Jody Benjamin’s The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850, critically documents 150 years of sartorial history and the role of cloth in Western Africa’s economies during the height of the Atlantic slave trade. It examines how the trade in textiles, their consumption, and Western African dress created global networks that enabled Western Africans to play a central role in the circulation and consumption of textiles beyond the continent’s borders.
Benjamin’s study moves beyond Eurocentric examinations of history in Western Africa by centering regional conventions and perceptions of dress among the diverse African communities formed around ethnicity, religion, and polities. Trade and movement across the three nautical anchors of the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger rivers define the circulation and consumption of textiles and influence the politics of dress within the region. The economic shifts brought by the Atlantic slave trade and the later shift to cash crops and raw materials changed the region’s configuration, moving economic hubs from one area to another. Dress practices depended on time, place, gender, religion, social class, occupation, and age, and shaped social interactions. Sartorial signification constituted an archive of how Western Africans were influenced by the global trade in goods and the circulation of people. The imbrication between the trade in humans and the commerce in textiles is evident in the exchange of humans for cloth and the use of forced labor in cotton fields. Yet both markets “stimulated each other” while remaining independent.
Methodologically, the book employs a palimpsest of materials, drawing on oral histories, museum and government archives, travel documents, and images. It analyzes how historical events, including the triangular trade in humans, political crises, and environmental shifts, shaped dress and self-fashioning in West Africa. By distinguishing West Africa from Western Africa, Benjamin offers a unified yet heterogeneous spatial analysis of how diverse communities in the region deployed dress and self-fashioning to assert individuality while remaining part of a larger diaspora.
Eurocentric studies of textiles and dress in Africa present African garments as curiosities rather than as fashion. Benjamin’s work highlights African dress and textiles as fashion by examining their creative aspects and stylistic temporalities, thereby giving African fashion a robust and dignified genealogy. Benjamin constructs this genealogy through a wide range of sources and shows how the body functions as an ethnic, social, and gendered signifier. The focus on embodiment reveals connections among how the body is adorned, the social signification of that body, and its relationships with other bodies. The book focuses on “dress as language” and addresses a wide range of subjects across gender, social status, and age.
The Texture of Change traces changes in Western Africa and gives voice to perspectives that highlight cosmopolitan spaces and documents shifting values over time. Benjamin’s reading of dress in Western Africa challenges Eurocentric interpretations of African dress and bodily adornment and highlights sartorial acuity in Western African politics of dress during the period studied. With a focus on African-made cloth and material culture, Benjamin reads Africans as “social actors” shaping global histories of dress and self-fashioning.
The book progresses through themes across time and space. Chapter One focuses on the Kingdom of Kaarta and the sartorial expression of Bamanaya through the narrative of Djeli Mamary Kouyate. The Kusaaba that anchors this chapter is read as a living archive that links cultures and craftsmanship, showing how cloth enabled the exhibition of power and access, as well as spiritual and mystical might.
Chapter Two examines how self-making through dress, fueled by the mobility of people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, created trade networks in which textiles served as currency. These networks stretched from Portuguese Cape Verde to Sierra Leone. Cloth and dress were tools for negotiating power and layered identities. The story of Maram Njaay, the first wife of the Braak Fara Kumba, and her resistance to the French trade monopoly underscores women’s roles and agency within the broader political economy of textiles and other goods.
Chapter Three shows how European commercial ambitions in the Sahel, both for people and for goods, rendered lives precarious, especially for women and girls, who were the primary skilled workers in cotton and indigo harvesting and processing.
Chapter Four zooms in on Saint Louis, a cosmopolitan town at the mouth of the Senegal River, linking the Sahel to the Atlantic trading routes. It highlights how, during a tumultuous period marked by slavery, abolitionist struggles, religious reform, and the rise of capitalism, West African textile consumers emerged as agents whose sartorial choices shaped trends in bourgeois Europe.
Chapter Five shows how the politics of dress demarcated social, ethnic, religious, and gender lines on the Upper Guinea Coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that African Muslim and European Christian denominations established distinct dress codes that enabled marginalized groups, such as women and the enslaved, to gain mobility by manipulating dress and engaging in self-fashioning.
Chapter Six examines how dress enabled orientalist manipulation of race and gendered dynamics in the intersecting lives of African elites, farmers, and European traders. It emphasizes that the period is marked by a shift toward groundnut cultivation, as local farmers rejected the French and British push to cultivate cotton and instead turned to groundnuts.
This book is rich, informative, and thoroughly researched. It is a significant contribution to the field and beyond.
