A Wider Loom? French Colonial Preoccupations with West African Weaving

This article explores the cultural and historical context of textiles that were never woven, the product of failed efforts by a colonial administration to transform a distinctive West African art form: strip-woven cotton fabric. Although these textiles were the result of an unsuccessful project, they nonetheless provide insights into the agency of visual culture at colonial intersections. Textiles that were woven also figure in this exploration of cotton and colonialism, primarily to emphasize their distinction from those that were not. Both sets of textiles are from the Soudan Français (today Mali), the largest of France's West African colonies and a major cotton producer. Although we know little about the forms these never-made—more accurately, almost never-made—objects might have taken, we do know why and when they were to be made. These textiles would have been created in the 1930s, a decade that saw two events that featured West African weaving: the 1937 Exposition International des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris and the 1932 founding of the Maison des Artisans Soudanais in Bamako, capital of the Soudan Français (Figs. 1–2, 13). At both, French colonial policy and the long history of cotton in the region intersected, producing commentary, images, and policies that indicate the many ways in which a colonial government sought to harness this medium to project images and to support an array of policies. An exploration of these many cotton manifestations deepens our understanding of the centrality of the fiber and its artisans to the imagery and the implementation of French rule in West Africa.

In the account of these events and their un-made (or scarcely made) textiles, we can learn much about the multiplicity of strategies the French administration deployed in an effort to make use of the region's visual culture in their exercise of colonial power. In the colony and in the metropole, the French administration used West African cotton textiles—from raw cotton to finished cloth—in support of cultural as well as economic strategies; while the latter has been thoroughly examined by other scholars, the former has not, and it is my focus here. As I will demonstrate, French officials harnessed cotton in its woven forms to meet their narrative needs, fueling colonial imagery, just as surely as they aimed to use cotton in its raw form as the foundation of their economic programs, fueling colonial industry.

The French colonial narrative supported the structure of the overseas empire through the characterization of the cultures of the colonies, producing an implicit or explicit contrast with the metropole. The administration projected this narrative through images, events, and objects as well as text, all of which were threaded through with strands of cotton, particularly during the interwar period. France's minister of the colonies from 1920 to 1924, Albert Sarraut, described the many media by which the administration's message would be diffused: "It is absolutely essential that a methodical, serious, continuous propaganda through word and image, through newspapers, conferences, films, and expositions can have an impact throughout our country" (Fig. 4).¹ To this long list we can add textiles and weaving, which the French administration hoped to employ as another mode of propaganda delivery. My fiber-focused exploration of French policy in the 1920s and '30s demonstrates the exceptionally tortuous nature of this narrative, whose purveyors twisted themselves in knots as elaborate as could be found on any loom.

One type of loom, in fact, was a leading player in the colonial narrative promoted by members of the French administration in Soudan Français and in Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) as a whole, the federation of colonies of which the Soudan Français was the largest and most cotton-centric. The loom in question, generally referred to as a strip loom,² is a prominent element of the region's visual cultures, employed by weavers across Soudan Français and beyond (Figs. 5, 8). Although its prominence in large cities has faded in recent decades, weavers at work on strip looms are still