Patterns in Circulation: cloth, gender, and materiality in West Africa by Nina Sylvanus (review)

Nina Sylvanus's excellent multi-layered trans-historical study of Togolese wax-print fabric (or pagne) interweaves the role of African women in postcolonial developments, on the one hand, with a timely intervention in the 'China-in-Africa' debates on the other. The cloth constitutes women's moveable wealth and is of social and aesthetic importance to them. Women, who work the value of cloth, are invested in it in multiple ways, having controlled its circulation in West Africa until Togo's liberalization under structural adjustment programmes. The latter created the opportunity for copied cloths from China to be introduced. As the media in Western countries rages over China's increasing capital ties with African countries, it is useful to revisit the long history of national marketplaces and capitalist accumulation in Africa in order to retain the African story that is constitutive of agency, as Sylvanus does in Patterns in Circulation. In the book, wax-print fabric is neither simply an artefact nor a commodity produced and consumed. What differentiates this book is that, while the content of pagne exposes internal relations and contradictions, its form is neither fixed nor stable. For a relatively short book, with an introduction, conclusion and five chapters, it abounds with stories carefully interwoven with theory.

Chapter 1 uses the stories of two women preparing for celebrations – Atsoupi, for a wedding celebration, and Belinda, for a baptism – to illustrate how women, regardless of financial means, use pagne to construct particular self-images through the choice of pattern and colour as well as through sartorial tastes that include tailoring, accessories and orchestrated gendered bodily techniques. The cloth contains histories and qualities that reflect a cultural hierarchy of value (for example, class and taste) that is intelligible to the public, and thus has the power to communicate self-making ambitions.

Chapter 2 further elaborates on how pagne, being an already culturally hybridized product, is an archive in itself. It documents a history of taste, assemblage and circulation that connects three regions of the world: West Africa and South-east Asia helped construct the market for wax-print technology and contributed to the development of its aesthetics, while Europe provided the early 'skilled counterfeiters' of cloth. Togolese women cloth traders became influential mediators and distributors of pagne by inserting themselves into the trade – by 'naming, displaying, and claiming it as property'. Through stories about the Nana Benz in Chapter 3, Sylvanus delves into the economic and political ascendance of Togolese women traders up until independence.

Nana Benz were successful market women with historical ties to influential precolonial trading clans and who formed credit relationships with major European textile companies in the colonial era. They came to capture the postcolonial national imagination for their vehicular power, and although they lost their economic position by the 1990s, they persist through the national brand and through memory, especially among a new generation of women cloth traders, Les Nanettes, who have been able to adapt to the neoliberal landscape. In Chapter 4, Nanettes such as Antoinette are presented as global actors, co-producing cloths with Chinese manufacturers and competing with traders from the Middle East who sell copies of Dutch wax cloth from India, Pakistan and China. Antoinette's collaboration with textile engineers in Hong Kong and China resulted in the first imitation of Dutch superwax ('super-soso') and a Chinese-made wax print (Mondial) being sold in the Lomé market. Her success incentivized other Togolese and Chinese traders to reproduce them. What differentiated these imitations from earlier versions was that the labels and names were also copied along with designs.

In an era of economic and political insecurity, the rapid influx of 'hyper-counterfeits' into the national marketplace not only engenders a new regime of mass consumption and provides entrepreneurial opportunities; it also enhances anxieties around value systems and panics about...