Wearing the Ghanaian border : Performing borders through the National Friday Wear programme

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Wearing the Ghanaian border: performing borders

through the National Friday Wear programme

Linn Axelsson

To cite this article: Linn Axelsson (2021): Wearing the Ghanaian border: performing borders through the National Friday Wear programme, Space and Polity, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2021.1879635

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2021.1879635

Published online: 07 Mar 2021.

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Wearing the Ghanaian border: performing borders through

the National Friday Wear programme

Linn Axelsson

Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulateﬂows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme– a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inﬂow, of foreign textiles – the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 26 June 2020 Accepted 18 January 2021

KEYWORDS

Borders; bodies; dress; Ghana

Introduction

In the now classic text Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness, Anssi Paasi (1996) placed the construction of territorial units and their boundaries in the wider context of nation-building. The borders of the nation, Paasi argued, are produced through a range of representational practices and performances far from the territorial boundary itself. In addition to being central to the production of territory and nation, this paper suggests, cultural and political strategies that appeal to national identity and citizenship

can be used in an instrumental way in the actual practice of regulating ﬂows across

borders. In this process, the paper further argues, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents (Smith et al.,2016).

As such, this paper speaks to wider debates about the growing spatial ambiguity of borders, which are now seen as both externalized and networked throughout society (e.g. Bialasiewicz,2012; Mountz,2011; Yuval-Davis et al.,2018). The increasing use of a wide range of so-called smart-border technologies has been central to these debates. Indeed, a growing group of scholars argue that biometric technologies, body scans,

and data-mining– a risk management technology that analyses the degree of riskiness

of individual bodies through their associations – (e.g. Aas, 2006; Amoore, 2006;

Amoore & Hall, 2009; Epstein, 2007; van der Ploeg, 1999a) embed borders in human

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

CONTACT Linn Axelsson linn.axelsson@humangeo.su.se Department of Human Geography, Stockholm Uni-versity, Stockholm SE-106 91, Sweden

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bodies and transform them into mobile sites of border control (e.g. Amoore, 2006). Rather than a technologically assisted smart-border that is carried in human bodies

(Amoore, 2006; Popescu, 2012; Weber, 2006), the border that is the focus of this

paper, as suggested above, is one that is wrapped up with notions of nation, identity and belonging, and which is displayed to the world when worn on citizen bodies. By highlighting the agential potential of the citizen bodies on which borders are displayed,

the case presented in this paper also introduces a new ‘borderworker’ to the rapidly

expanding list of actors, including, for example, higher education institutions, employers and airlines, that currently perform borders on behalf of the state (e.g. Lahav & Guirau-don,2000; Rumford,2008; Yuval-Davis et al.,2018).

In order to develop this argument, I draw on the National Friday Wear programme– a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage civil servants and other white-collar workers to dress on Fridays in clothes made from domestically produced textiles in an attempt to revitalize the local textile and garment industry and construct a sense of national pride in Ghanaian consumers (Ministry of Trade and Industry,2004,2005,

2009).1 The National Friday Wear programme was one of several strategies that were

developed in Ghana in response to the increasing inflow of foreign textiles, primarily of Chinese origin, across Ghana’s borders. This inflow is widely considered a threat to the survival of Ghanaian textile producers (Axelsson,2012). If successful, this strategy would reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles to Ghana without impeding the free trade agenda. Thus, while rooted in nationalist rheto-ric, the primary purpose of the National Friday Wear campaign, I would argue, was not to address a national identity crisis but rather a crisis of controllingflows of foreign tex-tiles into Ghanaian territory. Indeed, as this paper will illustrate, despite being a cultural and political, as opposed to a legal, manifestation, the borders that the National Friday Wear programme sought to enforce were in fact the territorial borders of the nation-state. The paper consequently follows what is perhaps a somewhat less well trodden path in border scholarship; one that seeks to bring a diverse understanding of inclusion and exclusion into the analysis of contemporary borders while not overlooking the deeply territorial nature of socially and culturally produced ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ (Donnan & Wilson, 1999; Jones, 2009; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Newman & Paasi, 1998; Paasi,1996; van Houtum,2005). It also suggests a need to qualify the claim that borders are spatially reconfigured to restrict the mobility of certain threatening people, while, at the same time, facilitating the global mobility of products. Rather, foreign pro-ducts, this paper suggests, may also be placed at the centre of the processes that discrimi-nate between trusted and threateningflows and that impose restrictions on the latter.

