Paper short abstract:

Popularly, isishweshwe is assumed as indigenous to South Africa given the textile's manufacture in Zwelitsha since 1948. However, its origins are in Lancaster, England. This paper traces isishweshwe’s South Africa seeding and entrenchment from 1948 onwards.

Paper long abstract:

In the popular imagination – locally and beyond – isishweshwe is indigenous to South Africa. This detail is taken as a given because, since 1948, the textile has been manufactured in Zwelitsha township in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. In contemporary South Africa, what is foregrounded is this Eastern Cape detail, grounding the indigeneity and authenticity discourses that surround the textile. Simultaneously, the global and domestic political-economic and racial capitalist dimensions are dismembered and hidden from shweshwe’s story. However, this emphasis tends to ignore the textile’s roots elsewhere. Specifically, as an industrial good, its origins predate the 1948 opening of the Da Gama plant in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Isishweshwe’s industrial origins are in Lancaster’s 19th-century textile industry: the culmination of British imperial penetration and appropriation of India’s artisanal cotton industry. Against the backdrop of Britain’s decimation of the Indian cotton industry, the proposed paper will explore the Manchester-South Africa chapter of this history, recounting the structural dynamics that gave culminated in the much-loved isishweshwe textile’s production in South Africa. It contextualises isishweshwe’s long history against the backdrop of domestic settler colonial dynamics following the Union of South Africa’s formation in 1910 and global imperial relations between Southern Africa and Britain. The paper argues that, domestically, isishweshwe’s industrial seeding in South Africa was a direct consequence of the Union of South Africa’s industrialisation drive, diversifying the economy away from the mining industry’s dominance. These early 20th-century attempts at expanding the country’s manufacturing base intersected with the British textile industry’s search for new textile production sites to maintain a degree of the industry’s global competitiveness amid growing pressures from, among others, Japanese competition. In effect, isishweshwe’s manufacture in South Africa occurred at the intersection of distinct international and domestic political-economic conditions that shweshwe came to be manufactured in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.