African Fabric/Dutch Wax

Dutch Wax

(Inspired by an article on Slate)

Dutch Wax, batik, and African print. There are many ways to describe the designs you see above, as long as you don't refer to them as tribal, because my goodness that's racist. Though the fabric is generally associated with African culture, its history is more complex than you would think.

Let's travel back to the 18th century. In the Dutch East Indies, the Indonesians decorated their fabrics by using a wax-resist technique called batik. In batik, designs are created through a layering process. First, a fabric is dyed a solid color. Then, wax is painted on certain areas of the fabric to protect the color from being changed in the next dyeing cycle. The fabric goes through a number of cycles until the design is complete.

When the imperialistic Dutch saw the locals performing this technique, they thought, "What can we do to recreate this fabric in a factory and then sell it at a cheaper price to locals, completely undermining their local market?" Of course I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, but you get my gist. It took some time, but at the end of the 19th century, factory batik was created.

However, the Dutch's plan didn't quite work. The mechanical process added crackles to the material, which did not appeal to the batik purists of the West Indies. So, they decided to bring the fabric to a new market, West Africa.

Beforehand, the Dutch had sent some West African men to fill their armies up in the West Indies. The men that the Dutch enlisted supposedly took an interest in the fabric and brought it home to their families. When the machine-made fabric became available, the West Africans embraced it wholeheartedly. Dutch wax became a sign of status in West Africa. Patterns were developed and named in line with local traditions, weaving the fabric into the sense of national identity (see what I did there?)

Where does this fabric stand today? In the Western world it has become quite popular in fashion lately, under the label of "tribal pattern." In West Africa, it is viewed as "cosmopolitan," and often Africans will buy fabric from European companies instead of African ones because it's seen as higher class. What irony. To add further complication, Chinese companies have started developing their own mimicry of Dutch wax designs, which are starting to take over the market. 

To summarize, what we call "African print" is an Indonesian dye technique, stolen by the Dutch, peddled to West Africans, and then stolen again by the Chinese. 

We really do live in a global society.