Past and present across most of Africa, people have been and remain passionate about how they appear in public, and Zambia is no exception. When Zambian women today talk about ‘our dress’, they are referring to clothes that are tailored from brightly coloured printed cotton fabric referred to as chitenge in the Chinyanja language. My research assistant Norah Rice presented me with my first chitenge outfit in 1972 prior to my departure from Lusaka, where we had been exploring married women’s work opportunities in the low-income township on the outskirts of the capital where she lived with her family (Hansen Reference Hansen1975). The fabric was produced by Kafue Textiles of Zambia, a fully integrated textile mill owned jointly by the state and private enterprise, which had opened for business in 1969, five years after independence (New York Times, 26 November 1989) (see Figure 1.1). We had bought the fabric with an abstract pattern in wine-red and dark blue colours at a factory outlet in the centre of Lusaka, one of several such outlets across the country. Seated on the living room floor in her home, she had sewn the two-piece garment herself. Unlike today’s ornately decorated outfits, this dress was plain, with a straight skirt reaching well below the knee, a top with a V-neck bordered by ties to fold into a bow, and three-quarter-length straight sleeves. I do not recall the brand of her hand-operated sewing machine; it might have been an old Singer model as one of today’s most popular machines, the Shanghai-produced Butterfly brand, may not have been available at that time because of import restrictions.
Then and later – for we continued to work together until she passed away at the end of the 1990s – my research assistant taught me how to dress in public. I still recall her consternation when, also in 1972, an American girlfriend and I took her to a steak lunch at Lusaka’s Intercontinental Hotel wearing bell-bottom jeans while she had dressed up in chitenge wear. I was in my mid-twenties then and she, 13 years my senior, sought to teach me proper dress decorum. In 1981, when I commuted to the township on a bike, she instructed me not to wear jeans on a bicycle. Her advice drew on a variety of norms that converged on the dressed body, including mission-inspired notions of decency, cultural ideas about the privacy of specific body parts, and Western-inspired dress practice. Although the weight of some of these norms has shifted since the colonial period, they continue to affect women’s dressed bodies through to the present.
In fact, while dress practice was not central to my research when I first began my work in Zambia in 1971, during subsequent years I could not help noticing that dress was an important part of everyday life and that it figured actively in shaping people’s lives. I learned that changes in clothing practice were written into Zambian history, which it helped to enact. Bringing the dressed body to the fore in my account of changing engagements with clothing not only adds an unusual angle to our understanding of late colonial and postcolonial Zambian society; it also offers new ways of exploring dress as a scholarly activity. Inspired by my years of accumulated knowledge about Zambia, this book unfolds clothing histories from my published and unpublished works where most of them, except the secondhand clothing story, have played accessory roles. Here, I examine all of this evidence alongside a rich body of historical and interdisciplinary scholarship on dress. Inviting attention in its own right, clothing, I argue, helps people make history and create sociocultural change just as much as history helps drive their new dress practice and fashion cultures. Altogether, exploring the dress and fashion scene in relation to changes in the political and social setting opens up a surprising range of issues that have endured across history in Zambia. They converge on the dressed body and make the significance of a well-dressed appearance the heart of that story.
Changing dress practice opens windows into the social, economic, and political developments that over the course of the twentieth century and into the present have shaped how people in the region of central and southern Africa that today is Zambia experienced and acted upon their world. Such interwoven histories bring into sharp focus several potentially culturally charged issues during the colonial period in terms of race, and between generations, classes, and urban and rural dwellers. Dress is as central to changing notions of status, identity, and personal style as it is to political power. As historian Phyllis Martin has pointed out, the association of dress with the physical body and the body politic is a particularly potent combination (Reference Martin and Allman2004: 229). Mediating between self and society, the dressed body provokes supportive as well as contentious reactions, giving rise to enjoyment and admiration as well as to tensions, anxieties, and debates.
Because they pay considerable attention to appearance, people in Zambia eagerly discuss the clothes of others, and they comment at length and in detail about the dress of people in power. Such lively preoccupations with bodies and dress involve women as well as men, although news media and scholarship have showcased women much more frequently than men when accounting, for example, for bare-breasted women demonstrators or describing the stripping of young women wearing miniskirts in public. Challenging deep-seated moral and cultural dress norms, such events have provoked reactions of indignation, shame, and even violence. Sadly, they continue to take place. But when African men’s attire makes the headlines, the news-breaking commentaries tend to revolve around excessive consumption as a screen for corruption and deceit. To be sure, dress norms weigh down unevenly on women’s and men’s bodies. As I demonstrate, dress readily becomes a flash point of conflicting values that fuel contests in colonial encounters, across class, between gender and generation, across the rural-urban divide, and in recent global cultural and economic exchanges.
