15
Sarah Fee
Fifteen of my young men died one day because I said I must have a certain red cloth that was thrown down [to my rivals] as a challenge.
Chief Mirambo of Unyanyembe, Tanzania, to Henry Morton Stanley, 1882.
African fashion exists, a point that has been firmly established by many recent essays, monographs, and edited volumes (Gott and Loughran 2010; Jennings 2011; Hansen and Madison 2013; Rovine 2014) and this holds true for the past as well as the present. Before the widespread adoption of tailored garments in Africa, “wrapper dress”—a large rectangle of cloth wrapped around the waist, hip, or shoulders—was subject to fashionability, gauged by fiber, weave, pattern, finish, and color. As throughout the world and across time, translocal trade often provided inspiration (Lemire 2010). In eastern Africa, the area examined in this text, from the medieval period, records show that people enthusiastically demanded and consumed foreign fabrics, and their quickly changing tastes had to be satisfied by producers or they risked poor sales (Prestholdt 1998, 2004, 2014; Machado 2014). In the nineteenth century in particular, intensification in global commerce attracted merchants from Asia, Europe, and America who aggressively marketed hundreds of types of cloth, but the residents of eastern Africa were interested in just a few. Only two products of purely European design captured a tiny share of the market. They were British-made fabrics of brilliant red shades: broadcloth and bunting, woolen goods that are defined and described below. Across the wide expanse of the eastern half of Africa, from Uganda to Madagascar, broadcloth especially was adopted as part of a system of political elite fashion. How and why this came about forms the subject of this text.
It begins with a few comprehensive observations on the color red in human history in general, and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Next, it examines the appropriation of foreign red woolens in West Africa, and red broadcloth as a perfect vehicle for the color red, before turning to the select consumption of this cloth in eastern Africa, a vast interlinked trading zone that comprised present-day southern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda, northern Zambia, and the offshore islands of Madagascar and the Comoros Islands. Finally, it examines the case study of the royal dress of highland Madagascar, where the demand for British scarlet broadcloth was fueled by a complex mix of preexisting symbolism and the political need for novelty.
It has long been appreciated that the color red holds a special place in human perception, cognition, and cultural codes. In a highly influential cross-cultural survey of the 1960s, the anthropologist Brett Berlin and linguist Paul Kay (Berlin and Kay 1969) found that in many language groups, only two color terms exist: black and white. In cultures where a third term exists, it is red. In such cases, other hues are linguistically assimilated to one of these three, as among the Ndembu of Central Africa, where “blue cloth … is described as ‘black’ cloth, and yellow and orange objects are lumped together as ‘red’” (Turner [1966] 2013). Other scholars point out that “that red is the oldest-identified, or at least oldest named, color” (Kay-Williams 2013: 16). This explains why in some ancient societies—Egypt, China, and Coptic Arabic, for instance—the term for red is the general term for color. Berlin and Kay attributed this special status of red to innate, physiological processes. Goggin (2012: 30) neatly explains that the color has unique properties, being “the lowest of light frequencies discernable to the eye”; red is known to make the eyes dilate and the heart beat faster. Amy Butler Greenfield (2006) concludes in her popular study of the color red in human history, “before there was blue or yellow or green there was red, the color of blood and fire.”
A large body of anthropological literature has, however, questioned this “color science” and its universalizing assumptions. Although there may exist innate human cognitive response to colors, the cultural associations, meanings, emotions, and uses which different societies assign to them vary widely. Anthropologist Diane Young (2006) underscores that “cognition is always mediated by other people and altered by social experience.” Sub-Saharan Africa—an immense area populated by hundreds of ethnic groups speaking hundreds of languages—offers a case in point. In his famous study, anthropologist Victor W. Turner ([1966] 2013) showed that color symbolism is contextual, relational, often ambiguous, and tinged with moral evaluations. In Central Africa, different societies may classify blood as “black” or “white” depending on the context. Yet even these studies of “color as language and as symbolic meaning”—what people perceive or say in regard to color—are insufficient according to Young. They tend to dematerialize color, neglecting to study its vehicle, which is often key to cultural appreciations of it. Further, it must be recognized that color has agency which individuals harness to their own ends. We thus also need to consider what people do “with material colored things within the dynamics of social practice” (Young 2006).
