The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850 by Jody Benjamin

Historical scholarship on textiles and dress cultures in West Africa often straddles three dominant themes: trade, production, and consumption. In tracing the circulation of both foreign and local textiles across the region, as well as the patterns of consumption within communities, historians have underscored the important function of textiles in African societies and the impact African traders had on the development of the global textile industry. Jody Benjamin’s monograph is a vital contribution to this growing body of scholarship. With a focus on western Africa, a region that stretches from modern-day Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone to Western Mali, Benjamin explores how textiles featured in individual and communal responses to political, religious, and environmental changes at the turn of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

By centering textiles, dress cultures, and the politics of clothing, this book unearths voices and perspectives often marginalized or lost in archival records, constructing a complex history of the peoples caught at the crosshairs of regional and global changes over time. The book is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion based on an extensive archival research, including English and French sources, oral accounts, and a variety of visual materials. Each chapter opens with a vignette and tackles a different place and time, enabling the author to “draw attention to continuities and contrasts across this broadly integrated region.” (5) Through a vivid and accessible narrative, the author makes three key contributions to the scholarship: first, he underscores the central role of textiles, particularly cotton cloths (local and foreign) as agents of social, political, and economic change; second, he explores the use of textiles to emphasize status, gender, and religious claims in the pluralist and polyglot societies of western Africa; and third, he engages textiles and sartorial practices as archives that offer new perspectives on western Africa histories of social hierarchies, religious power, state authority, and resistance to layered forms of oppression.

Chapter One traces the emergence of two Bamanan states of Kaarta and Segu during the decline of the Malian empire and the desertification of the Sahel which drove waves of migration across the region. By relying on oral accounts and museum objects such as the kusaaba, the author makes a bold shift from prevailing Arabic and European sources and shows how the production, circulation, and consumption of cotton textiles shaped the political economy of these emerging states. Benjamin thus argues that “textiles were symbolically important to those seeking to dominate as well as to those resisting domination” (31). Chapter Two explores the regional textile trade, emphasizing the central position of cotton cloth as currency in the trade between Africans and Europeans, among Africans, and as a marker of social difference in the region. In addition, the author highlights how the importance of cotton cloths to the Atlantic trade shaped early conceptions of race and blackness whereby enslaved Africans were reduced to pieza de India (piece of India), a unit of monetization in the slave trade. Finally, the chapter details European efforts to establish trade monopolies and the varied strategies African traders employed to resist the impositions.

The Texture of Change makes another significant contribution through its attention to the gendered nature of cotton production in the region. Chapter Three examines the crucial role of women’s skilled labour on the cotton cloth trade. Young girls and older women were responsible for harvesting, spinning, and dyeing cotton while men took over the tailoring aspect of dress production. However, although “women’s labour was central to the economy of the western Sahel, notably in the production of dyed textiles in Gajaaga,” (99) as the author argues, European accounts often overlook the labour of women in the production process. By drawing on a broader array of archival and visual images, Benjamin recovers women’s contribution and recenters their labour into the historical narrative of cotton cloth production in the region. Chapter Four turns to the substantive agency of western-Africans during a contested period marked by slavery, abolition, colonialism and religious reforms. Using an impressive array of visual materials and trade pattern books, the author shows how the mobility and cosmopolitan worldviews of Euro-Africans and laptots (West African sailors) significantly shaped the trajectory of textile consumption in the region.

The final chapters investigate the politics of dress in the Upper Guinea at the eve of abolition and European colonialism of the region. Benjamin centers his analysis on prominent local figures such as Fury Cannaba, Fendan Dambuya, and Nhara Bely, exploring how their sartorial choices reflected broader debates surrounding abolition, Islamic reforms, morality and personal aspirations. He notes that while Christian missionaries often interpreted the adoption of European clothing style as an embrace of western notions of civilization, some Africans, viewed western clothing “as a sign of apostasy and therefore to be rejected” (156). In this way, textiles and dress emerged as contested symbols central to the struggle for power by various groups and actors in the region.

A major strength of the book is the rich array of visual materials used to illustrate claims and arguments. Perhaps some of the materials call for a deeper examination as a more sustained engagement with the visual archive could have further enriched some of the book’s already strong claims and arguments. This is a minor point in the broader and important contribution this book makes to the scholarship of textiles and dress cultures in western Africa. Benjamin recognizes the difficulties of writing an alternate history of a region as vast and fluid as western Africa in a time characterized by shifting political alliances and diverse religious institutions. Yet, his expert use of English and French sources, as well as oral accounts and an impressive range of visual materials enable him to unearth voices and perspectives that are otherwise left silent in the archives. Benjamin emphasizes the position of Africans as producers and consumers of both locally made and imported textiles, and how the importance of the textiles trade drew western Africans into an emerging global textile industry. By placing textiles and dress practices at the center of the narrative, Benjamin’s study challenges our understanding of this geographic and linguistic diverse region of West Africa during the transformative periods of slavery, abolition, Islamic reforms, and colonial rule.

Eguono Lucia Edafioka

Vanderbilt University