Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  I sat with them and watched.

  Iyalaro’s mother came from a family of indigo dyers in Abeokuta, and she was named after a friend her mother admired, who took her as an apprentice when she was seven. She stayed with her namesake until she was fourteen. Later she married and joined her husband in Ibadan, where she trained in another well-known compound of adire dyers. In Yorubaland, guilds and their hierarchies were particularly strong; dyers usually worked in only one medium of design. Iyalaro was unusual because she’d been able to master and work in them all. She became a very significant dyer in Ibadan, specializing in the more unusual cloths, with names like “Four friends who know what to do,” “I will sleep among the children,” and “My wants are satisfied.” “Nobody can see the depth of the ocean” is one of the most elaborate and beautiful designs—it was tied and stitched in great detail and was made only on commission. She became known for this cloth.

  As the years passed, tastes changed, and demand for adire waned; work with indigo began to be thought of as “dirty work.” Once a viable trade, fewer girls came to Iyalaro for apprenticeship. Her own daughter trained as a teacher. By 1992 Iyalaro no longer made adire. By then some felt nostalgia for indigo cloths, and there were efforts, like a weeklong Miss Adire Carnival in 1993, to revive people’s passion for it, but it amounted to only a conventional pageant and fashion show. Its meaning slipped away, except among a small group of intellectuals and collectors. Years later Iyalaro was introduced to Nike, who invited her to teach at the center. Iyalaro, like Nike, began to travel abroad, teaching in museum and university programs on the lost art of indigo dyeing.

  Iyalaro did a demonstration for me, laying out cloths in various stages of production. With chicken feathers and a bowl of cassava paste she sat with her granddaughters painting traditional designs on sheddar. She took me to the compound yard, where indigo pots, painted and decorated with cowries, were set up in a performance space. The pots were dry, but Iyalaro mimed the act of dyeing, and for a moment I felt like I’d landed in a Disneyland for the Yoruba arts. The place felt too aware of itself and an audience.

  Iyalaro and the granddaughters and I could not communicate much. After a while Yinka’s translations seemed obtrusive, and I told her not to bother. I followed Iyalaro’s demonstration politely, no longer quite sure what I wanted, probably just her intense, quiet company. The technique did not really matter to me, because I was too bothered by the staging, by the dry dye pots, and it was after all well documented already. Ulli and Georgina Beier, some important historians and curators, members of the African studies faculty at Ibadan, and a group from the 1980s called Friends of Adire, had all done important work of archiving it for the tribe of the obsessed. I had hoped to touch the way of being of the artist, the cosmological and spiritual world of the dye pot, but I was beginning to realize it was a world I might never enter. And should I enter, the uninitiated, the stranger with time only to look and buy?

  I was glad when the demonstration devolved into lunch and a wordless bonding as Iyalaro and I packed our things to travel together to Ibadan. She put on the clothing of purdah. We shared the front seats of the molue, or minibus, back to the city in quiet comfort. We said good-bye at the bus terminal, and the affection between us was clear. I got no cloth from her. We exchanged no addresses, made no promises, raised no expectations. I wanted only to breathe her air.

  In Ibadan and Abeokuta I had visited some of the famous marketplaces for indigo cloth, like those at Oje and Itoku. Friends who had visited there, even in the early 1990s, had described them as a sea of blue and black and brown skin. Blue cloth was piled high, and indigo adorned most every body, bleeding into everything, sharp in your nose. I read once a NASA finding that indigo light has a wavelength of enough nanometers that it reaches far into space; I imagined that even from space, the cloth markets could be seen as shimmering blue points below. But only a few years later, these markets were full of imported laces and polyesters, sequined and embroidered velvets, and woven sets made of Lurex, jokingly called “Chinese plastic.” They were electric, vulgar, wonderful cloths but the antithesis of the vernacular of blue.

  I’d collected dyers’ names from friends and scholarship on adire and brought the list with me. I decided to go first to one of the more important dyers, Alhaja Ajoke Soetan, who lived in Kemta in Abeokuta. My heart was racing as I neared the compound. I was not sure what I would find. According to the historical record, indigo once dripped everywhere, bled into everything here. Dyers’ houses were said to be built on blue mud. The dye vat was used to color the iyalaros’ houses.

