Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  We sat for a long time in the heat and noise of the GTP plant. There was a dizzyingly sweet and acrid bruise to the air. It was a familiar scent, and I struggle to place it.

  A transistor radio hummed alive beside us: “Dr. Abalaka, a Nigerian medical doctor outside of Abuja, claims to have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. He’s injected himself six times with the AIDS virus and the vaccine has protected him. That act alone, he says, is ‘absolute scientific proof’ of his claim. The government is staging a review and is withholding comment, but hundreds of government soldiers are going to him and paying close to $1,000 U.S., selling everything they have to receive treatment. International pharmaceutical companies are apparently curious. The doctor says it would be ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘unethical’ to reveal any details until he has the president’s full support and recognition . . .”

  I was feeling overpowered by the heat and the smell, and the news report, betraying neither doubt nor irony, seemed bizarre and otherworldly. Then my memory was moved.

  When I was in college at Sarah Lawrence in the late 1980s and involved in pan-Africanist cultural organizations, I had made a trip with friends who were dancers and artists to a warehouse several hours away in New Jersey to buy the best-quality African cloths, which were not readily available even in New York. At the warehouse young white women who worked for Dutch and British companies were overseeing stacks of twelve-yard pieces of wax cloths packed into shelves in polyurethane sleeves. The plastic and dye smells sickened me, and the whole thing was disturbingly un-African. The salesgirls were most accustomed to filling mail orders to shop owners in Texas and Boston. They had no particular love for what they were selling; they could have been working for Kmart or a textbook company. In those environs, the beauty of the cloths seemed diminished, and as we added money together so that we could meet the thirty-six-yard purchase minimum, I felt suddenly reluctant. But we were buying the cloth primarily for the memorial service of a dancer friend who had died of AIDS.

  Far from the warehouse, the smell became more gentle and life was breathed into the cloth by the bodies it adorned. It was as if by literally touching the flesh the cloth became charged, like a fetish object.

  What was that smell? I was encountering it again.

  My thoughts were interrupted as we were summoned to an office. There the Executive Madame, a large woman with a stern beauty, her permed hair slick with oil, sat behind a large wooden desk in an outdated blue corporate skirt suit. She was reading the introductory information I’d been asked to prepare and present at the guard station. It was really only a short prospectus for my Fulbright research and a résumé, so I watched her long scrutinizing gaze, her painstaking attention, certain that she was not reading a thing.

  When she got up from her desk, she moved silently around the office, opening various cupboards and document binders. After a long while she cleared her throat.

  “GTP strives for beauty in its cloth,” she said in a voice heavy with the sweet, nasally tonals of Twi. “Vlisco is the Chanel of Africa. You could say we are the Calvin Klein, the Yves St. Laurent, the Gucci too.”

  She seemed to sniff as she surveyed my dress made up of one of Aunty Mercy’s batik cloths. “Wax cloth will be boring for you. And after all, this is just a plant. There is very little to see. Indigo was always used, but our new collections are changing. Ghanaian women like modern things. We are using more browns and greens; we are moving into many other colors too.”

  She handed me some promotional postcards, of women in couture-styled bright cloths with backgrounds of baobab trees and African sunsets. I’d shopped in Woodin, Accra’s fanciest boutique, also owned by Vlisco, that carried similar expensive ready-made designs. I was mesmerized and also made uneasy by the catering to assumed tastes. The “latest” designs featured the symbol for the newly minted Euro and computer mouses and refrigerators and fans—consumption desires beyond most Ghanaians’ reach.

  “The local dyers—these petty-petty craftspeople—are not really doing indigo dyeing anymore either, but at least they will provide you a quaint study. Women with babies at their backs, native scenes.”

  She had been pulling pages from the binders and file drawers as she talked and, one by one, calling for a secretary to come for them. Now she handed me the secretary’s copying and another little pack of the postcards. She stood sizing me up, trying to make sense of the young American “student” (I’d found it a useful pose) with Ghana connections (the visit had been arranged by a “big man,” a prominent friend of Mr. Ghilchreist’s brother) and U.S. embassy sponsorship.

