Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1998 by Lisa A. Lindsay

Edited by Hildi Hendrickson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. viii plus 268pp. $49.95/cloth $16.95/paperback).

This is not only a book about attire. The eight essays here use clothing and bodily adornment as points of entree into a wide range of topics including gender and sexuality, ideas about modernity and tradition, political power, death and the supernatural, tourism, hygiene, and national identity. By charting the social lives of particular types of apparel, the book addresses "popular, political, economic, and spiritual meanings assigned to treatments of the body surface in a variety of African colonial and post-colonial contexts."(p. 1)

As Hendrickson's introduction emphasizes, the relationship between the body, clothing, and identity has been examined almost exclusively in a Western and urban context. With its African focus, this volume shows that many phenomena considered integral to Western social development - "heterogeneity, migration, democratization, transnational change, and media representation" (p. 2) - are not foreign to Africa. She goes on to argue that "[t]o fully understand Western economic, political, and spiritual life, we would do well to heed the African examples." (p. 16) Although such points are well taken, this reader wished for a more Africanist orientation in the introduction, which may have better linked the volume's contributions to the relatively scant and dispersed but nonetheless existing literature on clothing in Africa.(1)

All but one of the essays are by anthropologists, and indeed ethnographic research solidly undergirds the contributors' theoretical insights. Still, there are occasional lapses into the vague ethnographic present, and rich historical explication is not always present in satisfying quantities. These papers are at their best when they focus squarely on what Misty Bastian termed the "embodied practice(s) of clothing." (p. 100) How does clothing create meaning in specific times and places? What actors are involved in the transmission and reception of such meanings? How and why do these configurations change over time?

In Part One of the book, "Creating Social Identities," Elisha Renne, Deborah James, and Adeline Masquelier discuss the ways in which body coverings help to define married women, "traditional" dancers, and supernatural spirits, respectively. Renne reads changing attitudes toward sexuality among Ekiti Yoruba in precolonial, colonial and contemporary southwestern Nigeria through an examination of the history of virginity cloths. Also taking on a broad chronology, James probes the dynamic interrelation between sesotho (Sotho ways) and sekgowa (white ways) among northern Sotho- and Pedi-speaking communities of the northern Transvaal, South Africa. This relationship is evident through changing clothing practices along with transformations in the means by which girls acquire adult clothes. Masquelier, examining the bori religious cult in southern Niger, explains that spirits' identities are given substance by clothes worn by the mediums.

In next section, "Challenging Authority," Bastian and Brad Weiss relate clothes to power and challenges to it. Bastian's lively essay begins with an analysis of a recent Nigerian newspaper cartoon showing a southern businesswoman dressed in clothes usually associated with Nigeria's male, Muslim, northern elite. Bastian then discusses the "cross-dressing "of some Igbo women (as rich and powerful men) and a small group of elite young men (as "traditional" elders). "Clothing practices ... are plainly about the embodiment of power," she writes, (p. 124) concluding that the adornment she describes shows Nigerian public life as thoroughly patriarchal. Weiss introduces the idea that body treatments can act as mnemonic devices that help to construct and represent lasting relationships. Focusing on mortuary practices among Haya peoples in northwest Tanzania, he shows that articles of clothing which are passed "from generation to generation, from natal kin to marital relations, and from life to death [work] to recall certain prior experiences and aspects of identity and to anticipate the fulfillment of others."(p. 144)

In the book's final section, "Intercultural Relations and the Creation of Value," Johanna Schoss, Timothy Burke, and Hendrickson examine local meanings attributed to body treatments that derive from foreign sources. Schoss studies two groups of tourism workers in Malindi, coastal Kenya. Their distinct cosmopolitan styles embody alternative strategies by which locals position themselves within the political economy of international tourism. Burke, the volume's lone historian, traces the promotion and reception of colonial definitions of personal cleanliness in Zimbabwe through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His fascinating social histories of commodities as seemingly mundane as soap and Vaseline show the body as a powerful arena in which colonial relations have been enacted and contested, even as Burke criticizes the assumption that "'the' body is an intelligible unit of analysis across time and space." (p. 190) Finally, Hendrickson examines the representation of Herero cultural and political identity in Namibia through roughly the last century via the use of color-coordinated flags and dress at community pageants. Like James and Burke, she is careful to trace the particular history of this now "traditional" phenomenon.