The City, Clothing Consumption, and the Search for “the Latest” in Colonial and Postcolonial Zambia

Abstract

Do not quote without the author’s permission. 1“Watch Lusaka, ” argued Samuel Ngoma, a feature writer for one of the daily newspapers in Zambia. “All who are gorgeously attired mostly get their clothes abroad. ” The capital’s so-called boutiques, he went on, “have become rather like museums … Neither Lusaka’s Cairo Road nor Kamwala shopping area is the place to look. You have a better chance at the second-hand clothes dealer, the flea market or even the city centre market dealer who jaunts between Lusaka and Johannesburg ” (Times of Zambia, 26 August 1995). To be sure, people in Zambia have shaped their material culture, including their dress, with commodities and ideas from far away as Samuel Ngoma acknowledged in this excerpt from 1995. Yet a lively interest in clothing is not a new thing in Zambia. The anthropologists who conducted urban research there during the colonial period were struck by the active interest Africans took in dress (Wilson 1941-42; Mitchell 1956; Epstein 1981). Their preoccupations were with Western-styled dress, a matter that many scholars examining dress in Africa have understood only through its Western origin rather than with reference to local use.

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