In what follows, I draw on a range of documentary evidence to outline how the National Friday Wear programme produced bodies that were at once spaces upon which borders were inscribed and actors that performed borders on behalf of the Gha-naian nation-state. These include the Ghana Trade Policy 2004, the Trade Sector Support Programme 2006-2010, the Government of Ghana’s budget statements for the years 2004-2009, and a variety of documents relating speciﬁcally to the national launch and several regional launches of the National Friday Wear programme: keynote addresses held by representatives for the government body in charge of the

cam-paign– the Ministry of Trade and Industry – documents outlining the structure of the

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A collection of articles about the programme from Ghanaian newspapers was also included in the sample. Throughout the rest of the paper, I combine insights from critical

border studies and scholarship on dress and adornment to analyse, ﬁrst, how the

National Friday Wear programme embedded borders in textiles and constructed citizen bodies as geopolitical spaces upon which the message of the state could be dis-played. I then turn the attention to how the National Friday Wear programme enrolled citizen bodies to perform borders throughout Ghanaian society by constructing unity through dress, projecting symbolic values embedded in Ghanaian textiles, and reprodu-cing norms about‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of dressing citizen bodies. In this way, borders are transported right into the heart of political space so that they, in much the same way as has already been suggested in the growing literature on the increasing spatial ambigu-ity of borders, may be enforced in ways that defy any taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between state, territory and border.

First, however, I try to show what an approach to contemporary bordering processes that takes seriously the agential potential of human bodies in producing spatially ambig-uous borders may look like. Following that, I explain how a cultural and political strategy that appeals to national identity and citizenship actually may serve the purpose of pro-tecting Ghanaian territory from the inﬂow of China-made textiles.

The body as borderworker

Over the last couple of decades, there has been renewed interest in the spatiality of borders. An increasingly sprawling body of literature in political geography and related disciplines has demonstrated that borders are now enforced in spaces within and beyond state terri-tories (e.g. Bialasiewicz,2012; Coleman,2007; Martin,2012; Mountz,2011; Vaughan-Wil-liams,2010; Yuval-Davis et al.,2018). At the centre of this spatially ambiguous landscape of border controls is the most intimate of spaces: the human body, in which borders increas-ingly are embedded. Based on the‘idea that risk and danger can be … read from the body’ (Aas,2006, p. 147), human bodies have become central to a wide variety of risk manage-ment technologies, such as biometrics, visualisation technologies and data-mining. These risk management technologies are used to distinguish between low- and high-risk popu-lations based on deviations from modelled norms about‘normal’ or ‘safe’ behaviour (Adey, 2009; Amoore,2006; Amoore & de Goede,2008; van der Ploeg,1999a,2003). Passively and silently resting inside the human body, this information, about identity, legal status, or the degree of risk a certain individual, represents a latent pool of data, which can be mined in order to determine who is ‘safe’ and who constitutes a ‘risk’, and consequently, whose freedom of mobility should be restricted. When the information needed to enforce borders is carried in bodies at all times, border control is no longer limited to speciﬁc entry points to nation-state territories, but may be carried out wherever‘risky’ bodies appear (Aas,2006; Adey,2009; Amoore,2006; Lyon,2005; van der Ploeg,1999a,1999b, 2003; Weber,2006). Indeed, as Louise Amoore (2006, p. 338) has argued,‘the biometric border is the portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets, in the oﬃce or the neighbourhood’. Surveillance of mobile populations through the body consequently seems to provide the solution to one of the key dilemmas in a time of heightened insecurity about global mobility: namely,

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the need to strengthen security without impeding globalization. Indeed, many of the tech-nologies discussed above serve the dual purpose of facilitating the mobility of capital,

goods and low-risk,‘normal’ and ‘qualiﬁed bodies’, while, at the same time, imposing

restrictions on the mobility of high-risk,‘deviant’ and ‘disqualiﬁed’ bodies (Aas, 2006; Amoore,2006; Coleman,2007; Lyon,2005; Sparke,2006; van der Ploeg,2003).

While the pressing of afinger on a biometric scanner may seem like a fairly mundane practice, biometrics, Charlotte Epstein (2007, 2008) has argued, bring travellers into contact with power. In this view, biometrics are invasive technologies that not only record bodily features for the purpose of identification; they also de-humanise people and reduce life to a‘functional attribute of the object’ (Epstein,2008, p. 185). Thus, even if border-cross-ing bodies in many instances are obliged to participate in border rituals, for example, by step-ping into the body scanner when asked to, in this literature, I would argue, bodies appear primarily as objects of border control (Aas, 2006; Vaughan-Williams, 2008); they are scanned, profiled and encoded and, if identified as deviant, they may be seized, detained or expelled. However, they rarely come across as agents of borderwork.

