Colonial Brazzaville and Kasai represent contrasting case studies of the adoption of Western styles of dress. Both areas experienced colonialism differently, especially as Brazzaville developed as a cosmopolitan urban center and adopted a Western style of dress, while the Kuba kingdom maintained its prior traditions of clothing longer into the 20th century. Nevertheless, both regions share a mutual history of the politics of costume. Cloth, as a visible sign of status and wealth in all Central African societies, engendered a set of social relations and rules regarding clothes that pervaded both Brazzaville and Kasai, despite the less cosmopolitan, heterogeneous populations in the latter. Thus, despite the significant differences between Brazzaville and Kasai, both regions exemplify local African appropriation of Western styles based on local practices and politics of costume. African appropriation of Western clothes was not simply imposed from above, but disseminated by local practices and patterns according to each region’s unique gender dynamics, timeline, and ethnic diversity.
The adoption of Western clothes in Kuba was an uneven, gradual process that lasted throughout the colonial period. Similar to change in Brazzaville, Africans’ outward appearance often began with Western missionaries, Christian converts, and African collaborators of the colonial system. In Brazzaville, for example, Senegalese overseers and workers came to work for the French colonial regime, along with Gabonese and Caribbean clerks (Martin 12). Often fluent in French and dressed in Western styles, black workers from Loango and Gabon were the trendsetters in Brazzaville fashion (158). European cloth, suits, monocles, gloves, cans, and other accessories of Western origin were widely appropriated by these foreign artists and clerks. Kasai, on the other hand, lacked the large number foreign African skilled and semi-skilled laborers who were fashion trendsetters. In Kasai, the Luba and Lulua peoples, unlike the Kuba, embraced Western style and dress in an attempt to be “like whites” (Vansina 310). Moreover, the Bushong and Kete continued to equate wage labor with slavery, leading to the Luba- speakers dominating the unskilled and low-level wage labor (310). Their early access and prevalence in wage labor ensured access to European clothes, since only participation in the industrial market economy through wage labor or trade could ensure access to Western styles of dress. Thus, access to wage labor in Brazzaville and Kasai facilitated the gradual adoption of Western dress through providing cash to purchase clothing through the capitalist industrial economy.
Brazzavillle and Kasai’s upper-class foreigners and early converts to Christianity facilitated the adoption of Western clothes. Similar to the dominance of the Luba-speakers in Kasai who entered wage labor more quickly, the residents of Bacongo, the wealthier, less heterogeneous African quarter of Brazzaville where an African upper class came to symbolize the area, also took most of the office work and other semi-skilled labor (Martin 67). Not surprisingly, the earliest Africans to adopt Western styles of dress came from this nascent urban upper class, foreign administrators and workers, who had to conform to the European dress code, and the growing Christian presence through mission schools. Mission schools, for instance, were one avenue for changing the dress styles and consumption of children and adults in both Kasai and Brazzaville. In Kasai, mission schools for girls began to require dresses and blouses in the 1930s, as well as subsequent schools for boys mandating shirts and trousers (Vansina 306). Other Christian missions, like the Scheutists, demanded their female followers wear a skirt for minimum decency, which created demand for a local tailoring industry (305).
Missions also encouraged the adoption of Western dress in Kasai because of their assumption that the Christian faith required also adopting the common table manners, etiquette, and practices of the industrial Western world (300). A Presbyterian school for girls in Luebo, for example, trained young women to dress, take care of clothes, how to be polite, and to become consumers of modern commodities, in addition to spreading The Christian Gospel. In Brazzaville, missions essentially carried out a similar goal. With a monopoly on education due to lack of colonial government investment in schools, the Catholic Church held a significant influence on the adoption of Western clothing by the people of Brazzaville (Martin 51). In addition, the Church supported the self-contained Christian village of Saint Firmin for mixed children, to prevent these mixed people from being corrupted by local African culture (54). Special Catholic schools contributed to this by encouraging African children to dress in “appropriate” Western attire and separating them from other Africans, like the case of the biracial children schooled in Saint Firmin, in Brazzaville. These biracial children required separation from the city’s Africans to prevent moral corruption by the African masses.
