The ongoing cultural debate that erupted at the Ghana–Zambia economic forum in Lusaka between Zambians and Ghanaians over the dress code for African politicians and public officials is both interesting and revealing. It is revealing not because of what people said, but because the debate exposed Africa’s unresolved relationship with identity, dress codes, modernity, and power.
The debate was triggered by the traditional attire worn by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama upon his arrival in Zambia this past week for a state visit. At the airport, he was received by Zambia’s President, Hakainde Hichilema, who was dressed in a three-piece British-style suit and tie. The contrast between the two leaders was immediately striking, and it quickly became symbolic.
The BBC, which first reported the story, noted that President Mahama wore a fugu, a traditional northern Ghanaian outfit made from handwoven narrow strips of thick cotton fabric stitched together to form a structured poncho-style garment. This form of dress, and many others like it across Africa, was popularized by earlier African leaders who wore their traditional attire with pride and political intent. Among them was Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. The fugu was what Nkrumah wore when he declared Ghana’s independence on 6 March 1957.
The fugu is not merely clothing. It functions as a cultural symbol with deep historical roots. Through these capillaries flow political memory, spiritual meaning, and a sense of rootedness that sustains collective identity. In many West African societies, clothing has long served as a carrier of social status, moral values, cultural distinction, and communal belonging, long before colonial rule sought to reduce dress to a marker of “civilization” versus “backwardness.”
Many Zambian netizens, according to the BBC, who mocked President Mahama’s fugu did not see this. To them, the outfit was an object of derision. Some ridiculed it openly, calling it a “blouse.” Malama Mulenga described it as a “maternity blouse.” Mwangala Imbula posted, “Am coming to get that blouse.” Master G wrote, “We love our blouse brothers.” These comments, though casual, revealed something deeper: a learned contempt for African symbols that do not fit colonial definitions of authority, cultural respectability, and masculinity.
Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, responding to the controversy, noted that the social-media buzz showed young people were increasingly interested in reclaiming their cultural roots. His intervention was important. Clothing is far more than fashion. It is a symbol of identity, dignity, and heritage. Anthropological studies consistently confirm this: you are what you wear; dress is one of the most powerful non-verbal languages through which societies narrate who they are and what they value.
You are what you wear; dress is one of the most powerful non-verbal languages through which societies narrate who they are and what they value.”
This controversy has sparked a timely intergenerational debate among Zambian and Ghanaian netizens about how Africans should dress and why. Why have African countries, societies, and religious organizations largely failed to rethink the colonial and ecclesial dress codes imposed on Africa over a century ago? Why do these inherited codes continue to regulate authority, respectability, and professionalism in African public life?
This colonial attachment to dress codes cuts across the entire spectrum of African societies. It stretches from the habits of nuns to clerical soutanes and liturgical vestments in our churches. It runs from parliamentary dress regulations in countries such as Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Côte d’Ivoire to the ubiquitous hood and wig worn by African lawyers and judges in courtrooms and public ceremonies, often in sweltering tropical heat. These garments were designed for European climates, histories, and legal cultures, yet they persist unchallenged in African contexts.
Africa’s attachment to colonial dress codes reveals an unresolved relationship with identity, modernity, and power—one that still regulates authority, respectability, and professionalism in public life.”
Why, for example, are African professors and students required to wear heavy academic gowns, caps, and hoods laden with medieval Western symbolism that most of us can neither explain nor defend? These academic regalia originated in European monastic traditions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which scholars dressed as clergy because universities were ecclesiastical institutions. What epistemic, heuristic or pedagogical meaning do these symbols carry today in African universities?
Why do African imams, sultans, emirs, and Muslim religious leaders living on the edges of the Sahara, in conditions of extreme heat, insist on wearing multiple layers of turbans, tagelmust, imama, and jalabiya? Even here, what we see is not simply tradition but the sedimentation of historical authority and transregional religious power, itself, shaped by centuries of cultural exchange and domination.
We may not answer all these questions today, or even in the near future, but we Africans must know that we are what we wear. This is why it is imperative that we raise questions about what we wear at this critical moment in history, when we are being challenged to write our own Africa script through a recommitment to liberative historiography.
Modern Africa was sold a lie through the convergence theory of modernity. This is the false narrative that, as the world evolves, societies will naturally converge towards a single set of values, institutions, and practices presumed to be universally beneficial. According to this logic, economics, politics, education, and religion would eventually orbit around Western norms as the apex of human development—a narrative popularized in Fukuyama’s End of History.