The recognition that an increasingly diverse group of actors continually perform borders into being has also arisen as a key concern in critical border scholarship (Amoore & Hall,2010; Bialasiewicz et al.,2007; Martin,2010; Parker & Vaughan-Wil-liams, 2012; Prokkola, 2008; Salter, 2011). In addition to agents representing the state – that is, immigration oﬃcers, border guards and so on – who, according to Nancy

Wonders (2006, p. 66)‘play a critical role in determining where, how, and on whose

body a border will be performed’, a signiﬁcant share of borderwork is now conducted by a range of non-state actors. Detention centres, for example, are increasingly run by private security companies (e.g. Doty & Wheatley,2013; Martin,2012), and responsibil-ities for veriﬁcation of immigration status have been divested to a broad range of non-state actors including higher education institutions, airlines, carrier companies, banks,

landlords and employers (e.g. Jenkins, 2014; Lahav & Guiraudon, 2000; Scholten,

2015; Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). In a similar way, supermarket staﬀ (Rumford, 2008),

lorry drivers, highway maintenance crews and tunnel toll collectors (Amoore, 2007)

have been enrolled in the search for potential terrorists.

Citizens are also increasingly involved in borderwork (Rumford, 2008). In some

instances, anti-immigrant activists take it upon themselves to monitor borders. The rise of the Border Solution Task Force and the Minutemen who operate along the Mexico-US border is one example of emerging citizen vigilantism in border control (Doty,2007; Shapira,2013). At the same time, state institutions increasingly rely on‘citizen-detectives’ – that is, individuals whose observations of the unusual or suspicious behaviour of ‘Others’ are used in theﬁght against terrorism (Amoore,2006,2007; Vaughan-Williams,2008). This way, the state outsources border control to bank clerks, travellers on public transport systems, employees of car rental businesses, and neighbours who, in their role as citizens, are made responsible for the security of the nation-state.

By drawing on insights from these strands of border scholarship, this paper seeks to make a case for an approach that takes seriously the agential potential of human

bodies in contemporary processes of bordering. Indeed, as Sara Smith et al. (2016)

have argued, bodies are territorial agents and as such, they are deeply intertwined in the making and unmaking of borders and territory. In contrast to the bodies in Smith et al.’s paper, which contribute to the intensiﬁcation of borders and territory through

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their deaths along the Mexico-US border, or the ‘silent’ biometric borders carried in human bodies that were discussed earlier, the citizen bodies that the National Friday Wear programme enrols play a more active role in the protection of Ghanaian territory against the uncontrolled inﬂow of China-made textiles across the country’s borders. In what follows, I bring border scholarship into conversation with previous work on the role of dress and adornment in the construction of state and nation (e.g. Allman,

2004) in order to show that the Ghanaian bodies engaged by the National Friday

Wear programme are both spaces upon which borders are displayed and geopolitical actors that actively perform borders on behalf of the nation-state as they move

through society dressed in garments made from domestically produced textiles. I ﬁrst

consider the mechanisms through which the National Friday Wear programme embedded borders in cloth such that they could be displayed on citizen bodies. I then consider how, within the context of the National Friday Wear programme, citizen

bodies performed borders by reproducing norms about‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of

dres-sing citizen bodies, by projecting symbolic values embedded in Ghanaian textiles and, most importantly, by creating incentives for others to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles, thereby indirectly reducing the inﬂow of foreign textiles across Ghana’s borders. However, before exploring this in more detail, I introduce the National Friday Wear programme and explain how it sought to enrol citizen bodies to regulate the inﬂow of foreign textiles into Ghanaian territory by appealing to national identity and the responsibilities of citizens towards the nation-state.

Ghana’s National Friday Wear programme

The National Friday Wear programme was launched in the Ghanaian capital of Accra on a Friday in November 2004. True to the form of state spectacle, the launch of the pro-gramme was marked by an elaborate ceremony. Dignitaries of all stripes and represen-tatives from several of Ghana’s textile industries attended the event to pledge their support for the initiative. In addition to the opening and closing prayer, awards were pre-sented to the winners of the National Friday Wear competition, and men and women’s wear made from domestically produced textiles was modelled to the admiration of the invited guests. Most important were the speeches given by leading politicians including, among others, the Minister of Mines (who launched the programme on behalf of the pre-sident), the Minister of Trade, Industry and President’s Special Initiatives, the Minister of Information, and Members of the Council of State. Through these statements, which were broadcast to the public by representatives of the media, the speakers appealed to Ghanaians to identify with the programme and to dress their bodies in clothes made from domestically produced textiles. This was a necessary measure to protect Ghanaian

culture which, the Minister of Information stated, was ‘under siege’ (Ghana News

Agency,2004b) by globalization. For the National Friday Wear programme to be success-ful, the attitudes of Ghanaians towards locally produced textile products would have to change, the Minister of Trade and Industry continued. Indeed,‘the belief that one was a gentleman only when he wore a suit’ (ibid.), which was introduced during the colonial era, would have to be abandoned.

