title: Patterns in circulation : cloth, gender, and materiality in West Africa / Nina Sylvanus. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017205 | ISBN 9780226397191 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226397221 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226397368 (e-­book) Subjects: LCSH: Textile industry—­Togo. | Women textile designers—­ Togo. | Textile fabrics—­Togo. | Clothing and dress—­Togo. | Togo—­ Politics and government. Classification: LCC HD9868.T6 S95 2016 | DDC 338.4/767702—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017205 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 ( Permanence of Paper).

For my father, Bernd, and in memory of my mother, Renate.

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: 1 Fashioning

2  Archival



3  Branding



4  Flexible



5  Dangerous

the Body: Dressing the Public Self  24

Prints: Alternate Histories of Taste and Circulation 49 Cloth, Branding Nation: The Nana Benz and the Materiality of Power  77 Patterns: The Nanettes Remake the Market and Cloth in China  109 Copies: Old Value Systems in a New Economy  138

Conclusion:

Patterns in Circulation  1

Assigamé Burning  165

Notes 175  Bibliography 189  Index 203

Preface The market I stepped into on my first fieldwork stint during the summer of the new millennium was a confusing and con­­tradictory one. Prior to my arrival in Lomé (Togo), I had visited the headquarters of wax-­print textile giant Vlisco in the Netherlands, which arranged my introduction to Fabrice Ruiz, the Togolese director of the Vlisco Africa Company (VAC). A former member of the French military, Ruiz ran the Lomé subsidiary with an authoritarian hand—­a forceful style I naively assumed had disappeared with French co­­lo­ nialism. His assistant, Livingstone Agbobli, like many Togo­­ lese employees and traders in the market, resented Ruiz and his “neocolonial style.” Agbobli later told me that surely the Dutch considered “this type of character” to be required in “a place like Togo.” Furthermore, in the aftermath of the company’s restructurings, Agbobli conjectured, “They probably needed someone like him to deal with the women.” When I asked him to explain what he meant by this, he responded in a slightly amused way, “Well, you know, our women are strong-­headed, they are powerful!” Prosper, an employee at the VAC warehouse, took me on one of my first trips to the famous cloth market, Le Grand Marché de Lomé or Assigamé (which translates as “women’s place”). It was there I first encountered one of the pow­ erful women Agbobli had mentioned. The director had in­­ structed Prosper to accompany me through the market laby­­ rinth to visit the shop of Dédé Evelyne Trenou, a wholesale trader and VAC client.1 After initial introductions and discussion of the day’s news, we began to talk about Dédé’s work, her role in the market, and the standing of the Nana ix

P r e fa c e

Benz and their daughters. The term Nana Benz refers to the powerful Togolese cloth traders of the 1950s to 1990s who controlled the West Af­­rican wax cloth trade until political crisis and global shifts in produc­ tion derailed their hold on the economy. One of the most potent economic and political forces in Togo for decades, the Nana Benz legendarily defined the nation through their vehicular power when they lent their Mercedes-­Benz (hence the name) cars to the postcolonial state. “Ha! There are only Nana 2Chevaux today,” Dédé laughed, amused by her reference to the small two-­horsepower Citroën car. “There’s no money to be made in this market. Look around you, the market is dead!” I glanced out the window at the lively scene. “Why is the market dead?” I asked. “Before, every day the market was full. On Mondays the Ghanaians came, on Tuesday c’est Côte d’Ivoire, Wednesday, Benin . . . Nigeria, and Congo on Thursdays, also Cinquassé and Niger and Burkina on Fridays. Everyone came to Lomé to get our cloth!” she replied, exhilarated at the memories alone. “What happened, and where do all these traders get their cloth from now if they don’t come here anymore?” I inquired. “Ha!” she sighed and turned to the counter, where she pulled out sev­­ eral cloth samples. I looked through the different samples as she con­ tinued, “You see this design here? They call it “Fish Scale” in Nigeria (see plate 1). These are classic Igbo colors—­red, black, and gold. I used to own this design. In fact, I inherited it from my mother! It’s a very old pat­­ tern. My mother, you know her father was Yoruba, so she specialized in the Nigerian market. She spoke several Nigerian languages. She owned several Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa designs—­and the Igbo especially, they don’t like changing color or pattern, each year they come and will buy the same cloth over and over again. But they took it away!” “Who took your designs?” I asked, surprised by her peculiar reference to design and product ownership. “Vlisco,” she shot back, “it’s in Cotonou now; we only get the leftovers!” Dédé and her peers had indeed re­­ cently lost control over the distribution of so-­called classic designs whose prestige and value the Nana Benz had built and made fortunes from. Vlisco’s “classics” are designs that have been in print for more than sixty years, and they make up a large portion of the Dutch company’s sales to­ day. The leftovers to which Dédé referred were patterns and hues for the Ghanaian and Ivoirian market as well as the new designs Vlisco launches at regular “fashion intervals.” Over the next couple of weeks, I met the majority of the cloth traders. The women spoke of their struggles and kept referring to the market x

P r e fa c e

in the past tense. One day, to my surprise, a trader invited me to her two-­ story villa to attend a major market transaction, which cloth traders call une vente (a sale). The merchandise she had ordered from the Netherlands two months before at VAC had finally arrived—­and so had her clients. About ten women, covered from head to toe in colorful wax cloth, sat on opulent leather couches and chairs in front of a big-­screen television in her living room. I watched a wealthy trader from Kinshasa pull out $50,000 in large bills from a black plastic bag. Indeed, the spectacular amounts of cash that were exchanged on this day made me doubt the traders’ previous complaints about the dead market. For several hours, I observed these women counting and recounting money and making calls on their cell phones. A group of three Ivoirian women arrived next. Soon after speaking to the hosting trader, they tabled large sums of mon­ey from Gucci handbags. The transactions were punctuated by moments of waiting, with snacks served by the trader’s domestic workers. La vente lasted many hours; the three women from Abidjan stayed overnight, catching the next day’s flight back to Côte d’Ivoire. A decade later, Dédé’s concerns about her shrinking business were unquestionably real. Although she was still a top-­tier wholesaler, the mar­­ ket’s material and spatial composition had changed profoundly. In the past, she had worked exclusively in wholesale. By 2010, however, she was also selling cloth by the “piece” (a twelve-­yard length—­enough for two outfits—­is the wholesale trade’s standard measure). It was only on rare occasions that she could transact the kinds of volume she had traded a decade earlier, when each of her clients bought between one hundred and three hundred pieces. I walked into her store one day just as an employee was cutting a piece of Dutch wax in half upon a customer’s request for a demi-­pièce (a “half piece” of six yards). Such rationing would have been unthinkable a decade before, when only small-­scale traders sold cloth by the unit or half unit. The rescaling of Dédé’s business was emblematic of the overall downsizing of the trade in Dutch wax—­which only rich consumers can afford—­and the simultaneous expansion of cheaper Chinese copies. The burgeoning market of Chinese copies is the scene of both tension and productivity. Indeed, Chinese fabrics dominate most West African markets today. In Lomé, they are traded on market streets and sidewalks and in stalls and stores, where they both threaten and reinforce the authority of the Dutch wax prints. Chinese copies are sold in a multitude of forms, lengths, and qualities that range from cheap polyester to various grades of cotton. But who gets to control the circulation of these fabrics and upstart brands that so overwhelmingly dominate West African xi

P r e fa c e

markets today? And can traders like Dédé reclaim their inherited power when the logic of the market seemingly organizes all aspects of economic, political, and social life? It is in the folds of the cloth’s dense ma­ teriality that we can find the answers to these questions, where historical and contemporary patterns of the making and remaking of relations between people, things, and the institutions that govern them are revealed.

xii

Acknowledgments Since my first visit to Lomé’s dazzling cloth market in 2000, I have learned much and accumulated many debts. I particularly want to thank the many Togolese women and men who generously offered me their time and entrusted me with their stories. I am grateful to the women traders of Assigamé for their patience with my inquisitive presence and for their insights and assistance over many years. I thank Dédé Rose Creppy, Ayaba (Baba) Sivomey, Florence Barrigah, Maggy Lawson, Esther Nadou Aziable, Cornelia Sant’Anna-­ Bocco, Marie Adjo Bolovi, Didi de Souza, Hevi Dela, the late Jessie Quévi, and those traders who asked to remain anonymous. I am especially grateful to Dédé Evelyne Trenou, who introduced me to the world of the market and generously allowed me to stay at her home when I first arrived in Lomé and during subsequent visits. Rudy Trenou’s stories about La France-­Afrique fueled many lively evening discussions. I owe deep gratitude to Esperenda de Souza Lawson, Yao Ahiaba, Frédéric Feraille, Michel Adovi Goeh-­Akué, Ginette Ayélé Ekué, Camille Canteaux, and the late Livingstone Médémé Agbobli, as well as the numerous Togolese who wel­ comed me into their homes and provided assistance over the years. I hope this ethnography accurately portrays their work and lives. This book exists because many people shared their time and intellectual gifts with me. My biggest debt goes to my colleague and friend Doreen Lee, who has read multiple drafts over the years and graciously edited my work. She deserves credit for many ideas developed in this book. Without her generosity, intellectual support, and friendship, I xiii

A c k no w l e d g m e nts

could not have finished this project. Fellow Northeastern Africanist Kate Luongo was a willing sounding board, and her friendship and culinary talents carried me through a great deal more. Over the years, Smitha Rad­ hakrishnan has been a key intellectual interlocutor and a dear friend whose wisdom and generosity has sustained me through good times and bad. Similarly, Christine McBride Loroh and Ruchi Chaturvedi were unfailing confidantes and frequent sounding boards, while Antina von Schnitzler, my partner in crime during much of the writing process, provided crucial boot camp support in work and life. During the final stages of revisions, Lorena Rizzo was an enormous help; she assisted me with the selection of images and with various formatting issues, while helping me think through what this book is really about. With wisdom and good humor, Karen Tranberg Hansen variously cajoled, coddled, and coerced me down the path of transforming this project into a book. Paul Stoller has been a valued mentor and reader across the years and continents. From this book’s earliest days, I’ve enjoyed the unfailing sup­ port of Jonathan Friedman, who introduced me to the discipline, and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Many other colleagues have been generous readers and critics: Sasha Newell, Charlie Piot, Francis Nyamnjoh, Fiona Ross, Sara Wiley, Jeff Juris, and Vincent Foucher. Several academic homes have nurtured this project, from graduate school at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris to my current community at Northeastern University in Boston. During a post­ doctoral fellowship at UCLA, I found a vibrant community of scholars and mentors. I gladly thank Françoise Lionnet, Akhil Gupta, Andy Apter, Dominic Thomas, Alain Mabanckou, and fellow postdocs Liz DeLoughrey, Eric Hayot, Smitha Radhakrishnan, and Juan Vargas. The Mellon fellows were never far, at work and play, especially Alessandra Di Maio and Sonali Pahwa. A two-­year visiting position in Reed College’s an­thropology department brought me a deeper sense of the anthropological project; I am especially thankful to Paul Silverstein. At Northeastern University, where I have been blessed to find a community of scholars and kindred spirits, this project became a book. I thank the faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University for their collegiality and collective will to sup­ port junior faculty in every possible way. I am grateful to my former chair, Steve Vallas, for his fervent advocacy for my work, and to Alan Klein for his wit and for reminding me that people remember stories, not theory. I warmly thank Kathrin Zippel, Berna Turam, Linda Blum, and Silvia Dominguez.

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Over the years, a wide range of institutions and grants have supported my research and writing. A Mellon postdoctoral fellowship hosted by the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape enabled me to work on chapters 1 and 2 of this book. I thank the center’s director, Premesh Lalu, and Suren Pillay and Lameez Lakhen. During a postdoctoral fellowship in the UCLA Global Fellowship Program, the foundation for this book was laid. I am especially grateful to Françoise Lionnet, former director of the program, for her mentorship and to Germán Esparza for exquisite logistics. A research grant from the International Institute at UCLA let me conduct further fieldwork in Togo, with follow-­up trips sponsored by Reed College and Northeastern. An NSF Advance mentorship grant helped me to put the final touches on this project, and I thank Jan Reinhardt for her assistance. I have presented this book’s chapters and ideas at many institutions and conferences, including UCLA, UC Irvine, Harvard University, Oxford University, SOAS, the Nordic Africa Institute, University of the West­­ern Cape, University of Cape Town, and University of Recife, as well as at nu­ merous meetings of the AAA and ASA. I am indebted for the feedback I received on these occasions. For insightful and engaged commen­tary, I thank Misty Bastian, Adeline Masquelier, Jennifer Cole, Andy Apter, Gracia Clark, Joanne Eicher, Leslie Rabine, Victoria Rovine, Peggy Levitt, Elizabeth Ferry, Constantine Nakassis, Narmala Halstead, Shamil Jeppe, and Fantu Cheru. An early version of chapter 5 appeared in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, while some portions of chapter 4 were published in African Studies Review. I thank both journals for allowing me to use the material. At University of Chicago Press, David Brent and his editorial assistant, Ellen Kladky, were unfailingly gracious and helpful to this first-­time author. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the press’s anony­ mous readers, whose judicious critiques greatly enhanced the manuscript. I thank Laini Szostkowski for her assistance in editing an early version of this manuscript and Sheri Englund for expert editorial advice. Although this book has drawn on the input of many, any remaining mis­takes are my own. Vlisco and the Vlisco Africa Company gave me access to their archives and collections in Lomé, Cotonou, and the Netherlands and allowed me to reproduce several designs and archival materials in this book. I am especially thankful to Ruud Sanders for assistance with various archival records and to former Vlisco designer and archivist  Jan van der Heijden for sharing his deep knowledge about the history of the company and wide-­ ranging design expertise. Thanks also to Dirk Alghrim for his generous

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assistance and patience helping me select and scan my old negatives and for selecting and reformatting numerous image files. I have been blessed with patient and supportive friends, who helped me through the long and often lonely process of writing and revising and only occasionally, and with the best intentions, asked when I would finish the book. I thank Jana Ostermaier de Bahena, who was there from the very beginning, as well as Nina Gildhoff, Sonja Göttsche Bebert, and Sven Diekmann, my oldest and dearest friends. I am especially grateful for the laughter, advice, and encouragement of Lynn Streit, Karen Smetana, Simona Bujoreanu, Céline Montherat, Abou Bacry Ly, Sylvie Labouh, Antoine Tesnière, Alicia Jara Rodriguiz, Ganesh Ramashandran, Charlotte Brinkmann, Birgit Sailer, Paula Caballero Lopez, and Martina Dege. I reserve my deepest gratitude for my father, Bernd Sylvanus, for his un­ conditional support and gift for restoring my faith in myself when the path got rocky. I am unable to express my thanks to my mother, Renate Sylvanus, who passed away before I entered university, but her curiosity about the world and extraordinary strength continue to astonish and sustain me.

xvi

Introduction

Patterns in Circulation pattern |'padәrn| verb [ with obj. ] 1     (usu. as adj. patterned) decorate with a recurring design: rosebud patterned wallpapers | violet-­tinged flowers patterned the grassy banks. 2     give a regular or intelligible form to: the brain not only receives information, but interprets and patterns it. (pattern something on/after) give something a form based on that of (something else): the clothing is patterned on athletes’ wear. ORIGIN Middle English patron ‘something serving as a model,’ from Old French (see PATRON). The change in sense is from the idea of a patron giving an example to be copied.1

The serial number of one of the most iconic African wax-­ print patterns is 14/0663. This classic design features a se­ries of concentric circles speckled with indigo blue and white dots that create a glistening sun effect. The central pattern is surrounded by small, interspersed dark figures that resemble a network. With the contrasts of blue, orange, and red, the radiating circles create a pulsing visual effect. They capture the eye and pull it toward the center blue disk, a centrifugal pattern that is in tension with the active, intersecting network that surrounds it. The pattern is vibrant and dense; pulsing and radiating with energy like the sun; it has an agentive quality, and when women wrap this “sunray” cloth around their bodies, or tailor it into a two-­piece outfit, it becomes fully animated (see plate 2).

1

Introduction

This type of wax-­print fabric is an essential consumer item in West Africa and beyond. In francophone West Africa, this cloth is referred to as pagne.2 It is central to women’s clothing and self-­making practices, but it is also used in men’s shirts and sometimes pants. Pagne is part of the transfer of wealth from a prospective groom to his intended wife prior to marriage or the inheritance a woman leaves for her daughters. Women who collect cloth and garments accumulate two types of wealth that anthropologists have long recognized: moveable wealth, which constitutes a category of objects that are thought of as portable and reserved for women’s economic circulations, and what Annette Weiner (1985) calls “inalienable wealth,” a concept that illustrates the inseparability of person and object once they are connected through gift, exchange, and memory.3 The lightness and malleability of the cloth make it popular for baby carriers, diapers, shower towels, market ground cloths, and picnic blankets. A polyvalent term, pagne denotes both the cloth or pattern that women purchase in six-­yard-­long units in the market and the cloth worn on the body itself. In Togo, which until recently was the hub for trading and working the value of this type of cloth, it is often said that a woman’s life can be read through the pagnes she accumulates over the course of a lifetime. Similarly, it is possible to read the history of African independence through pagnes imprinted with nationalist sym­ bols, presidential effigies, or party politics (see Picton 1995; Bickford 1994; Spencer 1982). Pagne cloth constitutes a form of archive, where intimate memories are stored, held in reserve, and always ready to be reanimated with life, story, and sensuous materiality. The cloth as archive can also absorb national memories in its capacity to record events and global connections that forge national identity. Each pagne has a name with the ability to broadcast images about power and politics, beauty and wealth, or about the joyful and complex relations between men and women. “Sugar” or “Morceau de sucre” (sugar cube) is a case in point. “Do you want to add some sugar to our relationship?” is the teasing subtext of this classic geometric pattern, which women like to wear and talk about in Togo. Another, more recent, print is called “Le sac de Michelle Obama” (Michelle Obama’s handbag); it is also known as “LV” in reference to Louis Vuitton (see figure 0.1). This pattern speaks to women for its alluring name and print aesthetic, which features a series of smart handbags adorned with frangipani flowers. To wear this pattern, an Ivoirian friend explained, is both to honor and to aspire to be ravishingly beautiful and powerful like Michelle Obama; it is considered a must-­have fashion piece in the wardrobe of stylish women in Abidjan, Lomé, and Lagos.4 2

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

0.1

“Le sac de Michelle Obama.” Photo by Vlisco.

Wax cloth stands out for its bright colors and iconic patterns that range from abstract, geometrical, and floral patterns to objects such as fans, roller skates, lipsticks, and cell phones.5 Pagne is at once perceived as traditional and modern, classic and cutting edge, and it is sensuously deployed during special events and for everyday wear. Patterns that are considered classics—­such as “Sugar” or 14/0663—­have special aesthetic and economic value. Six yards—­the standard length required to make 3

Introduction

a woman’s outfit—­of the 14/0663 design costs about $65, although its market price can skyrocket when supply is scarce and the pattern is in demand.6 Known by a variety of names such as “Target,” “La Cible,” “Disk,” “Record,” or “Plaque-­plaque,” 14/0663 has long-­standing currency as an investment and fashion piece in West Africa and beyond. It even found its way into Burberry’s 2012 fashion collection. Ironically, this type of printed cloth, which has become so iconic of African chic and women’s sartorial styles in West Africa, was long produced in Europe exclusively for African markets. Before entering the exquisite fashion circles of Burberry, Agnès B., and Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. brand, and prior to the pattern featured as 14/0663 in the “Classics Collection” of the Dutch textile manufacturer Vlisco, various iterations of this pattern were already circulating along the global trading routes of Empire—­namely, those trade networks that linked the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) to Europe via the trading forts of coastal West Africa. Vlisco currently claims exclusive rights to the pattern and attributes its origins to a 1936 design made by its drawing department. However, Vlisco was not the first Dutch company to produce the iconic pattern. 14/0663 was already a copy of a pattern that another Dutch manufacturer had been producing since the late nineteenth century.7 But this is not where the peculiar story of copy and appropriation of the sunray pattern ends. The radiating print aesthetic of the pattern offers several visual clues into the twists of the story. Returning to the layered and contrasting composition of the pattern, it is possible to see how elements of both repetition and irregularity organize its dazzling visuality. While the blue-­orange disk imagery repeats across the cloth and creates an appearance of symmetry, each disk has a unique signature. Upon closer inspection, we can see that several elements thread its visual form and give it dimension. First, a series of small white dots of different shapes and sizes appear unevenly across each disk; second, streams of tiny veins crackle through the pattern. These visual characteristics imbue the cloth with a distinct materiality and instant recognizability; they also provide traces of its production techniques as well as insights into its many different points of origin and assemblage. The white dots and small veins that speckle the cloth result from the wax-­resist batik production process by which individual layers of wax (resin), dye, color, and image are printed onto the cloth. The crackle-­veining effect results when the dye bleeds through a crack in the wax or resin. When done successfully, the cloth creates an irresistible sparkle that captivates the eye.8 This type of wax-­printed fabric was originally forged by Dutch colonial companies attempting to copy handmade Javanese batik cloth with 4

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

the goal of selling it back to colonial subjects at a cheaper price than traditionally handcrafted designs. When the project of selling machine-­ made imitation batik to the colonial markets of Southeast Asia failed, the Dutch began selling the cloth in West Africa with much greater success. This time the Dutch did not simply copy West African printing techniques. Instead they used a mechanized Javanese wax-­resist printing and dyeing technology to copy patterns found in West African textiles. Indeed, 14/0663 features the same circular repetitions with uneven radiating streams that West African tie-­dyeing creates. And this brings us back to the iconic sunburst pattern. A global assemblage par excellence, it mimics the visual detail of West African tie-­dye cloth but expresses it with a colonial-­era process that was an innovation of Southeast Asian resin-­resist printing. Wax cloth is complex; as a threefold material, visual, and textual-­ archival object, it exists in interaction with human agents who make, trade, and wear it. Its techniques of production are hybridized, and its aesthetic origins are mobile. It is the uniqueness of this cloth as a hybrid material object—­at once Javanese, Dutch, West African, and now increasingly Chinese—­that is at the heart of this book. Wax cloth’s deep history, its aesthetic innovations and cultural significance, its ability to transmute value and transform bodies, as well as its material presence across space and time, make it an interactive and agentive object. It is not enough to tell the story of pagne cloth as the global history of a thing in motion, cutting seamlessly through global flows and circuits of capital, human labor, and imperial interests (see Beckert 2014; Mintz 1985). The visual, material, and semiotic density of cloth—­what I refer to as its dense materiality—­ren­ ders it irreducible to a single thing, pattern, or theory. In the folds of wax cloth’s dense materiality we see the historical and con­temporary making, unmaking, and remaking of relations between peo­ ple, things, and the institutions that govern them. I call this process patterning. Patterning encapsulates how historical, technological, and cultural efforts that interweave the body of cloth create an effect of potential disarray and imperfection—­like the crackle and dazzle of 14/0663—­when we zoom in on the materiality of cloth itself, and yet enable more regular abstractions to emerge when we zoom out to a broader political-­economic scale of trade and production. From the most intimate sphere of the dressed body animating and being animated by cloth to the making and unmaking of markets, value, and the (Togolese) nation, unfolding cloth’s dense materiality and its changing characteristics reveals West African, and specifically Togolese, histories of capitalism. Because the dense materiality of cloth renders it suitable for commoditization in the context 5

Introduction

of mass trade flows, as well as fetishization in a Marxist sense, wax cloth exposes the hidden patterns of global capitalism. To understand the significance and impact of new economic regimes that are arriving in Africa and how market futures might unfold, we need only look at the long trajectory of wax cloth, its intellectual content and processes of value creation, and the colonial ideologies and gendered prac­ tices woven into it. This requires, however, thinking beyond the “brute materiality” (Tilley 2007, 17) of things, which means extending the details of the material object to the urban fabric of markets and the various processes of value and identity making with which they are interwo­ ven.9 In this book, I show how the composition and circulation of objects are intertwined and complex with agency, affect, and semiotic power. In so doing, I chart how the cloth’s different qualities and agen­cies—­ both human and nonhuman—­mobilize people and things on the one hand, and consequently shape political, economic, and gender relations on the other. The stories and narratives that make up this ethnography were collected between 2000 and 2010.10 These stories connect various sites that indicate how far wax cloth has traveled—­the colonial archive, the postcolonial era of nation building, and the current neoliberal moment. Drawing upon archival research, fieldwork, interviews, and oral history, I follow how wax cloth is made and printed, how Dutch designers imagine African aesthetics at a distance, how wax cloth is copied in China, and how the fabric travels to and arrives in the West African port city of Lomé. My ethnographic account reveals the real-­world predicaments of trafficking in such culturally valued things and explores how these values and objects are situated: in the shops of the women traders in the Lomé market and the parking lots where bales of cloth are repackaged for illicit border trafficking; at the free port where containers are transferred and sometimes confiscated; in the Vlisco United Africa company store, where women compete for fabrics and the favors of the so-­called neocolonial director; on Chinese factory floors where Togolese traders assist textile engineers perfecting copies and the right bundle of textures; and in the tailor shops where the cloth is transformed into real garments. I recall the trace of these other zones of production (for the meanings and values of pagne) in the public and private spaces, where the dressed body achieves a sense of immediacy when women’s bodies are evaluated and set into motion. Across these spaces and places, this ethnography explores not just how people make and remake themselves through the dense materiality of wax cloth but also how cloth and people animate each other and

6

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

are entangled in deep cultural, economic, and political patterns that are not easily undone.

Women and Cloth Shape the Nation Located in a seemingly marginal place and dealing with an unusual ob­ ject, this ethnography challenges us to think from West Africa into the world and back again. The setting for this story is the small entrepreneurial nation of Togo and the Lomé Grand Marché (Assigamé), once the largest market for wax prints in the region and a lively commercial frontier zone. Situated on the Gulf of Guinea between Ghana on the west and Benin on the east, Togo’s coastline is a mere 35 miles long. It is one of the smallest countries on the continent, a narrow strip that stretches roughly 350 miles north from the coast to Burkina Faso and with a population of about 7 million. What makes Togo such an interesting place is its long-­standing position in the region as an economic frontier and center for capitalist commodification via everyday consumer goods, especially cloth. The reasons for Togo’s varied commer­ cial frontier zone statuses are both historical and geopolitical. Over the past fifteen years Togo has become an entrepôt for Chinese goods in the region—­mostly knockoffs—­and thus a new economic frontier for Chinese capitalism, placing Togo within a new economic and political phenomena known as China-­in-­Africa. Togo historically has been a space for frontier capitalism. In precolonial times, the Togolese coast was entangled in the economies of the transatlantic trade that linked West Africa to Europe and the New World. As a slave-­trading hub, the town of Aného was a site of capitalist extraction and abstraction where bodies were commodified and exchanged for cloth.11 Indeed, cloth was once an alienable value, a universal equivalent against which the value of things as diverse as salt, gold, and slaves were equated across the Sahara and the Atlantic coast. When Togo came under German colonial rule, and later French authority, Togo’s commercial frontiers and the state’s ability to move and tax everyday consumer goods was what made it such a profitable and valued colony. Situated on the border with the British Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana), Lomé was the only frontier capital in colonial Africa and a vibrant site for cross-­border trade and trafficking in such culturally valued things as imported gin and cloth. Both were formative goods in the imperial and colonial penetration of African markets, but the cloth/fashion frontier was

7

Introduction

a specially charged one. Because cloth works on and through the body as a crucial frontier between self and society, cloth is an especially powerful site for creating identity and value. Europeans capitalized on the polyvalent nature of cloth, using it as both an economic and a political tool to fashion colonial subjects and markets (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Allman 2004). Of course colonial subjects were also fashioning themselves. In Lomé, a group of women cloth traders cleverly produced themselves in and through the colonial situation and its many frontiers. Entrepreneurs avant la lettre, they inserted themselves into the restrictive retail structures of colonial trading companies for whom they took on leading marketing roles in the distribution of everyday consumer goods, including wax prints. Working the value of cloth across urban and rural markets and channeling wax cloth across regional borders, these women dressed physical bodies and new consumer subjectivities. Along the way, they helped fashion the Togolese entrepôt as an increasingly important regional center for the entire wax-­cloth trade in West Africa. The centrality of Togolese women in the colonial cloth trade sheds new light on the operations of agency and power within empire. First, we see how important the colonies were for testing Dutch technology, and in turn how supposedly passive, colonized women actively embraced these technologies and shaped the global economy. Second, we are reminded of the fact that colonialism was “profoundly material and that colonized and imperial centers were linked by a traffic in objects that was sensorially configured” (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006, 3). After independence in 1960, the cloth trade became increasingly en­ tangled in nation building, whereby the women traders became an im­ portant economic and political force in postcolonial Togo. The postcolony continued to work as a commercial hub in the region, organized around a state that essentially replicated its colonial predecessor in modes of taxation while maintaining an orientation toward the exterior through the port and border trade. Meanwhile, the cloth traders regulated capital flows across multiple frontiers and fostered the mobility of goods and people into the Lomé trade hub, accumulating immense wealth for themselves in the process. The Lomé market became a vibrant economic center in the region. In this system of spectacular accumulation, the cloth traders themselves became a national brand. The Nana Benz (or Mama Benz, in anglophone parlance) became lingua franca throughout West Africa in reference to these women’s wealth, authority, and vehicular power. As a brand/image, the Nana Benz provided a felicitous modern façade to the dictatorship of Gnassingbé Eyadéma (1967–­2005), which was highly ef8

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

fective in attracting international donor monies and foreign investments into a “stable” political and economic environment that contrasted with its Soviet-­leaning neighbors (Piot 1999, 2010; Toulabor 1986). Togo soon became a strategic Cold War frontier in the region; it also acquired the label “West Africa’s Little Switzerland” for its vibrant market economy and international banking sector. By the early 1980s, the wealth channeled into Togo through the cloth trade reached such importance that it practically matched the revenue generated by the national phosphate industry. But then the nation-­state began to disintegrate. When several state-­owned enterprises collapsed during the mid-­1980s, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ushered the Togolese government into structural adjustment programs and austerity measures aimed at the reorganization of the state by the market. As elsewhere on the continent, the privatization of the state and the liberalization and reformation of the public sector pushed governments into fiscal crisis. Long-­standing structures of state employment were transformed, essentially leading to the dispossession of Togo’s middle class, which was pushed into alternative forms of employment to counteract salary shortages. Much of the 1990s was characterized by crisis. This predicament was brought on by major political and economic shifts that occurred at the end of the Cold War, with serious consequences for the cloth trade. The dictator, Eyadéma, was now pressured to liberalize the political sphere by an international community that had long turned a blind eye to his strongman ways. Although Eyadéma remained in power through a mix of political violence, and what Charlie Piot describes as “cunning, ruthlessness election fraud” (2010, 3), the regime’s political authority weakened and became in­ creasingly diffused. The political violence that marked the democracy move­ment of the early 1990s led to major strikes, the shutdown of the market, and the fleeing of thousands of Togolese to neighboring countries. This volatility forever tainted Togo’s reputation as a stable country with a thriving economy. And just as the Lomé market opened up again, the regional economy was hit by a major shift: la dévaluation. In 1994 the regional currency, the CFA franc (Communauté Financière Africaine) lost half of its value.12 This had major consequences for the cloth trade, because it essentially turned an everyday consumer good into a near luxury. Along with the neoliberalization of the economy, the Nana Benz’s trade was further derailed when the main distributor of wax cloth, Unilever’s United Africa Company, pulled out of the market and the Dutch manufacturer, Vlisco, took over its West African distribution points. Essentially, the Dutch company liberalized all the Dutch wax-­print patterns that the 9

Introduction

United Africa Company previously distributed via the Nana Benz, who held exclusive retail rights to the designs. The unraveling of these long-­standing trading and pattern rights broke the Nana Benz’s hold on the economy. Togo’s commercial frontier was again redefined. The Lomé free port has become a major economic frontier for Chinese wax-­cloth knockoffs whose unfettered circulation has thrown the West African textile economy into disarray. At the same time, the resurgence of Togo as an economic frontier for Chinese counterfeits has benefited the Togolese government, led by Eyadéma’s son, Faure Gnassingbé, since the dictator’s death in 2005. Indeed, Togo’s economic despair made it especially amenable to and reliant on Chinese investments, including loans and development aid. Over the past fifteen years, relations between China and Africa have attracted growing attention. China’s new Africa policy and its growing economic penetration (and enclaving of select zones) on the continent is hotly debated in US policy circles and think tanks. Such debates tend to focus on the neocolonial nature of Chinese capital in minimally regulated zones in general and the potential threat that Chinese goods and labor constitute for African subjects. Long-­term Chinese development aid—­often referred to as development aid with no strings attached—­is another concern (Bräutigam 2011). As Elisha Renne (2015, 60) writes, “Since the early 21st century, trade between China and Africa has expanded, with over $US 84 billion worth of Chinese goods exported to Africa in 2013, compared with approximately $US 4.5 billion in 2001. China is currently the leading exporter worldwide of manufactured textiles and clothing, which represents one of its major exports to Africa.” In media and policy briefings, China-­Africa relations are frequently por­trayed as the new axis of South-­South exploitation. Yet such utopian and dystopian visions of Africa have long animated conversations about the continent and its “place-­in-­the world” (Ferguson 2006, 4). This history thus has consequences for how we understand normative narratives about emerging markets that presume unprecedented opening up of ports, opportunities, and repertoires of taste. That Togo has become an economic frontier for China-­in-­Africa despite its lack of natural resources (unlike other parts of the continent, which attract Chinese investment in mining and infrastructure) is also significant. It demonstrates just how vital cloth and fashion are to the penetration of neoliberal markets. Notably, women still dominate Togo’s powerhouse textile market. The Lomé Grand Marché draws traders from all over West Africa and beyond, and Togolese cloth traders have started to become global entrepreneurs. Women traders have a long history in the making and design of this special material object through feedback loops between the cloth’s circuits of 10

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

production and consumption; they were important supporters of the national state, and now they are key agents in the new global China-­in-­Africa trade. In colonial times, in national times, and in the global era, women’s agency in the marketplace has been at stake. By the same token, women’s agency has been critical to national branding and identity in Togo.

Dense Materiality Wax cloth sits at many frontiers. It is at once a commodity, a “social skin” (Turner 1980), an archive, an image, a text, and a material object with distinct physical properties. As with photographic images, it is impossi­ ble to separate the material from the visual, the image from the object. The comparison between photography and cloth becomes possible when we heighten the image-­object relationship, which implies that the image cannot be separated from its referent (Barthes 1981). In their work on the materiality of visual objects, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2004) argue that when we think of photographs as both images and physical objects, we understand not only their physicality, opacity, and tactility but the ways in which they are “enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions” (1). The same is true for cloth. Indeed, when we apply the rich insights from theories of photography to wax cloth, we can make important observations about the sensuous materiality of pagne. The rich literature on photography also has much to offer for thinking about cloth as an affectively charged material object in terms of surface, tactility, haptics, memory, and melancholy (Sontag 1977; Pinney 2003; Strassler 2010). Just like the surface of a photograph has its own agent­ ive quality, whereby it can be more than a passive bearer of images, so does the surface of wax cloth. The experiential qualities of cloth, which are both visual and tactile, are not limited to sight and touch, for cloth is affectively charged. In her influential work on Melanesian systems of value, Nancy Munn (1986) offers the notion of the “qualisign of value” to think about the sensuous characteristics, or qualities, of objects (see Keane 2003). Thus, while we can see, feel, and wear cloth, it also has the power to evoke emotion and memory—­those “corporeal apperceptions” that occur prior to “conscious cognition” (Newell n.d., 3–­4; Massumi 2002). Recall, for example, the sensorial properties of the sparkling color and the crackle of the sunburst pattern. The visual force as well as the energetically charged and pulsating quality of the pattern make the cloth vibrant in such a way that it captivates the eye (processed as a dizzying cognition) and stimulates viewers’ imaginations. Munn’s qualisign 11

Introduction

of value inspires a fuller apprehension of Togolese perceptions of waxcloth authenticity and the materiality of copy. Also theorized as “qualia” in current efforts to conceptualize the language of qualities, this refers to the “experiences of sensuous qualities (such as colors, textures, sounds, and smells) and feelings (such as satiety, anxiety, proximity, and otherness)” (Chumley and Harkness 2013, 3). Qualia can thus offer important insights into the material density of surfaces and help shift the analysis of cloth beyond the classical anthropological approach to cloth as material culture (see Hansen 2004b; Küchler and Miller 2005). When buying cloth in the market, consumers expect to find color combinations and patterns that have the potential to enchant, or even shock, the eye—­a quality created by the unique manufacturing process. As I describe in chapter 1, in Togo women have specific ideas in mind when choosing cloth, including a sartorial vision of its (fully embodied) tailored look, and ideas about when and how to wear it as well as calculations about the kinds of emotive responses they wish to elicit from others during aesthetic events. This is no easy task. And it is an especially daunting one when considering the abundant choice of pagne materials available in the Lomé Grand Marché. There, pagne is hawked on the street, traded in humble market stalls, and sold in large shops filled with bolts of cloth that are stacked floor to ceiling, creating an impenetrable wall of color that only the expert consumer can navigate (see plate 3). Cloth that is charged with the kind of (sensorial) ammunition required to elicit admiration from others does not lay lifeless in the market, as a Lomé fashionista who prides herself in being an expert shopper explained to me. “It looks at you,” she said, “C’est tellement beau! Its beauty is so great, you need to touch it. . . . It speaks to you, and it wants you to have it.” There is even a kind of magic to the way that the sensuous materiality captivates the viewer’s attention. More than mere surface aesthetics, or inert image, the cloth’s surface properties appeared to literally animate this woman. Seemingly saturated with human-­like qualities, the cloth’s haptic force created both dazzle and a tactile sensation, and thus an effect that is at once cognitive and sensorial. The re­ lationship between the woman and the cloth is depicted as reciprocal: “It speaks to you, and it wants you to have it,” and the woman clearly desires that cloth. Thus, when pagne is animated with an active social life, it can be seen as an actant in the Latourian (1993; 2005) sense, because it chooses the consumer and plays an active role in shaping the social world. But it can also be considered a form of distributed agency (Gell 1988) that

12

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

humans infer onto objects since the design is intended to have these effects. As I explain in chapter 1, the human touch is necessary to tame the cloth. In the process of bringing cloth to three-­dimensional life in embodied performance, the Lomé fashionista is both enchanted by and a powerful agent of the pattern’s magic. Even so, while I view cloth as an assemblage, and in chapter 2 I illustrate how cloth comes into existence through assemblages of heterogeneous actors, here I want to suggest that cloth goes beyond that. It is an affectively charged material object that animates people and things while it also patterns urban, national, and economic spaces such as the street and the market. The new turn to materialism and materiality has revivified debates in anthropology about the socialness of objects. Extending “the social life of things” perspective, wherein objects acquire a social biography with multiple careers (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), this literature offers new provocations for thinking about human and nonhuman agency.13 In her work on “smart fabrics” in design and fashion, Susanne Küchler (2008, 2011) investigates the composition of synthetic fibers. Smart fabrics are firmly technological and futuristic. These new materials, she writes, “[do] not just represent who we are, but [are] capable of standing-in for us, substituting for some of our own capacities” (2011, 124). Smart fabrics thus move the realm of the aesthetic to the futuristic repurposing of pure functionality. They promise the “posthuman” and revolutionary. Cloth can be both traditional and futuristic. In fact, cloth is currently and has always been a site of technological assemblage and futuristic experimentation, as shown in chapter 2. Wax prints are not smart fabrics per se. They are not specifically designed by a laboratory science that creates the kind of fibers Küchler describes as “capable of responding to light and heat” (2008, 105); nor do they participate in the same innovation and invention-­driven “technological materiality,” which Küchler (2008) ascribes to the smart materials of the new (or third) technological revolution. And yet the success that wax prints, a product of the Industrial Revolution, had on West African markets when it was first introduced had everything to do with a form of technological materiality that made wax prints “smart” in ways that other cotton materials traded in Africa were not. Wax prints were and are color-­smart; they presented the rise of color science and organic chemistry in perfecting the dyes that were colorfast, made to withstand the heat and light of African sun, and always in culturally desirable patterns and shades. In West Africa, cloth and clothing are assembled both visually and tactilely (see Picton 2008; Rovine 2008; Eicher and Ross 2010). The aesthetic,

13

Introduction

material, and semiotic characteristics of cloth matter enormously to its successful circulation and embedding in local processes of consumption and social reproduction. Textiles can be social—­even national—­skins that bridge the frontier of body and society by connecting a person’s most intimate sphere to the collective and the nation, as we see in chapter 3. As this book demonstrates, pagne itself is multidimensional, transhistorical, and animated through story and touch. Women educated me about the meanings of particular patterns as they opened their wardrobes and trunks to share the memories imprinted on their pagnes. These were special occasions of trust and pedagogy when pagne became story cloth.14 Elder women, for example often narrated their personal pagne stories in relation to the story of the Togolese nation. A woman who came of age during the late 1950s, for example, told me about the eighty-­odd cloth pieces meticulously stored in her closet. Each pagne recorded the specific event for which it was made. Her eyes gleamed nostalgically when she showcased “Otopa,” an iconic pattern that features a series of seemingly moving or dancing stars and shot through with crackle and a dense blue-­red color sheen (see plate 7). The woman remembered how she had bought the pattern in the market during the early days of independence, shortly after she saw Togo’s inaugural First Lady wear it. For this woman, the cloth worked as a memory object whose tactile materiality brought back the joy of celebrating the success and the confident, hopeful style of the new nation. The afterlives of garments tailored from wax cloth retain the vivacity of previously animated, sensuous experiences. It is this rich material and semiotic quality of cloth—­to bring joy, to create story, to generate desire, to have agency, to anchor sentiment and memory—­that, when bundled together, makes pagne so special, and hence an object of ongoing fascination. Much of the new turn to the socialness of things ignores the aesthetic and semiotic dimensions of objects and paradoxically turns away from the object and its “latent possibilities” (Keane 2006, 201). Like images, material objects are flush with instabilities; their meanings are unstable, ambiguous, and ultimately difficult to control. In his work on the infrastructure of Nigerian pirate video production, Brian Larkin (2008) provides an important example of how the material infrastructure of images can be hacked into, reordered, and “distorted.” Similarly, this book shows how the materiality of wax cloth—­its authenticity, its crackle, and its openness to copying—­ enables distortions and flexibilities that account for its ongoing circulation. Without fetishizing the object, pagne’s deep materiality enables us to consider what its material and visual properties mean in specific so-

14

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

cial and historical contexts and how they are experienced and steeped in gender, national politics, cross-­cultural patterns of influence, and relations of both alliance and betrayal. The centrality of wax cloth in women’s socioeconomic lives and in anchoring national economies and identities compels us to not only take the nonhuman agency of cloth seriously (how cloth and people animate each other) but consider its relationship to science and modernity. Cloth has long been a site of entrepreneurial and scientific experimentation in industrial modernity. It is also central to the making and remaking of global capitalism and its new designs, from imperialist expansion and the economies of the slave trade (see Beckert 2014; Kriger 2006) to the new sites of technological reproduction in China. The true picture of wax cloth in West Africa appears when we pull these different threads together. The closer we look at the patterns of the pagne, the more we see the old and new interacting: in this case, how technological innovation and experimentation on Chinese factory floors has transformed West African textile markets and thrown long-­standing patterns of trade and consumption into disarray, as chapters 4 and 5 recount. Here, the old theme of empire and the trope of the colonies as a site of imperial experimentation emerge alongside the “African future.” In both cases, though, as I show in this book, these innovations emerged in interactive, and deeply gendered, spaces of cross-­positioning. This process of patterning weaves the mutual modeling, negotiation, composition, and coproduction of this thing: the cloth itself but also its sphere of trade and consumption. The Old English word patron describes this process very well in that it is about making and providing models; patron contains in its roots both the fabric itself and the people who form its social contexts. Furthermore, it is not surprising that China has entered African consumer markets through the existing economic niche of the cloth/body/fashion nexus, and specifically the wax-­print market long dominated by European products. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, I want to suggest that the hard-­to-­ copy material characteristics of wax cloth—­namely, the crackle, a result of the dye bleeding through wax cracks, and colorfastness—­have produced new patterns and models to make and remake not just material forms and agencies but also spaces, like the market and the nation, as well as public selves. Through the concept of dense materiality, I refer to the cloth’s qualities of layering and condensing time and space as well as its ability to evoke emotions, to speak for itself and for others. In this way, Dutch wax cloth and its copies of copies are culturally and economically entangled

15

Introduction

with identity, nation-­building, and power. In their dense materiality we can trace certain patterns of the mutual making of humans and nonhumans (in this case, cloth) and the discursive and material spaces they produce.

Patterns of Appropriation Wax cloth is shot through with technologies of mimesis at the level of production and consumption. The current concern with the Chinese impact on authentic African textiles is full of irony, considering that what produced “authenticity” in the first place was rooted in the very technology of reproduction. All cloth, as print, to some extent is copy. Wax cloth is no exception. The classic pattern 14/0663 is printed in hundreds of thousands of yards each year, through both authorized and unautho­ rized channels. In fact, 14/0663 survives through its technological repro­ duction and dissemination. And yet it defies the logic of seriality and replication in conventionally printed, mass-­produced cloth. Recall the crackle, the distinctive and inimitable visual background effect, produced during the manufacturing process when dye leaks through the cracked wax resin. Each yard acquires a form of originality or authenticity (an “aura” as it were) that is enabled rather than diminished by the technical apparatus of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin [1936] 1969). Walter Benjamin’s concern with the loss of aura and authenticity during the age of mechanical reproduction provides a useful entry point for thinking about the seductive nature of technologically engineered images/copies and their effects upon people’s perception.15 Indeed, the story of 14/0663 not only troubles the very idea of loss of authenticity and aura through replication, but also reveals that “origin” is just as fabricated as the copy; hence, this book’s emphasis on circulation and life (of the idea, form, product) through reproduction and patterning.16 The pattern’s many points of assemblage, imitation, and reappropriation (copying technique and design) make it a hybrid par excellence and, hence, a true product of the multiple. This is not to say that consumers are not deeply invested in the idea of origin/ality in wax cloth, especially when it comes to performances of sartorial distinction, as I begin to describe in chapter 1. Similarly, producers of “originals” draw on mechanisms of use-­value enclosure through security measures of authentication and regulation to police the boundaries between original and copy—­and thus by extension, between “real” (Western) modernity and its various others (mimics, fakes, alternative modernities). Central to this discussion 16

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

is Sasha Newell’s pioneering work on the postcolonial relationship between modernity and mimesis in Côte d’Ivoire and his provocation that the fake/counterfeit was central to the making of modernity. As I show in chapter 2, cloth was the quintessential product of modernity in instantiating factory work and technological progress in the imperial metropole—­a process that was based on mechanical reproduction and copying and appropriating intellectual content originating elsewhere. Modernity’s obsession with originality and uniqueness, or despair thereof (Schwartz 2013), emanates from a long-­ standing historical relationship between modernity and in/authenticity (Newell 2012).17 The power of clothing and fashion to blur and break down social hierarchies enabled a person to hide her “real,” or inner, identity behind a social mask. While the notion (and fear) of surface imitation continues to inform much contemporary analysis of consumption and fashion, anthropology has questioned modernity’s “depth ontology,” whereby a person’s “true” self is somehow located deep beneath the surface (Miller 2005a, 3). Such a narrow focus with the insides and outsides of surfaces and the notion of social passing not only disparages fashion and dress as superficial but fails, as Newell writes, “to take account of other cultural possibilities for evaluation in the act of consumption” (2012, 20). In West Africa, dress and fashion work as powerful forms of display and public life. As Karen Tranberg Hansen argues, “Clothes are not worn passively; they require peoples’ active participation” (2013, 6). In Togo, people are expert dressers, viewers, and evaluators of other people’s embodied and carefully staged dress performances. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, an ongoing economic crisis, people’s investments in the dressed body and its public displays have become especially important, and the multifaceted surface of real and copied Dutch wax cloth plays a critical role. In Togo, consumers rank factory-printed cloth by quality and origin on a hierarchy of value and prestige, with Dutch wax at the top followed by Ivoirian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Chinese wax. Roller-printed “fancy” prints rank at the bottom of this hierarchy. To pull off a successful, inimitable look is a complex affair that involves choosing the right cloth as well as tailoring, accessorizing, and bringing its rich texture to life. While sartorial elitism is shaped through a relationship with real and exclusive fashion, it is also produced in tension with sartorial populism based on copies. Indeed, the magic of a real effect has its own value in allowing Togolese to be savvy consumers of real/fake goods. But copies come in many forms. As with counterfeit money, copies produce new forms of value anxiety (see Truit 2013; Apter 1999). Appropriate appropriation in Togo is constantly being redefined. As agents in the 17

Introduction

new global China-­in-­Africa trade, women traders collaborate with Chinese companies to produce better imitations of Dutch wax while mobilizing discourses about heritage and authenticity, as described in chapter 4. Meanwhile, producers of originals draw on mechanisms of value enclosure, or preventing other producers from accessing their value, through security measures of authentication and regulation to police the bound­ aries between original and copy. At the same time, consumers in Togo have become increasingly suspicious of brands and labels, so they rely on touch and smell to detect product authenticity, as chapter 5 explores. This book redirects the conversation about authenticity, copy, and culture by suggesting that the question of what is real is not really the one we should be asking. Rather, the material story I tell in this book shows that our categories of real/fake, authentic/copy, and legal/illegal are ultimately fraught and do not offer critical insights into the workings of capitalism and the world writ large. In fact, our theoretical and moral preoccupation with the fake as a category ends up generating more material processes of value enclosure through copyright and trademarked protections. The core moral and ideological fears about Chinese counterfeits in West African markets have to do with the appearance of new empires, the decline of the West, and the subsequent reconfiguration of North-­South relationships. Unfolding the layers of mimesis and copy in cloth’s dense materiality reveals capitalism’s complex patterns. These patterns shift from copying the colonies’ cloth and technology to new global relations of power, and seem to transact over passive African consumers. But neither the product nor the consumers have ever been passive. The story I tell in this book illustrates how these relationships are patterned on coproduction—­of producers and consumers, as well as humans and cloth. Whereas in the colonial past these exchanges and feedback loops were mediated at a dis­ tance, African agents are now coproducing cloth in China.

