Destiny world: textile casualties in Southern Nigeria.

Chaos is precariously near.--Anton Ehrenzweig (1967:31)

Walking along an Ibadan roadside in July 1996, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a cloth displayed in a market stall--a bedsheet repeatedly printed with the recognizable face and overstuffed body of Winnie the Pooh (Fig. 1). As I moved in for a closer look, those cartoon bears lost their legibility, competing for my attention with a clattering noise of repeating, unrelated patterns and colors, each establishing its own broken visual rhythm. Suddenly, out of the noise appeared other famous faces--Pooh's bouncing feline companion Tigger, smiling Dalmatian puppies--a hundred and one of them, all torn and scattered, submerging and rising again to the fore like an irregular heartbeat. And I thought, in a moment of gross misapprehension, "How very ... African."

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

But there was nothing "African" there. The patterning of the cloth was clearly the result of industrial accident, not human agency. And yet, despite that awareness, the uncanny aesthetic pleasure of my misreading was palpable, and it persisted. I soon began to collect bedsheets and pillowcases made from similarly printed fabric, hanging some of the more compelling examples on the walls of my room in a compound near Ile-Ife. Only later, when my displayed acquisitions drew unsolicited and intriguing appraisals from Nigerian friends and neighbors, did it become obvious that there was something here demanding further investigation. I started asking questions, and soon it became clear I had to follow the textiles to their source. The Yoruba traders from whom I had purchased the cloths were reluctant to point the way--they thought I wanted to go into business for myself. After many assurances that such was not the case, I was on a bus headed eastward.

This is a tale about the transformative power of perception. It speaks of the strange moments of encounter with otherness, in which, without much reflection, we react to the unfamiliar, mastering it, transforming it into something we've known all along.

Rejects

In several of southern Nigeria's larger towns, textiles featuring the printed--or more accurately, mis-printed--images of animated cartoon figures, super-heroes, professional sports team logos, and other icons of the contemporary American culture industry are fashioned into, and sold as, bedsheets and pillowcases. Many of these textiles are manufactured in the United States as waste products, never intended for sale in a legitimate consumer marketplace.

In textile industry lingo, such cloth is referred to as "leader sheeting"--a heavy, low-grade material used for gauging the accuracy of printing presses, correcting ink color and aligning design template registration, leading the way for the higher quality cloth to follow, It also is set as a spacer between cloths receiving different designs, rolling through the presses as design templates are changed. Hundreds of yards of leader sheeting are required for the mass production of any high-quality printed cloth. To reduce waste and production costs, leader sheeting can be run through the presses several times before it is discarded. The resulting product is often a composite of several disparate designs, none coherent in its own right--a palimpsest of broken patterns, figures, and colors that combine and interact in layered, random configuration.

In the US, leader sheeting can't be sold as second-or even third-quality goods. Instead, it is marked as trash, warehoused, and purchased in large quantities by Nigerian importers. Such entrepreneurs understand full well the topography of their country's battered economy and know what a market of mostly poor people can bear. That's why they import these cloths--even in tough times, they know they can sell them. They're cheap, they're durable despite their defects, and they're available. And today, even after the Nigerian federal government has enacted a ban on the importation of such global refuse, they're easy enough to smuggle into the country.

For textile manufacturers in the US, of course, the material is all just a mess, with no real market value. Likewise, the designs are not a consideration for Igbo textile importers in the town of Aba. They see the cloth not as fascinatingly random compositions, but only as a commercial opportunity. "It's very cheap," said importer Chief K. (1) "If we buy first quality, we can not market in this area. People prefer them, in fact, because it is what we can afford." With his target market in sight, K has one of his "jobbers," a commissioned agent in Atlanta, Georgia, acquire the cloths for next to nothing from factories throughout the United States. The jobber warehouses the cloths in Atlanta, and periodically dispatches them in container ships bound for Nigerian ports. Gifts of "dash," discreetly presented to customs officials, assure the contraband textiles an easy passage onto shore. (2) From there, they are trucked to Chief K's Aba warehouse in massive rolls and quarter-ton bales (Fig. 2). The bales comprise a special opportunity for the local wholesalers who buy from Chief K. Purchased by the pound, not even the importer knows what's inside until they're cut open. When they are, what bursts out is chaos: a few pieces of luxuriously textured fabrics tossed in with scraps and strips of material often clotted with botched ink. These are the best bargains in Aba, grab-bags from the underbelly of American industry.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Obiageri, a textile retailer in Aba's Ariaria market, had no illusions regarding the cloths' value in their country of origin: "It is waste from that place," she said. "You use these jansu cloths to clean the engine before the nice-flowered cloth" (in Aba, "nice-flowered" means "with bright, crisply printed designs"). For Obiageri, as for many textile merchants in Aba, the significant difference between the two sorts of cloth was this: "Nice-flowered dey cost. Jansu dey cheap." (3)

In a shop on Aba's Msulu Street, wholesale textile merchants like Dickson Ukaegbu grade the relative quality of the cloths from "first" to "fourth," from "bright" and "best-flowered" to "dark." Most people, Ukaegbu explained, want "bright" cloths when they can afford them, and so he displays those at the front of his shop, stacked in neatly folded 10-yard bolts (Fig. 3). (4) In the rear he piles cloths of a generally lesser grade, but Ukaegbu's distinctions are not absolute, and there's a lot of mixing in both display areas. None of the cloths in Ukaegbu's shop is perfect, but in time he sells most of them to vendors in Aba's Ariaria and New Markets, who in turn sell them to retail merchants from all over the country. Many of these merchants are Yoruba men from the southwest, who display their inexpensive goods at roadsides, usually near the outskirts of a town, far from central markets (Fig. 4).

