I was becoming more fascinated by the stories of indigo’s trade. In the colonial era, most of the indigo that was supplied by Europeans on the West African coast was simple loom-patterned, piece-dyed cloth used for daily wear. (Plain white, undyed cloth was its counterpart.) Known as “Guinea cloth,” it was woven in India, shipped to Europe, and then re-exported by slavers to the West Indies and West Africa, before it was eventually industrialized in European factories. Guinea cloth became popular and yielded enormous European profits because it supplemented local weaving, and the cloths were often sold cheaper than those that had to be transported between the coast and the interior.
At the same time European merchants were struggling to compete against aggressive African and Luso-African (a broad term for peoples of various Portuguese and African cultural and racial mixes) cloth traders. These men, almost exclusively, were well-connected, sophisticated businesspeople who made huge profits with their ability to negotiate European and African power, often through familial connections on both sides, their knowledge of the fine differences in what both Europeans and African elites desired in each locale; and their access to the interior trade routes.
These Luso-African merchants worked between the Cape Verde Islands, a remote, archipelago off the coast of Senegal, and ports at the Gabon estuary and in Angola, both in Central Africa, where traders exchanged ivory and slaves for indigo. Portuguese colonialists, the first Europeans to arrive in West Africa, had set up posts in previously uninhabited Cape Verde in the fifteenth century to resupply passing ships, later developing cotton and indigo plantations there. On these plantations, in small workshops under merchant supervision, skilled slaves spun, wove, and dyed some of the most valued and elaborately patterned indigo cloths. African and Luso-African merchants were able to exploit their presence at an early, pivotal period of the Atlantic trade, and so by the seventeenth century their weavers were producing loom-made cloths, dyed indigo or patterned with indigo stripes, that were being exported as far as the West Indies and Brazil.
In the modern era African merchants, big and small, moved indigo and other cloths from Congo, in southern Central Africa, to Senegal, at the continent’s westernmost tip. They transported cloth in steamships, in Peugeot six-seaters, on bicycles and motorbikes; they carried it on their heads; they used elaborate networks of agents, porters, and traders based on kinship systems and birthplace. Even the shorter journey from Nigeria to Ghana saw a staggering level of trade. There are records of consignments of cloth—as much as a thousand pounds at a time—being shipped from the interior of Nigeria to Lagos by rail, to Accra by sea, on to Kumasi by rail, and then farther north by road.
Our Peugeot would pass a small town, and then we’d travel for untrafficked miles until we began to see people along the road, carrying goods on their heads. That suggested we were nearing a town or village with a weekly market to which they journeyed. Our driver stopped once, in what appeared to be deep bush, to nervously check his engine; I watched three women appear from a path, walking in stride, carrying on their heads small, precise stacks of wax cloth with the bottom layers curved around their skulls. I recognized that I was in step with history.
We were by then near Klikor-Agbozume, a Ghanaian village near the Togo border. The woman sitting next to me with the dried fish called to the driver. She alighted at the junction to Klikor, and while the driver again worked under the hood, she placed one basket into the other and her patent leather bag atop, lifted them all to her head, and disappeared quickly down a dirt road.
During the ride I had felt disturbed by her but wasn’t sure why. She was interesting to puzzle over. Her skin was chalky white with scattered pink abrasions—telltale signs of the use of skin-bleaching cream. She looked like she had been washed in watery white paint or kaolin clay, like a relic of the Ewe shrines, a figure you expected to see tucked in someone’s bosom, between layers of carnelian and white and blue beads, during a festival.
Three tiny marks were cut into her face at the center of her eyebrows and on each cheek—typical of Ewe peoples. They were bluish, like a fading tattoo. They also looked like the inverse patterns of an indigo cloth, the marks so blue against her whiteness. I stared at them a little, though I knew it was the result of the creams, which don’t fully penetrate scar tissues and often leave bluish-blackish places in the skin. When the woman was younger and brown, she would have been quite beautiful, but this terrible kind of beauty was evidence of a twisted vanity. We talked a little, with a wall of reserve between us that was uncharacteristic of Ghanaians, as if we had some kind of uncomfortable history, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be. She revealed she was a trader in Accra and was returning to her hometown for a visit.