The launch of the National Friday Wear programme in Accra was theﬁrst in a series of festive events designed to carry the Ministry’s message across the country. Following the

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launch in Accra, the programme was gradually rolled out across the country with festive events taking place in the regional capitals of each of Ghana’s ten regions (Ghana News Agency,2006a,2006b,2006c,2006d,2006e,2006f,2006g; Ministry of Trade and Indus-try,2006a,2006b,2006c).

As suggested by the name, the National Friday Wear programme was a twist on the casual Friday concept, encouraging white-collar workers to dress in garments made from domestically produced textiles, rather than formal dress, on Fridays. But unlike elsewhere, where casual Friday is a way of bringing a little ease to the end of the

working week, Ghana’s National Friday Wear programme had a more profound

agenda. Indeed, this campaign was part of a broader strategy drawn up by the Ministry of Trade and Industry with the intention of promoting made-in-Ghana goods and revi-talizing the textile industry (Ministry of Trade and Industry,2004,2005).

The purpose of the programme was also to rekindle‘the national psyche’ and give ‘the Ghanaian a unique national identity and a sense of pride’ (Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2006a; see also Ministry of Trade and Industry,2004; Ghana News Agency,2004b;

Gha-naian Chronicle, 2004) by creating a unique Ghanaian look comparable to the Indian

sari. Accordingly, the programme was designed to carry the message that the consumption and adornment of domestically produced textiles were not only linked to employment for Ghana’s workers in the present, and to a potential future for Ghana as a middle income country, but also to a unique Ghanaian identity with pre-colonial roots. At the launch of the programme in Wa, the capital of the Upper West Region, for example, the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry stated in his keynote address that:

as a nation, we must safeguard our cultural heritage and traditional values which have been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. These are expressed through local and national clothes we wear. […] It is through patronizing these made-in-Ghana goods […] that we can deepen the spirit of patriotism and nationalism (Ministry of Trade and Industry,2006c).

And when he launched the programme in the Ashanti region he said:

The Ashanti Kingdom prides itself on its rich and exquisite culture. [---] [O]ne cannot mention the Ashanti Kingdom without [mentioning] the kente cloth, which according to history, wasﬁrst woven in Bonwire. There is also the Adinkra cloth that emanated from Ntonso. Therefore what we are doing here today is a perpetuation of the noble tradition of practising our culture (Ministry of Trade and Industry,2006a).

In addition to economic rationales, the National Friday Wear programme thus also rested upon the understanding that the Ghanaian nation is closely linked to its textile tra-ditions and that identity may be expressed through dress.

However, while rooted in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism, the purpose of statements such as these, as explained earlier, was not to address a national identity crisis but the growing inﬂux of cheaper, often pirated, China-made copies of domestically

produced textile designs and obroni wawu– second-hand clothes from Europe and the

United States– to the Ghanaian market. To understand this, the National Friday Wear

programme must be placed in the context of neoliberalism and the consequences thereof for how international trade is regulated.

Within Africa, Ghana has been widely touted as a model of neoliberal reform. After having implemented three International Monetary Fund and World Bank sponsored economic recovery programmes, commonly known as structural adjustment

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programmes, the Ghanaian economy is thoroughly imbued with the ethos of free trade. This has served to remove certain barriers to trade that once provided the incentives for the establishment of textile industries in Ghana, including, for example, tariﬀs, exchange control, import licensing and temporary import bans (Axelsson,2012; van Koert,2007). In order to fully appreciate the agenda of the National Friday Wear programme, it is also necessary to consider long-term Ghanaian debates about contraband trade, corruption in the Customs Service, and the repeated failure to secure a particularly contested border

shared with Togo to the east (Chalﬁn, 2010; Nugent, 2002), across which unregulated

ﬂows of foreign textiles continue to enter Ghanaian territory. In Ghana, economic liber-alization, combined with the discourse about the porosity of the country’s borders, has resulted in an understanding that some of the trade regulation measures previously used to protect Ghanaian territory are no longer available, and a fear of being left unpro-tected in a global market.

