The Semiotics Of Chainmail
I want to begin with a phrase I came across while reading about Christianity and cloth in the Pacific. A researcher, writing about the history of missionary dress codes in Oceania, described what the cloth carried with it: “the semiotic chainmail which linked nakedness, sexuality and sin in Christian conceptions.”
Chainmail. Not a metaphor I would have reached for myself, but one that seems to me to describe precisely what was being exported when the missionaries arrived with bolts of fabric. The chain was forged in the European theological tradition—the links from Augustine through the medieval period through the Victorian regulation—and it was being transported to places where the chain had not previously existed, and there affixed to bodies that had not previously been wearing it.
The London Missionary Society arrived in Tahiti in 1797 and then in New Caledonia. At the time, men, women and children dressed in a simple short skirt made of plant fibres or tapa. Imported from the West, the “mission dress” quickly became the norm throughout Oceania as evangelisation progressed. The issue of dress was dealt with in the Code de l’Indigénat, an ultra-repressive system that subjected colonised populations to specific constraints and penalties for non-compliance.
What I notice in this account is the administrative mechanism. The church arrived with the theological argument, and behind it—or alongside it, or through it—came the legal structure: the Code, the ordinance, the penalty for non-compliance. Rhodesia’s Immorality and Indecency Suppression Act of 1903 criminalised exposed skin as part of the same apparatus that prohibited interracial sex. The covering of the body and the management of who that body could be near were administered by the same instrument. The Act’s title names both: immorality and indecency, conjoined. The exposed body was the indecent body was the immoral body was the body requiring management by the colonial state.
I have been writing about the way the British tradition managed the male body at home: the Victorian bathing ban, the external skirt worn over the trunks, the naturist magazine with painted underpants over the photographic negatives, Captain Wallis calling organised nudism “from the pit.” What was exported to Rhodesia, to the Pacific islands, to the indigenous communities of the Americas and Australia, was this tradition, in its legal form, applied to people who had been living within entirely different bodily conventions and then told that those conventions were immoral and indecent and would be addressed by an Act bearing exactly those words in its title.
The specific mechanism by which this operated in Africa is worth attending to. The 1916 Immorality and Indecency Suppression Ordinance in Rhodesia criminalised all sexual activities between black men and white women, while white men remained largely exempt from scrutiny in interracial relationships. What I notice in that asymmetry is that the legislation was using the language of indecency and immorality as instruments of racial rather than moral order. The black male body was the body requiring management. The white male body was the body whose management was not at issue. The law was named as a law about decency. It was structured as a law about race.
A Rhodesian Herald newspaper in 1926 reported that African women “have more of the animal about them in sex matters and they have not the restraint and control that white women have.” The language of animality and the language of restraint: both of these are familiar from the earlier essays in this series. The body requiring covering was the body that had not demonstrated its capacity for rational self-governance. The body that could be trusted to manage itself was the body that deserved to be seen clothed. The colonial project was applying to African bodies the same logic that Augustine had applied to the body in general and that the Victorian tradition had applied to the working-class body in particular: the unclothed body as evidence of the failure to achieve the governance that civilisation required.
What is also recorded, and what I find important to hold alongside the account of imposition, is the complication of the response. The adoption of introduced cloth and clothing was not simply a colonial imposition by foreign missionaries on passive Oceanic peoples, a repressive disciplining of the savage bodies of the heathens. Without denying the semiotic chainmail which linked nakedness, sexuality and sin in Christian conceptions, we need to acknowledge how introduced cloth was actively sought by Oceanic peoples; its very materiality a sign of the spiritual efficacy and power of foreigners. The cloth was also desirable. On many islands, status was expressed through the quality and rarity of material. European fabric arrived as something powerful and new, and in some contexts the dominant social groups adopted it because adopting it was a way of asserting status rather than surrendering it. On many islands, where status was denoted by dress, the dominant social groups were anxious for new styles to continue to assert their elevated social status. Consequently, when the missionaries arrived, their new fashions were rapidly adopted by the ali’i.
I find this complication more interesting, in the end, than the simpler account of imposition, because it resists the narrative in which colonial subjects were purely passive and the colonising tradition was purely triumphant. The men who adopted European clothing were making decisions—not always free decisions, and not always decisions that would have been the same without the pressure of the law and the mission behind them, but decisions nonetheless, within the limited space that the colonial situation allowed. The fabric arrived carrying the semiotic chainmail. Some people wore it anyway, for their own reasons, and made it mean something the chain had not intended.
What the chainmail produced, over generations, is harder to trace. Colonisation runs so deep that what is now imagined as ‘African values’ in dress often mirrors the coloniser’s gaze. Even as nationalist movements called for cultural pride, the visual grammar of decency still mirrored the coloniser. The body, once colonised through land and labour, was now colonised through fabric.
I hold this formulation lightly, because it comes from a specific political position, and political positions are not always the most precise instruments for tracing historical fact. But what it points toward is something I recognise from the men I encountered who had been shaped by the colonial inheritance: the modesty that had been imposed as an external regulation and had been absorbed as an internal one, so thoroughly that it was no longer experienced as external at all.
I wrote in an earlier essay about two kinds of bodily shame: the shame generated by the Augustinian tradition, which attached to what the body desired, and the shame generated by the colonial process, which attached to what the body was. These are different inheritances producing different experiences. But what I observed in the room was that both of them produced the same external effect: a quality of apology in relation to the body, a sense that the body required justification before it could be simply present, that its presence without justification was itself a kind of transgression.
The men in the room who were carrying the colonial inheritance rather than, or in addition to, the Augustinian one, had in some cases a more specific account of where the shame came from. They could sometimes locate it—in a family’s history, in the mission school, in the legislation that their grandparents had encountered and that had persisted in one form or another into their own generation.
What the colonists brought to Africa was the criminal categorisation of behaviour. The acts were indigenous. The name and crime were imported. The paradox is crucial: the laws that some politicians now defend as bulwarks of independence and authenticity are themselves colonial impositions. What was true of the laws governing sexual conduct was true also of the laws and norms governing the body’s appearance. The shame about the body’s visibility was not an African value that the Europeans disrupted. It was a European value that the Africans were given, through law and mission and commerce, and that has in some places taken on the appearance of authenticity through sheer duration.
I am drawing on what I have read here, not on what men told me directly, and I want to be careful about the distance between the two. What I can say from direct observation is more limited: that the quality of bodily apology I noticed in men who had been shaped by the colonial inheritance had a particular texture—located in the body’s appearance and existence rather than in its desires—and that this texture was different from the Augustinian residue I recognised in men whose shame came primarily from the theological tradition. The two were not always distinct in individual men, who had often absorbed elements of both without being able to separate them.
For young Kanak women, the mission dress is now a symbol of twofold domination: that of patriarchal society, in which the woman’s body belongs to the man, and that of Christianity, which based its ideal of modesty on ‘the shame of the body’. The shame of the body. That phrase, which the Kanak commentator identifies as the foundation of the Christian modesty imposed through colonialism, is the same phrase I have been tracing from Genesis through Augustine through Victorian legislation to the painted underpants in the naturist magazine.
The semiotic chainmail crossed the oceans. It arrived on bodies that had not forged it, and in many cases those bodies still wear it, generations later, in the form of an unease about their own physical existence that has no name or only borrowed names and that the men who carry it often cannot locate in any history they know.
The fabric came carrying a new shame. The chain was never explained.
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