I had visited Klikor once with a Ghanaian and Jewish-American friend, Afi, whose father owned a luxury hotel in the region. A few days before we arrived, Afi had found in the morning paper an announcement for the annual festival of the Adzima shrines—the home of the entranced, bare-breasted woman in the blue wrapper I’d witnessed on the road in front of Eurama’s shop in those first months. Afi and I had gone to the festival, hoping to get a peek into the world of the trokosi, or “wives of the gods.”
Trokosi (or fiasidi, as it is also called) is an ancient Ewe penal system under which crime and punishment are inheritable. With trokosi, if someone commits a crime—or if a family carries a social debt or a legacy of monetary debt, in some cases even decades earlier—and particularly if that debt could be attributed to recent misfortune, the family is forced to atone to the gods. The land or other property of the guilty party is impounded, and the virgin daughter or other female kin, usually a child six to ten years old, is sent to the shrine priest to repair the sins of her relative. The girl becomes an initiate of the shrine, the “wife of the gods,” and the literal slave of the shrine priest. The Ewe believe that this giving over of a virgin, who is considered pure and closest to embodying human virtue, will restore protection and righteousness to the perpetrator’s family. For the girls, it means a life of co-wivery and toil to the priest and shrine community, working nearby plantations and other sometimes-considerable business holdings. The women and girls are uneducated, untrained, and often kept in an altered state with native medicines.
As Afi and I stood barefoot on the edge of the procession, in borrowed wrappers that we were asked to wear before entering the area near to the shrine at the village’s center, we had not really understood what we were watching. The men leading the procession through the hard-packed dirt roads in the elaborate hive of adobe structures, carried a large fetish object, the size of a child’s body covered in cloth. I imagined that it was a corpse. I’d heard that during the shrine initiations the girls were branded on their faces and bodies, their heads were shaved, and a symbol of their now “deceased” body was dismembered, the parts bound together and dragged around, then put on rack in the shrine to become permanent relics of the gods. The trokosi are now under the watch of a local human rights movement involving world agencies like the UN and large NGOs who call for its abolition and the rehabilitation of the 35,000 to 40,000 girls and women, many of whom represent generations of indenturehood.
Many of the women were dressed in blue wrappers, tied at the breasts and waist, with the white and blue and carnelian-colored beads at their upper arms and calves, and white kaolin clay markings on their faces and legs and arms and chests. Other women appeared, dressed similarly, but in varied blue wax prints and calicoes. It was a self-conscious festival-making. Women also sat in a group near the shrine, most of them in simple blue cotton cloths like factory-made Guinea cloths, or yellow and blue cloths—the shrine colors—with a look of poverty in their bodies. We’d approached them to ask where we could buy food, a cold drink, but we barely got replies.
Afterward we visited a strange “center for research” in town, a small chamber with a few unremarkable items on display and odd, jumbled pamphlets about Ewe culture and history for sale. The man who ran it was the person who had
approached us soon after we arrived in the village, insisting that we change into cloth. I asked him about indigo and why so many women wore blue. In reply, as we left he handed me a page of frenzied writing with a meandering argument in favor of trokosi and why it was misunderstood. At the bottom he’d written, “Indigo is the color of the snake god ancestral shrines, the hunter god, and the thunder god.” There would be no answers today.
The visit had felt like my encounter with this woman beside me in the Peugeot—solicitous but defensive, cloaked in wariness and secrecy, if not simple inscrutability. Something about her manner suggested that there might be some connection between us, some reason for reserve. Many months later, when I looked at the photos I’d taken at the festival, this woman appeared in some of them, dressed in blue cloth, with a matching blue tied on her head. Long yellow beads and carnelian adorned her upper arms, and a wax cloth was tied at her waist with a yellow cell phone design. She was sitting with other women near the shrine. In the eye of the camera she has the pallor of a corpse lit by the bright blue marks on her face, and she is oddly smiling.