[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]

And this is how Mickey Mouse comes to Nigeria.

Beautiful Flowers

Unlike other familiar instances of goods remade by ingenious African bricoleurs, such as the cans of oil and insecticide reshaped into lamps, toys, and suitcases throughout the continent, the cloths do not undergo an "ironic" shift in use-value during their passage. They remain cloths throughout, and are employed for the purposes intended for their first-quality counterparts: usually as bedclothes, but sometimes as window drapery, space dividers, or even garments. (5) Skilled textile workers, usually Igbo women, shape the raw cloth into finished products, cutting vast swathes down to size, stitching together strips and leftover fragments into complete bedding sets: a sheet and two pillowcases. Some of their piecework is quite artful, as we will see, but no further changes are made to the cloth--no reprinting or dyeing is involved.

These specialty seamstresses are collectively known by the name of the cloth they work and sell: jansu, "rejects." The name is telling: Jansu women are held in some contempt by other cloth vendors in the Aba market, who regard them as mere gleaners, scrap-collectors. Certainly, the jansu have the unique opportunity to collect, at no cost, the scraps of cloth that remain upon the completion of a sewing commission. They also buy cloth from wholesalers and importers' warehouses, but their choices there are limited.

As textile retailer Mrs. Grace "Madame Babyface" Okafor pointed out, the jansu pick through the bolts and bales of cloth that mainstream merchants like herself leave behind. "We will pick the best ones," she said, "and leave the ones we don't want for them." Similarly, Okafor suggested that the jansu's economic limitations mean that they are little concerned with the design or quality of cloth. "For the jansu people," she explained, "it is the price they look for. They go buy anything." (6)

However, as they piece together motley collections of scraps and strips, some jansu (a name they do not call themselves) do indeed emphasize design in their work, and show a clear and discriminating sense of aesthetic proportion. This is most apparent in the pillowcases they produce, which are often judiciously planned and, occasionally, stunning artistic achievements.

Take, for example, two pillowcases I purchased in Ibadan (25 July 1998), part of the same bedding set (Figs. 5-6). There is a real design sensibility at work here, a structure of aesthetic correspondences made from disparate scraps. In these works, Minnie Mouse and Goofy take center-stage, their iconic wholeness, once diminished by industrial accident, now restored by artistic intention. Let's focus on the lady rodent. In a swirl of off-register color, she holds forth a blood-red blotch like a stigmata. The unknown seamstress has extended the green gingham check pattern that bisects the mouse's head--first, below, by joining to it that same pattern from another cloth, which also lengthens the red mass of Minnie's dress, and then by attaching a panel of blue and orange vertical streaks that expand the grid and rephrase the bold color of the central piece. Unplanned error is transmuted into willful design. However random the printed mishaps of the raw material, there is clearly nothing accidental in the way it is assembled into a finished product.

[FIGURES 5-6 OMITTED]

According to Ijeoma Chigbundu, an Aba jansu seamstress, two other pillowcases, featuring the outsized heads of Winnie the Pooh's over-stimulated pal Tigger (Figs. 7-8), also were notable--not only for their careful color-matching, but also for the attention paid to correspondences of texture. This is especially so in the pillowcase in Figure 7. "These flowers," said Ijeoma, pointing to the cloud shapes that float around the cropped mass of Tigger's head, "it is like this flower here"--that is, the floral print that limns the lower edge. "She done join am together like that," she added. "It is beautiful." (7)

[FIGURES 7-8 OMITTED]

The Wonderful World of Disney

Walt Disney Company cartoon characters, benign and happy creatures all, are by far the most prevalent among the many corporate logos adorning the waste textiles sold every day in Nigerian markets. Disney is the very model of a globalizing media conglomerate, the second largest in the world, with interests in magazine and book publishing, major motion picture production, live theater, radio, Internet, network television and cable broadcasting, theme parks and tourism (Wasko 2001:28-69). Unlike other such corporations, Disney makes claim to a friendly universality, with products consistently designed to appeal emotionally to the broadest possible audience. Indeed, Mickey Mouse, Disney's flagship character, may well be the most widely recognized cultural figure on the planet.

Disney spends little on product advertisement in Africa, (8) but its trademark images are everywhere, often put to use in ways not licensed, or intended, by the Company. In southwestern Nigeria, Disney characters decorate the walls of local elementary schools and are emblazoned on hand-painted signs proffering the services of hairstylists, sign painters, mechanics, and a host of other tradespeople (Fig. 9). In the US, such unauthorized uses of Disney's trademarks tend to drive the company's copyright lawyers into a froth of litigation. But in Nigeria, trademarks don't stand a chance.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

In one Yoruba town in 1999, for example, the "Waltz Disney Video Club" (Fig. 10) rented pirated videos from the US, England, and Nigeria, while its very name did a weird little dance to avoid copyright infringement--as was the good but incredibly ironic intention of the owner, an avid fan of Disney films he pirated. And just across the street (Fig. 11), Mickey Mouse was made to serve the spiritual life of an evangelical Christian congregation, beckoning from the cement facade of the "Sanctuary of Hope" church with the smiling promise of Redemption: "YOU'RE WELCOME TO HIS WONDERFUL PRESENCE!"