This is why Africa accepted the normativity of Western education and its pedagogical structures, including frameworks such as the so-called Bologna Process. It is also why African states adopted Western economic institutions, as well as Westminster or U.S. democratic systems, as if they were the only orthodox pathways to legitimacy and progress. The same convergence narrative shaped the Christianity introduced to Africa by Western missionaries, often accompanied by the denigration of African religious symbols, rituals, and aesthetics.
Africans were taught—explicitly and implicitly—that to belong to history and to access prosperity, dignity, and recognition, they had to abandon their own ways of life and fully embrace Western forms. African cultures, histories, and agency were thus stripped of their epistemic value. Their proven capacity to generate creativity, rationality, ethical systems, and social praxis was systematically dismissed.
One of the most visible and enduring symbols of Africa’s entanglement in this false theory of convergence is what we wear today. This is evident not only in formal settings, where dress codes are enforced through rigid, often neoconservative regulations, but also in the everyday fashion choices of young people who imitate Western styles as markers of identity. In doing so, many cling to the thin edge of an evaporating culture, becoming increasingly rootless and rudderless in the process.
The most flamboyant caricature of this phenomenon is the sapeur culture of Congo. It has undeniable entertainment value and attracts global attention. But its vacuity becomes apparent when set against the autochthonous contexts of social suffering, economic precarity, and political instability in which it operates. In these contexts, sapeur culture often over-simplifies what authentic cultural recovery in Africa should entail.
Yet it is important to remember that the sapeur movement, like the so-called vestimentary revolution under Mobutu, did not begin as an empty spectacle. It began as resistance and reinvention. The sapeur used clothing as a language of defiance through exaggeration and parody. They did not passively accept European dress codes imposed under colonial rule, nor the humiliating hierarchies that accompanied them.
Instead, they launched a dress revolution in which even the poor dressed flamboyantly to declare: “We are still here.” Poverty, colonial residues, and structural violence and marginalization may render us invisible, but we refuse erasure. Mobutu himself initially supported aspects of this cultural revolt, particularly through policies that sought to Africanize names and public symbols. The exaggerated mimicry of European fashion was a way of puncturing its authority, lampooning its rigidity, and refusing to bow to its unwieldy rules.
Africans today must think seriously about what we communicate—to ourselves and to the world—through what we wear.
Given its vast continental reach and uniquely centralized and unifying structure, the Catholic Church in Africa must play a leading role in this reflection. No other religious institution on the continent possesses comparable moral authority or cultural presence. This is not a call to replicate the sapeur experiment within ecclesial life. Rather, it is an invitation to a deeper interrogation.
Why is it still considered normal for African clergy and religious to wear vestments, habits, and clerical garments that are unsuitable for our climate and disconnected from our cultural contexts? Why should their symbolism not be re-imagined and re-symbolized through made-in-Africa forms that speak authentically to local communities?
Inculturation is not cosmetic revisionism; it is the liberation of culture from within, a transformation of consciousness that must begin in the mind before it appears in what we wear.”
Inculturation is not merely about surface ornamentation or aesthetic revisionism. It is not the cosmetic addition of African motifs to European frameworks. It is the liberation of culture from within. It is a mutual insertion: the insertion of authentic African values into the Gospel values received through the mediation of the Church, and the insertion of the Gospel into African cultures and traditions so that these cultures may become living mediators of the Gospel in new, credible, and compelling ways for African peoples.
Inculturation, therefore, entails both critical unlearning and creative reimagining. It requires the unlearning of alienating symbols, categories, and practices that distort African self-understanding. At the same time, it calls for the renewal of life and society through the agency of faith received in transformative African cultural vessels, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Such liberation is not first institutional or aesthetic. It is intellectual and spiritual. It must begin in the mind.
Authentic inculturation begins with the transformation of consciousness. Cultural symbols and materials—what we wear, for example—are external manifestations of what we know, believe, and desire for ourselves and our future. A cursory examination of history shows that cultural forms gain legitimacy gradually through domestication, ritualization, and communal acceptance. They endure when people recognize themselves in them.
Cultural practices become alienating when they circulate as imposed codes rather than as invitations that resonate with people’s deepest convictions. It is time Africans began to wear cloth—in social, political, religious, spiritual, and official spaces—that speak to who we are and what we aspire to become.
When we do this, we will not be rejecting what is good from outside Africa. We will simply be at home with ourselves. We will also be offering something to the world—not as exotic decoration or occasional solidarity wear, but as cultural expressions others may wish to adopt because they speak powerfully to our shared humanity.