The ultimate purpose of the National Friday Wear programme was thus to address the inﬂow of foreign textile products across Ghana’s borders without undercutting the free trade agenda. In this sense, the National Friday Wear programme had something in common with other attempts to respond to an economic crisis by inﬂuencing consumer choice rather than raising barriers to trade. For example, the Buy British campaign of 1931, Stephen Constantine (1987) has argued, also emerged in a political environment where a departure from the principle of free trade was unthinkable. Instead, the British cabinet embarked on a publicity campaign that appealed to the citizens’ obli-gations towards the nation-state. The cabinet’s statement, which was to be made in the

House of Commons read: ‘It is the plain duty of every British citizen, at the present

time, to give all the help he can to British industry by buying British goods. Anyone who imports foreign goods unnecessarily is rendering a real disservice to his country; and the Government are conﬁdent that both individual buyers and traders will recognize this common obligation’ (Constantine,1987, p. 46). In this way, the British government sought to indirectly regulate international tradeﬂows.

The languages of nationalism and citizenship, I would argue, were utilized in a similar way within the context of the National Friday Wear programme in order to regulateflows across borders. To clarify, if Ghanaians consume more domestically produced textiles, they are likely to lessen their consumption of China-made textiles and obroni wawu, thereby indirectly contributing to reducing the inflow of foreign textile products to Ghana. However, the way that the National Friday Wear programme sought to achieve these goals was distinctly different from the approach adopted within the frame-work of the Buy British campaign. The National Friday Wear programme, I argue, sought to respond to the perceived threats posed by trade liberalization and the ‘porosity’ of Ghana’s borders, by constructing borders that could be worn on citizen bodies.

Borders on the body

As discussed earlier, the increasing use of a range of technologies in the regulation of mobile populations has transformed bodies into carriers of borders (e.g. Amoore, 2006). Following Saskia Sassen (2006), who in Territory, Authority, Rights, suggests that contemporary borders are embedded not only in people but also in things, I want to suggest that the National Friday Wear programme in Ghana can be seen as an

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example of a state strategy that embedded borders in a product– in this case in textiles – rather than in bodies. This, in turn, allowed for borders to be carried on citizen bodies. Indeed, by drawing inspiration from Irma van der Ploeg’s (1999a) claim that biometric technologies transform the body’s surface into codes, in this section, I argue that the National Friday Wear programme transformed citizen bodies into geopolitical spaces upon which the state’s message was displayed.

The tool used by the Ministry of Trade and Industry to embed borders in textiles was not high-tech software programmes, as is the case in the literature on technologies of risk management, but rather the festive launches of the programme outlined above. These launches follow a distinctive, repetitive and standardized pattern. They open and close with prayer. A series of speeches by representatives of diﬀerent levels of government, a variety of cultural displays, including the display of domestically produced textiles on bodies, and solidarity messages from relevant organizations follow before the ribbon to an exhibition of Ghana-made products is cut and the region is declared oﬃcially part of the National Friday Wear campaign. In this sense, the launches of the campaign can be seen as cultural and political ritual which serve to condense a set of distinctive

symbolic values and meanings into an object – domestically produced textiles –

through routinized, sequential acts (see Donnan & Wilson,1999; Kertzer, 1989on the role of ritual in bordering). These objects, the launches of the campaign suggested, were the missing link between Ghana’s past – its cultural heritage and traditional

values– and future as an industrialized, developed nation-state (Ghana News Agency,

2004a; Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning,2008), and by consuming domesti-cally produced textiles Ghanaians could support these values. In this way, domestidomesti-cally produced textiles were made out to be representative of a long trajectory of textile pro-duction in West Africa; of attachment to the Ghanaian nation; to employment for Ghana’s workers and of the ‘dreams of becoming a middle income economy’ (Ghana

News Agency,2007b).

The understanding that Ghanaian identity is linked to what people wear on their bodies has deep historical roots, as has the notion that Ghana will develop through investment in the textile and garment industry. Textiles were constructed as symbols of independence in the years leading up to Ghana’s independence in 1957 and were used to create unity and a sense of attachment to the new nation (Gott,

2009; Hess, 2006; Mohan, 2008). Likewise, the textile industry was placed at the

centre of the newly independent government’s strategy to deﬁne Ghana as a truly

independent and economically self-reliant nation-state (e.g. van Koert, 2007). These

were roles that textiles were particularly suited to play because they had long been imbued with symbolism and played key communicative and meaning-making roles in Ghanaian society (Aronson, 2007; Cordwell & Schwarz, 1979; Gott, 2009; Kriger, 2006; Picton, 1995).

