Material culture constitutes a marvelous site for documenting community narratives and re-centering women’s voices in the archives. When the community narrative is to highlight the work and voices of Yorùbá female entrepreneurs, then asọòkè is arguably the most fitting material culture for the job.

The strip woven Yorùbá fabric, synonymous with Nigerian ceremonial events and highlighted in popular music videos and Nollywood movies, is a vibrant heritage practice in the 21st century. Central to its survival are the investments of female traders and artisans who bring varying levels of innovation to the fabrics’ age-old designs but whose narratives are silenced in national and global archives.

Indeed, there is a long history of successful, female-led, multi-generational businesses in the asọòkè sector established in Yorùbá cities with extensive trading networks across Africa and its Diasporas. These highly profitable trading networks contribute directly to Nigeria’s lucrative cultural and creative industries, specifically to the country’s apparel sector. The German data research platform Statista projected the same apparel market to reach US$9.23bn in 2024. While the substantial contributions of the asọòkè industry to Nigeria’s economy are apparent, the narratives of the women whose business acumen and creative impulses sustain this profitable industry exist outside of mainstream historical discourse. One reason for this exclusion is that the impressive heritage work underpinning the asọòkè industry occurs in domestic spaces, where business knowledge and artisanal skills are transferred informally through everyday embodied performances and practices.

Scholars across disciplines – from archive theorist Jacques Derrida to the wonderfully accessible historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot and performance studies scholar Diana Taylor – have shown how the esteemed status of written text over embodied practices omits critical groups in the production of archives. The power to separate sources of knowledge and the politics of selection and representation has seen women’s narratives silenced or excluded from official written records. This silencing relegates the significant business contributions of the Yorùbá asọòkè women to spaces described by the literary scholar Sadiya Hartman as “margins of monumental history.” If the women’s voices exist at all, they do so only through scant representations of their fabrics in mainstream archives.

Western museums, where asọòkè are stored as artefacts, are also culpable in these acts of omission. Here, asọòkè comes into its own as a quintessential representation of material objects from exotic communities populated by nameless artists. With a collection of asọòkè dating back over two centuries, the British Museum, for example, has a shortage of provenance on individual networks of Yorùbá female weavers. The rendering anonymous of the creators of African artefacts in museums is well documented. What makes asọòkè distinctive in this regard is that museums acquiring representative samples in the 21st century – when digital technology provides the means to document the object’s journey and provenance – still broadly attribute authorial rights to a general Yorùbá group. Already silenced in mainstream archives, the women whose financial and creative investments sustain this material culture also find themselves systematically omitted from museum archives.

Why women globally are written out of history is not as topical as it once was. We already know, for example, that Western patriarchal practices erased women’s names from archives because many are not documented as individuals with given first and last names but simply as legal partners to husbands. In the case of Yorùbá women, African(ist) postcolonial feminist scholars following Oyeronke Oyewunmi convincingly argued that the masculinisation of the English language effectively erased Yorùbá women’s histories from written records and mainstream archives.

How to reintegrate women’s narratives into national histories and global archives should now be our focus. We could, for instance, focus on spaces where Yorùbá female asọòkè traders transfer business and artisanal skills through everyday practices. If we acknowledge these spaces and the practices they engender as archives in their rights. What lessons might we learn from the material culture they produce? What exceptional cultural memories might we uncover when we trace material object histories through the life stories of their female producers and traders?

These are some of the questions I address in Sanyan Archives: a text and digital repository of cultural memories that draws from the past and is constructed through narratives in the present by a collective of female entrepreneurs ranging in age from 25 to 90 years old. Sanyan is the most prestigious of the strip woven asọòkè fabric, and it is historically produced with threads spun from the cocoons of the now endangered wild anaphe (West African) silkworms. Sanyan, for this archiving project, is both a material culture and a metaphor for the woven narratives of a vibrant but endangered female cultural archive that links the past to the present in seemingly disparate spaces.

Incidentally, I documented the first Sanyan Archives narrative facilitating the procurement of an asọòkè in Lagos for the Brighton Museum and Arts Gallery in England. While searching for multi-generational asọòkè entrepreneurs, a friend introduced me to the exceptionally gorgeous, nonagenarian Mama Ogunmowo. Mama is the oldest contributor to Sanyan Archives, and her daughter would later design a Brighton Museum asọòkè acquisition. Mama’s story is as intriguing as it is beautiful, spanning a range of pivotal historical events and topical issues of the last century. In her narrative, the Anthropocene is not an academic concept but a lived experience. When she started formal education in 1944, for example, the wild anaphe silkworms of Sanyan fabrics flourished in lush green rural spaces now homes to modern dwellers in concrete buildings.

Her story is the history of a nation and the construction of homogenous gender norms. Let us take 1951, the year Mama got married; a popular Yorùbá renaissance movement became a political party about the same time the British oil company Shell-BP discovered and exploited its first 450 barrels of oil from the Niger Delta. One event contradicts the other. The first was a celebrated political independence from British colonial rule; the second started a highly problematic, enduring economic neo-colonisation. By 2021, when Mama celebrated her 90th birthday, the extractive legacy of this multi-layered colonialism was fully embedded in all facets of Nigerian life, including its cultural practices, language use and education. It is a cultural colonialism that continues to reconstruct gender norms, silencing historically grounded narratives of Yorùbá women’s financial autonomy and subsuming complex female identities across the country into simple, linear narratives of economically subjugated “African women” perpetually impoverished and in need of aid. Mama’s life experience stands in stark contrast to this monolithic tale of gendered poverty. Her story – along with the narratives and experiences of other women chronicled in Sanyan Archives – is as vibrant as the rich material culture her successful, multi-generational business produces.

Like all productive community projects, Sanyan Archives is collaborative. Along with the different female contributors to the project, I worked with local artisans, filmmakers and museum curators in the diaspora. A good example is my production of a short film from extensive research material, which I loaned to the Brighton Museum for its celebrated, multi-year “Fashioning Africa” exhibition. The task required both close collaboration with one of the exhibition’s curators as well as a great work relationship with an exceptional filmmaker in Lagos, who not only captured the different creative stages in the production of the Brighton Museum’s asọòkè but also brilliantly edited research lengthy footage. The resulting short film gave a much-needed context to the museum’s “Fashioning Africa, Aso-Oke: A Celebration of Style” display. This successful collaboration with a British museum provided a visual, digital provenance of the asọòkè acquired, reintegrating the voices of female Yorùbá asọòkè entrepreneurs into a Western museum archive.

Sanyan Archives is, however, more about making a new, multimodal community repository of female narratives than it is about the deconstruction of Western archives. The Yorùbá material culture, asọòkè, links the women’s lives, businesses and stories to the socio-economic and political realities of the 21st century. In place of the history of pristine pasts and “traditions,” vibrant threads of asọòkè interconnects narratives of continuous innovation in everyday spaces where complex gendered practices enrich a multi-faceted community and its creative processes in a fast-changing African country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image courtesy of the Sanyan Archives project