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Cultured States

History professor describes how East African governments proscribed youth cultural expression in the 1960s
April 18, 2011
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By Karen Herland

Source: Concordia Journal

While women were “burning their bras” in North America as symbols of gender oppression, young men in a local youth league in Tanzania were burning wigs as symbols of Western decadence. | Courtesy of Duke University Press
While women were “burning their bras” in North America as symbols of gender oppression, young men in a local youth league in Tanzania were burning wigs as symbols of Western decadence. | Courtesy of Duke University Press

The 1960s saw the civil rights movement hit its stride in the United States, with African-American culture and politics taking the forefront in cities. The expression of urban youth culture in dress, music, and style became markers of political and social engagement under the “Black is beautiful” banner.

Across the Atlantic in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, government efforts to define an authentically African post-colonial culture led to bans on miniskirts and soul music. The transnational meaning of these individual expressions is the subject of a new book.

“People all over the world appropriated and turned to their own ends bits and pieces of globally circulating popular cultures,” says history professor Andrew Ivaska about the impetus for Cultured States: Youth, Gender and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Duke University Press 2011). Ivaska’s research suggests that beyond a simple rejection of Western styles, these cultural debates reflected tensions over urban and rural, notions of modern and traditional, and broader cultural anxieties around gender, generation and wealth.

Ivaska spent seven years of his own childhood in Kenya and became interested in these subjects while doing his doctoral research in African history. He argues that the above tensions reflected a conservative impulse shared between colonial and post-colonial governments. While colonial interests saw cities in Africa as European centres where African populations served as migrant labour, post-colonial governments feared urban centres as potential threats to law and order and challenges to official notions of the modern.

Documenting that many of the reactions and edicts against clothing, hair and musical styles were particularly directed against women, Ivaska underscores that the post-colonial project also became a site for the playing out of anxieties around female financial independence and changing urban economic opportunities. Many of the campaigns about appropriate office dress had as much to do with who should benefit from office jobs as what should be worn in those environments.

Drawing on earlier studies of post-colonial African urban culture, Ivaska offers a fresh take on this period in his focus on the proscriptive side of national cultural policy: “The promotional side, while trumpeted, didn’t go very far and was not really funded. What really generated talk were the bans.” Ivaska concludes that this negative reinforcement had more to do with gendered and generational anxieties around the city than a desire to present cultural pride.

Ultimately, his book presents the challenges and shape of “what it means for the state to be involved at this level of people’s lives.”

Related links:
•   Cultured States
•   Concordia's Department of History



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