The launches of the National Friday Wear programme thus sought to tap into the already deep signiﬁcance of textiles to Ghanaian society and the entangled symbolic meanings and economic values that the textile industry represents. In this way, the speak-ers quoted in the previous section strategically articulated the aims of the programme in a

geographical sense; through notions of space– by referring to attachment to the

Gha-naian nation– and time – by emphasising the importance of remembering past values

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At the same time, the programme sought to construct China-made textiles and obroni

wawu as‘wrong’ or ‘deviant’. This was because, unlike Ghanaian textiles, China-made

textiles and obroni wawu did not reﬂect the ‘right’ attachments, pasts and futures associ-ated with domestically produced textiles. Within the context of the National Friday Wear programme they were instead seen as purely economic products, devoid of meaning, and their presence on citizen bodies was consequently constructed as culturally and

politi-cally ‘wrong’ (Axelsson, 2012). The National Friday Wear programme could thus be

read as a cultural and political response to the potential collapse of the Ghanaian textile industry that partly sought to transform the economic issue– the imminent col-lapse of the textile industry– and wider concerns about trade liberalization and the ter-ritorial integrity of the Ghanaian state into a question of citizenship, identity, and belonging. The responsibility for ‘keeping the local textiles industry in operation by

patronizing their products’ was one that Ghanaians had forgotten, the Deputy Upper

West Regional Minister stated at the launch of the programme in the Upper West Region (Ghana News Agency,2006g). He continued, their‘taste … for foreign products’ had not only had economic consequences for the textile industry but had also‘done a lot of damage to their conﬁdence as a people’ (ibid).

The embedding of certain meanings and values in cloth through the launches of the National Friday Wear programme, in turn, made it possible for the message of the Gha-naian state to be displayed on citizen bodies. That is, the National Friday Wear pro-gramme did not only embed borders in a product; the propro-gramme was also about the conﬁguration of embedded borders and the bodies on which they appeared.

Dress and adornment, Joanne Entwistle (2000, p. 7) argued in The Fashioned Body,‘is one of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and identity’. Dres-sing the body is at once an individual experience closely linked to the construction of self and identity and a preparation of‘the body for the social world’, which makes ‘it appro-priate, acceptable, indeed respectable and possibly even desirable’ (ibid.). In this sense, dress is not strictly the individual’s choice but is always deeply inﬂuenced by norms and expectations about what belongs on the body depending on the social context in which they appear. Entwistle draws on a range of social situations including weddings, funerals, job interviews, business meetings, and formal evening events to illustrate the point that certain situations require certain styles of dress. At other times, what is worn on the body becomes more deeply entrenched with issues of morality. During the nineteenth century, for example, the corset was the main marker of respectability and morality for women. The woman who chose not to wear a corset was considered ‘loose’ or morally deplorable. Thus, dressed bodies are always ‘a product of culture, the outcome of social forces pressing on the body’ (Entwistle,2000, p. 20).

In a similar way, the National Friday Wear programme sought to create norms about what belonged on citizen bodies in certain contexts. Using the past and future values and aspirations vested in Ghanaian textiles, the National Friday Wear programme thus suggested that the culturally and politically responsible way of presenting citizen bodies at work on Fridays was in garments made from domestically produced textiles.

Dress is particularly suited to carrying messages such as that of the National Friday Wear programme because textiles and adornment of the body are communicative practicesﬁlled with meaning. Indeed, dress and fashion are powerful languages (Allman,2004; Cordwell &

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communicate political messages. In the years leading up to independence, for example, the Ghanaian ambassador chose to dress in kente– a cloth made from hand-woven strips with intricate geometric designs, sewn together selvedge to selvedge– and other indigenous cloths when attending the United Nations to mark the transition to independence (Ross & Adedze, 1998). Likewise, in the 1940s and 1950s, the local elite expressed national pride by wearing the kaba– a three-piece outﬁt developed in Ghana’s coastal areas during the nineteenth

century – rather than Western attire, which had been the norm during the colonial era

(Gott, 2009). Once independence had been won, President Nkrumah dressed in cloth

from diﬀerent parts of the country in order to construct a sense of national, as opposed to

regional or ethnic, identity (e.g. Hess, 2006). Speciﬁc commemorative cloths in the

colours of the nationalﬂag, some depicting the ﬂag itself, the coat of arms and a map of the country, were also used across Africa in the post-independence era in order to construct a sense of national consciousness, belonging and loyalty towards new nation-states (Spencer, 1982). In this way, the bodies of certain strategic persons functioned as pivotal geopolitical spaces upon which political messages were displayed.