Global Interchanges
As driving forces in the industrial revolution, cloth and textiles played major roles in mediating historical encounters in Africa prior to the onset of colonial rule and subsequently, deeply intertwining dress practice with major transformations of people’s livelihoods locally and globally (DuPlessis Reference DuPlessis2016). To be sure, textiles and clothing are weighty subjects in African history in economic and cultural terms and they continue to be so today. For decades prior to the arrival of Europeans during the fifteenth century and during the slave trade across both the Atlantic and the Indian oceans well into the nineteenth century, the cloth and clothing trade was big business (Kriger Reference Kriger2006; Machado Reference Machado, Riello and Parthasarathi2009; Machado, Fee, and Campbell Reference Machado, Fee and Campbell2018; Presholdt Reference Presholdt2008). Along with the trade spread new dress conventions. Islamic-inspired dress had already, from around 1000 and onward, spread in the Sahel/Sudanic region and along the East African coast. Although European-style clothing had been known and worn by local elites in coastal areas since the late fifteenth century, it did not become part of ordinary people’s dress practice until the late nineteenth century (Cameron Reference Cameron, Eicher and Ross2010: 371–72). Exposure to Christian missions introduced new styles of garments (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff1997). Talking about the backdrop for this transition with reference to southern and eastern Africa, historian Robert Ross identifies a major shift in the material culture of consumption ‘between the 1880s – earlier in some parts of South Africa – and the 1950s, though in most parts of the continent it had been completed before then’. According to him, this ‘entailed the virtually complete reclothing of half a continent, and also the remaking of a whole variety of other articles of consumption’ (Reference Ross2008: 121). Changes in styles and dress practice and the widespread adoption of Western-styled wear also entailed different valuations, as African consumers modified such garments to suit their own purposes. New forms of social differentiation arose at times, full of contradictions, as we shall see in this book in controversies over women’s dress practice.
Briefly, through all of this, African and Western notions of dress practice interacted, drawing on each other for sources of inspiration, ‘although at times with conflicted and compromised outcomes’ (Martin Reference Martin and Allman2004: 228). Marked colonial disdain for Africans wearing Western-styled dress tended to mistake African dress practice for imitation rather than recognising the desire to be part of a changing modern world. Today, especially in the former white settler colonies in southern and eastern Africa, we must reckon seriously with the centuries-long wearing of Western-styled garments. Here, as I have argued for the case of Zambia, people have dressed in Western-styled clothing for so long that the garments have been incorporated into everyday dress practice to become local. Yet until recently the West has tended to see only imitations of itself in the global circulation of its garments. As a result, an overdrawn distinction lingers between Western-style clothing conventions, on the one hand, and local or traditional ways of dress, on the other. Seeking to unsettle this stubborn Western-centric fashion vision in scholarly accounts, dress scholars Joanne Eicher and Barbara Sumberg proposed the term ‘world fashion’ as more appropriate to capture the effects of increasing globalisation on contemporary dress practice (Reference Eicher, Sumberg and Eicher1995: 296). Both dress historian Margaret Maynard and I have suggested the term ‘global fashion’ for this process (Hansen Reference Hansen and Alman2004c; Maynard Reference Maynard2004).
At issue in these works is the search for an explanatory framework that encompasses all of these influences, not in opposition to but alongside each other, and to focus, as I do here, on their creative tensions. In today’s increasingly globalised world with its rapid exchange circuits between local and global actors, the privileged position of the West in influencing dress in Africa has given way to new interchanges spanning the globe and to many diverse, and constantly changing, sources and inspirations that are at play in shaping dress practice from within and beyond the African continent (Cheang, de Graaf, and Takagi Reference Cheang, de Greef and Takagi2021; Jansen and Craik Reference Jansen and Craik2016: 1–22).
Bodies, Dress, and Materiality
Such a focus acknowledges the active roles of dressed bodies in how clothing put to use during social interaction is shaping and transforming history. There are several additional arguments for this focus, some of which I spell out below, while I discuss others in subsequent chapters when they become particularly relevant. More generally, when exploring how dressed bodies ‘work’, anthropologists and dress scholars continue to draw inspiring insights from the work Terence Turner conducted several decades ago in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Because it both touches the body and faces outward to others, the body surface has a dual quality, which Turner characterised as a ‘social skin’ ([1980] Reference Turner, Burroughs and Ehrenreich1993). Extending these insights to analysis of dress practice in Africa, anthropologist Hildi Hendrickson explained their value: ‘Being personal, [the body surface] is susceptible to individual manipulation. Being public, it has social import’ (Hendrickson Reference Hendrickson and Hendrickson1996: 2).
