Colonial Fashion Histories

Abstract

On 2 March 1940, A Grand Big Show Competition DANCE , featuring ballroom dance champions from clubs in several Copperbelt towns was held in the Railway Compound in the zinc and lead mining town, Broken Hill (today Kabwe), in what was then the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia). As was common at such events, European residents were invited to watch and to judge both the dancing and the dress. At this particular dance competition, British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, who was conducting research on the town’s African urbanization, had invited along his wife, South African born anthropologist Monica Wilson. An astute observer with an unusual flair for African preoccupations with dress, Godfrey Wilson asked her to ‘cover the frocks’, as she noted in a letter to her father in South Africa. Looking after their new-born baby and assisting her husband in a variety of ways, she told her father that ‘it was so nice to be doing “field work” again’. Aside from emphasizing the ‘intense desire’ of Africans in Broken Hill for clothing and calculating their expenditures, Wilson himself provided little detail about their evolving dress practices.

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