Securing Ablodé Blibo: Togolese Women Merchants and the Transnational Politics of Decolonization, 1915-1994
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Harms, Robert
Abstract
This project demonstrates how a wealthy group of Togolese women cloth traders, known as the Nana Benz, used the wealth they acquired from selling European-manufactured textiles to shape political movements that spanned French Togoland, British Togoland, and the Gold Coast. This dissertation reveals the role women played in the expansion of consumer economies during colonialism, and shows how profit-driven incentives became critical motivations in decolonization movements in the region. The Nana Benz’s political influence extended to the United States where African-American periodicals including the Crisis, Ebony and Essence magazines depicted them as embodiments of Black women’s revolutionary potential. By situating the Nana Benz’s anticolonial activism within the larger context of global Black freedom struggles in the twentieth-century, this project bridges the disciplinary boundaries which often divide African Studies and African-American Studies. Although the Nana Benz’s political imagination and economic activities transgressed regional and international boundaries, the women turned their attention to the issue of French Togoland’s independence and nation building process after the British incorporated their portion of Togoland into the Gold Coast in 1956. My study demonstrates how the Nana Benz navigated and sustained Togolese business and political culture over the course of the next decades, a tumultuous period that saw the assassination of Togo’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, the consolidation of political power in the hands of military ruler Gnassingbé Eyadéma, and the collapse of the women’s regional monopoly on the textile trade.
Recommended Citation
Kothor, Marius Ami, "Securing Ablodé Blibo: Togolese Women Merchants and the Transnational Politics of Decolonization, 1915-1994" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1047.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1047