Tracing the Patterns I first came to this project through the archive that preserves 14/0663. Fascinated by the global story behind this cloth, I turned to the sample books in the Vlisco archive to unravel the tangled threads that wove the story of Dutch wax in West Africa. As I worked materially with these objects in the archive, studying and touching the cloth samples to capture their narratives, each time I began making progress in linking narrative fragments to specific locations and technological processes, the object disappeared. I kept losing sight of the patterns that make up this 18

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

uniquely hybrid object because I was focusing only on its physicality. As Adorno wrote, the thing recedes before our gaze ([1966] 2007); we can only experience its human distortions. I encountered a similar sense of elusiveness, of cloth receding before my gaze, when I came to do my fieldwork in the Lomé market. My research in the Netherlands indicated that Lomé was the major center for cloth distribution in West Africa; it was the place of cloth. Yet when I arrived in Lomé, as the preface recounts, the cloth traders told me that the market was no longer there. It was apparently dead and had shifted to Cotonou (Benin), 150 kilometers east of Lomé. This despite the large bales of cloth I saw women carrying on their heads across the market and against the backdrop of a seemingly vibrant landscape of patterned fabric stacked in innumerable bolts across the street and floor to ceiling in market shops. It was the contradictory scene at the supposedly dead market that made me want to understand how the wax-­print market works today and what is brought to bear on this peculiar object, now endlessly copied and mass produced in China. How could I view cloth as both a concrete object to track, fold, and touch and a theoretical position from which to think about the ontology of markets, value, subjectivity, and consumption? And how would I ethnographically scale this multisited project while trying capture and represent its complex temporal scales? Methodologically, I began thinking through scale by turning to various commodity studies, pioneered by Sidney Mintz’s (1985) study of su­gar as the vehicle for showing how seemingly remote places have been his­ torically linked by the movements of capital, labor, and commodities.18 In the Africanist context, Karen Tranberg Hansen’s study on secondhand clothing and globalization in Zambia (2000) and Brenda Chalfin’s work on shea butter in Ghana (2004) further developed the Mintzian political economy tradition by tracing circuits of commodity exchange and relations of power along chains of production, distribution, and consumption. Taking a commodity-­chain and “the social life of things” approach to show how local histories and transnational contexts feed into one another, Hansen’s work looks closely at both the economic dimensions of secondhand clothing and the cultural economies of clothing consumption. Although I found this approach methodologically useful for capturing the different dimensions and circuits within which my object was located, wax cloth—­and the complex work cloth’s dense materiality performs in patterning nation, taste, agency, and subjectivity—­strikes me as a unique case. Cloth is an especially powerful site of making because it works on and through the body, facing both inward in its capacity for individual 19

Introduction

self-­ fashioning and outward as a signifier of individual or collective iden­tity. Wax cloth makes livelihoods, social status, global trade, and the Togolese nation. Classic patterns such as 14/0663, for example, simultaneously make a visual impact and define the nation. While a pattern is something we can see replicated in an image, it is also a physical thing used to make, copy, and recompose other things, including markets. Thinking through the recent and historical politics of circulation of this curious object, wax cloth, demonstrates the significance of localized evaluations and the larger patterns of global power and capital circulation in which they are embedded. This book examines wax cloth as a material thing interwoven with a history of circulating ideas and ways people deploy, manipulate, claim, and endow an object with matter. Rather than simply following an object like coffee or cotton from its site of production to the final consumer, I resist the urge to treat cloth as a simple commodity that begins with production as the site of making and ends with consumption, where the product is tamed or vanquished. Wax cloth is not mute, flat, or stable. It constantly moves. But its intrinsic mobility is not restricted to its global circulation across borders and time. We encounter cloth’s mobility and flexibility in tailor shops where the material is cut and assembled into garments, when exhibited on dressed bodies strolling the streets of urban West Africa, or when it is being remade in factories in China. Who gets to control it, who gets to profit from it, and whose tastes are advertised tell us very different stories about global flows and capitalism against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial history and politico-­economic trans­ formations. This story complicates and decenters the dominant history of an imperial/global North ruling over a peripheral/passive South and weaves African agency into the patterns of global capitalism. The story of wax cloth, its circulation, and its dense materiality narrates a process of ongoing formation. To pattern is to form, imprint, and compose; it is a process of constant crisscrossing, of squaring influences, and of mutual negotiation that facilitates different forms of human and object agency and subjectivity. I take up the patterning of the subject in the book’s first chapter, “Fashioning the Body,” which establishes how women and cloth mutually empower each other in performative acts of public self-­making. This chapter charts women’s ongoing investments in pagne in relation to the role of cloth as an active agent in the production, expression, communication, and evaluation of a woman’s social skin. Togolese women play seriously when it comes to creating and presenting themselves in public, and they rely on the material efficacy of cloth to enchant and speak, as well as on their own ability to animate it through particular techniques 20

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

of the body. As women locate and visually mark their presence in public spaces, they dress with an agency and style that emanate from the combined action of the body and the cloth. Focusing on the interaction between bodies, cloth, and self-­styling in the presentation of women’s individualized fashion, the chapter explores how cloth and fashion work as a prime arena for women to claim a place in public life. This contemporary phenomenon, and the importance of cloth’s materiality in the making of Togolese self and society, has deep roots that can be read in the ar­chive of cloth that women wear on their bodies today. Chapter 2, “Archival Prints,” steps back in time to establish the historical development of the wax-­print aesthetic. Wax cloth came into being as a product of imperial and technological experimentation in which the wax-­print aesthetic was meticulously sampled and patterned on various handmade textile designs. Linking the complex historical, material, and mimetic creation of the cloth to the rise of new technologies of mass production and the making of colonial markets, I highlight how West African aesthetics and the difficult-­to-­discern notion of taste shaped, inflected, and in fact patterned the production of the unique cross-­cultural wax-­print aesthetic. My reading of cloth-­as-­archive highlights the overlapping histories of circulation that bolster the cloth while it decenters the dominant narrative. It tracks the negotiated presence of different external influences across time and space to dispel simplistic claims about the origin, originality, and authenticity of African wax prints. This chapter thus provides a historical foundation for understanding the wax-cloth commodity as the result of a material process of aesthetic and commercial negotiation that patterns not just the making of this ob­ject but its sphere of trade and consumption. Moving away from the early history and circulation of the cloth on the West African coast, chapter 3 turns to its trade in Togo. “Branding Cloth, Branding Nation” narrates the entangled making of cloth, women, and nation. It establishes how the Nana Benz built the Lomé market into a monumental site of economic power and national prestige through their fabric labor. The chapter describes how the Nana Benz became one of the most potent economic and political forces in postcolonial Togo, shaping the West African wax-­cloth trade until political crisis derailed their hold on the economy. Detailing this system of cloth distribution and pattern rights, I show how individual women de­termined the production and circulation of exclusive patterns through their charismatic trading prowess. Togo’s Nana Benz tapped into the fabric’s malleability to name and brand wax prints as profitable property, attaching both aesthetic and national meaning to the iconic cloth. These women’s work with cloth is not 21

Introduction

peripheral; instead it constitutes the formation of the postcolonial nation and the commercial, consumerist, and aesthetic spaces engendered. Indeed, they were so successful that the state sought to appropriate the women’s branding power (and powerful forms of display) to legitimate their political platforms and to assert the nation as an embodied public sphere. Although this worked for a time, once the postcolonial system and na­ tional marketplace faced the realities of devaluation and structural adjustment, relationships between traders, the state, and the market had to be recalibrated and patterns of exchange and circulation remade. Chapter 4, “Flexible Patterns,” narrates the demise of the Nana Benz in favor of more nimble women cloth traders (Nanettes) who use their aesthetic and material knowledge of cloth to copy less expensive wax prints in China. This chapter tells the story of this transformation, which itself relied on the cloth’s dense materiality and flexibility. It details the unmaking of the Nana Benz’s old system of cloth distribution and pattern rights against the backdrop of shifts in global production and the unraveling of the postcolonial nation while chronicling the making of the Nanettes and their entrepreneurial flexibilities as they, in turn, remake cloth in China. In neoliberal Togo, the increased circulation of a bewildering variety of upstart brands, knockoffs, counterfeits, and copies precipitated not only the global recalibration of registers of value but the local reappraisal of existing methods of evaluating the authenticity of cloth. Chapter 5, “Dangerous Copies,” examines the consequences of these national and global recalibrations on established patterns of consumption. The chapter discusses how people’s mechanisms of cloth evaluation and understandings of authenticity clash with the logic of a moral regime of value instantiated by the Vlisco company, which, assailed by copies, claims legal and technical rights to Dutch wax. But as this book argues, patterning is in fact imprinting, it is composition, and it is the mutual negotiation or coproduction not just of cloth but of commerce, consumption, and value by a range of actors, including the cloth itself. Ultimately, this process does not change with the introduction of intellectual property rights or new registers of value. If this book began with a story about the metaphorical, seemingly invisible “death” of the market, it ends with its literal and spectacular collapse. The conclusion, “Assigamé Burning,” recounts the 2013 burning of the Lomé market and the subsequent explosion of rumors and accusations around this tragic event. The disappearance of the market institution—­that national monument that the Nana Benz had made 22

Pat t e r n s i n Ci r c u l at i o n

through their fabric labor—­signaled a shift in the dominant economic regime that had governed the Togolese nation for decades. Dispossessed of their power and stock-­in-­trade, the women engaged in public protest, working the power of cloth to claim their place in the market and civic life. The burning of the market appeared to mark the end of the woman-­ cloth matrix in Togo and the old economic paradigm of the nation they had built. Yet their ongoing street demonstrations show that they have not entirely receded from public view. Today, the future of the market and women’s continued role in it remain open questions.

23

One

Fashioning the Body: Dressing the Public Self When I visited my friend Atsoupi on a steamy day in December 2010, she was carefully planning her outfit in preparation for a wedding celebration that promised to be the talk of the town. The special occasion was highly anticipated by many in the city. “All of Lomé will be there,” Atsoupi told me with great excitement in her voice. Atsoupi did not personally know the bride and groom, but her boyfriend had invited her to accompany him. She took this invitation very seriously. Fully resolved to make this the occasion for an especially fashionable appearance, Atsoupi had saved up money to purchase a pagne she had always wanted to own. She had clear ideas of what to do with it and was determined to carry out her vision. “I’ve already spoken to the tailor about the cut,” she informed me. “It will be beautiful!” A few days later, I accompanied Atsoupi to the market. While we strolled through aisles of shops filled with endless bolts of colorful cloth, Atsoupi spoke passionately about different patterns and the stories they evoke. She then chose “La Cible,” the radiating sunburst pattern 14/0663. “I’ve liked this pattern since I was a little girl,” she explained when I asked about her fabric choice. “It attracts the eye in this very special way; it bedazzles! And it moves so nicely on the body. It’s really a classic . . . my grandmother had it. It never goes out of style.” But instead of choosing the conventional red, blue, and yellow color combination, she wanted a more glitzy hue to work on and through her skin. 24

Fa s h i o n i n g t h e B o d y

“I want my outfit to shine and catch people’s eyes,” she said decisively. “I think the bright green and blue will do it. What do you think?” But before I could comment on her aesthetic choice, Atsoupi spoke about the symbolic value of the chosen cloth. “People will know this pagne, and they will appreciate that I value our heritage. They will comment on the beauty of it and how I combine tradition with modern style,” she said with conviction. The evaluation of pagne fashions is particularly complex. The ability to “read” pagne includes knowing its history and context and identifying its place in a hierarchy of value denoted by origin and quality. Togolese use the terms tsigan (“big one”) to indicate a high-­value pagne, while tsivi refers to the “small” value of the cloth, also called petit pagne (small pagne). European-­imported wax cloth is tsigan; it provides maximum “sparkle” and is preferred by fashion-­conscious urbanites. The innovativeness in design, colorfastness, and high-­quality cotton of the resin-­resist wax print firmly locates that cloth in the high-­value register. By contrast, the less durable, roller-­printed “fancy” print is tsivi. Historically, these two types of factory-­printed cloth have dominated West African markets; together they fall under the umbrella category African print cloth. Although inferior in quality to resin-­resist printed cloth (hereafter referred to as wax print or wax cloth), the much more affordable fancy print aesthetic has long generated its own image culture. Both wax and fancy prints give material and visual form to the changing cultural norms and values that have shaped urban life in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. In Atsoupi’s eagerness to be seen in her outfit at such an important, life-­changing, and value-­creating event, she chose not just any tsigan but a classic wax hollandais (a Dutch wax print) design, albeit in an unusual color combination. The following day, I accompanied her to the tailor. Fabric and fashion magazine clippings in hand, Atsoupi consulted with a seamstress to design the unique look she hoped to create. The making of Atsoupi’s garment was a complex affair and required several consultation visits before the tailor cut the material. Atsoupi was both excited and anxious. She had invested most of her monthly salary in this project and cautioned that, “Once it’s cut, it’s cut!” After the initial construction of the garment, several fine-­tuned alterations were necessary to adjust the length of the maxiskirt, the sophisticated hemline, and the flared gores as well as the fit of the elaborately embroidered bodice. Finally, after multiple visits, Atsoupi was happy with the results. The night before the big event, Atsoupi carefully rehearsed her look. She experimented with different accessories and evaluated the fit of the 25

chapter One

dress on her body. Several girlfriends had come over to assist her. They commented on the beauty of the outfit while they made suggestions on how to present it. As one of her friends explained, “It’s not enough to just have a stellar garment. You have to accessorize it with the right high heels, the right purse, the right jewelry, the right perfume, the right hairdo, and you have to make it come alive!” A woman animates pagne and brings it into being, and it does the same for her. Atsoupi chose the fabric for her outfit based on its eye-­catching pattern and vibrant colors in addition to its value as a heritage design. While she counted on her pattern selection to elicit public recognition as a symbol of heritage and sophistication, she expected the materiality and visuality of the cloth to work for her in multiple ways. In fact, for Atsoupi, the cloth ought to work in personalized ways. Its effect is not simply about beauty, but instead evokes pageantry by organizing strategic elements to succeed—­to be visually and spatially dynamic in presence. The colors should dazzle and enhance her skin; the borrowed and bought accessories should convey her sartorial power to perfection; she should walk in a certain way to alter the space. In this manner Atsoupi can control the way the room looks at her, and she knows, by anticipating the heritage pattern’s effect, what they see. Pagne, like the one Atsoupi chose for the wedding, is invested with a materiality that acts independently of human intentions, but whose potentiality only becomes fully realized in action. Such a notion of material agency requires moving away from a pure semiotic understanding of clothes as signs representing people to an understanding whereby signs/clothes have a material agency that is integral to the clothed person (Keane 2005; Miller 2010). In other words, sartorial and social successes are semiotically bound up in the social successes and failures of the (public) person. In Togo, pagne is at once perceived as traditional and modern, classic and cutting edge. Pagne can be tailored into stylish garments, or it can be wrapped and knotted around the body. It is a material that is appre­ ciated sensually, but which simultaneously conveys coded messages. It is vibrant matter with material agency, and yet it is manipulated by its wearer and brought to life by the body. It is an ordinary object that patterns women’s everyday interactions inside the home, features at the heart of many urban living arrangements (“cours communes”), is used at work in the market, on the streets of Lomé, and on the public stages that kin-­related life cycle events provide. While men also wear tailored pagne, especially shirts, women’s investments in pagne’s material and visual infrastructure are of an entirely different kind. If pagne is part of 26

Fa s h i o n i n g t h e B o d y

women’s moveable wealth, it is also part of women’s social and aesthetic projects. This chapter is an exploration into the types of (embodied) knowledge that combine in the social space of pagne. Women like Atsoupi make choices that are common to brand-­ conscious fashionistas around the world, and they play seriously when it comes to commanding attention and claiming a place in public life, for it is women, not men, who are looked at and assessed for their public performance. Wrapping the self in cloth is one way to manifest the mutual constitution of body and cloth, where the combined agency and corporeality of the woman and the pagne work together to create a social skin (Turner 1980). The act of wearing pagne both dresses a woman’s subjectivity and extends and locates her self in specific social and urban spaces. Yet this project of fashion can fail. Carla Jones (2010) has described how Indonesian middle class Muslim women “materialize piety” by nor­ malizing Islamic fashion, yet their individual expressions of sartorial com­ plexity can lead to social embarrassment if they are deemed less than tasteful. In urban Togo, the successful tailoring of individual style and a social skin—­a process requiring cultural expertise, savvy, and knowledge of the cloth’s material properties—­is contingent upon a larger politics of reputation and recognition that hinges on the value of public appearance. Presenting the self in public is a performative and embodied act that is carefully crafted for the critical gaze of different social groups, including elders. Thus, successfully claiming a place in society requires controlling these gazes through a complex corporeal aesthetic and practice that involves animating cloth so that it enlarges the woman—­makes her a grande personne, simultaneously big, established, and impressive—­while also conforming her to gendered expectations of appropriate femininity. Normative ideas about gender and a woman’s worth are dominant cultural representations through which Togolese interpret women’s fash­ ions. In this way, a grande personne (an established person) is said to have arrived in society. Her respectable sartorial display both situates and highlights her social status. Reputation attached to a particular form of respectable femininity hinges on social constructions of success, maturity, and financial well-­being. This distinctly feminine project takes place in an urban context where men tend to wear tailored pagne shirts mostly during leisure time or more formally during ceremonial functions while women like Atsoupi bet on creating spectacular and singular bodily performances with their pagne. And so it is women, not men, who are at the center of social spaces during the kin-­related life-­cycle events such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals that regularly take place in Lomé’s 27

chapter One

many neighborhoods. These events are critical sites of public visibility and form a culture of display and performance where urban kinship networks coalesce. They offer a “stage presence” (de Boeck 2012) for women to present their public selves through conspicuous displays of clothing and how their body interacts with it. In fact, there is a long gendered history in Togo of presenting the body in public and for women visually claiming a place in public space. While men adopted Western-­style clothing during much of the colonial period, women built themselves through the material and visual possibilities of pagne. Much as it does today, in colonial Lomé, viewership and talk about dress informed and shaped consumerist desire and tactics for style and distinction as well as people’s ambitions to claim membership in newly emerging “communities of taste” (Martin 1995, 2). The city was a crucial site for acquiring knowledge about clothing styles, and, as elsewhere on the continent, clothing became “the most readily available practice for popular expressions of African aspirations” (Hansen 2000, 52).1 Increased access to sewing machines enabled new interpretations of European tailoring techniques and style (see Mustafa 1998a; Gott 2010; Rabine 2002; Sylvanus 2013b). Wax cloth’s material qualities—­its solid cotton texture, colorfastness, and rich visuality—­made it especially suitable for experimenting with form and style, giving custom-­made expression to women’s sartorial self-­making. The tailoring of new garments ranged from fashionable urban adaptations of the missionary-­influenced turn-­of-­the-­ century hip-­length blouse (marinière) to the fitted, hip-­flounced taille-­ basse (camisole) style that is worn with a tailored skirt and reminiscent of Dior’s postwar New Look. After independence in 1960, these hybrid styles were being reinterpreted anew along with the rapid succession of new wax-­print patterns featuring iconic symbols of modernity (cars and buses, and later cell phones and computers) and abstract designs in an urban context that provided the body with a new public stage to make its mark. With eyes to see and behold, the aspiration to make a memorable sartorial impression remains key today, as demonstrated by Atsoupi’s hyperawareness of the stakes of her investments in everyday visual economies and spectacular life-­cycle events. Indeed, the kind of appearance Atsoupi wished to make at the wedding required not only hard work and expertise to create but a significant financial investment. Atsoupi’s ability to present herself as simultaneously fashionable and respectably elegant depended heavily on her choice of pagne and its twofold value. The value of the self-­image she hoped to create was produced both by the garment and the style competence required to pull off a distinctive look. In a regional context where presenting the 28

Fa s h i o n i n g t h e B o d y

body and identifying through material possession have long mattered, Atsoupi’s contemporary choice points to what happens at the critical intersection of the surface of the body and the material surface of cloth. A deep analysis of the role of the dressed body and the material infrastructure of pagne in performative acts of self-­display and public making is critical for understanding women’s historical and ongoing investment in wax cloth. This chapter charts the expertly assembled codes of sensuous materiality in the individual dress projects of Togolese women. When a woman effectively uses corporeal technique to animate pagne, she can extend cloth’s affectively charged quality to shine, enchant, and speak while taming its power to restrict—­or worse, betray—­her. The stories that make up this chapter illustrate how women and cloth mutually empower each other. But it also necessarily takes into account how sartorial elitism in urban Togo is produced in tension with forms of sartorial populism that are organized around the possibilities and limitations of pagne’s visual and material qualities. Illustrating the enchantments that come with dressing right, the chapter highlights the centrality of bodily technique as a key mode for women to imprint and claim their place in society. This intimate, enduring relationship between pagne and women’s self-­fashioning underpins the story of this book.

Techniques of the (Dressed) Body Women like Atsoupi become powerful agents of a pattern’s magic when they design outfits with tailors, when they shape and accessorize them, and ultimately when they animate and embody cloth. Yet creating and managing the powerful effect emanating from the combined agency of body and cloth requires bodily technique—­what Marcel Mauss (1973) famously called “techniques of the body.” For Mauss, such corporeal techniques are informed by specific societal rules and habits learned through pedagogy and imitation, implying both the institutional or tra­ ditional passing on of (gendered) bodily attitudes and the unconscious appropriation of ways of moving and being. Mauss speaks of the “habitus of the body” when describing how the body is straight “while walking, breathing . . . swinging the fists [and] the elbows” (70). Similarly, techniques of wearing, walking in, and managing pagne require not just cloth and style expertise but corporeal proficiency. This form of corporeality and bodily “infrastructure”—­which Filip de Boeck (2012), in his work on Kinshasa urbanities, describes as building the body into perfec­ tion—­involves knowing when and how to sensuously roll the buttock or 29

chapter One

when and how to slow down to create a memorable impression. Building bodily technique, gesture, and corporeal efficacy takes work, practice, and expertise. Rather than drawing on theories of performativity and embodiment, this chapter analyzes practices of dress consumption and sartorial efficacy through the lens of bodily technique. “Good” pagne, women frequently explained, moves with and on the body. Indeed, on the dressed body, pagne develops an aesthetic of movement through which both cloth and body become entangled and appear in mutual ascendance. The power of forms and colors achieves visibility and efficacy as women expertly shape their figures to fit the cloth; cloth must flow with the body to enhance its elegance and gravitas while simultaneously extending the capacity of the person. Per Atsoupi’s analogy, like catching the sunlight, the cloth must be capable of catching and attracting the gazes of others, thereby enhancing the visibility of the wearer.2 Good pagne thus retains a kind of magic over its audience. This special form of radiation enlarges the person, a phenomenon described by Georg Simmel (1950) in his work on secrecy and adornment. Atsoupi’s enlarged visibility creates a particular form of public presence and power. Yet pagne can also be stubborn. Cloth that is too stiff, too smooth, or does not move accurately has the power to defy a woman’s bodily techniques and thus, by extension, can undermine her public appearance. Much like a sari, whose experiential and material qualities Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller (2008) describe as being imbued with the powerful yet treacherous capacity to “[turn] a woman into a person” and to “betray” and deceive her “when neglected,” the “prosthetic” quality of pagne embedded in the cloth’s texture is diminished when it is not properly wielded. Banerjee and Miller use the notion of the prosthetic to describe the versatile domestic work of the pallu, the piece of the sari that falls over a woman’s shoulder down to her waist. The cloth, they argue, becomes an extension of the person when used to wipe a baby’s tears, handle a hot pot, or perform other tasks. Its tactility requires mastery and maintenance, and is an embodiment of the woman’s care, modesty, and style. Pagne, like the pallu, requires embodied technique to enable its prosthetic quality. Women in Togo must properly manage pagne, which can involve wrapping or combining tailored and untailored pieces to form a full outfit. In particular, the “third piece”—­essentially an unconstructed two-­yard section of cloth necessary to make a full (complet) of six yards—­is reminiscent of the work of pallu. This piece is either wrapped or folded at the waistline to emphasize the body’s midsection as a sign of a woman’s well-­being, an example of which we see in figure 1.1. Women frequently readjust its fold or change its position. This piece can also be tied into 30

Fa s h i o n i n g t h e B o d y

stylish headgear; “folded like a handbag,” as a seamstress remarked; worn as a scarf; or folded over the shoulder in a chiefly style (Sylvanus 2013b). When a woman uses pagne in the latter form to mark her social standing, it cannot slip off her shoulder or, worse, glide to the floor when walking too hastily—­a faux pas and lack of “clothing competence” (Hansen 2013, 3) that prompts criticism and mockery. In fact, women who do not walk properly in pagne are sometimes mocked as “lame ducks,” a comparison that elicits both laughter and ridicule. Finally, in the charged context of communal living arrangements, where co-­wives sometimes inhabit the same courtyard space, women wield pagne’s prosthetic quality to create dramatic effects or to wage small battles. Togolese women consider the dressed body to require the active participation of both the cloth and the wearer. The body is often ignored in theories of fashion, while theories of the body tend to ignore fashion and dress, as a growing body of critical Africanist dress and fashion scholarship has noted (Hansen and Madison 2013; Gott and Loughran 2010). Bringing the body into the analysis of fashion and dress complicates fashion analysis by including how people wear clothing and, by extension, how people learn such bodily techniques. Joanne Entwistle’s (2000) notion of “situated bodily practice” captures this well by foregrounding how dress and fashion are socially mediated, embodied, and practical. Such an approach squares the socially discursive world that polices the dressed body with the lived, embodied experience of the dressed body that chooses, feels, and wears clothing. Women like Atsoupi acquire such expertise and knowledge through a matrilineal line. Atsoupi, for example, learned from her grandmother how to wrap, knot, and walk in pagne when she was a young girl. Hence, her socializing experience of the dressed body and embodied experience come together. The techniques of the dressed body involve not only the physical practices that Mauss identifies but the materiality and visuality of the garments and ornaments that adorn it. In Togo, elaborate personal grooming is integral to a woman’s sartorial and social success. Women relax, coif, or braid their hair with attachments or different-­colored extensions; eyebrows are shaped in the popular coastal styles of amour (love), décalé (extravagant), or style séduction; fingernails are manicured and painted, sometimes set with small diamond-­like sparkles; lips are enhanced with rouge lipstick boosted by dark lip liner; and eyes are enlarged with magnetic colors to match a woman’s outfit. Finally, women perfume their necks and wrists with strong fragrance and bedeck themselves in gold jewelry or, in the case of the less affluent, in bijoux fantaisies, which are trendy fashion earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. In her pioneering work on beauty and 31

1.1  Woman in a tailor shop sporting a traditional-­styled three piece, with a blouse, a wrapped

skirt, and a third pagne layered over the top and coming together in a fold. Photo by author.

Fa s h i o n i n g t h e B o d y

women’s fashion in urban Senegal, Hudita Mustafa (1998a, 1998b) shows how accessories such as perfume and hairstyles add to and shape the sensual experience of the fashioned body.3 The full effect thus addresses multiple senses, transforming the body even beyond the additive process—­ the “putting on” of accessories and adornments—­that Mustafa describes. This strong sense of “more than” is not to be confounded with “excess.” In fact, the piling on of things is really about making sure each aspect of the body’s appearance is groomed and accounted for. Adornment means ears are present, eyebrows speak, eyeliner stands out; in short, nothing is too much, but everything is maximized and enlarged. When effectively put together, the dressed body has the capacity to enchant the gazes of others as its powerful aesthetic works their senses and emotions. Writing about the “radiation of adornment,” Simmel captures these embellishing objects’ bedazzling power, describing how “the sensuous attention [they] provoke [supplies] the personality with such an enlargement or intensification of its sphere: the personality, so to speak, is more when it is adorned” (1950, 339). Newell (2012) compares this embodiment of the radiating power of objects in the bluff economy of young Ivoirian men as “the literal absorption of their value into the person” (147). The competitive consumption and successful dis­ play of clothing spectacles, Newell argues, performatively magnify the value of the person by imbuing her with an “internal force” (163). Pagne acts to enhance a woman when she knows how to absorb its force and efficaciously produce her public self as inimitably irresistible and ultimately memorable. The process is admittedly a long-­term one—­from train­ing the body, choosing the cloth, designing and rehearsing its effects, to the decisive moment when the combination of strategy and vi­ sual materiality is launched into a competitive public sphere. A fully constructed garment demands a fully constructed performance. According to Atsoupi and her girlfriends, “You can never let your pagne be, you have to constantly handle it, you move it, your third piece [the untailored piece], you move it from your shoulder to your waist to your hand . . . it’s all orchestrated.” As a photographer friend remarked, “Each woman has her programme” when it comes to pagne. What that ideal gesture looks like, whether it is elegant, serious, nonchalant, or sensual depends on the occasion and the viewing context. The gendered performances and the reactions they provoke are often competitive in nature, and both contribute to the evaluation of the woman as well as her outfit. Women exhibit poise and gait to demonstrate the desired effects of finesse and control over the pagne, which include how the garment moves on

33

chapter One

the body, how it transforms the body, and how it seduces its audience as it creates exuberance and reputation. Both men and women comment on the slowly rotating, sensuous movement of the buttocks in a woman’s walk, a movement that is accentuated by the right pattern.4 In the context of kin-­related life-­cycle events, which are essentially public events with a distinct stage, a woman’s appearance invites the kind of commentary that potentially offers public recognition. Women’s carefully styled appearances are so visually dominant at such events that men’s sartorial arrangements solicit little, if any, attention. The field of the gaze is complicated and controlled by the object of the gaze, which emphasizes the combined agency of woman and cloth. Indeed, just as the wearing of clothing is deeply sensuous-­experiential and at once intimate and public, viewership of people’s styled appearances has an experiential quality (Miller 2010; Hansen 2013). Women have strong reactions to other women’s embodied fashions; it is not just the print aesthetic and outfit that are carefully assessed but, as Atsoupi’s friends explained, how a woman handles her garment and uses her body to enhance her look. Women employ various techniques to effectively communicate their presence through public clothing spectacles that others eagerly await to evaluate, or in the more confined social circles of weddings, birthdays, baptisms, and funerals. Viewers often begin by assessing the origin and value of the cloth before commenting on the composition and tailoring of the garment in relation to how it moves on the body and, most importantly, how the body moves it.

The Craft of Consumption Pagne fashion provides enormous potential and variability for women to express ideals of beauty, taste, and power in a competitive urban context where dressed bodies are constantly evaluated and shaped into perfection (de Boeck 2012; Newell 2012). The passion with which Togolese women talk about pagne garments they have worn to special occasions, and which are now meticulously stored in wardrobe museums, points to two ways that womanhood is produced: the corporeality of a dressed and sensuous body and the visual impression of a woman’s image at a public event. Women strive to create a memorable imprint, which in turn is evaluated by others. Remarks on skin tone, hairstyle, body language, and accessories (shoes, jewelry, handbag) are elements contributing to a woman’s total

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look, but evaluations are especially concerned with the type of fabric used as well as with the innovativeness of the garment itself. Access to, and display of, high-­quality cloth (tsigan) indexes the status and wealth of the wearer. Less affluent women rely on tsivi, less prestigious pagne imported from Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria (so-­called lagosivi, or “small Lagos”). More recently, pagne from China (chivi, or “small Chinese”) has changed the dialectics of fashion and social distinction altogether and brought on a delicate moral economy of value, as I discuss in chapter 5. The tailoring of women’s public skins hinges on the creation of real garments, which can be made from tsigan, tsivi, or chivi. The relatively low cost of tailoring makes individualized pagne fashion much more affordable than imported ready-­to-­wear clothing.5 Garments are tailored for specific occasions, as we saw with Atsoupi, and most fashionable urbanites do not want to be seen in the same outfit twice. Not surprisingly, the Dutch textile company Vlisco taps into women’s desires for exclusive fashion. Since Vlisco redesigned its image as a heritage brand (“Vlisco, the true original since 1846”) because it could no longer compete with lower-­cost copies on a large scale, the company now sells fashion rather than fabric. Fashion is firmly located in the Vlisco flagship stores that have recently opened in major African cities. In its aspiration to dress the rich and beautiful in “true luxury,” Vlisco has directed its marketing efforts toward two main consumer personas: the younger “fashionista,” who wears pencil skirts, trousers, and jumpsuits, and the older “traditionalist mother,” who dresses in full three-­piece outfits.6 Images of these personas are carefully circulated through Vlisco’s social media channels and large-­format billboards. Yet the discourse of fashion that animates the creation of these modern versus traditional consumer personalities sets up a false dichotomy. This binary is firmly rooted in the Eurocentric language of modernity that locates the modern subject in the realm of fashion and change, while its pre-­modern counterpart is relegated to stasis and tradition (see Allman 2004).7 Moreover, the Dutch way of envisioning the young West African fashionista as the new consumer versus the older traditional mother is inadequate when it comes to African print fashion. In fact, pagne fashion and style is always drawing on discourses of heritage and authenticity to make its mark, but it is also always being innovated upon. Atsoupi’s way of styling herself is a case in point: In the folds of pagne’s dense materiality and its ability to condense time and space, she played up its multiple temporalities (“a classic” with lineage but dressed in novel ways). Then, too, different styles of tailoring pagne assemble different temporal and

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1.2  Vlisco ad flaunting the modern fashionista style while laying claim to the fabric’s heritage.

Photo by Vlisco.

spatial reference points. In Togolese fashion, such references tend to draw on urban and global-­cosmopolitan spatial coordinates rather than the traditional-­modern temporality. Despite Vlisco’s efforts to move Dutch wax out of the market and into the air-­conditioned fashion boutique, the locus of Togolese fashion remains the market. Like Atsoupi, most stylish Lomeans design their own looks by buying cloth in the market and tailoring it to suit their own taste. A woman’s ability to work the cloth, choose the right tailor, and communicate what she wants constitutes a form of agency that the prêt-­à-­porter fashions cannot provide. What is more, the fashion boutique may also take away the agency of those who cannot afford those looks. Togolese fashion is created in the mosaic of street-­level sites that

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make up the marketplace (see figure 1.3), on the dressed body, and at the tailor’s shop. Buying cloth at the Grand Marché de Lomé, once the most important cloth market in the region, is a complex affair. Indeed, browsing through market stalls to find the appropriate pagne and transforming it into a garment is very different from the ready-­to-­wear shopping experiences of the global North or South African shopping malls that serve as critical sites for what Sarah Nuttall (2004) has called the “styling of the self.” In Togo, most women do not shop in prêt-­à-­porter fashion bou­tiques, where a look can be bought with curated ready-­made items and branded apparel; in fact, there are few of them around, the Vlisco flagship store being one. Without the mediation of the mall or the fashion boutique, women rely on their own vision as well as that of the seamstress-­visionnaire to style themselves. To maintain stylistic currency, women often have their outfits mended and reassembled, or they work through informal savings associations to finance purchases. The anxious work of mastering all the facets that go into the act of consumption includes shopping for cloth and making and styling the garment as well as interpreting it. This work, anthropologists have suggested, constitutes a

1.3  Market street. Photo by author.

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form of production (Miller 1987; Hansen 2000). Consumption becomes a form of self-­and garment-­making, where the woman, the cloth, and the tailor work together to create a public persona. The ticking, mechanical sounds of sewing and embroidering machines are a familiar sound in Lomé, signaling another form of production. Tailor shops are ubiquitous in many neighborhoods, and Lomeans expect their tailors to do ongoing research to stay abreast of the most popular styles. Most tailor shops draw on multiple images and styles that circulate from Abidjan, Dakar, Paris, and on to Lomé. Each week, a group of “Ghana fashion boys” crosses the border to Lomé, where they go from tailor to tailor to display and sell the latest “fashion posters” printed in Accra and Lagos. The posters depict current styles, and some tailor shops put them up on the walls for their customers’ viewing pleasure and inspiration. The inventory of a tailor may include both old and new catalogs of popular French mail-­order fashion houses such as la Redoute or Otto, its German equivalent, as well as an amalgam of global and regional magazines (including Elle and Amina).8 A trendy seamstress whose tailor shop in the popular neighborhood of Kodjoviakopé I frequently visited explained how she creates garments in close interaction with her clients: “They often ask if I saw the latest episode of Sauvée par l’Amour [Saved by Love, a Brazilian telenovela] or Ma Famille [a popular Ivoirian soap opera] and ask if I can make the same nipped-­in waists, or the same peplums of this or that main actor, or if I can add the same lace ruffles to their neckline.” She then constructs elaborate details to highlight and supplement the cloth’s pattern and its color palette to accentuate a client’s features. Known to fashionable urbanites throughout the neighborhood, this tailor had a reputation for making particularly original, fanciful creations, some of which she displayed on her shop’s bright blue walls. Tailored pagne can be highly suggestive (see plate 4), with tight skirts, leg-­exposing hemlines, and nipped-­in waists. A pagne can be dressed up or dressed down when accessorized with various fashion items. The “two-­piece,” reserved for younger women, plays with the style of the taille-­basse (camisole) and the length and style of the skirt (see frontispiece). The “three-­ piece,” or complet, involves an additional piece of cloth requiring a total of six yards. Togolese often speak about how being dressed up from head to toe in the print aesthetic strengthens a woman in a particular way. It makes her respectable, but also fashionable; the tailored pieces allow for individuality and creativity. “Ça passe par tout [it passes everywhere],” said Solange, an elegant cloth trader who initiated me into the world of pagne during the early days of my fieldwork. “You can wear le complet to any occasion, and you will be respected by the elders,” she explained. As 38

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a display of cultural knowledge and taste, this style yields tremendous flexibility. “You make it work for you, you interpret it in a particular way, and you play with the cut of the neckline, the embroidery, and really make it very, very exquisite if you want to, and people will comment!” The stakes during life-­cycle events are especially high because the audience is made up of kin, peers, and elders whose eyes behold women’s dressed performances according to established hierarchies of class and gender.

Staging the Self Two-­ piece and three-­ piece garments are the foundation for women’s public self-­making. Yet the financial investments required for maintaining fashion currency create social barriers between elites, middle-­, and working-­class women, despite the sincere and purse-­taxing efforts of less privileged working women like my neighbor Belinda. Belinda, a hairdresser in her late twenties, took me to a baptism. Like most life-­cycle events organized by kin networks and attended by neighbors, friends, and extended family, this function took place on a neighborhood street temporarily blocked off by fences and tent-­like coverings. Women are generally dressed in pagne for such aesthetic events, and while they experience social pressure to maintain reputation and modesty, women make pagne work for them, generating talk and excitement as they move through the venue. Like my friend Belinda, women often have their own agendas. There were at least three hundred people at the baptism. When we arrived, music was blaring from speakers. Lomeans of all ages were seated in front of a stage where an emcee was moderating. We had rushed to the event, walking at a quick pace, but when we approached the public scene, Belinda slowed down. In fact, her entire bodily demeanor changed, as if she had grown taller. The importance of a first impression gradually became apparent to me. Just before we made our entrance into the crowd, Belinda took out a tissue from her white purse. She dabbed the sweat from her forehead, and then wiped the dust off her white high heels. Next, she checked the position of her maxiskirt’s slit and smoothed her form-­fitted sleeveless bodice. She finished with a final check of her hair, which she had just relaxed and swept up in the latest style. As she placed her purse firmly under her arm, Belinda verified her impeccable look one last time by adjusting her white earring clips. I could sense her anxious excitement about what was about to happen: the imprinting of her image. In slow movements, as if she were literally going on stage, Belinda presented her 39

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crafted appearance to the public gaze. She postured for a moment, placing her hands on her hips as if hesitating to turn left, but then walked straight ahead in a slow, confident, buttock-­rotating gait. Exhibiting her feminine skills in seemingly effortless movements, complemented by the pleasing fragrance of her perfume, she strolled down the aisle between the first row of plastic chairs lined up in front of the stage. She knew, she had told me earlier, that those white shoes, purse, and earrings would make an impression with the telescopic effects of her styled pagne, the highly sought-­after pattern “Sac à Puces” (bag of fleas). Although she did not attain Atsoupi’s well-­ bred elegance, Belinda seemed pleased with the production of her image. She did indeed catch the attention of the audience, who inspected her outfit from head to toe as she walked between the stage and the rows of seated guests. Some turned their heads. Some seemed amused. Others were more inquisitive, seemingly exchanging commentary about Belinda’s self-­presentation. But what kind of recognition was she seeking? She seemed to know several people at the event; her girlfriends were there, as well as some of her clients. What did recognition in the eyes of friends and strangers produce? Throughout the baptism, Belinda kept commenting on other women’s outfits: “See the girl there, in the official pagne [the pagne chosen by the family for this event that supporting kin wear to signify alliance], the one whose back is almost nude? Eish, what a faux pas! She’ll forever be known as petite, or la bonne [a domestic worker], nobody will take her seriously.” She contrasted this woman’s failed look with what she considered a “proper” yet “boring” look, pointing at a mother who wore the same fabric as a wrapped skirt with a wide blouse and the third piece in her hand. “She’s really traditional, and people will respect her for that, but her pagne has no shape; maybe she didn’t have extra money to spend on the tailor, unlike the Madame over there. Oh she’s so elegant, and her pagne is so beautiful.” Belinda’s critical evaluations of other women’s styles were competitive. With each assessment, she compared herself to other women’s displays of dress and attitude while also gathering information about current and future trends. Distinguishing herself from la petite, whom she looked down on as lacking the necessary social skills required for having dress competence, Belinda also diminished the traditional but unshapely outfit of the mother, who she speculated lacked the means to be fashionable. Her confident, and often critical, judgments of other women’s outfits seemed to make fashion both an alienating and an aspirational project: Belinda’s long-­term ambition was to look like the elegant Madame she praised, whose cultivated style she hoped to achieve one day. Several of Belinda’s friends and clients approached her during the bap40

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tism to greet her and acknowledge her styled appearance. She certainly received the desired recognition from her peers. It was only shortly before we left the event that I came to understand the larger context of this competition. Near the exit was a table covered with photographs of the event, and people were looking at the snapshots. The presence of photographers hired to document events such as this one is common (see Nwafor 2011, 2012). Pictures are usually developed within two hours and are available for purchase as the festivities wrap up. The quantity of pictures taken, as Heike Behrend (2012, 2013) observes in her work on photography and textiles in East African weddings, determines the status of a guest, and Belinda was eager to evaluate her own image. She counted the number of snapshots taken of her, including the ones where she was slightly out of frame, and seemed happy with a count of fifteen. After counting the pictures, she hesitated for a moment at the table and then purchased an image where she figured center stage. “I will put this one up in my salon, so everyone can see,” she said. Belinda’s quest for public recognition exceeded the context of the actual event. Not content to simply gain clients’ and peers’ admiration, she wished to make her imprint memorable and widely known. Belinda’s sartorial success was compound by her desire for public recognition (to be admired for her daring and inimitability), which appeared to challenge exclusionary hierarchies of class and taste. I encountered a photograph of Belinda’s public enlargement a few weeks later at a family lunch gathering organized by a wealthy cloth trader. As her children and grandchildren gathered in the trader’s living room—­where Johnnie Walker whiskey, sparkling wine, and soft drinks accompanied our appetizers—­one of her daughters pulled out pictures from the baptism I had attended with Belinda. When I explained that I had been at the event, they inquired who this hairdresser friend of mine was. Upon a more careful look at the photographs, I identified Belinda in the background of one of the pictures. “Oh, her! Yes, I remember this girl, she was definitely trying to make an impression!” the trader’s daughter commented. “Let me see,” exclaimed her mother. She adjusted her glasses and carefully inspected the photo, exclaiming in disapproval, “Argh, what a flash!” A long conversation ensued, which hinted at the ideal look for women—­and thus, by extension, at the possibility of failure, even when coveted pagne and trendy accessories are involved. One daughter commented, “She’s dressing above her station.” Her sister found Belinda “savvy, but trying too hard.” The women reached a consensus that Belinda’s fashion statement was overly ambitious. In fact, the cloth trader said that the pagne she wore looked fake, and was nothing more than a cheap copy of the prestigious Dutch wax, “[which] she surely 41

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couldn’t afford.” Her daughters wondered whether the purse was leather or plastic. Their increasingly destructive critique appeared to work as a way to manage or tame Belinda’s look—­her afterimage, so to speak. Speculations abounded in their discussion. Belinda was not of the same social class, and they mocked her for trying to dress above her station. They explained that the kind of appearance a woman ideally wants to make at any social event—­whether she wants to go for a more “conservative-­classical” or a provocative “fashion” look—­is linked to elegance cultivée. But cultivated style, as Bourdieu (1979) has argued in his work on social distinction and taste, is acquired over years. It is inconspicuous and invisible, yet involves seeing and observing as well as learning from others. Togolese politics of reputation and recognition are tied up in long-­ held social hierarchies of class and taste. Although today the economy of appearances and elite domination of fashion is changing, with Chinese copies enabling fashion aspirations to be more democratically realized through the marketplace, as elsewhere, Togolese elites continue to have vested interests in upholding social boundaries through sartorial practices. What constitutes appropriate dress etiquette and style requires social consensus, while the individual cultivation of taste requires knowledge acquired over time and institutional mediation (see Bourdieu 1979). Creating such a sartorial style is hard work. It is available only to those who are sufficiently “cultivated” and involves both the act of conforming to conventions of dress (of knowing how to dress appropriately, when, and where) while demanding a unique interpretation of the garment (involving taste, skill, and bodily technique). When I asked whether Belinda could ever achieve this kind of cultivated elegance, the cloth trader’s family laughed. “Well, she can, but she has a long way to go. For now she looks like one of those girls in an Ivoirian soap opera and not like a grande personne,” the trader explained. But was Belinda’s look a failed one? In the eyes of the elite, her look was, at best, dismissed as frivolous—­at worst, as “put on.” Yet for Belinda the fashions of the elegant Madames were aspirational, not delimiting. Instead of imitating a look she could not afford, Belinda styled herself independently and showed her determination to one day be as successful and rich as the elite Madame. In fact, the kind of recognition she received was part of Belinda’s intention. Her enlarged visibility at the baptism radiated beyond the event and created social success. Being compared to an Ivoirian soap actor was not a bad thing; in fact, it was perhaps even more desirable than having the cultivated elegance of a grande personne. Her personhood was effectively extended through the combined agency 42

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of body and cloth. Belinda was on her way, moving forward, and she explained that she “did not need a sugar daddy” to finance her investments in style. She was determined to make it on her own terms. Belinda wanted to create her own imprint, regardless of whether the Madame was mocking her for now. After all, she had achieved memorability in that her image circulated and generated talk, testifying to her ability to consume well, even if her aesthetic project still needed polish. As Belinda’s story details, a woman can be mocked for dressing above her station or for putting on a garment instead of embodying “real” fashion. The ambiguity that clothing elicits through the efficacy of body and cloth surface is what makes it a permanent feature of social commentary. But such talk, as many of my interlocutors confirmed, is also fun. “We love talking pagne!” It contributes to the construction of women’s selves as well as of society. As in other parts of the continent, or with any sumptuary regime for that matter, debates over dressed bodies can be heated because conflicting values can come into play across class, gender, and generational divides. Women’s dressed bodies assume different meanings depending on the context in which they are presented and by whom they are seen. Atsoupi and Belinda each have a strong sense of self and visions of who they want to be, yet the two women possess remarkably different investments in public clothing spectacles. Both women are dressing to impress immediate peers and those who look up to them as trend-­setters. Belinda presumably cares more about her friends and, as the photo she bought indicates, an audience (including hair-­dressing clients) that was not even present at the event than about impressing the elite audience that later gossiped about her. At the same time, for both women, the consumption and conspicuous display of pagne work as what Sasha Newell (2012) has called “efficacious acts of self-­production” (127), which are intimately connected to desires for collective recognition. He details how young Ivoirian men create ostentatious spectacles of wealth through performative displays of expensive clothing. He writes, “One who wished to faire le show [show off] needed the right authentic name-­ brand clothes, the right shoes, a new haircut, perfume if possible, at least a pack of cigarettes . . . [and a roll] of cash which could be drawn from the pocket to the awe of any witnesses” (99). To expertly faire le show and publicly display one’s potential required not just money, accumulated over many months and often through illicit means, but also skill, taste, and attitude. Belinda and Atsoupi made similar kinds of economic and symbolic investments in the crafting of their individual clothing spectacles. The 43

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creation of the “right” look—­discreetly sumptuous in Atsoupi’s case, flamboyant in Belinda’s—­ was carefully conceived and meticulously strategized. Although the two women sought different forms of recognition through radically different looks (polished versus glamorous), the attention to detail and conduct these styles require are markedly similar. The task of presenting and styling the self—­of making oneself socially relevant through style that is both intangible and tangible and upheld by cloth in different urban spaces—­is an empowering project. It is also an anxiety-­producing task that hinges on social constructions of gendered bodies, comportment, presentation, and public evaluations thereof. Women thus take seriously how they make themselves matter through their visual expressions of personal taste while simultaneously seeking collective recognition. Togolese consumption of imported and domestic cloth and clothing was already well established by the early twentieth century; however, the importance of appearance, clothing, and aesthetics has a long history in this part of West Africa.9 As Belinda’s story demonstrates, the allure of sumptuous dress and of people adorned with beautiful objects still elicits strong reactions among spectators, including sentiments of awe, amusement, desire, disavowal, and jealousy. Although Belinda did not have the means to invest in Dutch wax cloth with lineage, as Atsoupi did, and could only afford a copy of a trending pattern, her tailored pagne effectively highlighted her appearance. Belinda’s conspicuous display of attitude and clothing spectacle compelled the stance of kpeng kpengonsen, an expression that translates to “It’s me, I’m here!” Belinda’s glamorously self-­made style and physical bearing flouted elite norms of consumption. Her flamboyant look made a provocative fashion statement compounded by desires for the new, the global, and, most importantly, of being in the eyes of all. Atsoupi sought collective recognition as well, but of a different kind. Less daring than Belinda, Atsoupi crafted a much more refined and carefully polished appearance. She bought a classic Vlisco pattern and consulted with friends and dressmakers to preempt critique. Thus, in a sense, her look is not merely more collaborative but also more normative, working with the perceptions of others rather than flouting social rules.

