Introduction^{Footnote 1}

We are all familiar with notions of “clothing defining the person,” from cases of historical sumptuary laws to the latest examples of power-dressing. In the realm of African fashion, postcolonial times have brought new visibility of African fashion on the world stages. Now, often, instead of an exoticized “other” appearing in world fairs, leading African fashion designers appear as both respected performers and admired innovators on global fashion runways.^{Footnote 2} With the available detail and nuance now applied to studies of recent and contemporary African fashions, the time is ripe for further examinations of examples of precolonial African fashions.

This article presents a history of sixteenth and seventeenth century central East African efforts to define elements of a regional fashion aesthetic, one supplied by their engaged participation in wider African and Indian Ocean world economies. I investigate regional artisanal economies in the central East African mainland, looking specifically at communities in what is now southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique and their uses of one of the most “exoticized” elements of their fashion: lip ornaments called variously lip-plugs, lip-plates, or labrets. Close readings of sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese accounts and historical linguistics evidence reveals a new history of developing regional fashion trends. Such a history underscores the importance of regional consumers and artisanal experts in shaping wider East African precolonial economies.

This study, part of a larger ongoing project, explores how historic sixteenth and seventeenth century central East African communities used and understood a significant visual ornament. Thinking about these objects as simultaneously trade items, artistic innovations, and fashion statements brings together questions about their materials and manufacture as well as their visual uses, performances and symbolism. With these lip ornaments we see a widely shared effort to domesticate various long-distance trade items (shells, bone, and various metals) into what was likely an already-existing fashion. I suggest that, rather than signifying ethnic distinction, in these earlier times lip ornaments signaled engagement with a shifting variety of commercial goods and networks.^{Footnote 3} Inhabitants’ choices to wear lip ornaments in these times demonstrated their choices to follow an evolving regional aesthetic that crossed language and geographic lines.

This history takes place among communities of central East Africa living in what is today southern Tanzania and the northern parts of northern Mozambique. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, communities there could be divided into members of two distinctive East African language families. Speakers of the Yao, Mwera, and Makonde languages lived respectively in the riverine valleys of the Ruvuma River and in the mountains and highlands closer to the coast. These three language communities were collectively the Ruvuma branch of the Rufiji Ruvuma language family.^{Footnote 4} Their immediate geographic neighbors were speakers of various Macua languages living to the south, in parts of northern Mozambique. These Macua languages were part of a separate language family, only distantly related to Rufiji Ruvuma.

Language Communities of Central East Africa c. 1500

As important as this linguistic geography will be to this history, so too was the political and commercial geography of these societies. Both Ruvuma and Macua communities were located between larger centers of East African trade and they themselves had helped establish important regional and long-distance networks linking together parts of East Africa. They served as important trade middlemen between East African communities to their southeast, such as the Mutapa Kingdom, and trading hubs such as Kilwa on the East African coast. By the sixteenth century their trade partnerships had grown to include the smaller-scale Ruvuma societies to their north as well as the newly arriving Portuguese merchants at the coast. Both Ruvuma and Macua peoples thus had rich access to multiple East African and Indian Ocean commercial networks and a variety of fashion and commodity styles from which to choose.^{Footnote 5}

Our earliest western descriptions of the inhabitants of this region come from Portuguese visitors and merchants, who were attempting to establish trading forts along the East African coast at sites such as Sofala and Kilwa. Macua and Portuguese relations were frequently antagonistic – likely because of the pivotal role both communities sought to play as regional trade middlemen.^{Footnote 6} Portuguese descriptions of the Macua from the seventeenth century onward were frequently critical and set the tone of the ethnographic “otherness,” persistently applied to various societies in this region. In contrast to the Swahili coastal area, early inland central East African aesthetic and fashion preferences have seldom been examined. This forms a sharp contrast to the richness of recent ethnographic and art history studies focused on Makonde communities of this region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^{Footnote 7} From ethnographies that emphasized the “exoticism” of these communities, Makonde speakers and their neighbors were then “re-discovered” by the world of art collectors and art history scholars during the early-twentieth century colonial period.^{Footnote 8} Now, instead of their “otherness” being read as a sign of these communities’ isolation from colonial (and westernizing) influences, such “exoticism” was hailed as an innovative feature of indigenous modern plastic arts.^{Footnote 9} More recent anthropological studies, in turn, have resituated these artistic traditions in their local performative and spiritual contexts.^{Footnote 10}

Asking questions about earlier precolonial aesthetics requires a combination of approaches. Recent directions in studies of fashion, performance, and cross-cultural encounters offer important perspectives to questioning the significance of artistic and aesthetic traditions among earlier generations of Makonde language speakers and their neighbors. Attention to fashion and performance urges us to continue asking questions of how regional communities imported and refashioned various raw materials to new purposes. Jeremy Prestholdt, in his study of nineteenth and twentieth century coastal Swahili consumerism, likened this process to one of “domestication.” He explains:

Prestholdt employed this usage of domestication to focus attention on how allegedly “western” imported goods – such as clothing, clocks, umbrellas – became uniquely Swahili commodities. In a sense he was beginning with goods assumed to be “foreign” and demonstrating how they became “Swahili.”

