Wrapped In Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American identity. (Books).

WRAPPED IN PRIDE Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity Doran H. Ross with contributions by Agbenyega Adedze, Abena P.A. Busia, Nii O. Quarcoopome, Betsy D. Quick, Raymond A. Silverman, Anne Spencer

Textile Series, no. 2. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 1999. 347 pp., 702 color & 50 b/w illustrations, 1 map, appendixes, bibliography. $70 hardcover, $39 softcover.

What would happen if a museum selected a single subject--a textile, for instance--and addressed that subject from myriad angles, rotating it so it could be viewed from all sides, following the path of its travels and the transformations of its form? Such treatment would reveal multiple layers of styles, markets, functions, and meanings and traverse academic disciplines such as art history, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology. Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity exemplifies the potential of this multifaceted approach, which has resulted here in a magnificent assemblage of images, stories, historical documentation, and art historical analysis. The book was published to accompany an exhibition of the same title, organized by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and the Newark Museum (reviewed in African Arts, Autumn 2000). Like kente cloth itself, Wrapped in Pride is readily adaptable to many audiences--thoroughly researched and documented, yet eminently approachable. Readers will find analysis of kente on many levels, from the cloth's broadest significance for African and African American consumers to the thread count and warp-to-weft proportions of specific textiles. As the field of African art turns increasing attention to the work of contemporary artists and the transcultural world of the Diaspora, Wrapped in Pride suggests how fruitful the future may be.

Using fieldwork based in diverse sites from Bonwire to Los Angeles, the book admits the voices of diverse artists, consumers, and critics. Some of these voices are at odds, telling conflicting tales of the cloth's meanings, the parameters of its technical and stylistic variations, and its histories. Wrapped in Pride is enhanced by this chorus of perspectives, which demonstrate that kente's power--like that of all art--lies in its ability to absorb changing meanings while retaining its identity. For the Asante, the people most closely associated with kente, the cloth shifts from being a marker of class and regional origins to serving as ritual costume, nationalist statement, and marketing device. As kente travels abroad, it becomes a broad symbol of African civilization, an expression of African American pride, and again, a marketing device. Wrapped in Pride demonstrates that all of these roles are interrelated, and all are equally relevant to the cloth's current success in Ghanaian and international markets.

Telling kente's story in full requires a shift in the usual art historical perspective. Rather than seeking out "authentic" kente, Doran H. Ross, the book's editor and primary author, focuses on the authenticity of people's experience of the cloth. He sets forth his position in his introduction (p. 28):

   We will for the most part avoid referring to any of the latter three types
   [kente made on new types of looms or on machines] by value-laden referents
   such as "fakes," "replicas," or "imitations." This will certainly not
   please everyone, but as we shall see, it more accurately reflects the
   complexity of an international phenomenon enmeshed in contexts and meanings
   that extend well beyond those originally intended.

Questions of authenticity, thus, are complicated by kente's travels and by the changing sociopolitical landscape of its native Ghana. Its weaving is no longer circumscribed by royal patronage, its consumption no longer restricted by class or economic boundaries. Ross recognizes that fakery does not exist where kente, whether strip-woven or factory printed, is deeply embedded in cultural practices and personal identity. This expansiveness lends Wrapped in Pride its vivacity and transforms it from documentation to lively conversation.

The inclusion of diverse factory-made forms does not, however, diminish the thoroughness with which Ross discusses the intricacies of the cloth's production on treadle-operated horizontal strip looms. The technology and the patterns associated with kente's long history provide a foundation from which other forms have emerged. Ross describes the loom and offers current hypotheses concerning its origins in north Africa as well as the mythological origins of weaving in the work of Ananse the spider. He explains the complex task of laying out the long warp and threading the heddles. The process is well illustrated in photographs of weavers and of the beautiful heddle pulleys that may adorn a prosperous weaver's loom.

