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The market in Kumasi must be one of the largest in West Africa.
You can find almost anything here, including lots of cloth.
Cloth has always been important in West Africa,
long before Europeans came around the coast in the late 15th century,
cloth had been traded back and forth between West Africa
and the Mediterranean.
West African markets have always played an essential part
in mediating taste between artists and their patrons.
Some cloth from Bonwire is being sewn together.
But, far more important, as far as this market is concerned,
are the printed cotton textiles.
During the latter half of the 19th century,
Dutch textile makers wanted to copy Indonesian batiks
and sell them to Indonesian people at a price that was cheaper
than they could make them for themselves.
Eventually, the Dutch found a way of printing resin
rather than the wax of a true batik, onto both faces of the cloth.
The resin resisted the dye, but the results were not popular in Indonesia.
Yet, quite by chance,
they sold well in that part of West Africa known as the Gold Coast,
today's modern Ghana.
Many of the current popular designs show the strong trace
of their Indonesian origins.
These cloths were first produced in the Netherlands and then,
soon after the beginning of the 20th century, in Britain,
especially in the factories around Manchester.
These resin-resistant cloths are known as wax prints because of their history,
and they're different from the so-called fancy prints,
which are simply printed imitations of the resist-dyed cloths.
Money flies, okay.
It means that the money has wings, and if you have money,
you will be on the move all the time.
As soon as these fabrics began to sell on the Gold Coast,
the Dutch developed designs around local West African interests.
These especially focused upon the visualisation of proverbs,
already an established art tradition among people like the Ashanti.
'Money has wings' was first designed in the Netherlands
but was very popular in Ghana and was widely copied.
It has also been redesigned in Ghana,
replacing the bird with a hand holding an egg and adding the words
"life is like an egg."
This reminds us how easily our lives can be broken
and yet we hold our destinies in our hands.
We are outside the Catholic Cathedral in Kumasi,
and a young mother is wearing a pattern we'd seen in the market,
'money has wings.'
She said she wore the cloth because she liked it.
Then she said she'd bought it when she was expecting her first child.
The design may have made her think of the baby growing within her.
Sometimes the remnants from dressmaking
are patched together for re-sale.
This is really beautiful, so –
What is this hand?
The hand was educational as well as proverbial.
The spots were originally the twelve pennies in the Victorian shilling.
This one is...
Okay, wait, wait.
On what occasions would someone wear this?
Like when they are doing something like... or all these things.
They can wear it any time, any time at all
Okay.
Okay, what about this one?
Pebbles or stones... okay.
I want to see the old cloths.
Old cloths.
First, and then after that, maybe show –
These ones – these are ones are old cloth.
These are old cloth.
It's called...
Okay, so it's from the early 60s...
Yes, it was.
At independence, these technologies were transferred to West Africa.
Akasombo is one place in Ghana where there is a textile printing factory.
This one's from Akasombo.
It's from Akasombo.
Okay.
- So, is this a real wax? - Yeah, it's a real wax?
Do you have a super wax here?
- This one is a super wax. - This is a super wax,
okay.
So, what is the difference between the super wax and the ordinary wax print?
Okay, this one's very good than the ordinary printing, wax.
- In what way? - Than this one.
In what way?
You know, this one, the colour is very good.
The one they are using to do this one, is very good than this.
And what about this one?
This one...
Most of the cloths in Kumasi Market are either fancy prints
or wax prints made in Ghana or Nigeria.
This is a very old cloth,
it's called Bonsu – it's a name –
a name of a person.
- Bonsu. - Yeah.
Okay.
Other themes included the novelties of the day,
such as education in the late 19th century.
It's called...
Or the mobile telephone a hundred years later.
When did it come out?
- This year. - Only this year?
How much?
This one is not Ghanaian cloth, it's Nigerian.
- It's from Nigeria. - It's from Nigeria.
The designs are responding to the senses both of tradition
and of modernity.
And the English models, one tree is broken –
gets broken by the wind, one tree gets broken by the wind.
Okay, where – for your factory?
In Ghana, in Akasombo.
This is, in fact, a locally – factory-printed copy
of a resin-resist cloth produced in Holland by the Vlisco company in Helmond.
And one of the problems that the Dutch producers of these cloths had
is that as soon as they produce a new popular design,
over here, the textile factory owners and designers pirate it.
So, the very fact that the Dutch designs are copied by local factories,
means that the Dutch designers have to work very hard
keeping on top of the whole fashion interest in these cloths.
The more expensive Dutch and English cloths are sold in specialist shops.
Could you explain to me why this particular cloth
is so much more expensive than the Ghanaian printed cloths?
For this one, it's import one, from Holland,
that is why this one is more expensive than Ghana one.
- So, this cloth is from where?
And do you know how they make it?
They use polyester to make it.
You mean foam rubber?
Yes.
They have some – a lot of designs, they have a lot of designs,
so when they pick their design, they put it in the this thing.
The wax.
Yes, and they print it.
So, they print the hot wax onto the cloth.
Yes, they use foam.
And then the wax resists the dye.
Yes.
It's another version of how the whole Dutch wax thing came about,
which involved printing hot resin onto both faces of the cloth,
and, of course,
they did that in imitation of Indonesian batik,
and that's how this whole thing started.
So, this –
so, you've actually got a number of things going on,
you've got that technique,
you've then got the printed imitation of it, fancy cloths,
and then you've got this kind of thing,
which is a local reversion back to the where the technique
originally came from.
These cloths are a record of collaboration between art makers,
designers, print workers and traders, and the people who buy and use them.
We can see the designers' response to local poetic interests,
visualising people's ideas about themselves
and about the society in which they live.
With Adinkra and Kente,
the relations of production include the African diaspora.
Wax cloths and fancy prints are the result of even wider global relations.
Studying these textiles emphasises how important it is
to be open to the ways different societies define their own art making.