  “But perhaps I can make steps with the higher administrators if you’d like to know more,” she said with the suggestiveness and direct glance that were a cue for bribe giving. In that moment, we both began measuring the stakes, tightening our game face.

  I told her I’d call on her again, not sure that I would.

  As we walked down the long corridor, she acknowledged Eurama for the first time. “Aunty, sorry-eh? Sorry. Your husband? But Aunty, your shoes . . .”

  By now the factory smells seemed more piercing.

  “What is that smell?” I asked.

  “It is your indigo—but of course we use an industrial dye—and trichloroethylene, something used to remove the resin from the cloths after the dyeing process.”

  I was familiar with trichloroethylene. In Attleboro, where I grew up, there had been worries about the local mills along the Bungay River dumping the compound. It was known to contaminate water supplies and cause respiratory, nerve, kidney, and heart damage with prolonged exposure. What of Tema water and soil, and what of the workers? What of those who wore the cloths?

  “She should satisfy herself!” Eurama said as soon as we were out of earshot, sucking her teeth, and letting her shoes clack harder on the floor. “What at all did this woman do for you? Shame! Working for the white people in big big offices and still as hungry as a lion, asking for bribes!”

  I looked at the pages that the Madame had copied for me. There were images of African women, dressed in Vlisco sewn in elegant kaba and slit, posed examining cloth on industrial rollers. I would have liked to imagine these women were friends of Aunty Mercy during her stint in Holland. They would run the offices, lunch together, and go home to their Dutch husbands, their work a respite from housewifery.

  “Dog labor!” Mercy had said of her days at the plant. “There are no proper jobs for Africans there.” I thought about the Executive Madame’s patronizing of me. In Mercy’s own factory in Teshie-Nungua, on the road to Tema, she was not at all a quaint figure but a woman in splendid hand-printed batik and vintage Chanel sunglasses, driven in her shiny American pickup truck, her bag stuffed with more bills than the Madame would ever have earned. In Ada, her hometown, she held a title in an important traditional council that had power with the national government.

  The other pages contained photos of large industrial indigo vats, fashioned as deep, low-lying troughs with twelve wheels—resembling enormous film reels—suspended above, cloth spun around them seeped with indigo. The photo was a surprise; the wheels were so eerily reminiscent of the ancient means of transporting cloth on camels. At the same time, it disturbed my image of small clay dye pots, or even the larger pits like those of Kano that were deep wells in the ground, which required taxing handwork, craftsmanship, months of toil, a culture of patient caretaking and ritual akin to, if not actually part of, the devotion of shrine-keeping. It was, for me, an act of looking simultaneously forward and backward along a deep schism that I wanted to trace. The material she’d given me hinted at a surprising history, and as I later journeyed closer to the ancient practices, I kept being pulled back to the history of Vlisco.

  On the way home from Tema, I convinced Eurama to stop for ice cream. “Only if we hide ourselves,” she said. “A widow can’t eat ice cream.”

  We found a corner table near a window at the top of Frankie’s, a Lebanese-owned restaurant frequented by expats, where few would recognize Eurama’s
status or care. Across the street was the Woodin boutique, its shiny storefront filled with ready-to-wear designs mixing the blue and white Vlisco cloths—the old, esteemed designs customarily worn for funerals and church ceremonies and baby namings—with denim and silvery embellishments. Aunty Mercy’s shop was less than two hundred feet up the adjacent street. The contrasts in African and Dutch modernities, as dramatic as those reminiscent images of the ancient and industrial wheels, were so powerful, I knew that I needed to understand them before I again ventured out.