Ethnographic studies reveal that in several areas of sub-Saharan Africa, red is understood as an ambiguous hue, associated with life-force, supernatural powers, and rulers; it signals both “distinctiveness and threatening power” (Renne 1995). Acquiring, wearing, and displaying red items of dress were thus often central to leaders’ claims to divine status and political legitimacy. In West Africa, this ongoing need for certain types of colored red adornment inspired people to trade across incredible distances and odds. Red corral and magenta silk, among other objects, formed an important part of the trans-Saharan trade route, which flourished from the eighth to sixteenth centuries, linking the Mediterranean and North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa across hundreds of miles of lifeless desert. From the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese—followed by the Dutch, English, and French—began to frequent West Africa’s coastline, these trade patterns shifted southward. One inducement for West Africans to redirect their trade to Atlantic ports were the Indian and other foreign textiles Europeans brought to trade; some of the most popular being British red woolens.
Historian Colleen Kriger (2006) has considered the contributory factors for this popular reception of British red woolen yarn and fabric in West Africa, and why it topped the list of imported trade goods from the 1600s. Local artisans had access to sources for dyeing their cotton thread red; but the color was surpassed by the better dye-absorbing properties of wool, which produced “greater intensity and saturated quality of the color” (Kriger 2006: 36). With its “exceptional luminosity,” British red wool created a “visual power that was … seized upon by political and religious elites and deployed in their service” (36). Its initial high cost further added to its luxury status. The top echelons of society in many West African locales thus coveted cloths made of the fiber, though for different uses and purposes. Kriger does not specifically mention broadcloth among the British red woolens traded to West Africa, but her descriptions imply that they were.
Broadcloth takes its name from the process of its creation: wool was woven in broad widths, up to 4 meters wide, then fulled in hot water to shrink it and create a felted surface (Munro 2009). A dense nap was further formed by using short staple English wool and a variety of methods to brush, press, and/or shear it. Broadcloth was valued in Europe for its warmth, durability, stiff drape, waterproof features, and hard edges, which did not fray and therefore did not require hemming. In the Medieval period, it was a heavy, luxury fabric produced in many areas of Europe in a wide variety of colors and qualities. In early modern times, England emerged as the major center, mass-producing lightweight, lower-quality versions, with the West Country and Gloucestershire in particular leading production. Into the eighteenth century, the town of Stroud produced the famous “Stroudwater reds”—chosen to clothe the Army’s Redcoats—their superior color attributed to the special qualities of the local waters.
Thus color mattered deeply. In most places, scarlet broadcloth was the most costly and valued. Historian John Munro argues that in Europe it was the dye that made the cloth so prestigious. It was not the quality of the wool or the shearing of the cloth that elevated its price, but the expense of scarce insect-based kermes dye which added 181 percent value to the wool and accounted for 63 percent of the price of the finished product. Exorbitantly expensive, scarlets were the cloth of rulers and the Church. Color historian Amy Butler Greenfield (2006: 3) summarizes, “Elusive, expensive, and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born.”
The overseas demand for broadcloth greatly stimulated British production. From the late 1500s, English merchants joined other Europeans in traveling to Asia, initially with the purpose of finding new markets for broadcloth. The cloth failed to appeal to consumers in India, who acquired only small amounts as furnishings and animal trappings, but it proved wildly popular in the Levant, and far into Central Asia, where it was imported in colossal amounts, giving new life to Gloucestershire production. In the new world, too, there was avid demand. Anthropologist Cory Willmott (2005) has shown that the First Peoples of the Great Lakes region demanded woolen textiles—more so than arms, beads, or iron goods—in exchange for the furs the Europeans sought. Broadcloth—not the better-known blankets—topped their list of desired goods. A variety known as “stroud” in fur trade circles was developed specifically to appeal to Native Americans, who used it widely to fashion and adorn pouches, leggings, breechcloths, wrappers, and tunics. Curiously, Willmott devotes little attention to color, noting only that blue broadcloth was most in demand, followed by red, with others a distant third. In West Africa, as noted earlier, color mattered deeply; red woolens met with greatest success, a preference that applied to eastern Africa, but with some singular variations.