When Cloth Speaks Consumption of pagne involves an intimate relationship between the surface of the body and the surface of the cloth. No longer external to 44

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the self, objects of adornment become embodied; their value is literally absorbed “into the person through public performance” (Newell 2012, 144). The passion with which women discuss the print aesthetic in relation to the complex roles it plays in their lives reflects their attachments to this expressive cultural form. Wearing pagne successfully involves a confluence of personalized fashion expressions, commonly understood references and experiences of everyday life, and embodied dress practices passed down matrilineally. Pagne fashion thus, in large part, shapes women’s participation in the gendered public sphere of contemporary urban Togo: It has the agency to speak for a woman, whether regarding heritage, ambition, rivalry, personal dissatisfaction, or mediation of con­ flict. As patterns appear on the market, only those whose materiality is sufficiently active can speak to consumers and become part of women’s outward expression. I will give a few examples of such agentive pagne shortly. Good pagne reflects the “stuff that makes up an African woman’s daily life,” explained an acquaintance; in other words, it provides a canvas for concerns about money, beauty, polygamy, and rivalry. A material agent in its own right, it enables dialogical imagination. When not properly managed, however, it carries the risks of betrayal. As Belinda’s story demonstrates, a woman can be mocked for not knowing how to display herself successfully. But in everyday life, pagne can also constitute a substitute speech act for a woman, exhibiting messages with highly charged and (for her) unmistakable meanings. At once indeterminate and alive with endless possibilities, pagne simultaneously evokes, listens, and often takes on highly charged points in the mediation of urban conflict. Whereas previously this chapter has emphasized the kinds of public ven­ ues in which the total look captivates, this section draws attention to the intimate and communal living spaces in Togo that allow for a different and more direct communication of messages through pagne. The cour commune, a shared courtyard space that mimics central features of village life, is the primary site of urban conflict. Consider Dikta’s cour for a moment. This young esthetician had been renting a small room in a lower-­class housing compound; she was generally getting on well with her neighbors, with whom she shared cooking, water, and sanitation facilities. Aside from the occasional nuisances of noise and arguments about cleanliness, Dikta described the social organization of her cour as generally trouble-­free. However, more recently she was having problems with a neighbor who had spread rumors about her. This neighbor lived in a tiny one-­bedroom flat next to Dikta. She had a teenage daughter and a polygamous husband who visited once a week. “She 45

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spoke ill of me inside la cour,” but Dikta was, to use her words, “not having it.” “She was really irritating me . . . then one morning when I saw her, I quickly took out a pagne we call ‘Onions’ . . . oh, you should’ve seen how I gave it to her!” Dikta told the story to a group of girlfriends as we sat inside another friend’s cour. She garnered amusement and applause from her audience when she stood up to demonstrate just how she had wrapped the cloth around her waist and drawn attention to herself by opening and closing the pagne several times in theatrical gait. Her dramatic performance skillfully embodied how she wielded pagne as a rebuke, and Dikta’s friends celebrated her account. They were quick to explain to me the hidden meanings of Dikta’s indirect speech act. “By wearing this pagne, well, she told the woman to worry about her own rotten onions, because her home smells!” Again, everyone burst into loud laughter. “It’s so I don’t have to speak to her,” Dikta commented. “I let the pagne speak. . . . She will understand that I’m talking to her!” The language of print and the efficacy of bodily gestures can express the most cutting, difficult, and wounding issues between women. This is especially the case in the charged context of polygamous marriage and its dialectics of jealousy and rivalry.10 Reflecting changes in existing models of marriage, unions, and courtship practices in urban Togo (see Locoh 1994), a surge of popular prints such as “Je cours plus vite que ma rivale” (I run faster than my rival) or “Oeil de ma rivale” (My rival’s eye) became popular during the 1980s and 1990s (Ayini 1987; Bellow 1985; Bickford 1994; Touré 1985).11 They remain so today because of their unique aesthetic and their ability to communicate transgressive messages. Many Lomeans I spoke to about the charged materiality of these particular kinds of patterns explained how they signified women’s power and wealth in a society where men, even if they have agreed to a Christian (monogamous) marriage, often revert to customary law and take on co-­wives. Women constantly debate these matters—­at times through mocking, at others through moralizing language. This is very much part of the gendering of urban popular culture, and it is a specifically female asset, as the printed image underpins women’s power and independence in Togolese society. Another iconic pagne called “Si tu sorts, je sors” (You go out, I go out) depicts an open birdcage with a bird on a swing, ready to fly, following the example of another bird that has already escaped the cage. “If your husband takes on a deuxième bureau [“second office,” i.e., a mistress] and doesn’t come home at night, then you wear this pagne to give the message that you will do the same thing,” asserted my acquaintance, Alice.

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These vectors of women’s power are multidirectional and communicate with both men and women. As “Si tu sorts, je sors” illustrates, pagne speaks a language that is at once playful and serious, enabling women to take on pressing matters. “When you have trouble, or when your husband has a deuxième bureau, you wear “Oeil de ma rivale” to insult the other woman; and when you wear it, the other woman, she knows that there is some insult coming her way because you haven’t spoken to her, you let the cloth do the talking!” a friend of a friend said. “Oeil de ma rivale’s” undulating, energetic pattern appears almost three-­dimensional, with sharp yellow and black wave-­like shapes that form as circles around pink and blue diamonds, or eyes, that interpellate the viewer’s gaze (see plate 5). The bedazzling print carries a meaning already inscribed in the contested field of romantic courtship and competition. When it interacts with the surface of the body, the cloth becomes a powerful agent with weapon-­like characteristics, which women animate through bodily gestures, activating its internal force and affective energy. Thus, when effectively charged as a weapon defending a woman’s social or conjugal position, it generates the kind of material efficacy that breaks down the distinction between people and things that has concerned recent analysis of the posthuman (Bennett 2010; Holbraad 2011). The literature on new materialism has contributed much to our understanding of nonhuman agency and the efficacy and affect of things. However, while a key concern of that scholarship has been to push for an ontological turn (away from human ontologies to vital flows) that eradicates human subjectivity and meaning, this chapter has shown that subjects and objects continue to speak in the combined action of person/body in cloth. Pagne is not just an object appropriated by the acting subject; rather, it is foundational to the subject’s agency (Gell 1988). The kind of meanings that are created in this action are not just made of signs, per Keane’s (2005) suggestion, nor are they made by what Daniel Miller (2005b) has called “the tyranny of the subject” (22); instead, they are patterned by the “clothness” of cloth, whose qualia produce affect, emotion, and desire and are distributed in the way people talk, feel about, and are mobilized by them. Even so, women still firmly control the vectors of power in pagne performance and urban negotiations. By excluding men from this economy of words, yet making public—­and thus eminently negotiable—­the themes of polygamy, infidelity, and money, women participate in Togo’s public culture, that “zone of cultural debate” (Appadurai and Breckenridge

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1988, 6). Pagne itself is a primary actor in these debates; it simulta­ neously holds and elicits agency, but its efficacy is only realized upon a woman’s successful wielding of the cloth. This highly corporeal and performative act requires bodily technique to work in action, making the stuff of everyday life matter. Insulting and rebuking those who have wronged you through a swift and calculated decision over which iconic pattern to wear works like a form of individually wrought justice. It is also a recursive act, as more and more women affirm the aptness of the name “Oeil de ma rivale” through their communicative display of pagne. When cloth speaks, rivals are stunned into silence. All the while, women regain control over their reputation and honor, restoring their sense of right and proving that the techniques of the body and the power of the cloth are not just reserved for social occasions, but can powerfully mediate social relations. These potentials highlight why investments in pagne are never bad investments, for pagne is the stuff of everyday life. This chapter has established the important role of pagne in women’s lives and acts of public self-­making, which pattern women’s ongoing in­ vestments in, and sensuously embodied interactions with, cloth’s dense materiality. In the same way that cloth affectively enhances and extends the person—­in some cases, making or breaking a woman’s social and sartorial success—­it also condenses various, even conflicting, meanings—­ both visually and materially. Similarly, in the folds of its dense materiality, pagne also has the quality to layer, condense, and ar­chive time and space. Indeed, as the next chapter will illustrate, in the historical textures of wax, dye, and image that are layered into the cloth, we can see the pat­ terns of production and circulation that West African tastemakers and consumers played a critical role in setting into motion.

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Two

Archival Prints: Alternate Histories of Taste and Circulation An entry point into the complex history of wax cloth in West Africa are the sample books in the Vlisco company archive in the Netherlands. On the shelves in the archive, a host of thickly bound nineteenth-­century sample and order books sit piled on top of one another. Like scrapbooks, these volumes contain cloth samples that are carefully composed, cut, and glued by hand, and annotated with technical details about shading, hue, and coloring. Browsing through the pages of a swatch book is a richly layered sensorial and aesthetic experience. When I first visited the Vlisco archive in 2000, I was enchanted (and admittedly overwhelmed) by the enormous variety of patterns and colors that were sampled in these books; at the same time, I was intrigued by the careful and caring way in which these book pages had been assembled over time, both as a practice of archiving and knowledge production (see plate 6). Each sample book narrates a history of production and mirrors a diligent process of technical experimentation with shading, coloration, and elements of design. A single pattern appears at times brighter, then again darker. But while the material composition and visual design of the sample books appeal to the eye and illustrates the ongoing process of sampling, recycling, copying, and adaptation, their narrative order conceals much about how and why they came into being in the first place. The rich materiality of these 49

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books has served several generations of Dutch designers as a source of inspiration for designing wax cloth for West African markets.1 As in-­house archives, they build a sense of tradition, much like fashion houses today, where the past becomes an authoritative reference for new creations; each move to return to the fold strengthens the brand in the present. Yet despite their insistence on the physical materiality of design traditions, they also suggest something about the immateriality of taste—­of those unseen consumers who responded to the samples and influenced the materialization and making of the cloth as a commercial product to be sold and desired, and that ended up fashioning West African bodies and consumer subjectivities in unexpected ways. The presence of these archival objects—­textured by the scents and colors of the past—­documents a sensuous history of appropriation, assemblage, and circulation that connects Europe to Southeast Asia and to West Africa. Originally a product of Indonesian stylistic origin and Eu­ropean technological manufacture, wax cloth was not produced for domestic consumption in Europe but for a West African market that initially emerged in an imperial context. The complex adaptation of a highly specialized Western industry to the aesthetic preferences of African consumers suggests that Western manufacturers and traders took the economic ramifications of African taste preferences quite seriously, even if they simultaneously sought to dismiss them on the grounds of racial inferiority.2 In fact, women traders became the key intermediaries and marketers as well as tastemakers of the cloth in coastal and hinterland markets. They were just as critical to the making and marketing of the cloth as the Dutch designers and manufacturers were. The product of their interactions and negotiations is reflected in a category of patterns called “classics,” such as the classic sunburst pattern Atsoupi chose for the wedding and whose temporality she strategically deployed. This chapter establishes what goes into the production of cloth. I follow the movement of cloth and show its contingent location within larger global processes and relations of power, but I diverge from classical political economy studies of commodities (Mintz 1985) in that I am not looking only at the movement of capital, labor, and commodities to gain insight into capitalism’s circulatory system. What goes into the production of this object, and its subsequent animation, is not just physical labor but craft, science, and technologies of mimesis. Thus, the chapter explores how different registers of taste and expertise pattern the cloth’s production, materiality, and movement throughout its life. Wax prints weave together producers, distributors, and consumers in complex webs of interrelation and material relations that are best under50

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stood when we read textiles as archives (Stoler 2010; Burton 2005; Farge 2013).3 Rather than read cloth as artifact, I am interested in revealing the patterning and layering of time and space in both textile materiality and aesthetics. The conceptual analogy between textile and archive is reflected in the formalist language scholars use to describe materials in terms of structure, texture, and pattern. Colonial archives, as anthropologists and historians of colonialism argue, are not mere repositories of historical knowledge but rather discursive orders that constitute narratives about time and space (Stoler 2010). It is important to understand Dutch wax as an archive, because it tells the story of control and how it is challenged in the context of the creation of markets and tastes. It records the global connections and negotiations that forged the cloth’s making, its circulation, and its dense materiality. When we read cloth as archive, we move out of the realm of governmentality and political economy and into the realm of aesthetics, agency, and narration. The cloth’s archival threads reveal a sensuous history of mechanical reproduction and show how its value continues to be created at the intersection of commerce, West African aesthetics, and subjectivity. This chapter takes us back in time, first to trace the imperial patterns of cloth making, circulation, and reproduction. This part of the story reveals the historical complexity of well-­established taste mechanisms and cosmopolitan aesthetics that required European merchants to continuously sample, copy, and create new types of cloth. Situated from the late nineteenth to the mid-­twentieth centuries, the chapter moves between the Dutch archive and the West African context, as European merchants and Dutch designers created cloth for distant consumers whose taste and agency kept them in business. My aim is not to present a comprehensive history of the production, circulation, and trade in wax prints; such an attempt is epistemologically fraught, because it raises questions about an issue that anthropologists and historians beginnings and origins—­ have long problematized for its empiricist and teleological assumptions (Trouillot 1997). Instead, my goal in this chapter is to disturb the assumed metropole-­to-­colony trajectory by looking at the threads and layers that weave the story of Dutch wax. What they show is how cloth’s dense materiality came into being through imperial networks and the agendas of a vast array of heterogeneous actors that included manufacturers, brokers, designers, scientists, colonial trading companies, and West African tastemakers. This is not a simple story about a piece of material culture, or how it gets put together; what the archive of cloth shows are the nested and layered forms of capitalism that are constantly being remade and innovated upon. From this story, African consumers and producers emerge 51

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as fully formed subjects, not merely constituted by capitalism but also constitutive of it, just like the dense materiality of wax cloth itself.

Cloth and Cosmopolitanism Global flows are rarely unidirectional. Although it can produce unexpected exchanges and hybrid forms, the global circulation of things is directed and channeled in specific ways. Many narrations exist about the multilayered directionality of global flows—­of capital, technology, information, goods, and people—­in old and new discourses about globalization (Appadurai 1990; Friedman 1994; Friedman and Ekholm Friedman 2013; Tsing 2000, 2005; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Meyer and Geschiere 1999). The global circulation of cloth—­an object I view as a special com­ modity—­has produced an important set of discourses about imperial history, encompassing mercantilism, slavery, and colonialism (Roy 1996; Ri­ello and Roy 2009; Beckert 2014; Johnson 1974; Johnson 1980). But along with this history of (colonial) appropriation between Europe and Africa, imported commodities have figured in African cultural economies in ways that demonstrate that Africans were and are creators of novel, hybrid cultural expressions rather than exploited subjects of imperial enterprise. As explained in chapter 1, this particular commodity is a critical form of cultural expression for women like Atsoupi today. When Dutch wax cloth was introduced to West Africa in the late nineteenth century, European traders did not have to create a market or a taste for these new colorfast materials. They were already firmly in place. West African preoccupations with embellishing and dressing the body made the trade in wax prints of central importance to the shifting cultural and economic identity of the region. By extension, those involved in its trade became particularly powerful agents of change. Europeans only indirectly mediated local tastes and fashion, as African traders and consumers responded to—­and sometimes rejected—­the purified objects of industrial modernity. Consumer desires for the dressed body and objects of adornment subverted European attempts to cover its colonies in fabric or to control the meanings of the commodities that their profits turned upon. Rather, the highly specialized market for wax prints emerged at the intersection of a series of hazards, shifting regimes of global trade, and the critical historical juncture when merchant capital transformed into industrial capital. To situate how this new pattern of capitalism emerged, as it is told in the archive of wax cloth and the making of its distinct materiality, we 52

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must establish the long history of textile dealings and circulations in West Africa. In fact, coastal West Africa has a long history of both domestic textile production—­including printed, stenciled, woven, and tied-­and-­dyed cloth—­and the importation of fabric from around the globe. Beginning in the fourteenth century with the trans-­Saharan trade, textiles served as a leading economic commodity in local, regional, and international markets by virtue of their commensurability. Cloth offered a standardized measure—­the six-­yard “long,” that is, enough fabric to make a full garment—­to the European Atlantic slave trade that was widely practiced in the forts and lodges of global commerce along the 500-­kilometer coastal stretch of contemporary Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria between the six­teenth and nineteenth centuries (Hopkins 1973). The inventories of European shipments to West Africa, for example, detail a resolutely global mix of cloth and garments that were traded for slaves on the coast. Such imports included Indian chintz, silk socks from Nepal, Bengali fabrics, Arabic linen, and Schlesinger cloth (Reikat 1997). In addition to these products, Indian and Javanese batik may have circulated up and down the coast on the trading routes of the Dutch East and West India Companies.4 Michael Taussig argues that trading colored fabrics with African chiefs in exchange for their slaves enabled Europeans to obtain slaves without resorting to kidnapping and other violent means. As Taussig writes, “Europeans bought slaves in exchange for Indian textiles. . . . ‘The problem was to pick just the styles and colors that were in demand along the Guinea coast that year’” (Harms in Taussig 2009, 135). The stakes in dealing with high-­quality imported fabrics thus were high, and the West African Gui­nea coast (the so-­called Slave, Ivory, and Gold Coasts; see figure 2.1) was a key site of imperial competition between the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British Empires.5 Although the Dutch never had territorial colonies in West Africa, they had trading posts on the “Dutch Gold Coast” (contemporary Ghana) during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and built forts on them to protect them from rival European trading interests. The dominant narrative of enterprising industrialists and entrepreneurs elides any critical interrogation of how the routes these traders traveled were embedded within Dutch imperial geographies, and thus how a market for the commodity was previously established in Africa as taste and aesthetic styles circulated with the flow of objects and bodies along imperial trading routes. The arrival of the Dutch wax print to the region at the end of the nineteenth century is therefore deeply entangled in the larger history of the Dutch empire and its economic systems of mercan­tilism, imperialism, and colonialism (see Ward 2009; also Beckert 2014).6 Before the creation of the African colonies in the late nineteenth 53

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2.1

A seventeenth-­century map of West Africa’s Guinea Coast. Artist unknown.

century, chartered companies such as the British Royal African Company and the Dutch West India Company competed for slaves in the Atlantic slave trade and, by extension, over the control of the global textile trade (Steiner 1985; Hopkins 1973). Yet when we move away from a conventional framework of imperial history and shift to a historical narrative that circles around the question of aesthetics and taste, the experiential qualities of cloth come into focus, revealing how materiality and style were constituted through long-­ standing commodity circulation within Dutch colonial geographies. The well-­worn misrepresentation of undressed and unfashionable African bod­ies as “uncivilized” belies a long history of West African practices of sumptuous display and self-­adornment with colorful clothing. In his A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea ([1705]1967), chief merchant of the Dutch West India Company Willem Bosman described the textile dealings in the markets of the Guinea coast in great detail, noting the variety of fabrics and their different colors, textures, and origins. As head of the powerful Dutch company’s production and trading initiatives in Fort Elmina, then the coastal center of Dutch political and commercial power, Bosman needed current, on-­the-­ground knowledge of the complex consumer habits of local populations.7 Consider Bosman’s portrayal of sartorial elitism: On the lower part of their Bodies they wear a Paan [a wrapper, or pagne] which often is three or four times as long as that of the Men: This they wind around their Waste, 54

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and bind it on with a Fillet of red Cloth, or something else about half Ell broad and two Ells long, to make it fit close to the Body, both ends of the Fillet hanging out on their Paan; which in Ladies of Quality is adorned with Gold and Silver-­lace: On the upper-­ part of their body they cast a Veil of Silk or some other fine sort of stuff; whilst their Arms are beautified with Rings of Gold, Silver and Ivory. (Bosman [1705] 1967, 121)

Bosman’s account forcefully underscores the persistent power of the dressed body. His description of the excessive amount of cloth and valuable jewelry used by eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century “Ladies of Qual­ ity” captures a concern for finely wrought excess that was decadent but not vulgar (Bosman [1705] 1967, 118). In fact, what Bosman’s account about wealthy women on the Guinea coast reveals is that aesthetic sensibilities and taste already existed in this time and place with their own temporalities and historicity, akin to what Homi Bhabha has called “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (1994). This form of cosmopolitanism challenges the idea of the Western metropole as the center of fashion and history and shifts agency to non-­European subjects as historical actors. In fact, the modes of self-­fashioning Bosman describes are not about the African mimesis of Western modernity (Newell 2012). Rather, they suggest that self-­fashioning African subjects tapped into imperial spheres of circulation, extracted their visual signi­ fiers, and assembled them with local references to form a distinctive image culture. Women in different areas established preferences for certain fashionable materials, thereby creating both localized and changing patterns of consumption for luxury goods. Of course, such cosmopolitan styles also indicated sartorial elitism, wealth, and power, elements that later were expressed through the wax-­print fashions. Cloth proved to be a commodity significantly affected by shifting tastes and therefore quite volatile in developing global markets (Steiner 1985; Hansen 2000). In the following centuries, speculative capitalist traders attempting to respond nimbly to changing consumer demand soon replaced European mercantilists relying on tried-­and-­true trading routes. British firms in particular benefited from the technological progress and the unspoken doctrine of imperialism to which the Industrial Revolution gave rise. The technological innovations shifted not only the dominant mode of printed cotton cloth production from manual to mechanical but the centers of production from India to Europe. Where handmade Indian cottons once led, European factory prints slowly came to dominate late-­nineteenth-­century West African markets (Steiner 1985; Nielsen 1979). Importantly, these fabrics achieved success through the practice of mimicry. 55

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Traditions and Technologies of Mimesis When Dutch wax was introduced to West Africa roughly two hundred years after Bosman’s account, merchants did not have to create a market or a taste for the colorful printed cottons. Indeed, the Dutch—­and the English before and after them—­appropriated not only existing patterns of textile circulation but also the materials themselves. Until the formative years of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-­eighteenth century, Europe’s textile industry was at the periphery of global production. Indian print and color technology, although manual and time-­consuming, were far superior to European printing techniques. This superiority was reflected in the European metropoles, where cashmere shawls, paisley prints, and calico were important status symbols (Lemire 2003). Between the seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, these Indian textiles also dominated the African cloth trade. Finely glazed chintzes imprinted with large flower patterns and unglazed calicoes featuring smaller flower patterns were highly desired for their finishes, colors, and patterns as well as their colorfastness and light weight. By the eighteenth century, Indian cottons had become so popular on the West African coast that European manufacturers began copying them to maintain a footing in the lucrative global textile trade. Producers in Manchester, England, became skilled counterfeiters of Indian chintz and calicoes, followed by French and Dutch imitations. From 1720 to 1750, their challenge spurred on a trade struggle between Indian and British manufacturers that played out over the aesthetic preferences of West African consumers as Christopher Steiner in his pioneering work on the history of textile commerce between Europe and West Africa shows (1985).8 Although England brought the quality of its cotton printing up to speed during this “cotton war,” the British copies still lacked the precision and refinement of the Indian originals. By the mid-­1800s, however, so-­called Manchester cloth had gained acceptance in West African markets. British calico printers took special interest in it and progressively “modified [manufacturing] to suit the African taste” (Nielsen 1979, 469). Indeed, Europeans began to compete with one another in a complex race of imitation, mimicking one another’s mimicry of various handmade textiles—­ a process by which industrial piracy became a variety of innovation. By the end of the nineteenth century, European mass-­produced chintz and what Steiner calls “Euro-­African cloth” dominated West African markets. Changes in manufacturing processes spurred by the technological ad­ vances of the Industrial Revolution enabled the continuous reappro56

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priation and reproduction of previously costly, labor-­intensive textiles. With power looms and machine printing, the quality of printed cloth, that “original commodity of modernity” (Chalfin 2010, 135), became more consistent. Mechanical reproduction enabled precise measurement so that patterns could be lined up to produce a great volume of cloth efficiently, which were then inserted into capitalist trade flows. This was certainly the case for British calico and chintz printers who copied Indian textiles and the type of cloth they eventually produced for West African markets. Yet the seriality of mass production combined with its dissemination also made these fabrics increasingly common, offering less and less potential for sartorial distinction. It is arguably in this context that the new wax print established and distinguished itself through its mass-­ produced uniqueness. The technological process that stands behind the unique aesthetic of wax cloth—­what I call “the aesthetics of imperfection”—­hinges on the mechanization of handmade Southeast Asian batik production. The traces of this technological process are embossed on the cloth itself, and they form a constitutive element of the materiality of crackle and color that weave its density. Peeling back the historical layers of its materiality, composed of complex patterns of circulation and reproduction, takes us to the island of Java, then a Dutch colony and part of the so-­called Dutch East Indies as well as a center for batik artisanship. Java’s traditional art of handmade batik production involved a pen filled with a small reservoir of molten beeswax (Robinson 1969; Kitley 1992; Elliot 2013). Experienced textile artists used the pen to draw a design by hand on both sides of a prepared piece of cloth. The oxidization of the wax created small cracks, which gave the pattern a crackled look. Where wax was not painted onto the parts of the cloth to be left undyed, patterns were stamped on the fabric, initially with wooden blocks that later were made of copper. The wax was then scraped or boiled away and the patterned layers were dipped by hand into natural dye baths. Depending on how many colors or layers the artist wanted to include in the design, this process was repeated as necessary. This required both skilled labor and considerable time; the making of a sumptuous batik could take a single artist many weeks to create. Following the imperial pattern set by the British (with chintz re/ pro­duction and trade), Dutch industrialists tapped into Java’s textile economy throughout much of the nineteenth century. Dutch textile manufacturers experimented with various technologies to mechanize batik production with the aim of selling mass-­produced imitation batiks on the markets of the Dutch East Indies. In fact, the rich collection of 57

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high-­end, handmade batik samples and poor, mid-­nineteenth-­century mechanized Dutch imitations conserved in the Vlisco archive documents this laborious process; it shows the stark contrast between the precision and delicacy of handcrafted batik and the unrefined, blotchy, half machine-­made, half hand-­blocked batik imitations. John Picton (1995) details how the Haarlem Cotton Company eventually developed La Javanaise, a Perrotine printing machine that printed wax onto the cloth.9 This machine was soon replaced by another Haarlem invention featuring a duplex-­roller printing technology that mechanized the application of hot wax to both sides of the cloth in a single operation, thus mimicking the manual batik process. To re-­create the iconic patterns and kaleidoscopic, blended effects of Javanese batik, the cloth was then indigo-­dyed to reserve the pattern, and once the wax was cleaned off, additional colors were manually applied to the cloth by stamping wooden blocks onto the indigo base (see plate 7). In addition to the Haarlem manufacturer, other smaller textile mills began producing imitation batiks for Southeast Asian markets. One of these manufacturers was Vlisco, then known as van Vlissingen. Vlisco’s official narrative of origins is framed as a family history that began in 1846 when a wealthy Amsterdam merchant named Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen acquired a textile factory in Helmond in the southern Netherlands. The family history suggests a success story that is based on intimacy, but in fact it is the operationalization of extended family networks that occurred in an imperial context. In this transnational setting, a family member stationed in Java sent batik samples to Helmond to be reproduced by machine, the product of which would then be sent back and sold on Southeast Asian markets. This narrative privileges elements of technological innovation and experimentation with roller printing and hand blocking in the batik imitation trade and conjures a market-­ driven repositioning from the Dutch East Indies to West Africa in the mid-­1870s. Yet this chronology, with its origins in Java leading to the re­ purposing and “Africanizing” of batik imitations to fit West African con­ sumer concerns, is replete with silences and omissions. Although Vlisco indeed sent adapted batik imitations to the “Coast of Africa,” as a document in the company archive attests (Bienfait 1876), these prints were not wax prints but so-­called Java prints.10 In fact, unlike the Haarlem producer, Vlisco was unsuccessful in transferring the hand-­block craft process into a single mechanized cylinder-­printing operation. Instead, Vlisco made a one-­sided print, a product of inferior quality. While Dutch batik imitations were much more affordable than the handcrafted original, their success on the markets of the Dutch East In58

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dies was nevertheless limited and ultimately short-­lived (1840 to the 1860s). Despite ongoing industrial efforts to improve the quality of the copies on Dutch factory floors, technological innovation was marked by technical limitation. In fact, mechanical reproduction had two major shortcomings that created the important aesthetic of imperfection, which Indonesians ultimately rejected but that would later appeal to West Africans. The first shortcoming was related to the technical difficulty of removing the wax once the cloth was indigo-­dyed. Indeed, as excess wax spots continued to resist subsequent color applications, they created an uneven speckled effect across the cloth. These imperfections were enhanced when color bled through those areas where the wax had cracked, thus giving wax cloth its signature crackle (see plate 7). The second shortcoming and technical imperfection that contributed to the cloth’s distinct materiality was not technological failure but human failure. This was related to the application of additional colors through hand-­blocking, and the difficulty of doing so with precision. Thus, when the color blocks were slightly misaligned with the design and marginally overlapped, they inadvertently created a unique visual effect, or sparkle. These technical shortcomings, a product of the technology of mimesis, actually created wax cloth’s unique aesthetic. Technologies of reproduction and Javanese aesthetics were decidedly at odds, such that the elite dismissed the materiality of the copy—­its imperfections—­as “faulty workmanship” (Robinson 1969, 73). Although the Dutch continued to experiment with technology to control the technical imperfections that were so central to the identity of batik prints, these technical failures are ultimately what made the Dutch copy inferior to the precise and refined texture of the handmade original (and the social valences assigned to its authenticity). Eventually, the imitations were displaced when local batik makers developed more efficient production processes that made batik more affordable. In addition, Javanese consumers developed strong (if not anticolonial or nationalist) taste preferences for local productions. This shift coincided with another shift in taste preferences: Consumers on the Gold Coast desired higher quality, more specialized designs and colors that European mass-­produced cloth appeared to no longer provide. Thus, while the pronounced wax crackle led to the cloth’s displacement on Southeast Asian markets, this technical failure paradoxically became one of the most marked features of the cloth’s value and authenticity in West Africa. Unlike the more homogeneous objects of mass (re)production available on African markets—­including yard upon yard of calico and Euro-­African cloth printed with perfect regularity—­the wax-­print 59

2.2

Vlisco hand-­blocker applying color to pattern 14/0663. Vlisco archive.

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technology perfected technical imperfection. The uncontrollable, random nature of the production process ensured that no two yards of cloth looked identical. The Haarlem imitation batiks thus found a receptive market in West Africa, where consumers long accustomed to the floral patterns of Indian chintz appreciated them for their vibrant colors. Technological innovation and limitation are thus key to the historical trajectory of wax cloth and its distinct visuality. Wax effects and vivid, sparkling color are the linchpins of a wax print. The value and hue of color in interaction with the pattern produces a “dazzling effect” on the senses, what Atsoupi described when she chose the sunburst pattern in the market, and which she sought to animate at the wedding in her embodied performance. The combined effect of printing technology (creating crackle and speckled effects) and color technology is what created the cloth’s animating materiality. In the language of Latour’s actor-­network theory, color can be viewed as an actant in an assemblage of various heterogeneous actors that included manufacturers, brokers, designers, chemists, engineers, colonial trading companies, and West African tastemakers. Patricia Spyer (2006) has drawn attention to the sensory dimensions of color and its ability to animate and move people and things. When we combine these insights about the animating quality of color and mesh it with Michael Taussig’s (2009) argument that vivid color is a manifestation of the sacred—­which is to say that color contains a magical, organic quality that impresses on the senses—­we can better understand how the cloth’s animating materiality creates “sensory transactions within which subjects not only act but are acted upon” (Spyer 2006, 126). Beginning in the nineteenth century, skilled color specialists working at the Haarlem Cotton Company, specifically a man named Prévinaire who had also invented La Javanaise (and thus by extension Dutch wax cloth), steered the Dutch industry’s technical advances. A diversity of printing methods contributed to the iconic sparkle of classic wax prints, but color technology ultimately created this unique aesthetic—­the layering of images, dyes, and wax—­making the cloth vibrant to seduce the senses. Rapid developments in the new science of organic chemistry made colorfast synthetic dyes widely available in the late nineteenth century (Travis 1993). Synthetic dyes were cheaper to manufacture and greatly expanded the range of colors easily available to Dutch wax manufacturers. As the sample book in the Vlisco archive shows, coloration and shading became a major site of technological experimentation. Cloth was developed in new technologized ways to withstand the light of the African sun and to please the senses of African consumers through desirable shades and patterns. Hence, this process was sensorially configured. 61

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In the Vlisco archive, I found numerous color recipes dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Getting color “right,” the head of the Vlisco design department in the Netherlands explained to me, “is as important as the precision of the pattern,” and the brightly hued wax prints that Vlisco has produced for West African markets since 1914 have a particular reputation. Sparkle and colorfastness, a measure of how well dye is attached to fabric, matter enormously in the success of a wax print both historically and today. If the luminously hued fabric could not hold its sparkle and color penetration after laundering and exposure to harsh sunlight, it did not convince quality-­conscious consumers in West Africa. Thus, wax prints were color smart. The first synthetic dyes copied their natural counterparts. Science and technology anthropologist Sara Wiley notes that many early synthetic chemicals were “introduced as mimics: synthetic dyes produced the same colors as plant-­derived dyes, nylons appeared like silk stockings, and plastics like glass” (2011 21). Yet for every attempt at mimicry, something different is still smuggled in. The synthetic color revolution fundamentally altered the way textiles were produced and distributed as well as the understanding of the effects of color on consumer bodies and selves (Blasczyck 2012). The detailed color recipes held in the Vlisco archive demonstrate that the efficacy of color was not lost on producers. Chemists took great care to prepare just the right mix to replicate a design but were also aware that the versatility of synthetic dyes was an asset to production. The stunning colors impressed consumers and made it possible for textile companies to create and market a variety of forms from a single pattern. As Dutch manufacturers began to develop designs specifically for an African market, they had to contend with not only the realities of changing taste and market demand but the fashion desires of African consumers they could only imagine from a distance. Until the early twentieth century, the Haarlem Cotton Company was the only manufacturer of Dutch wax designed for West African markets in Europe and the sole proprietor of the technological means of wax-­ print production, with Vlisco entering the fray decades later. Although Vlisco Java prints were traded in parts of Eastern and Western Africa, it was not until 1914 that Vlisco was able to produce resin-­resist prints (wax cloth) at a time when several other manufactures in the Netherlands (Haarlem, Deven­ter), England, and Switzerland were also making wax prints for West African markets. In fact, Vlisco was a latecomer in an already established market. Vlisco’s origin story—­with its constitutive

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trope of 1846 and claim to the origins of Dutch wax cloth—­is fabricated, yet it has become the dominant story in journalistic and academic accounts about Dutch wax in West Africa.11 Despite numerous attempts by Vlisco and competing manufacturers to re-­create and copy the Haarlem technology, this was not achieved until the early 1910s by a process that allegedly involved industrial espionage (Ankersmit 2010). By the late 1910s, manufacturers in England and in the Netherlands began producing and copying the Haarlem designs.12 Although designed from a distance, the early wax prints show a clear interest in copying or drawing from African influences in the same way as British manufacturers had previously adapted Manchester cloth to suit West African taste as Steiner has shown (1985).13 This process of market adaptation involved mimicking the visuality of West African cloth, including tie-­dye, paste resist, and stenciled adinkra. The making of Dutch wax cloth raises questions about modernization, progress, and technological reproduction. When we uncover the strata of wax and dye in the unique materiality of the wax print, what emerges is a technologized aesthetic of imperfection that belies the modernist logic of reproduction as worthless repetition—­for each yard of the printed cloth is distinctive and inimitable. This brings us back to the notion of cloth as archive, and to the sample books in the Vlisco archive. The narrative of these books reveals an ongoing process of sampling, of recycling and reusing, of copying and adaptation in the production of this cloth as an aesthetic object and as a commodity to be sold on West African markets. But while these books offer rich insights into the technical making and texturing of patterns and shades, they say little about the coproduction of this cloth as an interactive process, at once imaginary and real. How did Dutch designers imagine or match African taste? And what does the richly textured and layered materiality of cloth tell us about the complexity of West African aesthetics?

Collaborative Design Designing fabrics for distant buyers was no easy task. How the Dutch learned to meet the needs of the West African market involves looking once more at the textures and patterns of time, space, and aesthetics layered in the textile—­that which makes it an archive. The technological process, including the failure to produce perfect batik imitations, creates

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aesthetic value; this process also creates complex forms of misrecognition and reappropriation that keep producing change in the cloth as well as how consumers experience its visuality and materiality. Tapping into the fabric of taste and aesthetics, especially at the level of design, was an ambiguous endeavor. For Europeans, understanding, detecting, and ultimately conceiving African taste preferences was a complex matter, shaped by prevailing racist ideologies of nineteenth-­century Europe and the views and perceptions of European traders in the colonies. Initially, selling cloth was accomplished by trial and error, but ultimately Europeans had to quite literally redesign their textiles in response to local demand. The early patterns for Dutch wax prints were a curious blend of signs conjured at a distance in European drawing rooms by male designers. Art historian John Picton has suggested that the first Haarlem engravers drew upon a great variety of visual sources including “Indonesian and ancient Egyptian visual sources, West African proverbial interests . . . and the Dutch countryside.” (1995, 28). Other iconographic and stylis­ tic influences may well have been drawn from the long history of chinoiserie in Europe; the contemporary arts and crafts movement; Dutch art nouveau and its use of ornamental and oriental design; and early-­ twentieth-­century ideas about African primitivism that came to embody modernity. At the turn of the century, physical examples of many of these sources were collected under one popular institutional roof: the Ethnographic Museum. In addition to the old sample and pattern books, the museum became an important source of inspiration for Dutch designers who, in most cases, would never set foot in West Africa. The textile designers working for the first Vlisco drawing department, established in the late 1800s and headed by art nouveau–­trained designer Johan Jacobs until the late 1950s, are known to have made regular museum field trips.14 During the early twentieth century, Vlisco mainly produced curtain and upholstery fabrics for the domestic market. There was no explicit African design policy, and the wax-­print market was one among many for the company. After the 1920s, however, sketchbooks at the Vlisco archive document that designers conducted explicit research in African ethnographic collections. Amsterdam’s anthropology museum, formerly known as the Colonial Institute (today called the Tropenmuseum) was one such destination for these men. Until 1945, the Colonial Institute held the most important Africa collection of the Netherlands. The collection was subsequently relocated to Europe’s first ethnographic museum in Leiden, another field site for the Vlisco drawing team.

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2.3  Sketch by Johann Jacobs, head of the Vlisco drawing room, 1935. Photo by author. Vlisco

archive.

2.4

Java print “839R” produced in 1937 after Jacobs’s sketch. Vlisco archive.

The Leiden National Museum of Ethnology provided vast sources of exotic inspiration to Jacobs and his colleagues; presumably, various objects from the former Dutch Gold Coast, especially from the Asante kingdom, were part of these collections. The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren—­with its expansive collections of ethnographic objects including Congolese fetishes, masks, chairs, raffia and kuba cloth collected

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from King Leopold’s Congo Free State—­also may have been a source of inspiration. Haarlem designers undoubtedly drew upon similar sources, including Amsterdam’s 1883 International Colonial and Export Exhi­ bition. Picton (1995) suggests that, in a similar vein, the British Mu­ seum collections served as models for textiles in Manchester drawing rooms. The hybrid qualities of Dutch wax designs demonstrate the alterity that inherently emerges in attempts at re-­creation, particularly when the other’s aesthetic is fully or partially imagined. Extending Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “mimetic faculty,” Michael Taussig (1993) argues that mimicry creates an ambiguous space of communication that can be deployed to register sameness and difference, or even function as an opportunity for the (same) self to become (different) other. In the colonial context, mimesis again creates an unstable space, but this time it is between boundaries that reflect the familiar hierarchy of the colonizer and the colonized. When the other is imagined at a distance, the crea­ tion and maintenance of this unstable space becomes more complicated when taste, or judgment, is ascribed to a racialized category.15 An analysis of the resemblance between African objects collected and exhibited in European museums and early wax-­print design patterns would contribute to a more detailed understanding of the multiple sources designers drew upon. However, we can assert not only that the distinct aesthetic of the wax print was originally produced on distant Dutch design floors, but also that white Dutch men essentially drew for black West Africans, especially women. The striking image in figure 2.5 of male Vlisco designers working to create aesthetically pleasing textiles for mostly female African consumers while smoking pipes powerfully captures the gendered dimensions of the commodity chain of Dutch wax.16 In the image’s background, a designer is shown working off a coffee-­table book titled Africa, which seemingly provided him with inspiration. While African women’s tastes produced their jobs and environment, the Dutch men working from the modern comfort of Vlisco headquarters fabricated the cloth from a bricolage of sources and imaginaries. Of course, the visual sources and ideological context that shaped early twentieth century designers were not the same as in the late 1960s. However, what is unique in both contexts is the male gaze that viewed museum objects, imagined the other while trying to produce a sparkling, seductive fabric for African women. The erotic charge of a textile produced by men for women’s bodies nonetheless seems tamer than many examples of colonial or imperial gender relations, such as education policy for women or interracial 66

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2.5

Vlisco design department, 1960s. Vlisco archive.

sexual relations (Stoler 2002). The exchange of samples and correspondence of European textile manufacturers suggests a clear if sometimes grudging need to take into account African women’s desires; indeed the women consumers and traders were the ones making or breaking the popularity of a pattern and putting it into circulation. European men actively imagined the women for whom they designed in a fashion perhaps similar to how overseas European markets were imagined, as stationed Dutch wives eagerly awaiting the fashions of the metropole. Even if they are both captive markets, the concept of taste changes the dynamic. Taste introduces a more ambiguous and negotiated relationship to the exchange between producers and traders while also collapsing the boundaries between subject (body) and object (cloth). If one has good taste, one is able to select objects that have an intrinsic value; that is, the objects themselves are powerful, and only those with good taste can properly recognize that and thus gain more power in the eyes of others by virtue of their association with these objects. So if taste is ascribed or managed in a demeaning way, it is because the agency of the tastemaker is somehow dangerous or considered inferior. Asserting oneself as possessing taste gives both agency in relationship to powerful objects and leverage with others. 67

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The fashionability of African consumers was disturbing to European merchants because it essentially contradicted prevailing visions of race and difference governing existing perceptions of African preferences for color, pattern, and texture. Their desires threatened to collapse the assumed cultural distance between the “civilized” West and the “primitive” rest; only the metropole was presumed to be on the cutting edge of cultural expression (Allman 2004). Europeans, therefore, struggled to understand what constituted taste on the Gold Coast, how to discern it, and why it was constantly shifting. In 1879 an agent of the Basel Mission Trading Company wrote, “When the natives liked a piece, they wanted it regardless of price. . . . The Negro knows exactly what he wants, either he likes a piece and he will buy it at whatever price; or he doesn’t like it, and in that case it cannot even be sold at a bargain. When a design pattern is out of the here so almighty fashion, then we have our hands full with getting rid of it” (Wanner 1959, 176, translation and emphasis mine). Just as late-­nineteenth-­century correspondence documents the exasperation of European traders over how to predict and accommodate African demand, they also capture a crucial element: that African subjects were the sole arbiters of style, that they indeed had fashion, and, by inference, that they commanded a system of production over which Europeans had limited control. Indeed, we can see the creation of something novel here: Europeans were put into a position of selling a service, along with goods. The difficulty for Europeans was to figure out how African demand worked, as firms would anxiously “order the new things without selling the old stuff” (Wanner 1959, 176). The vagaries of this particular struggle are embedded in colonial capitalist logic: The stakes for European traders on the coast were high, and a successful trader was one who understood that local elites were always looking for newer objects. West African consumers’ constant quest for novelty and differentiation—­what Georg Simmel (1957) considered to be the heart of Western fashion and, by extension, modernity—­provoked great anxiety among European traders on the Guinea coast. Because the presence of European employees of metropolitan trading companies like the British F. & A. Swanzy Ltd. or the Basel Mission Trading Company both trading in wax prints from the late nineteenth century onward, was too thin on the ground to see and understand local tastes during the early period (ca. 1880–­1910) of the wax-­print trade, they also employed locals—­both men as clerks and women as distributors. However dismissive these European traders were about the “native” market, practicality decreed that some degree of collaboration was essential to European business interests. The feedback loops between women cloth 68

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traders and Dutch designers were mediated by merchants and employees of metropolitan companies in a productive tension to settle on the patterns that were so popular that they eventually became classics. To resolve this tension and to mask the inability of manufacturers, traders, and brokers alike to consistently satisfy African taste, European traders tended to downplay the richness of African aesthetic preferences and desire for color by describing them as “impulsive” or “unpredictable,” thus upholding the cultural dichotomy between sophisticated European and inferior native. However, Europeans who worked on the ground had to acknowledge the complexity in styles of African adornment if they wanted to generate profits for their products and remain in business. There­ fore, they inevitably contradicted the evolutionary progression scheme that located Africans within the realm of “lack”—­lacking civilization, modernity, and thus, by extension, taste (Ferguson 2006; Allman 2004). Taussig (2009) introduces a distinction between “chromophobes” and “chromophiliacs” in relation to how color is experienced sensorially as a negative or a positive value. From this perspective, chromophobes describe (European) subjects whose simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of color is connected to its intimate and immediate sensory properties. Chromophiliacs are (non-­European) subjects whose desire for color and visual sensuousness stands in stark contrast to the distinguished taste of civilization. In Europe, bright colors were long taken as signs of degeneracy or inferiority; hence, a taste for vibrant color marked subjects as uncivilized, foreign, or other. How, then, did European designers at a distance and merchants on the ground manage the problem of color in relation to the immateriality of taste? This was a sensorially configured dilemma, at once visual and material as well as generative of meaning. Designers indeed paid attention to consumer taste as merchants gathered information from African tastemakers. European merchants were often on the lookout for new products that would appeal to what they perceived as the difficult, “capricious” needs of West Africans. Hence, traders tried to make sense of the fact that what they were saying was desirable did not necessarily sell. Cloth continued to be a highly sought-­after commodity, and traders were constantly searching for fabrics of better quality, new patterns, and brighter colors. Savvy traders had quickly come to reckon that factory imitation chintz cloth had become somewhat mundane by the end of the nineteenth century; the standardized repertoire of Manchester mass production had ceased to bedazzle West African consumers. When the first Haarlem wax prints arrived on the West African coast, their peculiar patterns, pronounced 69

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craquelé, distinct bubbling effects, and overall sparkle made them exceptionally attractive. The myriad color and design combinations made possible by the production process, which made the cloth an imperfect, impure object in Southeast Asia, constituted its desirability on the Gold Coast. Although the Dutch continued to design from a distance, the knowledge they cultivated from consumer responses to color would become critical to maintaining the fabrics’ allure. By the mid-­1910s, both Vlisco and Ankersmit colorfast wax prints were distributed on West Afri­ can markets by the British trading firm F. & A. Swanzy Ltd., which would later become Unilever’s United Africa Company. It was not until the early 1930s that Vlisco employees visited their West African markets, recording consumer responses to samples in a systematic way. In the following decades, many of these early patterns acquired a special status among consumers for their material quality, memorable patterns, and vibrant colors.

Classic Remakes Today, some of these early designs are called “classics.” Vlisco touts this category on its website, as do women traders on West African markets. In the Lomé market, for example, most cloth traders will have between three and ten classics on display in addition to more recent and trending patterns. When a woman wears a classic, it signifies her good taste and textile knowledge. As with any historical category (and invented tradition), the classics category is indicative of a narration about time, location, and value. It is also a reflective act. What is considered a classic in Nigeria, for example, is not a classic in Togo and vice versa; nor are the patterns and colors the same. However, there is overlap with regard to specific designs of the early 1900s to roughly the 1950s. The pattern narrated as the first design in the classics category is in print to this day (see plate 8). In Togo it is called “Efio Dutu,” or “Peau de Léopard” (leopard’s skin),while in Ghana, where it appears to have been introduced first in the late nineteenth century, it is named after an Akan proverb, “The Household Gravel” (in reference to kinship and family, “It’s sometimes sharp and can cut you deeply”). For Vlisco, this classic is design number 14/0001. But Vlisco did not create this pattern. The Haarlem Cotton Com­ pany is the originator of this design, which was registered in 1895. These designs also provide concrete examples of how late-­nineteenth-­ century Dutch designs mimicking Javanese fabric can still be popular

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today and, moreover, taken to be African prints. All of these designs ap­ pear in six preserved Haarlem order books from the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the 1917 liquidation of the Haarlem Cotton Company, all company records disappeared with the exception of the six books (which is why so little is known about the introduction of the wax print). Today, Vlisco still prints about twenty-­five patterns (mostly Haarlem designs) that are about a century old as well as about two hundred patterns dating back to the 1950s.17 The deep economic and material ties formed by the continuation of these designs suggest a lasting interest on the part of Dutch companies in responding to established patterns of consumption and African style. The “Hands and Fingers” pattern is part of this series of long-­standing designs that is frequently reprinted (or re-­ engraved, in technical parlance). Although it is no longer manufactured in Manchester, Vlisco still produces this pattern in the Netherlands. It is also made in Ghana, Nigeria, and, most recently, China. While the material effects of the intentionally imperfect resin-­resist technique are clearly visible, there are no other visual clues or inflections of Indonesian batik iconography. Rather, what we see is an interesting transmutation or immediate adaptation of the designs to local aesthetics. According to Picton, the imagery of twelve pennies of English shilling on the palm of a hand depicted on the print is based on an Akan (Ghanaian) proverb that gets attached to the design: “The palm of the hand is sweeter than the back of the hand” (2001, 160). Interestingly, several features of this Haarlem pattern were already used in design patterns of earlier Manchester cloth (see Sykas 2005), which suggests that Haarlem designers had in all likelihood reappropriated the pattern. The copying of both production processes and design marks the very foundation of these prints, along with various forms of industrial espionage and copyright infringements. Not only were colorists, designers, and other employees recruited among competitors to capture manufacturing secrets, but many esteemed classics were themselves part of a copyright struggle of historic proportion. Ebenezer Brown Fleming, the Glasgow agent of the original Haarlem wax prints, committed the primary act of appropriation by registering the Haarlem designs under his name in England from 1895 onward (Elands, forthcoming). However, when Vlisco bought the Haarlem Cotton Company’s engraved printing rollers in the early 1920s, it assumed that it was also buying the copyright to the Haarlem designs as Picton (2004, 54) details. Meanwhile, the Manchester-­based producer of English wax known as ABC (Arnold Brunnschweiler & Company) also printed the “Hands

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2.6

“Gingembre” (ginger). Also called “Doté” in Togo. Photo by Vlisco.

and Fingers” pattern in addition to many others. Until the 1950s, the two companies unknowingly continued to produce and market copies or variations upon the same Haarlem patterns, which by then had become long-­standing classics in West African markets.18 Novelty and mimesis were therefore closely intertwined in the designs of this early period (1880–1914), resulting in the production of a hybrid original.

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While the visual rendering of the Indonesian batik style is rarely found in patterning but rather in the technical imperfections and irregularities, a Vlisco design from 1922 (see figure 2.6) specifically draws on the iconography of Javanese batik in a reappropriation of the Garuda-­winged deity corak garuda. Many women possess a piece of this cloth in Ghana, where it was likely introduced and is known as “Akykeyere Akyi” (turtle’s back). The ninety-­year-­old pattern is also popular in Togo, where it is called “Gingembre” (ginger). Like other long-­standing classics in West African markets, the pattern has an iconic quality. Its invaluable heritage makes its wearer respectable, while also telling stories about the person that are both intimate and public. The Garuda-­winged iconogra­ phy is found in several wax-­print designs that continue to circulate in West Africa. The hybridity of wax cloth made up of layered images, dyes, and wax has an archival quality in that it narrates various imprints and cracks in this story. The question of copy, original, and appropriation is folded into the development of this cross-­cultural print aesthetic. If all cloth, as print, is to some extent copy, then what determines originality, and how or who gets to claim it? The hybrid character of the cloth itself complicates claims to ownership and authorship that are created and legally asserted through mechanisms of value enclosure as intellectual property. When, almost a century later, Dutch wax traveled beyond the imperial relations of Europe and Africa and began to be copied in China, issues of copy, originality, and appropriation raised complex questions about what made for proper or improper appropriation of cultural heritage.