[FIGURES 10-11 OMITTED]

The appearance in Nigeria of such dislocated images, and of those misprinted on the textiles at hand, testifies to the massive productive power of the Walt Disney Company and to the capacity of transnational media corporations in general to replicate themselves around the world through unexpected channels. It recalls too the words of cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who, in a 1936 essay, anticipated a world at once united and dangerously lulled into unconsciousness by the universalizing creations of the burgeoning Hollywood film industry:

   The ancient truth expressed by
   Heraclitus, that those who are
   awake have a world in common
   while each sleeper has a world of
   his own, has been invalidated by
   film--and less by depicting the
   dream world itself than by creating
   figures of collective dream, such as
   the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse
   (Benjamin 2002:118).

The power of Disney animated films, and of the cartoon figures that populate them, depends on producing consistently a convincing illusion that the dream depicted on the screen is real. Evidence of manufacturer's error cannot appear anywhere in Disney's Magic Kingdom of images--such ruptures would destroy the fragile illusion, jolting viewers awake to the reality that their collective dream is in fact manufactured, a commodity to be consumed like any other. In the US, the epicenter of global dream production, we never see Mickey Mouse headless, or Minnie Mouse ravaged and four-eyed on a printed bedsheet (Fig. 12). Such disturbing aberrations are instead shunted to peripheral spaces such as Nigeria, where they remain invisible to everyone but Nigerians, for example, who buy them for their own reasons. (9)

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

Quarter-up: Visual Polyrhythm

In addition to the assorted scraps collected from sewing commissions, jansu seamstresses also purchase long, narrow strips of cloth, called "quarter-up" in Aba, directly from warehouses, where they are sold, dirt cheap, by the pound--the wider the strip, the more costly the cloth. As the name "quarter-up" suggests, the pieces have been cut from once-whole cloth. When American manufacturers discard their waste cloths, they often run them first through a shredder, assuring that the whole cloth will never be used. In Nigeria, however, where the joining of narrow strips of cloth has several long and distinguished histories, the shredded, rejected strips are revitalized, set into rhythmic motion.

Robert Farris Thompson (1983, 1996) has suggested that in many cultures throughout West and Central Africa, there is a deeply ingrained taste for disrupted, polyrhythmic patterning in a broad range of visual arts. Such a taste for visual polyrhythm, consonant with drummed and melodic idioms in music (Waterman 1990, Chernoff 1979), finds its most articulate expression in a variety of narrow-weave textiles produced across West Africa. In typical practice, horizontal weft patterns of adjacent woven strips are carefully joined together, matched in such a way that they achieve a kind of visual asymmetry. The regularly spaced pattern of one strip meets the regularly spaced pattern of another and another to create a coherent irregularity, an "offbeat phrasing" that lends movement and surprise to the surface of the cloth. In such pulsative patterning, cultured predilection, not accident, is the guiding force--though accident often provides the culturally attuned eye with delightful, welcome surprises (Ehrenzweig 1967:56-7).

Two pillowcases sewn together from four-inch-wide "quarter-up" strips exhibit a similar polyrhythmic composition. In Figure 13, three strips of cloth featuring regularly spaced horizontal bars of bold red, green, yellow, violet, and blue have been set askew. A floral pattern printed on the reverse has seeped through the front surface, further breaking up the pattern's regularity. And there, at the upper right, is Disney's version of Ariel, the Little Mermaid, her flaming red hair just entering the field of explosive color.

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

In a second, more complex example (Fig. 14), the printed horizontals are more intricate and variegated, with interspersing dark bands, bright hatch-marks, and multi-hued lozenges. These strips too seem to have been willfully misaligned, complicating a rhythm already interrupted by the ghostly repetition of Mickey Mouse's four-fingered, white-gloved hand.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The resemblance of these pillowcases with Yoruba aso ofi or aso oke textiles (Fig. 15), or with the Ijo popo cloth produced south of Aba (Fig. 16), is striking. (10) But there's no way to know for sure if the unknown seamstresses' moves to disarticulate the boldly colored horizontal patterns was arbitrary or intentional. None of the jansu seamstresses with whom I spoke identified a signature style in any of these works, and none seemed particularly interested in the issue.

[FIGURES 15-16 OMITTED]

If we cannot access original creative intention behind such works, however, we can know the way in which others responded to them. Several Yoruba market-women found these pillowcases particularly exciting, and were vocal in their reactions. In one exemplary and especially articulate observation, Comfort Aduke Titilayo, who sold spicy beancakes in Modakeke, said this about the pillowcase in Figure 14: "All the types [of designs] on this cloth are like that of aso ofi (Gbogbo eya to wa ni ara aso yii tofi ni)." She continued, "We make traditional cloth with strips like this, aso ofi. There is no difference. It is an ofi pattern. But I don't think it is from here." (11)

A Yoruba Something

The people with whom I spoke during my research--Igbo tailors and wholesale cloth vendors, Yoruba retailers and consumers, a successful Igbo cloth importer, university students, and even a pair of Yoruba divination specialists--inevitably regarded the cloths as functional: basic answers to the basic need to cover one's polyurethane mattress. Like so many aspects of life in Nigeria at the turn of the millennium, there was an air of resignation that settled heavily on the need to consume trade goods of such dubious worth. "Believe me,," said Segun Adeniji, a textile merchant at Ibadan's Agodi Gate, "if the economy of this country was good, people would not be buying this kind of cloth. If I had a lot of money, I no get cloth like this." (12)

Some people, however, regarded these textiles in ways that moved beyond resignation and utility into realms of aesthetic practice and perception. For these Nigerian observers, such cloths are not only re-made but also re-thought as a matter of course, made subject to an aestheticizing gaze by men and women who happen now and again to consider the world in aesthetic terms. Transformation occurs in the eyes and minds of perceptive vendors and consumers, Igbo and Yoruba, who read the surfaces of the cloths and interpret them in compelling, often conflicting ways. Significantly, this global flotsam was often considered in part as a local, and a specifically ethnic, product. In a strange and fortuitous convergence, the waste products of one society happen to correspond with the aesthetic norms, products and practices of another. They end up as something that belongs to both, and to neither.

