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34 - Colonial Fashion Histories

from Part V - Fashion, Colonialism, and Post-Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2023

By
Karen Tranberg Hansen
Edited by
Christopher Breward ,
Beverly Lemire  and
Giorgio Riello
Christopher Breward
Affiliation:
National Museums Scotland
Beverly Lemire
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Giorgio Riello
Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Global History of Fashion
From the Nineteenth Century to the Present
 , pp. 1190 - 1218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

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