Sampling Patterns of Circulation By the early twentieth century, the West African trading context had changed profoundly. Formal colonialism and regular steamship service between European metropoles and their West African colonies transformed the accelerated circulation of goods, the organization of colonial trading companies importing those goods, and the relationship between the agents of these major trading companies and local tastemakers. Women were already trading on coastal markets at the time of Bosman’s sartorial account, but their trading positions on West African markets was strengthened through the colonial economy’s new division of labor, whereby men were drawn into the formal wage sector, while market women fortified their entrepreneurial autonomy and expanded

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their influence by linking urban and rural marketplaces and provisioning them with new commodities. Not all consumer goods encountered success, but Dutch and English wax cloth did become hot commodities to trade and consume. The new trade in imported wax prints rapidly became one of the most lucrative economic activities on the coast. In early-­twentieth-­century Accra, it was essentially controlled by Ga and Akan women. By 1914, Swanzy had become the biggest distributor of Dutch wax prints from Haarlem, Deventer, and Helmond as well as English wax imported from the industrial centers of Manchester and Liverpool. When the Unilever-­owned United Africa Company took over Swanzy in the early 1930s, they inherited its predecessors’ credit clients, “many hundreds . . . nearly all of whom were women. . . . When the Corporation acquired the unique trading asset of the Dutch wax blocks, it was a natural decision for the Corporation to sell the product through the women traders” (Pedler 1974, 240). As scholars of dress have shown, cloth and clothing constitute a special type of commodity that is at once an “art form” and an economic object, possessing an “inordinate number of designing, producing, and marketing variables” (Cox 1938, 225–­38, in Steiner 1985, 106). Cloth and clothing are central vehicles through which social relations are produced and reproduced. When this dynamic is accurately divined, the textile trade is highly profitable; when misjudged, cloth is “especially difficult to sell” (Steiner 1985, 106). European traders working in West Africa as the twentieth century dawned were quite aware of the power of the dressed body. The challenge for European merchants on the ground and manufacturers at home was to predict consumer desires for particular patterns and colors; failure to understand local taste meant waste and significant financial loss. In the previous section, I detailed how from the African side, a few patterns that were copied, altered, and hybridized along imperial trade routes became African classics with market longevity, and thus gained the status of classic and patented designs in the European manufacturers’ archive. However, it is important to note how rare truly successful patterns actually were. To manage market volatility and financial losses, European firms would send samples ahead of cargoes to test the designs’ market potential before (mass) producing them, a practice that is still in use today. Vlisco presents samples of new fabric collections to its clientele, who make suggestions for color and design alteration before the cloth goes into production. Women traders who distributed European goods on West African markets were always part of this process. Because of design variables and the geographical distance between designers and consumers, this 74

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was often a process of trial and error. Even today, manufacturers assert, “Out of twenty new designs a month, maybe three or four will work.”19 In an effort to manage knowledge gaps, multinational trading firms—­La Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale and the United Africa Company, which became the biggest distributor of wax prints in West Africa from the 1930s to the late 1990s—­essentially relied upon women traders as key mediators, who in turn were eager to gain exclusive rights to distribute a design. The role of local tastemakers and market women who distributed the cloth suggests an interactive relationship whereby material and knowledge flows circulated between metropole and colony. Sample books place a great deal of agency at the consumer’s feet. They are a book of choices that, while limited by what the producer offers ready-­ made, may yet still be reconfigured and open to consumer intervention. They are a quick guide to what is commercially and scientifically possible, but they do not exhaust the design possibilities of what is yet to come. A sample has a contingent quality. It is a conditional object that might be produced or sold, or might not, depending on how tastemakers work with and contribute to shaping it. The presence of the historical sample books at the Vlisco archive is a strong indication of the kind of experimental labor that went into the making of wax cloth and the knowledge production that went along with it. Although the samples and forms of sampling conserved in the pattern books at the Vlisco archive have a fixed (if not a trapped) quality, the sample is also a material indication of exchange. The objective for manufacturers through these processes of sampling was to find the best sample that would become a commodity to be sold. The sample thus indicates an ongoing aesthetic process, a patterning of tastes and preferences—­or adversities—­inflected by consumers. This is the case regardless of whether the sample ever becomes an actual product. In one way, the sample, in contrast to the final piece, works as “raw” material that we can retrieve from the archive. The sample book is both the source and the product; it serves as a stock of patterns and colorings—­of diverse cultural and aesthetic origins, of different historical provenance—­that can be reproduced, copied, changed, and varied. It is also a form of documentation of precisely these processes. My reading of cloth as archive brings into view the overlapping histories of circulation that stand behind the cloth, which can help us more productively understand both cloth and commodity as the result of a material process of aesthetic and commercial negotiation. Once the market for Dutch wax was firmly established, Togolese women continued to be central in the mutual making and remaking of cloth and subjectivity. During the colonial era and after Togo gained independence in 1960, 75

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African tastemakers added layers of meaning and material qualities to cloth through naming, displaying, and claiming it as property. Women traders made cloth and particular patterns desired and desirable through the cultural and commercial work of branding, whereby they made the most of cloth’s semiotic power. The next chapter focuses on the institutionalization of the trade in the Lomé marketplace, where the Togolese cloth traders were central to aesthetic and commercial negotiations, both with European companies and later with the nation of Togo.

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Branding Cloth, Branding Nation: The Nana Benz and the Materiality of Power Inside the Lomé market, a cloth trader has created a private museum above her shop to commemorate her late mother. A staircase connects the vibrant, multicolored shop floor, animated by bolts of cloth and market sounds, to the quiet upper-­level museum, where snapshots of the past radiate from the walls. The visual density of the room is so overwhelming that at first the eye does not know where to focus. The golden picture frames glint and glare. At closer look, the narrative of this display becomes evident: The photographs chronicle the economic ascendance and public life of Manavi Sewoa Ahiankpor, from poor village girl to the first Togolese cloth trader to purchase a Mercedes Benz in the 1960s, her proximity to the dictator, Eyadéma, during the 1970s, and her welcoming Pope John Paul II at the Lomé airport in the 1980s. In this celebratory narrative of Togolese modernity, sev­ eral fetishes stand out: the car, the woman, and the dictator.1 The national story unfurls across time: One black-­and-­ white photograph shows the young dictator surrounded by cloth traders in a visual bloc of unity. The women in their vivid pagne frame the dictator, dressed in a dark suit. Eyadéma’s then-­slender body seems almost weak—­as if he had not yet accumulated sufficient power—­and insubstantial in contrast to the women, whose confident and forceful bodies seem to uphold him. Another set of photographs reveals 77

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the evolving and yet committed relationship between Eyadéma and the Nana Benz in state spectacles.2 This time, more than a decade later, the dictator appears in full military regalia, reflecting his increasingly firm hold on both political and military power. The stage for this display is the Lomé stadium, where Eyadéma awarded Manavi Sewoa the highest state honor, a golden medal, for her contribution to the national economy. One photograph shows Sewoa and Eyadéma clasping hands, a potent sig­ nifier of the unification of women’s nation-­building economic power and their emerging political power around West Africa’s iconic cloth. The peculiar and spectacular showcase of power that the market museum represents demands explanation. How did this value-­laden image of alliance between the Nana Benz and the dictator come into being in this postcolonial context? As image and power feed off each other in the postcolony (Mbembe 2001), did cloth and dress substantiate the wom­ en’s influence while capturing their bodies in the political spectacle of the dictatorship? Or did the dictator inscribe himself onto the cloth (and its animating power)—­worn, traded, and embodied by the women—­to mark and extend his authority through the combined materiality and visuality of women and cloth? If Eyadéma sought to appropriate the Nana Benz’s image and their powerful forms of display (cloth and Mercedes cars) to assert and feminize his authoritarian regime as a modern entrepreneurial, postcolonial nation in the making, then what had brought the women’s representational power into being in the first place? Were the Nana Benz merely bolstered by the military dictatorship that manipulated their image, or had they accumulated so much economic power by controlling the circulation of cloth and its dense materiality that they in fact were the ones propping up the dictator? Charting the complex political economy of cloth in Togo, this chapter unpacks what stands behind the museum display: the economic ascendance of the Nana Benz as an entrepreneurial class as well as their role in shaping the institutionalization of the West African wax cloth trade in the Lomé market; the political alliance between the Nana Benz and Eyadéma; and the special character of cloth as a material, visual, and symbolic marker of political, national, and gendered economic power. If the previous chapter conceptually emphasized the textual, aesthetic, and archival qualities of cloth, this chapter foregrounds the object as the medium through which the spectacle of power becomes tangible and legible, on the one hand, and how cloth comes to stand for the social and cultural fabric of the nation on the other. Tapping into its dense materiality, the Nana Benz (re)worked the cloth by creating value out of its sensory, aesthetic, and semiotic qualities; then they branded the commodity 78

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3.1

Manatex Market Museum. Photo by Koko Masseme.

and made it uniquely theirs. As the Nana Benz dressed themselves, their entrepreneurial strategies, and the nation in cloth—­and thus, by extension, the market and consumer subjectivities—­the material object became a key prerequisite in the mediation and signification of power and national identity. In fact, it is the high visibility and omnipresence of this material and visual object across multiple spheres, from the most intimate and common social use via popular and exclusive fashions to its enrollment in state spectacles, that make it such a forceful medium. The political and cultural economy of cloth in Togo is complex and entangled in relations of power, gender, and politics. To reckon with the complexity of these relations and the heritage position of the Nana Benz in the Togolese present, we must first establish how the women emerged historically as a distinct group of entrepreneurs and made the Lomé mar­ ket a key trading hub in the region.3 Indeed, what it means to be a textile entrepreneur in Togo today is built upon the legacy of these women: how they worked the value of cloth across multiple frontiers; how they operated within the logic of colonial-­era capitalism by inserting themselves into the restrictive retailing systems of European trading companies; how they negotiated pattern rights to cloth distribution that garnered them unparalleled wealth at a critical point in Togo’s transition from colony to independent nation-­state; how they consolidated their power by creating their own corporatist body; and, finally, the manner 79

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in which they positioned themselves as entrepreneurs vis-­à-­vis political figures and the state. Once we have looked deep into the historic, economic, political, and cultural tangle of these women’s entrepreneurial trajectories and established their social location and the quality of their sociopolitical capital, we can understand the delicate bridge they built to a military dictator toward whom they remained in many ways doubtful. The chapter closes with an explanation of how this precarious alliance became relevant for the women to influence commercial policies garnering immense wealth and also for the dictatorship to instantiate its power and represent the nation as united, modern, and distinctly entrepreneurial. It is at this point where I will explain how cloth becomes political in that it is imbricated with nation(alism). Although this arrangement worked for both parties through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the alliance would implode in the early 1990s, when political unrest (1991–­1994) brought the economy to a standstill and the Nana Benz lost their stock-­in-­trade. The story of the Nana Benz is unique in West Africa’s recent economic and political history. The Nana Benz served as key markers in the production of modern, capitalist Togo by dressing the nation in multiple ways: economically, symbolically, and politically. Instead of viewing the Nana Benz as a diffuse, passive body that signifies culture, I highlight how these women entrepreneurs actively built the Togolese economy through their labor and produced their own significations through cloth. The Nana Benz imprinted value upon the cloth they branded while their trade conferred lasting geopolitical value to Lomé as the region’s trading hub. This story, then, is not just about signification, but about the rise of wom­en’s power through the history of the cloth, its trade, and the making of an essential West African consumer item. Women have long served as reproducers and signifiers of national groups or categories, and their dressed bodies are therefore potent symbols of the nation (Yuval-­ Davis and Anthias 1989; Allman 2004). But in Lomé’s market and in Togo’s national imaginary, the Nana Benz represent far more. As individual women who arrayed their bodies to make trend-­defining statements and as an organized group of merchants with their own corporatist body, the Nana Benz wielded considerable agency, economic power, and authority over the body politic. In short, they signified but did not merely reproduce. Captured at the height of their power in a daughter’s upstairs memorial, the Nana Benz rise above the shop floor to a new level, producing lasting formations of national identity focused around wax-­print cloth—­ their iconic commodity—­and the layers of materiality, feminine display, and nation that they helped to create. 80

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The Fabric of Alliance Women like Manavi Sewoa were not fabricated by the dictator, as a su­ perficial reading of the workings of gender, power, and politics in the post­ colony might suggest. In fact, when Eyadéma came into power in 1967, the women were already important economic figures and an organized group of merchants with their own corporatist body. An outsider to the political, economic, and ethnic landscape of southern Togo, Eyadéma could not ignore the Nanas’ forceful entrepreneurial presence at the heart of the Lomé market. Instead, he cleverly tapped into their heritage position and their material resources as well as their branding power, generated through the women’s ability to create and claim what John and Jean Comaroff have described as “the assertion of a monopoly over a named species of value” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 13). And monopoly power over their iconic commodity they would establish, first, by harnessing cloth’s dense materiality and, second, by controlling its circulation. In this way the Nana Benz created value out of the cloth’s sensory, visual, and material qualities; then they commodified it by en­ closing its (cultural) value and branding it as national property: “les pagnes de Lomé” (the pagnes from Lomé). By claiming culture as property through commodification (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), the Nana Benz conferred lasting geopolitical value to Lomé as a center of capitalist commodification. Drawing on oral knowledge and primary sources, this section lays out the broad economic and political context into which the Nana Benz stepped as individual traders during the 1930s under French colonial rule. Because oral histories are replete with agendas and silences, just like historical facts, I draw on what Ann Stoler (1992) has called “culturally reasonable conjecture”—­that is, I conjecture from what is known about the larger context about the more intimate processes by which these women produced themselves as powerful economic subjects in and through the colonial situation. Rather than being sought out by colonial/global capital, women traders strategically inserted themselves into economic trading niches whereby they actively produced their social and economic location against the backdrop of shifting colonial regimes and political economies.

The precolonial heritage of the Nana Benz is tied to the influential trading clans that organized the transatlantic slave trade from the coastal 81

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entrepôt of Aného at a time when Lomé did not yet exist. In fact the names of several Nana Benz (d’Almeida, Sant’Anna, Bocco) reveal kinship ties to the Aného trading clans that were composed of Afro-­Brazilian merchants (a group of repatriated slaves from Brazil and Sierra Leone) who had mixed with the local Mina population. Although not all cloth entrepreneurs claim this trading heritage today, the link to a common ethnic and geographic origin (a discourse that can be mobilized for entrepreneurial gain) is nevertheless important for understanding how the Nana Benz have historically forged alliances with political and economic elites, notably with Sylvanus Olympio, Togo’s first president and former director of the United Africa Company, the main distributor of Dutch and English wax cloth. When Lomé became the capital to three successive colonial regimes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Aného’s commercial bourgeoisie relocated to Lomé in pursuit of urban employment, opportunities for women emerged through the colonial economy’s new division of labor. While European firms employed the male trade bourgeoisie as clerks and shop managers (in an effort to dismantle the local middleman system [Heilbrunn 1997; Gayibor 1997]), women took on leading roles in the commercialization of new commodities from the metropole (Cordonnier 1982). Of course, women were already trading cloth and connected coastal and hinterlands markets, but they long relied upon local intermediaries to source the imported cloth instead of obtaining it directly from European trading companies.4 The foundation for the cloth merchants’ economic power was rooted in the commercial networks they built across colonial boundaries as well as their insertion into the retail systems of those European firms we en­ countered in the previous chapter. As noted in chapter 2, it was the wom­en traders who did the work of selecting and testing cloth patterns and colorways. Understanding what constitutes good pagne—­the kind that moves on and with the body in Atsoupi’s analogy—­and choosing such cloth in the right shade and texture from a set of premanufactured samples was no easy task then, nor is it today, and manufacturers and distributors heavily relied upon the women’s marketing and trendsetting labor. Market women, who operated from the heart of Lomé’s rapidly growing urban and commercial center, were particularly well positioned to evaluate and even predict old and new consumption patterns. The local expression travailler pagne (working pagne) is particularly significant here, for these relatively new materials indeed required work that the European firms depended on women to do. A small group of traders took the opportunity to insert themselves into the exclusive 82

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retailing systems of the four major companies that dominated Togo’s colonial and postcolonial import-­export trade: La Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO), La Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain (SCOA), La Société Générale du Golfe de Guinée (SGGG), and the powerful British United Africa Company (UAC). Women had so-­ called passbooks with these companies, a credit system whereby passbook hold­ers could acquire merchandise up to double the value of an initial deposit of cash, jewelry, or a wealthy husband’s security deposit. Detailing this passbook system in colonial Accra, Claire Robertson (1984) describes how women customers additionally obtained a commission on the goods they sold. In Togo, it was through these credit relationships with the major European companies (referred to as “boutique” by several older women I spoke to), combined with the traders’ mobility and talent for dressing consumer subjectivities, that the Nana Benz laid the foundation of their economic power.

Just as trading cloth successfully today requires (1) access to cloth, (2) up­to-­date market information, (3) networks of credit and trust, and (4) solid trading networks, so it did for the Nana Benz who entered the trade during the 1930s. Consider the story of Laura Doe Bruce, the woman who would later preside over the Nana Benz’s powerful merchant organization and whose story exemplifies how these traders inserted themselves into the retailing systems of colonial trading firms like UAC, and then established pattern rights. Initially a seamstress with a distinct eye for pagne, this trader was dealing in cigarettes, matches, and alcohol (so-­ called marchandises diverses) before accumulating enough capital to enter the cloth trade and work pagne’s value. Her daughter, Dédé Evelyne Trenou, whom we encountered in the preface and who inherited her mother’s trade in the 1980s, recalls: “Maman began working in the market in the mid-­1930s with cigarettes and alcohol. You know, you could make good money with cigarettes and alcohol then. . . . She worked with a Lebanese, together they got their stock from King Cash—­you know, King Cash, the building next to the cathedral? Before King Cash, it was a boutique called John Holt/JB Ollivant. It was English [she pauses with a nostalgic glance] . . . then the Lebanese cheated, he took all the stock! She dropped the Lebanese [through whom she had access to the distributor] and went to work with UAC.”5 Meanwhile, other cloth traders, such as Juliette Bocco, engaged in a shrewd practice of two-­sited trade: sourcing English wax cloth from Accra while working and trying out new patterns and colors in Lomé—­all 83

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done in close collaboration with UAC’s Togolese branch as well as SGGG, CFAO, and SCOA. In the process, the women strengthened ties with European firms, exercised control over an emergent urban cultural economy of taste, and gradually shifted the trade from Accra to Lomé. In reference to the women’s work in establishing trust with European firms, Bocco’s daughter explained: Back in the day, you couldn’t just show up at CFAO or UAC like that; they wouldn’t just sell to anybody, especially not if you wanted big quantities . . . they wanted serious guarantees, even if you knew someone who worked there . . . of course, that helped [she giggles, for her mother would often obtain a highly desired fabric through her connection to Olympio’s wife]. You had to establish credit history, and that required having trading capital; some women my mother told me even made jewelry deposits at UAC to get credit there. So my mother started with marchandises diverses, and little by little she built up her trading capital and eventually had enough to work pagne with UAC.

By the 1940s, Doe Bruce had established an account with UAC Lomé at a time when Sylvanus Olympio became the director. An initial cash deposit allowed her to take out double the value of the deposit in cloth, a credit she would pay back the following month without interest. At the same time, she sold the cloth on credit to clients, often over longer periods of time and, hence, with interest. Although some cloth traders worked the cross-­border trade with colonial Ghana, where they sourced and trafficked designs that were not distributed in Lomé, Laura Doe Bruce tapped into a Yoruba trading network that operated along the coastal corridor that connected Lagos to Accra, intercepting the traders as they transitioned through Togo. Her Yoruba background was of particular advantage to her in establishing her trading prowess and specialization in the Nigerian market. Her daughter recalls how her mother’s fluency in Yoruba determined her entrepreneurial logic: “Those rich traders from Porto-­Novo, Lagos, and Ibadan . . . well, they would go straight to mother.” This knowledge of Yoruba certainly provided cultural and aesthetic proximity, if not trust, between women like Laura Doe Bruce and her clients, whose vast trading networks in this region of West Africa are well documented (Hopkins 1973; Falola 1991). “She understood what they liked, what colors, what designs, their taste, you know,” her daughter said. “There was a sense of trust there, so my mother, she could extend credit, and she knew how to get it back. . . . And then Igbo traders [from southeast Nigeria] would come to her too, because they heard that my mother has des beaux dessins [beautiful patterns] that weren’t even 84

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available in Accra at that time. . . . She worked these designs with UAC, and eventually they were hers.” Doe Bruce’s ability to extend credit across multiple frontiers combined with her aesthetic ability to choose and work the particular colorways and patterns that remain popular on Nigerian markets today as well as her entrepreneurial savvy to channel and eventually control not just the circulation of Yoruba patterns but of what would become one of the most lucrative markets in the wax cloth trade: so-­called Igbo designs (see plate 1) enabled this trader to have a remarkable career and to ultimately establish pattern rights. In addition to acquiring rights to several Igbo patterns, she obtained exclusive rights from UAC to a design that it initially only distributed in Accra: the classic “Peau de Léopard” (leopard’s skin) discussed in the previous chapter (initially produced by Haarlem Cotton Company, then ABC [Manchester], then Ankersmit [Deventer], and only later by Vlisco) and which is known as “Efio Dutu” in Togo (see plate 8). The system of attributing exclusive pattern rights to a particular trader was based on seniority and historical standing in the cloth trade. There was no expiration date for this informal licensing agreement; once a Nana owned a design, she kept it without temporal restrictions while she continued to accumulate new ones. In this way, the Nana Benz effectively controlled demand and supply as well as the global commodity chain for these fabrics by commanding their designs whenever they pleased. Patience Epévi Sanvee, for instance, was notorious for running European production floors: “With each production, there was one of her designs in the machine,” explained another trader. With the arrival of up to four containers every week (each carrying five hundred bales, and each bale containing fifty pieces of cloth), an affluent Nana Benz would easily receive several thousand yards of printed cloth each week. “The bales arrived at the warehouse, and her initials were written on the bale itself next to the number of the design, which she owned,” explained a trader who recalled Epévi Sanvee as a “fearless negotiator.” Thus, each year, hundreds of thousands of yards of cotton were printed in European textile plants for Togo’s Nana Benz, whose authority overrode their distributors’ sway. These exclusive arrangements worked incredibly well with the distinctive logic of European trading firms such as UAC, which transferred the wholesale trade and its risks squarely onto the shoulders of the women while profiting from these women’s market knowledge, which they fed back to manufacturers in Holland and England. At the same time, these types of exchanges and transnational trade networks strengthened Togo’s colonial boundaries and its entrepôt position in the region. Doe Bruce’s story exemplifies how the first generation of Nana Benz redirected cloth 85

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circulation in at least three ways: first, through specialization in regional and ethnic markets; second, via the exclusive control over patterns; and, third, through the ability to extend and recuperate credit across multi­ ple borders. “Lomé was dressing Benin and Nigeria,” said Dédé Rose Creppy with glowing eyes (see figure 3.3). This Nana Benz who entered the cloth trade in the early 1950s further explained: “Les mamans like Doe Bruce and Patience [Sanvee], they specialized in Dutch wax, and maman [Juliette] Bocco, and later myself and Manavi [Sewoa], we specialized in English wax, only later we traded Vlisco. Cloth traders from Nigeria, from Ghana, from Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, they all came to Lomé because we had the best cloth here. And then, of course, these traders brought all kinds of products to Lomé that we didn’t have . . . little by little this created a big network.” This is how the Nana Benz built their power. Through these economic interventions, the women fortified Lomé’s frontier position as a regional hub.6 Eventually, they influenced trading policies, negotiating a low-­tariff import regime that made Dutch and English cloth imports relatively cheap in contrast to the protectionist policies of Ghana.

With the entrepreneurial trajectories of the three women exemplifying how the Nana Benz instituted their trade and fashioned themselves as a distinct entrepreneurial class before Eyadéma came into power, we must briefly consider their relationship to the state before and after independence. The cultural capacity to work cloth, travailler pagne, is central to the constitution of the Nana Benz as postcolonial figures whose economic and moral interventions could not be ignored by those in power, including Eyadéma. The kind of authority these women leveraged after independence had already been exemplified during the colonial period, when Lomé’s market women came out in opposition to the French administration. In a 1933 fiscal rebellion against the colonial state, which some consider the beginning of Togo’s long struggle for independence, the women brought the country to a standstill. Drawing on a trader’s memory of the events that led to the women’s rebellion against the French colonial administration in January 1933, d’Almeida-­Ekué (1992) describes how French tax collectors would come by traders’ houses to inventory their belongings, “evaluating the value of each bonbon, matches and imported soap that I had placed on a plate that I was about to take to the market” (83, my translation). Mobilizing a large number of women to march to the governor’s palace in January 1933, this rebellion—­an event remembered as La Révolte des Loméennes (the uprising of the Lomé 86

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3.2

After shipment. Cloth bales arrive in Lomé. Photo by author.

women)—­led to not only the liberation of the oppositional leaders but the departure of the new governor and the revision of the new tax regime. This was not the last time traders would intervene in politics, and it foreshadows the type of involvement in nationalist and postcolonial politics that the Nana Benz would assert. During the nationalist era that emerged with the political movement for decolonization after World War II, market women financially supported Togo’s leaders—­with whom they shared a common southern heritage—­in the struggle for independence (Heilbrunn 1997). Nationalist politics of the 1950s intersected with the capitalist orientation of Togo’s cloth merchants and their desires for independence from France. During this era, markets became deeply political spaces of resistance orchestrated by women traders and their power to mobilize public opinion (Kponton 1977). Cloth traders cleverly supported both of the nationalist leaders who were positioning themselves as agents for social and economic transformation: Sylvanus Olympio of the Comité de l’Unité Togolaise, to whom many women had ties due to his position as director of the powerful British trading company UAC, and Nicolas Grunitzky of the Parti Togolais du Progrès. Over the decade before independence, the economic and political power of Lomé’s cloth traders continued to expand. Through their fabric labor, the women eventually shifted the geographic focus of the trade 87

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from Accra to Lomé, making Togo, as mentioned before, an economic hub in the region. The distinctly gendered work of travailler pagne became the bedrock of this lucrative trade, and thus the foundation of the Nana Benz’s economic sovereignty.

Lomé’s cloth traders were also central mediators in the production of new forms of national consumption in the periods immediately before and after independence. Fashion became a way to express the enormous optimism and hope Togolese had for their new nation. Dress and style, and the desired ability to consume well, provided a visual language to claim particular urban statuses. Being well dressed effectively communicated refinement and social success measured against new sensibilities of time and space brought on by urban employment, waged labor, and education. The fast-­growing city offered a multifaceted stage for new ways of seeing as well as showcasing identities and aspirations through sartorial display. Indeed, women’s dress practices took on new meaning during the early postcolonial period, when urbanites rediscovered and reinvented the pagne aesthetic. Women’s attire included tailored dresses, miniskirts, and maxiskirts, and other form-­ fitting styles drew upon multiple spatial references with women looking to Paris as much as to Abidjan, Accra, and Kinshasa. The special characteristics of wax cloth—­ its unique visuality and aesthetic form—­gave material expression to various concerns: urban, aesthetic, cosmopolitan, and national. Its sensuous particularity and its aesthetic of imperfection appealed to the senses in unique ways and lent itself to new articulations of identity. As with other (now rights-­bearing) citizens of African countries recently liberated from colonial rule, Togolese sought out unique means of expression against the backdrop of a nation in the making. The fascination women developed for newly tailored forms of pagne acquired further nationalist currency at the hands of Togo’s premier First Lady, Madame Olympio. Indeed, the sartorial choices of this presidential ambassador helped shift the print aesthetic from the realm of dress into the realm of fashion. During one of the presidential couple’s first official outings in 1960, she wore an elegantly tailored pagne outfit in lieu of her typical European two-­piece suit. Instantaneously, the tailored pagne aesthetic became political. Madame Olympio gave currency to a look that cohabited with European clothing styles used as office wear, yet powerfully embedded pagne in the representational order of the new nation. Over time, the Nana Benz’s knack for selecting good pagne—­the kind that moves on and with the body to enhance a woman’s appear88

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ance and that can become a classic or heritage piece that itself communicates the power and identity of the woman wearing it—­and their ability to control cloth’s circulation is what made them so entrepreneurial and powerful.

Togo rapidly acquired the reputation as the place in West Africa where the most beautiful pagne were worn and traded. When Ghana obtained independence in 1957, it created strong protectionist trade policies that propelled the largest distributor of wax cloth (UAC Accra) to relocate its textile dealings to Lomé. The power of the cloth traders continued to expand when Togo gained independence in 1960 and Olympio became the country’s first president. The traders already had connections to Olympio, the former director of UAC and whose political campaign they had backed financially. Despite Olympio’s strong nationalist leanings and incentives to adopt protectionist trade policies, the women negotiated a special cloth tariff that benefited their trade. When Eyadéma had Olympio assassinated in 1963 and the political and economic climate began to shift, the women were quick to protect their trading interests. In 1965, they consolidated their power in an organizational structure, L’Association Professionelle des Revendeuses de Tissu (APRT), the Association of Professional Cloth Traders, whose hierarchical structure Rita Cordonnier (1982) details in her pioneering study of the Nana Benz’s cloth trade. The women cleverly negotiated the status of the cloth merchant organization with President Nicholas Grunitzky, whom Eyadéma had put into power after the first coup (Heilbrunn 1997).7 Two years later, when Eyadéma and the army took power, this professional trade structure served the women particularly well to further consolidate their economic interests through state protection.8 As a Kabre from the north, an ethnic group that was economically and politically marginalized throughout the colonial era, Eyadéma had no support among a southern population whose economic power had been established since the Atlantic trade (Piot 1999, 2010; Toulabor 1986). As a foreigner in this historic-­political landscape, the stakes for Eyadéma were complex because his regime lacked not only political legitimacy but economic substance. Soon the dictatorship cultivated special ties to economic elites, and the Nana Benz and their cloth (trade) provided the perfect package to underpin the new regime while bridg­ ing the gap in regional, cultural, ethnic, and entrepreneurial capital between the dictator and a southern population of predominantly Ewe and Mina speakers. Meanwhile, the women were concerned about their 89

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trading privileges during this new time of political and economic uncertainty brought on by Eyadéma’s military coup. The instability and uncertainty that marked this moment are captured by a Lomé teacher: “We didn’t know what was going to happen politically, economically. . . . The French had supported Grunitzky; were they going to remove Eyadéma?” His succinct statement points to both the continuities between the colonial and early postcolonial periods vis-­à-­vis the role of the metropole as well as the enormous uncertainty that accompanied this moment. In this context, it becomes clear that the alliance the Nana Benz were about to forge with Eyadéma was not only risky but profoundly unpredictable. When the women eventually personally negotiated a new economic position with the dictator, their alliance would become mutually beneficial. While the Nana Benz were able to broker a low-­tariff import-­ export regime that led to the growth and ultimate monumentalization of their trade over the next two decades, the dictatorship tapped into both their signifying power as mothers of the nation (to brand his authoritarian regime) and their material resources, especially the visuality of cloth and its power to mark and unify. Under Eyadéma’s authoritarian regime, the women’s corporatist body, the APRT, was the only organization that was not consolidated into the dictator’s single-­party rule under the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT). The dictatorship accommodated the women’s trade cartel, granting it entrepreneurial autonomy of a special kind. Where other groups and interests were silenced and suppressed, the women’s trade corporation flourished into an international cartel that made Lomé into one of West Africa’s most vibrant centers of trade. Over the next two decades, the reputation of Lomé in West Africa as the source of the most beauti­ ful pagne was consolidated. Traders from throughout West Africa traveled to Lomé to seek out the iconic cloth, along with fashion-­conscious first ladies, including Madames Mobutu and Houphet-­Boigny. The alliance of fashion and the first ladies with whom the Nana Benz interacted highlighted the reputation of Lomé cloth in particular ways, as it evoked a longer history and an intricate domain of female alliance. The Nana Benz had repeatedly forged relations to Togo’s first ladies, but in the 1960s, the alliance was not patterned on cloth only. It was established through an intimate web of religious networks. This network of religion, which adds another layer to the Nana Benz’s complex relationships, brings us back to Laura Doe Bruce, the trader who became APRT’s president and who was a prominent member of the prayer group Zion. Founded in the mid-­1950s by Grunitzky’s wife (who was also the cousin of Olympio), this group offered pious comfort and spiritual companion­ 90

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ship as well as a critical link to political power: first to Grunitzky, with whom the traders negotiated the foundational terms of APRT, and then to Eyadéma. Indeed, the dictator’s first, and official, wife (Hubertine Eyadéma) was a member of Zion and a “friend” of Doe Bruce’s. As Doe Bruce’s daughter recalls, “When there was a problem in the market, my mother would call her friend, and the next day they [APRT] had an audience with Eyadéma.” It is in this intricate interweaving of religious, economic, social, and political tangles that the Nana Benz constituted and solidified the kind of power required to shape the entire wax cloth trade in West Africa. The Nana Benz’s control of the fabric’s commodity chain—­its regimes of production, distribution, and consumption—­made their trade monumentally important and exceptional in West Africa’s recent economic history. As described below, these women’s labor—­ of reworking and branding the product; of attaching value, material worth, and prestige to the fabric—­fashioned a prestige economy that emblazoned the trade with a special kind of value: national heritage.9 This nationalist appeal to heritage was simultaneously local and global, traditional and modern, cultural and entrepreneurial as well as deeply gendered. It was the entrepreneurial, affluent, gendered image of the Nana Benz that the state chose to tap into and commodify for its nation-­branding project.

The Politics of Branding John and Jean Comaroff (2009) have described how people as brands have political and economic currency in places where we normally would not expect it. Branding creates allegiance to national culture, often through the commodification of difference and heritage. The Comaroffs’ show how the commodification of culture, or the “ethno-­episteme,” is consciously managed within capitalism—­wherein people come into agreement over what gets branded as authentic heritage and which marks the beginning of peoples’ “corporate life” (2009, 84)—­but the com­ modification of culture in the Togo of the 1960s to 1990s is much more ambiguous. In my reading of the work branding and brands perform in the Lomé market and in the way Eyadéma embedded the Nana Benz in the representational order of the nation, I refer to three kinds of brand/ ing. First, I refer to cultural and commercial branding as the necessary work that goes into making cloth valuable (by naming, embodying, and claiming cloth as property), while I consider political and national branding as the mobilization of bodies and embodied imagery. Second, 91

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I refer to the commodity the Nana Benz licensed as a Togolese brand (pagnes from Lomé) while considering the Nana Benz as a national brand that Eyadéma mobilized to mask his authoritarian regime. Finally, I refer to the Nana Benz as a globally circulating African brand. Implicit in all of these forms is the commodification of culture and difference, which we begin to see in the way the Nana Benz performed their difference through acts of conspicuous consumption. The image of the first-­generation Nana was one of ostentatious accumulation of Mercedes cars, villas, overseas properties, and gold jew­ elry—­paired with the corpulence of the Nanas’ physical bodies. Like the most successful men, the Nana Benz indulged in luxuries and garishly displayed their success in public. Doe Bruce bought her first of many villas in the 1950s and bought an apartment in a suburb of Paris. Sewoa purchased a Mercedes Benz in the early 1960s (the first of many), which became a critical symbol of their, and the nation’s, wealth and power. The Nana Benz produced a nationalist commodity in cloth and eventually became a commodity themselves while making the nation entrepreneurial. Indeed, these women traders constituted the crucial link between the commodity form and the nation form, and they did so by giving cloth—­and themselves—­a name. As this chapter has established, controlling the circulation of cloth relies on reworking its value. The Nana Benz inscribed Dutch and English wax cloth with an unambiguous sense of authority and ownership, and this is where these women consolidated their power. Each design has a specific name, and naming is an essential part of the branding process. “Without a name it has no life, but with a name it becomes truly African,” a trader said. Her comment powerfully captures the anonymity of mass production and its alienating logic of seriality; the commodity can only attain its full affective value by becoming African and by bearing a name that conjures up images, emotions, idioms, and events—­the stuff of memory. By making the most of the semiotic potential of the cloth, the Nana Benz traded on cultural associations to create a brand. Names are a uniquely powerful marker; they give crucial value to the cloth, charging it with a material agency that at once animates and is animated by the body. For the trader, the work of naming imbues imported cloth with local currency. Indeed, the name is what creates the value of a best-­selling pattern that has the potential to become a classic. And here is where the Nana Benz’s work comes in: detecting and selecting what appeals to consumer desire from the seemingly infinite possibilities of mass production. “Not all designs have a name, it’s only the ones that are joli joli [especially pretty] and everyone wants them. We give a name to our pagnes like art­ 92

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3.3

Dédé Rose Creppy at her market stall wearing “Stars of Lomé.” Photo by author.

ists give names to their artwork,” explained Maryse, a retailer in the market. Because naming acts like affective branding in that it ascribes the “object-­form to the idea of an association with it,” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 18, emphasis in original), the named cloth accumulates semiotic power. Pagne names can be playful, like “Sugar Cube,” and emphasize a woman’s independence as described in the introduction, while others, like “Oeil de ma rivale” (see plate 5), have the power to stun others into silence. Another category of designs the Nana Benz launched around inde­ pendence were those named in reference to specific events, such as “Stars of Lomé” or “Congrès.” Dédé Rose Creppy, the only living Nana Benz who is still trading in the Lomé market today, initially launched this design, which coincided with an international conference that was being held in the Togolese capital (see figure 3.3). “Stars of Lomé” has since become a classic, a must-­have in any reputable woman’s cloth col­ lection. In fact, this form of coincidental event-­related (and often politically inflected) branding was common after independence. For instance, the launching of a pagne design known as “Lumumba Be Ka” corresponded with the 1961 assassination of the charismatic Congolese independence leader, Patrice Lumumba. The design instantly became a best-­seller in Kinshasa and among Congolese more generally. Similarly effective in this vein of event branding, which was pioneering in that it 93

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did not draw on the physical image of Lumumba but rather on an abstract design, was the launching of a geometrical pattern that coincided with Thomas Sankara’s coming into power in Burkina Faso in 1983.10 Sales for the cloth were high throughout the 1980s and created unprecedented value upon Sankara’s assassination four years later. The interaction between the economic-­commercial work of licensing and the cultural work of branding is significant. In fact, this is how the women’s corporation and the traders co-­constructed their common commodity. Many other examples exist of this kind of politically inflected branding, which simultaneously linked a name or event to a design as well as the particular trader who licensed and marketed it. Depicting a series of cowrie shells, a design called “Beceao” plays with the appeal of money, the conversion of shell valuables to the CFA franc (the common currency issued by the Central Bank of West African States, which is the BCEAO in French), and its subsequent devaluation in 1994. Likewise, the popular 1960s design “Sekevi,” which translates as “boat’s anchor,” mobilizes references to the Lomé port, inaugurated in 1968. According to the daughter of the trader who launched the design, or “baptized” it, to use her language, “Sekevi” signifies international connection, including maritime transport by which the cloth gets to Lomé, while simulta­neously foregrounding locality and the imperatives of personal attachment to place and family. While the Nana Benz reworked the cloth’s value by adding layers of meaning and making it valuable through their bodies, they effectively enhanced the cloth’s semiotic power and currency. As the Nana Benz branded cloth and controlled the West African wax cloth trade, they themselves became, as described earlier, a political brand. In Eyadéma’s Togo of the 1970s and 1980s, the regime adopted the Nana Benz as a na­ tional brand and cast them as an economic success story that elevated Togo’s modernizing capacity above other developing nation-­states. It also used the Nanas as collateral in a quest for international donor monies. The Nana Benz provided the perfect substance for this project by inhab­ iting the seemingly impossible compromise of tradition/heritage and modernity. In order to think the nation, Ben Anderson (2006) famously argued, new forms of imagination had to be engineered. His famous example of print-­capitalism—­whereby the written word became the printed word, and print, whether it was the Bible or the newspaper, could reach the masses as a commodity—­is useful for considering how printed pagne cloth reached the masses, solidifying communal identities while registering difference. The efficacy of pagne and its association with the Nana 94

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Benz and the Togolese nation is reflected in the stories Togolese remember about the cloth traders, and which offer insights into the way the Nana Benz captured people’s imaginations. Nearly every person I spoke to, young and old, had a story to tell about the Nanas: from “they built our nation” and “they were the backbone of our economy” to more critical assessments about their political collaboration “they bankrolled le vieux [the old one; that is, Eyadéma].” Whatever the story was, the Nana Benz made the nation both intimate and palpable, offering Togolese the possibility to partake in its narrative. The invention of the metonym Nana Benz by the Togolese press made the national brand accessible in terms of scale. The Nana Benz were wealthy capitalists, but they were also “our” mothers and grandmothers. The capitalist values represented in vehicular power were cleverly attached to tradition, as signified in the Mina term nana, which translates as grandmother or mother. As mothers of the nation and the market, producers of a nationalist commodity as well as re/producers of national wealth and prestige, these women’s branding power was deployed by the Togolese state in its quest to advertise the Togolese nation as modern, progressive, and entrepreneurial, but with a distinctly female look. Much like the figure of the transnational Caribbean “higgler,” whom Carla Freeman (2001) describes as signifying both locality and movement as well as West Indian womanhood, nationhood, and globalization, the Nana Benz embody the familiar image of colorful West African market women—­firmly rooted in the history of the region as provisioners of national markets—­and the transformative potential of capitalism. Signifying both heritage and tradition on the one hand and entrepreneur­ ialism and capitalist savvy on the other, the Togolese state circulated the Nana Benz’s feminine image to an outside world divided by the mascu­ line im­perative of Cold War politics. Couched in the façade of a modernizing and developing nation, the Togolese state launched grand national growth plans that included industrial development projects (textile printing plants, plastic manufacturing, flour milling, salt crystallizing, etc.) as well as monumental infrastructure projects (palatial hotels, schools, hospitals, markets, sports stadiums, state media, and national monuments). The national framework had promised high productive capacity and national wealth, but what the postcolony produced instead was hollow spectacle—­ what Achille Mbembe (2001) calls “empty signs/ifiers.” As with other young African nation-­states with little, if any, material resources in the absence of industrial power, the Togolese postcolony had to compete with its neighbors over foreign investments. Spectacles of the state’s 95

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modernizing capacity masked its lack of substance and became the key mode through which the Togolese state introduced itself to the Cold War–divided world as a competitive, prosperous, and forward-­moving nation. During the 1970s, state ritual and spectacle were carefully staged through “hyperbolic celebrations of national holidays” (Piot 2010, 3) that served to position the dictatorial state as a modernizing nation to donor countries. As Piot brilliantly demonstrates in his analysis of the political culture of the Togolese postcolony, Eyadéma profiled himself as nationalist and ruled in “textbook Big Man style,” accumulating wealth and power as he performed “a personalized cult-­of-­the-­dictator nationalism” while ensuring “that European money and support never abandoned him” (Piot 1999, 6). Following Comi Toulabor’s (1986, 1994) pioneering analysis of the nature of phallocratic power in Eyadéma’s Togo, Piot connects Eyadéma’s spectral, performative rule to various forms of excess, transgression, and conviviality (see Mbembe 2001; Bayart 1989). Like other dictators in postcolonial Africa, Eyadéma instantiated his despotic personal power as both fetish and monument, as both magical and obscene, effectively inscribing his mythical presence onto national history and culture (Piot 1999, 2010; Toulabor 1986). Thus, staging the nation and producing national subjects as modern became the corrupt authoritarian regime’s main modernization project. To make up for the state’s lack of substance, it formed an alliance with Lomé’s cloth traders, whose branding power—­economic, symbolic, and political—­helped the dictatorship cast its image as both modern and capitalist. Moreover, the state instrumentalized the modernist, developmentalist discourse of pro­ moting women’s interests and rights as part of a national agenda, carry­ ing out a complex “performance of modernity.” The inauguration of the Lomé market in 1967 was one of the earliest such performances, and it set the stage for the Nana Benz’s involvement in the regime’s spectacles of Togolese modernity. Eyadéma’s investment in the Nana Benz doubles back on the dense materiality of cloth. Cloth is forceful because it can at once evoke sentiment and move imaginaries and bodies while grounding the political and the nation in its materiality and visibility. Because cloth provides a surface for multiple narrations and representations—­the literal image layered onto the cloth for everyone to see and the bundle of unbridled meaning it generates and that is open for manipulation—­it was made to work as a medium that inscribed and disseminated the political spectacle and embodied power. Cloth and clothing also have the power to capture individual bodies and the body politic, serving as a sign of corporeal sub96

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stance and superficial allegiance (Allman 2004; Hendrickson 1996). By the same token, cloth can literally become political. For instance, when Eyadéma’s portrait and party slogans appeared on cloth, the fabric literally captured the body politic during political spectacles when wearing the presidential party pagne became obligatory. Perhaps the object’s primary force lies in its mundane banality—­the way it is located in and locates the stuff of everyday life on and through the dressed body—­that enables the mediation of national matter and the political. Thus, if cloth is both the medium and material through which the stuff of everyday life, national heritage, and the outright political are negotiated and given vi­ sual and material form, then those who control its signification and cir­ culation are especially powerful agents.

The Spectacle of Papa et Ses Femmes The unspoken deal the Nana Benz had with the dictator—­granting political legitimacy in exchange for trade protections and entrepreneurial autonomy—­was bound up in complex and highly ambivalent webs of gifting, kinship, and ideologies of affection. Indeed, in a strangely refractive language that combined the idioms of kinship and capitalism, the traders endorsed Eyadéma not just as the father of the nation and gatekeeper of their trade but as “the husband of all husbands” (Toulabor 1994, 68).11 Conversations I had with women traders of the older guard revealed many references to “Papa et ses femmes,” which ambiguously translates as Papa (Eyadéma) and both “his women” and “his wives.” During official party meetings, the Nanas lent their benevolence—­con­veyed via their physical bodies covered in cloth with overtly political imagery or in their trademark patterns—­to the spectacle of political representation. They also lent infrastructural support in the form of their brand-­name cars. Thus, they secured a place in international state visits and national celebrations not just as symbols of modernist capitalist success but by supplying the material signs of luxury and excess that marked such spectacles. In this way, they provided both political legitimacy to Eyadéma’s authoritarian regime and a gendered façade of political munificence. However, such relations were not always favors traded between equals, and at times women remembered them as coercive extractions of their gendered labor, especially in the domain of cooking, caring, and giving resources. The complex and ambivalent relationship the Nana Benz had with Eyadéma is captured powerfully in the conflicted recollection of an APRT member who had participated in various state spectacles. 97

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At the beginning the women [the cloth traders] had more resources. When the state needed cars, at that time there were no rental car agencies, there was nothing . . . so when there was a conference here and the state needed Lomé’s most beautiful cars [les plus belles voitures de Lomé], they took the women’s cars and their drivers. And they took them for free! And that’s when it all started, that’s when the president [Eyadéma] began to call upon us for all kinds of things . . . and we, well [she pauses for a moment] . . . we had to show up! In those times even, there was no Hôtel du 2 Février to host a banquet or a feast for the population; so to do those kinds of festivities it was necessary to find people to cook and to feed the nation. And we, the women, we were there to cook to help the young nation get on its feet!

Although the Nana Benz had willingly collaborated with the dictator, for this relationship was gainful on both sides, here the relationship appears imposed or forced. Although entangled in complex webs of rec­ iprocity, the Nana Benz feared losing the protection of the dictator and with it their trade cartel. This trader’s description of being co-­opted into providing vehicular power to the state while willingly performing rituals of nation feeding and giving corporeal substance is particularly revealing in that it shows an element that is often obscured in popular descriptions of the Nana Benz as fiercely capitalist. In the context of state-­orchestrated rituals of nation making and nation feeding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the work of the cloth traders reflected a deep nationalist attachment indicative of the tremendous optimism that characterized a people’s experiences after independence. Of course, a reading of such civic nationalist enactments can be analyzed as part of their calculative economic logic, and the performance of belly politics (Bayart 1989), which included their various charity projects that involved important financial church investments that were not related to the government. Laura Doe Bruce donated to her prayer group, for ex­ ample, while Manavi Sewoa gifted a chapel to her church, and Patience Sanvee dressed church choirs in pagne uniforms. But these acts might also be read as both a form of exchange (for spiritual protection) and the moral imperative to purify (capitalist) value. Moreover, the trader’s comment offers clues into what modernity meant to Togolese and the state at this time, and thus provides insights about why the state claimed the Nana Benz as a political brand image for its modernizing façade. The trader points out that there was no concrete structure of sufficient size until the Hôtel du 2 Février opened in 1980.12 The women in fact supplanted the idea that modernity had to be manifested in the built environment of a modern capital city. Rather, specific social groups and forms of behavior expressed a Togolese modernity still in the making. 98

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3.4  Union Nationale des Femmes Togolaises members, among them several Nana Benz.

Photographer unknown.

Echoing Filip de Boeck’s (2012) provocation to think about urbanity as a space that is being scaled and built through the infrastructure of the body, we can make a connection between the grand infrastructures of mod­ernization and the infrastructure of the body that the Nana Benz made possible. They provided corporeal substance and superficial allegiance to Eyadéma’s national-­developmentalist state as well as material infrastructure, including their cars. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Nana Benz became part and parcel of Eyadéma’s cult of the dictator. They were folded into his national narrative and became attached to the dictator himself, albeit in ambivalent ways. They would perform rituals of various kinds, including sponsoring a soccer tournament in his honor that showcased a group of younger Nana Benz playing to defend the values of the nation. Like other groups that stood by the dictator and willingly performed their national allegiance by giving their physical bodies to the body of the nation, the Nana Benz also acted as a cultural group that emitted a core economic essence. Dressed up uniformly in the same pagne and bolstered by markers of wealth and status, including exquisite handbags, fancy shoes, and gold jewelry, the Nana Benz stood in close proximity to the dictator during 99

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such events. On some public occasions, the Nana Benz’s dress supported the dictator on a more intimate scale, such when APRT members wore the roller-printed presidential cloth imprinted with Eyadéma’s image during official parades of the 1970s and early 1980s. Printed locally by Togotex,13 and sometimes even in Holland, presidential cloth materials were freely distributed to all RPT members as well as to the populace. Indeed, at the height of the authoritarian regime, people worried that they would be flagged if they refused to wear the cloth. Fear of Eyadéma’s regime and its political culture of repression reduced Togolese to what Toulabor characterizes as “proto-­political beings” (1994, 61 and 62). As the daughter of a Nana Benz explained, “They simply couldn’t refuse to wear that cloth and stand by Eyadéma,” the consequence of which may have been the end of their trade emporium. A key shift in the materiality, visuality, and symbolic meaning of pagne occurred when the dictator (and thus, by extension, the state) inscribed himself onto the cloth such that wearing pagne became an act of embodied politics. The performance, or animation, of such a politics took many forms. An obvious infrastructure for this type of embodied politics was the women’s wing of Eyadéma’s one-­party rule, the Union Nationale des Femmes Togolaises (UNFT), which was supported by several Nana Benz who made up a fifth of its membership, as detailed by Cordonnier (1982). Occupying the front seats at a political event (see fig­ ure 3.4), we can see how the women provided corporeal substance and political legitimacy to the dictatorship. This practice was not unique to Togo; the use of political cloth featuring presidential imagery and slogans of development was widespread in postcolonial Africa, and was elaborated to perfection by both Mobutu and Houphouet-­Boigny (Bickford 1994; Spencer 1982). One can literally read Africa’s early postcolonial political history through cloth as Picton (2001) has suggested. But wearing political prints doesn’t necessarily sig­ nify support. In her work on imaged pagne in Côte d’Ivoire, Susan Do­ mowitz (1992) expands the significance of cloth names and naming beyond branding and relations among women to include oblique criticism of the state. Domowitz describes how Ivoirians strategically tailor political cloth as acts of resistance. Similarly, in Togo, one woman recounted how she had tailored a pagne that featured the image of the dictator in such a way that Eyadéma’s face appeared across her derrière so that when she sits down, for example, she performs a gesture of political resistance by literally sitting on the dictator’s head. In such cases, men also make use of cloth to express their political views. For a contemporary example, see figure 3.5, featuring a man dressed in the party cloth of Faure Gnass100

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3.5

Embodying politics. Faure Gnassingbé. Photo by Bruno Zanzoterra.

ingbé, Eyadéma’s son who became president after his father death in 2005. Although pagne continues to be used as an instrument of electoral politics in Togo today, its instrumentality in substantiating Eyadéma’s regime had faded by the late 1980s, at a time when his political spectacle could no longer hide the ills of a failing national economy.