This dual quality of the body surface makes dress a very special thing, unlike most other things. What is more, we do not wear our clothes passively but are actively involved with them. As embodied practice, dress and the body are intimately entangled with the particularities of time, location, and context (Entwistle Reference Entwistle2000). The agency dress possesses does not stem from it as a thing in itself, although its materiality matters by affecting how we experience what we wear and makes our clothes interact with our bodies. Its agency arises in practices of use and consumption, through performances in everyday life, and during special events and occasions. In short, dress is a fundamental aspect of social interaction, involving both wearers and viewers.
While much of the appeal of dress is visual, the sensuous experience of fabric on the body that helps bring dress to life makes materiality matter importantly both in the selection of dress and its wearing as well as in how we take care of it. The sensual and aesthetic – what clothes feel and look like – is, according to British social anthropologist Daniel Miller, ‘the source of its capacity to objectify … morality, power and values’ (Reference Bastian and Masquelier2005: 1). In effect, this view attributes material agency to the wearer’s dress practice. Nina Sylvanus’ anthropological work on wax cloth and dress in Togo has shown this aspect with great insight, demonstrating how the rich material and semiotic quality of the cloth helps dress come alive, bringing joy, creating a story, generating desire – in short, having agency (Sylvanus Reference Sylvanus2016: 11–16). Wax cloth may be special in this respect because of its layered history, yet as I discuss later, such animation also pertains to other printed textiles like chitenge in Zambia. It too has sensuous qualities that draw the attention of both wearers and viewers. When shopping for textiles and dressing, women test the touch of a textile and its quality. Enhancing their dressed body presentation, they make considerable efforts to care for their garments when it comes to laundry, drying, and ironing as well as in the accessories they select to match their outfits. All these efforts contribute to the ‘clothing competence’ (Hansen Reference Hansen, Hansen and Madison2013b) they demonstrate by being well turned out. And the quality, style, and taste of their dressed bodies are both ‘seen’ and ‘read’ by a discerning public who understands how to interpret them (Haynes Reference Haynes2019: 38; Sylvanus Reference Sylvanus2016: 44–48).
Africa in Dress Scholarship
Anthropology has a proud tradition of studying material culture, including body adornment, cloth, and textiles (Luvaas and Eicher Reference Luvaas and Eicher2019; Weiner and Schneider Reference Weiner and Schneider1989), a tradition that extends to Africa where art historians have added rich details about aesthetics, forms, and fabrics (Picton and Mack Reference Picton and Mack1989; Picton et al. Reference Picton and Picton1995). Turning to history, textiles and clothing are substantial subjects in Africa and beyond (DuPlessis Reference DuPlessis2016; Kriger Reference Kriger2006; Presholdt Reference Presholdt2008). When the reigning anthropological focus shifted from evolution to function during the 1920s and then to structure during the 1940s, material culture studies fell out of favour only to blossom in recent years (Küchler and Miller Reference Küchler and Miller2005). For quite a while, dress scholarship prominently featured the rich cloth traditions of West African societies (Byfield Reference Byfield2002; Perani and Wolff Reference Perani and Wolff1999; Renne Reference Renne1995; Ross Reference Ross1998; Rovine Reference Rovine2001), while paying limited attention to the diverse clothing repertoires of the late colonial and postcolonial periods that go beyond Western and ‘traditional’ African dress options. Today this is all changing (Akou Reference Akou2011; Brown Reference Brown2017; Nwafor Reference Eicher and Eicher2021; Rabine Reference Rabine2002; Richards Reference Richards2022; Sylvanus Reference Sylvanus2016). Outside Africa, anthropologists Daniel Miller and Emma Tarlo played major roles in re-establishing dress practice as an important topic of inquiry that includes a focus on historical changes and mass consumption (Miller Reference Miller1987; Reference Miller1998; Tarlo Reference Tarlo1996). The clothing engagements and dilemmas they describe from India and the Caribbean concern larger debates involving individuals and groups in specific historical circumstances. Rather than viewing culture as the product of a specifically place-bounded society, today we view it processually as created through agency, practice, and performance, approaching it as cultures ‘in motion’ (Rodgers Reference Rodgers, Rodgers, Raman and Reimitz2013: 1–19). This shift helps reorient the way we understand ‘traditional’ not as a temporal status of a textile, garment, or image but rather as styles or media that make connections with, or evoke, local culture and history (Rovine Reference Rovine2015: 18–19).
