Clonette:
The True History of an African Doll
This is an English translation of an excerpt of the book, originally published in French.
Introduction
I
n the 1950s, during the late days of British colonial rule in Gold Coast, West Africa (now Ghana), a bright, optimistic stranger appeared in the city. Primary school-aged, wearing a crisp, bright-colored pinafore and clutching a rabbit, her large round-eyes and impish smile were framed by permed and neatly coiffed hair; as impervious to the heat as her ankle socks, worn with shiny Mary Janes, were to the dusty red laterite city streets.
Dei Dei
Her name, “Dei Dei,” was pressed in tiny letters at her waist. “Dei Dei,” meaning “first-born,” is a familiar appellation for Ga-Adangme or Ga girls (Ga people, with deeply diverse heritages, predominate in the region of greater Accra, Ghana’s capital and one of Africa’s most important trade and cosmopolitan centers). She would become known as “Aunty Dei Dei” deserving of a title of respect usually reserved for mature women.
Aunty Dei Dei’s status as “first born” has extra significance: She is the first industrially manufactured doll in West Africa and, it can be argued, the African continent. She is the daughter of the era when the legal architecture of political Independence from Britain was conceived, establishing in 1957, the former colonial state of Gold Coast as the republic of Ghana—Africa’s first Independent nation. Ghana’s independence would inspire a toppling of colonial governments across the African continent and, indeed, other colonial states worldwide. Ghana itself is part of this story of firsts: colonized by the Portuguese in the 15th century the former Gold Coast became the site of subSaharan Africa’s first European colony. The subsequent changing of hands between Swedish, Danish and German interests, among others, and eventually the Dutch and British, left a legacy of extraction of wealth, raw materials and intellectual capital. Elmina Castle, built in 1482 on the central coast, is the first colonial structure south of the Sahara.
Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it marks more than four centuries of use as a primary military and bulking station—most significantly as a nexus in the capture of peoples (an estimation of as many as sixty million African lives were lost) who became commodities in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
She is not a doll
T
he thirty-seven year old Kane-Em factory, Ghana’s largest plastics enterprise, is housed in the North Industrial Area of Accra—a sprawling expanse of gritty, sprawling factory compounds and small workshops. An expansive new, modern building adjoins a smaller cement house that was the original Kan-Em plant. Just inside the ornate iron gate is a truck, featuring images of bright, candy-striped plastic children’s balls, a green and orange kettle for Islamic prayer ablutions, and stacks of nesting plastic housewares. Plastics, always a valuable commodity in West Africa, are given an air of novelty at Kan-em. The sharp modern color palette—different from the ubiquitous clear or milky white containers, different from the white enamel bowls, tins, and calabashes, are a product of Ghana and not an expected Asian import. As you enter the main compound, metallic ornaments, and banners celebrating Eid al fitr, are hung in recognition of their large Muslim base of customers. A line of petty traders—mostly women—and wholesalers
with businesses of every size, spill over from the polished, air-conditioned office waiting room to shaded benches under a company canopy. If you are lucky to pass through heavily locked doors leading from the office to executive corridors and eventually the plant floor, you will pass a Buddhist shrine lit with candles. Gobind Wadhwani is the son of Mr. Wadhwani, Kan-em’s owner. Immigrating from Mumbai, he arrived in Accra in 1955, two years before Independence, with the premonition of change already alive. Gobind remembers his first encounter with Aunty Dei Dei. When he arrived, he went to work for an older Indianowned plastics company in Accra, operating a hand-molding machine in blindingly hot factory sheds; producing items from melted plastics, one-byone, then removing the still hot rugged edges with a hand-fashioned and handheld blade. Aunty Dei Dei was originally manufactured as a somewhat costly holiday gift for the women storeowners and smaller scale traders who queued at the factory to purchase wholesale plastic goods.
The Wadhwanis recall that Aunty Dei Dei’s first incarnation was much as the girl we know: wearing a pinafore or school frock, holding a rabbit, and later flowers or a tiny stuffed bear. Then Baby Dei Dei was born. A sixinch exact replica, she was fixed onto the back of her “mother” with yellowing cellophane tape. She hung there in a desultory manner; not at all mirroring the beauty and warmth of Ghanaian women’s carrying of children, tied at their backs in a cloth wrapper. Mr. Wadhwani recalls that Aunty Dei Dei’s design and beauty was contested early on: “One Alhaji saw [Aunty Dei Dei] and immediately declared that she was “useless.” He complained that her legs and arms didn’t bend and she was not inviting to hold. (Many West African Muslims practice a syncretic or sufi form of Islam that does not forbid the making of human images and figures). Others decided that her only remarkable feature was that she was hollow and happily squeaked when she was squeezed.
(The Wadhwani’s had been innovative with her new form. She had previously been manufactured by a metal-plastica company who had fixed the top of her head with a plastic whistle that children could easily remove and had choked on. Gobind had then developed a small metal “lock” at the bottom of the whistle to ensure children’s safety.) The Wadhwanis say Auntie Dei Dei’s design originated in Indian sacred figures, which were usually carved from a single piece of wood or other material, without articulations: her legs and body could not bend. The art of figure making in Ghana, and much of West Africa, is for the large part quite similar; in that way her design is also African. While Aunty Dei Dei never lost her essential form, with the Alhaji’s claim began a slow commercial altering of her visage. A competition was announced to Kan-em customers and traders: Who could best fashion a new Aunty Dei Dei?
