Abstract
Kanga, a factory-woven cloth printed with colourful designs, emerged from a complex history of global trade networks responding to local east African consumer demands in the late nineteenth century. This chapter presents the first art historical analysis of the cloth genre, drawing on a wide variety of European texts, local accounts, photographs and surviving objects. It demonstrates that kanga grew out of earlier demands for unbleached and indigo-dyed cottons from the United States and India, the impact of newly invented synthetic dyes, advances in printing technologies, and the design influence of square printed handkerchiefs. The kanga emerged by 1886, drawing on both global textile production revolutions and enduring east African aesthetic preferences for printed cloths with crisp, bold and symmetrical designs within a bordered composition.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to Sarah Fee, Pedro Machado, Gwyn Campbell and the anonymous readers for their comments on this manuscript, and to the Pasold Research Fund which, in part, supported this research.
- 2.
This article builds on the work of Laura Fair but, instead of chronicling clothing trends as linked to the social identities of consumers, I focus on networks of trade and supply, and innovations in technologies of production that made new types of cloth available for sale in Zanzibar during the second half of the nineteenth century. See Laura Fair, “Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar,” The Journal of African History 39, no. 1 (1998): pp. 63–94, and Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Zanzibar, 1890-1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), pp. 64–109. Much of this article centres in Zanzibar, as the late nineteenth-century entrepôt for imported goods, but scholars such as Sheryl McCurdy have worked to nuance understandings of how consumer goods functioned along trade routes into the interior of east Africa. See Sheryl McCurdy, “Fashioning Sexuality: Desire, Manyema Ethnicity, and the Creation of the ‘Kanga,’ ca. 1880-1900,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): pp. 441–69.
- 3.
Anonymous, The Periplus Maris Erythraei, trans. Lionel Casson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 7–8, 11, 17. Periplus Maris Erythraei was written by an Egyptian Greek merchant between 40 CE and 70 CE. This handbook for merchants outlined the trade between Roman Egypt and the Indian Ocean world, from the coast of east Africa through southern Arabia to the coasts of the subcontinent of India. Amongst other trade goods, the writer mentions textiles woven in Gujarat that were traded to the Horn of Africa in the first century CE.
- 4.
Pedro Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, 1300-1800,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 178.
- 5.
Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth,” p. 172; Thomas Smee, “Observations during a Voyage of Research on the East Coast of Africa, from Cape Guardafui to the Island of Zanzibar, in the H. C.’s cruiser Ternate, (Captain T. Smee,) and Sylph schooner (Lieutenant Hardy), 1811,” in Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, by Richard F. Burton, vol. 2 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), pp. 493, 512–13.
- 6.
Jeremy Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain: The Social Fabric of Material Consumption in the Swahili World, 1450-1600,” Program in African Studies Working Papers 3 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1998), p. 17; Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth,” pp. 170–4.
- 7.
Preference for blue cloth (called zuartes) from the 1780s is noted by Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth,” pp. 172–3, and preference for white cloth is confirmed in 1811 by British Captain Smee and again in 1859 (called merkani) by British explorer Richard F. Burton; See Smee,“Observations during a Voyage of Research,” p. 513 and Richard Francis Burton, “The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society XXIX (1859): pp. 422–3.
- 8.
Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” The American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): p. 769.
- 9.
Trade reports, travelogues, and business documents all emphasize the dominance of merikani over kaniki and even the lengths which competitors went to imitate American manufacture. For example, William Samuel W. Ruschenberger, Narrative of a Voyage round the World, during the years 1835, 36, and 37, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), pp. 65–6; Burton, “The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa,” pp. 421–3; Richard F. Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, vol. 2 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), pp. 412–4.
- 10.
Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions,” p. 769.
- 11.
American merchants could only lament this change in fortune: ‘Before the war, nearly two thirds of the Cotton goods (which form one of the principal articles of import) were imported from the U.S., but for the past four years the market has been supplied chiefly with goods of English manufacture from Bombay & England. In ordinary times, however, these can hardly be brought to compete with American Cottons.” See Edward D. Ropes, “Letters Concerning Eastern Africa: 61. Edward D. Ropes to William H. Seward, October 5, 1865, Zanzibar,” in New England Merchants in Africa: A History through Documents, 1802-1865, ed. Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brookes, Jr. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1965), p. 538.
