The Making of Ghana: Dressing the Nation - Addressing the People (Nkrumah)
Assessing Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah's sartorial choices in the lead up to national independence.
Osseo-Asare’s Kwame Nkrumah’s Suits is important to assess when examining the range of ways Nkrumah addressed the people during the independence movement. It uniquely recognises the centrality of fashion theory to Ghana’s national and anti-colonial history.
Significantly, ‘Nkrumah’s team claimed simple white and black batakari1 as they made their rallying cry to end colonisation’ at the 1957 Independence Day Speech in Accra (Osseo-Asare 2021). By doing so, the Big Six — which was an all-male faction — hoped to launch the possibility for a new unified national identity between southern, western, eastern and northern Ghana (Osseo-Asare 2021).
Kwame Nkrumah at Ghana Independence Day Speech (1957), 2nacheki on YouTube
However, the perennial re-inscription of ‘southern or Akan hegemony over the very construction of “nation”’ (Allman 2004: 157) prevalent throughout the independence period was not subdued by the symbolic wearing of the batakari as it did nothing to structurally centre Northerners who were peripheral to the Akan-centric independence campaigns of the South. As explored in my previous piece, the schemes pre-1957 by European colonists and missionaries were largely focused on the South which meant the sartorial culture Northerner’s prescribed to remained in tact yet were increasingly considered as ‘primitive’ by Southerners and imperialists alike.
Furthermore, how Nkrumah dressed was not only directed to citizens of the colony but to the imperial power. Although occasionally fashioning indigenous cloth, Osseo-Asare notes that Nkrumah mostly wore suits in the lead up to independence, which is particularly interesting as it suggests that he engaged in Western fashion trends in hopes of being palatable to the West. His choice to do so implies that he recognised that styles of dress visibly evidenced the cultural distance and power imbalance between ‘centre’ (i.e., Britain and other Western nations) and ‘periphery’ (i.e., African colonies) (Rovine, 2009, 50). He also fashioned the Zhongshan/Mao suit which was a Chinese suit influenced by the Stalin tunic as a symbol to express his leftist position on the political spectrum.
Premier Zhou Enlai's with the President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah in 1964
A 1957 image of the Duchess of Kent dancing with Nkrumah at a ball following the public speech depicts the Prime Minister wearing the obi nkye obi kwan mu si2 kente design which, in Akan philosophy, embodies patience, sympathy, reconciliation and most importantly, forgiveness.3 By intentionally selecting this kente design to wear on the day of national independence and at a dance with a representative from the imperial metropole, it can be inferred that Nkrumah semiotically addressed the nation to forgive their imperial predecessors through his dress.
Shutterstock, Ghana Independence Nkrumah Accra Ghana, image, 1957,
It is necessary to consider Nkrumah’s sartorial engagements in relation to the Campaign to Dress the Nation in the late 1950s. This is because it contextualises the disparity in the gendered treatment between Northern fashion theory and Ashanti/Gold Coast fashion theory in its role in resisting colonial rule. Why were Northern women lambasted for engaging in their traditional practices which were objectively more anti-colonial/radical than Nkrumah’s investment in Western fashion theory and respectability politics? Did Nkrumah himself, the arbiter of the Campaign, view Southern colonially influenced fashion theory as superior to Northern fashion theory?
Bibliography
Allman, Jean Marie. Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove. "Kwame Nkrumah’s Suits: Sartorial Politics In Ghana At Independence". Fashion Theory 25, no. 5 (2021): 597-632. doi:10.1080/1362704x.2021.1878591.
Rovine, Victoria L. "Colonialism's Clothing: Africa, France, And The Deployment Of Fashion". Design Issues 25, no. 3 (2009): 44-61. doi:10.1162/desi.2009.25.3.44.
The batakari is a handwoven smock and is traditionally worn by Dagomba, Hausa and Dagbani Northern men
Translates to ‘sooner or later, one could stray into another’s path’
According to "Kente Cloth…The Fabric Of Kings", Six Degrees North, 2022, https://sixdegreesnorth.me/2012/05/09/kente-cloth-the-fabric-of-kings/.