African adoption of European clothes also took place in the context of local societies’ own desire and initiative. In the 1920s, Kuba women, for instance, became attached to wraps, especially expensive Dutch wraps with steadfast colors, expecting to receive one new wrap of cloth every year from their husbands (Vansina 306). Women in Brazzaville also appropriated female fashion from the West. Gabonese and Loango women in the 1920s began to wear short dresses, high-heeled shoes, silk stockings, powder their faces with rice flour, and straighten their hair (Martin 158). European women also influenced fashion trends in Brazzaville, which reinforced the local custom of associating clothing with status, since these women had to attend many social functions that required a public presence in the highest quality European clothing (159). Magazines and catalogues used by European women to order clothes were also used by Africans, who would show the designs to local tailors to have them copied (159). Once their clothes were no longer wanted, white employers often gave them to African domestics, leading to being sometimes sold in African markets, furthering the spread of European fashion in Poto-Poto and Bacongo (158). Interestingly, most women continued to prefer African cloth into the 1950s, with only women married to elite men or professional women wearing European-style dress in Brazzaville (167). Nevertheless, African women in Brazzaville attached more importance to cloth and created a hierarchy of value for different types, as well as adopting new styles of wearing African cloth. Beauty pageants, such as the ‘Miss Brazzaville’ competition, also sparked controversy on whether participants should wear African cloths or short skirts that showed their legs, with most males in the audience preferring short skirts (170). This problem aroused by female dressing styles led to controversy about urban African women and morality, which reveals the extent to which adoption of European dress was male-dominated.
Men, who were the largest consumers of European dress, like women, associated cloth with status and an expression of power. This precolonial practice remained at the root of all African appropriation of European dress code, meaning that urban, professional men or members of the elite were more likely to adopt European dress codes. Beginning with urban African elites in Brazzaville, or the ‘class of 1949’ in Kasai, the educated Kuba men who received a Western education at boarding schools, young men began to aspire to wear modern clothing as a marker of status within the rapidly changing world. In the example of Kasai, these young men learned to see themselves as part of the broader colony of Congo, and though they still valued and identified as Kuba by remaining steeped in core values, including the sense of hierarchy, they desired accessible aspirations for material wealth and status (Vansina 315). Though by the 1950s European clothes were worn by an estimated 1/5 or 1/4 of the population of Nsheng, the Kuba, capital, these educated elite men set trends and developed a larger worldview that clashed with that of Kasai village elders (311). These males conspicuous consumption of modern clothes at concerts with urban music such as the rumba and other novel leisure activities further reinforced their status as elite and more modern than the older generation (315).
Likewise, younger male elites in Brazzaville also flaunted their European suits, trousers, and other clothes in bars, clubs, and other venues, replaying the centuries-old tradition of cloth as a status symbol. Young men in Bacongo, for example, established clubs that focused exclusively on fashion, blending their taste in fashion with mutual aid societies for each other that included going to popular bars such as ‘Chez Faignond,’ or dancing to pop music (Martin 171). Urban workers also participated in the dress frenzy to show off their status regardless of their wages. These migrant workers began to purchase Western clothes, some going as far as starving themselves to buy new clothes with their pay, in the case of a number of servants in the 1920s (162). Indeed, by 1951, according to one survey, 21 percent of expenditures were on clothes in Poto-Poto and Bacongo, meaning that the consumption of cloth was widespread across all classes (162). Men were clearly more dependent on the consumption of European dress than women in both Kasai and Brazzaville, due to greater access to wage labor and unequal gender relations which allowed men to continue their privilege of expressing their power and status through ostentatious personal display.
The consumption of Western styles of dress and their appropriation by Africans in Kasai and Brazzaville during the colonial period reflects parallels. These similarities in the spread of modern styles of dress share a mutual origin in the long association of cloth with prestige and wealth in precolonial Equatorial African societies, dating back to locally manufactured raffia cloth. Africans in Brazzaville, however, with the longstanding tradition of the Atlantic slave trade in Malebo Pool and its cosmopolitan population derived from centuries of trade between and among Africans and Europeans, alongside foreign workers, was exposed to European dress earlier and appropriated it more rapidly. In Kasai, the adoption of Western dress occurred more gradually, with some groups like the Luba and Lulua shifting their dress more rapidly while the Kuba continued to look down on wage labor as synonymous with slavery. Moreover, the Kuba were hesitant to adopt Western clothes since it would erase all outward manifestation of the Kuba as distinct from neighboring Africans. However, the gender dynamics of both regions share a commonality in the unequal access to European styles of dress due to the dominance of men in access to wage labor with higher wages. Nevertheless, each region’s adoption of Western dress illustrates local agency and change with continuity, since the political purposes of cloth, as expressions of status and power, remained the same.
Wonderful post. its the history of African Wax Print cloths.
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