Colonial Aspects of Finnish- Namibian Relations, 1870–1990

University of Namibia, 2020

The need to explore the Vakwangali traditional clothing as an inspiration for designing fashion clothing arose from acquired knowledge and understanding that intersections exist between traditional clothing and fashion design. It also began from observations that while such intersections seem to have resulted in the development of fashion clothing from traditional clothing among, for example, Ovaherero and Aawambo of Namibia, it is puzzling as to why the same have not occurred among Vakwangali of Kavango West region. Traditional clothing of Vakwangali has a rich history that is embedded with value and meaning. However, this rich cultural heritage is not reflected in their everyday wear. The main objective of this study was to explore various Vakwangali traditional clothing and styles over time; in order to explain the lack of transformation of Vakwangali cultural clothing from traditional clothing styles to fashion clothing. In addition this study aimed to suggest initiatives to transform Vakwangali traditional clothing into fashion through an exhibition fashion collection. Data was collected through interviews with key informants to gain in-depth knowledge regarding Vakwangali traditional clothing and its influence through a narrative style. Additional archival documents, regarding early establishment of mission work and schools, showed the influence of Christianity and colonial rule on Vakwangali traditional clothing including its transformation. Artefacts were also observed at the Maria Mwengere Museum in Rundu and Owela Museum in Windhoek to record details on craftsmanship of Vakwangali traditional clothing needed for fashion design. In addition, the online BAB Photography archive was studied to gain visual references to guide the designing process of the Vakwangali Fashion Collection. The study found that besides the various Vakwangali clothing, which included leather aprons for men and women, different hairstyles and ornaments were used to adorn the body. The study also found that there existed different styles between gender and social status. Generally, factors such as trade, Christianity and changing of livelihood contributed to the lack of transformation of Vakwangali traditional clothing into fashion. Further, the study revealed that Vakwangali are longing to restore the value and meaning that was embedded into the traditional clothing and are open to initiatives of reviving Vakwangali traditional clothing. This study created possible ideas for transforming Vakwangali traditional clothing into fashion from which Vakwangali fashion collection was created. The study recommended that different projects should adopt the suggested styles for different occasions.

Journal of Social Development in Africa, 2011

The government of Botswana through its National Policy on Culture (2001) and the National Ecotourism Strategy (2002) is committed to preserving national culture and historical heritage. The policy stipulates that valuable heritage must be preserved and developed in order to foster a sense of national identity, pride and unity. It is necessary to reformulate cultural values and valuing processes, in order to better understand the Setswana culture and its meaning in material objects. To this end, dress as one of the valuable material culture objects is essential for signifying and expressing subtle cultural value and social relationships. The intimate link between people and their traditional dress lies at the core of ethnic identity, and has assumed a higher level of significance among consumers and tourists who collect symbolic items. A specific emphasis on a national traditional dress seems to be lacking in Botswana. This paper argues that there is need to restore traditional dress in Botswana, which would serve as a symbol of national identity and cultural heritage. The paper is based on the findings of a study that explored the historical underpinnings of national dress in Botswana, and how national dress could be used to sustain culture.

The Nchaka festival, also called Egwu Ogba is usually celebrated in Ogbaland at the end of each year to mark the end of the farming season and to commemorate their victory at the war fought against the Aboh kingdom across the River Niger. Ogbaland in this research covers Omoku, the headquarters of Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area of Rivers State, in Nigeria. Omoku is located in the northern part of Rivers state, sharing boundary with Delta state and Imo state. The Nchaka festival is in two parts, the male and the female Nchaka, whereby elders of both sexes have different parts to play at different times. During the festival, celebrants carry symbolic cultural items such as hand fan, dane guns, spears, metal gongs, sword and wooden drums to perform various activities. The celebrants do not have a unique textiles that identify them, but rather dress gorgeously with imported acculturated textiles, also used by other communities at various festivals. This research is an exploratory study aimed at projecting and documenting the history and culture of the Ogba Nchaka festival symbols as motif on textiles for a unique identity of the celebrants for posterity. This will enrich the collection of modern Nigerian textile design and add to the cultural fabrics and symbolic items used during the Nchaka festival in Ogbaland. Photographs of a collection of the symbolic items were taken and critically studied, and key celebrants interviewed. Homes of expositors, shrines and libraries were visited for accurate records. Researchers attended the proclamation of the 2014 Nchaka festival by the Oba of Ogbaland, His Eminence, Oba Chukumela Nnam Obi. Sketches of the various items were made and compositions created as motifs for textiles. These were in turn transferred to cloth as samples with surface embellishment on batik, using flat iron-on stones and taken to the field for critic and acceptance. It was recommended among other issues that the design is a step in the right direction to document and preserve Ogba cultural heritage, historical events and symbols through textile design. The findings show that the symbols of Nchaka festival were accepted as being suitable for modern textiles of identity for Nchaka celebrants and serve as a platform for documenting the culture of the Ogba people of Omoku for scholarly references.