This is particularly apparent in the bedsheets, which in most cases are simply cut to standard sizes from bolts of whole cloth. In their several strata of densely over-printed patterns, some Nigerian people do indeed see evidence of manufacturer's error. But for others, such as textile wholesaler Dickson Ukaegbu, "They are planned designs." (13) This could be a cunning sales pitch, of course, meant to allay consumer suspicion of cheap, discarded material--stuff for poor folks. But the responses of several Yoruba men and women suggest that the cloths need no positive spin to be desirable. In Ife, schoolteacher and part-time textile merchant Bolaji Ajibade offered this capsule assessment in English: "The patterns are beautiful ones. Some designs are placed on top of others, and give out good looking." (14)

How does a jumble of random and often unfamiliar patterns and figures come to be regarded as "beautiful"? Because, suggests Pierre Bourdieu, viewers are imbued with a capacity to read through the exotic jumble, impulsively seeking out and perceiving familiar organizations in the new and strange:

   In the absence of the perception that
   the works are coded, and coded in
   another code, one unconsciously
   applies the code which is good for
   everyday perception, for the deciphering
   of familiar objects, to works
   in a foreign tradition. There is no
   perception which does not involve
   an unconscious code and it is essential
   to dismiss the myth of the "fresh
   eye," considered a virtue attributed
   to naivete and innocence (Bourdieu
   1993:216-17).

If, in effect, individual perception is largely structured by the codes of the "cultural unconscious" that Bourdieu (1977) calls habitus, the spontaneous misreading of the unfamiliar is an inevitable first step in any process of crosscultural understanding--a provisional and involuntary colonization of the unknown. That is, we perceive--first and without reflection--that which fits the templates of what we already know. Only after that do we begin to measure and translate difference. To illustrate, let's examine two bedsheets as they were described in the Yoruba southwest.

The first, seen in Figure 17, is composed of two patterns: a black checkerboard, streaked and broken, superimposed over repeated Mickey Mouse icons that are ruptured by the overlaid grid, becoming secondary design elements. "Because of the small square pattern, it will be beautiful," said a market-woman in Modakeke, who continued: "This is like a traditional design, aso ge-suga (sugar-cube cloth), that we have in the market now." (15)

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

Bolaji Ajibade saw this as well. "It is the sugar-cube pattern," she said, and added:

   Some call it "block," because one
   can use wood blocks in adire to
   make repeating patterns with wax.
   This one even resembles adire, but it
   is different because they used stencils.
   Maybe the wax was removed
   during the process of dyeing, so it
   caused some irregulars. But you
   know, they say every mistake is a
   design. At times mistakes will bring
   out other fine, beautiful patterns. It
   is messed up somehow, but at least
   it is beautiful. (17)

The cloth is beautiful, then, despite its mistakes, because it bears a design similar to one already in the Yoruba marketplace. But it is beautiful too because of its mistakes, welcome visual surprises that distinguish it from the familiar. Language provides the connective tissue, as many people described the foreign textiles in terms long familiar to students of Yoruba culture: coolness (itutu) and luminosity (titan; didan); that is, moderation and shining clarity as fundamental expressions of aesthetic excellence. (e.g., Abiodun 1983:23; Drewal 1980:17; Thompson 1973, 1974:37-42; Yai 1994:108)

"This one here is very, very beautiful (Tibi lewa gaan gaan ni)," said one Modakeke woman of a cloth imprinted with several tiers of images (Fig. 18): Winnie the Pooh and his plush-animal entourage; Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck striking classic poses; a painterly grid in blue and green; another grid of short, thin black lines; and a plane of multi-hued rectangles. "It is cool to the eyes (o tutu loju)," she said, "not too bright." (18) Similarly, Mrs. Florence Oyebamiji of Modakeke noted, "It's very cool. Red, blue, so many colors." The profusion of colors and cartoon characters was not perceived as incoherent clutter, but rather as an attractive, balanced design, appropriate to the cloth's intended use. "Cloth that is cool (aso t'o ba cool)," continued Auntie Florence, "is good for beds where we lie down in the night." (19)

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

In Okeigbo, the diviner (babalawo) Aderemi Fagbade described this same cloth as "fine and shiny (tan) like ankara. It is good and sweet to see (o dara, o dun un wo). It looks like the flowered cloth (aso ododo) of our fathers." (20) Another babalawo, Kolawole Oshitola, an Ijebu man living in Ibadan, also saw this cloth as exceptional. "It looks like ceremonial cloth," he said, though he didn't specify which one. "People will see it as adire, but it is not adire. It is Nigerian art imported from somewhere else." (21)

Clearly, among Yoruba people I interviewed, this particular textile struck a powerful chord of recognition. Indeed, it was the cloth most often singled out for comment. Likewise, many of the other bedsheets and pillowcases I offered for display (in the form of both actual cloths and color photographs) almost inevitably elicited comments relating them to "traditional" Yoruba textile patterns and types: adire, aso ofi, ankara, or kampala, especially.