  In an open shed beside the large family house, I could see cloths hanging on a line, but the stink of chemicals told me they were not indigo. At the door of Alhaja’s house I was greeted by a young girl. When I asked if it was her house, she smiled. She slowly swung open the screen door and stepped out, to stand with me and Yinka on the doorstep. It took me a minute to follow her cues. I looked at the white tiles at my feet, dusted with red earth. Alhaja’s name was written on them. I was standing on her grave.

  The women working in the compound were all older, their gray heads closely shorn. They wore long rubber gloves and cloths tied like aprons to protect themselves from the dye. The blue ran to dirty black and left a thick odor. The cloths they dyed had the simple designs you see replicated in every market. It left me broken-hearted and unable to ask the questions I wanted to ask. To thank them for inviting me to look in, I bought a piece of purple cloth with a wax design stenciled with a pattern from stiff polyester lace.

  I went to other dyers on the list and was told of other deaths, in variations of the same scene.

  Adire had always been the domain of women, except for the men who became stencil-cutters. They were responsible for cutting the designs used by the iyalaros, who favored stencil-work­—popular with buyers and less labor intensive. The stencils were cut from the lead linings of European tea chests. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, as styles that relied on stitching became the vogue, men dominated as machine stitchers. Indigo was, for the iyalaros, female traders, and those in some ancillary roles, a means to amass great wealth and even political power, as Nike’s great-grandmother, Ibitola, had done.

  Yoruba women were expected to be financially independent from their husbands. Men covered their wives’ debts but had no control over their profits, which women used to support themselves and their children. They therefore lived under a strict code of both spousal obedience and independence. Indigo wealth had allowed women unprecedented power and autonomy. Indigo adire had once been big money. In 1936, for instance, the dyeing industry brought a quarter of a million pounds into Yorubaland. The colonial government recognized adire as a leading economy, which meant that women, for the first time, made significant inroads with both the colonial and the traditional structures of power. Yoruba indigo was exported as far away as Brazil, and adire cloth was traded rigorously as far as Senegal and Gabon. And adire was simply one of many Yoruba indigo cloths, popular but certainly not the most prestigious or valuable.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the introduction of chemical blues fatally undercut indigo wealth. The Russians had successfully synthesized blues in the eighteenth century, but it was the Germans who introduced synthetic indigo, Indigo Pure BASF, in 1897. Its originator, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer, had spent more than twenty years trying to unlock the science of indigo. For this and other innovations, he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1905. Soon after World War II, the German companies BASF and ICI began to export chemical indigo. The blues were not as deep or tonal as natural indigo, nor was the dye completely fast, but dyers began to use it as an additive to natural indigo to quicken the process. In the 1960s BASF opened for business in Lagos.

  For brief moments, like the era of the Oshogbo movement, some vigor returned to the indigo market. But for a number of reasons, totally organic indigo dyeing soon disappeared. For one thing, the process of indigo dyeing is tedious and slow. Peop
le must gather wild indigo leaves; pound and dry them into balls—up to 150 for a single vat—to set them to ferment and dry; collect ash and process it so that it acts both as a mordant for the cloth and as a solvent for the dye; prepare stencils or cassava paste, to use as a resist; and tie, pleat, fold, hand- or machine-stitch, or hand-draw elaborate designs into the cotton. It all takes many weeks of work. The iyalaros relied on a complex hierarchy to execute it: initiates of Iya Mapo and individual guilds performed specific tasks on specific kinds of adire; young girls, through a system of kinship, apprenticeship, indentureship, and slavery did the base design work. Greater work opportunities for women and access to girls’ education were also contributing to the art’s demise.

  BASF’s history reminded me of Vlisco’s tactics with the Mama Benz. Yoruba women had always expressed a penchant for cosmopolitanism, for the new and modern. Even adire dyers, who seemed to market tradition, embraced rapid innovation and happily adopted new materials and designs. In fact, it was the import of shirting, and later heavy satin and velvet from Europe, that had spurred the adire industry, giving dyers who previously worked on woven hand-spun cotton a smoother, wider palette upon which to experiment.