- 12.
Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth,” p. 172; Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits,” pp. 27, 29.
- 13.
Ruth Barnes, “Indian Trade Textiles: Sources and Transmission of Designs,” in Cultures of the Indian Ocean, ed. Abdul Sheriff and Jessica Hallett, pp. 230–42 (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1998).
- 14.
Many of these patterned cloths were helpfully itemized by Burton in 1859, but these comprised only “minor [import] items” rather than the “principal imports” of merikani and kaniki. See Burton, “The Lake Regions,” pp. 421–3. For detailed descriptions of patterned cloths, relative price and demand, see Burton, “The Lake Regions,” pp. 428–32.
- 15.
Edmund Knecht and James Best Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing (London: Charles Griffin & Co., Ltd., 1912), pp. 18–22.
- 16.
Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, pp. 17–8, 24.
- 17.
John Gardner, Bleaching, Dyeing, and Calico-Printing (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1884), p. 62; Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 49.
- 18.
Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 18.
- 19.
Gardner, Bleaching, Dyeing, and Calico-Printing, p. 63; Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 49.
- 20.
Susan W. Greene, Wearable Prints, 1760-1860 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014), pp. 177–8.
- 21.
Greene, Wearable Prints, p. 156.
- 22.
Charles O’Neill, The Practice and Principles of Calico Printing, Bleaching, Dyeing, Etc. 2 vols. (Manchester: Palmer and Howe, 1878), p. 285. O’Neill also lists over one hundred patents related to the making and application of aniline coloured dyes (excluding black), pp. 286–98.
- 23.
Date of magenta from Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 9; John Lightfoot discovered aniline black in 1860 and he patented it some three years later, O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, p. 304; quote from O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, p. 301. O’Neill separately lists patents related to the making and application of black aniline, pp. 301–3.
- 24.
Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 9.
- 25.
O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, p. 90; Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 9.
- 26.
O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, p. 67.
- 27.
O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, pp. 67–8.
- 28.
O’Neill, The Practice and Principles, pp. 91–2.
- 29.
William Crookes, A Practical Handbook of Dyeing and Calico-Printing (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.: 1874), p. v.
- 30.
Greene, Wearable Prints, p. 191.
- 31.
Gardner, Bleaching, Dyeing, and Calico-Printing, pp. 160–81.
- 32.
Knecht and Fothergill, The Principles and Practice of Textile Printing, p. 9.
- 33.
Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions,” p. 766.
- 34.
European merchant-converter firms were essentially distributors or middlemen in the sourcing, shipping and supplying of manufactured goods from industrialized metropoles to consumer colonies. Headquartered in European cities, these firms often held branch offices throughout the world’s growing urban centres.
- 35.
Measurements quoted in Karl Wilhelm Schmidt, Sansibar: Ein ostafrikanisches Culturbild (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1888), p. 144; Charles New, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1874), p. 29.
- 36.
Though Schmidt provides the measurements for the smaller pocket-handkerchiefs, he provides the definition of ‘Lezos’ as ‘six in a row compose a piece, a doti in the native measure, find their use as hip and breastcloths’. See Schmidt, Sansibar, p. 144. A doti is the equivalent of four yards, which makes each large handkerchief approximately 24” square, or around 60 cm.
- 37.
Edward A. Alpers, “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500-1800,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (1976): pp. 1, 24, 35, 39. Alpers suggests that trade in cotton cloth from Gujarat to the Swahili Coast may have commenced in the fifteenth century, following the rise to prominence of the Islamic sultanate of Gujarat in 1392. The Portuguese controlled trade in coastal east Africa in the sixteenth century, which continued to be dominated by Gujarati cloths. By the early seventeenth century, cloths from Gujarat still dominated the east African market and were dyed blue or dark purple, also blue, black and red.
- 38.
Schmidt, Sansibar, pp. 144–5.
- 39.