In general, over the last couple of decades, dress research has emerged as an interdisciplinary domain of scholarship that includes cultural studies and performance studies, among several disciplines. Dress scholarship has flourished in recent years with new conventional and online publication venues as well as social media. So has research on dress and fashion in Africa, inspired by a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is adding important insights to our understanding of the changing place of clothing and of dress practice in several African countries since the late colonial period. Below, I discuss some works I find notable for situating dress historically in changing socioeconomic and cultural contexts and turn then to some recent works that are helping to place Africa on the global fashion map, thus challenging previous images of the continent’s role as marginal, on the fringe of the established fashion scene.
I begin during the colonial period in Zambia where in fact African dress was written into pioneering anthropological research conducted in several rapidly growing mining towns by scholars associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. They include in the late 1930s to early 1940s Godfrey Wilson in Broken Hill (today Kabwe), and in the 1950s, J. Clyde Mitchell, Arnold Epstein, and Hortense Powdermaker in towns on the Copperbelt, as I discuss in some detail in Part I of this book. The significance of this work has been elusive in recent scholarship for two reasons. One reason has to do with the overall lack of recognition of research on dress, the status of which for a long time was not considered legitimate but viewed as a rather frivolous focus for anthropological research. The second reason concerns specifically the lack of appreciation for the published works by these anthropologists in scholarship condemning its colonial underpinnings.Footnote 1 Rereading these works carefully and with close attention to context has given me rich observations from that period about the dressed body as a battlefield involving race, gender, and generation in everyday lives in towns during the late colonial situation. As historian Megan Vaughan has argued, these works ‘actually leave open greater possibilities of multiple interpretations and meanings’ than critics have attributed to them (Reference Vaughan1994: 15). Although Wilson’s statement about African clothing desires probably is one of the most memorable quotes from his work, it invites repetition as it goes to the heart of my concerns: ‘The Africans of Broken Hill are not a cattle people, nor a goat people, nor a forest people, nor a tree cutting people, they are a dressed people’ (Reference Wilson1942: 18).
Perhaps it is not surprising that I am drawn for inspiration to historical works that bring urban leisure activities during the late colonial period into sharp focus. In fact, scholarly interest in exploring leisure in relation to the changing political and social scene has helped reveal a wide range of positions expressed by the changing fashion scene. For example, Laura Fair’s work on post-abolition urban Zanzibar details how women used dress practice to demonstrate their freedom from slavery and articulate Zanzibari identities (Reference Fair2001; Reference Fair and Allman2004). Discarding their required dress practice as slaves, in fora such as dance groupings and initiation rites women developed new dress practices, communicating their independent self-making ambitions. On the other side of the continent, in colonial Brazzaville, Phyllis Martin describes how African male workers from several regions used their newly earned cash to purchase clothing, experimenting with imported European-style fashions, while some young women and women holding jobs alternated between wearing European-styled dresses with short skirts and pagne, wrapped-around printed cloth (Reference Martin1994; Reference Martin1995).
The capital of colonial French West Africa, Dakar in Senegal, the ‘Paris of Africa’, has a long reputation for elegance and fashion.Footnote 2 Historian Dior Konaté explains how women used fashion to show their support to the Bloc Africain, a political movement that mobilised colonised people across French West Africa, in a campaign for the vote of African women in 1945 (Konaté Reference Konaté, Goggin and Tobin2009: 244).Footnote 3 Expressing their growing political involvement, women adopted a dress they called the robe bloc, wearing it at political meetings from the 1940s into the 1950s. When demonstrating and engaging in political activity, women would wear the dress, which was long and red, the colour of the Bloc Africain, and spectacular new coiffures (Konaté Reference Konaté, Goggin and Tobin2009: 236).
Konaté and dress and literature scholar Leslie Rabine both describe the change of the robe bloc from political dress to a fashion garment among urban women during the late 1940s and 1950s when war-related import restrictions on fabrics and consumer goods were done away with. Rabine explains how dressmakers innovated the style of the colonial missionary–influenced high-waisted loose dress, the ndoket (camisole), decorating its surfaces with embellishments and trim, making the bodice more form fitting and using lots of fabric in its construction. One style from 1948 had a dropped waist, perhaps, speculates Rabine, inspired by Dior’s ‘New Look’ of 1947. ‘European in its design, yet local in conceptualization’, the robe bloc reflected a new political consciousness and self-confidence (Rabine Reference Rabine2010: 308).