  And so when a certain Mr. Hoffman from BASF Lagos went to a famous Ibadan dyer, Madame Faderera, with a business proposal, and the two began to travel about, touting the new dyes, people responded excitedly. Madame Faderera was set up as a wholesaler. She organized tie-dye training workshops that anyone could attend, collapsing old hierarchies. At the same time she and BASF Lagos exercised a strict control over supplies and distribution. This step undercut the powerful trade unions of the iyalaros and put a large share of dyers’ profits into male and foreign hands.

  After Oshogbo I decided to leave Nigeria. I felt like I was there only as a collector, a tourist of the past. Talk of a petrol strike was brewing; Lagos was still edgy from a massacre on the day of my arrival. The roads felt like death arcades, with sudden collapsed craters, the hulking skeletons of vehicles burnt in crashes, electricity dancing along the power lines. Signboards erected by the government warned against the dangers of ritual murders and Christian cults. The buses were filled with itinerant evangelists who preached fervently for hours, then become hawkers of medicines. The specter of death was everywhere. But most of all I felt uneasy with myself. Everything was in decay, and I was standing in the midst of it, romantic for the past, with a satchel of loot. Àdùnní’s eyes seemed to reach into me, pointing at my own dislocation. I decided to forgo fabled Ogidi, Nike’s birthplace. I would approach the Hausa dye pits in Kano from the north later, when I journeyed to Niger.

  Eurama would perform faafo the next week—the one-year rite when the soul of the dead is said to cease to roam freely and cross the river into the world of shadows. Eurama would end her public mourning and remove her mourning cloth. I felt pulled to return to Accra, where I was less of a stranger. And I had a special gift for her that I’d bought in Oshogbo: her first pair of blue jeans.

  On the morning I was to leave for the airport, the petrol strike was on. The roads were mostly deserted, and as I sat outside my hosts’ place, a man slipped into the car shed and siphoned gasoline from a neighbor’s Mercedes-Benz. The newspaper, under the headlines about the strike, carried an article about a newly enacted ban on the import of all printed fabrics. Less than one quarter of the factories that were producing cloth in Nigeria a decade earlier were still in operation today. The minister of industry was leading a committee charged with making Nigeria self-sufficient in textile production by 2006. It is a very old story, improbable propagandizing. The truth is that by 2006 Asian imports would nearly eclipse all other sales. And in the remotest parts of West Africa, Chinese agents, speaking not the languages of trade like Hausa or Mandingo but local dialects, would be selling pirated and machine copies, made in more than thirty Chinese factories, of every cloth precious to anyone. The men at Vlisco hoped that it would flatten the road for them to sell beyond their traditional markets, but in truth Dutch sales were down more than 30 percent.

  That morning I sat with my host, Peju, at breakfast, telling her of my sorrow at arriving so late in Ibadan. She laughed and said, “Well, at least you found your family house!”

  I didn’t understand her.

  “Don’t you know that the iyalaro’s home that you visited yesterday was your professor’s grandmother’s place? His grandmother was a great woman, one of the most powerful, wonderful dyers.”

  I couldn’t believe her! He had never told me. The cloth he had given me was only “something he’d collected” on a trip home, he’d said. Was it, like the others that hung in his home, one of her cloths? Why had he withheld this fact from me, even during all those years when my obsession with indigo grew, and as I headed off to his homeland? Was it a willful omission, or an inability to connect to something of his past? I had stood in his grandmother’s compound without knowing that it was hallowed ground, the place that had set my journey flowing.

  I paid a large sum in dollars to my host’s driver to buy petrol to take me to Lagos. As he and I made the almost two-hour-long journey on empty roads, both of us were silent, aware of each other’s anxious desire to reach our homes. I clutched a bag of cloth between my knees, wondering, again, at the folly of my obsession.

  Ten

  Blue Gold and Concubines, Niger

  Niger feels like a land of fire. The temperatures reach well above 107 degrees for much of the year. People move with a silent litheness, as if perpetually crossing something burning. The air has a cracking quality, as does cloth against the skin. Sweat evaporates as if an iron had been touched to it. From Niamey, Niger’s capital, I boarded the twice-weekly bus for the journey north to Agadez, which would take more than a full day, wondering how the body calibrates. But there is a gentleness to the extreme, and you trust and dance into the fire.