Wrapped in Pride is heavy, literally as well as figuratively, with images. Like the exhibition, which I visited in its Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., incarnations, the catalogue is a feast of kente colors. They burst from the page in images of cloth on the loom, cloth for sale, cloth worn, and cloth made into furniture, dolls, banners, and backpacks--moving far from its origins without severing its ties to literal or symbolic points of contact in Ghana. Full-page images of kente, details of strips, archival photographs of past Asante royals, pictures of weavers, merchants, and consumers in Ghana and of kente wearers in the U.S. all illuminate the text and, equally important, draw the reader into the lives of the people who give the cloth its many meanings.

Along with the images that illustrate each chapter, occasional "Interleaves"--two-page spreads of photographs that illuminate specific topics--enliven the book. These include visual tours of Bonwire, the most famous kente-producing town, through its weavers, both male and (exceptionally) female, its kente festival, and the signs that advertise weavers and merchants. Kente's place within the diversity of Asante textiles is explored in another interleaf, which illustrates the many other cloths worn by chiefs and other people of high status. Stamped adinkra, machine-embroidered or appliqued akunitan, brocade, and other forms may not have achieved kente's iconic status, yet each has its own role to play in the constellation of Asante arts of power and prestige. The Accra textile market, an explosion of cloth and color, is illustrated in Interleaf G, and Interleaf I presents powerful photographs by Howard Bingham recording Muhammad Ali's 1964 visit to Ghana, where the charismatic young athlete wore kente with pride. Other interleaves explore the cloth's popularity in the United States, documenting kente-clad dolls, kente-style strips woven with fraternity and sorority symbols, and kente's high visibility at festivals of African culture. With their dramatic images and minimal text, these interleaves are like threads picked out from a larger pattern, depicting selected events in the life of kente.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters that range widely in length, seven of which were written by Ross. The six remaining chapters are by Ghanaian and American authors who, unfortunately, are identified only by name. Even for insiders to the world of African art, some of them may be unfamiliar. Each contributor offers a distinct perspective on the cloth, adding color and complexity to its story. Ross powerfully introduces kente's many lives in chapter 1, describing how its meanings and forms have shifted and changed over time and across distances. Other early chapters by Ross present essential information about the history of the cloth and the Asante kingdom, whose close association with kente has created the aura of royalty that is transformed into the African American pride documented in later chapters.

Abena P. A. Busia's short essay, "Maternal Legacies: A Weave of Stories," communicates kente's emotional effect as well as its political and historical reverberations. Busia, a poet and daughter of former Ghanaian Prime Minister Dr. K. A. Busia, relates the stories of three kente cloths in her collection. She offers the perspective of a nonspecialist, a Ghanaian who is deeply touched by kente's symbolism and who is not involved in its production or sale. Each of her cloths might be analyzed in terms of its symbolic patterns, as illustrated by the glossary of designs provided in chapter 8. Their most important meaning for Busia, however, is the one embedded through use--the memories created when kente is received as a gift, worn at a wedding, carried in a suitcase during voluntary or involuntary exile from one's homeland. In Busia's case, one cloth pattern carries both national and personal significance. Her father's political party, the Progress Party, commissioned its own kente pattern, its yellow and red colors symbolizing the rising sun of a new era. Busia's unexpected encounter with it years after the party was banned evoked memories and produced new tensions, demonstrating the persistence of the kente's political power.

Just as kente memorializes the leaders who shape people's lives, so too does it honor the deities and other spirit beings who may bring prosperity when properly propitiated. In his essay, "The Gods Wear Kente," Raymond A. Silverman describes the altars erected for atano, the deities associated with the longest river in the Akan region, the Tano. Worship of the river is the basis of an ancient religious practice that predates the Asante political and cultural dominance of the region. The religion and its deities have been adapted to the symbolism and power structure of the Asante polity. Like Asantehene (supreme leaders) and local chiefs, the priests of atano shrines acknowledge the power of the gods by dressing them and their shrines in kente and other royal attire. Silverman does not indicate that the cloths carry symbolism in these contexts beyond a broad reference to high status and power. This generalization of meaning might be compared with another religious context in which the cloth appears: African American celebrations of Kwanzaa, discussed in a later chapter. The textile's intense power thus extends into the world of religious faith.

