Pith and power: Colonial style in France and French West Africa

Abstract

Through close analysis of interwar French representations of the pith helmet, both visual and textual, I trace the array of significations to which this single form of material culture was harnessed as it moved between France and Afrique Occidentale Française. Though born of a vulnerability specific to white, European bodies, this headwear's distinctive, recognizable form became an emblem of imperial power for those same bodies. This imperial connotation propelled the helmet into dress practices on the other side of the colonial divide, where West African consumers brought further layers of semantic complexity to this headwear's colonial connotations. A select few West Africans wore pith helmets to signify their status as adjuncts to the French administration, thus extending that power. Others took up the pith helmet in defiance of French sartorial norms, bringing its associations with elite status into their own dress systems. Wherever it appeared, the pith helmet alluded to an elsewhere. In France, the helmet conjured the steamy climate of the colonies; in the colonies this headwear invoked the metropole and its administration of colonial subjects. My analysis demonstrates the complex roles of this key element of colonial material culture, which moved between colony to metropole, both projecting European power and revealing the precarity of that power.