Wole Soyinka
foreign, imported products; the educational and social policies of the
nationalist and reform movements in colonial West Africa:
First to call was the widow, Mrs. Esan, taking the fight to Akinyode for leaving
Morola behind. She had traveled from Saki with bales ofeleto etucloth and, with
great pride, samples of the Saki variant of the imported velvetpetuje, whose influx on the market had threatened the local weave from Iseyin and Saki. A former trainee teacher under Soditan, she had imbibed some of his resentment at the claims of this cloth, which the Lagosians had named, with such disloyalty, “the cloth which eclipsesetu.”Etu, that noble cloth whose warp and weft spun the very fabric of history of the Yoruba! Isolated in the Women’s Training College to which she had been posted, she thought often of this outrage wrought against the local product by the insensitive elite of Lagos. It was bad enough that this so-calledpetujeshould command outrageous prices yet be so much sought-after
but to lord it, in addition, by the sheer power of naming, over a passive product
of undisputed worth – this was augmented thievery, aided and abetted by the
shameless children of the house! She was in charge of home crafts at the training
school, and aided by the weavers of Saki and Iseyin, she set up her looms in
the school, unraveled the velvet impostor along patterns borrowed from the
disparagedetu, then filled in the cotton yarns, based on the original color motifs. The result was lighter, more porous, and therefore more suited to the climate. She named iteye et`u()
The little allegorical narrative in this passage must not go unexamined.
“Etu” is one of the brands of highly valued woven cloths, noted especially
for its rich texture. “Eye et `u” (“glory of etu”) which the intrepid Mrs.
Esan fashions as a counter to “pet `uje” (“the cloth which eclipses etu”) is
made by unraveling color motifs from the “velvet foreign impostor” and
overlaying these with patterns borrowed from the traditional “etu” itself,
but with cotton yarns which make the entirely new product, “eye etu,”
“lighter, more porous and more suited to the climate.” In other words, it is
an entirely new homemade product which is fashioned in response to the
claims of superiority of the imported foreign product. This means that,
parallel to the efficacies enabled by naming things through marshaling
the resources of language, there is a materiality, a referent in the world of
objects and relationships to which linguistic acts of naming relates. This
is radically different from the conception of the links between language
and identity in Yode’s ruminations on Ashtabula as a place name, a
conception in which the potency of words and utterances inheres in the
order of nature itself and the secret, occult correspondences between the
essence of things and their names.Isarais a remarkable text in the way
it deploys these two radically different conceptions, not as the antithesis
of each other, but in both playful and utterly serious juxtapositions, the