The first of many non-Asante perspectives is provided from within Ghana, in Agbenyega Adedze's discussion of the kente produced by Ewe weavers in Ghana and Togo. Though the cloth is blurred into a generalized reference to Africa as it travels abroad, in its Ghanaian forms the patterns and colors may speak volumes about ethnic affiliation as well as political and economic status. In the opening pages of his introduction, Ross alludes to the separate paths kente has taken in Ewe and Asante communities as he discusses the cloth's name itself. Debates surround the term kente, which is traced by some to the Ewe language, by others to Asante and Fante terms. Basic societal traits may be read into kente's styles: the centralized hierarchy of Asante is embodied in the control exercised over patterns and their uses, while the more egalitarian, localized structure of Ewe communities permits weavers to experiment more freely with pattern and figurative imagery.

Adedze seeks to bring Ewe versions of the cloth to the foreground, out from behind the shadows of Asante kente's dominance in the public imagination. He notes that studies tending to view Ewe only in light of Asante "obscure the originality and creativity of both peoples and lead to questions of influence and borrowing that tend to fan ethnic chauvinism on both sides" (p. 134). Adedze's description of the long history of Ewe kente and the proverbial meanings of its figurative patterns indeed marks the cloth as distinct from the Asante versions. His references to the ceremonies surrounding the weaving and wearing of kente, such as the sacrifice of a chicken to a newly assembled loom, make one long for further information concerning the rituals of weaving. Do similar strictures surround the Asante cloth? And what are the beliefs that underpin the Ewe practices? These may be topics for a separate study, but the tantalizing allusion to such rituals might have been amplified here.

Adedze's descriptions of the rules by which Ewe and Asante weavers distinguish their textiles are complicated by Anne Spencer's profile of Samuel Cophie, a master weaver in Bonwire. His story demonstrates that ethnic distinctions between styles of cloth often serve merely as conventions that provide a springboard from which artists create exceptions. Cophie's career encompasses both the preservation of traditional weaving practice and innovation for contemporary markets. Cophie is Ewe, not Asante, a fact that did not inhibit his apprenticeship to an Asante weaver and his adaptation of Asante-style motifs along with the Ewe patterns. Like generations of weavers before him, he first learned to weave as a young boy and later honed his skills in the workshop of an elder. Today he employs seventeen weavers--an indication of the scale of kente production in Bonwire. Spencer's ac count of the apprentices' tasks, which gradually increase in complexity, indicates that Cophie's workshop is as much educational institution as business venture.

Though his training and his technique might be classified as "traditional," Cophie is strikingly innovative. Like all successful artists, he responds to changing opportunities as well as changing demands. The clientele he serves--sixty percent non-Ghanaian--has inspired him to create new patterns and new color combinations to suit nonlocal tastes. Focusing on a single weaver permits readers to better understand the business of kente, yet Cophie's own voice is mediated by Spencer's narration of his story. Just as Busia spoke directly to the reader, one wishes Cophie and other weavers might have related their opinions and their biographies directly.

Fully a third of the book--the final four chapters--is devoted to kente's fortunes in the United States, where the cloth is adapted to new functions and given broader meanings. Here the reader is treated to direct communication from the creators, merchants, and consumers of kente and kente-related products. An important and innovative component of both the exhibition and the book is the authorization of young voices--high school students in Newark and Los Angeles who serve as researchers in their own communities. Before entering the communities where kente has exploded into new markets and new media, the book provides a historical and critical groundwork laid by Ross and Nii O. Quarcoopome, each addressing distinct aspects of the cloth's African American manifestations.

Ross offers a sweeping survey of kente's reception by Western observers, beginning with Pieter de Marees' descriptions of clothing along the Gold Coast in 1602 and concluding with the late-twentieth-century use of kente in the work of American artists of African descent. In between, he documents early observations of kente by missionaries and colonial officials. The translation from Ghanaian royalty to African American pride began in the 1920s, with W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke,' and later, returning to kente's place of origin, President Kwame Nkrumah's high-profile celebration of the cloth. Ghana's status as Africa's first postcolonial, independent nation lent additional power to its symbols of leadership on the world stage. The interconnectedness of Ghanaian and U.S. adaptations of kente demonstrates that influence does not flow in one direction--an important refutation of the "Primitivism" model in which African art provided a static springboard for Western innovation. Artists and objects travel between worlds, travel whose earliest documentation may be found in the affinities between African American quilting traditions and west African strip-woven cloth such as kente.

