Practicing Decoloniality

Abstract

The issues raised by de Greef, Goncalves, and Jansen (2021) hit a chord with me as a Kenyan woman who loves the art of body adornment, particularly Goncalves's reference to the learning and unlearning involved in her daily existence about herself, from hairstyle choices to which language one speaks. From a young age I have often wondered where my own historical context lies when it comes to fashion. I grew up in several parts of Kenya, where I met and interacted with children from various communities, including those that wore traditional fashion and those that didn't. This was one of the things that inspired me to create OwnYourCulture, an online platform decolonizing fashion through traditional jewelry. In this virtual community, users post photos and stories of themselves dressed in traditional fashion emphasizing their relevance in contemporary fashion. Kenya is a country of very diverse regional communities, each with a strong heritage and style diversity. This plurality of cultural experience started to collapse at the time of colonialism up and until now. For my ancestors to “assimilate” they had to abandon their own sense of style.Prior to starting my work with Own-YourCulture, I had been working in the fashion industry for some years. I consistently felt a calling to go deeper into my own practice while at the same time the Kenyan fashion industry was trying to come up with a uniquely Kenyan outfit. This conversation was happening in 2014 and it was initiated by different stakeholders within the fashion industry with the aim of getting government and public support. However, a decade earlier, in 2004, the government had partnered with the fashion industry and put together a competition whereby designers were to create a unique Kenyan outfit. The completion was held countrywide and a designer was chosen but her designs were never implemented.Such an endeavor has been an ongoing debate since independence. Given the diversity of tribes living in Kenya, no one seems to be able to agree on one style that encompasses all the tribes. We are in a creative conundrum. It is at this point, in June 2014, that I began to explore traditional fashion from around Kenya and the larger eastern Africa.There is rich style history in each Kenyan community and the majority of these pieces are unavailable in the country or no longer made. Some can be found in foreign museums, but they are largely inaccessible to the Kenyan public. As a Kenyan citizen, it is hard to get into such museums without jumping through various heaps of paperwork applications and interviews for a visa that is not always guaranteed. I now rely on oral history as well as books and photographs to gather Kenya's past. When I began researching this work, nothing had prepared me for the offensive textual descriptions of my ancestors that I encountered in books on ancient eastern Africa. At the same time, I would share images of ancient Kenya from this research and highlight the unique style of each community. Many online users expressed surprise and awe, as they did not know about their traditional fashion history, and so a few months into this work, I assembled a team of bead artisans and together we do our best to recreate ancient traditional jewelry.Through my work, I confront decoloniality every single day and have to constantly unlearn previous thoughts, standards, and ideas about fashion and look at what it means for myself and how I dress, as well as for my culture/country. In a Financial Times article, acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017) writes about how “global” fashion standards aren't always complimentary. My experience can relate and for the past seven years, I have worn different styles of traditional fashion daily—from layers of beadwork to Kenyan-made fabrics—and posted images to my social media. I am constantly experimenting with how much jewelry I can wear at once, what types of collars match traditional jewelry, or what colors mix well with traditional jewelry. I wear colorful kanga fabric of the Swahili and see how many of the various Kenyan beads my hair can carry. I use images of ancestral Kenya as my guide, back when they would wear jewelry on every part of the body. I altered my entire wardrobe in order to emphasize more traditional fashions and have now nurtured a virtual community of style guardians who do the same, thus preserving Kenyan traditional fashion in a way that meets our present needs.As a wearer of traditional fashion, I am always explaining to others that my outfit is not a “costume” but clothing that expresses my personal sense of style and is deeply embedded in the cultural history of my country. Once at a concert in Nairobi a White man assumed that my outfit was my Halloween costume—a holiday rarely observed in my country! Another time, while waiting for a bus, the woman seated near me asked if I was a traditional dancer, as according to her, those are the only ones who can carry such aesthetics. This clearly indicates the extent of the erasure and limitations of fashion identity. Further, in Kenya traditional fashion aesthetics are synonymous with tourism. Every tourism company features the traditional fashion of the few communities that still maintain it, but separates it from contemporary fashion experience. For example, during international events, ushers dress in traditional accessories, but in the fashion industry Western ideals reign supreme. Yet, this essentializing has started to change and new designers are coming up with beautiful pieces based on their heritage, thus contributing these styles to the mainstream fashion industry and also contributing to decolonial practice.Within my virtual community, there is still a discomfort associated with wearing traditional fashion and a preference for jewelry that is smaller or in more monotone colors. Though oral history shows that adornment in colorful and flamboyant jewelry was a daily practice, as well as a mode of self-expression and a marker of status, today many consider it too ceremonial, while still others consider it too outdated.Humans are diverse and we cannot all conform to one style. We should all have the freedom to wear what we choose and we ought to respect each other's style systems both past and present. And yet, Western fashion ideals are so ingrained in us Kenyans that we still doubt our own ancestral style and histories. In our broader efforts to decenter and decolonize fashion systems, we (Africans?) need to recognize and denormalize Western systems of dress. By highlighting indigenous fashion coding in my own adornment choices and in making them part of daily experience in the virtual community, we remind of the long, diverse, and dynamic systems that were already in place and recenter them in addition to, or in lieu of, dominant Western fashioning.