In these critical appraisals, Yoruba aesthetic terms were quickly mapped out onto exotic materials, rendering them reassuringly familiar. Only afterwards was mention made of their subtle, but significant, difference from Yoruba textiles. But difference too can be accounted for within a distinctly Yoruba code of appreciation. Following Olabiyi Yai's (1994:113) conception of Yoruba "tradition" (asa) as characterized by constant departure (iyato) from the given, it is not far-flung to suggest that in such creative acts of spontaneous misreading, these exotic wares become, if only for an instant, traditional Yoruba textiles. "The design is traditional," said a market-woman in Modakeke, "but they are made in the factory, and they are not from Nigeria." (22)

Surprisingly, it was one of the agents responsible for bringing such textiles into Nigeria, Chief K of Aba, an Igbo man, who perceived a certain "ethnic" flavor in the cartoon creatures or other figures of these so-called Tom-Boy designs (with tonal emphasis on boy), named after the "Tom and Jerry" cat-and-mouse-chase cartoons that appear now and again on Nigerian TV. As he leafed through my book of textile photographs, he halted abruptly at the image of the bedsheet in Figure 18, and said definitively, "This one now, it is a Yoruba something." (23)

The Menagerie of Imagery

"What I love most," said Bolaji Ajibade, regarding a bedsheet and pillowcase imprinted with Disney images of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet beneath a crumbling black checkerboard and a downpour of Navajo-style darts (Figs. 19-20), "is that most of the patterns have things that are familiar and things that are not familiar." (24) At an historical moment in which American image-making corporations such as Disney have an alarming power to extend their reach to cultures throughout the globe, it might be tempting to think that their products and messages are somehow homogenizing in their effect, received intact, recognized as they were intended. But this is not the case in Nigeria, at least, where Disney character icons are subject to transpositions that detach them from their corporate source, generalize them, and replace their aesthetic and affective meanings.

[FIGURES 19-20 OMITTED]

In Ibadan, for example, retail textile vendor Olayinka Olajide suggested that most of his Tom-Boy cloth sales were not the result of specific product recognition, but because of their "many-many designs":

   They are "good" cloths because people
   love the mixture of foreign and
   traditional patterns. Designs with
   "toys" are better than plain cloths.
   These "toy" designs and flowers,
   different animals, lions, leopards--it
   is very flashy and attractive. You
   know, flowers and animals are general;
   they are common in traditional
   cultures and in foreign cultures. (25)

In Yoruba culture, icons of animals are printed on high-quality cloths associated with chieftaincy and kingship. They are emblems of power and privilege, valued as important symbols and as sumptuous design elements. In one such cloth (Fig. 21), a stencil-printed aso oloba ("king's cloth") collected in Abeokuta in 2002, we see a noble family sitting amid a lush garden of flowers and trees and words praising the glory of God. It's Paradise, and the world is at peace. The King and Queen are on their thrones, flanked by a royal menagerie of lions, elephants, birds, and mythical creatures. (26) But note too the pale, narrow stripes and strings of fleurs-de-lis that slice across the garden at regular intervals, bisecting plants and animals, disrupting the iconic wholeness of the royal family, causing them all, by design and by accident, to flicker in and out of legibility. Paradise, it seems, overlays an industrially printed cloth, probably imported from Europe. At what moment did it become ennobled as a Yoruba textile?

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

And what of the Tom-Boy cloth in Figure 22, global rubbish of a more recent vintage, hardly touched by Igbo hands, never altered by Yoruba hands, but loved for the classic beauty perceived in all the random streaks, disjointed Mice, and pale, fluffy toys? Mechanical accident alone splinters the solidity of the "foreign" creatures that appear on the surfaces of this and other Tom-Boy textiles. But if the creatures do remain recognizable amid the clutter--if indeed animals are common emblems in "traditional" and "foreign" cultures--their representations do not necessarily translate intact across cultures.

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

In interviews with Yoruba people, the Disney figures that decorated the cloths were rarely known by their trademarked character names, though they usually were recognized as animals. Among a group of market-women in Modakeke, the image of Donald Duck was regarded with some accuracy as a bird (eye), but the diminutive Piglet was said to be a cat (ologbo). Mickey Mouse was alternately discussed as a cat, an elephant (erin), and a dog (aja), while Winnie the Pooh and Tigger were perceived as human beings (eniyan). (27)

In some conversations, the animal icons were glossed by the generalizing terms "toys" or "teddy-babies," acknowledging their relation to the world of childhood. "I love them because they are colorful and childish," said Deola Ajiboye, a zoology student at Obafemi Awolowo University (Fig. 23). "The teddies make me feel like a child--they are cuddly, warm, and homely." (28) Tom-Boy cloths are popular with university students who, in contrast to most local market-women, cloth vendors, and others, often do recognize the characters from youthful hours spent watching cartoons on television.