While West Africans welcomed a variety of types of woolen cloth from Europe, in eastern Africa consumers largely rejected them.1 The only exceptions were broadcloth and a distantly related woolen prototype, bunting, the vast majority of it a bright red. Although imported in only small amounts, broadcloth in particular was integral to the reshaping of economic and social life in the eastern half of sub-Saharan East Africa in the nineteenth century. From c.1820 to 1885, this vast area became linked through a network of caravan trading trails that moved ivory, slaves, and copal to ports on the Indian Ocean, most importantly Zanzibar, for export to India, Europe, and, increasingly, the United States. As important in the creation of this vast commercial empire was the local African desire for imported cloth. The largest volume was coarse blue or white cotton yardage from India and the United States, which served as common dress (Alpers 1975; Sheriff 1987; Prestholdt 2004). The remaining approximately 20 percent consisted of costlier more luxurious fabrics, known as “cloth with names” (Fee in press). These included (1) finer grades of cotton cloth, (2) printed cotton wrappers, largely the fashion of coastal Swahili women, (3) Asian striped silk and cotton blends, and (4) broadcloth and bunting, usually of a brilliant red shade. Every trading caravan carried a selection of all these cloth types into the interior of eastern Africa, and each had a specific role to play in the complex intertwining of commercial and social relations.
The elite consumption of scarlet broadcloth during this period had multiple origins. Firstly it was due to what anthropologist Nicholas Thomas termed “localization”: a foreign object being selected for consumption because it fits with preexisting cultural exigencies.2 In eastern Africa, as in other parts of the globe described in this text, red had deep symbolic signification attached to notions of life force, fertility, and strength. Long before the arrival of Europeans in eastern Africa, red cloth of Indian manufacture appears to have served as the wrapper dress and regalia of rulers in some regions. Imported from Gujarat to the Swahili coast, it tended to be the most expensive of cotton cloths, perhaps because of the cost of the dyes involved, or their complexity. In the 1850s, the highest-ranking silk cloth, the deuli, was also most likely red (Alpers 1975: 22). Although evidence is sparse, observations suggest that the appeal of broadcloth laid not only its familiarity, but also in its novel features. First was its distinctive shade of red. Its scarlet hue may have been made from cochineal—which in England in the 1820s was used for making broadcloth of a fashionable “flame” color—and thus a change from the madder-based dyes of Gujarat (Partridge 1823: 143, 239; Chenciner 2000: 216). Certainly its wool base made for a unique product, with its luminous features as described above by Kriger. Arabs in eastern Africa reportedly valued broadcloth for its sheen, while African consumers were observed to judge quality by the length of nap (Burton 1860). In hiding the weave of the cloth and any hint of grid or pattern by a felted surface, a long nap effectively caused the cloth to appear as pure color. While referencing long-established color hierarchies, scarlet broadcloth also provided a novelty, an essential ingredient in claims to distinction, status, and ultimately power in the “prestige economy” of eastern Africa (Glassman 1995; Prestholdt 1998: 23, 27).
Four general social groups appear to have consumed broadcloth in eastern Africa. Swahili and Arab men of means, who were concentrated on the coasts, but also traded, traveled, and settled inland, used broadcloth in a variety of colors—blue, black, red, or light green—for tailoring Omani-style vests and overcoats that they wore on formal occasions. A second group of consumers were rulers in the interior, who ranged from village headmen to hereditary kings of vast territories. As formal dress they generally wore either hand-woven silks from India and Oman or broadcloth. They might follow Arab styles and have broadcloth tailored into robes, but fashions from the coast never moved wholesale to the interior. Inland rulers overwhelmingly preferred red broadcloth, and as often wore it African fashion, wrapped around the hip or chest as a wrapper (Grant 1864: 101; Livingstone 1875: 516; Stanley 1878: 458; von Hohnel 1894: 177). In some areas, such as Madagascar and Uganda, sumptuary laws restricted broadcloth to royalty (Callet 1878). Elsewhere, notably the wealthy ivory market of Ujiji in Tanzania—with its ready access to trade and trade goods—broadcloth was worn more generally by men and “women of wealth” (Burton 1860: 320). A final distinctive group of consumers of scarlet broadcloth were caravan “elders” and guides; these men were hired by Arab and Swahili merchants—as well as European explorers—to manage the hundreds of porters who carried the trade goods necessary for lengthy journeys, and to lead, interpret, and serve as intermediaries with local populations. As distinct emblems of their responsibilities, they wore scarlet broadcloth as great capes, robes, and/or turbans, which they were particularly careful to don before entering important villages. If these guides were not provided with this cloth, they might refuse to proceed, as a group of Belgian missionaries discovered to their dismay in 1880, when forced to send an emissary eighty kilometers back to the Tanzanian coast in search of it (Leblond 1884: 62).