In this article, in a similar fashion albeit for an earlier time period, I explore how lip ornaments – exoticized as explicitly East African – in fact, drew from more “familiar” long-distance trade goods in their creation. Domestication thus provides a useful frame in which to view local efforts by central East African communities to engage with their wider trading world. Imported items through various networks were refashioned into a common stylistic aesthetic of various lip ornaments. Additionally, recent studies on African artisanal specialists and re-fashioning provide further insights to local agency and process.^{Footnote 12} Such studies remind us of the various local actors – from consumers, artisanal specialists, traders, and trade middlemen – who all assisted the transformations of trade goods over physical distances and to new local forms.

Close readings of both Portuguese records and historical linguistics evidence permit a richer understanding of the local significance of lip ornaments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The former sources are available in Portuguese and English thanks to several published collections of sources from Mozambican and Portuguese archives. Linguistic evidence was collected during my doctoral fieldwork in Tanzania during 2010–2011 and from published dictionaries of languages from this region.

Historical linguistics techniques allow a historian to reconstruct the historic meanings and forms of words spoken in this central East African region. By exploring the etymologies and webs of meaning surrounding key words, such as for lip ornaments, these methods shed light on the collective understandings of these historic communities. Metaphors found in the meaning of these crucial words can help illuminate regional conceptions of the uses and significance of these physical objects.^{Footnote 13} Evidence from each type of sources is considered in turn to explore different facets of this history.

Early Portuguese Sources

Let us turn now to some specific descriptions of these peoples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Portuguese observers were quick to fold Macua appearances and behaviors into their mutually antagonistic relationship. In an apt summary of Portuguese sentiments, Dos Santos wrote: “The Kaffirs of the mainland of Mozambique are Macuas, heathens, very barbarous, and great thieves.”^{Footnote 14} Although aspects of this language reveal clear bias, I present here several descriptive passages from these early Portuguese observers. I quote them at length and invite readers to focus closely on the variety of trade goods and artisanal specialists involved in fashioning these inland aesthetics.

Beginning in the early 1500s, Martín Fernández related the following about communities near Sofala:

The Portuguese to the north also reported similar styles of body ornament. In the early 1500s, Duarte Barbosa wrote about the mainland near Mozambique Island:

About fifty years later, Father Monclaro reported similar fashions near this stretch of coast. Describing the island of Angoche, southeast from the present day town of Nampula, he recorded:

Finally, to return to Dos Santos’ account of 1609, he elaborated on the Macua:

Crafting a Regional Aesthetic: Visual Metaphors, Fashion, and Long Distance Trade

Combining these accounts, we can make several observations. These styles of lip ornamentation appear shared among peoples living in a geographic region that corresponds to central and northern Mozambique. In the sixteenth century, they included communities near Sofala, along with mainland communities north of Sofala and generally south of the Ruvuma River. We know from historical linguistics that they were speakers of the various Macua and Ruvuma languages. The latter language family included early forms of Yao, Mwela and Makonde. They also shared preferences for a variety of notable facial ornaments – from decorative scars to large ear decorations and lip ornaments. Here I was particularly interested in thinking about the evident deliberate incorporations of long distance trade goods. From these documentary accounts, we can see these had included bones, claws, and small stones in the earliest sixteenth century accounts, along with the additions of various metals (copper, pewter, and lead) by the seventeenth century.

Thanks to recent studies, we now know a lot about more contemporary understandings of such body ornaments. In later times, such as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, lip ornamentations had become closely associated with specific ethnic identities, such as the Makonde. As Zachary Kingdon explained, this fashion was closely tied to Makonde cosmological understandings of the intersections between humans and the natural world. Kingdon explained that, for Makonde communities, “it would seem that if a person’s essential nature can be described as ‘open’ and ‘passage-like,’ then the practice of piercing the lip and wearing the ndona can be viewed, in an almost literal way, as a manner of affirming, responding to, and consolidating, or fulfilling this nature.”^{Footnote 19} This raises some important questions. Were similar cosmological views in development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Or did wearing similar lip ornaments convey a different set of metaphors for earlier consumers and artisans?

