What a great choice of colourful fabrics! We'd both decided to have clothes made in local style, and as Anne is a seamstress by trade, she offered to make dresses for us. Cotton cloth in a huge range of traditional and modern patterns is abundant, some made here in Cameroon and some from Nigeria.
You buy a fixed length of 6 metres, and that's enough for a blouse, long skirt and headscarf. Anne brought us a big magazine with Hello-style photos - including a "Big babes" section! We could design what style we wanted, and she measured us and made up our frocks in a day or so. We're looking forward to showing them off at the Santa council meeting on Friday - a surprise for our hosts!
As we'd expected, most people do dress formally for work. The professional women I've met usually wear traditional or modern dress and jacket outfits; men wear traditional or suits, or just smart shirt over trousers. Traditional men's wear is a long tunic/coat over matching trousers, and a hat - looks great, very colourful.
Flipflops and thong sandals are amazingly popular, considering the state of the roads we all have to walk along. Men's shoes are really pointy but their feet look quite wide to me, as people go barefoot so much. I wonder, do they get bunions?
Lots of people wear western-style clothes, some new but there's a massive market for second-hand clothes. I gather they come from those so-called "charity collections" bags that people are always leaving on my doorstep. Companies collect our free cast-offs, bale them up and ship them to Africa, where local entrepreneurs buy them and sell them in markets and roadside stalls. So you see people in Tshirts advertising Bradford and Bingley!
5 comments:
I've heard that about the charity collection bags before too. I've heard quite negative things - that it's bad for the local clothes industry. Are you seeing that at all? Are the second hand clothes discouraging people from wearing locally made traditional dress?
I see what you mean about the shoes, that black pair on the top row in the photograph look painful even for feet used to wearing shoes.
Ax
(Stereophonics today!)
See now sis, this song is debatable. It was sung by loads of people before Stereophonics. Mum may be referring to the Rod Steward version or Chris Farlowe who sung the original :P
All those shoes look painful, the outfits sound lovely though. When your back and I come visit you will have to model it for me!
All that fabric - sounds like a patchworker's heaven!
I think many people want to wear western style clothes a lot of the time. after all, you two wouldn't want to wear same as mum would you? they have the same influences of popular culture, jeans, Tshirts, tight leggings, short skirts, and the whole global culture is bound to overwhelm ethnic clothing. at least they still have good seamstresses able to make up your own design!
I love so many of these cotton prints, or the polyester cotton prints - especially the floral ones - I have several plain 'patio dresses' made from these fabrics that I wear everywhere - easy to dress them up or down with various wraps or jackets, purses, and shoes - Loves these florals. Maggie
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