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AFRICAN WAX PRINTS “Guaranteed Dutch Wax Vlisco/Véritable Wax Hollandais Vlisco” printed on the cloth’s selvedge. These signs mark the fabric as authentic according to the legal regimes that underpin the ideas of originality and brand ownership. But on the ground, attitudes towards authenticity are quite different.
Consumer standards and attitudes In my research in Lomé (Togo), once the largest textile market for Dutch wax prints in West Africa, I found that consumer evaluations of copies rarely match legal evaluations. Copies are technically pirates according to International Property law. But to buyers they can be both authentic and inauthentic, real and fake. As anthropologist Elizabeth Vann notes in her work on Vietnamese real-fake goods, the categories of brand ownership and the intellectual property rules that uphold them cannot be taken for granted everywhere. Just like consumers of the global North, Togolese desire affordable goods and willingly buy copies and counterfeits. Some copies have become investment pieces that generate sensations of desire and pride and necessitate cultural expertise to successfully choose and purchase. Others, however, are considered faux or bad and are not valued as highly. Good copies do not
betray consumers, whereas bad or fake copies have the power to expose the unsavvy. Instead of relying on labels and techno-signs of authenticity as per the Vlisco style guide, Togolese turn to the cloth’s material properties to establish its worth. Value is ascribed through the senses, by touching, smelling or even tasting the cloth. Hitarget has become especially popular among younger consumers due to its affordability and high-quality thread count, colour palette, and design precision. Expert fashionistas can distinguish Hitarget from Vlisco by mere sight. Some even consider Hitarget to be “better” than the “authentic” print. Even more amazing is the fact that Hitarget has recently also fallen victim to counterfeiting, making the distinction between real copies and real-fake even more challenging. In Togo, societal norms of ascribing value to fakes and copies are at odds with global regulatory regimes that are based on a specific proprietary relationship between authorship and ownership.
Roots of intellectual property In a world where most things are produced with some level of human collaboration, intellectual property law inevitably raises complex questions about what constitutes “authorship” and “invention”. Intellectual property law essentially manages the slippery tension between private ownership
and the public domain – the “commons”. It does this by granting temporary private ownership rights for a fixed term, after which the rights fall back into the public domain. Copyrights, patents and trademarks – the basic tools of intellectual property law – are firmly rooted in 18th-century liberal thought. Rights were created to manage the conversion of ideas into property – with accompanying rights that could be protected, licensed, and ultimately turned into money. Not surprisingly, to secure financial returns corporations push for extended rights of intellectual property so that their inventions, words and trademarks can be asserted and licensed as legal rights. It is in this way that they are converted into profits in competitive global markets. They may also, as Vlisco did, create new markers of authenticity so that their intellectual property claims are recognised by consumers. The historical twists and turns in the European and Chinese reproduction of African print cloth challenges the very idea and practice of intellectual property rights. After all, who legitimately creates and who illegitimately appropriates? ❑ Author: Nina Sylvanus, assistant professor of anthropology, Northeastern University (This article was originally published on The Conversation)
Lome, Togo was once the biggest textile market for Dutch wax prints. (Photo: Denis Vermeirre)
AFRICA AND MIDDLE EAST TEXTILES ISSUE TWO 2016
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