In linguistic records for this region, we see three frequently occurring terms for lip ornaments: mthathi, “lip-ring” or “lip plug” in Macua; lupelele, “lip-ring” or “hole for lip ring” found in several languages including Yao; and the term ndonya, “lip plug,” which is found most often among the languages in the Ruvuma region and among languages to the north and west (see Appendix). Focusing here on *ndonya, we can trace its meanings and geographies across a large part of this region during the fifteenth-sixteenth century.

In various Macua translations, the term *ndonya is defined as a fold, plug, or twist in a material – such as cloth or skin. We see this same term associated with lip ornaments in a variety of languages to the north and west of Mozambique. All of these languages were Bantu languages. However, the distribution of the term *ndonya cut across groupings of immediate language families. We find *ndonya with an explicit meaning of “lip plug” in languages of the Ruvuma family (Yao, Ruvuma, and Mwera) as well as in related languages from the northern branch of this family, called Rufiji (such as in Matumbi and Matengo). To the west, this term appears in the Tumbuka language of the Nyanja family as well as in accounts of Swahili at the coast (see Appendix). This geography underscores the deliberate spread of *ndonya across and between these different geographic communities as local speakers added this term to their vocabularies.

Associating *ndonya with “lip plug” can speak to deliberate choices to adopt this style of fashion or it may indicate familiarity with others doing so. Delving further into the meaning of *ndonya, as understood historically, points to certain geographic areas of innovation with this style. This noun derives from a commonly shared Bantu language word for rain. For example, in the Makonde language, we find the verb -tonya “to rain” and the noun formed by adding a prefix: indonya/dindonya “lip-plug (in upper lip).”^{Footnote 20} This aquatic etymology of *ndonya strongly hints at local metaphors linking this visual ornament and ideas of fashion with understandings (perhaps physical and/or spiritual) of their environment. Such a connection is further substantiated by vocabularies in the Yao language. Here, we find the term *ndonya applied to both lip ornaments and to “the tongue of land formed by the confluence of two rivers, a cape or peninsula.”^{Footnote 21}

This raises possibilities that Yao language speakers, if not possibly others earlier, made connections between physical geography and this visual ornament as well as possible links between metaphors of contrasting elements – water and land, artisanal work, and physical bodies. We can begin to consider the roles that local and long-distance trade commodities may have played metaphorically in this one visual symbol. In later centuries, Kingdon’s research has shown how Makonde cosmologies viewed one’s mouth as the physical and spiritual interface between external and internal worlds.^{Footnote 22} Perhaps in the seventeenth century, in a similar vein, these lip ornaments represented regional engagements with local as well as long distance trade resources. Substantiating such possible metaphors will require further interdisciplinary research. At present, though, around the time of our documentary accounts of lip ornaments, these central East African communities were also in the process of inventing multiple local language terms for them. One of these – *ndonya – seems to have acquired environmental and aquatic connotations in this same era.

In more concrete social and economic terms, lip ornaments continued to resonate as fashion components and commercial strategies in recent times. Although local metaphors may have changed, we nonetheless can see an impressive continuity of decorative styles. To briefly reference an early twentieth century ethnographer, we learn that some of the Macua women “in addition to the pelele, wear a brass or iron nail from four to seven inches in length (…) passed through a hole in the lower lip and left hanging in front of the chin. When a lady cannot afford a metal ornament of the sort, she utilizes a piece of stick which she covers in beads.”^{Footnote 23}

Thus in a recent historic era when beads had become a ubiquitous and generally valued trade good, beads became the accepted regional substitution for more valuable metal ornaments when the latter became unobtainable. Such preferences seem to echo sixteenth and seventeenth century examples of using an array of trade goods – from stones, bones, and claws, to lead and pewter. Not all the respective rankings among these are yet discernable. However, the possibility of multiple consumer choices points again to the importance of this fashion style. For many reasons – economic, social, and probably spiritual – it mattered more to these peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to wear *ndonya in some form than not to wear them at all. Integrating external trade items – such as the imported metals – was likely both a strategy to domesticate these metals to an “acceptable” local form of adornment and a sign of emerging efforts at social differentiation.

Tracing these connections – between trade goods, their reworked forms, and most significantly, their various evolving historic meanings helps us to bridge gaps in our historical understandings. Such connections allow us to discern the ongoing processes of domestication that Macua and other sixteenth century consumers took part in with the imported metals as well as with trade items of regional circulation – such as shells, stones, and bones. Thinking about such questions, in turn, raises others, such as when and how did such visual ornaments acquire such specific ethnic associations for some communities – such as the nineteenth and twentieth century Makonde – but not for others? When did local materials – such as the famous Makonde blackwood – become the more emphasized component of this jewelry? And what symbolism did these lip ornaments have for other communities who chose not to define them as quintessential symbols of their ethnic identities?