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

In many cases, however, Yoruba market-women, especially, referred to the character images simply as "shapes" and "flowers," seeing them only as abstract pattern. It is in this de-identifying reduction--the interpretive reception of ostensibly universal icons as a complex, rhythmic interplay of repeated forms and colors--that the translation of these cloths is most astonishing, and yet most ordinary. "You have the same pattern repeating," said one Mrs. Oyinlola in Modakeke, pointing to the grinning Mickeys, monstrous, waddling Pooh Bears, and sleep-signifying Z's spread across a cloth surface marred by erratic streaks of black and white, and mottled bands of blue (Fig. 22). "Very cool," she added. (29)

An Index of Civilization

The determination of "beautiful" form, the kind that "gives out good looking," is not shared universally across cultures--not even across Nigerian cultures. Curiously, my own taste in these textiles, seasoned by some familiarity with Yoruba arts and aesthetics and by earlier training in Western modernism, seemed often to correspond with the tastes of many Yoruba men and women. Of the several dozen cloths I collected over the course of a year, those I regarded as most remarkable often were selected by Yoruba people as worthy of special comment. When I purchased one or more Tom-Boy bedding sets from vendors in Ibadan or Ife, they frequently praised my selections and offered comments not unlike those noted above.

In the southeast too, in Aba, cloth vendors ended transactions with appraisals. Mrs. A. Aluka, a jansu seamstress, offered an especially telling commentary regarding three bedsheet-and-pillowcase sets I had just purchased from her.

"You know," she said, "the three you done pick, they are the same thing--it is only the flower [i.e., the ornamentation] that is different."

"The same thing?" I asked. "How are they the same?"

"These are the Yoruba's best," said Mrs. Aluka, "because every time they will ask of this type."

"Why do the Yoruba prefer this type?" I asked.

"You must go ask them," she said. "All I can say is that they ask for this type every time." (30)

As Chief K had perceived a certain cloth as "a Yoruba something," so too did Mrs. Aluka clearly identify a normative "ethnic" preference among the Yoruba textile retailers with whom she did business--they preferred the jansu or Tom-Boy cloths, with their muted composites of figures, patterns, and colors. Locating quality of cloth and clarity of design as markers of ethnic identity and economic status, Igbo traders such as Mrs. Aluka were quick to distance themselves from the jansu cloths they regarded as rough and cluttered. Especially, they wanted nothing to do with those cloths so thick and black with ink that their designs were nearly indiscernible.

"I prefer white cloth, or nice-flowered cloth," said Mrs. Aluka. "But the people in the north [that is, the Hausa who also purchase textiles in Aba], they like dark, dark cloth more than white." (31) Dickson Ukaegbu had also observed Hausa merchants' preference for such dark cloths, suggesting, oddly, that Hausa people wear them when they go fishing. "The cloths are dark," he said, "and they don't frighten the fish." (32)

But Mrs. Aluka had other observations to share. "Listen now," she said, lowering her voice to a stage-whisper, "those people [in the north] are somehow ... interior, you know, far from the cities. They are black now, and they always like to sit on the ground. Instead of having some chair, they spread these dark cloths on the ground."

A woman sitting nearby laughed, and said, "Yes! Ah, the Yoruba too now, I think they can not wash the cloth to keep it clean!" (33)

Such disparaging remarks, triggered by a viewing of misprinted textiles, repeat ethnic prejudices that have long held sway in Nigeria. In the southern regions dominated by the Yoruba in the west and the Igbo in the east, (34) it is common to hear northern Hausas described as primitive and uneducated country bumpkins. For the jansu seamstresses in Aba, the Hausas' preference for dark cloth confirmed this perceived backwardness. Likewise, the Yoruba retailers' choice of cloth was certain proof of a Yoruba disdain for the civilizing benefits of laundry soap.

Later, in Ibadan, I mentioned these comments to Kolawole Oshitola, the Yoruba ritual specialist. "Ah well," he said with a shrug, "the Yoruba have been dressing in fine cloth since a long time ago. But the Igbo now, only recently did they stop dressing in feathers." (35)

Destiny World

During one of my first visits to Nigeria, a Yoruba man asked me, "Is it true there is a Magic Kingdom in America?" I was taken aback, obviously, because yes, there is one--two, in fact--but I didn't know how to explain to this man the function and meaning of Disney theme parks in the United States. I still don't.

It turns out it already had been explained on Aiye!, a 1980 recording by the Yoruba Fuji star, Barrister, in a hit song called "Destiny World." The title itself puns on the three-syllable Yoruba pronunciation of Disney: Di-si-ni. In his Yoruba language, Barrister sings of a miraculous place he visited in Orlando, Florida, America, a Magic Kingdom where the dead speak from beyond the grave, where you can visit the moon and return again, where you travel around underwater and meet Mami Wata face-to-face, where even the architecture talks to you with a human voice. The singer is awed by all this, and praises the oyinbos (a term inadequately translated as "Europeans") for using their god-given wisdom to construct airplanes and useful instruments, for improving the quality of their lives through technology, for making progress in the world.

The tone of praise shifts as Barrister deals out a harsh critique to his own African people. "Let us ask ourselves, seriously," he says, "Is the God who created the whites the same God that created the blacks? We blacks are also blessed, but we are ruining ourselves ..." He builds his argument with observations from the marketplace: "If a black man is selling lace cloth and a white man is selling lace cloth, you will buy from the white man. If an oyinbo is selling bad rice at a high price, and a black man is selling good rice at a low price, you will still buy from the oyinbo. This is a problem" (Barrister 1980).

Despite the song's massive popularity in the Yoruba southwest, Barrister's opinions were not shared in Nigerian political circles. Seventeen years later, Nigeria joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), opening the floodgates wider to cheap, low-quality products--especially textiles--from all around the globe. The results have been catastrophic: Of the approximately 150 textile factories that existed in Nigeria in the late 1990s, only 10 remain fully operational as of May 2005. (36)

"We each come into the world with our own destiny," Barrister tells us, in classic Yoruba oratory mode, and leaves the question implicit: If technological progress and domination of a global marketplace through vehicles such as the WTO comprise the apparent destiny of oyinbos, what is the destiny of today's Africans? Following Barrister's logic, we might ask: What is the destiny of a people (presumably represented by their governments) who implicate themselves in their own domination by literally buying into the inequities of that marketplace, who content themselves with the discards of the Magic Kingdom, rather than responsibly building and maintaining local industry?

