FABRICATING DREAMS: SEWING MACHINES, TAILORS, AND URBAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ZAMBIA*Karen Tranberg HansenIntroductionDuring the first half of the twentieth century guns, bicycles, and sewing machines were the imported industrial products that African men had to have if they were to achieve economic success in the changing context of everyday life in colonial Northern Rhodesia. This observation was made in Luapula Province in 1995 by the grandfather of my research assistant, Damiano Chonganya. Damiano's grandfather had served in the Congolese army on the Belgian side during the First World War, and had married a woman who was also from Luapula. On their return to Mansa, he estab-lished himself as a building contractor. The extensive labour migration across the Central African region in the early decades of the twentieth century is well documented,1 but the technology and ideas that were car-ried along and spread in the process have received far less attention. I sug-gest that the sewing machine is one example of a technology that has not received its due.The purpose of this paper is to take the technology provided by sewing machines seriously and to acknowledge tailors as important actors, not only in early urban development but also in the contemporary period. The focus is on imported sewing machines and the tailors who used them, for * My research on the clothing economy has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and faculty grants from Northwestern University. In addition to interviewing tailors in many different locations, I have also used their services for my own wardrobe, using the skills and services of many tailors, women and men, in township markets, city markets, downtown corridors, and private homes. In 2002, I briefly observed a training course in tailoring, organised by the Kanyama Youth Training Program, a NGO offering vocational services for young people with limited economic means. Recently, I began research on tailors' involvement in the development of up-scale and designer fashion, first in 2007, and again in 2009.1 Among them, J. Fabian, History from below: The "Vocabulary of Elisabethville" by Andre Yav. Text, translations, and interpretive essays (Philadelphia, 1990); B. Fetter, The creation of Elisabethville, 1910–1940 (Stanford, 1976); and J. Higginson, A working class in the making: Belgian colonial labor policy and the African mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison, 1989)
168karen tranberg hansen 2 M.C. Musambachime (ed.), The oral history of Mansa, Zambia (Lusaka, 1996).3 Efforts to design sewing machines took place both in Europe and the United States. There were earlier patents, yet the most significant ones were registered during the