Describing how young Angolans strategically employed dress to carve out space for participation, historian Marissa Moorman casts revealing light on the complicated relationship between local and imported dress styles. Angola remained a ‘Portuguese territory’ until 1975 when a protracted guerrilla struggle that began in the early 1960s resulted in independence. Even in a context of marked repression of political and cultural activity in late colonial Luanda, the capital, young Angolans used dress, dance, and music to imagine their new nation. While colonial policy promoted Portuguese dress and denigrated African clothing as quaint or folkloric, older women from the urban elite, bessanganas, dressed quite distinctly in several layers of panos (wrappers) on top of a long-sleeved blouse along with a smaller pano headwrap. Younger women wore European-style dress, often with a pano wrapper around the waist, and a headscarf. ‘Young women who used panos with miniskirts or European dress in the 1970s nodded to the bessanganas’ style as uniquely Angolan while also adopting it. By neither dismissing it as archaic nor reproducing it layer by layer, these young women demonstrated a new posture of Angolan womanhood that was both local and worldly’ (Moorman Reference Moorman and Allman2004: 88).
Young Angolans reached beyond the colonial horizon with local fashions and cultural activities that expressed both their difference and cosmopolitan outlook. Using local instruments and dress they performed American-style tap dancing and songs of Carmen Miranda in the dance halls of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s. This local scene included fashions associated with rock ’n’ roll in the United States and Europe as well as bell-bottom trousers, shirts with huge collars, big sunglasses, and ‘Afro’ hair (Moorman Reference Moorman and Allman2004: 84–85, 94–95). They ‘dressed and coifed themselves’, Moorman explains, ‘in the image of film heroes both white and African-American in order to more clearly express who they were and how they were Angolan. They embraced their education, their European-style dress, and their grandparents’ panos in the same gesture’ (Moorman Reference Moorman and Allman2004: 98). When political and cultural activities were banned during the early 1960s, young women as described above adopted panos on top of their European-style dress, proclaiming their sense of an urban Angolanness. Their quotidian self-styling ‘gave them a lived experience of independence which made political sovereignty both imaginable and desirable’ (Moorman Reference Moorman and Allman2004: 98).
As these examples clearly demonstrate, local engagements with Western-styled clothing varied by place and time across Africa, reflecting diverse dress traditions and norms as well as changing cultural and economic politics. Still, it is remarkable how scholarship on textiles and dress in Africa has been tardy, if not reluctant, to reckon with the importance of Western-styled clothing, noticing it mainly in passing rather than taking it seriously as a regular part of local dress practice. Historian Robert Ross’ global historical overview is a recent important exception (Ross Reference Ross2008). For a long time secondhand clothing was not considered to be a worthwhile research topic, thus foreclosing substantive investigation and the provision of new insights. Yet imported secondhand clothing is a commodity with a long history of use in Africa and widespread consumption today. The West and Africa, as I have argued in my previous work (Hansen Reference Hansen2000a), exist in each other’s space, which today is thoroughly globalised with interchanges of people, ideas, and commodities between the local and the global that would have been hard to imagine in most of Africa towards the end of colonialism in the 1960s.
