Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  Until the end of World War I, when inland motor travel increased, lone or small bands of traders cycled on heavily loaded bicycles forty to fifty miles a day to area markets trading indigo. Head porters, paid by the piece, carried spine-twisting loads on twenty-five-to-thirty-day walks to Accra and Tamale from towns like Ilorin in southwestern Nigeria. Indigo had been the backbone of Ghana’s northern economy, over time opening avenues for trade in more modern goods like inexpensive, foreign-manufactured electronics. In 1969 an Alien Compliance Act—a punitive law instituted to protect Ghanaian labor interests—forced 200,000 foreign nationals to leave Ghana in two weeks. Yoruba traders and their families were the majority expelled forcibly, leaving everything behind. The depleted landscape through which we drove still bore witness to the resulting economic collapse. When the bus stopped en route, I surveyed cheap polyester and cotton cloths hanging in shops where indigo and other Yoruba cloths would have been sold.

  We eventually stopped in the city of Salaga for petrol, and I peered into the darkness at the quiet city. For centuries this trade hub had joined markets in Yendi, Mole, and Wa, to the east and west, with those as far as Burkina Faso and probably most notably Nigeria’s Hausaland. Salaga had been an epicenter of the transatlantic and Saharan slave trades, and the town was rich with reminders: sites of slave markets, the royal palace where the trade was controlled, baths and a sacred tree and other markers where rituals and customs were performed. The trade routes from Salaga to Kano, in northern Nigeria, were among the most important in the early nineteenth century. Kano, the source of the taglemust, is one of the oldest and most lucrative indigo dyeing centers in the world and one of the few remaining places where the ancient practices of dyeing are still maintained, though there is daily threat to its collapse.

  Tonight the darkness placed a webby veil over what remained of that history, revealing only the bright citadel of the Mobil station and strangers like us, passing on. I tried to quell my hopes of experiencing much more than a tour of history. Would the journey lead me to dyers, to the treasures of old fabled cloths? At times I was no longer sure what I sought. Cloth, certainly, but also something far less tangible: a will to keep a fine blue light, always out of reach, alive in my eye.

  The morning after Kati and I arrived in Bobo-Dioulasso, a city one hundred miles southwest of Ouagadougou, on narrow, deeply pitted roads, we rose early and set off walking, guided by the minaret of the ancient adobe mosque, its dark-sticks foundation poking through the whitewashed adobe like many wonderful high-tuned antennae. As we walked, we saw blue wrappers peeking from under hemlines of boubous, light blue damask dresses with indigo bled into the bottom quarter of the hem, and I was bursting with excitement. Eurama’s spirit reached my ear, whispering, “Are these the Beautiful Ones? Don’t rush!” I tried to slow my heart, to calm the voyeur’s eye that I fixed on the women’s underskirts, taking measured steps beside Kati as we played a game of “I Spy,” peering coyly into the gates of compounds as people alighted and disappeared along the road.

  At one house, a man stood propping open a green metal door, surveying the street. Behind him a young girl stood with a bucket of water on her head. Her back was to us, and she was talking to someone, gesturing with her free hand, until she turned and walked out of our frame. A skein of inky blue threads hung in her place on a tree branch, a clay dye pot planted where her feet had been.

  Just inside the gate we met Madame Harouna, a bent-over doyenne with a sorceress’s hands colored blue to her wrists. She quickly retreated to her house, where she traded her stained work clothing for a blue-and-gold-satin scarf tied tightly on her head, covered with a white lace miafi that fell over the shoulders of a purple and green tie-dyed-damask dress. I could see right away that she was a mischief-maker. She seemed amused by our visit, by my wild, obvious thirst, by the frenzy in the young men in the yard. Her son, eager to show us the ground loom on which he worked, was weaving a cover from threads dyed in three shades of indigo that were stretched many feet across the compound. The others sat idle until they found reason to jump hungrily to negotiate the Wangara she spoke and our poor French, acting as go-betweens. We couldn’t express much, so exhausting was the jostling, the translations. Finally she grasped my hand with her aged blue palm and led me to her dye pots, stooping to stir them, allowing the dye to trickle onto her finger and then tasting it with a chef’s scrutiny.