Quarcoopome, in a chapter entitled "Pride and Avarice: Kente and Advertising," investigates the exploitation of kente as a marketing tool, a function he views as a cynical distortion of the cloth's history and symbolism. The questions he asks at the outset of his discussion (p. 193) might be applied to any number of revivals and adaptations of "traditional" forms, both in Africa and elsewhere:

   Who is privileged to choose a symbol to represent an entire group? What
   changes in meaning occur as a once relatively obscure object is elevated to
   the status of a cultural symbol? Are advertisers drawing upon existing
   norms and social identities or, in fact, inventing new ones? Is the
   construction of commercialized cultural profiles an inevitable consequence
   of the frenzied search for micro-markets?

Though not critically addressed in earlier chapters, one might turn such queries to the elevation of kente to national symbol in ethnically diverse contemporary Ghana. What cultures are silenced or muted by the primacy of an Asante/Ewe national symbol? Though the U.S. adaptation of kente in marketing contexts is apparently based solely in economic strategies, the burgeoning Ghanaian production of the cloth also creates economic incentives for the cloth's role as national symbol. Quarcoopome describes varied contexts in which kente is deployed to attract African American consumers. He notes that the cloth's appearance is rarely accompanied by information concerning its origins, instead serving as a vague symbol of African heritage. The irony of this circumstance, in which once reviled cultures are celebrated by AT&T, HBO, Coca-Cola, and other industrial giants, complicates the revival of kente.

Betsy D. Quick, in an extended chapter that addresses kente's adaptations in contemporary Los Angeles and Newark, focuses on the celebratory nature of the cloth's new markets. Here the student-curators helped shape the exhibition and the publication, conducting interviews with community members who make, sell or use kente, documenting with photographs its presence in their daily lives, and expressing their own responses to the cloth. There is no cynical mass-production of kente products; instead the artists and merchants featured in Quick's discussion are directly linked to their communities, seeking through kente to support ethnic pride. The cloth marks important events, such as Christmas, Kwanzaa, graduations, and Black History Month. It teaches through children's books, school projects (like the ones instigated by the Fowler and the Newark Museum), and religious practices. Following Nkrumah's use of kente, contemporary American politicians, both black and white, have signaled their affiliation with African American communities through the cloth. In these and many other contexts, contemporary kente plays an active role in constructing both personal identities and civil societies.

Voices of support and of dissent are heard through the interviews of the young curators. Debates concerning kente's commercialization and its use by non-African Americans provide insight into the cloth's many meanings. Quick does not have any ready answers to the many questions raised by kente's high visibility in contemporary, urban American cultures; instead she allows the actors themselves to create an arena within which readers might shape their own responses. In providing this forum for debate and discussion, Wrapped in Pride becomes, like the cloth itself, an active participant in cultural transformations.

Questions of authenticity and the appropriateness of kente's presence in new contexts in Ghana and the United States are thus answered here by individuals as a function of their needs rather than the distant canons of art historical study. For Asante royalty and Ewe chiefs, for members of Asafo military companies and keepers of village shrines, and for tourists and African American artists, kente communicates ideas about identity and community. As Ross eloquently describes in the book's final chapter: "Fundamentally, this volume is about an African textile that has simultaneously found many homes in many countries, many forms within those homes, and many meanings within those forms" (p. 275). Wrapped in Pride takes on the challenge of documenting this diversity of incarnations and, more difficult, of bringing readers to an understanding of the emotions that underpin kente's popularity. This challenge is, in the opinion of this reviewer, met with dramatic success.

VICTORIA ROVINE is Curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Her book on contemporary mudcloth, Bogolan: Shaping Culture Through Cloth in Contemporary Mali, is published by Smithsonian Institution Press (2001).