These strategies, which during a diﬀerent moment of Ghana’s history served the purpose of forming a new nation-state, I argue, were later utilized within the context of the National Friday Wear programme with the intention of regulating the inter-national textiles trade. Thus, while expressed in normative and identity terms and addressed through cultural, rather than legal sanctions, the point is that the National Friday Wear programme sought to achieve a political aim– securing Ghana’s territorial integrity– and an economic aim – development through investment in the textile indus-try– which both required that fewer foreign textiles entered Ghanaian territory in an unregulated way. Similarly to the Buy British campaign, the National Friday Wear pro-gramme appealed to the citizens’ responsibility towards the nation-state. However, for the campaign to be truly successful, the message that the consumption of and adornment of domestically produced textiles were linked to the survival of Ghana’s garment and textile producers and to Ghanaian identity needed to be enforced beyond the day and the venue where the programme was launched.

Performing borders through the body

If in the previous section the focus was on aspects of border ritual that had to do with spectacle and show, and which served to embed distinctive symbolic values and meanings into domestically produced textiles, in this section, I shift the focus to the role of border ritual in producing‘a space which is organized in such a way as to compel certain kinds of appearance’ (Amoore & Hall,2010, p. 303). This space, Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall argue, ‘is theatrical, not in a playful illusory sense, nor in the sense of a scripted, rehearsed pretence, but as a space conﬁgured as theatre in which appearance, and iden-tity, is always in question’ (ibid.). Similarly, but in relation to fashion and dress codes,

Entwistle (2000, pp. 1–2) suggests that ‘when we speak of fashion we speak

simul-taneously of a number of overlapping and interconnecting bodies involved in the pro-duction and promotion of dress as well as the actions of individuals acting on their

bodies when“getting dressed”’. Dress codes consequently ‘form part of the management

of bodies in space, operating to discipline bodies to perform in particular ways’ (Entwis-tle,2000, p. 16).

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Both border ritual and fashion thus compel bodies to act in specific, albeit it very different, ways. In this section, I combine insights from these separate sets of literature to continue the exploration of how the National Friday Wear programme sought to protect the Ghanaian territory and market from the influx of foreign textiles. Indeed, in order to fully understand how the National Friday Wear programme enforced borders it is necessary to shift the focus from the speeches given at the launches of the

programme, which were intended to embed borders in cloth by producing a speciﬁc

Gha-naian dress code, to the dressed geopolitical bodies in motion that performed borders throughout Ghanaian society on behalf of the state.

Thus, the second way that the National Friday Wear programme tried to reach out to Ghanaian citizens was by‘sending out’ into society citizen bodies dressed in Ghanaian textiles. Indeed, the norms and expectations about what belonged on the body produced by the National Friday Wear programme would not travel very far unless they were also actively promoted and worn by citizen bodies. As the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry stated when he criticized participants at the inauguration of the National Salt

Producers Association of Ghana for ‘failing’ to dress in National Friday Wear: ‘“you

should not just be talking and promoting your goods only, you should demonstrate it practically”’ (Ghana News Agency,2007a).

Theﬁrst set of bodies utilized by the National Friday Wear programme to display the message of the state, as suggested earlier, were those of strategically positioned persons in each region. Consequently, the launches of the National Friday Wear programme discussed in the previous section not only served the purpose of embedding certain values and sym-bolic meanings in domestically produced textiles, they also sought to enrol local members of parliament, directors of private companies, representatives of educational institutions and other strategically positioned people to acknowledge their responsibilities as citizens and to display garments made from culturally and politically appropriate textiles on their stra-tegic bodies (Ghana News Agency,2010). As dignitaries in their local communities, these people served as role models both for their employees and for the local community, and if they embraced the Friday Wear programme, then so might many more in the region. The following comment, which was published on the editorial page of the Ghanaian Chron-icle after the launch of the Friday Wear programme in November 2004, illustrates this point:

whether the National Friday Wear idea will catch on, a lot will depend on the type of leader-ship given by members of the government and policy makers. Their example will spur others on to patronize it so that it will not be just a one-day symbolic wear, but something that will be part of our way of life (Ghanaian Chronicle,2004).

Or, as stated by the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry when he launched the pro-gramme in the Ashanti Region in September 2006:

we must all acknowledge our various roles in the promotion of such a laudable government initiative as the“National Friday Wear” programme. To the heads of our educational insti-tutions, government sees you as moulders of the youth. In your enviable roles, you are in a vantage position to instil in them such a laudable national programme. By so doing their patronage of the programme will be guaranteed (Ministry of Trade and Industry,2006a).