False Images and Cracked Façades Anthropologists have argued that African understandings of capitalism, and evaluations of the socioeconomic inequalities it produces, are often assessed in the moral idiom of witchcraft and magic (Geschiere 1997; 101

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Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). Importantly, such moral formulations about capitalist accumulation and figures of entrepreneurial success are also deeply gendered and mobilize complex cultural categories about women and men, often pertaining to sexuality (Masquelier 1993, 1997; Bastian 1996). In Togo, talk about Eyadéma’s wealth and virility long animated popular imaginaries regarding the occult source of his power (Piot 1999, 2010; Toulabor 1986, 1994). Similarly, moral discourses about the source and the legitimacy of the Nana Benz’s wealth and power have long accompanied popular representations of the women traders as either sexually promiscuous or as devotees of the Mami Wata divinity, an entrepreneurial success–­generating water spirit that is part of the coast’s vodun religion. While such fictions about the irreconcilable difference of the Nana Benz have always been present in popular imaginaries of power, they could also be strategically deployed for both strengthening and weakening the women’s authority. When mobilized to weaken or control their power, such representations and rumors exposed the “gendered cracks and crevices in the national façade,” to use Jean Allman’s expression (2004, 156). Popular rumors about their material accumulation suggested that the secret to the Nana Benz’s success was supernatural and transgressive. For example, rumors spread that the Nana Benz would regularly consult with diviners and voodoo priestesses whose powerful gris-­gris (amulets) not only protected and fortified them against invisible market forces but helped grow money-­spitting snakes in their uteruses. Various iterations of this rumor circulated during the 1970s and 1980s and became part of a popular imagination that linked women’s economic power to corrupted female sexuality, as the traders’ reproductive organs were not producing children but money (Rivière 1978). The money allegedly also served the traders to pay for sexual services with younger men, who would visit the women at their sumptuous villas where they lived without their (often polygamous) husbands.14 Meanwhile, some versions extended the theme of corrupted or deviant femininity and sexuality and mocked the Nana Benz for their independence in the domestic sphere, including their transgression of patrilocal residence. Such moral tales about “appropriate femininity” and “appropriate accumulation” serve as both a source of popular amusement and as a way to police gender and regulatory discourse. In the early 1980s, moral discussions about these traders’ unregulated, greedy accumulation reached a peak after it became public that one cloth trader had allegedly accumulated 850 million CFA francs (about $ 2.8 mil­ lion) with marginal fiscal taxation.15 Meanwhile, the state, which bene­ fited enormous­ly from the various capital flows that moved through its 102

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entre­pôt territory, was also playing with the popular resentment of cloth traders. Not only did a focus on the women as greedy profiteers shift attention away from the state’s corrupted social contract with its citizenry, but the state also used such grievances strategically, even instigating some of these scandals against the Nana Benz. While the Nanas served as political instruments of modernity, their economic independence, their ethnic difference, and their history of mass mobilization were all potential threats to the regime. Despite the women’s alliance with the dictator, they were also proud southerners who had uncritically reproduced the colonial divide between north and south as well as the colonizer’s language of civilization. Part of a southern commercial elite, the Nana Benz saw themselves as much more “civilized” (or evolué ) than the northerners, whom they considered “raw” and “uncivilized,” especially Eyadéma’s Kabre ethnic group. I witnessed many conversations among self-­identified southerners mocking the presumed savageness of their northern compatriots. Eyadéma himself was mocked for his lack of a secondary education, his poor oratory skills, his body, and his general mediocrity and grotesqueness, which created a form of “conviviality” between ruler and ruled and that has long characterized the political culture of the postcolony (Toulabor 1994; Piot 1999; 2010; Mbembe 2001). Because of the women’s economic power and ability to organize dem­ onstrations in support of or against the regime—­in other words to stand by the dictator or to turn against him—­part of Eyadéma’s strategy was to keep the Nana Benz close and central to the state’s façade but also vul­ nerable to political uncertainty. When political spectacle could no lon­ ger hide the reality of failing state-­owned enterprises and rampant unemployment and the government was ushered into structural-­adjustment programs and austerity measures by the IMF and the World Bank, the Nana Benz became a target of state intervention and popular protest. By then the revenues the traders generated from cloth sales had come to rival phosphate-­generated revenues, before a decline in world phosphate prices seriously compromised the economic returns on which the state depended. At the same time, the women were accused of price inflation and soon Eyadéma’s interior minister made the cloth traders his target by temporarily enforcing price displays in the market. West African market spaces have long been sites for state intervention and popular contestation, wherein women traders have been at the forefront of critique and public dramas of repression and dispossession (see Clark 1994, 2001, 2010; Robertson 1984). The reasons for these forms of repression and accusations against women as “wretched capitalists” and profiteers are historical and linked to women’s long-­standing dominance 103

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in West African markets as provisioners of commodities and mobilizers of public opinion. It is also a long-­standing theme in popular culture, rumor, and gossip. In Ghana, for example, market women were publicly accused of being “human vampire bats” against the backdrop of Ghana’s failing economic policies (Clark 2001). One of the most well-­documented cases of political violence against market women in West Africa’s recent history is the demolition of Accra’s Makola market in 1979 and again in 1981 (Robertson 1983, 1984; Clark 1988, 1994). Market women were beaten by looting soldiers and held responsible for the nation’s economic ills. As Robertson writes, “Because of their visible role [they] were forced to bear the brunt of public displeasure provoked by shortages in goods, invisible inflation, decline in terms of trade, corruption and incompetence” (Robertson 1983, 469, emphasis in original). Similarly, in Togo, the state-­owned press began to cast the Nana Benz not as nation builders but as greedy profiteers. Instead of sharing the wealth of the nation with all—­especially the wives of ministers and others who wanted to have their share of the national cloth cake but were de facto excluded from APRT’s hierarchical structure—­the Nana Benz were accused of hoarding it, similar to the money-­spitting snakes they were said to hoard in their uteruses. The webs of affinity and reciprocity that had underwritten the gift contract between the dictator and the women unraveled, turning increasingly coercive, exploitative, and toward simulacra. By the late 1980s, the women refused to support the dictator. But for Eyadéma, a knockoff of their image was sufficient. Devoid of anything substantial, it served as a simulacrum during national celebrations (Mbembe 2001). “We were sitting in front of the news and as usual they [the regime] did their propaganda; same old, same old story . . . but then we see my mother’s doppelgänger when I was sitting next to my mother at that very same time,” the son of a Nana Benz recalled of a scene in 1988. Of course, this was not the first time this had occurred. Seemingly, at least to the regime and its logic of “same old, same old,” these women continued to hold an impeccable national value, even when—­or now, perhaps, especially—­ when produced as simulacra. If, per Mbembe, the production, appropriation, and circulation of false images is indeed characteristic of the complex working of power in the postcolony (transforming the identity of the original and its referents, blurring truth and falsehood), then we must further establish the connection between the character of political prosecution experienced by the cloth traders and the character of the commodity. The kind of power wax cloth connotes is indeed crucial. Cloth denotes economic 104

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and political clout; it can capture individual bodies and the body politic, but it also has semiotic power. In fact, wax cloth has the kind of power that retains cultural and economic value even as it is distorted and counterfeit. Similarly, the women controlling its circulation wield an authority that is not easily undone. When the Nana Benz’s power became available to the opposition in the aftermath of the Cold War, the state’s protection of them violently collapsed. In March 1991, Lomé’s market women came out in public opposition to a single-­party regime refusing to hold democratic elections. The women organized a large-­scale protest march to advocate for the liberation of their “children,” a group of university students who were arrested and put on trial as terrorists for demanding freedom of speech. “We were marching from the market dressed up in white with red head scarves, and we, the women, we were ready to bring the dictator down,” explained a trader whose political ambitions emerged during this time. The 1991 women’s march, commonly recalled as la marche des femmes, was met with violent repression, and several women were injured. “They beat us up!” one trader remembered with great anger. “Ils ont touché aux femmes” (The military touched the women), she went on, capturing in this phrase the symbolic severity of laying a hand on the nation’s female workforce. Indeed, the state was physically deconstructing a potent national image that it had helped to consolidate in the first place. The march became a turning point, marking the end of the gift dynamic long upheld by the dictatorship and the Nanas and the beginning of a shift in gender dynamics in the market. When several Nanas publicly turned their backs on Eyadéma in response to the state’s abuse of power, the military came down forcefully. “They broke the glass [in the market shops], smashing it all, and they were looting, stealing. . . . They carried bales of cloth across town,” a Nana recalled. Then the crisis intensified. The military killed several activists during street protests, 300,000 Togolese fled to Ghana and Benin, and the economy came to a complete standstill between 1992 and 1993 (Heilbrunn and Toulabor 1995; Nwajiaku 1994; Macé 2004). The Lomé market shut down for more than a year, and traders from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria flocked to Cotonou, where international trading companies were now shipping and distributing their goods.16 With the breakdown of the entrepreneurial nation and the Nana Benz in exile, the political economy of the Togolese cloth trade changed forever. No longer a site of national prestige, the Lomé market never regained its standing and regional reputation for dressing West Africa. The combined effects of a political system fraught by internal divisions within 105

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the governing class and a national economy in steep decline signaled the decisive end of the business model that had made the Nana Benz wealthy. Then Eyadéma returned to power in 1993 and remained in office until his death in 2005, despite suspensions of economic and military aid by the European Union and the United States.17 Yet the dictatorship and Eyadéma’s patrimonial state never fully regained its mojo. With his power diminished, donor monies drying up, and NGOs entering the social and biopolitical field, as Piot describes, the configuration of political power became much more diffused, or “horizontal” (2010, 49). While upholding the political form of the nation-­state, Eyadéma’s government transitioned into a crude neoliberal regime firmly rooted in the logic of the market and the rationality of the commodity form (Piot 2010). Yet despite the liberalization of the political sphere, socioeconomic prospects for many Togolese have paradoxically diminished since. This was especially the case after 1994, when the CFA franc lost half of its value and generated economic hardship and new forms of uncertainty. Needless to say, these structural shifts in Togolese politics and political economy were a major blow to the cloth traders. On the one hand, they had lost their economic position in a market that was to be entirely rebuilt with merchandise now costing twice as much since 1994, while their European distributors were now shipping the cloth to Cotonou; on the other hand, their relationship with Eyadéma was profoundly compromised, if not severed altogether. Amid these transformations, another structural shift diminished the position of the Nana Benz in the standing of the nation: the shift from political to neoliberal branding. In the new political configuration, marked by the diffusion of power and the retreat of the state, the Nana Benz’s nation-­building labor and political status had become obsolete. Bereft of their stock-­in-­trade and stripped off their political status, the Nana Benz had become a mere brand. Ironically, a 1994 French coffee-­table book featured an image that illustrates the height of the Nana Benz’s power after the fact: the moment they absorbed the power of pattern rights. The book (Fauque and Wollenweber 1994) celebrates the famous Nana Benz Patience Sanvee. The trader is dressed in the same fabric as her sedan. Both the woman and car are wearing an iconic Vlisco pattern called “Billionaire” that features a blue rectangle divided diagonally by dazzling red and green hourglasses. The fabric’s brightness is so overwhelming that at first we see only the pattern spread across the frame, cladding the trader and her car in a shared social skin. The boundaries between human and object seem to disappear as they are united by the “Billionaire” pattern. What,

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then, is the thing of value in the picture’s semiotic chain? Has cloth domesticated the woman and the car? With a closer look, we can see that the trader and the car in fact belong to each other—­they are entangled with one another in cloth—­and they appear to work together as a single image. Taken separately, we can see a display of signs and symbols dressing both the machine and the woman. They are signs juxtaposed to spell out the brand name, Nana plus Benz. Taken together, the thing of value is the Nana Benz as brand. The pattern also conveys a distinct message: “Billionaire,” a pattern that was long “owned” by Patience Sanvee. The Nana Benz has survived as a brand and as an image of African modernity that can circulate globally in the package of woman-­nation; its impeccable value circulates in transnational reproduction as the hall of mirrors of what comes to stand in for Africa, and that gets reproduced as an African brand over and over again. Just as the Nana Benz brand has circulated as the perfect package of a gendered entrepreneurial ingenuity, so has the market exhibit described at the beginning of this chapter. In 2013, the museum traveled to the Vlisco headquarters in the Netherlands, where it was featured as part of the company’s participation in Dutch Design Week. Staged as a heritage piece in the “Vlisco Unfolded” exhibit, the curated mini-­installation of the Lomé market museum made the African market accessible in terms of scale for visitors to Dutch Design Week to marvel at amid displays about the craft of Vlisco and its legacy of design innovation. The scale of such contemplations was necessarily skewed toward the celebration of Dutch cultural heritage, not least for the artifact value the Lomé market retained—­at once monumentalized and museumized, if not mausoleum­ ized. Or so it seemed. In 2015, when I returned to the Vlisco archives, I stumbled upon several of the gold-­framed photographs I had first encountered in Togo in 2010. Now surreptitiously stored in a repository of Vlisco (as archival objects themselves), it was unclear whether these were the original objects on loan whose return was imminent or if in fact they were replicas or duplicates from the exhibit (see Schwartz 1996). Of course, photography destabilizes the very notion of authenticity in the original through its capacity for copy (Krauss 1984; Benjamin [1936] 1969). But the circulation of images and things, as shown throughout this book, does not operate in a vacuum. In Togo, the photo exhibit is part of a similar discourse of memory and memorialization that connects several generations of women. Here, too, a claim based on local heritage and genealogy is being made upon the Nana Benz as brand by those first-­and second-­generation cloth traders who now struggle to

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maintain their economic position in the post–­Cold War era of neoliberal reform. Faced with the harsh reality of devaluation and inevitable copy that accompanied shifts in the region’s political economy, global production, and the disintegration of the dictatorship, the cloth traders’ effort to mobilize a discourse of local heritage by memorializing their presence at the heart of the market thus is not surprising. But whom does the national brand “Nana Benz” properly belong to? Questions of brand ownership and authorship arise anew in the neoliberal context, when a new generation of traders, Les Nanettes, claims the national Nana Benz brand but have the cloth made in China. In times of crisis, the registers of value that women have come to depend on are thrown into question. The next chapter examines how individual traders, who have redefined flexibility in the context of this neoliberal landscape, experience and work these shifts. The ambiguous power of pagne and the cloth trade has unraveled the lives of some while making the success of others possible.

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Four

Flexible Patterns: The Nanettes Remake the Market and Cloth in China When I returned to the Lomé market in 2008 after two years, I visited Solange inside her shop. It was there, eight years earlier, that I had come to know her as a successful cloth trader in the market. Everything seemed the same at first glance, but after a few minutes I became aware of an unusual stillness about the place. A strange ambiance of vacancy and decay pervaded the room—­the flickering fluorescent lights interfered with the bright colors of the fabrics, while the noise of a struggling fan added a general sense of interruption. Market activity seemed strangely suspended inside Solange’s, a space that had always bustled with raucous exchange. I took a seat near the wooden counter where Solange conducted her business. Clients from all over West Africa used to line up in front of this counter to fetch the iconic cloth before moving it across the borders to Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria, and sometimes Democratic Republic of the Congo. Perhaps the lights had flickered then as well, and conceivably the fan had always made its humming noise—­but back then such idiosyncrasies would have faded into the vibrant soundscape of market exchange. If the signs of decay and crisis that seemed so conspicuous on this day were already apparent in previous years, they had not been immediately visible to me. Even off moments

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involved activity when trade was taken to adjacent spaces, such as the parking lot situated by the shop’s back entrance. There, day laborers hired by clients repackaged the cloth into transportable units for trafficking across Togo’s many borders, and money entrepreneurs were ready at any moment to exchange US dollars, Nigerian nairas, and Ghanaian cedis for local CFA francs. I had never perceived instances of off trading as suspended moments, perhaps precisely because they were always linked to busy, noisy trade. My sense of Solange’s shop as a hub was shaken, however, when she recounted her recent misfortunes to me. In the space of only two years, this trader had fallen from being universally recognized as one of the top wholesalers in the market to inhabiting the very bottom of the Dutch trade hierarchy. In practical terms, Solange was de facto excluded from accessing large quantities of the reputed cloth—­now distributed by the Vlisco Africa Company, which took over Unilever’s historic United Africa Company—­while her credit with Togo’s banking institutions was also compromised. Solange was not alone in her situation. Other traders of her generation also felt the crude effects of market liberalization as national structures unraveled and shifted the conditions of possibility for many. The value of entrepreneurial nationals like the Nana Benz became increasingly obsolete at a time when the Lomé Grand Marché appeared to no longer serve as a site of national prestige and wealth production. In the crisis of the state in 1990s Togo, the unraveling of the alliance between the dictatorship and the Nana Benz resulted in a breakdown of both national protections and the women’s corporatist market structure. In addition, the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc was a major setback to the region’s textile trade.1 The price of cloth doubled practically overnight, and Dutch wax turned into a luxury good that few consumers and traders could afford. As a second-­generation Nana recalled, “All of the sudden, you had to put 10 million CFA on the table to get what you ordered two weeks earlier for 5 million!” In the past, a Nana’s profit margin on a twelve-­yard piece of cloth could range from 5 to 20 percent. Prior to the devaluation, high earners such as Patience Sanvee, who was featured in the French coffee-­table book mentioned in chapter 3, could make up to 3 billion CFA (about $10 million) in annual turnover. By 1998, this rate had dropped to 400 million CFA (about $760,000). Then, too, Togo’s new fiscal regime raised the value-­added tax on imports from 7 to 18 percent, while a new flat tax rate was imposed on the cloth traders’ annual profit, in addition to a 1 percent tax on the value of their or­ders. Consequently, Dutch wax cloth became even more expensive. 110

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The average price for a twelve-­yard piece, the traditional wholesale unit, has since ranged between $90 and $140. With the reordering of economic and political life in the 1990s, the Togolese entrepôt not only lost its little Switzerland status as European trading interests and investments diminished, but this crisis was also marked by the retreat of the state and its regulatory interventions as Piot (2010) has detailed. At the same time, the state reconfigured itself in the economies of “twilight markets” and illicit capital produced by market liberalizations (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 10).2 Reconfigurations of the state through various “shadow economies” are certainly not unique to Togo (Roitman 2005; Peterson 2014),3 nor are the kinds of economic uncertainties and inequalities this has produced for African subjects. For Togolese, these transformations have indeed been profound. And although the public sphere has been liberalized, prospects for civil society have paradoxically also diminished. Making ends meet has become a daunting task for many in the charged context of chronic inflation and everyday precariousness. Then, when in a controversial move the Togolese military installed Eyadéma’s young son, Faure Gnassingbé, to succeed the dictator upon his death in 2005, the small West African nation became an explicit frontier for China-­in-­Africa, and a key hub for Chinese counterfeit goods. To reposition itself in the global economy after more than a decade of political instability (1991–­2005) and empty state coffers and accumulating national debt, the government effectively courted Chinese development aid and investments to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructures. At the same time, the neoliberal state has made select zones within one of its most precious assets—­the Port of Lomé—­particularly attractive to global capital. In the face of state and market transformations, the position of the Nana Benz and their role in the West African wax cloth trade was essentially unmade. Two key neoliberal shifts accompanied the restructuring of the textile trade, one at the level of the region’s political economy, the other at the level of the global economy. The first was related to the 1994 currency devaluation of the West African CFA franc. While this mone­ tary adjustment deeply transformed the organization of both the Togolese and the region’s textile economy as mentioned before, it also led, in conjunction with the African debt crisis, to the disinvestment of Western assets, which ultimately left a void that Chinese investors (state and private actors included) began to fill by early 2000. The second neoliberal reform occurred in 2005, when the WTO lifted an international textile trade policy with profound consequences for African industries and markets (Axelsson and Sylvanus 2010; Axelsson 2012).4 The 2005 lift of the 111

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Multi-­Fibre Arrangement, an international regulatory framework that had kept the global textile and apparel sector outside the regulations of the WTO, brought an already struggling West African textile industry to the brink (see Maiwada and Renne 2013), ushering many factories into insolvency while throwing open doors for Chinese competitors.5 Meanwhile, the Togolese marketplace has been fundamentally recal­ ibrated by the presence of new global actors whose interventions have caused anxiety about the possibilities and limitations of economic and social reproduction. The increasing importance of China-­in-­African economic life and the unmaking of long-­established patterns of trade and cloth distribution are exemplified in the narratives I detail here—­from Solange and the decline of the old generation Nana Benz to the emergence of new local and global players. The traditional trade in Dutch wax prints experienced an overall decline during much of the 2000s, challeng­ ing Vlisco’s standing in the region as the bearer of legitimacy for African prints.6 Meanwhile, Chinese copies of popular Dutch designs have gained new importance on increasingly dispossessed West African consumer mar­kets; they have also generated new wealth for a few members of the younger generation of women traders. This chapter continues the story of the rise and fall of women traders and the making and remaking of Dutch wax cloth in the postdictatorship era. Despite years of experience navigating Togo’s challenging postcolonial economic and political landscape, the daughters of the Nana Benz who had inherited their mothers trading and pattern rights, such as Solange, struggled to adapt to these recent shifts in the market. On my 2008 visit, their shrinking stalls contrasted sharply with the rapidly expanding shops of traders like Blessing, who sells large volumes of African prints that she imports herself into the Lomé port, and Antoinette, who has pioneered a business relationship with China. These women once occupied the periphery of market activity, but today they epitomize the success of a new generation of enterprising traders called Les Nanettes.7 These women work across different and often shifting sites of post-­Fordist production, global economic enclaves, and commodity hubs. Shifts in global production and diffusions of state power and economic deregulation in Togo have produced new kinds of entrepreneurial practices and subjectivities. These novel and often contrasting economic rationalities are reflected in the trajectories of traders like Solange, who can no longer secure the nationalist protections of the past, and Nanettes, who are hooking into something new. Indeed, as Nanettes move through new sites of power, the old generation of traders is increasingly stuck in a cycle of downward mobility and disaccumulation. 112

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Hopping from one commodity site to the next, scouting for new market trends and better products while intervening in the production process on global factory floors, the Nanettes are hedging the kinds of high-­ risk entrepreneurial logics that have so concerned neoliberal discourses about “rational economic woman” (Rankin 2001; Karim 2011). Women like Antoinette and Blessing, whose global interventions and creative innovation with cloth design have enabled access to a new generation of African prints, not only fashion themselves as powerful entrepreneurial subjects in the neoliberal economy, akin to how women like Atsoupi and Belinda in chapter 1 fashion their bodies to claim a place in public life, they also transform consumer subjectivities and practices of sartorial elitism. With the opening of the Nana Benz’s system of pattern rights in the aftermath of neoliberal reform, and liberalizations of the market and the public sphere, new prospects for Nanettes and consumers to remake and work cloth’s material flexibilities have proliferated. In telling their story, this chapter is concerned with the unmaking of old patterns and the emergent forms of material and entrepreneurial re/making. It begins by chronicling Solange’s downfall, a story that establishes the transformation of the wax cloth trade in West Africa on one hand and the unraveling of the Togolese nation on the other, and continues with the Nanettes fabric labor in China. If during much of the postcolonial period, the Nana Benz had helped consolidate the nation’s entrepôt position and identity in the region, in the contemporary (post–­Cold War and post-­devaluation) moment, old borders, frontiers, and trading connections are being re­ configured—­if they do not break down altogether. Organized increasingly around new global sites of production and mechanisms of value creation tied to new regimes of credit and debt, the new system of cloth distribution is predicated on entrepreneurial flexibilities of a new kind. As Nanettes fashion their entrepreneurial strategies with and on the material qualities of cloth in China, they are both animating and animated by the material’s own flexibility. Cloth’s dense materiality inspires traders to collaborate, innovate, and tinker with pagne design in China. When cloth loses its own flexibility and gets stuck at the port, and thus cannot circulate or produce value, or when its very qualities of smoothness and fungibility are so vibrant that it moves into markets beyond the Nanettes’ control, then it has the power to restrict or unmake a trader’s success. In this chapter, I go beyond a conventional analysis of the flexibilities of neoliberalism by ethnographically foregrounding how the material characteristics of cloth—­its ability to move and enchant as well as its malleability and openness to copy—­shape entrepreneurial practices that resonate with neoliberal patterns. 113

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Threadbare It was July 2008, and I was paying my usual morning visit to Solange at her shop. She was on the phone, so I sat down in a corner to wait. My gaze shifted to the familiar clock and the picture of Jesus that hung above the trading counter. This is a common sight in Lomé textile boutiques, as many traders credit their faith for leading them on the path to success. Solange and her employees always looked up to Jesus upon entering the shop in the morning, offering a prayer for a prosperous day. This act was followed by an extensive cleaning procedure that included not only the picture frame but the entire shop, in the same elaborate ritual of antidust purification I had witnessed other store owners perform. On this day, however, the picture frame hung at a slightly tilted angle, as if faith had left the shop altogether. Was Jesus no longer protecting the space in which Solange’s business had thrived for the past twenty years? A few days later, a full-­fledged drama occurred in Solange’s shop; it was a scene that seemed to confirm a breakdown of protection. I had spent the previous mornings chatting with Solange about the various changes that had impacted her trade since I left Lomé in 2004. She told me that, because of her déclassement (deranking) from the Dutch hierarchy and her declining trade volume, she had to split the shop to reduce overhead. Although she tried to explore alternative sources of revenue, including work with new textile manufacturers and products, she contended that the banks were no longer giving her the same credit arrangements to which she had been accustomed. The lack of credit limited opportunities for Solange to successfully diversify her business activities. Now, she lamented, she had to “run after money all over town while working like a slave!” Solange’s comparison to slavery seemed to me like a strange analogy for her declassed position in the market. But before I could deepen our dis­ cussion about the cruel conditions relegating her to what she perceived as servitude, a young man of Middle Eastern origin entered the shop. The man’s body language was aggressive; he walked brusquely toward Solange, who retreated behind her counter. Against all forms of conventional or appropriate market behavior, the man began shouting at her in broken French about the return of his money. He forcefully demanded repayment, accompanying this demand with a series of insults. Solange initially responded calmly, explaining to her heated opponent that “the deal was off” and that she would thus not pay the sum, but the situation quickly escalated beyond a screaming match of insults. Solange became visibly distressed after repeatedly asking the man to leave her shop. In 114

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turn, he became more verbally abusive, claiming that if she did not pay the money immediately, he would send his men to break her legs. In the midst of this heated and hostile situation, Solange turned to me. “You see what this country has become?” she exclaimed. “These thugs [bande de voyous] think they can operate in all impunity! You must tell your ambassador!” Before I had time to react, Solange picked up a chair. Raising it dramatically above her head, she screamed, “Get out! Out, now!” Her two employees, visibly concerned, anxiously attempted to keep her calm. “Mother, you mustn’t,” they implored. Solange, undeterred, pushed them aside and lowered the chair in front of her chest. Armed with the chair, she began physically pushing the man out of the shop. The latter, clearly astonished by Solange’s unexpected reaction, finally obeyed her command. He made a hurried exit, shouting that he would be back with the police. Solange was shaken after this incident, and she seemed surprised by her own behavior. Although routinized performances of particular roles mark the everyday pragmatics of market exchange with scripts that range from how a trader should interact with competitors in the market, with the Dutch, or with clients on the shop floor, I had never seen her lose her calm or enact a dramatic script of the kind I witnessed that day. The scene left me puzzled and perturbed. Had I observed a performance of market authority in its most dramatically staged form, or were these the visible signs of a crumbling market monument, and thus the unmaking of women’s market authority in the postdictatorship era? The absence or breakdown of any form of protection ( Jesus and Eyadéma included) then became crudely apparent to me. As Solange processed the violent scene in its immediate aftermath, she explained that the man was a competitor from Iran. He had recently arrived in the market, where he traded in cheap knockoffs of Dutch wax imported from India, Pakistan, and China. “This man knows nothing about pagne,” Solange iterated, or how the “African market works.” She claimed that he had no respect for the kind of work she and her peers had been doing in the market for generations. Most importantly, she contended that if Eyadéma were still alive, “this kind of scum” would not have been tolerated. Eyadéma, she claimed, “would’ve given him twenty-­four hours to leave the country!” Exposed to the vicissitude of the new market, Solange had to manufacture her own ways of handling issues as they arose, but she accounted for what had happened in her shop in a strange, nostalgic refraction of the authority of the dictatorship and its paternalistic values. The Iranian trader was an embodiment of a general transformation in market conditions, and powerfully epitomizes how the neoliberal has 115

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seeped into people’s everyday lives. Revisions in Dutch distribution policies and global shifts in production had altered the nature of competition as well as the visible and hidden logics of the market. Moreover, these changes had affected all traders. Women of the old guard with long-­standing histories in the market experienced particular difficulty maintaining their positions and wealth.8 Some began trading in Chinese copies of Dutch wax on the side, an economic diversification they had to hide from Vlisco if they wanted to remain in business with the Dutch. However, these women were not as successful as the Nanettes, nor were they as mobile or flexible. Solange was visibly struggling. She explained that, because she had been reranked at Vlisco, she only had third-­choice access to cloth. “You need to have first-­choice access if you want to maintain yourself at the top,” she elaborated. “You need to get hold of the best stuff to make decent profit margins, and you need quantity, too.” The reason for Solange’s sudden decline—­from a top-­tier wholesaler position to the bottom rung in the space of four years—­was not immediately clear to me. Perhaps the general crisis that had reigned over Togo since the 1990s finally caught up with her, or maybe there was a breach in her network that had weakened her position? It took many weeks to get Solange to comment more specifically about what exactly had happened at Vlisco, and therefore for me to understand what had compromised her position and reputation in the market in such a way that she no longer had the clout to obtain the dispensations she had become accustomed to. Banks would not grant her credit, even after she went so far as to mortgage various family properties. There were rumors speculating that Solange’s financial difficulties were linked to her failed investments in new trading venues. As a competing trader suggested, “She just couldn’t manage the stress of Vlisco anymore. . . . She just couldn’t keep up. . . . She would place commands with Vlisco, but she actually didn’t have the money!” An older Nana added with a deep sigh, “It is sad . . . things are not like before. . . . She could not cope.” A younger trader told me, “Apparently she called her clients who [came] all the way from Abidjan, Porto-­Novo, and Lagos and told them she had stuff she didn’t, but she didn’t have any because she couldn’t pay for it! So our clients, ha, they dropped her.” Each of her market competitors had a story to tell about what had happened to Solange. Most of them involved references to dishonesty and money, suggesting that she had put her “heritage” position and reputation on the line. When she spoke about the strenuous labor of “running after money,” Solange often evoked an analogy to contemporary slavery. The connec116

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tion of enslavement to the spatiotemporal circulation of capital is not to be taken lightly. For a trader to survive the volatility of the cloth market, she depended upon robust credit and debit relationships to keep capital flowing in her favor. Since her relationship to her creditors had changed, Solange found herself in a vicious cycle of debt. The cycle involved recuperating credit she had extended to clients, reinvesting the money in cloth, and reimbursing the bank, all while trying to sell the second-­rate product she could still obtain from Vlisco. Solange’s heritage position had previously afforded her open credit with minimal interest. Now she only qualified for credit on mortgage, while she also had to reimburse accumulated back interest and penalties. Given the post-­devaluation economic climate, this was challenging to say the least. “I even had to take out microfinance loans,” she said in an appalled tone. Solange was subjugated to moving money from one creditor to the next and back, as opposed to “making money work” for her—­a common expression traders use in the market to describe the speculative temporalities of extending and recuperating credit from clients. To make money work, a trader must carefully manage the credit-­ debt nexus in “its ability to link the present to the past and the future” (Peebles 2010, 226). As Jane Guyer notes in her work on the complexities of fixing debt and delay in modern Atlantic Africa, traders and creditors engage in a challenging balancing act. Big traders such as Solange must balance the flexible temporal arrangements they have with their own clients with the more punctuated imperatives of formal creditors like banks, which operate according to the “principle of interest rates rather than amounts stretched out over indefinite periods of time” (2004, 160).9 A trader’s ability to spatially restrict and channel the flow of a credit-­debit relation­ ship across regional trading networks is an investment in the future, albeit often for speculative gains. Yet with the breakdown of colonial and postcolonial trading and pattern rights that defined the Nana Benz’s system of cloth distribution, long-­standing credit arrangements between Eu­ ropean trading firms and the women traders were also being undone. Both first-­generation and second-­generation cloth traders use various credit arrangements to keep goods and capital flowing and avoid argent bloqué (blocked money). This term refers to money that is not in circulation because it is stuck in cloth that does not sell, because it is either held up at the port or not desired by consumers. The balancing act that Guyer describes extends beyond the rational economic logic supposedly governing exchange in the market. Additionally, it serves to regulate relationships between people and things in bonds of reciprocal 117

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obligation that operate along entirely different spatiotemporal lines and institutions. Solange preferred to work in more established channels to move money around, but her shop was never just a site of pure economic transaction where commodities were exchanged and currencies changed hands. So­ ciality was continuously transacted there, and it had a solid reputation across Togo’s borders. Of course, there was always the risk that a relationship that could not be maintained would lead to a leakage in a trader’s network. Like a container that could only hold so much, the goal for a big trader was to remain well connected and armored against the risks of both bad luck and the vicissitudes of the market. Solange’s position in a market flush with economic crisis had always appeared to be fully fortified, until 2008.10 Solange’s story critically illustrates how what had grounded the Nanas’ continuity—­the relations women had established to secure pattern rights and national protection—­has been disrupted in the neoliberal context. Solange’s heritage position—­her brand value, as it were—­is no longer “honored.” The legacy and power that the first generation of Nana Benz passed on to their daughters and granddaughters has been diminished.11 Pattern rights are no longer based on the colonial-­era relations forged between the first generation of traders and European trading firms. So while the Nana Benz brand retains value for Vlisco as the company is assailed by copies and upstart brands, the returns are no longer the same for the women traders. This is evident in the shift from the colonial/postcolonial patterns of power described in chapter 3 (based on trust, credit, and mutual benefit) to open, neoliberal patterns where women now compete over two-­year pattern rights. Solange represents the extreme case of someone who can no longer make use of her old connections and privileges. Two types of credit-­debt regimes are at work here: concrete, in the balancing act between being flexible and managing formal systems of credit, and symbolic, as Solange’s credit unworthiness no longer generates returns that she can pass on to her daughters.

Changing Patterns Two years later in 2010, I sat in Solange’s living room. In a mix of nostalgia and anger, she spoke about her financial ruination while we flipped through a photo album. When we came across a series of images that depicted scenes of a glamorous dinner party organized by the Vlisco Africa

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Company, she detailed the betrayal of trust she had experienced and that had ultimately led to her downfall. The dinner was an awards event, during which the company presented various prizes for “Best Nana Benz of the Year 2006,” “Fairest Nana,” or “Best Nouveauté” (best novelty) to the best-­performing traders. Vlisco has been organizing such events for several years now as part of a larger attempt to boost performance through reward structures. The most significant of these was the nouveauté distribution system, in which traders compete with one another for a two-­year privilege to exclusive distribution rights over a pattern whose color and design variation they helped create. Among the glitzy images was a group picture of Vlisco’s top ten clients. “You see these two here,” she pointed with her finger, “they are the ones who betrayed me and brought me down . . . they were after my share!” When I asked her to specify what exactly had happened, she explained how she had tried to revive what had worked in the “old system,” when the women made decisions together to solidify their position and to protect their trade. Apparently, the other women just weren’t seeing “how they were being manipulated by the Dutch, moved around like pawns and queens in a chess game,” she said. To use Solange’s chess analogy, it appeared that she was the one being “moved around.” Like many other traders, Solange was frustrated by prices at Vlisco, which increased constantly despite ongoing inflation and crisis. “C’est la crise!” People don’t have the money anymore to afford Vlisco. It’s become a luxury.” Therefore, she attempted to unite top traders to agree to buy only at a certain price. She became the spokesperson for the other women and confronted Vlisco on the assumption that she was being backed up by her peers, whom she trusted “to go on with the boycott.” Meanwhile, the other traders went ahead and fetched their merchandise while Solange’s shop remained empty for the next two weeks. Solange lost more than income from the failed boycott. Her anger was directed as much toward the Dutch, who “broke” her and who made her work “like a slave,” as it was toward the other women who had betrayed her. Things got worse still when rumors about Solange sparked a confidence crisis throughout her network. “They spread lies about me, they were telling the banks that I was broke, that I was no longer in the trade, and they told my clients the same lies . . . that I can’t be trusted!” “Who spread the lies?” I asked. “Those two,” she shot back with her finger pointing at the picture. “I couldn’t get any good cloth anymore, they [Vlisco] gave me the stuff you sit on for weeks and your money is blocked,” she further detailed. “And were you able to sell it?” I inquired.

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“At a huge loss! That’s when I started working with the Chinese. You remember Monsieur Li who used to come to my shop with his samples?” she asked. “Yes, I went to his office a few years back. But I thought he had left?” “True. Before he left, I did a container with him, but when I received the container, the stuff was bad! I couldn’t sell it and lost a lot of money. I took out more loans, mortgaged my house, running around all day trying to make things work until I became ill, very ill.” Misfortune and bad luck had struck Solange. Her illness may have come from exhaustion brought on by the merciless cycle of debt in which she found herself, but it was clear that she had also lost the fortification of her social and political networks as well as faith in the protection of Jesus. “She was no longer herself,” her husband said. Meanwhile, market rumor had it that she was the victim of a bad curse. Jean-­Pierre Warnier’s (2007) account of those who suffer from misfortune and witchcraft in Cameroon is useful here. He distinguishes between two types of people. The first accumulates power like a container and is armored against bad luck through solid connections, including ancestral ones. The second is someone with a curse from a severed relationship, whose container therefore has a leak. Being successful in the market requires being well connected, fortified, and armored (or blindé ) against all kinds of visible and invisible threats. In Togo, the Nana Benz were the quintessential embodiment of just that: a fully connected and armored container with no leaks or potential for breakdown. Although the Nana Benz regularly came under attack by way of witchcraft accusations, their symbolic power and mystique was only reinforced while they were connected to and protected by the dictator himself. Once these connections were severed, the fortified containers began to leak. The corpulent bodies of the first-­generation Nanas did not reflect the neoliberal imperative of circulation, nor the new way of travailler pagne. In a strange refraction of the breakdown of national values, Solange began to get thinner and thinner in her weakened state. Her loss of largesse also diminished her power to give to others in the style of belly politics (Bayart 1989). She could no longer accumulate in the system. Solange’s subsequent exclusion from the market and disappearance from the public sphere was accompanied by further forms of anomie that she experienced in the private sphere of the home, signaled by a return to conventional patrilocality as the dominant mode of matrimonial residence. Financial constraints brought on by her market debt forced Solange to move out of her two-­story villa, with the intention of renting it out, into a small two-­bedroom apartment owned by her husband. In addition, she 120

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had to let go of her car, which she explained, “was constantly breaking down,” and now shared her husband’s Toyota and driver. As a response to the experience of displacement and alienation, Solange turned to a different space, her self. She explained that she had found great comfort by healing her “inner self” through prayer, religious readings, and recitations. Accessing this intimate sphere appeared to offer a form of self-­sovereignty that perhaps replaced those forms of sovereignty she had lost at work. The self-­disciplining rituals of prayer and reading not only punctuated and filled her empty time in meaningful ways but sheltered her from her family’s criticisms and the experience of social anomie. Although her husband mocked her for her godliness, she found piety central—­not merely as a form of Foucauldian self-­discipline or technique of the body but rather as a key mode of reconstitution to rebalance her desires and ambitions. Solange’s painful failure to adequately invest follows her like a curse. But her downfall is also symptomatic of a bigger decline of a postcolonial system and its pillars, including the market monument and the nation it once upheld. The depreciation of national values and the recalibration of relationships between traders, the state, and the market have transformed long-­established patterns of exchange and circulation. In this new context, power cannot be shored up because it must circulate, like Nanettes who travel between factories and shops in China, Southeast Asia, and Togo.

Les Nanettes The Nanette is not quite a Nana, but she has the ambition to accumulate wealth and be rich and powerful like a Nana Benz. To be a Nanette means to not be afraid to take risks, to travel often, and to work several trades at the same time, all in highly flexible ways. Just like the Nana Benz, she is a similarly ingenious arbiter of style and taste who imports new products and transforms Dutch designs. However, the Nanette is not protected by her manufacturer, nor does she benefit from the prestige Dutch wax evokes. Her position is never secure; it remains precarious and linked to short-­term investments. Although the Nanas had long controlled an international trade network that required flexible skills to predict color and design trends across the region or to recuperate credit transnationally from clients, their work was relatively stable, and they traveled only moderately. Their relationships with European distributors and wax cloth manufacturers, albeit now transformed, were previously 121

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established and reliable. The younger Nanette, by contrast, straddles different manufacturers, intervenes in the production process, and travels globally to Shanghai and Guangzhou Province in China, to Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia, and Thailand. Furthermore, she often transacts in more than one product domain. In addition to cloth, a Nanette may import shoes, handbags, jewelry, or other fashion accessories. When speaking to Nanettes about their global travels and how they had first arrived in places like Bangkok or Yiwu, they often referenced personal connections. “I met a manufacturer in Hong Kong who put me in touch with someone in Guangzhou and that person connected me to a factory manager,” one woman specified. Another added, “You have to get to the right people,” and getting to the right person often involved following the tiny streams leading to just that individual. Such capillary interactions can be enormously productive, but they can also ruin a trader precisely because they are both highly individualized and highly provisional. Many Nanettes make their money dealing in copies of Dutch wax made in China. Multiple varieties of copies are available on the market today, and they occupy different value registers depending on the imitation technologies employed and the quality of the materials and colors.12 Early copies were, like fancy prints, mimics purely on the surface with screen-­printed wax crack effects. In fact, since the early 1980s, women traders had already been exploring the potential of global factory floors in Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, which reflected the shift in global textile and clothing production at that time, and later from India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia (Gereffi 1999; Gereffi and Memedovic 2003). These traders, who were excluded from the then-­booming wax-­ cloth business the Nana Benz controlled, and whom we might think of as proto-­Nanettes, imported both clothing and apparel, as well as African print cloth. But the fabrics they sourced were pale imitations of what the Nana Benz traded, circulating in a different regime of value called “imi-­ wax.” Imi-­wax materials are essentially imitations of resin-­resist prints rather than actual wax prints: instead they simulate the appearance of the former with a screen-­printed “bubble” and “crackle” pattern that re­ peats every yard or two. In this way, imi-­wax cloth visually recreates the irregular texture and visual effects of Dutch wax (resin-­resist) printing and dyeing technology. They also imitate Dutch patterns, and in addition to being produced globally, imi-­wax is also manufactured in factories in Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal (see Cassara 1994b; Rabine 2002).13 When global textile production shifted yet again in the 1990s, this 122

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time to Southeast Asia and China, the Nanettes were quick to follow. By reworking the material infrastructure of pagne in China, one such Nanette fashioned herself into a particularly successful entrepreneur. This trader was Antoinette. Antoinette used to be the main wholesaler of damask and lace in Lomé, but like Dutch wax, Swiss damask had become a luxury good for an already minimal market. This Nanette had chosen the path of entrepreneurship and innovation over her previous teaching career in a Lomé primary school. Inadvertently, her teaching skills would become central to her work in the global economy and its imperative of innovation and rapidly changing market-­niche specializations. Antoinette was first connected to East Asian textile firms through a contact she met on business travel in Thailand, who helped her obtain a visa for Hong Kong. In collaboration with textile engineers in Hong Kong, she decided to create copies of the highly regarded but expensive superwax prints by using screen printing to mimic the printing technology of the double-­sided cloth. Superwax was launched in the 1970s and was considered the highest-­ quality print in the Vlisco collection. It featured three colors rather than two, and was popular for its abstract patterns and especially bright and vivacious hues (see plate 5). “When you buy a super, it’s for a very special occasion like when you want to shine and be noticed,” commented a friend’s mother, who had a few select pieces in her wardrobe, “but I haven’t bought a superwax in years, it’s too, too much [expensive]!” Before la dévaluation, superwax was much pricier than regular wax prints were. Nonetheless, until then, most middle-­class women could afford an annual purchase of one or two pieces. Imitations of Dutch superwax did not exist until Antoinette helped produce them. Shot through with new technologies of mimesis, Antoinette’s copies, called “super-­soso” after her daughter Soso, were sold in the Lomé market in 1995 for a fifth of the price of the Dutch originals. Antoinette did not try to pass them off as Vlisco products; she didn’t need to. The fabrics provided a viable alternative for consumers aspiring to be fashionable at a moment when economic and political crisis shaped Togolese everyday life. The flexibility and materiality of the copy excited people’s imaginations and desires to dress in fashions that they had been excluded from since the harsh reality of currency devaluation had hit them. But in 1996, Antoinette was confronted with a significant challenge: A group of Togolese traders had her prints reproduced in India, and counterfeits of super-­ soso fabrics entered the market. These hyper-­counterfeits did not just mimic the design; they also mimicked the super-­soso label. Launching an endless process of copying copies and thus of new temporalities and 123

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volatilities, this instance marked the beginning of the further recalibration of the national marketplace into its current state, flush with copies. Although super-­soso had initially enhanced Antoinette’s entrepreneurial flexibility, the cloth’s own flexibility was now unmaking her trading prowess and market control. After several failed attempts to regain control over the super-­soso market, Antoinette abandoned it and decided to focus her energies on new opportunities. To do so, she took her own initiative and made use of the relationships she had cultivated. It was during one of her regular business trips to Honk Kong in the late 1990s when Antoinette met the manager of a textile manufacturer from Shanghai. Antoinette had heard rumors about the growing textile printing and dyeing technology in China’s Shandong Province, and she was especially drawn to the potential and economic promise of this new technology. Back in Togo a few months later with an invitation from her Shanghai contact in hand, she arranged for a visa at the Chinese embassy. By early 2000, she was sitting at the Shanghai office of the group Auden. The company’s head manager, whom Antoinette referred to as Mr. Chang, was himself a former textile engineer who had spent many years in West Africa working for the Hong Kong–­based company Cha Chi Ming (CHA Textiles).14 The group CHA has owned several textile factories in Nigeria and Ghana since the 1960s, and Mr. Chang had worked at both Nichemtex in Nigeria and Akosombo Textiles Ltd. (ATL) in Ghana. In addition to overseeing wax cloth production at these two factories during the 1990s, he also spent time in Manchester where CHA had acquired the historic wax print manufacturer ABC.15 In short, this textile engineer had solid knowledge of the wax printing and dyeing manufacturing process. When Antoinette first met Mr. Chang in Shanghai, Auden’s production process was still in its initial stages. Mr. Chang was working with a team of engineers to develop new machinery while also working on color technology. He showed her several fabric samples, but Antoinette was not impressed. “The colors weren’t right,” she recalled, adding that, in her opinion, the designs were not precise and the cotton was too thick. Nonetheless, Antoinette immediately recognized the technical quality of the fabric. She had been in many salesrooms and on many factory floors over the years, but she had never come across what she called “real wax.” What she meant was that the sample she was shown was not produced by screen-­printing or roller-­printing technology, as with imi-­wax prints or the notorious super-­soso; instead, the resin-­resist printing technique appeared to approximate the now ancient copper-­engraved printing and dying technology that the Dutch and the British employed. 124

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What set the Dutch wax print apart from its screen-­printed copy is technology and texture. Screen-­printing technology at its best can create the visual effect of the imprinted designs, but it cannot create the textural depth of authentic resin-­resist printing and dyeing technology. As described in chapter 2, Dutch wax-­printing technology involves a complex process of printing patterns on resin, immersing the cloth in indigo vats, using cracking machinery to remove excess resin, and then manually blocking up to three different colors (two for wax block prints and three for superwax prints). Despite their “faulty” colors and patterns, the fabric samples Antoinette was presented with in Shanghai did appear to have that deep, textured level that she had not come across in Dubai, Bangkok, or Hong Kong. By recognizing what set these samples apart, Antoinette had also discovered a key aspect that characterizes the authenticity of real wax. Like many Nanettes, she took matters into her own hands by deciding to become involved in the copy production process once more. She knew that she was on to a material that had great potential, but she also knew that realizing it would take hard work and time. The power of the copy, as we will also see in the next chapter, is not only that it holds power over the original but that it creates something new. As Taussig (1993, xiii), drawing on Walter Benjamin, points out, “The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.” While this applies to the copied cloth itself, the same could be said for the Nanettes. Indeed, Nanettes have fashioned themselves in the form of a Nana, yet they have also turned into something different that also influences the original.