  I peered into the pot at a treacly, pungent blue bath of rainwater and ash, urine, and tiny fermented leaves. I wanted to throw myself in.

  It was not the first time I’d encountered an indigo dye pot.

  “A crazy idea—a North American dye pit,” my professor had said in his offhanded way when I had told him I had a bowl of the pounded and dried leaves of Ibadan indigo in my kitchen. I wanted to try to make a dye vat, knowing that because I was not an initiate in the tricky science and cosmology, it would fail as anything more than a place to dream.

  I had just returned from an artist’s indigo studio in St. Helena in the South Carolina Sea Islands. A South Carolina poet had told me about it when I’d talked about wanting to write about indigo at a conference we attended. The studio was run by a woman, Arianne King Comer, a native of Detroit. Arianne had traveled to Turkey and parts of Asia to study natural dyes and eventually traveled to Yorubaland. She had become obsessed with indigo and made the connection with the indigo plantations in the South Carolina Sea Islands that her ancestors had worked on. She had set up a studio there and brought over some Yoruba dyers to restore the African connection to an American legacy.

  At Arianne’s, I found three red clay pots filled with indigofera dye from Ibadan, steeped in the laterite earth behind her studio. With the red dirt, the water tanks, the low cement house with plantain growing in the yard, the birds and dogs wandering in and out of rooms, it could have been Nigeria. I stayed for a few days, lucky to arrive when one of the vats was matured for dying.

  With a few yards of white cotton cloth, I entered the dye pot’s magic. The first time the cloth was submerged below the thick, foamy, oily head of the bath and then quickly released, it emerged a thin, dirty yellow. The color was so weak that I imagined it spoiled, but as I shook it in the air, the yellow darkened and changed cast. With each submersion and each infusion of oxygen, the cloth transformed from the yellow hues of skin through a spectrum of greens into watery blues that progressively deepened. The skein of threads hanging on the branches of the tree shading us, bleeding blue into the earth, were as dark as the Yoruba indigo I had at home.

  Here at Madame Harouna’s, for the first time the dye pot was not academic. It felt familiar. And it felt holy, like a shrine. I was content to just be there, without asking what cloth, what use, what meaning or history, simply knowing the place in my senses.

  The dye pot was aging, she had told me. The color she could achieve was weakening. She would not start a new dye pot again until she’d amassed more orders. There was little demand for indigo, and the work was consuming. Her children did not share the passion. There was little I could do there but look and feel.

  The young men had drawn back from me, but I could see them calculating my gaze at a lovely woven wrapper—three dark shades of indigo joined by white bands—that they’d hung on a branch of the tree. Of course I would buy it.

  When Kati and I left Madame Harouna’s with the wrapper, and her address tucked in my bag, I was eager to resume our playful hunt. There was much more to discover, I was sure. But as soon as we stepped through the gate we could feel the mood on the street had changed. We saw a large crowd of young people moving toward the house. We could feel the tension in their bodies, a kind of contained frenzy, until—in a moment—they broke into a run, coming at us like frightened deer.

  Madame Harouna’s gate had latched behind us. We pushed and pounded, and by the time the hollow echo of our hands on the iron summoned her, men who looked like ordinary citizens with thick rubber crops were chasing the crowd. She opened the gate, hurried us into her
yard and slammed it shut. I didn’t understand why she was laughing as she led us to the latrine at the side of the compound. Doubling as a bathing place, it was a roofless adobe closet with a small stinking pit at the center, set with a porcelain toilet cover over which you squatted. The smell of feces vaporizing in the 104-degree heat was overwhelming.

  The ground at the edges of the latrine was sloped, and the mud wall had eroded and broken away so you could easily peer over it unseen. In spite of the smell it was a perfect lookout point. She motioned to us to watch the crowd advancing along the road. The men descended on them, the slap of their crops setting them running again.

  “Mort,” Madame Harouna choked.

  Someone had just died? Were others going to die with them? Were we in danger? I felt my bowels slip. Madame Harouna was still laughing.

