Systems of Slavery and White Supremacy

Slavery was a designed system that expanded into a mechanized and colonial tool of European empires. The proliferation of design products marketed to Africans on the continent, such as the Dutch wax prints of the company now known as Vlisco, have their origins in the Netherlands’ imperial presence in Indonesia. These Dutch wax fabrics proliferated mainly in West Africa in countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. In parallel in the East African countries Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, local African designers created Kanga–a community authored cloth garment that speaks cultural norms through distinctive patterns and Swahili phrases typeset in Arabic and Latin Alphabets.

The Kanga’s high-quality cloth was printed with resist, block, or hand-painted African visual language on bolts of fabric steam milled in Massachusetts made from white cotton picked in the Carolinas. The enslaved Africans in the insidious Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade labored to produce the cotton as a commodity sold back to Africans in a system designed to enslave black bodies.