Afro-Asian Threads: Batik and African Print-Fashion, from Vlisco to Mandela
African print-fashion and Indonesian batik have long and connected histories. I recently visited UCLA’s Fowler Museum, which currently features a fabulous exhibition called “African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste: Globalization, and Style” (until July 30th). The exhibition traces the modern history of African print-fashion, from the role of Dutch companies like Vlisco (a contributor to the exhibition) to national fashion preferences across the African continent. Black and white photographs taken by Oumar Ly from the 1960s and 1970s capture Senegalese villagers posing in the latest print styles, along with iconic images of African dandies in print suits, fedoras, and pointed loafers. Hip-hop- and 90s-inspired casual wear, spiderweb-print suits, and short, funky balloon skirts highlight the work of contemporary designers like the Ivory Coast’s Alexis Temomanin and Ghana’s Titi Ademola, who both feature in a set of videos from the exhibition, along with the curators (Suzanne Gott, Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie Rabine).
The exhibit also includes a 1957 print that Vlisco’s United Africa Company designed to commemorate Ghana’s independence, inscribed with a portrait of Nkrumah, and the motto ‘Freedom and Justice’, and initially designed by the company’s Accra office as a gift to the Nkrumah government. Next to it is a small photograph of an old woman absorbed in dance, wearing the same print at Ghana’s Fetu Afahye Festival in 2004. Other political statements have been made through African print, including a dress made to commemorate International Women’s Day, one of the busiest days of the year for Cameroonian seamstresses.
The exhibition begins by tracing African print to the painted and bloc-print cottons produced in India as early as the fourth century, exchanged through trade between South Asia and East Africa. By the eleventh century, Indian prints had also inspired the development of handcrafted batik in Indonesia. Batik is a unique technique historically involving the use of wax to demarcate lines and colours and resist bleeding, resulting in vibrant, bold prints. In the nineteenth century, Dutch and British manufacturers copied batik cloth styles, introducing roller-print and mechanisation techniques. They attempted to market these styles to Indonesians, who preferred their own hand-dyed cloth.
As a result, Dutch and British manufacturers then turned to the West African market. According to the opening exhibition panel, local traders, ‘mostly women, supplied information on desired cloth patterns and colorways to manufacturers’ representatives, transforming colonial goods with local African aesthetics and cultural values.’ Historians of textile production in 19th c. West Africa have often noted the interaction of European companies, and their response to West African demands.[1] But the exhibition’s juxtaposition of Javanese prints with vibrant, evolving African prints through the use of Vlisco’s fabric archive highlights the role of European companies as conduits for Indonesian styles and techniques, adapted for an African audience.[2]
The narrative highlighted the pre-colonial and colonial-era connections existing between Asia and Africa through the guise of material culture. Trade links have long been noted, and there has been some excellent recent work on the social and political legacies of South Asian migration to East Africa by Sana Aiyar, Saima Nasar, Margaret Frenz and our own Gerard McCann. The wonderful work of UCLA professor Nile Green (to whom I owe the visit to the Fowler) traces Islamic print and missionary connections between India and East and South Africa in the colonial era. But the transfer and exchange of traditions that go unpreserved in texts or archives, such as food (eg. the cuisine of the ‘Cape Malays’, originally enslaved Javanese brought to South Africa by the Dutch), while celebrated in tourist guidebooks, has garnered little attention in scholarship. Connections in print-fashion are similarly difficult to pin down; yet they say much about shared cultural practices and historical connections that continued to bear significance in the post-colonial era.
At the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Ghana’s three-man delegation attracted attention on account of their bright West African prints, particularly next to stark military uniforms and Mao and Nehru suits (the impact of this is lost amidst the black and white photographs and footage of the conference). One member of the delegation, James Markham, who had spent some years in Southeast Asia as a joint-secretary to the Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon, was approached by an Indonesian female journalist — likely clad in a batik sarong — impressed with his colourful ‘kente’ blouse and shawl. When asked whether women’s dress was similar in Ghana, Markham replied, ‘No, the women’s dress is exactly what the women wear in Indonesia… called a ‘ntam’, a short-sleeved blouse and a long skirt you’re wearing here.’ They went on to discuss the role of women in politics, education, and standards of living, but it was shared fashion practices that sparked the interaction.
More recently, Nelson Mandela’s status as a global fashion icon was due in part to his Indonesian-inspired batik shirts, some designed by Indonesia’s most celebrated batik designer Iwan Tirta. Dubbed the ‘Madiba’ style in Africa, Mandela proudly wore them at official gatherings, even when Indonesian officials shied away from wearing batik in international arenas. For the past decade, both African print-fashion and Indonesian batik have been undergoing a resurgence on the world’s catwalks and in everyday popular fashion, thanks to the efforts of pioneering young designers. The link between batik and African print serves as an everyday, material reminder of Afro-Asian connections traced back to centuries.
[1] Christopher B. Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa: Towards an Ethnohistory of European Cloth Marketed in West Africa, 1873–1960’, Ethnohistory 32:2, 91–110.
[2] This is elaborated further in Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016). See also Paulette Young, ‘Ghanaian Women and Dutch Wax-Prints: The Counter-Appropriation of the Foreign and the Local Creating a New Voice of Cultural Expression’ Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2016 (51:3).
