Redressing the past

Tensions of colonial dress, the white gaze and thin legacies of oral tradition are at play in the Fashion Accounts exhibition at Museum Africa. The exhibition signals a void — the lack of an uninterrupted record of black South African histories of dress.

The work — a series of installations — challenges rituals of collecting, archiving and memorialising through dress. It’s a protest against inherited Western museum practices which remain exclusionary. By holding fashion to account as an instrument of colonialism, the exhibition — curated by Wanda Lephoto, Alison Moloney and Erica de Greef — also honours the use of fashion as a means of resistance and preservation.

The works offer entangled histories of dress from the influence of colonialism, Africans’ appropriation of western textiles to the post-apartheid response by contemporary fashion minds and designers.

“Europe created the concept of savageness and barbarism as antithesis to its modernity and civilisation ... Europe was to represent the modern model and the rest was to represent the antiquity; the traditional,” Rabah Omer writes in their paper, "The Modern and the Traditional: African Women and Colonial Morality”.

It is from this premise that Africans were brainwashed about their traditional clothing, which was deemed "primitive” and "barbaric”, to adopt European wear considered "civilised” and "modern”, creating an inferiority complex that later generations are now dismantling. Colonisers also used the church and Christianity as morally divisive tools to pit modesty, which meant covering up the body, against African wear, which was seen as revealing and immoral.

Decolonising dress starts with interrogating this history, understanding the colonial ties of the Basotho blanket or the Shweshwe textile (an Indonesian cotton printing technique brought to SA by the Dutch and Germans in the 1800s) which have been appropriated into South African dress cultures.

In Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, a collection of private portrait images that urban working- and middle-class families had commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned, the SA photographer asks pertinent questions. Who were these people? What were their aspirations? What was the occasion? Who is gazing? Did these images serve to challenge prevailing Western perceptions of the African? Are these images evidence of mental colonisation? The book is drawn from an ongoing research project of Wits University.

It inspired a response from fashion designer Lephoto and his collective The Sartists (Sartorial Artists) with the Sartists Sports Series of 2014 (included in the exhibition) to “reimagine how historically, blackness was presented back to black people”, opting for fictioning in place of absence.

The collective which comprises Lephoto, Kabelo Kungwane and Andile Buka interrogates and interprets the past to inform current urban youth cultures through fashion, giving an educational, documentative and nuanced slant to their sartorialism.

In another corner of the museum is the Bernberg Fashion and Textiles Collection from the Bernberg sisters, who donated their Forest Town home with antiques, paintings and fashion and accessories worn by colonial settlers to Museum Africa in 1960.

The exhibition brings up emotions: anger, sadness, longing even for something unknown yet felt and a connection to nameless faces. The heaviness sat with the curators as well.

“Working with the weight of a violent history is overwhelming. It was the scale of erasure, and the evidence of oppression and disavowal — it lingers in the archives — that compelled us to continue. And our shared conviction that this is necessary transformational work for future generations to access history differently,” De Greef said.

For Moloney, entering this collection as a white British curator from London “felt unsettling yet familiar as the collection content is similar to those in British museums. How could Wanda, Erica, and I engage with this collection which both represents and eradicates history? How could we put absence into collective action? How do we exhibit a colonial, settler collection without repeating colonialism? This exhibition offers fragments of our conversations held over many years, and made with respect and in friendship,” she said.

For Lephoto it was about finding a middle ground in the personal. “Walking into the archive, I was not sure of what to find. This is where the question of beauty or trauma comes in. On the one hand the garments are beautiful but on the other hand it is easy to imagine the colonial settlers who oppressed our ancestors embodying these clothes,” said Lephoto.

“But something happened when I saw the cape in the archive. The cape represented my mum. It also represented the missionaries who used the church and the bible for colonising African spirituality. Despite these efforts, African spirituality is still intact. My mum navigates Christianity but at the same time she maintains her practices of African spirituality. They seemingly oppose each other but they also meet and become one with my mom.”

Optimism prevails in the exhibition. Extending on the practice of visual artists such as Lebohang Kganye who preserve familial heritage through their art, is fashion designer Thebe Magugu. With the brand’s family heirloom shirt, Magugu had images of his family printed over it. The shirt resonated so much so that it spawned a bigger project that had Magugu designing the shirt for global clients who wanted to immortalise their loved ones on a shirt. This is represented in the exhibition by a piece from his Genealogy Collection, Spring/Summer 2022.

With the gradual growth and localisation of the textile industry, there’s a move through prints towards ownership, reclamation and preservation.

Putting a poignant spin on this is sustainable textile designer, Sindiso Khumalo with her Jagger Collection Spring/Summer 2022. It pays homage to the African History Library which was razed in a fire that ravaged the Reading Room and other facilities at the University of Cape Town in 2021. Women whose voices were held in the archive are celebrated as well as historic maps, African film and political posters to reclaim what has been lost.

A suit featured in the exhibition, “carries the print of a colonial map that was digitised before the fire and is an ode to the richness of cultures from the deep past”, Khumalo said.

"It offers a way to re-embody and reimagine those histories. Mapping and archiving are synonymous. I believe that fashion intervenes in way to create new connections and celebrates both iconic and intimate moments in African history.”