  I went back to the university library to try to understand what the Vlisco literature had suggested. And this is the story that I found:

  The Dutch flag had flown in the Gold Coast as early as 1594. By the 1800s, English, French, and other European rivals occupied forty fortifications along the four-hundred-mile coast, used partly as trading posts and bulking and distribution centers for ivory, gold, hides, gum, spices, and slaves. The Netherlands became the fourth-largest slave-trading nation, following England, Portugal, and France, exporting a recorded 477,782 captives between 1630 and 1794. Dutch textiles had made up 57 percent of the goods exchanged for human lives. In fact, by the late 1600s, cloth constituted more than 50 percent of European exports to West Africa on a whole. Record after record show African lives being traded for two or four “measures”—likely two or four yards of cloth, each two-yard piece the length of an African woman’s wrapper. At the same time American abolitionists and Quakers staged boycotts of indigo and cotton cloths to further their antislavery efforts. In the 1800s Dutch colonialists in Indonesia, recognizing the beauty and profitability of Javanese batik cloths (which were widely believed to have originated in India long before Christ and were introduced to Indonesia and Malaysia around 1275 by the Chinese), studied batik processes, hoping to enter the trade. In cities like Helmond in the southern Netherlands, where Vlisco had been established, the Dutch successfully industrialized batik. These factories were already producing “blue cloths,” iconic blue-and-white-patterned textiles dyed originally with woad, Europe’s indigenous blue dye. The process of printing blue cloths was similar to the base process for industrial batik.

  In the late 1800s Dutch merchants introduced a less costly product to Indonesia that they hoped would undercut the local market. Indonesians immediately rejected the Dutch cloths, preferring their own hand-patterned, wax-resist designs. The Dutch process relied on resin in lieu of wax, as it was more suitable to the European climate and combined better with the dyes. The combination of resin and nonindigo dye created half-tones and crackling lines in the cloths instead of the bold, exact lines and color contrasts typical of Indonesian batiks. Indonesians regarded these qualities as imperfections, and the Dutch market failed.

  The Dutch fleet of the British-owned East India Company—which was the most significant colonialist agent in Asia, administering governments and militias and trading in silks, opium, tea, indigo dyes, and other goods—was by then making regular stops at stations along the Gold Coast en route to and from Europe.

  The Dutch soon discovered that West Africans favored the cloths that the Indonesians had eschewed. Indigo cloths were already one of the most highly valued trade items. The dark blue base design in many of the cloths was attractive; and—particularly when smaller, repetitive patterning was used—the cracklings and dye tones created a kind of movement in the cloth and body similar to the beauty of indigenous African cloths.

  Living in the shadow of Elmina Castle, the first European building south of the Sahara, built in 1482 by the Portuguese and then occupied by the Dutch (and now a UNESCO World Heritage site for its importance in the transatlantic slave trade), was a small community of former Dutch army conscripts who had served in Indonesia. These men, part of three thousand “Donko” slaves—the lowest caste of captives of the Ashanti empire—were sent to Indonesia from 1810 to 1840 under a system of de facto slavery. These men eventually bought their freedom with army service and resettled in Elmina beginning in the 1820s in a close-knit community of relatively elite “Old Javanese” pensioners. They flew the Dutch flag, spoke Malay as a common language, and put themselves at the disposal of the governor, making expeditions into the interior. They dressed in Javanese cloths; the wrapped and togalike draped clothing of Akan men of the Gold Coast was not too dissimilar from Indonesian dress styles. These men’s lives have been little documented, but they are also partly responsible for Vlisco’s influence in West Africa.

  The slave trade effectively ended in 1841, persisting for thirty years after its abolition under the 1814–15 Vienna Congress. Profits from the colonial cloth trade had nonetheless grown so significant that the market persisted long after the abolition of slavery. By 1876, when Vlisco began formally shipping cloth to the Gold Coast and concertedly pursuing an African market, they were extending the profits from goods that had long been exchanged and stored alongside captives in the holds of the coastal forts. Inside of Elmina Castle, the wrought-iron railing to the main building bears a W, presumably for King William I, the Dutch king who sponsored the three factories that were the backbone of the Indonesian cloth trade, eventually inherited by Vlisco. Knowing this history put a new order to my way of seeing.

  In the 1920s and 1930s Vlisco began a process similar to the Indonesian one with West African cloth designs. These cloths often incorporated traces of Indonesian designs, and “Java” designs themselves became an expensive category of Vlisco cloths sold in Africa.