A short distance beyond Klikor the road widens, the heavy bush giving way to hard-packed, bare earth filled with a clatter of structures. You pass three or four checkpoints along the road, and then amid a frenzy of vehicles and bodies, you are at the Ghana-Togo border—a simple walk across a fifty-yard-long aisle, much like a passage at a bus terminal, herded by customs officers with sticks. I came to love the borders the way I loved the marketplace: the push and pull of bodies, the strong smells, the filth, the jokes and friendships, the brutal underside of exchange, the turbulence and tensions that accrue when so much is at stake. Amid fears of inquiry, bribe-taking, taxing, and the contesting of identities, the borders are where Africans meet in the frenzy of commerce. Money-changers, border guards, customs officers, traders, and hustlers rule the frontier. People clutch their U.S., Russian, Congo, Chad, or Egyptian passports; the market women do their weekly provisions run from Abidjan; the pineapple trader worries about what the heat and the delay are doing to his goods, so loaded with natural sugar that they will easily spoil on the road. All around you much is being bought and sold—the illicit, the exotic, and quotidian. I am fixated on the display of cloth—the swirling mass of bodies cloaked in myriad ways. As citizens of all of Africa pass to and fro in a narrow corral of gates, I watch for indigo treasures.
After a short ride between the border and Lomé, the capital of Togo, on a hired Mobylette, a moped, I’m standing in the Central Market. The market is like many in Ghana, and you can see the two countries’ reliance on each other, exchanging goods through years of Ghana’s recession and Togo’s political upheavals. But floating above the crowds on shiny head trays are fresh loaves of French bread, imported strawberries and green apples, and sweet, dark magenta bissap juice, made from hibiscus flowers, in tiny plastic sachets. They signal a kind of decadence that you see only in the former French West African colonies. There are endless stalls filled with soaps and washing powders, toothpastes, deodorants, margarines, and cooking oils—most Lever Brothers brands. The ascendancy of Coca-Cola and Lever Brothers is touted from umbrellas to get customers out of the sun and shiny new refrigerators bearing the company names.
In the 1930s the United Africa Company (UAC), a British entity that was by this time the dominant trading house in West Africa, came under the control of Unilever, the parent of Lever Brothers. The company’s profits were built on the principles and practices of the earlier trade in slaves and cloth and raw materials, and it continued to extract raw materials such as palm oil and palm kernels, in turn dominating Africa’s import market by making soap and margarine from them and selling them back to African nations at high profit margins. By the time Ghana achieved independence in 1957, UAC was the largest importer of printed cloth from Dutch factories, which were one quarter of exports from the Netherlands to West Africa, and Vlisco dominated.
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and then its president, and a founding member of the Organization of African Unity, was cognizant when he took power of the need to balance the scales between Ghana and the former colonial rulers. He soon doubled the import tax on cloth and tried to create incentives for local production, hoping to end the country’s dependency on foreign manufacturing. Countries like Nigeria, which gained independence in 1960, soon followed Nkrumah’s lead. Vlisco was able to craftily work its way around the taxes, extending special credit arrangements to the cloth sellers in Togo, and openly encouraging smuggling across the Ghana and Benin and Nigerian borders. As much as tastes for Vlisco were born in Ghana, it is Togo’s market women who, in many ways, built a stronghold for the company. I wanted to see the fabled Mama Benz, the Togo cloth sellers, whose wealth and power was said to “pass the African Big Men’s.’’ Surely, women in the Francophone West African countries were showier, more extravagant in their tastes than in places like Ghana, were one’s money was often hidden away or displayed more subtly; where the most marked evidence of it was in the number of extended family members and other persons it was apparent someone was supporting. Already, I could see a difference in the predominance of expensive neon-colored wax cloths, in contrast to Ghana’s darker, earthen tones. These were mixed with even costlier lace trims and wrappers and scarves. These were the “daughters’’ of the Mama Benz, ordinary women, struggling in the heat and dust of the noonday sun.