Tides of Innovation in Oceania

Clothing and Difference, 2020

This document is the author's submitted version of the book section. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. " 'I dress in this fashion': transformations in sotho dress and women's lives in a Sekhukhuneland village, South Africa" in Hendrickson, H (ed) Clothing and Difference: embodied identities in colonial and post-colonial Africa, Duke University Press, Durham, 1996. 1 Deborah James Consciousness, and its "colonisation", has recently attracted some attention in the study of southern African society (JL and J Comaroff 1989; Bozzoli 1991). Although not expressed in quite the same terms, the processes by which such colonisation has been withstood have preoccupied scholars in southern Africa for somewhat longer (P and I Mayer 1971; Alverson 1978, McAllister 1980, 1991). While other writers have examined overt acts of resistance, anthropologists have concerned themselves with subtler means of defying domination, often through the reassertion of apparently traditional cultural forms, with effects sometimes perceptible no more widely than within local communities themselves. Recent studies in this vein examine rural people's portrayal, through local knowledge, of their colonisation and their incorporation as an industrial proletariat within the capitalist world. This knowledge is seen as both enabling people to conceptualise their own history as dominated but resilient subjects (JL and J Comaroff 1987:193) and, in parallel, as facilitating the ongoing construction of group or individual identities by such people (Ferguson 1992; Thomas 1992). The production of this local knowledge often involves the invoking of tradition (Coplan 1987, 1991), and often counterposes this with images of modernity, resulting in sets of opposed dualities: town/country, townsman/peasant, Christian/non-Christian, setswana/segoa (JL and J Comaroff 1987; Roseberry 1989; P and I Mayer 1971). Criticisms have been levelled at this writing. Spiegel, for example, disparages "dualist approaches" for the inappropriateness of their search "for persistences of a pre-industrial world view in the ways in which people order and perceive their contemporary relationships" (1990:46). But the emerging contrast between, for example, setswana and segoa, was not "a confrontation between a primordial folk tradition and the modern world" (JL and J Comaroff 1987:194-5). Rather, Tswana tradition came to be formulated largely through its complementary opposition to "the ways of the European". Indeed, the very images of a preindustrial or pre-capitalist world which feed into the making of such dualities are products of people's encounter with the relationships and realities of the industrial or capitalist one (Roseberry 1989:144, 201-3, passim).

International Journal of Innovative Research and Development

Abstract:The Fanti Asafo flag images and iconography which has been adapted and used as Asafo flags for Asafoactivities have been passed down over countless generations. These images serve as symbols which generate and communicate ideas, perceptions and beliefs, they are rooted in symbolism, religious practices, social taboos and totems. These symbols are visualobservable fact but carry a great deal of verbal and non-verbal connotations. These images are a direct commentary on society, highlighting on all facet of human survival. The visual recognition and the message it sends is understood by its users, it is popular amongst the Fanti people of the coastal region of Ghana. They are used as motifs in the production and designing of the Asafo flag with symbolic colour for performances. This paper seeks to use the images and iconography in the Fanti Asafo flags as inspiration for textile design. The research method employed was qualitative, specifically the descriptive approach and artistic research design. The population for the study comprised the coastal dwellers from the coastal settlement across the central region of Ghana. The scope stretches from Senya Breku, Winneba, Saltpond and Cape coast. Interviews and observations were adopted for data collection. Findings revealed that images and the colour in the flags produced intricate and interesting designs that can fits perfectly into the ethnic category of textile design concepts. The usage of the images resulted in unique unconventional textile designs which can be adopted for contemporary usage in furnishing and home décor Keywords:Coastal fanti asafo flags, asafo flags, textile design, symbols, motifs, fanti, textile design, textile design resource.