  In the Woodin window there was also a display of neon pink and blue and red “Angelina,” the iconic, usually dark green dashiki cloth emblematic of 1960s and 1970s Black and African identities and Black liberation struggles throughout the globe. It long predated the daishiki era and was one of the earliest “Java” prints to be traded; ironically, the design had been inspired by Coptic patterning.

  I kept thinking about Ghanaian women’s dresses and the “100% Guaranteed Real Dutch Wax” stamp on the selvage, always—until the late 1960s, when sepias and other colors were introduced—a crackling line of beautiful blue. Most women choose to display this selvage rather than fold if into their hemlines. Some of the most expensive “Super Wax” cloths even feature the Vlisco logo as centerpieces to their designs. I had once read about an Alabama slave owner, a man named T. H. Porter, who made his chattel wear buttons with his name stamped into them. Buttons—much less custom designs—were such a relative luxury in Porter’s era, and slaves were afforded few or none. The arrogance of this requirement, the sick vanity, always stayed with me.

  Ghanaian and other West Africans wear colonial and slave history in bright, intoxicating displays every day. In fact, the very measure of the cloth evokes the measure of a captive person’s life.

  Six

  Amazons, Wives of the Gods, and Mama Benz, Ghana/Togo/Benin

  In Irving Penn’s lens, the daughters of the Mino, the legendary Amazon women warriors of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (the modern country of Benin), stare into the camera with a watchfulness of women beyond their years. They are lithe, their bodies on the meridian of pubescence, their breasts taut and bared of everything but collars of powder—a cosmetic, with spiritual purpose too—appointed with thin coral and gold and metal necklaces. The heavily cicatrized bodies of some of the girls mark their clan, their status, and their various initiations; the fresh wounds were likely rubbed with a mix of henna and indigo to deepen their relief against the skin. Their bodies are wrapped gloriously in indigo cloths designed with chieftaincy leaves and scar-like lines and patterns like sugar cubes. The cloths were ironed or beaten on a wooden block by a wooden mallet, until they achieved a starchy crispness and sheen. The girls sit as if in ritual as much as studio scene. Their heads, tied in wax cloth and satin, disturb the palate of blue and white and black, with a sudden flash of red or gold.

  The photos appeared first in Vogue magazine in 1967, when Penn journeyed with his ambulant studio on special assignment to Dahomey. The girls’ faces are arresting; so much feeling moves behind
their impassive stares, and the cloth absorbs every mood, projects it as a fiercely playful theater. It is character acting. Penn admits that the photos he took are a creation of “extreme artifice”: the bodies are in studied poses, recast in startling relief against a stark white studio backdrop.

  I find the photos troubling for their exoticism, for the way the girls were sexualized, and yet I realize their power, because the girls’ eyes and the way the cloth was photographed lived on in my imagination. One morning I woke up thinking of the images, and I decided to travel to Benin to see if I would find something to supplant them; bits of blue sugar cubes and leaves. I also thought of the journey as a kind of dry-run to Nigeria, which was just a few hours beyond Porto Novo, a chance to test the infamous road and border crossings through Togo and Benin, to see if I was ready for the indigo badlands, the place from which Fulbright had revoked its grants.

  The next day I was leaving Accra in an ancient Peugeot at breakneck speed, the road below exposed through the rusting carriage. I sat in a middle seat between a woman with baskets of dried fish and yam at her feet and a Cameroonian student returning home on vacation.

  You won’t travel far on the road leaving Accra before the modern, mostly whitewashed cement-block houses change to clusters of small adobe structures with corrugated tin or fiber roofs. Occasionally you pass a hotel or the mansion of a chief or wealthy person who has built in his hometown—the domain of his ancestors and clan; usually only returning to these homes for obligatory rites, most often funerals. The lack of development is striking on the ninety-eight-mile stretch to Keta, Denu, and then the Aflao border with Togo. Poor roads, collisions, slow-moving, overburdened trucks, and endless customs checkpoints can slow a little over a hundred miles to a half-day’s journey. The story of that road is revealing of its precolonial and later colonial makings: from Ivory Coast to Togo, four hundred miles of coastal routes were devised mainly for the extraction of human beings, sumptuary items, and raw materials.