  By now the crowd was wheeling back, recircling, and people were jeering as it grew. Some made playful taunts. I noticed then that there were many small children among them, squealing with excitement.

  Her son explained over the wall that a funeral procession was assembling. One of the masqueraders, an old master from an important secret society, had died. Young people were losing respect for the masquerade, the son explained, and the beatings were meant to reinstill respect for its seriousness and power.

  “When they bury the man, you will see the finest indigo!” he said.

  For now, there was no sign of masks, no indigo, only the men with crops and boys with slingshots, and crowds of young men and women in jeans making sport on the road.

  We stayed at Madame Harouna’s until the streets quieted. Later that evening, as the sun was setting, I walked from the mosque, toward our host’s house, and wondered about my remove from everything. Kati and I had discovered little of what the morning promised. No other dyers, no funeral procession, none of the treasures we sought. Just a lovely, sleepy town that featured a well-stocked library, a shop selling fresh-made gelato, and a cinema that regularly screened not the usual fare of popular grade-B movies but African art house films. We stood in the streets looking simultaneously at things ancient and avant-garde, expecting our desires might finally be met, but what we both hoped to discover still felt so out of reach.

  “Is indigo really to be found?” I asked Kati.

  “You will find it! But it is left for you to answer if indigo is a cloth or a lesson in life’s mysteries discovered from a latrine,” she giggled. “For me, I have found the rarest, the most beautiful beads. I keep some for my collection, but I put many one by one into a string for someone to wear, for my mother-in-law to add to someone’s ceremonial this and that, or to give out to a visitor—someone like you, whose spirit for this world is strong. For me it is not the accumulation of the beads, it is the accumulation of so much history with others, a marking of passages, so much shared. It’s not the beads but the life they represent that accumulates on a fantastic strand! But don’t mistake me-o! I also like fine-fine things!”

  “Ehhhhh-heeee!” she said. “Now decide!” We had turned a corner, and I had not been looking, but before us was a woman sitting on a mat in front of a house. Her legs were outstretched, her braided hair was uncovered, gold jewelry glinted from her ears and neck, and she wore a crisp pinstripe blouse and indigo ikat—one tied at her waist, one over her shoulder in the fashion of younger women. Beside her were two small girls, their necks freshly powdered after their evening bath, adorned only in gold earrings, amulets at the infant’s wrists, and strands of tiny white waist beads.

  It was Baule cloth from Ivory Coast, I knew, recognizing the elaborate ikat designs with stark blue and white contrasts and touches of bright reds and greens and yellows. The indigo came from the legendary Dioula dyers from more northern reaches—famous also for weaving, as Koranic scholars, and as long-distance traders—who tie-dyed the threads used in the blue warp.

  I stopped, calculating in my head, and out loud with Kati, if I should approach her. All the while Eurama chided in my ear, “Catherine, don’t disgrace yourself!?” Just then it began to pour violently. Everyone scrambled for cover, and Kati and I found ourselves being led by the woman into a bedroom, where we sat in total darkness, cozy among stacks of dowry pots, trunks, and clutter, amid the bodies of others we could not make out. The rain fell for a long time before someone entered with a kerosene lamp, and everyone loosened into conversation.

  I asked the woman about her cloth. She shrugged, uninterested. Then one of the men in the room—always, because they were first to be schooled, our French-speaking emissaries—calculating, in the way I was calculating, a coup of some sort—prompted her. “You want to buy this,” he said. It was not a question. The man left, came back, and left again after speaking to her in Wangara. Then came a phone call and a message.

  Someone’s sister who lived in town had purchased some of the cloth on credit. The finer pieces were expensive commissions, but she could no longer pay the woman it belonged to, who would be coming from Abidjan again that month. That someone was Sophie; she could be found selling fish in the night market.

  I thanked them for the tip, and Kati and I went back to our host’s house in the slowing rain and encroaching darkness.