Several recent scholarly publications and lively social media discussions are placing Africa on the global fashion map, thus changing tired images of the continent’s role as marginal, on the fringe of the established fashion scene (Gott and Loughran Reference Gott and Loughran2010; Gott, Loughran, Quick, and Rabine Reference Gott, Loughran, Quick and Rabine2017; Hansen and Madison Reference Hansen and Madison2013; Jennings Reference Jennings2010; Rabine Reference Rabine2002; Rovine Reference Rovine2015; Shaw [2011] Reference Shaw2014). Among the chief movers of African dress from a marginal to a central position in fashion scholarship, art historian Victoria Rovine provides a panoramic synthesis of African design in the global fashion market (Rovine Reference Rovine2015). She is well known for her work on bogolan, a cloth from Mali, on African designers in Paris, and on African design as an artistic medium (Reference Rovine2001). Focusing on professional designers, both women and men, in several countries in West Africa, South Africa, and Paris, her more recent work explores a creative fashion market that is exclusive. South Africa, for example, has a well-developed fashion industry, unlike most of the rest of the continent where a formal fashion infrastructure is not well developed. ‘Fashion matters’, as Rovine demonstrates (Reference Rovine2015: 30), and art historian Christopher Richards focuses on the fashion scene developed by women in Ghana from the mid-twentieth century and on. Examining fashion as art he reveals a cosmopolitan fusion of styles (Richards Reference Richards2022). A wide-ranging anthology on ‘African’ print fabrics adds a vivid dimension to Rovine’s high-fashion panorama that nearly hides from view the enormous popularity of this important design element (Gott, Loughran, Quick, and Rabine Reference Gott, Loughran, Quick and Rabine2017). The Africanisation of printed fabrics, developed in colonial interchanges between Europe and Southeast Asia, continues to unfold, as I discuss in Part III of this book. Across most of the continent, such printed fabrics have widespread and enduring appeal to huge populations of fashion-savvy consumers who dress in ‘the latest’ produced by tailors, dress makers, and designers; engage in self-fashioning from the ‘China shop’ (a shop selling Chinese imports); and pursue the extraordinary dress possibilities provided by the secondhand clothing market.
Exploring Dress Practice in Zambia
Although I never really planned it, clothing and dress practice have come to play inspiring roles in my research in Zambia ever since my first study of women’s work in the informal economy in Lusaka in the early 1970s. Trained as an economic and urban anthropologist, in all my works I have examined different ways of making urban livelihoods. Yet throughout my many research projects in Zambia dress practice continued to grow with me not only because of its visibility but also, and more important perhaps, because of issues arising around dress practice. As I noted at the outset, throughout the years of my coming and going to Lusaka, it was impossible to ignore people’s lively engagements with dress and the importance of dressed bodies in everyday life. A few examples suffice to illustrate.
During my research on domestic employment, I was struck by colonial employers’ frequent disapproving reactions to the dress practice of their mostly male household workers and their concern that Africans were stepping out of place when wearing Western-styled clothing (Hansen Reference Hansen1989: 42–43, 68–69). When conducting research on women’s work in the informal economy in a low-income township in Lusaka in the early 1970s and 1980s, I realised that women’s clothing, or lack of it, indexed the quality of conjugality and gender relations because of the cultural expectation that husbands were to provide their wives with clothes. Even when urban women earned money in their own right, newly acquired clothes easily provoked husbands’ suspicion, sometimes leading to domestic trouble and court cases (Hansen Reference Hansen1997: 118–40). Then during the 1990s my chief research focus turned directly on dress and consumption as I followed the flow of secondhand clothing from closets in the West to markets and wardrobes in Zambia, wondering what people made with and of other people’s clothes (Hansen Reference Hansen2000a). What had been conceived largely as a study in economic terms developed as a cultural agenda to examine dress practice. In fact, my anthropological focus increasingly turned to what people were wearing, the meanings they attributed to dress, and how to interpret such meanings. Subsequently, the rapidly growing local design and fashion scene attracted my attention in explorations of this creative frontier of economic engagement and its involvement with global style trends.
As a field of research in its own right, changing clothing practice provides a meeting place where anthropology straddles history with fine-grained, long-term ethnographic research. Spanning nearly half a century of my work in Zambia, my book draws on a wide range of methodologies and sources, ranging from the anthropologist’s stock in trade, participant observation, to archival research. Discussing some of my methodological choices in more detail as they become relevant to specific chapters, at this point I merely list some of my main approaches. The diverse subjects I examined over the years invited the use of a wide range of methods, both conventional and innovative. They include conducting household surveys, studying consumption practices, recording budget expenditure, carrying out all sorts of interviews, participating in kitchen parties (bridal showers), and spending weeks in outdoor markets observing sales and shopping practices involving secondhand clothing, as well as analysing essays written by secondary school students, and memoirs of former colonial household employers I interviewed in Great Britain, among many others. Spending time with tailors and their clients, I explored how style matters were negotiated. I also consulted government archives in Zambia and Great Britain, newspapers and magazines, and letters to the editor as well as, in more recent years, Internet-based sources. Even in the time of Internet-based news, printed newspapers and magazines in Zambia continue to be read by many more than the person purchasing them, and they circulate widely. In the 1980s, when scarcity of all kinds of goods was a daily experience in Lusaka, a common joke had it that Zambia never would experience a political coup until the day when both newspaper and beer delivery ceased. And while letters to the editor may not be representative, their commentaries connecting letter writers to newspaper readers help us catch the tenor of their time.Footnote 4
