Patterns in Circulation by Nina Sylvanus

Author:Nina Sylvanus [Sylvanus, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Africa, West
ISBN: 9780226397368
Google: EKtSDQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Four

Flexible Patterns: The Nanettes Remake the Market and Cloth in China

When I returned to the Lomé market in 2008 after two years, I visited Solange inside her shop. It was there, eight years earlier, that I had come to know her as a successful cloth trader in the market. Everything seemed the same at first glance, but after a few minutes I became aware of an unusual stillness about the place. A strange ambiance of vacancy and decay pervaded the room—the flickering fluorescent lights interfered with the bright colors of the fabrics, while the noise of a struggling fan added a general sense of interruption. Market activity seemed strangely suspended inside Solange’s, a space that had always bustled with raucous exchange.

I took a seat near the wooden counter where Solange conducted her business. Clients from all over West Africa used to line up in front of this counter to fetch the iconic cloth before moving it across the borders to Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria, and sometimes Democratic Republic of the Congo. Perhaps the lights had flickered then as well, and conceivably the fan had always made its humming noise—but back then such idiosyncrasies would have faded into the vibrant soundscape of market exchange. If the signs of decay and crisis that seemed so conspicuous on this day were already apparent in previous years, they had not been immediately visible to me. Even off moments involved activity when trade was taken to adjacent spaces, such as the parking lot situated by the shop’s back entrance. There, day laborers hired by clients repackaged the cloth into transportable units for trafficking across Togo’s many borders, and money entrepreneurs were ready at any moment to exchange US dollars, Nigerian nairas, and Ghanaian cedis for local CFA francs.

I had never perceived instances of off trading as suspended moments, perhaps precisely because they were always linked to busy, noisy trade. My sense of Solange’s shop as a hub was shaken, however, when she recounted her recent misfortunes to me. In the space of only two years, this trader had fallen from being universally recognized as one of the top wholesalers in the market to inhabiting the very bottom of the Dutch trade hierarchy. In practical terms, Solange was de facto excluded from accessing large quantities of the reputed cloth—now distributed by the Vlisco Africa Company, which took over Unilever’s historic United Africa Company—while her credit with Togo’s banking institutions was also compromised. Solange was not alone in her situation. Other traders of her generation also felt the crude effects of market liberalization as national structures unraveled and shifted the conditions of possibility for many. The value of entrepreneurial nationals like the Nana Benz became increasingly obsolete at a time when the Lomé Grand Marché appeared to no longer serve as a site of national prestige and wealth production.

In the crisis of the state in 1990s Togo, the unraveling of the alliance between the dictatorship and the Nana Benz resulted in a breakdown of both national protections and the women’s corporatist market structure.

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