***
“Bring me a doll!” had become a familiar, teasing goodbye since the early years of colonialsponsored migration to Europe for training, schooling, or mission work. When a loved one or neighbor would travel abroad, it also expressed a hope for safe return and admiration of the privilege to have “been to” the UK, or Holland, or even the US. More poignantly, it revealed the largely out-of-reach cost and the powerful commodification and love for European dolls, whose long hair and strong human likeness animated features of colonial school and storybooks, commercial images, and a European culture of childhood. Even today in Ghana—as in much of West Africa—where markets are flooded with inexpensive Chinese imports of blond dolls and well-worn European and American cast-offs sold in the second hand market and at tables on the roadside, the power of the Western baby doll is not diminished.
Me broni ba (“My white baby”) is a common affection. “Me broni ba, I love you!” shouted after a well-dressed woman. “Oh, don’t cry, me broni ba!” said to a favored child. “Me broni ba!” a compliment passed to a woman with freshly coiffed AfroEuro-styled hair. *** Though we do not have an image of her actual physical alterations, with Aunty Dei Dei’s future being considered by many, we know that she becomes more of a deliberate metissage; more and more racially or ethnically ambiguous, but no less “African.” She was born on African soil, and in many ways emblemizes Ghanaian woman’s expressions of a unique post-colonial cosmopolitanism (the wearing of a particular style of permed hair or short cut wigs), a decided modernity, a hint of Western savoir faire, African pride in its political future, and the playfulness and desires of the girls and women of her era.
The first Miss Ghana, Miss Monica Amekoafia, crowned in 1957, the year of Independence, might best represent, not just her post-colonial nation’s idealized beauty and comportment, but Aunty Dei Dei herself— unabashedly brown-skinned and thick bodied, representing African ideals. To the extent of certain erasures of her “Africaness”—both symbolic and imaginative, in her hairstyling (which resembles Queen Elizabeth’s) and clothing and cultural references (rabbit, flowers or bear), Aunty Dei Dei also reveals something of colonialism’s far reach and its disquieting power. When asked of African children of the 1950s and 1960s and later, many remember Aunty Dei Dei amidst the household or family compound, or in trader stalls or larger stores at the markets, often appearing at Christmas time. Mostly she is remembered in sentimental or expendable terms: she was a “cheap” but charming knock off of Western aesthetics and English archetypes, or expensive object, depending not so much on social class as family’s class preoccupations and means. Some who could afford her preferred traditional toys—homemade
objects like boats and cars and dolls fashioned imaginatively from natural materials or recycled metals. For some, her bright colors, air of being an import, and the relative expense and status of plastics were an allure. Others argue that she was “colo”—a relic of the culture of colonialism; that she was “not fine” like imported European dolls who could be cuddled and whose hair and dress could be fussed over. Or she is remembered as a simple novelty, something with a short decorative life; or as a funny object that squeaked and could be filled and used as a water gun until it eventually became kicked about and then discarded. Aunty Dei Dei is an African doll with the importance of a ritual power object. She is a girl who at once embodies modernity, prosperity, cosmopolitanism, and the playfulnss and desires of the girls and women of her era—as well as those of women globally, each discovering a narrative. A pleasure. Colorful. Whimsical. At the same time, she is an emblem of colonialism and the disquieting history and violence to African women’s bodies and self-image. What Aunty Dei Dei is, unequivocally,
is a girl with a passport. Few of her lovers internationally know her history. Fewer know that as much as she might not appear so, SHE IS AN AFRICAN GIRL. SHE IS NOT A PLAYTH ING. The art of figure making in Ghana, and much of West Africa, is for the large part quite similar; in that way her design is also African. Aunty Dei Dei’s form, and what is signified of both European and African aesthetics (the English archtypes of the school girl and rabbit--later replaced by a teddy bear or flowers - and African ideals of balance and scale) allowed her to be easily adopted in cosmological practices.
She became commonplace in Akan, Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, and other West African ritual, used to express the yearning for, care, or mourning of a child, or as representative in various cults of twins. For many—whether African elites, the Alhadji at Kan-em, or children wishing for a foreign “baby,” she is a desultory symbol. For Westerners, she has become a colorful, whimsical figure, belonging to no particular place or time—no more than a kind of evocation of something of the near past—a spectre of the daughter of the 1950s Stepford Wife. Auntie Deidei’s charm depends on her bright, sculpted façade; a figure of mystery and yet no individuality, no singular incarnation: something so obverse to African women’s penchant and appreciation for the multiplicity of individual expressions. Aunty Dei Dei became multi-national, exported chiefly to Ghana’s near neighbors, Burkina Faso, Togo, Nigeria, Mali where 60% of her sales are generated. Mr. Gobind Wadhwani recalls with delight seeing her on the streets of Belgium and other European and American and European museum
gift shops, featured in luxury and décor and fashion magazines, on both African and Western movie sets and simple shelves at home. On the web one can find a staggering array of Aunty Dei Dei’s incarnations. For those in the community of Indian and Ghanaian factory owners and workers, who designed and manufactured her, and the African traders who sold her—as well as those who admire her today—she has become a symbol, a kind of muse, too, of a notion of a unique metissage. For Filles du Facteur, she became a muse.