The redemption of broken, ruined things, of waste products subjected to ostensibly ironic reuse and revaluation in spaces far removed from the Magic Kingdom, from "Western" centers of production and consumption--over the last decade this issue has been the stuff of serious analysis in Africanist art historical discourse. At its core is a guiding metaphor: the notion of Trash-Becoming-Treasure draws us back to the redemptive function of Art in colonized or neo-colonized spaces, and helps preserve Art as a special category of practice (see Cerny and Seriff 1996; Coote, Morton, and Nicholson, et al. 2000; Gundaker and McWillie 2005; Kratz 1995; Roberts 1992; and Shohat and Stam 1998). It also neatly mirrors and reifies the polarizing conception of the "First World" colonizer as monolithic, industrial oppressor and the colonized "Third World" subject as resilient, industrious bricoleur.

But in Nigeria, at least, the binaries are not so clear. As a Yoruba proverb says, "If fire has no secret ally it cannot cross a river" (Bi ina ko ba ni awo ki i gun oke odo). There is willing complicity, even a desire, among Nigerian entrepreneurs such as Chief K of Aba to import the world's discards to their country--obviously, because it's outrageously lucrative. I asked K why he imported this foreign refuse rather than support textile production in Nigeria. He responded with a sneer: "The [cloths] we are producing in this country are not even up to this quality." (37)

Chief K hits on a difficult point. Among Nigerians, there has been a long-standing and pervasive lack of pride in the country's capacity to produce goods for its own consumption. Linked to a justifiable distrust of leadership in every arena of Nigerian political and economic life, this lack of pride continues to confer an additional glamour to products imported from Europe, North America, and Asia. Such glamour extends even to such dubious products as the jansu cloths I've been discussing.

In 2002, the Nigerian government banned the import of such degraded textiles--part of a promise to revitalize the nation's ailing textile industry--but given the prevalence of corruption and the ease of smuggling in Nigerian seaports, the ban was bound from the start to fail. It is, indeed, failing miserably, despite recent government efforts to better police the ports. In April 2005, Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh were still hanging up for display on the outskirts of Ibadan, far from the Magic Kingdom, their eternally smiling faces still cracked and blasted in ways most visitors to the Magic Kingdom will never see.

But maybe there is something redemptive in all this--though, for an art historian such as myself, it's a shaky, vaporous affair. Perhaps, if the exported detritus of the Magic Kingdom does indeed make its way to Nigeria in shards and ruination, another kind of magic is spontaneously set into action to redeem those shards, for a moment, into whole, useful, and even beautiful things. This is the ordinary magic of interpretation, the transformative magic of thoughtful aesthetic practice--a thing of the mind and the hand, a thing of shared culture, a thing that somehow, despite the odds, manages to endure.

"You see?" said Dickson Ukaegbu, the Aba textile wholesaler, "These cloths no be rejects. Since they are useful here, they no be rejects like that." (38)

This essay is based on a paper, "AfroDisney: Fortuitous Convergences and the Redemption of Textile Casualties in Southern Nigeria," presented at the 13th Triennial Symposium of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, April 1, 2004. Principal research in Nigeria was funded by a Fulbright Grant (1998-1999), administered by the Institute of International Education. Further research was made possible by a Smithsonian Institution Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2001-2002), and by a University of Michigan Humanities Block Faculty Initiative Grant (2004). I also am profoundly grateful to the University of Michigan Department of the History of Art, and to the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, for allowing me a semester's leave of absence so I could get it all on paper. A humble bow, too, is due to the following excellent souls for their encouragement and help along the way: Rowland Abiodun, Sarah Adams, Glenn Adamson, Lisa Aronson, Sally Bjork, Hubertus Breuer, Donald Cosentino, Navin Dadlani, Henry J. Drewal, Naomi Goodman, Mark Gjukich, Sheree Johnson, Leslie Jones, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Barry Landua, Oyinlola Longe, Adam W. Miller, Diane Mark-Walker, Enid Schildkrout, and, of course, my teacher, Robert Farris Thompson. And for the generosity of each of the Nigerian men and women named on the following pages, I am forever indebted. This essay is dedicated affectionately to my wife, Melissa A. Doris, and to my colleague and friend, Raymond A. Silverman.

[This article was accepted for publication in November 2005.]

References cited

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Abiodun, Rowland, Ulli Beier, and John Pemberton III. 2004. Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Beier Collection. Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College.

Aronson, Lisa. 1982. "Popo Weaving: The Dynamics of Trade in Southeastern Nigeria." African Arts 15(3): 43-47, 90-91.

Barrister, Alhaji Chief Doctor Sikiru Ayinde, and his Progressive Fuji Commanders. 1980. "Aiye/Destiny World." Aiye, Siky Oluyole Records, Ltd. SKOLP 010.

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility (Second Version)." In Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, pp. 111-133. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. "Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception." In The Field of Cultural Production, pp. 215-37. New York: Columbia University Press.

--. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burton, Simon. 2001. "Disney in South Africa: Towards a Common Culture in a Fragmented Society?" In Dazzled By Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project, ed. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips and Eileen R. Meehan, pp. 257-268. New York: Leicester University Press.