Farouque Abdillah and Gill Shepherd, “I am like a kanga-cloth. I die in all my beauty,” Africa Now, February (1984): p. 48; Janette Hanby and David Bygott, Kangas: 101 Uses (Nairobi: Ines May, 1984), p. 2; Anthony John, “The Kanga Struts in Style,” Weekend Standard (Kenya), July 2 (1982): p. 11; Tony Troughear, “Khangas, Bangles and Baskets,” Kenya Past and Present 16 (1984): p. 13. The nineteenth-century measurement (72” × 50”) comes from “Zanzibar: Report for the Year 1896 on the Trade of Zanzibar,” by A.H. Hardinge, Diplomatic and Consular Reports on Trade and Finance, Foreign Office No. 1961 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1897), pp. 9–10. Today, kanga in my collection measure closer to 167 cm × 111 cm or 66” × 44”.
- 40.
Fair, by contrast, cites Hanby and Bygott’s and Linnebuhr’s date of the late 1870s for the creation of leso ya kushona. See Fair, Pastimes and Politics, pp. 79–80; Hanby and Bygott, Kangas, pp. 2–3; Elisabeth Linnebuhr, “Kanga: Popular Cloths with Messages,” in Readings in African Popular Culture, ed. Karen Barber (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 140.
- 41.
New arrived in east Africa in January 1863 and departed in May 1872. See Charles New, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa, 3rd edn (Oxon: Frank Cass, 1971), p. 8.
- 42.
New, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa, 2nd edn, p. 60.
- 43.
John Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 342–3.
- 44.
P.F. van Vlissingen & Co. records use the term slendang to refer to cloth wrappers and recorded measurements in the imperial system: handkerchief as 30” × 30” and full-size wrapper 54” × 79”
- 45.
Blauw & wit slendangs Zanzibar and Zanzibar handkerchiefs, records salvaged from 1876 textile pattern book, Vlisco Museum, Helmond, The Netherlands. Photographs in the collection of the author.
- 46.
Linnebuhr, “Kanga,” p. 140.
- 47.
Manuscript from Anonymous, Manuscript from Firmenarchiv O’Swald 1878, 621-1/3-21; as quoted in Lutz J. Schwidder, “Das Hamburger Kolonialhandelshaus Wm. O’Swald & Co. und die Einführung von ‘Techniken’ in die Kolonien 1890-1914” (PhD diss., Universität Hamburg, 2004), and cited in Linnebuhr, “Kanga,” p. 140.
- 48.
Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions”; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth.”
- 49.
Schmidt, Sansibar, p. 83.
- 50.
Schmidt, Sansibar, pp. 144–5.
- 51.
Numerous examples of printed cloth intended for the east African market are held in the archives of the Vlisco Museum. Vlisco, a Dutch textile printer formerly called P.F. van Vlissingen & Co., not only retained their own late nineteenth-century textile pattern books, but also acquired those of their vanquished competitors, Haarlemsche Katoen Maatschappij (HKM or Haarlem Cotton Company) and Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij (LKM or Leiden Cotton Company). All three Dutch textile printing firms produced printed designs on cloth, commissioned by European merchant converters, designed by resident Indian cloth merchants in the trading centres of east Africa, intended for east African consumers.
- 52.
Schmidt, Sansibar, p. 83.
- 53.
For a more in-depth discussion on the inclusion of text on early kanga textiles, see MacKenzie Moon Ryan, “A Decade of Design: The Global Invention of the Kanga, 1876-86,” Textile History 48, no. 1 (2017): pp. 101–32.
- 54.
The earliest extant examples date from 1886, but the vast majority of Vlisco’s early records were destroyed in a devastating fire in 1883, making it difficult to ascertain whether production started prior to 1886. Swatches of both leso and kanga are contained in the volume, Vlisco Slendangs 1886, Vlisco Museum, Helmond, The Netherlands. The date of Vlisco’s fire from H.W. Lintsen, “Part III: Textiles,” in History of Technology in the Netherlands: The Genesis of Modern Society 1800-1890 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993), p. 71.
- 55.
In rare instances, grounds of yellow and inks of blue and orange appear on late nineteenth-century kanga. Colours noted on swatches from late nineteenth-century pattern books from the companies P.F. van Vlissingen & Co. (Vlisco), Haarlemsche Katoen Maatschappij or Haarlem Cotton Company (HKM), and Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij or Leiden Cotton Company (LKM), all accessed in the archive of Vlisco Museum, Helmond, the Netherlands.
- 56.