Broadcloth was available for sale at shops and markets but, as indicated in the foregoing incident, it tended to circulate in the context of exchanges, as gifts that recognized legitimacy and authority. The most vital and expensive of these were the “tributes” or “tolls” that caravans had to pay in imported goods to local rulers to trade and travel in the territory (Prestholdt 2004; Fee 2012). The bulk of the goods consisted in cloth, the ruler typically demanding specific, expensive types for himself. If unsatisfied, he might hold the caravan captive for days of negotiation. British explorer R.F. Burton (1860) noted in the interior, broadcloth was worth four times the price on the coast, making it a “present for a prince”; he also counseled that “a bit of scarlet broadcloth, thrown in at the end of a lengthened haggle, opens a road and renders impossibilities possible.” Actual recorded gifts indeed suggest that red cloth played a regular and special part in the multi-phased, protracted gift-giving, with leaders requesting it in cases where it was not offered (Speke 1863: 210–211, 511; Grant 1864: 118; Stanley 1878: 248–249; Johnston 1886: 288). The fatal consequences for not recognizing sovereignty with the proscribed gift can be seen in this text’s opening quote, wherein the famous Wanyamwezi chief Mirambo met his Arab opponents in pitched battle when they refused his demand for a “certain red cloth.” In terms of volume and monetary value, British scarlet broadcloth was marginal in the trade to eastern Africa, accounting for as little as 1 percent of annual cloth imports (Rigby 1859), but in terms of local political and commercial dealings, it was indispensable.
The second imported red cloth based on a British woolen prototype that consumers desired in eastern Africa was bunting. Originally a worsted woolen fabric with a heavy glaze made in various areas of Europe, the bunting imported to eastern Africa was a lighter version made of cotton. It appears that only bright red varieties were desired (Stanley 1872: 50; Gamitto 1960, 2: 132, 143). Known in eastern Africa as bendera, from the Portuguese “flag” (bandeira), scarlet bunting indeed served for making the flag of the Omani sultanate—a red ground with the Union Jack in one corner and a crescent and star in the center—which was flown by numerous ships and official residences (Burton 1872, 1: 321; Krapf 1880: 24). In interior eastern Africa, meanwhile, red bunting, like broadcloth, was appropriated for wrapper garments. As the century progressed, the term bendera came to be applied to any bright “turkey-red”-dyed cotton, pointing again to the overriding importance of color. Originally developed in Turkey or India, these “turkey-red” dyes departed from those historically exported from Gujarat to eastern Africa. Although also based on madder, they entailed a complex recipe utilizing oils that produced a particularly bright and resilient shade that could withstand tropical sunlight, techniques mastered in England only from 1780. Much cheaper than broadcloth, British-made turkey-red cotton bunting was not reserved for the dress of leaders. In certain areas of the interior, the cloth was “especially prized by women” as wrapper dress (Burton 1860: 532). In others, warriors wore it in small amounts, either as headbands, or as stripes and fringes appliquéd onto a wrapper of unbleached cotton; thousands of these latter composite garments, known as naibere in Masaii country, were stitched together by caravan personnel for use in the Kilimanjaro area. In Madagascar turkey red cotton was appropriated for items of ritual dress, notably the tunics of boys to be circumcised.
The demand for these brilliant red fabrics in eastern Africa had far-reaching consequences, what historian Jeremy Prestholdt calls “global repercussions,” as it compelled textile mills in other distant locales to begin producing them specially for that market. The first were the cloth factories of Salem, Massachusetts, that had been originally created in the 1830s to supply unbleached coarse cottons to eastern Africa. Salem’s plain cottons achieved great success until the U.S. Civil War, when disruptions in supply provided a window of opportunity for industrial competitors, including the new factories of Mumbai. To regain their foothold in the East African ivory trade after the War, Salem merchants diversified their cloth offerings, in part by ordering scarlet broadcloth from the Salem mills, a shift necessitating considerable investments in new methods and machinery (Prestholdt 2012). Mumbai’s factories similarly diversified, and by the end of the century captured the production of bendera, scarlet red cottons (Anonymous 1898: 306).
