The "African Print" Hoax: Machine Produced Textiles Jeopardize African Print Authenticity (Report)

In the commercial parlance, African print is a general term employed by the European textile firms in Africa to identify fabrics which are machine-printed using wax resins and dyes in order to achieve batik effect on both sides of the cloth, and a term for those imitating or achieving a resemblance of the wax type effects. They bear names such as abada, Ankara, Real English Wax, Veritable Java Print, Guaranteed Dutch Java Hollandis, Uniwax, ukpo and chitenge. Using the term 'African Print' for all the brand names mentioned above is only acceptable to its producers and marketers, but to a critical mind, the term is a misnomer and therefore suspicious because its origin and most of its design characteristics are not African. Hence, Jefferson (1974:95) disregarded the prints as authentically African, but rather European "African Cloths", however, there has been no account made on why these cloths are neither African cloths, nor African prints. As the design content has been in contention, attempts to redress the situation started a while ago. For example, Littrell provided a blue-print on how to improve it. She called for the viewpoints of designers, distributors, sellers and consumers so that their ideas could be conceptualized as motifs for creating a possible new design order (Littrell 1977). Hence I will focus on some Nigerian universities and colleges with art departments and has incorporated African print designing and its studio production into their curriculum from the 1970's. In a cursory examination of fabric designs representing two reputable art departments, studentdesigners from the departments sheepishly adopted the design format associated with the European and Asian textile firms (the works will be shown later). The way forward here is the consideration of another possible design blue-print, is the focus of this paper, although production technique is not in contention, hence least discussed in this paper.