Cloth in West African History (review)

Cloth is a paradoxical raw material for the reconstruction of history. When used as clothing, its most common manifestation, cloth is highly visible, often revealing cultural values and social strata as well as aesthetic preferences. It is also highly mobile, leaving a record of travel, trade, and gift contacts. These factors make it a rich source of historical information.

Yet cloth also presents particular challenges as a primary document for historical research. Cloth itself is ephemeral; often used until it wears out, it rarely survives in archaeological contexts. Descriptions of cloth and clothing in travelers' accounts or trade records are often colored by the observers' own expectations and by the close link between dress and perceptions of morality (or immorality). Colleen E. Kriger undertakes an ambitious task in employing cloth and clothing as the raw material for her investigation of complex histories in West Africa, centered on the lower Niger River region. She succeeds in demonstrating that textiles and clothing can serve as windows onto richly layered African histories.

Taking three specific textiles as her starting points, Kriger follows their threads (to use an irresistible metaphor) to linguistic, archaeological, literary, economic, political, technological, and iconographic forms of historical evidence. She draws together these disparate sources to elucidate long histories of innovation and international exchange. The three textiles, all from Nigeria, are an elaborately woven woman s wrapper, a pair of embroidered man s trousers, and a wrapper adorned with resist-dyed patterns in indigo dye. The wrappers were collected by the author in the 1970s, and the trousers were collected in 1930. Each textile provides Kriger with a way into broad subjects, including the development of weaving technologies in the region, the interaction between local weavers and regional or transnational influences, the development of indigo resist dyeing techniques, and the impact of colonial policies on African textile production and markets. Each discussion spans chronological and geographical distances, moving from the scant yet tantalizing evidence of centuries-old textiles (beginning with the eleventh-century fabrics found in the Bandiagara region of Mali) to the adaptation of a variety of synthetic fibers and dyes in late twentieth-century Nigeria.

Kriger assembles prodigious amounts of information drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources to find connections and offer hypotheses about the development of techniques and styles. She provides tables that summarize the records of British and Dutch textile trading firms, comparisons of textile-related terminology along the West African coast, and surveys of the iconography of adire eleko (the indigo resist developed in and around Lagos in the early twentieth century). Through all of this detailed information, the theme that emerges most strongly and that represents Kriger s most important contribution is the continuity of change in these ostensibly traditional textile forms: Textile technology was labor-intensive, but that did not mean that it was static, outmoded, or unprofitable (178). Thus a long history of change and exchange demonstrates that indigenous textile production has not survived as a holdover, a nostalgic remnant of the past, but rather because it continues to adapt to changing markets.

The book s strength is its well-organized accumulation of data from a dizzying array of sources, drawn together to address a series of questions. Its weaknesses are few, but they merit brief mention. A book on textiles must surely call for color illustrations here, the author is limited to verbal descriptions of the vivid colors and dramatic patterns of textiles illustrated only in muddy black-and-white images. I also yearned for a bit more detail of textile production as Kriger herself has experienced it. She herself collected two of the textiles that are the focus of the book s explorations, and she has previously published important work based on field research in Nigeria, yet the reader gets very little sense of the individuals involved in textile production. Of course, we can know little of past producers whose identities were rarely preserved along with...