  I left Kati at a pito bar, a place that served local millet beer, near the house, and rode with our host’s son, Aziz, on a motorbike through muddy pot-holed streets, from one spot to the next in search of the fish seller Sophie. We finally found her stand, but she had gone home; there was no market in the rain. Another young woman had taken over; we were shown the path to Sophie’s house.

  Sophie greeted me with amusement and went to bathe, returning in an indigo boubou for the occasion. The cloth would cost twenty-three CFA francs, quite a lot, of course, she said, but it was not there with her—it was at her sister’s house. We waited while she carefully arranged her hair and summoned another bike; then we rode back to her spot in the market to wait for her and preserve Aziz’s last bit of petrol.

  Sophie retrieved a key from under the tray that she sold her fish from. She collected my money, then rode off, leaving me with Aziz there at the roadside long enough that I felt like we’d been fooled.

  Kati’s words echoed. Was it the cloth or the experiences that were really what was precious?

  Later, at the pito bar, under the spell of the rain and four balafons—long resonating instruments like xylophones with calabashes strung on their undersides—I shared one of the wrappers with Kati like spoils of war while Aziz grumbled about the price of the cloth, that it was not at all fine. No, it was not as fine as the first cloth, but it was still lovely somehow, with a softness and the rich color of fading blue-black denim. We bought the dancers a calabash of drink in celebration of a day of riches. They moved furiously in a fierce birdlike dance, until they became entranced and seemed near to lifting from the ground. We let the slow drizzle soak us until the band broke for the night. Then we walked home and dragged our mattresses outside to sleep under the metal awning and a quarter moon.

  Someone pulled a TV outside, and it whirred to life. Others gathered to watch the French news broadcast. Ouagadougou was wracked with protests and car burnings after a failed inquiry into a journalist’s death. We were heading back to Ouagadougou the next day to rest and buy the things needed to begin the long journey home. We’d journeyed for thirty-two hours from Accra and now had the return journey ahead of us. It made little sense, to come so far and never stay long enough to do more than dance along the world’s surface. What could I really know of indigo? What could I know about anything? But as I lay on the edge of sleep, I felt content somehow for the first time. Kati’s question had offered me clarity.

  I heard the slap of leather slippers on the hard earth, the clank of iron, the sound of someone’s retreat. Then the whirring of a fan began, blowing air across our bodies. The air blew too cold, and yet without the fan the air was stifling. Kati and I reached for our indigo wrappers to cover our bodies. What wonderful decadence!

  Five

  The Ch
anel of Africa, Ghana

  The Ghana Textiles Printing (GTP) plant is housed in a building of Dutch modern design, erected from imported steel and concrete by Vlisco, its parent company in the Netherlands. It is a modest building, yet it is grand relative to most of the other industrial compounds of Tema, a port city sixteen miles west of Accra that grew up around a man-made harbor built in the 1960s in the optimism of the early years of independence.

  I decided to visit the plant to try to learn more about wax cloth and the Dutch relationship to indigo.

  Eurama and I sat on cool cement benches at the factory entrance alongside men policing a sophisticated security gate. It was her first venture out since Mr. Ghilchreist’s burial. She had been reluctant to journey out but was relieved to escape the house and so many watchful neighbors. She dressed in her plainest, most staid black kaba, but when we sat down, she exchanged her simple, well-worn slippers for black sequined ones and powdered her face. European men hurried past in slacks and crisp white shirts, their faces ruddy, sometimes blistered from the sun and heat. Ghanaian men emerged from a doorway, refastening their company-issued overalls after being searched, and the speed and tension in their exits reminded me of Richard Wright’s chronicles of the gold mines in Black Power, his odd tome of what he called “reactions” to Ghana at the moment of independence.

  It seemed to me that cloth would be difficult to boost; any amount less than the six yards required for kaba and slit, or a man’s traditional togalike attire, would have no real value and was akin to having a pocket of torn bills. I later learned that Dutch technical knowhow was what was most carefully guarded, and that cloth designs too were protected with the fierceness of European couture houses. A tiny swatch or a digital file was all that was required to rapidly reproduce cloths in other African or Chinese or Indian factories, whose agents would then flood the African markets with cheap imitations.