The term “eastern Africa” covers a huge swathe of land, ethnic groups, and languages. To understand red woolens’ precise roles and meanings, it is necessary to consider a smaller cultural unit. Madagascar offers an instructive localized case study of the nexus of red, royal dress and the parameters of political fashion. “A conventional Western sense of color is highly biased and based on ideas of aesthetics,” observes Young (2006). The Madagascar evidence suggests that red was not merely “seen,” or “perceived,” but employed and experienced as a potent force.
Lying off the coast of Mozambique, Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, larger than all the British Isles combined. It was settled several thousand years ago, by immigrants coming from across the Indian Ocean, initially from Indonesia. By the nineteenth century the island was home to several million people and, like continental eastern Africa, was linked to western Indian Ocean trade networks. In their consumption and deployment of foreign red fibers and fabrics, they surpassed even their counterparts on the continent.
Madagascar had a highly developed and widespread hand-weaving tradition of cotton, bast, leaf, and indigenous “wild” silk. Weavers mastered a variety of local sources for creating red dyes, notably the bark of the nato tree, which produced a matte, brick-red hue, known as mena. Mena was one of the four named colors that included black, white, and yellow. Together, they were part of a complex cosmological matrix linking time and space. Madagascar color symbolism is closely related to systems in Indonesia, Java in particular, with additional elements drawn from Arabic astrology (Beaujard 1988; Crossland 2014). The system assigns each cardinal direction an element, destiny, force, color, and social category. Red was linked with the northeast corner, with strength, maturity, heat, life-force, ancestors, anger, and violence. Only rulers and nobles were endowed with the mystical strength necessary to wear red-dyed cloth and gold (also classified as red), and certain imported red ornaments, namely carnelian beads. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the mightiest of Madagascar’s rulers were the monarchs of the Merina kingdom of the central highlands, who controlled much of the island, including its major trading ports.
At this same time foreign imports came to supplement and then supplant local sources of red cloth as the most prestigious vehicle of red. One form was magenta Bombyx silk (silimena), imported as pre-dyed skeins by Arab merchants. Initially its cost was exorbitant and local weavers incorporated only small amounts into their weavings, giving rise to new cloth types, including spectacular mantles with supplementary wefts known as akotifahana (Fee 2013). By the 1820s, however, Merina rulers did not wear locally woven cloth, apart from a few ritual events; for most formal appearances they dressed instead in imported British scarlet broadcloth. British missionaries pointedly observed that: “The royal [cloth] … which is held in highest estimation, is of fine scarlet English broad-cloth, bordered and richly ornamented with gold lace … worn by the king on sacred festivals, and other state occasions” (Ellis 1838 vol.1: 279).
Red broadcloth—known in highland Madagascar as jaky—was the key material manifestation of Merina political legitimacy and supremacy (Callet 1878, 2: 1034). Sumptuary laws—the breaking of which were reportedly punishable by death—forbade it to all but kings and queens and the royal family, although rivals did attempt to usurp this prerogative. It was worn as wrappers, and it was further made into traveling tents and to cover royal objects: palanquins, corpses, tombs, the royal talismans; at the death of a monarch, the entire roof of the large royal palace—visible throughout the capital city of Antananarivo—would be covered in jaky. Indicative of the inseparable associations between jaky and political legitimacy, the key moment of Merina enthronement was the wrapping of the new Merina sovereign in scarlet broadcloth; symptomatic of its perceived independent agency, jaky was further believed to have the power to select a successor: boys were covered with red broadcloth as they slept, the cloth magically moving during the night to cover the head of the worthy child. Jaky was used, too, as an extension of the monarch; kings and queens dressed their private English-trained militia in red broadcloth, and granted honored subjects the right to wear small amounts. Extant items reveal that ritual objects associated with state powers, such as the hats worn by circumcisers, might also be made of jaky. The regular royal public proclamations and countryside tours, surrounded by the jaky-clad monarch, militia, tent, and talismans, presented a literal wall of brilliant red, a projection of divine force and temporal power.
