Clothing and the changing identities of Tanganyikan urban youths, 1920s–1950s

Abstract

Leisure and popular culture have long played an important role in all aspects of life throughout the African continent. It has been recognised that the analysis of leisure and popular culture can put social practices, as well as political issues into relief. For instance, in colonial Brazzaville, Gold Coast and urban Zanzibar, dress and fashion not only symbolised change, but they were also tools for affirming and ‘crystallising’ new generational, gender, status and ethnic identities (Martin , ; Akyeampong ; Fair , ). This paper argues that this was also the case in urban colonial Tanganyika. For instance, young city dwellers – both men and women, Christians and Muslims, elite and non-elite – creatively ‘appropriated’ Western clothes in order to express new identities and aspirations, foster social changes, and sometimes bring about political transformations. In order to perceive such broader dynamics, this paper makes use of local debates on the changing fashions which took place in the Swahili-language press. This paper demonstrates that educated Africans used letters to the editor and mashairi (poems) – as a forum mainly to make comments and complain about ‘new’ clothing styles. Chiefly based on evidence found in the monthly magazine Mambo Leo, and partly in archival documents and oral testimonies (as well as photographic support) collected during my Ph.D. fieldwork carried out in Tanzania between 2004 and 2005, this paper aims to illustrate the ways in which new personal and collective identities were constructed (and contested) through clothing practices in everyday life. To a lesser extent, this paper also focuses on the interactions between local fashions and global elements. The focus on dress contributes to grasp local strategies of resiliency and broader processes through which the so-called ‘common’ people forged their notions of the ‘modern’ and produced ‘translocal’ connections.

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