In Accra the large cloth stores dotting the main thoroughfares of Makola are run by market queens. Women like Eurama’s friend, Aunty Araba, own them; she returned from working as a nurses’ aide in Maryland to build an empire, first selling Igloo ice coolers to funeral-goers carrying private feasts and smaller traders for whom the electricity to refrigerate the drinks and foods they sold was unreliable. A very dark woman, full of spunk, with the intense, wide-set large eyes, a full mouth, black skin, and a thick, shapely body that is the Akan ideal, she favored kabas sewn in the latest Vlisco and drove a shiny new Ford pickup—a rarity in Accra. Aunty Mercy was the only other woman I’d seen drive one. Aunty Araba was the magadjer, the high priestess of the streets.
Lomé “store women” strictly drive Mercedes. You can see their sedans parked on the market streets, often covered in a tarpaulin, the driver standing watch with a chamois cloth in his hand. In their shops, they sit high behind the counter, large bodied, breasts heaved up on a stack of cloth, bedecked in gold, sporting gold-rimmed spectacles; from a distance their faces look like whorls in the grand flowering of their elaborate dress fronts and sleeves. They commandeer an army of smaller traders who are at the mercy of an extensive system of credit to both individual buyers and other traders. Their shops are lively with a flow of women competing for exclusive picks on new designs and colors.
The Mama Benz rose out of these throngs. Most of these women are illiterate and have little or no formal education or training. But they were the women who were able to negotiate, to find their way in and to build capital, slowly enlarging their shares of exclusive stock—especially Vlisco cloths—that they in turn sell in smaller pieces, pocketing big profits. Historically, many had liaisons with Dutchmen, sexual or otherwise, a practice encouraged by the heads of Vlisco, who have cynically exploited Togo and Ghana’s uneasy trade relationship, giving special privileges to Mama Benz. Vlisco also decided to market almost exclusively to women buyers and at the same time exploit local systems of patronage and a culture of nepotism. By choosing individual women as agents, often offering simple cloth in exchange for knowledge and market information, both Vlisco and the Mama Benz reign.
Among the hundred and fifty new cloth designs that Vlisco introduces each year, one is usually a tribute to the Mama Benz, refashioned from iconic Vlisco designs. The 2010 cloth is almost kitschy, featuring a flowery field, with “Mama” written in boldface below the iconic emblem of the Benz. The designers in Helmond, sitting at their computers and imagining African women’s tastes, know that each cloth is either approved or pronounced dead on arrival i
n the Mama Benz shops. Mama Benz have become the agents of the wit and creativity of the women who buy from them and the culture of the marketplace, all of which have their roots in the aesthetic of African and Asian ancient indigo cloths. The staple cloth designs, the ones that have so endured that they are given names and assigned proverbs and meanings, have remained in circulation now for decades, some nearly a century and a half. The Mama Benz write these cloths in or out of history with a quick, discerning glance.
I didn’t expect to find any hand-dyed indigo in the market, but there were indeed a few cloths, dyed with a synthetic agent on cheap calico, poorer cousins of the icons worn in the Penn photographs. I bought four of them from a woman selling at a tiny freestanding kiosk in the shadow of a large store. That was my own tribute to the woman’s strivings and my own, and to indigo’s ghost, on the palms of the Mama Benz, and in the air around us, phantom particles floating in the blazing sun, settling on the fridges and margarine tins and soap powder boxes in the market, items sent south by Unilever as new day wares for homemaking. Indigo profits that built the Vlisco empire.
So powerful was Irving Penn’s remaking of the myth of the Mino, or Amazons, that fifteen years after I’d seen the photographs, and even while the images trouble me, I walked the streets of Abomey, the former capital of the ancient Dahomey empire, still expecting to meet these girls, stubbornly resisting the idea that they had never existed as he had seen them through the camera’s eye.
Indigo Page 11