In their study of cloth and dress in West Africa, art historians Perani and Wolf (1999) found royal regalia to be inherently “anti-fashion”: purposefully unchanging and staid in fiber, cut, and color to mark allegiance to ancestral custom. In Madagascar, other patterns prevailed. Innovation—the ability to acquire and withstand the new—was interpreted as evidence of a sovereign’s mystical strength. This was evident not only in the initial adoption of broadcloth, but also in further transformations of royal fashion. Over the course of the nineteenth century, not only fabrics but also silhouettes were radically altered. Although retaining the religious convention and historic practice of wearing the color red, from the 1820s, monarchs adopted European-style tailored dress for their daily wear: trousers, shirts, vests, robes, and dresses (Plates 15.1 and 15.2). Similarly, the list of royal red objects was continually expanded; imported red silk parasols, red satins, gold braid, red leather shoes, and stockings were all over time classified and appropriated as distinctive insignia of royalty; by the late 1800s, it appears that scarlet velvet had replaced broadcloth as the main royal fashionable fabric.
In 1858, British explorer Richard Burton viewed eastern Africa’s imported scarlet broadcloth as a “cheap English article” costing 50 cents a yard. Looking at the same fabric, the people of Madagascar saw something extraordinary, divine, and fashionably royal. This text has endeavored to show that fashionability existed in pre-colonial eastern Africa, and long before tailored dress became the norm. Local consumers sought novel goods for wrapper dress which producers as far away as India, Britain, and the United States competed to satisfy. Unlike the “anti-fashion” strategy of some leaders in West Africa, political elites on the eastern half of the continent partially based claims for legitimacy on claiming novel fashions. Understanding why they chose scarlet broadcloth among the many other foreign fabrics available to the region has required an investigation of the cloth as a “material colored thing.” On the one hand, the desire for the cloth grew from preexisting color symbolism that associated certain objects classified as “red” with life-forces and authority. On the other, the physicality of broadcloth rendered it novel. Made of wool, which readily took red dyes, of novel colorants such as cochineal, and of a unique texture that obscured the weave pattern, broadcloth in this part of the world formed the perfect red.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my thanks to Drs. Alexandra Palmer and Bako Rasoarifetra for their encouragement and help with various aspects of this paper. Research was made possible by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the ROM Department of World Cultures.
Notes
1 In 1811, British mariners exploring the coast of eastern Africa observed there existed “no demand for English woolens” there and consequently the cloth was “not imported” (Smee and Hardy cited in Burton 1872, 2: 512).
2 Other terms to indicate this phenomenon include “domestication” and “cultural authentication.”
References
Alpers, A. (1975), Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Anonymous (1898), “German East Africa,” in U.S. Commercial Relations with Foreign Countries for the Year 1897, Washington, DC: Government Press.
Beaujard, P. (1988), “Les couleurs et les quatre éléments dans le Sud-est de Madagascar: L’héritage indonésien,” Omaly sy Anio, no. 27, January-June, pp. 31–48
Berlin, B. and P. Kay (1969), Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burton, R. F. (1860), The Lake Regions of Central Africa, New York: Harper and Brothers.
Burton, R. F. (1872), Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, 2 vols., London: Tinsley Brothers.
Butler Greenfield, A. (2006), A Perfect Red. Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Colour of Desire, London: Harper.
Callet, F. (ed.) (1878), Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagascar. Documents Historiques d’après les Manuscrits Malgaches, 3 vols., Antananarivo: Presse Catholique.
Chenciner, R. (2000), Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade, Richmond: Curzon.
Crossland, Z. (2014), Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of the Dead, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, W. (1838), History of Madagascar, 2 vols., London: Fisher & Sons.
Fee, S. (2012), “Hostage to Cloth: European Explorers in East Africa, 1850–1890,” Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 13th Bi-annual Symposium, “Textiles and Politics,” Washington, DC, 2012. University of Nebraska Digital Commons.
Fee, S. (2013), “The Shape of Fashion: The Historic Silk Brocades (Akotifahana) of Highland Madagascar,” African Arts 46 (3): 26–39.
Fee, S. (in press), “‘Cloth with names’: The Luxury Textile Trade to Eastern Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” Textile History, special number: ‘The Textile Trades of Eastern Africa’.
Gamitto, A. C. P. ([1831–1832] 1960), King Kazembe and the Marave, Cheva, Bisa, Bemba, Lunda and Other Peoles of Southern Africa, 2 vols., Lisbon: Junta de Investigaçŏes do Ultramar.