When dressed in garments made from domestically produced textiles, these strategic bodies visually projected the values embedded in Ghanaian textiles to the onlooker. When the president, for instance, attended a function dressed in textiles produced in

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Ghana, when the bank manager greeted his customer in his Friday Wear, when the civil servant dressed in kaba made from Ghanaian textiles stopped at the market on her way home, and when the school children, dressed in school uniforms made from domestically produced textiles, played in the school yard, they all projected the Ghanaian nation: to the president of a foreign country and to the Ghanaian in front of the television watching the function, to the bank customer, to the trader in the marketplace and to the Ghanaian who passed by the school yard. In this way, the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s message that the consumption and adornment of domestically produced textiles were linked to a unique Ghanaian identity with pre-colonial roots; to employment for Ghana’s workers in the present, and a potential future for Ghana as a middle income country could be spread beyond the day the launches of the programme were held.

The point of the launches of the National Friday Wear programme was thus to mobilize citizen bodies to actively perform borders on behalf of the state. By so doing, it helped shift responsibility for protecting the Ghanaian culture and economy onto ‘good citizens’ who were enrolled to display only the ‘right’ Ghana-made textiles on their bodies. It was only through these bodies that border enforcement could be made truly mobile and the message of the Ghanaian state widely displayed and distributed throughout society. Within the context of the National Friday Wear programme, the bodies of citizens thus performed borders in their homes as they chose their outfits for the day, in the places where they worked and studied, and in all the spaces they passed through when they moved between home and workplace or school. In this way, the National Friday Wear programme could have its desired effect: to enrol every Ghanaian in the programme, thereby reducing the consumption and, by extension, the inflow of foreign textile products into Ghanaian territory.

The geopolitical bodies enrolled by the National Friday Wear programme conse-quently performed borderwork while, at the same time, they were instrumental in bring-ing into bebring-ing the very cultural norms and values that the National Friday Wear programme sought to project, as illustrated in the previous section. Accordingly, within the framework of the National Friday Wear programme, to consume (the econ-omic aspect) and to dress in (the identity aspect) domestically produced textiles were entwined. That is, when one identiﬁed with the National Friday Wear programme and moved around in society dressed in garments made from Ghanaian textiles, one created incentives for others to wear them, thereby increasing the overall consumption of domestically produced textile products. Ultimately, this was how the National Friday Wear programme worked to intervene against the economic threat that the inﬂow and practice of wearing foreign textiles represents.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to make a distinctive empirical contribution to the now vast body of literature on the growing spatial ambiguity of contemporary borders. In particular, I have sought to bring some nuance to the growing body of work on the role of human bodies in the shift from a territorially ﬁxed view of borders to a much looser spatial understanding of the sites where borders may appear. I have attempted to do so by drawing attention to a case, which atﬁrst glance does not necessarily conform to precon-ceived ideas about what borders are and how they are enforced: the National Friday Wear

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programme. In doing so, I have sought to demonstrate that, in the management of global flows, bodies are used in more subtle and unconventional ways than has perhaps been previously assumed. By engaging with cultural and political manifestations and how these may be used to protect territory when legal borders no longer suffice, this paper has attempted to improve the understanding of the management of borders through the body. Indeed, the paper has argued that by attempting to render something which is legal as culturally and politically irresponsible, the National Friday Wear programme went further in its attempt to protect the Ghanaian textile industry than many other strategies, which focus solely on managing borders through the legal machineries of the state. The paper has also argued that to look only at the embedding of borders in people is not enough. When bodies are presented simply as carriers of borders they can never fully be agents in borderwork. Rather, it is the configuration of embedded borders and the moving citizen bodies on which they appear that transform the bodies of‘good citizens’ into borderworkers that actively perform borders on behalf of the state. A further implication of the case presented in this paper is the need to qualify the claim that management of borders through the body is intended to restrict the mobility of certain threatening people, while at the same time, it seeks to facilitate legal economic flows. Instead, the paper argues that border may be embedded in foreign products which, in certain instances, are constituted as threats. Just like terrorists, asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ migrants, foreign products may therefore be placed at the centre of the very pro-cesses that rework borders in a spatial sense in an attempt to manage fears about increas-ingly intricate global mobilities.

In making these shifts– that is, by highlighting the role of culture, identity and citizen-ship in borderwork and extending the analysis of borders to include the non-human– the paper demonstrates the immense potential of the border concept for addressing the broad range of tensions that are at the forefront in an age characterized by heightened insecurity about global mobilities.

Note

1. In 2009, the National Friday Wear programme was transformed into the National Everyday Wear programme reﬂecting the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s ambition to extend the programme to all working days.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank John Allen, The Open University, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. The author alone is responsible for the contents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding

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Notes on contributor

Linn Axelssonis a political geographer whose research focuses on the global circulation of people and products. She has a particular interest in how globalﬂows are governed through processes of bordering.

ORCID

Linn Axelsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0969-1333

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