Designing “Consumer Democratization” into Cloth Antoinette’s response to her discovery demonstrates another characteristic of the Nanette figure: investment in her own ingenuity. Antoinette was determined to do whatever it took to turn the samples into something great. A lengthy trial and error process ensued, and Antoinette spent several weeks in Shandong Province on Auden production floors assisting Mr. Chang and his team in the manufacture of “Guaranteed Real Wax Auden” (see figure 4.1). The name of the product she helped coproduce for Auden was called “Mondial wax” (global wax). To design a desirable fabric with the right bundle of qualities, Antoinette took on the additional role of fashion pedagogue as she had done previously during the fabrication of her super-­soso fabrics. This was no easy task. 125

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Antoinette had to, in her words, “teach the Chinese about African taste.” She recalled how difficult it was at times to communicate African concerns with color and quality. In fact, much of her initial pedagogical work with Mr. Chang’s team reminded her of an earlier experience in Hong Kong a few years prior when she was working on an imi-­wax product: “The finishing of their fabrics was dumpy. . . . It was glossy and cheap looking. They didn’t understand that Africans like the finishing being matte. . . . The fabrics were stiff and they had a taste of salt. I had to teach them everything, and together we made samples over and over again until c’était bon. At the beginning they just couldn’t understand that Africans really care for quality . . . that quality is as important as the design of the fabric.” The process of making the Mondial wax product was laborious and hampered by frequent misconceptions and miscommunications. Besides the material concerns with dye and finishing, Antoinette also translated for the Chinese what she called “African values”: a complex concern with style, aesthetics, quality, and the body. For Antoinette, the most challenging task by far was getting the Chinese manufacturer to understand the materiality of the cloth, namely its sensorial properties and ability to work as a “second skin”—­how it feels, smells, and how it interacts with the body. The technological dimensions of translation added further compli­ cations. Antoinette vividly recalls the frustration she experienced while teaching textile composition to her Chinese manufacturing partners. “They just didn’t understand that design precision and backdrop composition mattered.” For weeks, she worked with various textile engineers and designers, who created both copies and original designs inspired by Dutch patterns. Antoinette did not limit herself to designing, but also helped with “getting the texture right.” At first, she explained, the cotton seemed unmalleable, too thick and “starchy.” She had great difficulty convincing her Chinese interlocutors that the fabric’s surface mattered, because “it has to flow on the body, adapt to the shape of the body!” Antoinette knew that Mondial’s potential in the West African market hinged on the sensorial surface properties of the cloth—­color, brilliance, and design sharpness—­that spoke to African concerns with form, body, and aesthetics. Like the first-­generation Nana Benz who possessed a particular “eye for pagnes,” Antoinette felt equally at home creating fabric patterns, predicting fashion trends, and making business deals. Her technological skill and ability to tap into crucial elements of design, taste, and technical production allowed Antoinette to bypass the Vlisco-­style multilevel marketing structure and control many aspects of production

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4.1  Advertisement by Chinese manufacturer Auden featuring a copy of Vlisco pattern

14/0663. Photo by author.

and distribution herself, making her a signature example of the type of entrepreneurial activity practiced by many Nanettes. At last, Antoinette experienced success. The new imitation technology she helped refine in partnership with Chinese textile engineers provided a solid alternative to the superior Dutch original, thereby establishing a crucial link to the symbolic economies of fashion and distinction in which Togolese consumers have long-­standing social investments. As the first Chinese-­made wax print that technologically approximated the superior original, Mondial wax offered consumers the potential for ambiguity that the obvious mimicry of previous imitations had failed to achieve. Mondial presented the potential to blur long-­held social boundaries and sumptuary regimes, and thus to democratize the consumption of Dutch wax. In 2001, Mondial arrived in Lomé as the first Chinese wax

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print to enter the market. Thousands upon thousands of yards of cloth were soon available to consumers in Togo, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria for a fourth of the cost of the Dutch fabric. Despite their low price, the Mondial wax prints generated immense profits for Chinese manufacturers. The repercussions of Antoinette’s successful creation of Mondial wax was that the Nana Benz blamed her for killing their market by invading it with copies, and they denounced her as a ruthless, cheating trader. An­ toinette, by contrast, insisted that times had changed and that the era when only a small handful of traders could control the wax-­print market was over. She defended herself by claiming that she brought about a form of “consumer democratization” to Togo. After all, “that’s why we did ‘le movement démocratique’ [the democracy movement] . . . finally everybody can dress in wax. China wax is beautiful!” Traders like Antoinette work the qualia of the copy—­its texture, color, and smell—­to enhance its sensuous and aesthetic modalities. This is what she had to teach the Chinese producers to achieve. In helping to reengineer cloth’s materiality, the hyper-­counterfeiting Nanettes are doing more than producing false images that betray consumers; they are also fabricating, if not co-­constituting, its enchanting effects. The material efficacy of the copy is realized when it enchants the consumer; it seduces the senses, just like the original does, but all the while offering a different kind of potential and magicality that women like Belinda, whom we met in chapter 1, can tap into when convincingly put to work. At the same time, its sensuous excess and bundled texture can betray the woman when not properly appropriated in practices of status emulation. Clearly, the materiality and visuality of the copy has its own ability to animate people and things when it takes on a life of its own beyond the control of consumers and traders like Antoinette. This soon became the case with the product Antoinette had worked so meticulously; the cloth’s qualities of smoothness and fungibility became the very characteristics that eventually allowed Mondial wax to move into markets beyond her influence. Barely a year later, the Mondial wax boom ended. Realizing the market potential for Mondial copies, Antoinette’s Chinese manufacturer expanded its customer network throughout West Africa. The manufacturer sold the same color combinations of the classical Dutch designs that Antoinette had helped produce to other traders, who bypassed her and imported containers directly to Lomé and Cotonou for re-­exportation. The problem was that “these Chinese devils,” as Antoinette called them, sold containers of the same product at different prices throughout the region, disrupting local market mechanisms and increasing competition. 128

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Antoinette was overrun by the neoliberal market itself—­a market that she had helped to bring to Togo and that she had praised to her fellow Togolese for its ability to bring about a form of consumer equality. Here the Nanette becomes the subject of Chinese rules, if not of neo­ liberal transactions and market norms. While these women traders are subjects who are acted upon, and certainty do not control global commodity flows, they significantly shape their inception. Antoinette’s trajectory illuminates broader processes and moves beyond a static conceptualization of the relationship between the local, the national, or the global, thus exemplifying that scale is always emergent and contingent. Although Antoinette could not keep her innovation, claimed by the Chinese manufacturer, she found another producer. Today, she continues to create various adaptations of Dutch designs that she distributes under her own label. She makes monthly trips to Guangzhou to supervise the production process. But the risks of someone else claiming ownership to her designs, or of receiving faulty merchandise that cannot be returned, remain high.

Moving Cloth, Shaping Entrepreneurial Flexibilities Antoinette’s pioneering entrepreneurial trajectory exemplifies how traders make themselves flexible economic subjects through distinctive elements of discovery, innovation, cultural knowledge, and technological expertise. As Nanettes move themselves and cloth, we see a more intimate regime of valuation catapulted into a regime of mass consumption and circulation. To successfully transact and navigate an economic regime based on time-­space compression (Harvey 1990), where profit is made from the speed of copying and moving goods across continents, requires more than the ability to take risks. It requires what Carla Freeman (2007, 252), in her work on women entrepreneurs in Barbados, has described as the capacity for “individual movement, ingenuity, performance, and self-­invention.” In short, it demands a calculating, self-­maximizing, and enterprising neoliberal subject (N. Rose 2006). Yet in the case of Togolese Nanettes, these are not individuals who are disembedded from the particulars of culture (and cloth); the kind of free-­floating market subjects that scholars of neoliberalism have long described as ideal subjects (Giddens 1994); nor is their flexible subjectivity constituted in relation to neoliberal governmentality (Kanna 2010; Ong 2006). Rather, Nanettes cultivate distinct dispositions vis-­à-­vis the logic of time-­space compression and fashion themselves entrepreneurially through the flexibility of 129

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cloth. At the same time, Nanettes cleverly insert themselves into the corporate logic of the Togolese state rather than being produced by it, much like the Nana Benz did under the colonial and postcolonial regimes of governance but without the official regulatory framework of the state. As Freeman reminds us, however, “there is no ‘absolute reign’ of flexi­ bility disengaged from the particular of culture” (2007, 262). In fact, in Togo we can see an implicit connection between women’s fashion and the self-­fashioning of women entrepreneurs. Nanettes work their entrepreneurial strategies similar to the ways in which women dress their bodies to assert public visibility and agencies in a public sphere, which, although liberalized, has provided few prospects for women in civil society. Hence, fashion and trade are prime arenas for women to claim a place in public life. This was certainly the case for Blessing, who had crafted herself into a successful textile entrepreneur and market figure. When I first met her in 2000, she was dealing in gold jewelry out of an open-­air market stall shaded by umbrellas. But in the span of only ten years, she had become a major Nanette in the market. Blessing expanded her first boutique by leasing space from her neighbors, eventually taking over several indoor shops. Today, she runs three big shops and manages numerous employees. Highly entrepreneurial, Blessing distributes several kinds of African prints through her own labels, even selling a few bales of Vlisco here and there; however, she obtains the majority of her wealth through the sale of copies of popular Dutch designs. Blessing and Antoinette became traders at the critical juncture of state-­market transformation and shifts in sovereignty that made the Lomé port a new site of power and China a major investor and partner in trade.16 However, in the context of the state’s retreat from the organization of the national economy and the transformation of government into business, the Nanettes’ value and power are still being assessed. This is perhaps most evident in the Lomé port zone, where Nanettes must make use of personal networks to keep their goods moving. Each month, several hundred containers filled with counterfeit and imitation goods transition through the Lomé free port, where state, accredited, and private freight agents as well as hundreds of informal brokers negotiate the terms of customs clearance. This has become an especially complex affair since 2005, when the Multi-Fibre Arrangement was lifted and the Lomé port became a key entry point for Chinese textiles and apparel that soon flooded West African markets. To have a container cleared can take anywhere from a few hours to one or two months; the goods must pass various forms of inspection and customs technicalities, whose efficacy depends on the network the port broker is able to mobilize. Nanettes 130

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like Blessing have enriched themselves by cleverly tapping into the port’s new selectivity, while others struggle for access or were simply put off by what Solange called the “hassle of the port.” Nanettes are flexible in ways that cloth cannot be when it is stuck in a container at the port. A trader’s ability to have a container cleared in a few hours is what makes or breaks her career. Women like Blessing, who at peak moments can import up to ten containers per month, hedge high risks. “You can’t have your container stuck at the port,” explained Blessing. “You lose money each minute!” In these transactions, cloth loses its material flexibility. Part of the power of the copy and its material qualities are tied to its temporality. Copies have to move quickly to generate value, partially because their value is extracted from their relative firstness and innovativeness on markets assailed by Chinese upstart brands. If cloth’s smoothness has patterned entrepreneurial flexibilities and subjectivities, in port transactions it loses the kind of agency traders mobilize through personal networks and heterogeneous assemblages. Moving containers quickly out of port administration requires the intervention of at least one well-­connected agent who can navigate the temporalities and volatility of port bureaucracy and its governing regimes. The networks can be especially difficult to penetrate without the aid of an insider. Blessing’s husband is one of several hundred freight agents who cleverly works the technicalities and networks of the port infrastructure. But Blessing has also lost money at the port. Once a container was confiscated, and even her husband was not well connected enough to unblock it. The Nana Benz never dealt with customs regimes at the port, which was the domain of European trading firms and a sector that was gendered male. As importers, the Nanettes have penetrated the masculine port structure by proxy: Some are married to freight agents or customs officers, while others are involved in romantic relationships with port brokers, customs agents, or freight agents. “He assists me getting my con­ tainers out,” the mistress (deuxième bureau) of a wealthy customs officer told me. “It can be a real hassle otherwise!” Another was the girlfriend of a powerful broker who worked as a customs officer’s invisible hand. This is a common practice in the Lomé port. Official agents subcontract their work to brokers, building a complex infrastructure and hierarchy of port agents that operates on the margins of the law. Similar parallel structures have multiplied throughout Togo in the absence of a state regulatory regime acting as an official frame for trading interactions. This trader’s boyfriend was part of one such intricate network that allowed him to effectively push what is called a “dossier” (the papers necessary 131

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to clear containers) through the complex in/formal cost structure of port bureaucracy. For example, the fees that official and unofficial agents impose for various bureaucratic procedures involving stamps and signatures can fluctuate within a single day. “If you want your container out quickly, you have to cash out more. It’s simple math,” a broker explained. A private transitaire (freight agent) with whom I spoke about transaction costs acknowledged that a series of strategies, including so-­called faux frais (a nontaxable “gray category”), are available to reduce costs. But he also noted that “le système doesn’t always work; sometimes you have to pay full and more.” Nanettes have become subjects of neoliberal norms and rules, yet they also deflect control by constantly moving themselves, anticipating how production constantly changes in response to the continued circulation of capital. With direct flights from Lagos and Accra to Guangzhou, Nanettes like Antoinette and Blessing no longer fly via Dubai, where they previously stopped for a day or two to scout and source products in order to inspect production. From Guangzhou, for example, Blessing continues her voyage on a short flight to Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province, where she sources jewelry and sometimes handbags. Yiwu, also known as China’s “Commodity City,” was born out of 1980s government incentives to assemble the country’s commodities in a single place; today it is composed of several specialized commodity markets that extend over nearly one mile (Bodomo 2010). With about 60,000 factories offering the cheapest products (Yeebo 2013, 75), China’s Guangdong Province became particularly attractive to Nanettes in the mid-­2000s. Guangdong Province is situated close to Guangzhou, where a large West African trade population between 20,000 and 100,000 has established business networks that include everything from money transfers to shipping (Yeebo 2013, 78). Senegalese and Nigerian agencies take new entrepreneurs to various production locations and organize the handling of orders, helping with the logistics of sourcing and shipping. According to Marfaing and Thiel (2011), West African forwarding agents in Guangzhou and Yiwu handle up to 100 containers every month. Blessing indeed had worked with a Senegalese agent whom she referred to as her “brother” when she first started buying in Guangzhou and Yiwu. “It was convenient at the beginning,” she said. But she was quick to organize her affairs on her own once she had figured out how “things operate over there.” As Nanettes move themselves and cloth in and out of Chinese commodity zones and factory floors, they do not only appropriate neoliberal logics, but they also mobilize an autonomous set of practices and subjectivities through their innovative involvement with open-­source 132

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design and production. In fact, traders like Antoinette expertly use their knowledge about the qualia of cloth and West African fashion tastes to commission and work the material properties of Chinese cloth. As Antoinette and Blessing tap into these special economic zones and Chinese factory floors, they similarly and selectively use entrepreneurial logics in the Togolese port zone. On the one hand, the urban port enclave is increasingly more foreign than national; no longer building the national economy, the privatized port instead serves the interest of global capital. On the other hand, the networks inside the port are composed of heterogeneous public-­private assemblages, where customs officers make illegal deals with private brokers, subcontracting and outsourcing the work of the state informally. The Nanettes, who must negotiate with customs agents and manage the movement of their containers at the port, construct themselves as innovative, flexible entrepreneurs with the power to brand and control—­at least to some degree—­the circulation of cloth. For Carla Freeman (2007) the localized logic of “reputational flexi­ bility” converges with the global logic of neoliberal flexibility in the en­ trepreneurial styles of upwardly mobile Barbadian women. Following Harvey (2005), Freeman considers the Barbadian woman entrepreneur as the “quintessential” neoliberal actor (2007, 252). She argues that the women entrepreneurs actively shape their own subjectivities through creative economic practices, thus inscribing neoliberal flexibility with particular cultural meanings. Similarly, Nanettes fashion their entrepreneurial strategies and subjectivities in the Lomé port and on Chinese factory floors in ways that are neither exclusively engineered by the Togolese state nor by Chinese trade imperatives; rather, they are at least in part individually developed by the women themselves and the dense ma­ teriality of the cloth.

Moral Economies As people’s everyday lives have been shaped by new regimes of political and economic subjectification over the past twenty years, representations of power and success have also changed. In a context of deprivation and dispossession, many women still aspire to hyper-­accumulate and become powerful and rich like a Nana Benz, but the neoliberal subjectivities that underwrite people’s ways of being in the world are no longer based on social capital, genealogy, and class. Instead, these idealized subjects depend on the cultivation and affirmation of a self detached from old hierarchies and modes of subjectification (Banégas and 133

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Warnier 2001). This form of self-­fashioning is partially realized in the practical agility displayed by successful Nanettes to work global trade and financial flows. Solange, for example, spoke of the Nanettes’ success with envy and admiration. In acknowledging their ingenuity and hard labor, she confessed, “They are moving fast, and they are working all the time,” but somehow not slaving, as she views her own labor. Without the exclusive contracts and monopolistic control over patterns that their forerunners possessed, the Nanettes depend on high-­volume, high-­turnover trade to generate wealth. In short, this new generation of Togolese women traders produces itself in the new global economy and succinctly embodies its neoliberal values of unfettered access to the free market. Some traders of the old generation, however, are resentful of the Nanettes’ prosperity, which they suspect may be of dubious origin. As a trader of the old guard remarked, “These girls go to China only once or twice, they know nothing about cloth and trade, they don’t come from trading families, nobody has ever seen them in the Grand Marché, and yet immediately after they return from China they construct fancy villas, they purchase BMWs . . . the money can’t possibly come from the sales of Chinese fabrics.” The unspoken subtext of this quotation is suggestive. Is it that the Nanettes sell themselves? Do they engage in the black market? Or do they sell out in other ways? The mistrust expressed by this trader points at a negative value—­the assumed illegality of these women’s activities, which led to sudden fame and riches. If the money cannot come from the imported cloth, she reasons, then wealth can only be gained through dishonesty or conjured up by trickery and secrecy, thereby producing negative social relations. Ferguson reminds us how “the production of wealth . . . is understood to be inseparable from the production of social relations” (2006, 72). In neoliberal times, when wealth disparities have spiraled and inequalities are increasingly polarized, there is confusion about what is valued socially and what constitutes appropriate forms of accumulation. During the prime of the Nana Benz’s influence, ideas about legitimate accumulation were often linked to representations of power. This is especially true vis-­à-­vis women’s economic power today. For women traders, a material culture of success has become current again, but it is now associated with a different set of negative values, including Chinese drug trafficking and sexual immorality. The imputed ill-­gotten prosperity of the Nanettes to which Solange alluded is a case in point. Some were rumored to have illegitimate relationships with customs’ officers, while others linked the Nanette to political power. One trader told me that her 134

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own niece was one of the many girlfriends of the president—­whereby she implicitly suggested that Faure Gnassingbé himself supported her niece’s China trade. In their work on figures of success and power in contemporary Africa, Richard Banégas and Jean-­Pierre Warnier (2001) argue that the present moment has brought about an inversion of role models whereby religious figures, musicians, athletes, and savvy entrepreneurs have come to embody the new models of success. These figures have displaced postcolo­ nial authoritarian elites to provide a new aspirational model for the disenfranchised. By conspicuously exteriorizing their excessive wealth, they send the message that success and prosperity are indeed possible in times of economic hardship. The Nanette certainly is one such figure; the materiality of her success is visibly solidified in the BMW and grandiose villa. Yet in the eyes of the Nanas and the public alike, the figure of the Nanette is ambiguously evaluated. As self-­enterprising individuals whose primary commitment appears to be maximizing their own gain, they are simultaneously deemed corrupt, amoral, and worthy of emulation. Female virtue, wealth, and transnational trade powerfully come to­ gether in the new social imaginaries that have accompanied recent political and economic changes. A distinctly moral view of individual wealth accumulation both reveals and mediates Togolese ambiguities regarding transforming gender ideologies, entrepreneurial practices, and representations of power. Sexual morality constitutes one such regulatory regime whereby the oblique prosperity of the Nanette is attached to an ostensibly dangerous eater, the witch, who illegitimately accumulates through sex. During their heyday, the Nana Benz were also associated with witch power and rumored to cultivate money-­spitting snakes in their uteruses, as we saw in chapter 3. Instead of growing children, the Nana Benz grew money; their economic power allowed them to “eat” like men in the familiar trope of belly governmentality (Bayart 1989). The Nana Benz were rumored to take on lovers and gigolos much like men take on multiple spouses in the widely practiced customary regime of polygamy as a form of power. The Nanettes, on the other hand, depend on lovers to grow their business—­for example, by helping them navigate the bureaucracy and temporalities of customs regimes at the port. The Nanettes’ lack of appropriate reputation, as well as their lack of social and cultural capital, appears not to be a problem in the neoliberal market to which the old elite accuses them of having sold out. The figure of the Nanette contributes to the recalibration of the national marketplace by using channels and networks that appear more secretive, or perhaps even exploitative and destructive, but traders of the old guard 135

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are hard-­pressed to compete and uphold their heritage positions. In the past, the Nana Benz was similarly cast as a selfish, profiteering capitalist who produced wealth through illegitimate means rather than honest work. Yet the kinds of tensions, forms of competition, and foreign actors the Nanettes’ work introduced necessitated distinct fortifications. Perhaps, as the trader’s quotation suggests, the new age requires new kinds of witch power.

China-­in-­Africa Blessing’s and Antoinette’s experiences complicate the dominant narrative by which we expect China to arrive in Africa. As elsewhere in Africa, China has not manifested ex nihilo in Togo. China’s official relationship to Togo goes back to the early 1970s, when diplomatic connections were established and made visible through monumental construction projects such as stadiums, hospitals, and conference buildings. Starting in the 1990s, the two countries strengthened their financial ties by entering into a series of trade agreements. In the past decade, however, China’s presence has become much more visible in the everyday lives of Togolese as China’s economic engagement with Africa in general has witnessed explosive growth. As Deborah Bräutigam (2011, 310) reminds us, “China-­ in-­ Africa” is many things: “touring presidents delivering grand promises for partnership, provincial companies with very long names . . . factory managers demanding long hours of work, tough businesswomen, scrap metal buyers, traders.” This is not the result of a linear story of progressive phases, as much of the political economy literature leads us to believe.17 Instead, the Togolese story reveals a highly ambiguous account flush with contradictory logics and provisional designs, and of China’s involvement in the process of creating and circulating the fabrics. The introduction of the first copies required the expertise of Antoinette, who had already been working with East Asian manufacturers for a decade, and who pioneered Chinese wax in Togo. But much macrolevel analysis of China-­in-­Africa tends either to overlook the more intimate encounters of this story, as exemplified in Antoinette’s work, or else reify them as representations of an invasion of a foreign economic structure with a focus on resource extraction and the politics of energy, trade, investment, and aid (see Broadman and Isik 2006). Policy-­oriented debates about what has been coined the “New Scramble for Africa” occur in think-­tank and governmental circles. This literature tends to portray China-­Africa relations as 136

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the new axis of South-­South interaction, exploitation, and cultural politics, using language strikingly similar to a discourse of penetration. The stories of Togolese Nanettes foreground the intimacy of this encounter. Their accounts nuance macroeconomic discourses of fear and attraction promoted by alarmist images of Chinese cloth flooding African markets at the same time as African textile mills have been forced to scale back, if not close altogether. The contrasting entrepreneurial styles of the Nanas and the Nanettes, when seen in the context of wider political and economic changes, illuminate the complexities engendered by the introduction of new players in the neoliberal era. In the Togolese market, the national prestige of Chinese manufacturers is both overdetermined in macroeconomic, infrastructural terms and undermined by their lack of cultural capital, given that they have to produce copies under the authorship of traders like Antoinette. This recalls the relationship the Nana Benz and the women traders before them had with the Dutch manufacturers in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In many ways, Antoinette is a super-­Nanette, a pioneer of China-­in-­Africa very different from the perceptions that the Nana Benz have of the Nanettes. What it means to be a trader—­and thus, by extension, what it takes to be entrepreneurial—­is indeed changing. But as demonstrated throughout this book, in Togo women have long dressed themselves in the public sphere through trade and display, leveraging different forms of agency. If the Nana Benz leveraged political agency and crafted a lineage for their daughters, the Nanettes similarly leverage their economic agency to create viable futures for their daughters. Even younger traders in the market now aspire to the kind of flexibility Blessing and Antoinette model—­ that is, the capacity to adapt to ever-­changing economic opportunities and the ability to switch from one market segment to another. Yet the traders’ flexibility is both predicated on and restricted by the material characteristics of cloth and the power of the copy. As Nanettes tinker with cloth design, engineering copies and a new regime of mass consumption and circulation, they unmake a more intimate regime of valuation tied to the fixity of value, the nation, and the Nana Benz. And while the material efficacy of copied cloth creates new possibilities for consumers and traders, it also generates moral anxieties about the value of “true” and “faux” copies. The next chapter describes how Togolese navigate this new regime of value as they experience “China” on their dressed bodies, and the crises of signification induced by the neoliberal recalibration of economy and subjectivity alike.

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Dangerous Copies: Old Value Systems in a New Economy In June 2004, a rumor circulated on the streets of Lomé and in the Grand Marché insinuating that dressing up in Chi­­ nese fabrics could be dangerous. Although I had come across many stories suggesting the multiple risks and threats asso­ ciated with China’s increased presence in Togo since the be­­ ginning of my research in Lomé in 2000, the story of two sisters “burning almost to death” in Chinese knockoff fab­ rics was unmatched. Consider this version retold to me by Rose, a jewelry wholesaler in the market. Two young women were spotted in the market section where mostly copies of Dutch wax cloth are sold. The sisters had a specific pattern in mind when entering the market; they were looking for the current best-­seller, a fabric called “La Famille” (the fam­ ily), to wear at an upcoming social event. Following the pur­­ chase of twelve yards of a Chinese copy of the then trend­­ ing Dutch design, the women immediately took their pagne to their tailor, who transformed the cloth into two match­ ing outfits. The next day, the sisters dressed up in their styl­ ish garments and departed for their cousin’s baptism party. A neighbor spotted their departure and deduced that, be­ cause they were running late, they had decided to take a zemidjan, a taxi-­motorcycle, for faster transport instead of a regular taxi. As their zemidjan traveled through the differ­ ent neighborhoods, the women’s fashionable bodies were exposed to the gaze of the city and remarked upon by a 138

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num­ber of spectators. They had almost reached their final destination when a speeding motorcycle passed them. A spectacular accident hap­ pened at this point: Rumor had it that the motorcycle was going so fast that small flames fired from its exhaust pipe and instantly caught onto the women’s colorful clothes. A couple of sparks were sufficient for the Chinese fabrics to catch fire, and within a few seconds, they “burned like timber,” Rose said with dramatic affect. Several versions of this story circulated in Lomé’s Grand Marché dur­ ing that summer. One rumor emphasized the dangerous agentive qual­ ity of the Chinese copies, namely their corrupted materiality. The cloth’s instant flammability had allegedly jeopardized the lives of the sisters, who in one version of the rumor were said to have died on the spot, and in other versions they were said to have merely suffered from slight burns. It is not the truth of  these rumors that interests me here, or whose strategic effort it was to set them in motion, but rather what these stories reveal about the social and economic ambiguities of the neoliberal pres­ ent in the context of a shifting politics of value associated with Chinese market activity. The multiplicity of neoliberal forces that appeared to un­­ fix and recalibrate the national marketplace in chapter 4 resurface here, this time as a more immediate sensory threat. These stories about flammable cloth dramatically illustrate the power of the copy and the complex work it performs in people’s everyday lives. It can enchant and seduce consumers with its bright colors and sheen while undoing a person’s ability to discern and establish its true charac­ ter, thus compromising the making of the public self. The sisters knew they were buying Chinese knockoffs because they could not afford the Dutch cloth. What they did not know, however, is that what appeared to be an “authentic” copy, which is a copy that does not conceal its true character or change its materiality, was in fact a faux copy. Its true value was only revealed after the fact, following the act of purchase and when animated on the dressed body. Instead of underpinning the sister’s sar­ torial projects to enlarge their public visibility at their cousin’s baptism, the cloth sabotaged their undertaking. By contrast, true copies, when properly tamed and animated through bodily technique, provide the po­ tential for status emulation and thus the power to enhance a woman’s public appearance. As we saw in chapter 1, a woman’s reputation is always on the line, especially during the kind of life-­cycle event the sisters were about to attend, where women’s styled appearances are evaluated on a public stage. Women read one another’s pagne, identifying its place in a hierarchy of  value denoted by origin and quality. The old system of rank­ ing cloth and women’s embodied performances, however, has become 139

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more complex and increasingly elusive with the proliferation of ever-­ new copies, from fine to mundane, that puzzle consumers and specta­ tors alike with the unanswerable question of their material worth. Authentic, or true, copies are considered tsivi (small pagne) while fake copies are kpayo, false and counterfeit. Until the late 1990s, the bound­ aries between what Togolese considered to be of small (tsivi) and big (tsigan) value were clearly defined, despite the availability of imi-­wax mate­ rials from the 1980s onward. Tsivi materials, whether their designs were original or imitations produced in West African (Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin), Indian, Pakistani, or Southeast Asian production floors, were never identified as fake or as deceiving, partially because their circulation was controlled. Thus standing in clear relation to the superior original, they were not considered inauthentic or illegitimate in the sense that they did not threaten to unhinge the system of evaluation based on the ranking on a common scale. Like the new “true” Chinese copies—­ sometimes called chivi (small Chinese)—­the authorized copy did not pre­ tend to be the real thing or attempt to conceal its origin of production or history of circulation. Mondial wax is a case in point. In this process, copies reinforced what Simmel called the “attraction of the genuine” (1950, 343), and its “genuine fakeness” reinforced the “uniqueness of the original” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 13). Savvy consumers could eas­ ily identify the material value of the cloth, its secondness or thirdness, upon touching the fabric, if they could not tell its qualitative inferiority from its image. As socially certified copies, tsivi essentially worked to re­ inforce the place and value of tsigan, the superior original in the Simme­ lian sense. Similarly, true millennial China copies are socially legitimate because their materiality can be established sensorially (hence, they are tsivi), while fakes deceive the senses, exceeding the human sensorium as it were. Building on Taussig’s work on mimicry—­namely, the copy’s power to influence the original—­combined with the new literature on counterfeit brands (Nakassis 2013; Newell 2012) and neoliberal crisis in the African postcolony (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Piot 2010), this chapter es­ tablishes how different regimes of value are re/made by cloth. The sen­ suous particularities of cloth, which are tactile, visual, and affectively charged, create a sensory context within which subjects not only act, but are also acted upon as we have seen throughout this book. Because cloth sits on the surface of the body and works as a social, even a national, skin, it is especially powerful. This chapter considers how the Nanettes and their involvement with Chinese copying of Dutch patterns and pro­ d­­uction strategies has thrown this intimate regime of value and valuation 140

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into disarray. By showing the effects of this transformation, which has catapulted the old system of value into a regime of mass consumption and circulation, the chapter argues that the destabilizing influence of Chinese copies threatens to undo the knowledge systems of taste, sight, smell, and tactility that have long acted as authenticating arbiters of value in Togo. When consumers have to heighten their sensory register in response to the different and hard-­to-­detect qualities of the copied (copy of a copy of a copy) and noncopied cloth, different forms of agency and qualities come into play, including the combined agency of persons and material things. As women have to sharpen their senses, the agency of consumers at times conforms to the qualities of cloth. Consumers at­ tempt to navigate between unreliable (faux) and reliable (good) copies, but traders and textile companies also intervene in the crisis of value: Na­ nettes create upstart brands by claiming the heritage of the Nana Benz, while the Dutch company Vlisco creates “True Originals.” The story of the burned fabric powerfully points to the (potentially) dangerous materiality of the Chinese knockoff on the one hand and women’s desire for aesthetic expression through affordable fashion on the other. Although consumers willingly buy copies in lieu of the real thing—­ which people can no longer afford in the aftermath of currency devalu­ ation, state collapse, and a generalized breakdown in value registers—­ Togolese are suspicious about these new materials and their strange “phenomenology of value” (Apter 2005). The rumors about the two sis­ ters and the dangerously fallible Chinese cloth illustrate the conflation of invisible power with a concrete and ordinary object. The recent upsurge in the seemingly endless variety of good, bad, faux, and evil copies has dramatically impacted the lives of Togolese, thereby uncovering ongoing anxieties over what is hidden and indiscernible by mere sight as once-­ stable signs are disrupted and unfixed. The Togolese crisis in conceptions of value that has coalesced around the notion of fake also reveals the temporality of uncertainty: True and false values are exposed only after the fact of transaction, at which point the cloth becomes worthless or faux. With seemingly all registers of value in flux, anxieties over material purchases whose real value may only be revealed after the moment of transaction have come to define how Togolese have experienced recent neoliberal shifts in political and eco­ nomic values. Crises of the political and the economic, as an important body of Africanist scholarship has shown (Roitman 2005; Guyer 2004 Weiss 2004), frequently bring on a crisis of meaning and collective repre­­ sentations: Signs and referents appear disconnected from one another or somehow inappropriately match. By looking at commodities as central 141

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markers of everyday life, this chapter explores the hidden texts, mean­ ings, encounters, and objects of China-­in-­Africa to unpack how and why new dynamics of concealment have come to conjure a crisis in significa­ tion in the everyday realities of Togolese consumers. At times assessed as fake, deceptive, and even dangerous and enchanting, I explore how value hides in plain sight. Struggles over its production and circulation bring about a crisis of signification that manufacturers, traders, and consum­ ers try to negotiate by bringing notions of heritage, ownership, and au­ thenticity back into the global marketplace. Who controls the means of production, and thus the commodity form and its new magic? Who has the power to reveal or mislead? And how does this new type of copy shape how Togolese think and act in this world of reassembled commodities? Although previous theories about mass production, commodity signi­­ fication, exchange, and material culture (Adorno 1991; Benjamin [1936] 1969) offer important insights into these questions, they miss thinking through the productive dimensions of how capitalism generates itself through a crisis of excess produced by the circulation of copies, pirates, and counterfeits as well as original goods (Nakassis 2013). Copies per­ form complex work in an era when pirated goods traveling across global consumer markets can often be accessed more quickly and cheaply than authentic products. The persistent presence of a variety of copied goods both troubles and reinforces the authority of the real in the politics of contemporary everyday life.

Copies That Deceive Little can be taken for granted in postmillennial Togo. Each year thou­ sands of containers filled with counterfeit goods transition through the Lomé port, traveling on to both twilight and official markets and into the homes of consumers whose purchasing power has been in constant decline. As Togolese encounter the products that flow through the port, many have experienced this new market in knockoff goods as both op­ portunity and threat. Chinese-­made knockoffs provide people long ex­ cluded from the cultural economies and hierarchies of taste with new consumer possibilities, but they simultaneously produce fears over what cannot be seen. The anxiety over what is real and what is fake is charac­ teristic of capitalist modernity, with the established commodity signify­ ing the real and its invariable displacement devalued as false. The worry that consumers of copies express regarding being tricked out of their agency, or being deceived, exemplifies the tension between experiencing 142

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increased access to prized goods and being affected by the invisible pow­ ers and ulterior motives they may possess. Consumers must reconcile the attractive, enchanting effects of the knockoffs’ materiality with their treacherous decomposition—­when forms lose shape, or cloth loses color and even spontaneously self-­destructs. Just like consumers of the global North, Togolese desire affordable goods and willingly buy copies and counterfeits. Some copies have be­ come investment pieces that generate sensations of desire and pride and necessitate cultural expertise to successfully choose and purchase. Oth­ ers, however, are considered faux or bad and are not valued as highly. Moving between real and faux is certainly not just the predicament of the global South, but its effects are felt more intensely in places like Togo, where people struggle to make ends meet. Consumers must act carefully to distinguish the good copies from the bad ones. But copies are not one-­ dimensional. As Hillel Schwarz (2013) points out, copies give meaning to the original rather than the other way round, and copies come in many forms (facsimiles, duplicates, twins, replicas, etc.). Similarly Taussig (1993) reminds us that the copy influences the original and holds power over it. Copies that take on the character of the original share the power of the represented image, and thus affect what it is an image of (Stoller and Coombe 1994). Yet as copies reproduce the “outside” or surface of the original, they simultaneously create an ambiguous space of signification and ongoing transformation, of repetition with a difference as it were. Until the early 2000s, Togolese women were not easily tricked into confounding a copy (imi-­wax) with the original (tsigan) or with another copy. However, this dynamic changed in 2005 when WTO lifted the Multi-Fibre Arrangement that had long regulated textile and clothing quo­ tas as mentioned in chapter 4. The consequences of this lift led to the closing of numerous African factories and the massive entry of Chinese textiles and apparel on domestic markets. When this new generation of copies appeared on the market, they disrupted the fixed points of origi­ nality that had long coordinated the older copies. The profusion of Chi­ nese imitations of Dutch patterns labeled “real” wax—­narrating various fictions of originality, quality and authenticity—­made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to establish their material worth and to rank them accordingly. Just as the coordinates of one copy were established, the next copy was just around the corner, bringing with it the power to disrupt the value of the previous ones. Circulation was seemingly un­ ending, and traders’ attempts to manage the movement of copied cloth were merely short-­lived efforts to intervene in the logic of capitalism itself. 143

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As counterfeit Dutch patterns circulated in the market under various disguises and with labels asserting various claims to authenticity, includ­ ing “Real Dutch,” “Genuine Dutch,” and “Made in Holland,” attaching value and ranking fabrics on a common scale became a confusing task that demanded constant reevaluation on the part of consumers. Although people quickly figured out that the “Dutch” labels were not Dutch at all, consumers were nevertheless attracted to the cheap prices and willingly turned to the Chinese copies. In addition to threating the old and mutu­ ally constitutive dialectic of original and copy, some copies also under­ mined the dialectic of superior copy and faux or bad copy. Just when consumers were getting used to the value regime of the superior copy—­ how much to pay for it, how long it would last as a novelty item—­the next copy arrived and could be either better or faux. The copies’ inherent instability brought on complexities of a new kind: one never knew when a new copy would appear on the market, and who would wear it. This intricate complexity is captured in an instance a bank clerk described to me, “I had just bought a Super Vasco [Chinese copy of a Vlisco superwax print], and the next week my neighbor’s domestic wears the same thing.” When I asked her to clarify whether it was the same knockoff that her neighbor’s employee had bought at a cheaper price or whether it was a knockoff of that knockoff, she sighed and said she wasn’t sure but that it all seemed fraught. Consumers felt tricked out of their agency, for they had little, if any, control over how to assess the real value of the cloth or how to establish a new regime of  valuation. The difficulty was twofold. As Aisha, a young, fashionable Lomean who takes pride in dressing up in the latest Dutch fashion explained, “You can’t trust the trader you buy from, and you certainly can’t trust the label on the pagne . . . you just never know if le wax chinois is real or if it’s going to lose its colors and become faux!” Real, in Aisha’s words, translates to a product with substance, reifying that the copy infers the attraction of the original. Hence, cloth should be cloth, whereas the fake is a simulacrum, part of an unstable economy of appearances. Indeed, the biggest fear among consumers I spoke with was that buy­ ing a copy would later show its flaws and corrupted signs, turning the act of purchase into an alarming gamble. To counter the hidden mean­ ings that appeared to underwrite every economic transaction and ev­ ery text, Togolese deployed what Paul Ricoeur (1981) called a “herme­ neutics of suspicion” to navigate the semiotic uncertainty of everyday life. The difficulty lay in differentiating between the various materials, qualities, and qualia, as well as in maintaining a system of rank when 144

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new copies kept arriving in the market before consumers could establish their worth. The visual resemblance between one knockoff and another was often striking, and only the savviest consumers could differentiate between the multitude of copies by mere sight. Other senses—­touch, smell, and taste—­were required for the majority. To establish the qual­ ity of the cloth in the market, women would feel its texture, carefully evaluating its width and body to evaluate whether it had a soft, silky touch or a stiff, starchy feeling; some would also smell and even lick the cloth to detect its distinct odor and taste. Here we see how the agency of consumers conforms to the qualities of cloth. Meanwhile in the market, traders were accused of misrepresenting value by cheating shoppers into a deceptive relationship with potentially dangerous products or for selling an identical item at different prices. Take the example of Cheritta, a middle-­aged teacher, who went to the market to buy a Chinese copy a friend of hers had purchased a few days prior. “I knew how much she had paid for it,” Cheritta explained to me. However, when she showed the cloth to her friend, “She said, ‘Oh, I see now they sell it demi-­pièce [half piece, or six yards].’ . . . I didn’t under­ stand what she meant, ‘What do you mean demi-­pièce?’ I said, ‘Wasn’t yours demi-­pièce too?’ ” Cheritta was visibly annoyed simply recalling the instant she realized that she had paid twice the price her friend did: “I had been fooled!” She returned to the market the next day determined to get her money back, but the trader was not prepared to exchange the cloth. Instead, the woman refuted Cheritta’s accusation, arguing that she had not misrepresented the cloth’s price or yardage. Quite the op­ posite. The trader claimed that the yardage was clearly indicated on the label. Hence, there was no deception or swindle involved and thus no reason for reversing the transaction. Cheritta was not the only one who had been fooled into buying the cloth at its new price; other women encountered the same dilemma. And although the label had been in plain sight, her sense of betrayal was still profound. While her perceived expertise at paying “the right price” for copies was displaced, she was shocked that she was apparently not observant enough to see the label. In either case, Cheritta’s reaction to the change in the price of the cloth highlights the sense of uncertainty and risk that consumers must con­ tend with when purchasing copied goods. Although shoppers were suspicious of traders, they were especially sus­ picious of the product. Such mistrust held true for a range of consumer items: Chinese-­produced batteries were reported to die after a few hours of use; facial skin lighteners were rumored to irreversibly damage one’s face; and washing powders were said to bleach garments of their colors. 145

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Yet deceitful objects and substances had long been available in Togo, especially from Nigeria, where a “politics of illusion” (Apter 1999) had characterized the economic culture of the post–­oil boom nation. Petrol that is cut and diluted with uncertain substances and causes zemidjans and cars to break down is referred to as kpayo; the same word is used to designate other false products. Similar to things kpayo, Togolese assessed Chinese counterfeits as malicious because they essentially undid peo­ ple’s abilities to discern value. As a young moto-­taxi driver explained: “They attract your eye, and you’re seduced by its magic price only to later discover it’s kpayo and you’ve been tricked!” Since the purchase of his Sanya motorcycle two years ago, this young man had been spending a significant amount of his monthly income on repairs. This disruption in signs and value forms is succinctly captured in Andy Apter’s analy­ sis of Nigeria’s “419” economy, when “the letters of credit, bank drafts, official signatures, and corporate logos that previously legitimated and authorized the international instruments of purchase and sale [of oil] began to circulate like ‘floating signifiers,’ devoid of any real monetary or institutional referent—­until, quite literally, they hit their mark, a credu­ lous dupe who went for the bait, losing his or her shirt by giving some­ thing for nothing” (2005, 254). Each transaction held the possibility of being tricked, deceived, or fooled in plain sight, for there was always the risk of slippage between signifier and signified. If a thing’s appearance seemed real on the surface, one never knew and thus feared the collapse or unraveling of its inner essence as corrupt, defective, or, worse still, empty. The efficacy of the new regimes of reproduction was precisely this blurring and disconnect­ ing between surface and essence that threatened the difference between true and false. Meanwhile, women experienced the effects of this trans­ formation on the most intimate scale: the dressed body, that crucial site of making.

Itchy Sensations Little attention has been paid to how China has become real in people’s everyday lives, not just as a representation or a discourse but as mate­ rial reality and sensory experience felt on people’s dressed bodies. This intimate encounter with China’s new regime of reproducibility and its unstable modes of circulation was initially experienced as an itchy sen­ sation. “It doesn’t sit right on your skin, it itches,” Blandine explained to me in 2006. A statistician in the civil service, Blandine was part of that 146

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postindependence generation whose faith in the progress of modernity and the promise of middle-­classness was unhinged when the dictatorship was forced to enact structural adjustments during the 1980s and 1990s. This first instance of class unmaking—­when the distribution of wealth became much more unequal and civil servants began to experience salary cuts while the prices for basic necessities increased—­was magnified dur­ ing the liberalization of the 1990s that brought on continuing political limbo and economic crisis. Blandine viewed the decay of middle-­class con­­ sumerism and its privileged marker, the pagne imported from Holland, as the slow morphing of the nationalist dream into a postcolonial nightmare of uncertainty. She experienced le wax chinois, which was the only cloth she could afford if she wanted to participate in the symbolic econ­omy of changing sartorial styles, as an irritant. Her discomfort was a sen­­sory ex­­ perience that reflected a shift in Togo’s political economy. Blandine’s un­­ easiness with the new regime led by Faure Gnassingbé, and the govern­ ment’s systematic courting of China for investments and loans with­­out strings attached, was also a fear of disconnection from the structures that Togolese had long known. Coupled with the retreat of the state from the nation, the unraveling of those structures shifted the conditions of pos­­ si­­bility for economic and social success. Yet for those who had never been part of the exclusive dream of con­ sumerism and middle-­classness, the China fake provoked a different sen­ sation. China’s seemingly unending reproductive capacity and its inhe­­ rent ambiguities provided access to material forms from which they had long been excluded, namely to present their bodies in fashionable out­­fits. The blurring of the lines of social difference, previously upheld through a clear relationship between original and copy, threatened to confuse so­ cial conventions of dressing up. Of course, in the dynamics of fashion’s potential to confuse social categories, a degree of ambiguity is always al­ ready part of the structure, and arguably part of its appeal.1 Copies en­­ able social passing in the old sense of dressing up, but they also make elites feel vulnerable. At the same time, elite domination of fashion is no longer as important or as tied to national interests and prestige. With su­­ perior and fast or good copies available, fashion aspirations are more dem­­ ocratically realized through the marketplace. This raises the question of how sartorial elitism may even be challenged by good copies. Might the criticism that women leveled at Belinda in chapter 1, for example, betray their own sense of vulnerability in the way she made faux pagne work for her? In the discomfort of this potential there is also the danger of deceit. The uncertain and possibly corrupted materiality of Chinese pagne represented 147

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an additional threat of vulnerability, if not permanent displacement from old structures and of established Togolese hierarchies of goods and values. Given Togo’s previous conflation of the moral values of the nation with economic progress, the experience of this displacement by potentially all things Chinese was similarly assessed in moral terms. Over the past twenty years, Togolese lives have been uprooted by not only significant political and economic changes but the profound transformation of moral codes and social imaginaries. In this context, the foreign Chinese products were sometimes ascribed supernatural properties. I heard several stories about Chinese materials magically transforming themselves into alien things with deceptive, if not harmful, effects—­that is, things that appeared to be something they were not. Although people knew they were buying Chi­ nese copies, the degree of fakery and forgery, and thus consumer aware­ ness itself, was at all times contingent. As Aisha’s commentary suggests, you never know when the material reveals itself as more fake than you thought it, or as having less value than you paid for. Some Chinese pagne materials were imbued with wild trickster qualities of a special kind. At its best, the fabric would hold its promise and allow Togolese to partici­ pate in the competitive play of fashion. At its worst, it would scam con­ sumer agency away, as with the rumor recounted at the opening of this chapter. Of course, catching fire is an extreme case of bodily discomfort, yet it does point to why people feel so uncomfortable and itchy, which is the threat of being publicly unmasked as a fool or fraud. China’s regime of seemingly unending reproducibility was flush with hidden transcripts, mysterious forms of value creation, and a volatile politics of circulation. Togolese knew that production was taking place in China; they also knew that Nanettes like Antoinette were actively involved in the process, but there was much speculation about how Chi­ nese wax prints were made, giving rise to stories about illicitly run facto­ ries, abusive labor relations that allegedly involved not only after-­hours’ work but child labor, as well as rumors about capitalist excess. This is significant because of the heavy involvement of the Nanettes in making these copies. Allegedly, a single factory was producing copies of real wax prints as well as inferior copies that appeared to be real copies but were actually fakes. Had the sisters’ fabric caught fire because its material was so weak and fragile due to being reproduced one too many times? One rumor had it that it was the spirit of Chinese child laborers whose sweat was imprinted on the cloth that came alive during the fatal fabric-­ burning incident. The common thread of these spiraling speculations, which I view as provisional attempts to explain the current state of am­

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biguity, was the figure of the alien Chinese that came to stand in for global capitalism itself. Occult imaginaries and concerns with the visible and the invisible have proliferated in postmillennial Togo, as elsewhere on the continent. These concerns powerfully index how people experience the social and economic ambiguities of the present. Of course, morality has long inter­ sected with economic forms in Africa, including occult economies from the early colonial to the late postcolonial (Geschiere 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; White 2000; Smith 2008). The story of liberalization, the transformative power of the market and its contradictory ability to si­ multaneously include and exclude, has had complex and controversial effects in Togo as elsewhere. In his work on Kinshasa, Filip de Boeck ar­ gues that it is through an understanding of the occult that people imag­ ine their reality, and it is through that imagination that reality is cur­ rently produced. In Togo, the figure of the Chinese trickster features at the core of people’s imaginations as a dark, exploitative force that cannot be trusted yet has to be reckoned with. The deviant otherness of the Chi­ nese conjured constant talk, speculation, and fear over the inevitable un­­ folding of capitalism’s copying power and, by extension, an increasing disconnect from older forms of exchange. The uncertain context of pro­ duction and even more uncertain modalities of circulation were real con­­ cerns for Togolese who felt these provisional effects on their dressed bod­ ies. As moral stories about shifts in production and circulation structured around a new regime of value that troubled long-­held forms of social re­ production, they crudely point to the ambiguities of the contem­porary moment. In such a charged context of privation and extreme uncertainty, stories about fabrics with invisible powers are also stories about the am­ biguous logic of millennial or, rather, postmillennial capitalism.2 People were confused about what was happening to old value forms and their stable referents, and to commodities without secrets—­in short, what was happening to the structures they had known.