Glassman, J. (1995), Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, & Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888, London: Heinemann.
Goggin, M. D. (2012), “The Extra-Ordinary Powers of Red in 18th- and 19th-Century English Needlework,” in A. Feeser, M. D. Goggin and B. Fowkes (eds), The Materiality of Color. The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, London: Ashgate.
Gott, S. and Kristyne Loughran (eds) (2010), Contemporary African Fashion, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Grant, J. A. (1864), A Walk Across Africa, or Domestic Scenes from my Nile Journey, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons.
Hansen, K. T. and D. Soyini Madison (2013), African Dress. Fashion, Agency, Performance, London: Bloomsbury.
Jennings, H. (2011), New African Fashion, New York: Prestel Publishing.
Johnston, H. H. (1886), Kilima-njaro Expedition. A Record of Scientific Expedition in Equatorial Africa, London: Kegan Paul.
Kay-Williams, S. (2013), The Story of Colour in Textiles, London: Bloomsbury.
Krapf, L. (1880), A Dictionary of the Suahili Language, London: Trubner and Co.
Kriger, C. E. (2006), Cloth in West African History, Lanham: Altamira.
Leblond, G. (1884), A l’Assaut des Pays Negres. Journal des Missionaires d’Alger dans l’Afrique Equatoriale. Paris : À l’Oeuvre des Écoles d’Orient.
Lemire, B. (2010), “Introduction. Fashion and Practice of History: A Political Legacy,” in B. Lemire (ed.) The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society. Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times, London: Ashgate.
Livingstone, D. (1875), The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, New York: Harper and Brothers.
Machado, P. (2014), Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munro, J. (2009), “Three Centuries of Luxury Textile Consumption in the Low Countries and England, 1330–1570: Trends and Comparisons of Real Values of Woollen Broadcloth (then and Now),” in K. Vestergård Pedersen and M.-L. B. Nosch (eds), The Medieval Broadcloth: Changing Trends in Fashions, Manufacturing and Consumption, Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Partridge, W. (1823), A Practical Treatise of Dying of Woolen, Cotton and Silk Skein, The Manufacturing of Broadcloth and Cassimere, New York: Wallis & Co.
Perani, J. and Norma H. Wolff (1999), Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa, London: Berg.
Prestholdt, J. (1998), “‘As Artistry Permits and Custom may Ordain’. The Social Fabric of Material Consumption in the Swahili World, circa 1450 to 1600,” Evanston: Northwestern University, PAS Working (3).
Prestholdt, J. (2004), “On the Global Repercussions of Eastern African Consumerism,” The American Historical Review 109 (3): 754–781.
Prestholdt, J. (2012), Domesticating the World. African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Prestholdt, J. (2014), “Africa and the Global Lives of Things,” in F. Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, 85–110, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Renne, E. (1995), Cloth that Does Not Die. The Meaning of Cloth in Bunu Social Life, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
Rigby, C. P. (1859), “Return of the Exports of the Port of Zanzibar in the Year 1859,” British National Archives, FO 54, vol. 17.
Rovine, V. (2014), African Fashion, Global Styles. Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You can Wear, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sheriff, A. (1987), Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar, London: James Curry.
Smee, T. and Lt. Hardy.(1872), “Observations During a Voyage of Research on the East Coast of Africa,” [1811], reprinted in R. F. Burton (ed.), Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, 2 vols., 493–94, London: Tinsley Brothers, vol. 2.
Speke, J. H. (1863), Journal of the Discovery of the Nile, Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and Sons.
Stanley, H. M. (1872), How I found Livingstone. Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa, London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co.
Stanley, H. M. (1878), Through the Dark Continent, 2 vols., New York: Harper and Brothers.
Turner, V. W. ([1966] 2013), “Colour Classification in Ndembu Ritual,” Reprinted in M. Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, 47–84, London: Routledge.
von Hohnel (1894), Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie, 2 vols., trans. Nancy Bell, London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Willmott, Cory (2005), “From Stroud to Strouds: The Hidden History of a British Fur Trade Textile,” Textile History 36 (2): 196–234.
Young, D. (2006), “The Colours of Things,” in C. Tilley, W. Keane and S. Kuechler-Fogden (eds), The Handbook of Material Culture, 173–186, London: Sage.