Strips, Stripes, and Spinning Machines: French Colonial Policies and West African Weaving

In the Soudan Français (today Mali), cotton threads were intertwined with the policies that motivated and maintained French power in West Africa. The promise of cotton cultivation for French factories, and of a closed market for the products of those factories, brought textiles to the center of the colonial system in this colony. While the economic and political elements of the French colonial cotton regime in West Africa have been the subject of thorough research, the objects at its center—textiles and the tools used to make them—have not received similar attention. This paper focuses on these objects and in particular it examines the loom that has for centuries been used to create the region’s distinctive textiles, made of narrow strips stitched together. I document the apparent obsession of numerous French administrators and observers with the strip or horizontal loom, an essential characteristic of the production and the style of West Africa’s textiles. The loom appears frequently as a representation of both the fascinatingly exotic cultures of Greater France, and as emblems of the urgent need to transform these cultures through association with the French metropole. Indeed, through this technology we can discern the French administration’s unsuccessful struggle to reconcile inherent contradictions that defined colonial policy and goals, which aimed to both “improve” the weaving and dress practices of these subjects while also preserving their unchanging authenticity.