Power Dressing in East Africa: Clothing, Conversion and Culture Change from 1880 to 1895

Abstract

This ethnohistoric account focuses on the role dress played in the cultural changes British missionaries affected on East Africa in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, it examines the way Church Missionary Society evangelicals employed dress in their attempts to convert the Baganda on the north-western shores of Lake Victoria between 1880 and 1895. Lead by their power-hungry king, Kabaka Mwanga, the Baganda sought to withstand the reformative efforts of missionaries by appropriating European apparel through a process of indigenisation. Since dress is a material good which initiated and sustained social relationships in East Africa, it is examined in order to expose past social relationships and patterns of cultural exchange. The archived letters of CMS missionaries add to this inquiry by providing detailed first-hand insight into East African life in the 1880's. Marshall Sahlins' structuralist model of eighteenth century Pacific culture change is employed as a starting point with which to analyse the indigenous Bagandan response to introduced change. This investigation knits these three components together to argue that whilst the Baganda were changed visually by the CMS's missionary enterprise, local political hierarchy (and therefore culture) remained unchanged up until the very end of the nineteenth century. This thesis champions the resilience of culture in the face of radical transformation, and highlights two subjects undervalued in anthropology: the role which time plays in cultural transformation, and the general disinterest anthropology displays towards dress as a field worthy of academic scrutiny. I suggest that consideration of the former and collaboration with the latter will lend the discipline greater integrity.