Rewriting narratives of the past: A decolonial analysis of clothing, cleanliness and personal hygiene in 19th-century Togoland.

Accounts of colonized peoples have mainly been recorded and written by colonizer groups, and frequently, in languages different from those in which the experiences took place and were lived. These accounts have typically presented distorted views of many formerly colonized peoples because their authors either misunderstood the phenomena they observed or elected to do so for their own purposes. This may have occurred because of the influence of the authors’ personal circumstances, their beliefs and values, their membership in certain groups or the target audiences of their intended works. Because of this, accounts of formerly colonized groups must be deconstructed and reconstructed based on the culture and language through which the experiences were lived. This study does so by attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct the work of Jakob Spieth, a Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) missionary to the Ewe people of present-day Ghana, during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The study employs Fairclough’s approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how Spieth discursively constructed the colonial difference and the Ewe colonial subject during that period. This approach identifies how Spieth wrote from a position of power to describe the social practices of clothing, care of clothing, bathing, and personal hygiene among the Ewes of Ho as predominantly negative and inferior to Euro-Christian standards. To obtain a more accurate understanding of these practices, this research conducted semi-structured interviews with Ewe and Ho cultural and language experts to better understand these Ewe cultural practices during the colonial period. An analysis of the interviews reveals that the people of Ho had complex cultural practices around clothing, care of clothing, bathing, and personal hygiene, which were influenced by a cosmology that considered both the physical (practical, medicinal, and aesthetic) and spiritual functions of these practices in everyday life. Consequently, this study went beyond a mere description of the social practices of the people of Ho during the colonial era by attempting to provide a fuller exposition on the practices from the people’s ‘world-sense’. Finally, the research demonstrated the agentic nature of the nineteenth-century people of Ho by showing how they were able to make choices that benefitted them, even in the context of the colonial encounter. Through this research, the voices of formerly colonized peoples will hopefully be heard by those who attempted to misrepresent them in the past.