Benin dressing in contemporary Nigeria: social change and the crisis of cultural identity

Abstract

Benin dress culture reaches back to antiquity. Such of it as is visible in the archaeological and ethnographic records spans a time frame of no less than six hundred years before 1897. Its forms and patterns have ranged from aesthetic nudity among children and slaves to the very lavish and overpowering heavy regalia of the King (Oba) and the senior nobility. Its contents included beads, clothes, body marks, bangles, anklets, raffia works and a great deal more. It was one of Africa's richest dress cultures. With the experience of colonialism, this came under multiple pressures resulting in moral and social delegitimation and rejection as sources of sin and shame. For the overwhelming majority of the common citizenry who had become Christians and colonial civil servants, and who had all along been structurally denied access to the indigenous dress forms in the first place, there were more than enough reasons to abandon it in preference for what their colonizer offered them and a little later what they could lift from the dress forms of adjacent people within the same panNigerian cultural space. It has been a major form of irony of history. A nationalistic political and intellectual movement that swept across the continent in the fifties and sixties of the last century had sought to take people and their cultures back to roots, to rehabilitate and promote African identities. For the ordinary Benin indigene, in the matter of dressing, there are no roots to return to in the search for identity.