Middle Letaba Dam. Image credit: Bongani Tau.

Reflection: Compressed files: second skin, solid as gold, to weather the storms by Bongani Tau.

In much of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, European powers reshaped economies around agricultural and mining capitalism, restructuring urban systems in the process. Globally oriented port cities, [whose colonial-era function] was to export raw commodities to the metropole (and later to import manufactured goods), grew most rapidly, while the development of regional, manufacturing-oriented cities, some of which had long histories of proto-industrialism, was undermined. In settler colonies — where the model of extraction involved the persecution, dispossession, massacre, and ghettoization of indigenous or First Nations peoples, then the imposition of systems of slavery and indentured servitude using human labour from Africa and parts of Asia — pre-colonial societies were so dramatically disrupted that colonial powers almost, though not fully, built settlement systems from scratch.

Colonialism’s legacies are extremely durable and widespread […] Because colonisation powerfully shaped the global division of labour and enforced favourable terms of trade for Northern economies, it created long-term advantages for Global North cities and long-term constraints to high-wage employment and large urban middle classes in Global South cities. Colonial systems of administration also imposed various forms of spatial segregation in cities that have endured as context-specific articulations of the urban land nexus. (Randolph and Storper, 2022)

Growing up in my mother’s doily-infested tavern, with antique wooden furniture and the famous South African porcelain dogs I used to enjoy bumping into scholars, politicians, soldiers, teachers, and community leaders who stopped by for a drink and healthy debates about politics, religion, history and other topics. A wooden rhino stood proudly on one of the doilies on top of a table in the dining room. I saw it daily coming into the house. So, one day, I plucked up the courage to ask one of the gentlemen who chilled at home what it was. He told me it was an art piece that represented the famous rhino from Mapungubwe. “It was also a wooden rhino covered in gold”, he said. In hindsight, he referred to the discovery of the golden rhinoceros in 1934 from a royal grave at the site of Mapungubwe in northern South Africa, near the border of Zimbabwe.

Until then, I didn’t know what Mapungubwe was. It wasn’t until I got to high school, during history lessons, that there were feint mentions of this civilisation and the relics they left behind. My first real brush with Mapungubwe was in recent years when I started reading the work of Victor Ralushai after being introduced to it by his grandchild fashion designer and businesswoman Hangwani Nenovhela, founder of Rubicon clothing. During our conversation about her “Myth of Origin” collection, she spoke about her inspiration as a pre-colonial fashion civilisation living in Mapungubwe that her grandfather wrote extensively about extensively.

After that interview, I wondered what has been lost or erased, hidden in South African history. About what we could learn from what lives behind paywalls and brutalist buildings. If Mapungubwe could inspire Hangwani, how could the rest of the fashion industry learn from our collective ‘passed’? How could it inspire brave (k)new ways of thinking about fashion and the problems fashion can solve? The innovation, the textiles, the technology? How could it inspire future imaginaries? Can we rather develop Afrocentric industries that are growing in and for our communities? Can fashion look to sustainable practices that facilitate symbiotic relationships between humans and the environment and between humans?

As I pondered these provocations and started reading, I got invited to be part of a unique ‘micro-university’ workshop led by Scott Williams, a Research Fellow at the African Fashion Research Institute that paralleled my inquiry. It combined online sessions with a 3-day design sprint. During a three-day design sprint in Giyani, Limpopo, we participated in walks, interviews at Muti wa VaTsonga Open Air Museum curated by Dr. Udo Küsel and others and sharing that will culminate in a research zine consisting of a sonic work, photographs, sketches, writings, vlogs and a prototype garment. The garment will be made with the shepherd’s life in mind to help them withstand the elements and carry essentials. We want to give shepherds a second skin that learns from the rich history of Limpopo. That learns from the technology of old shepherds. An embodiment of histories that carries African avant-garde into the future.

We are working with sustainable upcycling practices to create this garment. The materials are made of Goretex or similar offcuts sourced from Taking Care of Business (previously known as The Clothing Bank) to create this garment.

Learnings:

Having assumed a dominant position in fashion scholarship, Eurocentrism is often seen as the ultimate authority on all matters of fashion and design. However, this perspective fails to acknowledge global communities’ vast and varied contributions to the fashion industry. Eurocentrism has thus become the centre, the present, the phenomenon, the author of histories, and the controller of our experiences, not just in fashion but in the world at large. This Eurocentrism, in its dominance, has erased diverse voices and perspectives, stifling the potential for a more inclusive approach.

To minimise this Eurocentrism, we need a radical overhaul of definitions of fashion, its scholarship and how it is practised globally. This involves reducing Western culture and even the epistemologies that inform how we think about fashion. This means re-orientation of academic institutions and their position, which reproduces this violence of erasure and calls for the emergence of (k)new ways of teaching and learning.

Being a part of the Mapungubwe Prototype Working Group, in the workshops and a part of the New Patterns programme has enlightened me. It was a taste of alternative ways of learning that emphasised alternative methods of fashion practice. Urgent pedagogies. Non-extractive, collaborative and accessible. New Patterns is a three-year decolonial research project created by the African Fashion Research Institute, funded by the National Arts Council illustrating the potential of praxis. The project is a response to the ongoing conditions and challenges of seeking fashion education of a decolonial kind. As a creative research project, New Patterns explores alternate ways of teaching, both in and beyond the formal classroom.

It is a double click on compressed histories, which we learned about in the museum and drew inspiration from to create the garments. Although complex cultures and histories were reduced to short paragraphs and unattended objects in the museum – another problematic practice that borrows from European methods of othering and remembering – this was an opportunity to look to the past to configure the future. What is the future? Can we shift the (design) attention away from the proclaimed centre of Western civilisations back to the local histories, cosmologies, and knowledges?

The colonial relationship required altering the productivity of the colonial society in order that its wealth could be exported to the core nations, and colonial cities centralised this function. Their major cultural role was to house the agencies of this unequal relationship: the colonial political institutions—bureaucracies, police, and the military—by which the core ruled the colony, and the economic structure—banks, merchants, and moneylenders—through which wealth drained from colony to core. (Richard Gabriel Fox, 1977)

References:

Randolph, G.F. and Storper, M. (2022). Is Urbanisation in the Global South Fundamentally different? Comparative Global Urban Analysis for the 21st Century. Urban Studies, 60(1), pp.3–25. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211067926.

Richard Gabriel Fox (1977). Urban Anthropology. Prentice Hall.