  I was traveling this time with four others—Afi, my Jewish-American and Ghanaian friend; another Fulbrighter, Julie, who was studying Ghanaian electoral politics, and Lindsay, an older woman who had lived and worked as a development consultant in the Volta region of Ghana for eight years. We were each on our own desert quest. I was excited to be journeying into L’Aïr Massif, the gateway to the trans-Saharan routes.

  At early dawn, as we set off, a small herd of wild giraffes looked calmly into the window of our bus, which was stalled on the road leaving the city. What great fortune! it seemed.

  Six hours into the journey, we reached Birnin Konni, a small border town just a spit from Nigeria. Along the way I watched the road, weighing the prospect of dipping down to the Kano dye pits on my return to Agadez. The roads were desolate, and there were easier routes through Lagos and Abuja, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make such a long journey through Nigeria’s south. I decided to leave it up to whim, and turned my thoughts to what was ahead, feeling excited and anxious.

  It was August 2000, and we’d arrived at a moment of armistice in the decades-long Tuareg Rebellion raging between the Hausa-dominant south, the seat of government, which controlled profits from uranium mining in the Tuareg-dominated north (Niger is the world’s fourth largest source), and the nomadic Tuareg, who emblemized Niger’s rank at the time as the lowest on the Human Development Index. It was a fight over land rights, political power, and control of precious resources, some lucrative and others dwindling. It was also shadowed by the Tuaregs’ role as conduits and raiders over many centuries in the trans-Saharan slave trade and as agents of the Islamic reform movement. It was difficult for me to read the air, to understand how sharp or how relaxed the tensions might be, but at a stop to refuel, halfway to Agadez, soldiers boarded our bus with semiautomatic rifles. They occupied the front seats and stuck the barrels of their guns out the bus windows, pointed up to the sky, a dramatic flag of defense. For the next twelve hours, on mostly deserted highways, the bus slowed and the soldiers warily inspected every nearing car or truck, every camel laid across the road, before signaling to the driver to continue on
. Someone explained to us that ambushes were common and that camels, wild and domestic, roaming freely, were often rigged with explosives.

  The heat rose, and the air became heavy with vapor. We crossed the moonlike terrain, passing small clusters of tiny adobe homes with miles between them, herds of sheep and goats, an occasional traveler on a loaded donkey, and as always, camels wandering unfettered. Amazingly, after almost thirty hours of motoring, we only just crossed the frontier before L’Aïr Massif, the frontier to the Sahara. These lands had long been plied by caravans headed south to Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Ghana. On these modern routes indigo cloth from the Kotar Mafa pits in Kano is still transported north and west in a vigorous trade with the Tuareg, Bororo, and Wodaabe peoples.

  Our first night in Agadez, we chose a guide purely on instinct, trusting his gentle spirit and desert-aged face. Sidi Mohamed was not yet thirty but the harsh climate had aged him so that he appeared to be middle aged. As he walked us to the outskirts of the city to the Tuareg campement where his mother lived, he moved adeptly as one with space and the land. The next morning we followed him to the camel market to rent an extra steed to his five, for our five-day journey.

  At the tailor shop in the Agedez central market, we ordered typical Tuareg women’s blouses and matching men’s pants, sewn from soft black factory-spun cotton that was embroidered in white, spidery geometries. I was surprised at how cool they felt, creating shade for the body. In a stall next to the tailor shop, I bought a scarf to protect my head and face from the sun and blowing sands. And from a locked glass case at the back of the shop, I purchased a taglemust. The soft gauzy skin of it was wound tight and then wrapped in paper and bound with string, so that it was the size of a large ear of corn. When I opened it, the loose, metallic indigo powder, mixed with goat fat and beaten into the cloth with a wooden paddle by men in Kano who were part of a guild of beaters, sifted into my palms. It smelled rich and loamy, of the vat. As I unwound a stretch of it, it glistened blue-black-purple, and outside in the sun it turned glinty and radiant.