Zingha Foma

My dissertation examines the sophisticated fashion networks that flourished on the Gold Coast before European arrival and demonstrates how these established systems fundamentally shaped European trade interventions from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Through a multi-layered methodological approach that synthesizes Portuguese, French, and English chronicles with archaeological findings, preserved textile fragments, and oral histories collected during extensive fieldwork, I reconstruct complex networks of fashion exchange that reveal how Gold Coast societies maintained autonomous fashion systems while engaging with new trading opportunities. Rather than passive recipients of European influence, coastal African communities actively maintained sophisticated material culture practices that Portuguese traders had to learn, respect, and adapt to within existing trade frameworks.

This research makes three key theoretical interventions that advance our understanding of pre-colonial West African society and early Atlantic encounters. First, I challenge Eurocentric fashion theory by demonstrating how Gold Coast fashion systems operated as sophisticated mechanisms for exercising choice and agency, rather than as static “ethnographic costume.” Second, I reveal how the migration of fashion techniques and styles across West Africa created complex networks of exchange that predated and shaped European trade interventions, particularly through the southward movement of Mande weaving traditions. Third, I advance new understandings of class formation in pre-colonial West Africa by examining how fashion producers—from royal artisans to local craftspeople—maintained distinct social positions through specialized knowledge and royal patronage, even as trading patterns shifted during Portuguese contact and the intensification of the slave trade.