Conference Proceedings of the 13th Congress of the PanAfrican Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related Studies PAA and the 20th Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists Safa. Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal. , 2015

Advances in social science, education and humanities research, 2023

Clothes not only function as a cover for the body, but also understood as a metaphor for power and authority. This paper examines the discourse about the role of the artwork of the Indonesian traditional textile art and costume shown as embodied dependencies during the Dutch colonialism in 17 th-19th century and how it changed today's society in Indonesia. This paper focus on the art history for the material culture and evidence of dependencies in the costumes and textile art Indonesia during the Dutch colonialism and are able in the wider form to correct the widespread in the academic evaluation between written and non-written traditions. The research method applied through empirical research in literature review, using theoretical framework from the art history literature, conceptually and methodologically existing slavery and labor history research. Dutch dominant for a long time and the influence of the population, the clothing in Indonesia is more than just marking differences and similarities in indigenous communities. These clothes give the media to express certain attitudes towards the influences from foreign cultural and political influences. Comprehensive analysis of the interaction of culture given the costumes, textile, attitudes, behavior, gender, norms of appropriateness norms to understand Indonesia's ever-changing social views.

Skhothane is defined by ostentatious performances that involve dance, ‘dissing’ and flamboyant dress. The following study identifies and analyses the neo-tribe’s fashion codes in order to understand more thoroughly how and why these are constructed as well as to shed light on subcultural phenomena in South African township culture. The idea of neo-tribes such as skhothane and hip-hop being counterculture has become challenged by the increasing influence of mass culture on the youth -especially in post-apartheid South Africa, where media dictates on lifestyle and identities are continually evolving. This qualitative research project aims at uncovering the stylistic nuances of the Skhothane neo-tribe. It further maps out the factors that inform how the members negotiate and express their identity using fashion. In this respect, phenomenological epistemology was appropriate as it lent itself to the deep inquiry into the culture’s identity from the perspective of its members. The ethnog...

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2019

Beadwork is a well-documented aspect of the socio-political culture of isiZulu speaking groupings in Southern Africa. Whilst scholarship on beadwork deals largely with the denotative and connotative value it offers wearers, this article's contribution relates both to its commodification and apolitical value by confronting a general assumption that a beadwork style known as isimodeni (modern beadwork), produced as a trinket for tourists along Durban's racially stratified Golden Mile since the 1960s, is an authentic representation of a Zulu material culture. The paper probes how traditional beadwork and rickshaw rides (with both highly decorated carts and pullers) were earmarked by tourism officials of the time, as commodities that could serve a demand for colourful exoticism and accessible "Zulu" culture. Methodologically, the article draws on the visual analysis of beaded artifacts and photographs, in addition to ethnographic data derived from unstructured interviews with bead-workers on Durban beachfront, to examine how a beadwork tradition transformed into a "Zulu" tourism commodity, and then transmuted into a nationalized, form of ethnic identity and sartorial tradition. Keywords Zulu, beadwork, isimodeni, Durban, tourism tribal, the exotic (Kasfir 2007) and for 'localness', amongst white residents and administrators. This value, is evident in a second interview, in 2012, with beachfront bead-worker Sindy Shezi: It is all about demand. Those days when a lot of whites, in 1985 were here, they just wanted the bright colours. They never told us what colours to choose or how to make it, but we would watch what they bought, and then make it. Look at this headband that I made, it's ANC (in the colours of the African National Party Colours). Now people come here and they want ANC, IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) or NFP (National Freedom Party) colours. People also ask for isigege (traditional beaded skirts); inkehle (hat of a married women); and imblaselo (modified western wear) so we make them, it's the fashion now (Gatfield 2014, 303) The interview offers indicators that a responsive process of beadwork production continued during the 1980s, in which the demands of both white and then black customers seeking either colourful holiday keepsakes, political signifiers, traditional wear or the latest fashion, were met.