Printed cloth with contiguous square handkerchief designs continue to be worn by women in the Comoros Islands today, though the fashion has fallen out of favour throughout the rest of east Africa. Personal communication with Isabelle Denis on 3 November 2012, and Chris Spring, ‘Not Really African? Kanga and Swahili Culture’, in East African Contours: Reviewing Creativity and Visual Culture, ed. Hassan Arero and Zachary Kingdon (London: Horniman Museum, 2005), p. 75.
- 57.
Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, or The Source of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878), p. 509.
- 58.
Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa, Or, the Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Toronto Presbyterian New Company, 1890), p. 37.
Stanley specifically requested four pieces of 24 yards each of kanga, equalling 96 yards.
- 59.
Abdillah and Shepherd, “I am like a kanga-cloth,” p. 48; Fatma Shaaban Abdullah, “Reflections on a Symbol,” Africa Now, February 1984, p. 49; Anonymous, “Kanga Textiles from Tanzania,” African Textiles: The Magazine for the African and Arab Markets, August/September 1984, p. 24; Troughear, “Khangas, Bangles and Baskets,” p. 13.
- 60.
Hanby and Bygott, Kangas, p. 3; Julia Hilger, “The Kanga: An Example of East African Textile Design,” in The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex, ed. John Picton (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1995), p. 44; John, “The Kanga Struts,” p. 11; Robert Ndwiga, “Be it Love or Sorrow, Say it with Khangas,” East African (Nairobi), June 5–11, 2000, p. viii.
- 61.
Frederick Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (1930; repr., London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), p. 177. This passage is drawn from his 1889–90 expedition with the Imperial British East Africa Company.
- 62.
Printed Swahili text, in both Arabic and Roman scripts, became a more standard inclusion in the 1910s just before World War I, though the innovation of including Swahili text, initially printed in Arabic script, is original to the emergence of the cloth genre itself ca. 1886.
- 63.
Andrey Zhukov, “Old Swahili-Arabic Script and the Development of Swahili Literary Language,” Sudanic Africa 15 (2004): p. 13.
- 64.
Zhukov, “Old Swahili-Arabic Script,” p. 14.
- 65.
The earliest kanga textiles in Vlisco’s archive that possess Roman-script Swahili text date to 31 March 1910. Judging from Vlisco’s holdings of other Dutch textile printers’ sample books, a variety of lettering styles—including cursive, sentence case, and block capitals—were all used to print Roman-script Swahili text on kanga in the first decades of the twentieth century. Based on thousands of kanga textiles and dozens of textile pattern books bearing hundreds of kanga swatches consulted at the Vlisco Museum, Helmond, The Netherlands. Photographs in collection of the author.
- 66.
“Inclosure 3: Extracts from a Report on the Trade of the Benadir Ports,” in “Zanzibar: Report for the Year 1891 on the Trade of Zanzibar,” by G.H. Portal, Diplomatic and Consular Reports of Trade and Finance, Foreign Office No. 981 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1892), p. 31.
- 67.
“Zanzibar: Report for the Year 1895 on the Trade of Zanzibar,” by A.H. Hardinge, Diplomatic and Consular Reports on Trade and Finance, Foreign Office No. 1765 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1896), pp. 9–10.
- 68.
Only after World War I did Dutch textile printer P. F. van Vlissingen & Co. shift production from woodblock to roller-printing for kanga textiles.
- 69.
See Appendix A: “Discussion of Kanga Textiles in Early Twentieth-Century British Colonial Trade Reports” in MacKenzie Moon Ryan, “The Global Reach of a Fashionable Commodity: A Manufacturing and Design History of Kanga Textiles” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2013), pp. 518–48.
- 70.
“Zanzibar: Report for the Year 1896 on the Trade of Zanzibar,” by A.H. Hardinge, Diplomatic and Consular Reports on Trade and Finance, Foreign Office No. 1961 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1897), pp. 8–9. The asterisk denotes the sample was forwarded to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, though its present whereabouts are unknown.
- 71.
“Report on the Island of Pemba for the Year 1900,” by O’Sullivan-Beare, Diplomatic and Consular Reports: Africa, No. 2653 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1901), pp. 15–6.
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Photographic Archives
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Textile Archives
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Ryan, M.M. (2018). Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century. In: Machado, P., Fee, S., Campbell, G. (eds) Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58265-8_10
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58264-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58265-8
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)