Authorship and Ownership A gigantic publicity program accompanied the 2008 launching of an upstart brand: Wax Nana Benz (hereafter WNB). Commercials were broadcast into consumer homes during prime-­time TV, and jingles ran on Nana-FM, Lomé’s most popular radio station among women listeners. In addition, a series of provocative billboard ads fashioned the visual

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5.1  Wax Nana Benz billboard in the Lomé market. Photo by author.

landscape of the city and incited Togolese women to dress à la mode with the slogan: “our mothers’ pagne are our heritage.” At the center of the airbrushed billboard featured above are two mod­ els in haute-­couture wax-­print dresses, above the catchy “our heritage” slogan. But the women are not just posing at random in their provoca­ tively short Wax Nana Benz outfits; they are warriors armed with both spear and shield ready to defend against whoever has attacked the na­ en-­ scène cunningly tion’s heritage. The advertisement’s defiant mise-­ promotes notions of fashionable pride, heritage, and the matrilineal line while evok­ing nearby, yet distant, dreams of a prosperous nation. That summer in Lomé, everyone wondered whether the Nana Benz had launched their own brand at last. If so, it would have been an act of defiance and national defense by the economic mothers of the nation. People speculated that the Nana Benz were taking on the Chinese in­ terlopers and counterfeiters to reclaim their heritage and redress the nation. The branding of the new cloth after the Nana Benz—­tapping into a dis­ course of local heritage—­was an especially effective marketing move by the owners of the new WNB brand. Although considered political collaborators by many, the Nana Benz also evoked nostalgia for the 150

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certain­ties of a past when sign and referent were relatively stable and the market was hierarchically organized. In the Togolese imagination, the Nana Benz are viewed as having built the nation economically; they also evoke faint memories of welfare and prosperity. Branding their power­ ful image as guarantors of strong national values cleverly mobilized and created an affective attachment to the product. The woman behind WNB, a United States–­trained economist who re­ cently returned to her native Togo, however, has no connections to the Nana Benz. An outsider to the textile trade establishment, this Nanette was largely unknown in the market; hence, the reference to the Nana Benz was false. She did not consult any Nanas before using the name, nor did she enter into any agreements with them to market the patterns the Nana once owned. Rumors surfaced regarding the spectral rise of this Na­ nette and her brand, suggesting that a faction of the president’s extended family firm lurked behind WNB’s façade. The president’s sister, who owns an advertising agency, allegedly designed the marketing campaign. In an interview with the West African women’s magazine Amina, Véronique Carrara does not disclose the names of her investors, but she comments extensively on the cultural ownership rhetoric of the brand and her vi­ sion to defend Togo’s cultural heritage with pagne. She explains that, al­ though the patterns Wax Nana Benz features are indeed Dutch, they are legitimate copies because they were no longer subject to intellectual prop­ erty regulation and naturally fell under the dominion and “the heritage of the Togolese people” (2008, 66). The real owners of the designs, she claims, are Togo’s Nana Benz, for they had not only made the popularity of the patterns and the new pagne print aesthetic but actively codesigned them, with the Dutch as co-­authors so to speak. Intellectual property rights were created as a concept to manage the conversion of ideas into property with contiguous rights that could be protected, licensed, and ultimately turned into money. Copyrights, pat­ ents, and trademarks, the originating instruments of intellectual prop­ erty law, are firmly rooted in liberal thought and the rise of representa­ tive government in the late eighteenth century. The shift of granting rights to individual authors and inventors, which inevitably raises com­ plex questions regarding what constitutes authorship and invention, de­ veloped out of this larger shift in political power and the rise of liberal democracy. Accordingly, this reorganization transformed the attribu­ tion of patents and privileges by a sovereign, to cartelized printers and publishers, into rights held by authors and inventors (Biagioli, Jaszi, and Wood­­mansee 2011). This conversion was underpinned by the liberal cat­ egory of the “creative individual”3 as bearer of rights and entangled with 151

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liberalism’s conceptions of private property, ownership, and freedom. In­­ tellectual property law essentially manages the slippery tension between private ownership (acts of enclosure) and the public domain (the com­ mons) by granting temporary ownership rights that fall into the public domain upon expiration of a fixed term of protection. The economic ad­ vantages of such legal protection are particularly visible during the pre­sent neoliberal era. Not surprisingly, corporations push for extended rights of intellectual property protection so that their inventions, word, and trade­­ marks can further be asserted and licensed as legal rights and converted into profits in competitive global markets. Carrara further notes that, after fifty years, the copyright protecting Vlisco’s old designs had technically expired; therefore, the designs were legally in the public domain. Ironically, the pattern we see on the billboard is a 1922 design copying a classic Javanese pattern called “Gingembre” (ginger) (also “Dotè” in Togo; see figure 2.6), which makes the project of assigning authorship and ownership status even more complex and elu­ sive. Yet Carrara’s commitment to the commons was strangely restrictive: The nationalist heritage rhetoric she deployed to justify her use of the designs ironically ends up reproducing the exclusions ostensibly associ­ ated with acts of enclosure, and thus private property (see Hayden 2010). Her celebratory heritage discourse is couched in the language of cultural entitlement and inherent rights, and cleverly draws on the “marketing of heritage-­as-­possession” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 32). In the lib­ eral language of property, and its constitutive exclusions, Carrera asserts that the Chinese in fact have no rights to use or claim ownership of the Dutch designs, since the latter’s success had essentially been the result of the labor and genius of the Nana Benz. And, more significantly, it was time to claim the intangible heritage of the Nana Benz and pronounce them the intellectual property of all Togolese. Although it was not a collective decision per se, the conversion of the Nana Benz into intellectual property by declaring them “national heri­ tage” and claiming their intangibility as part of the public domain ap­ peared to resonate with potential women consumers. Meanwhile, the daughters of the Nana Benz in the market did not know about the spec­­ tacular launch of a brand that used their mothers’ trademark and bla­ tantly commoditized their image. Branding indeed “invites cloning” (Co­­ maroff and Comaroff 2006, 13), and the cloned Nana Benz imagery was cleverly inscribed in a spectacle economy that played with notions of au­­ thenticity and heritage. It was as if Carrara was following a pattern that Eyadéma had established when he appropriated the image of the Nana Benz, initially to assert the nation as an embodied public sphere, and then 152

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later, when women and dictator were no longer embedded, by producing false images and distortion (see Larkin 2008). The promise of relocating value and granting ownership rights to citizen-­consumers was a power­ ful message of interpellation for Togolese who felt dispossessed of their rights, not just as consumers but also as citizens without protection from the uncontrolled flood of Chinese counterfeits on local markets. WNB did not hide the fact that the cloth was printed in China; instead, it made the Chinese site of production its locus of value, reclaiming authorship at its source to control its meaning and the terms of circulation. Playing with the specter of the foreign, the colonial Dutch and the neocolonial Chinese, the brand appealed to Togolese citizen-­consumers to reclaim their national identities and assert full membership as subjects in their own rights. When I asked women of different age groups about the new fabric in early 2008, the younger ones felt particularly attracted by the provoca­ tive cuts and style of the models’ outfits. Chanel, a twenty-­year-­old wait­ ress, commented upon the appeal of the billboards by drawing attention to the models and their outfits, “They’re sexy, we all want to look like them. . . . We are proud to be Togolese you know, and it’s true that the pagne is part of our heritage, and those outfits, they are a great com­ bination of tradition and modernity; it’s the same cloth our mothers and grandmothers wear. . . . Right now I want to wear those sexy skirts.” If part of Chanel’s desire was to be like those light-­skinned fashionable models,4 her aspiration to participate in the play of fashion as a form of self-­presentation also expressed her need as a consumer-­citizen to claim membership rights during times of economic hardship and ongoing cri­ sis. Here again we see that cloth—­in this case, a copy—­is participating in the making of subjectivity, while the consumer is also facilitating the making of the cloth and the remaking of a different kind of entrepre­ neur. If WNB offered that self-­making possibility, then Chanel would become a loyal customer. Another young woman added a critical detail. When I asked this woman whether she had purchased the cloth, she said that she and her girlfriends were first planning a trip to the market: “I need to touch the fabric, to see if it’s really as beautiful as it looks in the ads.” This expression of suspicion is significant and reflects consumer anxiety over things kpayo. The new fabric and its glossy metadiscourse also intrigued consumers in their forties and fifties. Pierrette, owner of a buvette, a small neighbor­ hood café-­bar, explained that she was drawn to yet confused by the ads. She initially thought that perhaps the Nana Benz had created their own label, and she was excited about the possibility of purchasing a fabric that she “could trust.” Pierrette’s desire to reinscribe her social location onto 153

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a stable material form in reaction to the ephemerality of faux things ini­­ tially favored the introduction of the WNB brand in its appeal to rely on classificatory exclusivity. When Pierrette purchased her first WNB fabric, she recalls she was very happy with it. It was not cheap, although much cheaper than the Dutch original she could no longer afford; nevertheless, she felt good about the quality-­price equation. She recalls that when she wore it for the first time, people complimented her on the brightness of the colors, and she was happy that, even after she had washed the gar­­ ment, the colors remained intact, unlike the other Chinese copies that were flooding the market. For a few months, WNB was a best-­seller among fash­ ionable Lomeans, both young and old. Then, overnight the price increased while the quality began to decline. Consumers who had begun to trust the new label and its brand person­ ality initially assumed that a manufacturing problem had caused the fab­ ric’s flaws. The flimsy, irregular quality of the cloth gave people pause, for they had begun to invest in WNB as a reliable replacement for the un­affordable Vlisco. Such investments were not just economic, but also social. The misrecognition of WNB as a good copy produced a crisis of signification affecting all of society, because it began to threaten the as­ sociated social reproduction, or the making of the self, tied up with pagne. One of the concerns with the provisionality of the Chinese products was that it could never be stabilized, for the next superior copy was just around the corner to boldly displace whatever value and reliability the previous copy had established. Although people could potentially, albeit with great difficulty, manage the continuous disruption of signs in the economies of fashion and dress, this difficulty was quite another in the context of life-­cycle rituals and bride-­wealth economies when nonnegotiable obliga­ tions are enacted through the exchange of wax cloth. As move­­able wealth, Dutch and English wax cloth have long constituted a fixed category of objects. But when aspiring husbands-­to-­be can no longer afford to buy the twelve compulsory pieces of cloth (to tie the bond between two fami­ lies), and instead reply upon copies whose value was always in flux, then longstanding patterns of social reproduction were also in flux. To afford at least one or two, ideally three or four, classical Dutch pieces was one dilemma. What to supplement them with to make a total of twelve pieces was quite another, particularly at a time when only the superior Dutch cloth seemed to hold its value. Because WNB had the potential to produce the kind of fixed value that was required in this gift economy, people were especially disappointed when the brand betrayed its promise of a na­ tional solution and foreclosed this possibility. 154

PLATE 1

Famous Igbo pattern “Fish Scale” or “Finger Nail.” Photo by Vlisco.

PLATE 2

Pattern 14/0063, known as “La Cible” (the target) in Togo. Photo by Vlisco.

PLATE 3

Cloth trader posing amid her display of pagne. Photo by Bruno Zanzoterra.

Young woman trying on a custom-­made superwax outfit at the tailor shop. Photo by Bruno Zanzoterra.

PLATE 4

PLATE 5

“Oeil de ma Rivale” (my rival’s eye). Photo by Vlisco.

PLATE 6 Early-­twentieth-­century sample book. Experimenting with color and design. Vlisco archive. Photo by author.

The six-­step production process (from top to bottom) of “Otopa” or “Gillette.” Photo by Stitching Afrikaanse Dutch Wax.

PLATE 7

PLATE 8

“Peau de Léopard” (leopard’s skin). Photo by Vlisco.

PLATE 9 Ambulant pagne cloth on the streets of Lomé. Lower left features the famous pattern “Ventilateur.” Photo by Bruno Zanzoterra.

Dangerous Copies

As wax prints of superior quality and lower price appeared in the mar­ ket, consumers realized that WNB was nothing but capitalist excess, a brazen simulacra produced in the same factory by the same workers un­ der a different label. Consumers felt tricked yet again. Not only had they been financially deceived this time, but they had also been stripped of the “rights” and promises WNB had sold to them—­the reclaiming and upholding of Togolese heritage. What had unmasked the authors’ com­ pelling metadiscourse—­which cleverly drew on the affective relationship between commodity form and concept while benefiting from its seman­ tic ambiguity—­was their ineptitude to control the fabric’s commodity chain. For they not only lacked basic market knowledge, such as quality-­ price mechanisms, but—­more importantly—­they failed to understand the specificity of the commodity whose value and circulation they tried to control. As discussed earlier, wax prints have a long history of having iden­tity imprinted on them, and they occupy a special segment in the Togolese world of gifts and goods. Because wax prints serve to uphold, reproduce, and refashion identity in the pragmatics of the everyday (and possibly the future), the WNB scam was quickly exposed. The brand owner’s speculative appetite was also cut short by the workings of a mar­ ket that generates a constant flow of copies.

Certified Copies In his discussion of the role New Jersey kente cloth—­industrial copies of handmade Ghanaian kente strips produced in New Jersey—­and Mal­ colm X baseball caps perform on Afrocentric markets in New York City, Paul Stoller raises the question of what constitutes value in the “age of simulated reality” (2002, 95). He suggests that since the same factories and the same workers often produce the same commodity (“real and fake Polo trousers”) using the same materials, it is not quality but the sign of the trademark that determines value. For Stoller, signs and labels authen­ ticate the object’s real or simulated value. However, in the Togolese con­ text, where trademarks are often copied and people tend to mistrust labels, consumers care especially about quality and qualia. And Nanettes know this. The copy needs to have the deep materiality and the qualities that go with it, but it also needs to be within consumers’ reach. Some traders recognized this strong consumer desire for stable mate­ rial forms to uphold long-­standing patterns of social reproduction and to claim and express identities. Having learned from the Wax Nana Benz debacle, they decided to step into the regulatory gap of the free market 155

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by exploring the legalities of intellectual property regimes. Driven by the entrepreneurial possibility to innovate, produce, and temporarily as­ sert control over a species of value, they, too, created their own brands. Togo’s membership status in the African Intellectual Property Organiza­ tion facilitated this undertaking; by 2010, several Togolese traders had registered trademarks with the Cameroon-­based organization. These re­ gistered and nominally protected statuses allowed them to sue against in­tellectual property infringements and to have containers seized at the port. This was not a cheap affair. A Nanette named Felicia, who holds exclusive ownership rights over several brands, explained that such mo­ nopolies were “the only way to make money in the market these days.” Felicia was one of a few enterprising wholesalers in the Lomé market who traveled to China every other month to supervise the production process of the two factories that produced her fabrics. I had spent many hours in her shop over the past few years observing and chatting with Felicia about her business. Following the success and ultimate fiasco of WNB, she considered creating her own trademark using similar brand­ ing appeal. She wanted to market her fabrics in order to control distribu­ tion more effectively and instill consumer loyalty and, by extension, to restore consumer agency. Felicia had a particular feel for market trends and understood consumer desire for reliable goods. Since the free mar­ ket was resistant to autoregulation, Felicia worked hard to create a fabric that offered an attractive, affordable, and stable material form. Un­like the owners of WNB, which had since disappeared from the market, she had solid market knowledge and knew exactly who was producing what and where, as well as which designs and colors were in fashion. In addition to her market expertise, Felicia had a particular sense for identifying future trends. Blessing had always been careful to register her innovations, and Fe­ licia made the same decision. Before she would register a new trademark with the African Intellectual Property Organization, however, Felicia care­­ fully monitored Vlisco’s new design collections. Assailed by copies, the Dutch manufacturer today launches four yearly collections in an at­ tempt to reduce the production time that would have enabled Chinese counterfeits to arrive on the market. Before Felicia would copy or rework a new Vlisco design, she would wait to see which patterns did well on the market. She would determine in what colors a particular design worked and what the important coloration details of the design’s background were—­namely, the aforementioned crackle and bubbling effects whose intensity or size she would sometimes modify. The labor she invested into crafting a new fabric required careful market monitoring. In addi­tion, 156

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Felicia had to send samples via courier to her Chinese manufacturer as well as manage the production process at the factory with regular visits to the manufacturing facilities. This was not an easy task, for it required skill, vision, and important financial means. Because this process was incredibly time-­consuming, Felicia’s ability to launch her copied Vlisco designs in the Lomé market was often de­ ferred. The time gap between the arrival of the Vlisco original and the production of Felicia’s studied and aesthetically secure copies made room for “fast copies” (cheap copies) to penetrate the market. Although Felicia took a higher risk than distributors of first, secondary, and tertiary copies, because her designs would arrive so late on the market, she speculated on the innovativeness of her copies. Like the Dutch designers at the turn of the last century, Felicia and other Nanettes create their copies by repro­ ducing and at times modifying existing patterns seen to be in the public domain. The designs’ perceived openness, however, puts all who seek to claim them at risk of being counterfeiters themselves. What traders like Felicia are doing is not that different from the work­­ ings of global fashion markets and factory floors, such as the oft-­studied case of Italian fashion that is either transnationally produced, or made at home by Chinese sweatshop labor. The 2008 film Gomorra by Matteo Garronewinner, an adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s best-­selling novel about the criminal infrastructure of the Naples branch of the Mafia (Ca­ morra), presents a fictionalized account of what “made in Italy” garments produced by Chinese immigrants in Italy look like. The film shows how Italian fashion houses outsource the production of their designs to Nea­ politan sweatshops that run on illegal Chinese labor. The fashion houses put out a bid in a system where several sweatshops are commissioned by the fashion houses, but only the sweatshop that delivers first is paid. Because the sweatshops are run in the shadow of the official economy, the owners cannot obtain formal credit loans from banks to pay for labor costs; therefore, they turn to the Mafia, which provides not only highly advantageous credit rates but also takes on the distribution of ex­­cess gar­ ments produced by sweatshops that did not deliver on time. In this raw, neoliberal shadow system, excess clothing of Italian fashion houses enters the market through parallel channels. Ironically, the goods sold in these circuits, although technically fake (unauthorized), are in fact originals modeled after the designs provided by the fashion houses but unauthor­ ized to be distributed under the latter’s label. Excess in capitalist production is certainly not new. The commodity form itself, as Constantine Nakassis following Marx observes is “in ex­ cess of itself” (2013, 113), which is to say that it is more than it appears 157

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to be. In neoliberal times, we know that original and copy are often pro­­ duced in the same factory, by the same workers, sometimes even with the same materials during afterhours and off the books. For Stoller, the minimally noticeable quality difference between original and copy in ad­ dition to the power of the sign (or the hypersign in Baudrillardian terms) displaces value and exceeds quality. Stoller suggests that value lies in the trademark itself, and not in the quality of the materials or the craftsman­ ship of the piece. On the contrary, in Togo, the trademark is an intel­ lectual innovation that is inferior and superfluous. While Nanettes use trademarks and various intellectual property tools to protect their innova­ tions from counterfeiters, Togolese consumers prefer trusting their senses and the qualia of cloth rather than the superfluous quality of signs and trademarks.

The Moral Regime of the “True Original” The Dutch response to the regulatory drama regarding the upsurge and uncontrolled circulation of copies of Vlisco designs and trademarked words was to restrict and enclose them through technologies of brand­ ing and intellectual property law. Yet such a technocratic and govern­ mental response to the emergence of unauthorized copying only pro­ vides a temporary, fragile solution. As  Jean and John Comaroff point out, branding essentially works as the “assertion of a monopoly over a named species of value” that can be dominated but not fully controlled (2006, 13). Branding always already invites its opposite, “cloning” (13). A claim of exclusivity through a privatized act of enclosure is a normative com­ mitment to private property and its legal protection and policing (Hayden 2010). The fragility of the branded form as a constricted regime of value that is troubled by its double (copy, counterfeit, or simulacra) is, to quote the Comaroffs once again, “a conceit at the core of the culture of Western capitalism: that its signifiers can be fixed, that its editions can be limited, that it can franchise the platonic essence of its mass-­produced modernity” (2006, 13). Here the Comaroffs point to the contradictions of modernity and capitalism, and it is this contradiction that gets reified in the neolib­ eral project of intellectual property regulation and trade treaties. Vlisco’s repositioning reflects the critical significance of the brand in contemporary corporate and legal practices. In the context of global brand formations, Constantine Nakassis suggests that brands work as “mediating technologies of and for neoliberalism” (2013, 116). Zooming

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in on Vlisco’s corporate image conversion, it becomes useful to think through the infrastructure of the brand as both a techno-­legal and a techno-­economic device in the constitution of moral regimes of value. Vlisco resorts to a moral regime that is one of continuity, innovation, and heritage, minus the colonial aspect. Vlisco was recently acquired by Actis Capital, a private equity firm based in London. Actis specializes in “emerging markets,” and has pur­ sued an aggressive growth and branding strategy for the company.5 Un­ til the early 2000s, the Dutch had distributed the fabric with minimal marketing intervention; the company’s name and design number was imprinted on the cloth’s selvedge as “Real Dutch Wax Vlisco” or “Véri­ table Wax Hollandais Vlisco,” but the product did not need a corporate visual identity to instantiate its authority. Instead, the cloth’s material­ ity spoke for itself, because it was already imbued with an aura and au­ thority. With sales in decline as a result of the intensified circulation of counterfeits and copies of Dutch designs on West African markets, Vlisco embarked on an extensive makeover of its corporate image whereby no­ tions of authenticity and originality became central to the making of the company’s brand personality.6 A global branding consultancy firm (BrandWatch) designed Vlisco’s new corporate image using the Vlisco name as a brand identity intimately built around its premium product; “Vlisco, The True Original since 1846” was launched in a gigantic mar­ keting campaign in 2007 (see figure 1.2). Since then, Vlisco continues to advertise with its name and the subtitle-­slogan “The True Original.” The brand is designed to “re-­enchant” confused consumers and bestow trust in “a disenchanted set of market relationships” (Mazzarella 2003, 192) brought on by the economy of counterfeits. The branding experts at BrandWatch carefully crafted Vlisco’s new image by creating an affective relationship between the commodity (and its associated slogans, trade, and word marks) and a unifying concept intended to capture Vlisco’s per­ sonality and essence (Mazzarella 2003; Manning 2010). From this point of view, claims to authenticity and originality are cleverly mobilized and attached to the brand’s image. Its truthful personality creates an affec­ tive relation­ship to the product with little semantic ambiguity. The brand draws on Vlisco’s heritage position in the African print market as well as its long-­standing commitment to innovation, original design creation, and state-­of-­the-­art printing technology.7 The company’s makeover also involved the rebranding of its iden­ tity as manufacturer to the more glamorous image of international fash­ ion house. On a quarterly basis, Vlisco launches wax-­print designs as

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thematic fabric and fashion collections with evocative names such as “Fantasia” and “Gallery of Poems.” The timed release of the design col­ lections serves as both an anticounterfeiting measure (it takes about two months for copies to arrive on the market) and a fashion statement, styled to complement changing seasons and tastes. Each “Vlisco Fashion Col­ lection” is accompanied by a glamorous publicity campaign that features black models in dramatic poses wearing luxurious haute-­couture and prêt-­ à-­porter styles. Vlisco’s recent branching into high fashion and high-­end fashion accessories (bags, shoes, jewelry), art, and glamour is reflected not only on its glossy website, the steady stream of social media communi­ cation, and flashy billboards in West Africa’s major cities but also in the openings of select Vlisco flagship stores in major West African and Central African cities. The visual opulence and fashion decadence of these ad­ vertising campaigns is perhaps best epitomized in Vlisco’s 2010 “Gallery of Poems” collection campaign. As I have described elsewhere (Sylvanus 2013, 30), the campaign is staged in the style of Marie-­Antoinette and features a dramatic scene of a black model in poetic gait, daring high coif hairstyle, and adorned in a sumptuously extravagant Vlisco gown. Signaling fashionable excess à la Marie-­Antoinette, the ad campaign’s eye-­ catching mise-­en-­scène plays with people’s fantasies and desires for excess and luxury. Needless to say, few people in Lomé can afford to shop at the Vlisco flagship store and acquire such extravagant high-­end fashion. But that is not the point. What Vlisco seeks to achieve in the relentless visual pro­­ duction of its new fashion house identity is to produce an image of ex­­ clusivity and luxury in the African print market and beyond.8 The com­ bination of high fashion and heritage rhetoric on the company’s website demonstrates how Vlisco has chosen to position Dutch wax as both a lux­­ ury good and a particularly African cultural artifact. By performatively le­­ gitimizing its brand regime, “The True Original,” through various social media channels, TV campaigns, fashion events, billboards, and news media ads, the Vlisco brand and its aura get recognized in the market and by in­­ ternational law as a mark. Its protected “intangible assets” ( per the World Intellectual Property Organization, of which Togo is a member) promote both economic and legal regimes. Vlisco’s turn to aggressive branding reflects the significance of the brand in economic and legal regimes of neoliberal governance. The in­ troduction of a Vlisco “spot,” an encrypted serialized code that appears on the fabric’s label, is a case in point. As a regime of intelligibility and seal of ownership, these codes are designed to help consumers distin­ guish between unauthorized counterfeit and authorized “True Original” 160

The “Connoisseurs of Style” campaign was launched in 2014. This online version is a simplified rendering of the 2010 booklet. Photo by Vlisco.

5.2

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fabrics. In this way, the brand enacts its part of the social contract as guar­ antor over consumer-­citizens who abide by its regime (K. Thomas 2013; Coombe 1998). Together with the 2010 introduction of an exquisite high-­ end leather goods collection (Haute Maroquinerie),9 Vlisco launched a five-­step manual designed to help consumers recognize the “Authentic Vlisco” through a series of reliable signs: encrypted, serialized, digital, bar-­ coded, textual, monogramed, trademarked, and metric. Read as regula­ tory legal signs, this pedagogy also works to produce exemplary subjects capable of distinguishing between legal and illegal goods. The sleek booklet features a step-­by-­step pedagogy of sign authenti­ cation: (1) brand and label, identified by trademarked monogram, en­­ cryp­­ted Vlisco “spot,” digital bar codes, and design number; (2) bilin­ gual “Real Dutch” sticker; (3) word marks on the selvedge (“Guaranteed Dutch Wax Vlisco/Véritable Wax Hollandais Vlisco” printed in English on one side and French on the other); (4) design number on the selvedge; and (5) metrical and yard measure, defined as the one-­yard (91.44-­centimeter) distance between the two Gs (in the word Guaranteed ) appearing on the selvedge. Thus instructed in this highly visual language, Vlisco implied that customers would be able to tell the difference between the authentic and the counterfeit in a methodical, reliable manner. Yet by relying on the signifiers attached to normative legal categories, Vlisco’s attempt at a pedagogy of authentication failed to reflect the evaluative framework al­ ready in place for Togolese women. In Togo, consumer evaluations of authentic and counterfeit, and orig­­ inal and copied goods rarely match legal evaluations; instead they exist in different regimes of value. Counterfeits, knockoffs and copies take many forms and generate differing levels of authenticity. Although considered inauthentic and illegal in the legal language of intellectual property, in Togolese regimes of authentication a counterfeit and a copy can be real (vrai) or fake (faux) as well as true or false (kpayo). In short, while Togo­ lese differentiate between vrai and faux goods, their evaluation does not concur with the logic of authenticity and authorship that intellectual prop­erty regimes instantiate as universal. In her treatment of Vietnam­ ese evaluations of counterfeit goods, Elizabeth Vann (2006) makes clear that intellectual property rationalities cannot be taken for granted every­­ where. Instead, she notes how there is significant variation in accepting the naturalization of “their associative links between ideas and goods, au­­ thors and creators, and property rights and ownership” (2006, 286). Sim­­ ilarly in Togo, authorship and ownership are not the primary category of evaluation even if consumers found Wax Nana Benz’s claim to national­

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ist exclusivity appealing. What matters most to consumers is the quality of the cloth, and its ability to enhance and singularize the woman. When I asked women in the market how they verify the authenticity of real Dutch and whether they resorted to Vlisco’s new sign language, a common response was that product recognition supersedes the efficacy of signs. One woman responded, “You have to lick it [the cloth], smell it, touch it; that’s the only way [to identify authenticity].” The turning away from the Vlisco regime of legibility to an everyday science for women, a regime of skilled cooks who can taste the ingredients in the composition, is significant. For a long time, one could tell whether something was au­ thentic by looking at how the cloth was worn on the body, but that is no longer the case. Now it has to be touched to be verified. The corporeal sensorium necessarily escapes the realm of intellectual property govern­ mentality. Like nineteenth-­century modern science attempting to regu­ late and capture the senses through color (Taussig 2009), technologies of visual legibility can never fully tap into the corporeal sensorium. Labels and “spots” may saturate the cloth with signs of authenticity as adorn­ ments, but they do not address the foundational and social grasping of cloth itself. “What about the label?” I asked another woman, “Sheesh, the label especially you can’t trust!”—­as if Togolese had already anticipated or sus­ pected that technologies of serialization, traceability, and authentica­ tion were fallible. In Togo, the trademark is an intellectual innovation that is in excess of itself. Designed to counteract the proliferation of copies and fakes, labeling technologies seek to intervene in the crisis of meaning and collective representations I discussed earlier—­that is, the attempts to stabilize the dialectic of fixity and unfixity conjured by copy and multiplicity. Yet the women I spoke with in the market repeatedly mentioned their suspicion vis-­à-­vis these signs and marks, believing that these things are in fact fallible and unfixable. Tellingly, they turned to their own regimes of verification (to counteract the Deleuzian process of unfixing, as it were). The source of intelligibility for these women was sen­ sory; brand-­sponsored attempts to saturate the cloth with techno-­signs of authenticity were superfluous at best. The real problem with the slippage between signifier and signified, that which makes the idea of a negotiable social world such a challenging project for consumers, did not concern the “big one.” The Dutch cloth continued to produce reliable signs of au­ thenticity through its own materiality, thus escaping the logic of branding and enclosure. The “small one” was in fact the persistent hitch and itch. Women continually struggled to identify the au­­thenticity and reliability

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chapter Five

of the Chinese copies that simulated and co-­opted the signs of their own assemblage while producing ongoing slippage. Clearly, the conversation in Togo has already shifted from the anxiety over (semiotic) production and the fixity of value of copies versus fakes to the semiotic production of the right texture or bundles of qualities and affects. For, as we have seen, consumers prize cloth for its ability to speak, shine, and satiate over whether it is “real” or “original.” It is that dense materiality, in conjunction with the body, that has the power to make the self.

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Conclusion

Assigamé Burning Shortly after midnight on January 12, 2013, the Lomé market went up in flames. The next morning, a Saturday, when hundreds of traders arrived to set up shop, the central market building was still smoldering. Although the city’s only two available fire engines had reached the scene relatively quickly, the firefighters were unable to connect their water pipes to the market’s broken hydrant. Instead, they relied on water trucks that shuttled back and forth between the market and a nearby water supply. The fire that ravaged Togo’s national monument was only brought under control with the assistance of a Ghanaian fire brigade stationed at the nearby border. Fortunately, nobody was injured, but several traders had to be evacuated. Some fainted when they realized that they had lost everything. The fire destroyed not just goods worth billions of CFA francs but the livelihoods of many families. I was in the United States at the time, but I phoned several traders to express concern and to inquire about their losses. “It’s a horrible tragedy,” one trader said. “Imagine, some women had just stocked up on goods, all their money was in it and, then just like that, overnight it’s gone! What are they going to do?” Similarly shocked, another trader described scenes of desolation: women screaming and crying over losing their stock, traders trying to rescue their goods inside the still-­burning multistory building. One woman al­ legedly made it to her stall amid the raging flames only to find the stall empty. Her merchandise had been stolen, not burned. Another woman purportedly fought through the crowd of overwhelmed spectators and ran into the burning 165

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building, but it was too late. She found only blackened remnants of brightly colored cloth. Scenes of desolation soon turned to anger. For decades the market had been the nation’s economic engine, governed by women’s trade associations and protected through the alliances they had forged to political power. Yet on this day, Togo’s cloth traders were not merely unprotected, they felt overtly attacked. Stories surfaced about the cause of the fire, spiraling into conspiracy theories, speculation, and accusations that implicated politicians and Chinese interlopers. Why had the fire department faced so many hurdles before it became fully operational? And why had firefighters acted only when it was already too late to save the Grand Marché? How was it that the fire engine from Ghana had been held up at the border for several hours? A pastor of the church opposite the market claimed to have seen a group of elite guards of the Togolese military breaking into the market building and spilling kerosene. Togo’s director-­ general of taxes was rumored to be behind the arson. People had long thought that the physical market space and the cloth economy were being targeted by private state interests connected to foreign—­specifically, Chinese—­capital.1 Fire signals intervention, power, and manipulation. Now in ashes, the ruined market sits on prime real estate—­an ideal location for a rumored shopping mall project hailed by global property investors. For years the municipality had been trying to relocate the market outside the center of Lomé. In fact, a new market had been constructed already, but the women had refused to trade from this peripheral location.2 Now the fire had done the violent work of clearing the space, which in turn led to the eviction of the market women. Fire thus “naturally” opened the way for new in­ terventions and redevelopments. This spectacular clearing of space points to broader processes of accumulation through land dispossession and speculation (Harvey 2003).3 The market fire is a literal object of speculation fueling people’s suspicions about state violence and the illegitimate measures of dispossession that this new era has proliferated. It is not unusual in West Africa for markets to burn down or to be bulldozed. Partially because they suggest something about state failure and formal institutions, West African markets in general, and market women in particular, have long been sites of state intervention, popular contestation, and repression (see Clark 2010; Robertson 1983). In fact, many saw the market fire as a political coup orchestrated by the ruling party aimed at weakening the opposition and their financial supporters: the market women. Since 2010, when a leading opposition leader was excluded from the National Assembly, there had been protests on the streets of Lomé. 166

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By 2012, the new political movement Collectif Sauvons le Togo (Save Togo Collective) was organizing regular sit-­ins and street demonstrations (including a women’s march, “La marche rouge des femmes”) to protest Faure Gnassingbé’s regime. What Faure’s ruling party did not anticipate was that the competing market women would stand together. Angered at the slowness of the state to react, the traders launched a series of protests, culminating in the ultimate form of protest: public female nudity. In front of the burned-­out market, angry women stripped as a ritual gesture to shame and jinx the government. This was not the first time women had removed their colorful pagnes in reproach. In 1933 and again in 1991, Lomé’s market wom­en used this form of civil disobedience as a vehicle of dissent and an act of political resistance against male authority—­first against the French colonial state, then the dictator, and now his son, whom many considered a puppet of the ancien régime. These acts of resistance are doubly symbolic as women exerted their agency with and through cloth and its disappearance. The cloth traders were united in protest, but economic and class issues still divided them. With one notable exception—­Dédé Creppy, the last historical Nana Benz and the president of the traders’ historic merchant organization (APRT)—­most of the successful cloth wholesalers had long since deserted the state-­owned market building for private shops in ad­­ jacent buildings. The women who lost the most in the fire were retailers. After many months of limbo and failed governmental promises of finan­­ cial compensation, a provisional container vending space was made avail­­ able to the women who had lost everything. But the government’s solutions failed the traders. Too far removed from the urban center, the new space was inadequate and further scattered the retail marketplace, partic­­ ularly the base constituted by less affluent traders and everyday shoppers. Without local customers and international clients from Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Nigeria, there was no market, and, as a furious retailer said, “no point of going to work anymore!” The women’s anger did not dissipate with a temporary solution that made their precariousness clear—­especially when they learned that the Grand Marché was not going to be rebuilt as it was, which further devalued their role as economic agents. The provisional space also diminished their capacity to trade on cultural associations, restricting their ability to work the cloth they had endowed with national meaning. While the mu­ tual agency of the women and the material appeared to be undone, the traders continued to animate the power of cloth to leverage agency and claim their place in the market. 167

conclusion

Evicted and marginalized, the traders’ anger continued to simmer; their protest took on a new form through social media channels. YouTube vid­ eos surfaced displaying the inadequacy of the provisional space and giving global expression to the women’s rage. Voiced in the language of development and progress, the traders accused the government of having run down a once-­thriving economy. “We were dressing everyone, Ghana, Benin, and now look at them and look at us!” one woman decried. “Is this how you treat us women?” another asked bitterly. Incongruously, the state similarly mobilized the language of development. While the rumored government plans to reclaim and develop the mar­­ ket’s real estate represents an attack on the women traders and the old economic regime they embody, the burning of the market also signals a larger shift: the arrival of a new economic regime with profound conse­ quences for the future of national marketplaces, women traders, and the nature of consumption. This shift can be seen in several vulnerabilities that the fire laid bare. African women’s small businesses are notably vul­­ nerable in the face of new regimes of accumulation and speculation linked to “Africa Rising”—­a term used by global investors who contend that Africa is the “last frontier” of capitalism—­and cheap competition from China-­in-­Africa. The destruction, anxieties, and development logics that arose from the market fire made other connections between place, capital, and dispossession crudely visible. In short, the market’s violent destruction threatens the nation’s basis for social and economic reproduction. This shift diminished the institution of market women in their powerful role of dressing the nation while changing the nature of the fabric itself: its origin, production technology, material composition, and design as trademarked intellectual property. Today, the long-­standing al­­ liance between gender, nation, and market appears to be broken in Togo— ­but wax cloth remains an important site of agency and power because its dense materiality is flexible enough to withstand change.

New Frontiers In this new era of frontier making, when old borders are being remade, the frontier itself keeps moving or disappearing. But who is defining these new frontiers, and who is extracting value? It was certainly in the ruling party’s interest to clear the city center—­an effort that scholars of urban informality have described as the neoliberal logic to enclose and extract value from a public good: land (Roy and AlSayyad 2004). The demise of the market institution reflects broader changes in Togo’s urban space and 168

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governmental efforts to court global investors by facilitating another regime of accumulation that is directly tied to “Africa Rising” (2011). This new global corporate discourse of Africa on the rise predicts the opening of new capital and development frontiers whereby Africa is “the last frontier of capitalism.”4 The act of land dispossession is foundational to Africa Rising. So is the creation of a new urban frontier. The Grand Marché not only occupies a prime piece of real estate, it is also an institution that constantly points to the limits of state power to rationalize and modernize existing urban arrangements of capital and labor production. Thus, if the market is necessary ( because it organizes the provisioning of basic goods), then it is also dangerous ( because it exposes state failure). Not surprisingly, World Bank and IMF interventions on the continent often target the “informal sector” (Peterson 2014; Elyachar 2005). The market is one such place—­ both “informal” and an “unmodern” form of accumulating capital, as it were—­whose frontier position legitimates intervention and transformation. The global moment of Africa Rising, however, promised transformations of an entirely new kind linked to spectacular GDP growth and rapid urbanization, of new middle classes and consumer markets, as well as the reconfiguration of African cities into “last development frontier” zones (Watson 2013, 215). The redevelopment of Togo and the disciplining of space has been the focus of Faure Gnassingbé’s political ambition, a vision that is in line with global efforts to rationalize African economies. In the “Vision Togo 2030” plan launched in 2014, the Togolese government presented a techno-­ futuristic modernization program for Togo’s new urban frontier, evidently modeled on Singapore. In fact, Togo’s maritime frontier, the new Lomé port, has already been marketed as the “Singapore of West Africa” to global shipping companies.5 At the center of Faure’s political ambition to attract global investors is “Lomé 2030”: a redeveloped city with sleek highways, apartment towers, green spaces, and shopping malls. The proposed Lomé 2030 is devoid of infrastructures such as the Grand Marché, which has confirmed people’s suspicions about the fire’s poli­tical motives for clearing space. The demise of the old market institution gave rise to new in­­ vestment and development opportunities that are linked to Africa Rising’s promise of unfettered growth and market opportunity. If the Gnassingbé administration’s spectacular vision of Lomé—­the Togolese future writ large—­was designed to accommodate Africa’s new global/izing moment, it is important to remember that the new fron­ tier also depends on existing structures. Reminiscent of Eyadéma’s grand in­­ frastructures of modernization described in chapter 3, the current 169

conclusion

redevelopment of urban space must be seen as continuous with the past, even as it takes on a new valence at this global instant. And of course these acts of urban development mean different things. The new Africa Rising moment is not the older internationalist moment when Togo was oriented toward Europe and the United States and dependent on Cold War monies. Today we see a more explicit form of modeling on the new centers of global capital, including Singapore. As “old margins are becoming new frontiers,” seemingly marginal places like Togo are critical locations offering “insight into the workings of the world at large” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 13, 1). Reconfigured flows of capital have remade Togo at different scales, simultaneously re­ constructing the standing of the nation-­state in the global economy and material infrastructures like the national market. At the same time, neoliberal values of flexibility, mobility, and speculation have become the cornerstones of economic life and the conditions of and for everyday forms of entrepreneurial survival. As many Togolese traders import counterfeit goods from China—­which take on lives of their own through circulation in markets and people’s homes—­what it means to be a consumer in neoliberal West Africa is also being recalibrated. Viewed in this way, the West African marketplace showcases Africa as “a laboratory for the future” (Hoffman 2011, 252); it is a site of permanent remaking—­not just a physical space to be built or rebuilt—­that is simultaneously inde­ terminate, contingent, and speculative while also anticipating new neoliberal patterns. If global investors speculating in resource-­rich Africa have welcomed the discourse of Africa Rising, the predicament of China-­in-­Africa has been perceived as much more threatening. The circuit of capital built in the corridor between Africa and China is often portrayed as the new axis of South-­South exploitation in Western media and policy discourses. Lurking behind this new axis are ideological fears about the decline of the West in the world and the appearance of new global empires. Clearly, South alliances are really such geopolitical anxieties over new South-­ about China’s place in the world rather than Africa’s “place-­in-­the-­world” (Ferguson 2006). Africa may be China’s frontier and capitalism’s “last frontier,” but what is Africa’s frontier?

Patterns of Resilience The densely layered materiality of wax cloth offers important insights into the ways in which West African market futures are unfolding. It tells us 170

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something about the patterning of a new phase of global capitalism tied to the rise of Chinese firms and China-­made goods that seemingly penetrate African markets without any form of regulation or intervention on behalf of local actors. Yet in this book I have shown how China-­in-­Togo is made through complex patterns of coproduction and cross-­positioning. We need to attend to the scale of Chinese capitalism in Africa if we want to understand not just what this presence is, but what it signifies in this particular historical moment. Then, too, if we focus only on Africa Rising or China-­in-­Africa as the dominant framework, we lose sight of the African story and the significance of national modes of reproduction. It is important to note that, although current vectors of globalization violently unmake existing structures and institutions in nations such as Togo, where the spectacular dismantling of the market—­that national monument par excellence—­unmade the influential gender-­nation equation, the relationship between women and cloth remains powerful. Cloth remains a special commodity that is essential to women’s social and cultural identities and reproduction across West Africa, even though the gender-­market relation is transformed by new structural conditions and locations for production. The burning of Assigamé violently displaced the market women and both weakened and marginalized their economic and symbolic roles in the Togolese nation. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-­standing power alliance between gender, nation, and market was undone in a neoliberal context where the concept of the nation has less standing than the market and whose logic increasingly organizes all aspects of economic, political, and social life. The rumors about government plans for the marketplace, which had so prominently fueled peo­­ ple’s political suspicions and imaginations after the fire, crudely exposed the state’s disinvestment from the old postcolonial politics of Togolese nationhood and its investment in an Africa Rising–­style vision of global entrepreneurship. Yet the mutual constitution of cloth and women remains important. So is the relationship between gender and market. This relationship is significant because it concerns the cultural reproduction of women’s identities writ large; it denotes a kind of cultural and social power that exceeds economic transactional power and acts of consump­ tion. Women, as traders and consumers of cloth, remain central because of the region’s long-­standing and multilayered investments in pagne, fash­­ ion, gendered performance, and public self-­making; because of the way cloth is, women will likely continue to insist on inspecting and handling fabric purchases in ways that belie the logic of Africa Rising and Vision Togo 2030. And it is about productivity—­but it is not about where the cloth is made or how counterfeit cloth both enables and destabilizes 171

conclusion

existing and contingent patterns of consumption. Practices of naming cloth, of letting cloth speak for women, of embodying cloth, and of mak­­ ing selves are unlikely to disappear because cloth is made elsewhere. In­­ stead, this productivity lies in the continuous ability and agency to ne­­go­­ tiate value production. And, as detailed throughout this book, the ability to manage external influences—­whether it concerns Chinese copies and the destabilization of value, shifts in global textile production, or inter­na­ tional copyright agreements—­is especially potent. It is a form of agency and power that is historically anchored in West African dealings with cloth, and thus necessarily involves women at its core. The story I have told in this book offers a counterpoint to the dominant Africa Rising and China-­in-­Africa framework to rethink women’s agency as national agency. The gender and market nexus remains an important site of action and power. Amid global transformations, West African ways of being in the world are not entirely dismantled by the arrival of new regimes of accumulation and their attendant logics of dispossession and frontier making. In fact, West African practices of managing change and social transformation, whether through acts of consumption or economic transactions, are not likely to disappear, and they constitute a form of agency that is deeply historical. For centuries, Africa has actively engaged the global. In tracking the negotiated presence of different external influences across time and space, this book troubles the view of an imperial, global North ruling over a peripheral, passive South, while provincializing Europe in surprising and often unexpected ways. The history of this material object shows how African markets have long been connected to transcontinental networks and how such interconnections and trade linkages have been reconfig­­ ured many times over and are continuing to be made. Togo’s long historical standing as an entrepôt and center of capitalist commodification via everyday consumer goods makes it an especially revealing place to read old and new patterns of global capitalism. The cloth frontier was a formative one in imperial and colonial penetration of African markets. When we place China-­in-­Africa in the history of Af­­ rica’s varied frontier capitalisms on one hand while zooming in on the long-­ established importance of what we might call African “fashion frontiers” on the other we can see not only how China enters into existing economic niches, but also how it is the same old frontiers that are constantly being re-­created. The archive of wax-­printed textiles makes this clear. It also reminds us of how central long-­term global interconnec­ tion and cultural mixture and hybridity have been to the making and remaking of social and economic life in West Africa. 172

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This book has examined cloth as a densely layered object and historical assemblage that weaves together global history and local tastemakers around Togolese nationhood. I have emphasized the making of national women’s identity and product, where both are conjoined, while highlighting how meaning, value creation, identity, and product are unraveling. Through this analysis, I have shown that the colonial and imme­ diate postcolonial era experienced circulation as frontier making and consolidation. Although the era of consolidation of the entrepôt was still transnational, imperial, and border crossing, the types of exchanges nonetheless strengthened the nation’s boundaries and the region’s identity. At the same time, older boundaries and trade networks were consolidated by women’s affiliation with the state at the national level and with transnational companies such as Vlisco. The post-­postcolonial, neoliberal era is where these borders, networks, and political connections are falling apart. This is a time when the frontier keeps moving and is being remade in the pattern of global capital. Profit is increasingly derived from time-­space compression—­in terms of the speed in copying and making cloth in China, the capitalization of materials, and the general flexibility of disassemblage and dispossession. Although it might seem that women’s design expertise can be stripped down to components and assembled elsewhere in new flexible and speculative ways, the infrastructure of wax cloth always require people’s active participation and input. Just as the women traders, who know more about cloth and local tastes than the Dutch or Chinese, did not quietly disperse as hoped in the aftermath of the burning of the market, so women as traders and consumers of cloth remain central to the constitution of this market as well as to West African ways of being in the world. This is because of cloth’s dense materiality and the ways people want to buy, interact with (see, touch, taste), and animate pagne. This book has conceptualized cloth as a vibrant object and as an assembled global commodity whose fabrication is uniquely entangled in imperial circuits of desire and more recent controversies of piracy and appropriation. If this book has captured how this peculiar object came into being by tracking different cross-­cultural influences and their negotia­ tion across time and space, it ends with the provocation to think about what happens when anyone can digitally print his or her own “African” patterns. What might the future of pagne look like when Nanettes do not merely own the rights to patterns as in the Nana Benz’s heyday, but when they actually alter, individualize, and print patterns? Perhaps the future is less overtly about the African consumer and more generally about the new consumer who creates unique fabrics. Although expensive and 173

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requiring highly specialized knowledge and infrastructure, in many ways, this is similar to how West African women inserted themselves into the early commercial exchanges with the Dutch. The dense materiality of wax cloth may always provide opportunities of this sort across time and across a changing global landscape of trade and appropriation.

174

Notes Preface

1.

I refer to individuals by their nickname or first name, and only in some cases by their full name, as is common practice in Togo. I have also adhered to anthropological convention by using pseudonyms for most of the individuals in this book in order to protect their identities. However, certain person­ alities have achieved acclaim, status, and recognizability in Togo as a result of their work in the market or politics, and in those instances I have identified them by name.

Introduction

1. 2.

3.

4.

This material is an abbreviated version of the definition found in the New Oxford American Dictionary online. In anglophone West Africa, pagne translates as “wrapper.” I prefer to use the French term throughout this book because of its rich etymology on one hand, and its ontological and signifying characteristics on the other. This type of cloth is generically known as “African print,” a category that in­­ cludes Dutch wax cloth as well as Ivoirian, Nigerian, and Chinese wax as well as various grades of screen-printed “fancy” cloth. For an excellent discussion about women’s cloth wealth in global Senegal, see Buggenhagen (2012). For an overview of the anthropology of cloth, see Schneider (1987) and Schneider and Weiner (1989). Nigeria is in fact the largest consumer market for wax prints, which are referred to as ankara. Ankara has important standing in social events, marriages, and other celebrations,

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

176

and Nigeria has its own economy of fashion journalism, celebrity maga­ zines, and blogosphere. Similarly, the Democratic Repub­­lic of the Congo constitutes a large consumer market, especially for so-­called superwax prints, which are printed on a superior type of cotton with three color applications. Wax cloth has made scattered appearances both in Africanist studies on dress and fashion (Rabine 2002; Gott and Loughran 2010; Rovine 2015) and in surveys of African textiles that have accompanied various art exhi­­ bitions since the 1980s (Spencer 1982; Picton 1995; Spring 2012). Founda­­ tional to this body of work is art historian John Picton’s study of the his­tory of African print design, and this book heavily draws on his insights. Sim­ ilarly, Africanist art historians Victoria Rovine (2008) and Christopher Steiner (1985; 1994) have produced pioneering work on issues of authenticity, cir­ culation, and visual representation in African art and textile design on glob­al markets that inspires how I theorize wax cloth and its circuits. For example, when a pattern is elected as the official uniform for a large celebration, the price of a six-­yard piece can reach up to $100, to which the cost of tailoring is added and can range anywhere between $10 to $100 depending on the level of sophistication and quality of the design and ma­ terials used. In his wonderful work on Yoruba uniforms in Nigeria (aso ebi), Okechukwu Nwafor (2011, 2012) details how the visual practice of being dressed as one body signifies the fabric of friendship and kinship. It was printed in Haarlem upon the orders of a Glasgow merchant (Brown-­ Fleming), who seemingly introduced and traded the cloth in coastal Ghana (see chap­ter 2; see also Elands, forthcoming). Indeed, a sample of the origi­ nal design (6251/rol number 3885) is conserved in swatch book 245, dated 1899/90, of the Haarlem Cotton Com­­pany. The original pattern is part of the Brown-­Fleming designs collection (1895–­1912). Initially this pattern was printed by the Haarlem Cotton Company for West African markets, and eventually it was copied and adapted by Dutch and English manu­ facturers. The swatch book is located in the Vlisco firm archive. I thank Helene Elands for drawing my attention to these documents. This process consists of three steps. First, wax is printed on both sides of the cotton to make a reservation. Second, the cloth (printed with wax) is placed into a base color bath (mostly indigo), and the design is created on the nonreserved places. Third, after removing (totally or partly) the wax, additional colors are fitted or block-­printed onto the already existing pat­ tern. Vlisco produces 14/0663 in forty unique color combinations. Often the blocks are imperfectly fitted such that colors overlap and inadvertently create a sparkle that is processed by the eye as a dizzying cognition (see chapter 2). Broadly speaking, this book stands at the intersection of three kinds of scholarship: the literature on materiality and mobilities; the globalization, gender, and nation literature; and the literature on postcolonial Africa.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 – 1 6

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Anthropology has recently found new interest in examining the materiality of culture by following globally circulating things (Carse 2014). Using the complex materialities of objects to rethink value, authenticity, modernity, and power, this literature critically examines the global assemblages of things, brands, counterfeits, and the regulatory regimes that make them (Coombe 1998; Vann 2006; Nakassis 2013). Similarly, scholarship on post­ colonial Africa has focused on the commodification of culture, heritage, and attendant questions of legal regulation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Boateng 2011) while establishing connections between mimesis, consump­ tion, and postcolonial identity (Newell 2012). The book is based on thirty months of fieldwork, consisting of several two­month trips between 2000 and 2003, twelve months of continuous field­­ work between 2004 and 2005, and follow-­up visits in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Sandwiched between the powerful kingdoms of Asante (contemporary Ghana) on the southwest and Danhomè (contemporary Benin) on the southeast, the coastal territory that became Togo functioned much like a free trade zone avant la lettre, with limited areas of economic and political sovereignty. At its center was the coastal entrepôt, Aného. For a detailed history of Aného, see Nicoué Gayibor (1997), Peter Seebald (1998), and Yves Marguerat (1994). In line with the XOF/USD exchange rate, the average value of the XOF currency (CFA franc) fell from 0.0034 in 1993 to 0.0019 in 1994. Thus, if in 1993 10,000 CFA francs were equivalent to roughly 34 USD, their value was only about 19 USD in 1994. Accordingly, if before the devaluation six yards of Dutch wax cost roughly 20,000 CFA francs, the cost after devaluation would be 40,000 CFA francs. Between 2000 and 2016, the average price for six yards of Dutch wax has ranged from 34,000–­40,000 CFA. While 6 yards (a demi-­pièce) is the standard length required to make a woman’s outfit, the standard wholesale unit is 12 yards (one pièce), thus with prices ranging from 72,000–­80,000 CFA. A recent trend in this line of inquiry has been to talk about the materiality of environmental life and various ecologies of the nonhuman (see Tilley 2007; Ingold 2007; Bennett 2010). Another trend, and one more relevant to how I think about cloth’s (techno-­material) composition, concerns ex­ ploring assemblages such as technical artifacts that are invested with par­ ticular kinds of agencies and capabilities that shape, constrain, and even substitute human capacities. For a fascinating historical account of the memories and stories embed­ ded in clothing, see Peter Stallybrass’s (1998) discussion of the “memory wrinkles” in Marx’s coat. Benjamin’s specter, however, was the aestheticization of politics in fascism, and hence the dangerous and seductive power the quantitative increment of images can have on audiences and society.