Cerny, Charlene, and Suzanne Seriff, eds. 1996. Recycled/Re-seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Chernoff, John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Ehrenzweig, Anton. 1967. The Hidden Order of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gundaker, Grey, and Judith McWillie. 2005. No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.

Kratz, Corrinne A. 1995. "Rethinking Recyclia." African Arts 28(3): 1, 7-12.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge.

Roberts, Allan F. 1992. "Chance Encounters, Ironic Collage." African Arts 25(2):54-63, 97-98.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1998. "Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics." In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, pp. 27-49. New York: Routledge.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 1996. "Impulse and Repose: the Art of Ituri Women." In Georges Meurant and Robert Farris Thompson, Mbuti Design: Paintings by Pygmy Women of the Ituri Forest, pp. 185-215. New York: Thames and Hudson.

--. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.

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Notes

(1.) Personal interview, February 23, 1999; full name withheld.

(2.) Chief K would not divulge the name of the jobber, or the name of any US company with which he deals. "This stops with me," he said, with a note of suspicions finality. I am grateful to Ogunleye Taiwo, Professor of Maritime and Petroleum Law at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ile, for his willingness to disclose unsavory truths about endemic corruption in Nigerian seaports (personal communication, April 8, 2005).

(3.) Personal interview, February 22, 1999.

(4.) Personal interview, December 28, 1998.

(5.) The scope of this essay does not include garments made from these textiles, which I encountered only rarely during the course of my research. I have learned that in Lagos today, such garments are highly valued by fashionable women, who regard the accidental patterns on the textiles as unique (Marcia Kure, personal communication, October 25, 2002). According to Rowland Abiodun (personal communication, June 22, 2005), this also was the case in the 1970s, when the fashion for these garments "spread like wildfire" in the southwest.

(6.) Personal interview, February 22, 1999.

(7.) Personal interview, February 23, 1999.

(8.) A 1998 Advertising Age feature, "Top Global Marketers" (Advertising Age, Sept. 28, 1998:S3-S50; cited in Wasko 2001:103), reported that Disney spent nothing on advertising its products on the continent. Only in 1997 did Disney establish a subsidiary, Disney Enterprises Southern Africa, to address marketing in Africa, especially in South Africa (see Burton 2001:258-9).

(9.) In today's global economy, indeed, there are centers and there are peripheries, a geography dutifully maintained by a ceaseless one-directional flow of corporate goods and images. For a historical critique of this construction, see Pratt 1992.

(10.) On popo weaving, see Aronson 1982, who traces the history of this mode of textile manufacture in the Ijo regions of southeastern Nigeria to the Ewe people of Ghana, via the trading towns of Grand Popo and Little Popo (Anecho) in contemporary Togo. While the article does not address the design of popo textiles at any length, here too we see a broad tendency to offbeat phrasing of design elements. Such a "local" production--an expression of a cultured taste that not only resonates strongly throughout a wide area of West Africa, but also is historically tied to it--could perhaps function as a kind of template for jansu seamstresses as they join narrow, "quarter-up" strips of discarded cloth to create pillowcases and bedsheets.

(11.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(12.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(13.) Personal interview, February 22, 1999.

(14.) Personal interview, March 13, 1999.

(15.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(16.) Personal interview, March 13, 1999.

(17.) Personal interview, March 13, 1999.

(18.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(19.) Personal interview, January 9, 1999.

(20.) Personal interview, December 15, 1998.

(21.) Personal interview, January 22, 1999. Oshitola, a ranking member of the Ogboni society of honored elders, was referring to woven ceremonial cloths associated with that group. Ogboni textiles such as logbon and saki often feature representations of animals along with more abstract designs.

(22.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999. Included in a recent catalogue of Yoruba textiles collected by Ulli Beier is an image of an "End-run of machine cotton cloth on which various colored dyes have dripped" (Abiodun, Beier, and Pemberton 2004:102, plate 22). Dated "20th century," it suggests further that a Yoruba taste for such accidental patterns extends beyond the textiles discussed in the present article.

(23.) Personal interview, February 23, 1999.

(24.) Personal interview, March 13, 1999.

(25.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(26.) Abiodun, Beier, and Pemberton offer an image of a similarly printed textile (2004:100, plate 20), and suggest that its design dates from 1935, the year of the Silver Jubilee of King George V. The design has undergone several changes over the course of the century; the royal figures, originally representing the English king and queen, later became Adam and Eve. The year 1962 appears on the cloth in Figure 21, but the work may well have been produced at a later date.

(27.) Personal interviews, March 11, 1999.

(28.) Personal interview, March 12, 1999.

(29.) Personal interview, March 11, 1999.

(30.) Personal interview, December 28, 1998.

(31.) Ibid.

(32.) Personal interview, date December 28, 1998.

(33.) Personal interviews, December 28, 1998.

(34.) Despite Nigeria's extraordinary ethnic diversity, its political geography is typically divided into four regions, three of which are associated with the country's largest ethnic groups: the Hausa north, the Igbo southeast, the Yoruba southwest; the fourth is the "south-south" of the various Niger River Delta peoples.

(35.) Personal interview, January 29, 1999.

(36.) Chris Nchakwu, "100 Textile Factories Closed, 50 in Distress--Workers," This Day Online, May 19, 2005, http://www.this day online.com/nview.php?id=17720.

(37.) Personal interview, date February 23, 1999.

(38.) Personal interview, February 22, 1999.