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16. Others have explored the relationship between cloth authenticity, copy, and circulation (Rabine 2002; Rovine 2008). Similarly, scholarship on the re­ lationship between globalization, consumption, and postcolonial identity in urban Africa has touched upon questions of circulation and originality (see Weiss 2009; Hansen 2002; Newell 2012; Masquelier 2013; Stoller 2002). 17. Social theorists of modernity portrayed industrialized societies as being es­­ sentially organized around the principles and insecurities of mimesis (see Adorno 1991; Benjamin 1986). The production of doubleness by moder­ nity’s technological apparatuses was perceived to trouble and diminish not just the aura of uniqueness and originality found in artistic production but was also considered a threat to modern identity. 18. For an excellent discussion of this literature and its various approaches (commodity biographies, global commodity chains and value chain analy­ sis), see Foster (2006). Chapter One

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

178

Although flamboyant dandy fashions betrayed European sophistication and were carefully monitored, women’s dressed bodies and aesthetic desires for novelty and distinction did not fall under the colonial radar, even as missionaries advanced gendered ideals of Christian propriety, norms of dress, and bodily conduct (see Seebald 1998; Gayibor 1997). For a fascinating discussion on the shininess of cloth in relation to how it may intensify a person’s visibility, including how the “magical properties of shiny things [may] reflect evil back upon its source,” see Picton (2008, 21). While long excluded from fashion scholarship, African engagements with dress, adornment, and fashion have gained traction since the 1990s. Jo­ anne Eicher’s (1994) pioneering work on African dress, further developed by Hansen (2000, 2004b, 2013), Rovine (2008, 2015), Rabine (2002), Mus­ tafa (1998a, 1998b), Gott (2009), Gott and Loughran (2010), and Hen­ drick­son (1996), marks a critical departure from dress scholarship that long differentiated between the “West” and the “rest.” In challenging the foun­ dation of Western fashion studies as being specific to and located at the center of capitalist production, recent Africanist scholarship has attempted to “liberate the idea of ‘fashion’ from the theoretical clutches of Western modernity” (Allman 2004, 2). I heard men talk extensively about la forme (“the shape”) of the buttocks, including debates about whether it was natural beauty or deceptive trick­ ery. Stories of women using fillers to achieve this ideal of beauty are not unusual. Neither is talk about how women’s diets and nutritional supple­ ments help to create the desired shape. In 2010, the cost to tailor a garment ranged from 2,000 CFA (about $4) for a simple blouse worn with a traditional wrapped skirt and the third piece

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 5 – 5 0

to up to 10,000 CFA (about $20) for a bodice with elaborate embroidery and a fitted skirt. 6. Vlisco’s shift from textile manufacturer to fashion house focusing on “new wealth” succinctly reflects the recent global corporate discourse about African growth, or “Africa Rising.” See www.vlisco.com for a description of how Vlisco crafts its vision of the new African consumer ready for luxury consumption and branded apparel. 7. As Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) point out in their famous work on invented traditions, traditions are often relatively recent inventions or hybrids that always produce something new. To reckon with dress, aesthetics, and the importance of appearance in contemporary Africa requires moving beyond conventional analytical dichotomies to recenter African subjects as authors and innovators of their own dress histories and fashion cycles. 8. For a rich discussion of tailoring in West Africa, see Heath (1992), Mustafa (1998a, 1998b), Rabine (2002), and Rovine (2015). 9. Dress and adornment have played major roles in the region’s political econ­ omy as well as in the production and reproduction of political and social life, as the next two chapters show. Indeed, a long history of sumptuary stat­uses characterizes this region, with people wearing a great variety of indigenous textiles (woven, stenciled, and tie-­dyed), which were used to both constitute and contest power. The politics of indigenous clothing in West Africa thus has a long history, and the rich textile design of indigenous cloth has been the subject of various monographs. For a detailed discussion of the aesthetic value and design of various African textiles, see Rovine (2008) on Malian mudcloth (bogolan), Boateng (2011) on Ghanian kente and adinkra, and Picton (1995) on Nigerian adire and West African textile production more generally. 10. For a comprehensive discussion of romance, courtship, and love in urban Africa, see Cole and Thomas (2009). 11. Names and outfits can have many lives. Another series of names alluding to the empowered status of women includes “Femme capable,” or “Capable woman.” This name is in reference to its counterpart “Mari capable.” Names of fabrics referring to popular US soap operas (Dallas) and Brazilian tele­ novelas (Marie Mare) were also popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Ivoirians are especially famous for naming pagnes that work in the contested field of love and romance, and Togolese women like to appropriate them and make them socially relevant in their own cours. Chapter Two

1.

The Vlisco archives hold 13,000 items related to the production of wax-­ printed textiles, including color recipes, company records, a collection of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century sample books of Indian calico and chintz, Southeast Asian batik, and twentieth-­century sketchbooks.

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2.

This is not unique to the West African context, as Jeremy Prestholdt (2004) demonstrates in his work on the US–­East African cloth trade. Adaptations and attentiveness to African taste and desires undoubtedly reflect a capital­ ist concern for profits in the context of an emerging colonial economy and metropolitan industrialization. 3. I thank Lorena Rizzo for putting me onto this analytical track. 4. This trafficking in multicolored cloth and bodies connected India and Af­­ rica into what might be called a “chromophilic ecumene.” I borrow and extend this term from Hudita Mustafa’s work on cosmopolitan fashion in Senegal. She uses the notion of the “sartorial ecumene” to characterize the “incorporation of objects and images of global origins into practices and circulations involving dress and bodily adornment”(Mustafa 1998b, 22). 5. Though Portuguese traders established the first slaving fort in Elmina in 1482, the Dutch controlled Elmina as well as other coastal trading posts for roughly 300 years. In the 1870s, the Dutch ceded their possessions to the British, then involved in local political struggles between the complex world of coastal African polities and the Asante of the north. The “British Gold Coast” was brought under British control by conquest wars from the 1890s onward, and eventually became a formal British colony. 6. For a discussion of an alternative “origin” story of the wax-print aesthetic in West Africa through returning Gold Coast soldiers (Belanda Hitam) who had served in the Army of the Dutch East Indies, see Kessel (2002), Picton (2001), and Nielsen (1979). 7. Part of the Dutch Empire, the Dutch Gold Coast was essentially run by the Dutch West India Company. Similar to the Dutch East India Company’s “indirect rule,” whose sovereignty in the Indian Ocean historian Kerry Ward qualifies as an “empire within a state” (2009), the Dutch West India Company essentially exercised political control over the coast as it orga­ nized the Atlantic slave trade from Elmina. 8. For a chronology see Nielsen (1979, 471). 9. For a detailed discussion of the technology of La Javanaise as well as its innovator, the Belgian Prévinaire, see Ankersmit (2010), Kroese (1976), and Krantz (1989). 10. Java prints occupy a small market segment in contemporary West Africa. Today, Java prints retain some semblance of Javanese iconography, but, with the exception of being printed on one side, they have little in common with Vlisco’s mid-­nineteenth-­century prints. The name “Java print” is likely to have initially appeared on Dutch production floors to designate the final destinations of the cloth. The patterns were first inspired by tra­ ditional Indonesian designs and lent Java prints a distinctly exotic look. Over time, some designs were altered to reflect aesthetic traditions that hybridized African, South Asian, and European cultural influences. One-­ sided prints with designs that did not evoke Javanese iconography, but

180

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 3 – 6 6

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

were adapted to African tastes, became known as “fancy prints.” One of Vlisco’s most famous Java prints of the 1970s, still highly desired, is called “Angelina.” From the late 1930s onward, the company slowly rose to prominence. By the mid-­1950s, Vlisco was exporting half of its total production to African markets and soon established a near monopoly for Dutch wax on West African markets along with Dutch competitor Ankersmit. Ultimately, the company terminated production for European markets in the early 1980s and focused exclusively on West Africa. Around 1910, several companies in the Netherlands and England began producing copies of the patterns Brown Fleming had registered in England, among them Ankersmit in Deventer and van Vlissingen (Vlisco) in Helmond, in the Netherlands, and F. W. Asthon & Company based at Newton Bank Print Works in Hyde, Blakeley and Beving, Logan Muckelt, and Paterson Zochonis among others. In addition to copying and innovating upon the Brown Fleming patterns, these companies also developed new designs. The most successful of the British manufacturers was F. W. Asthon & Com­­ pany which became Arthur Brunnschweiler & Company (ABC) from 1970 onward. Although Vlisco and ABC became the most established Dutch and English wax cloth brands on West African markets, it is important to note that wax prints were also produced in Switzerland (Hohlenstein Textildruc­ kerei, 1930-­1963), in France (IKD in Mulhouse), and during a short period of time in the 1980s in Italy (Mascioni) and in Japan (Sanyo Senko Co. Ltd in Hiroshima, and Toyobo Co. Ltd in Osaka). European manufacturers had to adapt the length of the cloth: knee-­length Javanese sarongs featured a 36” drop while West African women wore wrap around lengths reaching the ankles necessitating a 48” drop. Personal communication with former Vlisco designer Jan van der Heijden, Helmond, March 2000. Too little is known about the ways in which these early hybrid designs emerged, yet Europe’s nineteenth-­century scientific racism is well docu­ mented, crudely reflected in the successful tours across Europe made by so-­called human zoos (see Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire 2011), and in exhibits of commodified “precivilizational” humans on display for public amusement. At many World’s Fairs, fetish-­adoring Africans with tastes for loud colors were juxtaposed as primitive others against the refined crea­ tures of European civilization. Race ideologies, as well as the racialization of Africans, were actively produced through institutions such as museums and universities. Racial categories became sources of cultural and actual capital, cannily extracting value from their very processes of objectification and commodification. It was not until the mid-­1970s that women began to work in Vlisco’s de­ sign department.

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17. Personal communication, Frans van Rood, Helmond, March 2000. Van Rood also indicated that 1,200 engraved patterns are permanently kept in the Vlisco collection with all their color block variations. 18. According to Picton, Grafton, a firm connected to the Manchester Calico Printers’ Association, bought out Brown Fleming’s company in 1939. They, of course, also assumed that they had the copyright to the designs. The “duplicity” of the mysterious agent “only came to light in the 1950s,” when the Dutch manufacturers sued a Japanese company to prevent prod­­uction of wax cloth there (Picton 2004, 54). Vlisco could not provide proof of their title to the designs and a legal dispute over intellectual property rights en­ sued; devoid of any attempt to regulate previous forms of property theft by estab­­lishing ownership rights to Javanese authors, the dispute revealed Brown Fleming’s actions rendered the allocation of prior exclusive prop­erty rights impossible (Picton 1995, 28). 19. Personal communication, Frans van Rood, Helmond, March 2000. Chapter Three

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

182

For a discussion of the linear, teleological promise of modernity and its concretization in the state’s modernization project, see Ferguson (1999). Among them, Confort Adzrevo, Eunice Adabunu, Flora Agbale, Confort Anthony, Julie Bocco, Dédé Rose Creppy, Antoinette d’Almeida, Gisèle Djondo, Laura Doe Bruce, Flora Ekué Hettah, Marie Franklin, Suzanne Gbedey, Georgette Quenum, Ayélé Sant’Anna, Epévi Patience Sanvee, and Manavi Sewoa Ahiankpor. It is important to note that the Nana Benz were not the only “middlemen” responsible for the distribution and marketing of Dutch and English wax cloth in the region and beyond. Traders in Kinshasa (such as the famous “Moziki Cent Kilos”) have also forged relationships with Vlisco and other wax-­print manufacturers. Women have a long history of trade in this area of West Africa, stretching back to the Atlantic slave trade. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth cen­ turies, women were already involved in the complex trading networks that connected commercial centers of the Mediterranean to the West African coast during the trans-­Sahara trade (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries). Women’s labor took various forms: Some organized commercial operations at market towns, traveled with the caravans, or carried kola nuts, while oth­­ers traded in luxury goods—­including cloth of regional and foreign makes—­across the Sahara by proxy (Coquery-­Vidrovitch 1983, 1997; Lydon 2009). All quotations from individuals in this chapter are from personal interviews I conducted with various market actors in Lomé between 2000 and 2010. Indeed, French colonial policy in Togo never envisioned industrial develop­ ment. Although the French, like the Germans before, exploited agricultural

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 9 – 1 0 0

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

export cultures (initially palm oil, then coffee, cocoa, and cotton), these were minor in scale due to the small surface of the Togolese territory. Instead, the colonial state was mercantile in nature and made trade—­im­­ port and re-­exportation, and thus the entrepôt economy—­the focus of its colonial policies. Hence, the work these women traders performed contrib­ uted to the logic of the colonial entrepôt writ large. The intimate character of this high-­stakes negotiation reflects these wom­ en’s ability to draw upon the networks of affinity they had forged during the nationalist era, when they financially supported political leaders who became Togo’s first two presidents. The dictator was part of a group of Kabre soldiers from the north who had served in the French colonial army in Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria but who were denied access to the newly formed army at independence (Toula­­ bor 1986; Piot 1999). From the time Eyadéma took power in 1967 until his death in 2005, he stocked the army with northerners. In the fashion of patrimonial politics, power was concentrated in the hands of a small circle of northerners who held central positions in an army that would remain loyal to Eyadéma throughout his reign. In chapter 5, I return to how the appeals of national heritage and brand­ ing take on critical importance when China becomes the main producer of “African” wax prints. Of course, the long-­standing Ga and Akan traditions of assigning names and proverbs to adinkra designs can be read as an earlier form of branding that often entailed political (sometimes even subversive) content, namely in reference to the powerful kingdom of the Asante kingdoms. Although I do not subscribe to the postcolonial reading of power through the lens of the phallocratic, one way of analyzing this relationship of the Nana Benz’s endorsement of male military power is to read it as the traders having led their “wombs” to the “presidential penis,” as Toulabor (1994, 68) suggests. In his fascinating study of political satire in the Togolese post­ colony and Eyadéma’s “libidinous economy,” Toulabor discusses rumors about the vi­­rility of the dictator and his cronies that involved a satirical relabeling of the Union Nationale des Femmes Togolaises (National Union of Togolese Women) as the “National Union of Women of the Helmsman” (1994, 65). The tallest building in Togo, the hotel was promoted by Eyadéma as an­ other monumental symbol of Togolese progress. Although empty most of the time, the hotel was conceived to host international guests of the Lomé II Convention, the famous trade/aid agreement between the Euro­pean Com­ munity and the so-­called ACP countries (African, Caribbean, and Pacific). Like all African nations after independence that sought to make the textile industry the backbone of the economy, Togo had its own textile spinning, weaving, and printing facilities. Producing national pagne cloth (fancy prints) backed by German investors and technicians, Togo’s textile mill

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14.

15. 16.

17.

only produced between 70% and 80% of its production capacity (Marguerat 1993). By the late 1980s, after German investors pulled out following an interim period during which Togotex was essentially run by women traders who prefinanced the buying of raw materials while the factory printed cloth at their demand and unsuccessful attempts to attract Korean, Indian, and Hong Kong Chinese investors, Togotex shut down. Despite various attempts to revitalize production, the state currently considers selling the machines as disassembled pieces. Many Nanas indeed lived separate from their husbands; instead they lived with their children whose overseas education they paid for. Although Mina and Ewe women are not organized matrilineally, it is women, especially traders, who set up their daughters financially—­they complement the hus­­ band’s twice-­yearly dress and food allowances and provide a stock-­in-­trade for their daughters. For an excellent analysis of changing kinship and fam­ ily patterns in Lomé, see Locoh (1994). For a detailed description of the fiscality of the Nana Benz’s trade and the “patente” system, see Cordonnier (1982). For an in-­depth discussion of the Beninese “entrepôt state,” see Igué and Soule (1992). On Cotonou’s Dantokpa market and the textile trade, see Prag (2013). Although the weakened dictator encouraged international firms and the exiled trading population to return to Lomé, international investors and multinational companies continued to privilege the Beninese economy as a safer option. Benin was also attractive because of its geographical proximity to Nigeria, West Africa’s largest consumer market.

Chapter Four

1. 2.

3.

4.

184

The average value of the CFA franc (XOF currency) fell from 0.0034 in 1993 to 0.0019 in 1994 (see introduction, note 13). Scholarship concerned with the criminalization and privatization of the African state has indeed characterized Togo as a “shadow” and “smuggling state” (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999, 20). Yet the state’s capacity or interest to exempt fiscal regulation, even in the lucrative Lomé port zone, form complex public-­private assemblages whose governance works differently from places such as Singapore or Dubai. The historical context that shaped these global regulatory reforms is related to a series of political and economic shifts, from a first shift in the 1950s and 1960s in Euro-­American textile and apparel production to Asia, which was initially brought about by the rise of Japan, to a second shift to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a third shift during the 1990s to Southeast Asia and China (Gereffi 1999). These shifts in global textile and apparel production, what Gereffi and Meme­­ dovic (2003) have called the “global apparel value chain,” were the result

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 2 – 1 1 8

of neoliberal globalization, preferential trading regimes, and capital’s re­­ lentless search for low labor costs. It is in this context that deindustrializing Western countries pushed for the establishment in 1974 of the Multi-­Fibre Arrangement (MFA), a global regulatory framework designed to protect Euro-­American apparel markets from cheap textile imports, while facilitat­ ing the restructuring of Euro-­American industries (Kaplinsky and Morris 2006). Until 1994, the MFA essentially operated outside of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This changed when the 1994 Uru­­ guay round of multilateral trade negotiations instituted the GATT transi­ tional Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) to dismantle the MFA quota system. Over a ten-­year period, the ATC removed regulations that protected North American and European markets from Asian competitors and imposed quotas on small textile exporters like Ghana and Nigeria. On January 1 2015, when the ATC ended, the global textile trade and apparel industry thus came under the full jurisdiction of the WTO, rendering it subject to the same multilateral rules as other products. 5. As Heidi Haugen (2011) shows in her work on Chinese exports to Africa, the opening up of China to foreign investors in the mid-­1980s enabled Chinese textile manufacturers to buy the latest equipment, which helped produce textiles more efficiently. Alternately, in their work on Nigeria’s textile in­ dustry, Salihu Maiwada and Elisha Renne (2013) show that several textile mills were already closed by 2002 as a consequence of the implementa­ tion of an IMF structural adjustment program that had made purchases of improved weaving, spinning, and dying equipment too expensive. 6. In addition to Vlisco, the Vlisco Group owns the Ivoirian wax-­print ma­nu­ facturer Uniwax and fashion brand Woodin, as well as the Ghanaian GTP. 7. The term Nanette is highly ambiguous but essentially signifies “small Nana Benz.” 8. Of the first Nana generation (women who range in age from seventy-­five to ninety), only one trader is still active. The thirty-­five-­to fifty-­five-­year-­ old daughters and granddaughters of the original Nana Benz conduct the majority of trade today. The power shift from the first to second and third generations brought about a rupture in the structure of social capital that differentiates the younger women from their mothers, most notably in the realm of education, personal relations such as marriage, and kinship connections. 9. Guyer notes that the duration of repayment, as well as the calculation of interest, were not necessarily fixed to strict temporal frames or a fixed no­ tion of interest rate. Rather, the spectrum of debt repayment and indebted­ ness could take on various forms. 10. Solange’s financial situation was unrelated to the global economic crisis unfolding simultaneously. 11. Manavi Sewoa’s granddaughter, for example, is running her grandmother’s business today under the name Manatex.

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12. Chapter 5 details the evaluative crisis that results when fabrics of greater or lesser quality are mistaken or misrepresented for one another. 13. During the 1990s, African textile industries received significant foreign in­­vestment from Asian textile firms that used the African textile sector as a parallel avenue for EU and US export markets. With the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2001, this avenue became even more lu­ crative, attracting increased Chinese investment and manufacturing, most notably in Nigeria. Such a favorable investment climate soured quickly, however, with the termination of the MFA quotas on January 1, 2005. 14. West African postindependence markets attracted a number of Asian in­ ves­­tors. As postcolonial states established national textile industries as the back­­bone of their economies and promoted “authentic” African dress styles, the Hong Kong industrialist, textile engineer, and entrepreneur Cha Chi Ming extended his textile enterprise to Nigeria in 1964. During the 1960s and 1970s, CHA deployed several hundred Hong Kong Chinese workers, textile engineers, and designers to Nigeria and Ghana. To this day, CHA owns several factories and brands, which are distributed throughout West Africa. 15. By 2008, ABC machinery and production was transferred to Ghana. Although assailed by Chinese copies, and having lost an important portion of its his­­toric market share in both Ghana and in Nigeria, ABC continues to be produced in Ghana (Axelsson and Sylvanus 2010; Axelsson 2012). 16. The privatization of customary port regimes in the Lomé port operates similarly to the kind of multinationalization of state services that Brenda Chalfin (2010) describes of the Tema port (Ghana). Ongoing expansions of the port have attracted privatized foreign investments, including Chinese capital. With the recalibration of capital and port infrastructure, new forms of economic governance and power have emerged. 17. As Western governments, international organizations, and NGOs ponder the ways to “engage” China over Africa, as documented by cascading me­ dia reports, academic literature has focused on similar large-­scale economic phe­nomena (see Broadman and Isik 2006). For a more nuanced literature on the “New Scramble for Africa” focusing on resource extraction, the poli­ tics of energy, trade, investment, and aid, see Alden et al. (2008), Large (2008), Taylor (2006), and Bräutigam (2011). For an excellent discussion of Chinese entrepreneurs on West African markets, see Kernen (2010) and Kernen and Vulliet (2008). C h a p t e r Fi v e

1.

186

Simmel’s (1957) discussion of fashion captured the social tensions that emerged from claims to individual uniqueness of affluent consumers and subsequent forms of imitation by the lower classes. For Simmel, fash­ ion could only exist because of a constant tension between imitation

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 9 – 1 6 6

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

and (suc­­cessive) differentiation—­that is, the dynamic that produces fash­ ion’s perpetual changes in style. The Comaroffs (2000) have called this dynamic “millennial capitalism” to describe both capitalism at the millennium and capitalism in its messianic, salvific, even magical manifestations. The idea of the creative individual has its origins in Romantic thought, whereby authorship was linked to individual genius, a recognition that re­­ moved previously granted copyrights out of the hands of monopolizing printers and publishers and into the hands of authors (creators). The use of skin-­brightening soaps and lotions are popular among young ur­ ban women in Togo, as is the desire for métisse children or the fantasy to be like those light-­skinned femmes fatales of the popular Brazilian, Mexican, and, most recently, Indian and Korean telenovelas, which Lomeans follow with great attention. Until 2003, Actis Capital was owned by the British government. Privatized since, Actis Capital intends to double Vlisco’s size and turnover within five years (see R. Johnson 2013). On the prosthetic dimensions of the brand personality, see Mazzarella (2003). Mazzarella distinguishes between two metaphors upon which the brand depends: the metaphor of “prosthetic personality” central to the structure of the brand, and the metaphor of “gift exchange,” upon which the prac­ tice of branding relies (187, 192). The Vlisco group has three additional textile and fashion brands in its port­­ folio—­GTP, Woodin, and Uniwax, which are located in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. In a 2013 interview, Vlisco’s CEO talks about the glamour of Africa, which, he says, “used to be known for poverty, for AIDS, for wars, for corruption and all of these negative things. . . . Nowadays, Africa is known for its great opportunity, for its growth—­out of the top ten fastest growing economies in the world, 7 are African, so Africa is on a journey that is extremely fast, expanding GDP on an annual basis by 10 percent. It is going to be an ex­­ tremely interesting market” (R. Johnson 2013). Though the question is: glamour for whom? The collection featured handbags, totes, and pouches in the monogrammed style of Louis Vuitton; it proudly displayed Vlisco’s trademarked mono­ gram, VVH (van Vlissingen Helmond), on each item, recalling the family history of the van Vlissingen family who acquired the Helmond-­based fac­ tory in the mid-­nineteenth century (see chapter 2 for a genealogy).

Conclusion

1.

Indeed, political suspicion was heightened by the fact that the Lomé mar­­ ket fire occurred just forty-­eight hours after a market in Togo’s second larg­ est city (Kara, in the north) had burned down.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

188

Hedzranawoé market (or Assiyéyé in Mina) opened in 1987. Since the mid-­ 1990s, it has essentially become a secondhand clothing market organized by Nigerian men (Igbo traders), despite the city’s various incentives and (punitive) efforts to relocate Assigamé traders to this new location. During this period, the state-­run market authority closed Assigamé three days a week, an action the Nana Benz fiercely opposed and ultimately resolved through the cloth traders powerful merchant organization (APRT). The traders negotiated with various ministers and ultimately took the affair to Eyadéma, who overruled the city council decision in favor of the women. It is at this time that many wealthy traders began to rent shops outside the central state-­owned market building, where they were no longer subject to the market’s restrictive opening hours. This is a common thread in many cities in the global South, where fires tend to be understood as ways of clearing people off the land, making fires inherently political. As Mike Davis writes about the relationship between arson and slum fires, they “are often anything but accidents: rather than bear the expense of court procedures or endure the wait for an official de­­ molition order, landlords and developers frequently prefer the simplicity of arson” (Davis 2006, 127). For an insightful discussion about Africa as the last frontier of capitalism, see Thomas M. Blaser, “Africa and the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” Africa Is a Country, November 20. Accessed April 7, 2014, http:// africasacountry.com/africa-­and-­the-­future-­an-­interview-­with-­achille -­mbembe/. China especially has a vested interest in the new port structure, which has been marketed as a major container transshipment hub and entry to land­­ locked markets. With the aim of making Lomé “the Singapore of West Africa,” the port features high-­tech customs technologies. Since 2009, it also boasts the latest cargo scanner technology in the region.

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202

Index Abidjan (Ivory Coast), 2, 38, 88 Accra, 38, 74, 83–­85, 88, 104, 132 ACP countries, 183n12 Actis Capital, 159, 187n5 adinkra, 63 Adorno, Theodor, 19 Africa, 6–­7, 10, 13, 62, 64, 73, 96, 100–­101, 107, 117, 135, 181n15, 187n5; and China-­in-­Africa, 172; debt crisis in, 111; economic forms in, and morality, 149; “glamour” of, 187n8; as laboratory, for future, 15, 170; as “last frontier” of capitalism, 168–­69; “New Scramble for Africa” policy, 136 African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), 186n13 African Intellectual Property Organi­ zation, 156 Africa Rising, 168–­72 agency, 21, 42–­43, 47–­48, 51, 80, 142–­43, 167; of cloth, 36; of copies, 144; and global capitalism, 20; pagne fashion, 45; of sample books, 75; and taste, 67; of wax cloth, 168; of women, as national agency, 172 Agnès B., 4 Akosombo Textiles, 124 Allman, Jean, 102 alterity, and re-­creation, 66 Amina (magazine), 38, 151 Amsterdam (Netherlands), 64, 66 Anderson, Ben, 94 Aného (Togo), 7, 81–­82, 177n11

ankara (wax prints), 175–­76n4 Ankersmit, 181nn11–­12 appropriation, 71, 174; assemblage, and circulation, 50; of cultural heritage, 73 Apter, Andy, 146 Arthur Brunnschweiler & Company (ABC), 71, 181n12, 186n15. See also F. W. Asthon & Company Asante kingdom, 65, 177n11, 180n5, 183n10 Asia, 5, 50, 52, 58, 70, 121–­23, 140, 184n4 Assigamé. See Lomé Grand Marché Association of Professional Cloth Traders, 89 Auden group, 124–­25 authentic copy, 139–­40, 163 authenticity, 16, 18, 163; of cloth, 22; and photography, 107; and value, 162 authorship, 162; and ownership, 152 Banégas, Richard, 135 Banerjee, Mukulika, 30 Bangkok (Thailand), 122, 125 Basel Mission Trading Company, 68 batik, 53, 57–­59, 61–­63, 72–­73 Baudrillard, Jean, 158 Behrend, Heike, 41 belly politics, 98 Benin, 7, 53, 86, 105, 109, 122, 128, 140, 167, 184n17 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 125; mimetic faculty, 66 Bhabha, Homi, 55 203

I n d e x

Bosman, Willem, 54–­56, 73 Bourdieu, Pierre, 42 branding, 98, 106–­8; and cloning, 152; of cloth, 78–­80; gift exchange, 187n6; moral value, 159; naming, as essential part of, 92; national identity, 153; and neoliberalism, 158, 160; and ownership, 160, 162; politics of, 91, 93–­97; prosthetic personality, 187n6; and women, 76 BrandWatch, 159 Brautigam, Deborah, 136 Brazil, 82 British Empire, 53 British Gold Coast, 180n5 British Museum, 66 British Royal African Company, 54 Brown-­Flemming, 176n7, 181n12, 182n18 Burberry, 4 Burkina Faso, 7, 94, 105 Cameroon, 120, 156 capitalism, 51, 143, 149, 168–­72; commodification of culture in, 91; copies, circulation of, 142; and kinship, 97; millennial capitalism, 187n2; and modernity, 158; and wax cloth, 52–­53; witchcraft and magic, 101, 103–­4 Central Africa, 160 Central Bank of West African States, 94 Cha Chi Ming (CHA Textiles), 124, 186n14 Chalfin, Brenda, 19, 57, 186n16 Chanel, 153 China, 6, 15, 19–­20, 35, 71, 73, 108, 113, 115, 121–­24, 130, 132, 134–­35, 153, 156, 173, 184–­85nn4–­5, 188n5; China-­ in-­Africa, 7, 10–­11, 17–­18, 22, 111–­12, 136–­37, 142, 168, 170–­72; China-­in-­ Togo, 171; China over Africa, 186n17; Chinese pagne, trickster qualities of, 148; Chinese products, supernatural properties of, 148; Chinese wax prints, 127–­28; Dutch designs, and ownership, 152; itchy sensations, association with, 146–­49; new Africa policy of, 10; in Togo, 138 Chinese copies, 140, 163; corrupted materiality of, 139, 147–­48; as dangerous, 138–­ 39; dangerous materiality of, 141; and deceit, 147–­48; of Dutch designs, 112; inflammability of, 138–­39; profusion of, 204

143; reproducibility of, 146–­48; value, undermining of, 146, 154, 172 circulation, 146, 149, 173; of cloth, 52, 75; of copies, 142–­43; reproduction and patterning, 16 cloth, 19, 21, 23, 56, 69, 76, 85–­86, 100, 108, 137, 163, 171–­72; as archive, 63, 75; as art form, 74; authenticity of, 22; branding of, 78–­80; as charged material object, 11, 13; circulation of, 52, 75; classics category, 70–­72; and cosmopolitanism, 52–­55; dense materiality of, 18, 20, 48, 51, 61, 78–­79, 96, 113, 164, 173; emotion and memory, 11; experiential qualities of, 11, 54; as extension of per­­ son, 30; as flammable, 138–­39; as futur­ istic, 13; and identity, 8; mechanical reproduction of, 57; as memory object, 14; modernity, as product of, 17; and nationalism, 80; and nation building, 8; and photography, 11; as political, 80, 97; power of, 167; price, doubling of, 110; production of, 50; sartorial vision of, 12; semiotic power of, 76, 78–­79, 94; sensory contacts, 140; social relations, 74; and subjectivity, 75; as symbolic marker, 78; as traditional, 13; and value, 8, 140–­41; wielding of, as performative act, 48. See also wax cloth cloth traders, argent bloqué (blocked money), 117 Cold War, 9, 95, 105, 108, 113, 170 collaborative design, 63–­70 Collectif Sauvons le Togo (Save Togo Col­ lective), 167 Colonial Institute, 64 colonialism, 53; as material, 8 Comaroff, Jean, 81, 91, 158, 187n2 Comaroff, John, 81, 91, 158, 187n2 Comité de l’Unité Togolaise, 87 commodity studies, 19 Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occiden­ tale, La (CFAO), 75, 83–­84 Congo Free State, 66 consumption, 44; modernity, as rooted in, 35; public performance, 45; self-­ production, acts of, 43; styling of self, 37–­38; “traditionalist mother,” 35; younger “fashionista,” 35 copies, 16–­18, 136, 156, 158; and agency, 144; circulation of, as unending, 143;

I n d e x

as deceptive, 142–­46; deep materiality, 155; fake copies, as kpayo, 140; “fast copies,” 157; giving meaning to, 143; hyper-­counterfeits, 123, 128; imi-­wax materials, 122, 143; inferiorities of, 59; material efficacy of, 128; materiality of, 128, 143; and mimicry, 140; power of, 125, 137, 143; qualia of, 128, 133; short­­ comings of, 59; and signification, 143; as something new, 125; super-­soso, 123–­ 24; Super Vasco, 144; superwax, launch of, 123; and value, 144–­45, 149, 164; of wax prints, 63 coproduction, 18, 22 corak garuda, 73 cosmopolitanism: sartorial elitism, 55; as vernacular, 55 Côte d’Ivoire, 17, 35, 86, 100, 105, 109, 122, 140, 167, 187n7 Cotonou (Benin), 19, 105–­6, 128 counterfeits, 140, 144 cross-­positioning, 15 Dakar (Senegal), 38 d’Almeida-­Ekué, 86 Danhomé (contemporary Benin), 177n11 Davis, Mike, 188n3 de Boeck, Filip, 29, 99, 149 Deleuze, Gilles, 163 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 109, 176n4 Deventer (Netherlands), 62, 74 Dior, 28 Domowitz, Susan, 100 dressed body, 5–­6, 17, 52, 80, 97, 137, 178n1; as competitive, 33–­34, 40; different mean­­ings of, 43; experiential quality of, 34; gazes, of others, 33; pagne and performative acts, 29; power of, 54–­55, 74; public recognition, desire for, 34, 41, 43–­44; social class, 42–­43, 45; styling the self, as empowering, 44; techniques of, 29–­31, 33–­34 Dubai (United Arab Emirates), 122, 125, 132 Dutch Design Week, 107 Dutch East India Company, 53, 180n7 Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), 4, 57–­59 Dutch Empire, 53, 180n7 Dutch Gold Coast, 180n7 Dutch wax, 52–­53, 62–­63, 73, 75, 112, 121, 125; as archive, 51; early patterns of,

64; hybrid qualities of, 66; knockoffs of, 115; as luxury good, 110–­11 Dutch West India Company, 53–­54, 180n7 Edwards, Elizabeth, 11 Elle (magazine), 38 Elmina (Ghana), 180n5 England, 62–­63, 71, 85, 181n12; “cotton war,” 56 Entwistle, Joanne, 31 Ethnographic Museum, 64 Europe, 4, 7, 50–­52, 55–­56, 62, 64, 67–­69, 73–­74, 76, 170, 172; scientific racism in, 181n15 European Community (EC), 183n12 European Union (EU), 106 Ewe population, 89 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé, 8–­10, 77–­78, 81, 89–­91, 94–­96, 101–­2, 115, 152–­53, 169, 183n8, 183nn11–­12; mocking of, 103; Nana Benz, complex relationship with, 97–­100, 104–­6 fabrics, 57; mimicry, practice of, 55; and slavery, 53 fashion houses, 50, 157 F. & A. Swanzy Ltd., 68, 70, 74 Ferguson, James, 134 Flemming, Ebenezer Brown, 71 Fort Elmina, 54 France, 87, 181n12 Freeman, Carla, 95, 129–­30, 133 F. W. Asthon & Company, 181n12. See also Arthur Brunnschweiler & Company (ABC) gazes, 27; male gaze, 66; of others, 33 gender, 6, 15, 22, 27–­29, 33, 39, 43–­46, 66, 78–­79, 81, 88, 91, 97, 102, 105, 107, 135, 137, 168, 171–­72 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ACT), 185n4 Ghana, 7, 19, 35, 53, 62, 70–­71, 73, 84, 86, 89, 104–­5, 109, 122, 124, 128, 140, 165–­ 68, 185n4, 186nn14–­15, 187n7 globalization, 95, 171, 184–­85n4 global South, fires in, 188n3 Gnassingbé, Faure, 10, 100–­101, 111, 135, 147, 167, 169 Gold Coast (Ghana), 7, 53, 59, 62, 65, 68, 70 205

I n d e x

Gomorra (film), 157 Grafton firm, 182n18 Grunitzky, Nicolas, 87, 89–­90 Guangdong Province (China), 132 Guinea, 53–­55 Guyer, Jane, 117, 185n9 Haarlem (Netherlands), 62, 74 Haarlem Cotton Company, 58, 61, 63, 70–­71, 176n7 Hansen, Karen Tranberg, 17, 19, 31 Hart, Janice, 11 Harvey, David, 133 Haugen, Heidi, 185n5 Hedzranawoé market, 188n2 Helmond (Netherlands), 74 higglers, 95 hollandais (Dutch wax print), 25 Hong Kong (China), 122–­26, 184n4 Houphouet-­Boigny, Felix, 100 Houphouet-­Boigny, Madame, 90 India, 55, 115, 122, 140, 180n4 Indochina, 184n9 Industrial Revolution, 13, 55–­57 intellectual property rights, 151–­52, 158, 162 International Colonial and Export Exhibition, 66 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9, 103, 169, 185n5 invented traditions, 179n7 Italy, 157, 181n12 Jacobs, Johan, 64–­65 Japan, 181n12, 184n4 Java, 57–­58 Javanaise, La, 58, 61 John Paul II, 77 Jones, Carla, 27 Kabre (ethnic group), 89, 103 Kara (Togo), 187n1 Keane, Webb, 47 Kinshasa, 29, 88, 93, 149, 182n3 kinship, and capitalism, 97 kpayo, 146, 162; suspicion over, 153 Küchler, Susanne, 13 Lagos, 2, 38, 84, 132 L.A.M.B. brand, 4 Larkin, Brian, 14 206

L’Association Professionelle des Revendeu­ ses de Tissu (APRT), 89–­91, 97, 100, 104, 167, 188n2 Latour, Bruno, 12; actor-­network theory, 61 Leiden (Netherlands), 64 Leiden National Museum of Ethnology, 65 Leopold, King, 66 liberalism, 151–­52 Liverpool (England), 74 Lomé (West Africa), 2, 6–­8, 10, 24, 26–­28, 38, 87–­91, 94, 111–­12, 127–­28, 130–­31, 138, 149–­50, 160, 184n17, 186n16, 188n5; faux frais (gray category) of, 132; “Lomé 2030,” 169; street protests in, 166–­67 Lomé Grand Marché, ix, 6–­10, 12–­13, 19, 21–­22, 37, 70, 76–­80, 82–­84, 86, 88, 91, 109–­10, 123, 134, 138–­39, 156–­57, 167, 169; burning of, 22, 165–­66, 168, 171, 187n1; capitalist commodification, as center of, 81; market museum, 107; and modernity, 96; shutting down of, 105 Lomé II Convention, 183n12 Louis Vuitton, 2, 187n9 Lumumba, Patrice, 93 Mafia, 157 Makola market, 104 Malaysia, 122 Mami Wata divinity, 102 Manchester (England), 56, 63, 66, 69, 71, 74, 124 Manchester Calico Printers’ Association, 182n18 Marx, Karl, 157 materialism, 13 materiality, 4, 12, 21, 26, 31, 33, 49–­50, 54; as brute, 6; as corrupted, 139, 147–­48; as dangerous, 141; as dense, 5–­7, 15, 18, 20, 48, 51–­53, 61, 78–­79, 96, 113, 164, 168, 170, 173–­74; of pagne, 14–­15, 26, 46, 48; as sensuous, 2, 11–­12, 29; as tac­­ tile, 14; as technological, 13 Mauss, Marcel, 29, 31 Mbembe, Achille, 95, 104 mechanical reproduction, 16 Miller, Daniel, 30, 47 mimesis, 16, 18, 56–­59, 61–­63, 72, 125; and modernity, 17, 55 mimicry, 62, 66; of cloth, 56; and copies, 140; and fabrics, 55 Mina population, 82, 89

I n d e x

Mintz, Sidney, 19 Mobutu, Madame, 90 Mobutu Sese Seko, 100 modernity, 16, 52, 57, 64, 68, 95, 142; and capitalism, 158; of cloth, 17; and consumption, 35; and doubleness, 178n17; and mimesis, 17; and Nana Benz, 96, 98–­99, 103, 107; originality, obsession with, 17 Mondial wax, 125–­28 Multi-­Fibre Arrangement (MFA), 112, 130, 143, 185n4 Munn, Nancy, 11–­12 Mustafa, Hudita, 33, 180n4 Nakassis, Constantine, 157–­58 Nana Benz, 8–­10, 21–­23, 87, 110, 113, 117, 126, 128, 130–­31, 133–­34, 141, 151, 153, 167, 173, 182n3, 183n11, 184n14, 185n8, 188n2; branding of, 91, 94–­95, 98, 106–­7, 108; cloth circulation, redi­­ rection of, 85–­86; conspicuous consump­­ tion, acts of, 92; decline of, 111–­12; as entrepreneurial class, 78–­79, 81–­83, 86, 88–­89, 91, 137; Eyadéma, complex relationship with, 97–­100, 104–­6; as greedy profiteers, 104; intellectual property, conversion of into, 152; modernity, role of in, 96, 98–­99, 103, 107; as national heritage, 152; and nation making, 98–­ 99; pagne, association with, 94–­95; pat­­ tern rights, 106, 118; as signifying, 80; state intervention, target of, 103; success of, as supernatural, 102; Togo’s first ladies, alliances with, 90–­91; West African market women, as embodiment of, 95; witchcraft, accusations of, 120, 135–­36 Nana-­FM (radio station), 149 Nanettes, 22, 108, 112–­13, 123–­25, 127–­28, 134, 136, 148, 155, 157–­58, 173; ambi­­g­ uous image of, 135; ambition of, 121; Chinese copies, 122, 140–­41; entrepre­ neurial strategies of, 129–­33, 137; neo­­ liberal logics, appropriation of, 129, 132– ­33; open-­source design and production, involvement with, 132–­33 neoliberalism, 6, 106–­8, 115–­16, 129, 132–­ 35, 137, 157, 168, 173; and branding, 158, 160; “global apparel value chain,” 184–­85n4; neoliberal reforms, 111–­13

Netherlands, 19, 49, 58, 62–­64, 71, 85, 100, 107, 181n12 New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, A (Bosman), 54 Newell, Sasha, 17, 33, 43 New Jersey, 155 new materialism, nonhuman agency, 47 New World, 7 New York City, 155 Nichemtex, 124 Nigeria, 35, 53, 70–­71, 84–­86, 105, 109, 124, 128, 132, 140, 167, 175–­76n4, 184n17, 185n4, 186nn13–­14, 186n15; “419” economy of, 146 Nuttall, Sarah, 37 Nwafor, Okechukwu, 176n6 Obama, Michelle, 2 objects: as medium of power, 78–­79; quali­ sign of value, notion of, 11–­12; socialness of, 13–­14 occult, 149 Olympio, Sylvanus, 82, 84, 87–­90 Otto (fashion house), 38 ownership: and branding, 160, 162; and value, 153 pagne, 3, 20, 108, 113, 139, 154, 173, 175n2; agency of, 47–­48; as archive, form of, 2; in China, 123, 147–­48; chivi (small Chi­­ nese), 35; distributed agency of, 12–­13; dressed body, 30; Dutch colonial companies, forging by, 4–­5; and elderly women, 14; electoral politics, as instrument of, 101; lagosivi (small Lagos), 35; materiality of, 14–­15, 26, 46, 48; names of, as playful, 93; Nana Benz, association with, 94–­95; national memories, 2; patterns of, 15; petit pagne, 25; as play­ ful and serious, 47; prosthetic qual­­ity of, 30–­31; public culture, women’s participation in, 47–­48; public self-­making, 48; sensuous materiality of, 11; as social skin, 27; social space of, 27; as substitute speech act, 45–­46; third piece, 30–­31; three-­piece, 38–­39; Togo, beauty of in, 89; transfer of wealth, 2; travailler pagne (working pagne), 82, 88, 120; trickster qualities, 148; tsigan (high-­quality cloth), 25, 35, 140; tsivi (small pagne), 25, 140, 163; two-­piece, 38–­39; women’s 207

I n d e x

pagne (cont.) investment in, 26–­27; women’s self-­ fashioning, 29 pagne fashion, 25, 34; and agency, 45; au­­ thenticity and heritage, drawing on, 35; as innovative, 35–­36; public sphere, women’s participation in, 45 Pakistan, 115, 122, 140 pallu, 30 Paris (France), 38 Parti Togolais du Progrès, 87 patterning, 5, 51; as imprinting, 22–­23 pattern rights, 106, 118 patterns, 20–­21, 49, 61, 74; Akykeyere Akyi (turtle’s back) design, 73; Beceao design, 94; Billionaire design, 106–­7; and clas­­ sics, 50, 69; 14/0001 design, 70; 14/0663 design, 1, 3–­5, 16, 18, 20, 24, 176n8; Gingembre design, 152; Hands as Fin­­ gers, 71; as hybrid, 16; Lumumba Be Ka design, 93; Otopa design, 14; Peau de Leopard (leopard’s skin) design, 85; Se­­ kevi design, 94; Stars of Lomé design, 93; Sugar Cube design, 93; Sugar design, 2 photography: and authenticity, 107; and cloth, 11; image-­object relationship, 11 Picton, John, 58, 64, 66, 71, 176n5 Piot, Charles, 9, 96, 106 polygamy, 135 Portuguese Empire, 53 posthuman, 13, 47 Prestholdt, Jeremy, 180n2 public sphere, 113, 152–­53; and dress, 17 Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT), 90, 100 Redoute, la (fashion house), 38 Révolte des Loméennes, La (uprising of the Lomé women), 86–­87 Ricoeur, Paul, 144 Robertson, Claire, 83, 104 Romantic thought, 187n3 Rovine, Victoria, 176n5 Royal Museum for Central Africa, 65–­66 “sac de Michelle Obama, Le” (Michelle Obama’s handbag), 2 sample books: agency of, 75; exchange, material indication of, 75 Sankara, Thomas, 94 Saviano, Roberto, 157 208

Schwarz, Hillel, 143 self: in public, as performative act, 27; and self-­image, 28 Senegal, 33, 122, 132 Shanghai (China), 122, 124–­25 signification, 80, 137; and copies, 143, 146; crisis of, 142, 154; sign authentication, 162 signs, 95, 141, 155, 162–­63; and clothes, 26; power of, 158; and value, 158 Simmel, Georg, 30, 33, 68, 140, 186n1 Singapore, 169–­70 slave trade, 54, 81–­82, 180n7, 182n4; fabrics, trading of, 53 social reproduction, and identity, 155 Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain, La (SCOA), 83–­84 Société Générale du Golfe de Guinée, La (SGGG), 83–­84 South Korea, 122, 184n4 Spyer, Patricia, 61 Stefani, Gwen, 4 Steiner, Christopher, 56, 63, 176n5 Stoler, Ann, 81 Stoller, Paul, 155 subjectification, 133–­34 subjectivity, 51, 137; of cloth, 75 Switzerland, 62, 181n12 synthetic fibers, and “smart fabrics,” 13 Taiwan, 122, 184n4 taste, 68, 69; and agency, 67 Taussig, Michael, 53, 61, 66, 125, 143; chromophobes, and chromophiliacs, distinction between, 69; and mimicry, 140 Tema (Ghana), 186n16 textiles, 53–­54, 56; as archives, 50–­51; as national, 14; as social, 14; synthetic color revolution, 62 Thailand, 122–­23 Togo, 2, 5, 12, 14, 18, 20–­23, 29, 30, 44–­46, 53, 70, 73, 75–­79, 80–­83, 85–­87, 91, 94, 101–­2, 104, 106–­7, 116, 118, 120–­21, 127–­29, 134–­38, 140–­43, 146–­49, 151, 155–­56, 160, 164, 166, 168, 170, 173, 182–­83n6, 183n12, 183–­84n13, 187n4; appropriation in, 17; and authentication, 162; as center of capitalist commod­ ification, 172; Chinese counterfeits in, 10; devaluation in, 9; economic crisis in, 110–­11, 113; fashion in, as form of

I n d e x

expression, 36–­37, 88; first ladies, Nana Benz alliances with, 90; as free trade zone, 177n11; frontier capitalism, as zone of, 7; grande personne (established person) in, 27, 42; hermeneutics of sus­­ picion of, 144; modernity, meaning of to, 98–­99; national growth plans of, 95–­ 96; pagne in, as most beautiful, 89; pagne in, perception of, 26; pagne fashion in, 34; personal grooming in, 31; presenting of body in, 28; public culture, women’s participation in, 47–­48; public space in, 28; residents of, as proto-­political beings, 100; social hierarchies in, 42; street protests in, 105; textile market, women’s domination of, 10–­11; trademark in, 158, 163; “Vision Togo 2030,” 169, 171; as “West Africa’s Little Switzerland,” 9; women’s fashion, and women entrepre­ neurs, connection between, 130; women traders, importance of in, 8. See also China: China-­in-­Africa Togotex, 100, 184n13 Toulabor, Comi, 9, 96, 100, 183n11 Unilever, 9–­10, 70, 74, 110 Union Nationale des Femmes Togolaises (UNFT), 100, 183n11 United Africa Company (UAC), 9–­10, 70, 74–­75, 82–­85, 87, 89, 110 United States, 106, 170 urban conflict, cour commune (shared courtyard space), 45–­46 urbanity, 99; urban pop culture, gendering of, 46 value, 140–­42, 155; and authenticity, 162; and copies, 144–­45, 149, 164; and trade­­ mark, 158 Vann, Elizabeth, 162 van Vlissingen, Pieter Fentener, 58 Vietnam, 162 Vlisco Africa Company, 110, 118–­19 Vlisco company, 4, 9, 18, 22, 35–­37, 44, 57– ­58, 61–­62, 64, 66, 70–­71, 73–­75, 86, 106, 112, 116–­18, 126–­28, 154, 156–­58, 163, 173, 176n8, 181n11, 182n3, 182n17, 182n18, 187n9; archives of, 107, 179n1; boycott of, 119; and copyright, 152; corporate image, makeover of, 159–­60; encrypted serial code, introduction of,

160–­61; Java prints, 181n9; rebranding of, 159–­60, 162; superwax, launch of, 123; swatch books, 49–­50, 63, 176n7; “True Originals,” 141, 160–­62; van Vlis­­ singen company, 181n12; Vlisco Group, 185n6, 187n7; Vlisco United Africa, 6 Warnier, Jean-­Pierre, 120, 135 wax cloth, 1–­3, 11, 17, 28–­29, 36, 41–­42, 44, 49–­50, 57, 74, 78, 92, 176n5; and agency, 168; and capitalism, 52–­53; cloth making, as central to, 75–­76; as complex, 5; dense materiality of, 5–­7, 20, 51–­53, 168, 170, 174; global capitalism, 5–­6; as hybrid material object, 5, 73; and identity, 15–­16; as interactive and agentive ob­­ ject, 5–­6; materiality of, 14–­15; and mi­­ mesis, 16; mobility of, 20; and nation building, 15–­16; patterning of, 5; power of, 104–­5, 168; technological innovation, 61; unique aesthetic of, 59; visuality of, 61; wax-­print aesthetics, 21; in women’s socioeconomic lives, 15. See also cloth; wax prints Wax Nana Benz (WNB), 149–­51, 153, 162; as scam, 155–­56; signification, crisis of over, 154 wax prints, 8, 50–­51, 59, 61–­62, 68; as color-­ smart, 13, 62; and identity, 155 wealth: accumulation of, 2, 135; inalienable wealth, 2; moral view of, 135; and move­­ able wealth, 2 Weiner, Annette, 2 West Africa, 2, 4–­10, 13, 17–­21, 25, 44, 48–­ 52, 55, 57–­59, 61–­64, 69–­70, 72–­75, 78, 80, 84, 89–­91, 105, 109, 113, 128, 159– ­60, 166, 170–­74, 181n11, 182n4, 184n17; “Euro-­African cloth,” domination of in, 56; Java prints, 180–­81n10; market spaces, as sites for state intervention, 103–­4; textile production in, 53 West India Company, 53 Wiley, Sara, 62 women, 17–­18, 173; agency of, 36, 172; authority of, 105; and branding, 76; burning of Lomé market, marginalization of, 171; cloth, and public self-­making, 20–­ 21; as cloth traders, 8; entrepreneur­ial autonomy of, 73–­74, 79–­80; exclusive fashion, desire for, 35; market women, political violence against, 104; names, 209

I n d e x

women (cont.) power of, 179n11; and pagne, 20, 30– ­31; patterns, production and circulation of, 21; public protest of, 23; public selves of, 27–­28; public skins of, 35; re­­ bellion of, 86–­87, 105, 167–­68; repression against, 103–­4; as tastemakers, 50; wealth, accumulation of, 2. See also Nana Benz; Nanettes World Bank, 9, 103, 169

210

World Intellectual Property Organization, 160 World Trade Organization (WTO), 111–­12, 143 Yiwu (China), 122, 132 Yoruba, 84, 176n6 Zambia, 19 Zion (prayer group), 90