Tanzania: Mandela shirts’ intrigue Kenyan journalists

By Valentine Marc Nkwame

We should have to blame it all on Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, who remains the world legendary freedom fighter and Africa’s top statesman. His chosen attire is fast catching on in Arusha to an extent of making some visiting Kenyan journalists conclude that the flowery or patterned batik shirts were the National Dress of Tanzania.

The Kenyan members of the fourth estate were recently on an official tour here, visiting Arusha and Manyara Regions when it occurred to them that out of every ten local people they came across with here, at least six would be spotting a Batik shirt.

The visiting scribes were forced to break the silence after paying courtesy calls to several administration offices in Manyara Region where all officials were found wearing the flower patterned shirts made from Batik materials. “Are these shirts the official national dress?” asked the Kenyan journalists seriously.

The Kenyan scribes were even more taken aback when this rather innocent question incited laughter from their local ‘paper-and-pen’ counterparts. They were however told that, the shirts were actually symbols of major influence that Nelson Mandela had on Tanzanians but especially the residents of Arusha where the South African political giant visited frequently.

Nelson Mandela who has been using the Batik shirts as his trademark attire and identity. He frequented here in 2000 after he replaced the founding Tanzanian President, the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere as the chief negotiator for the Burundi Peace accord which was being hosted in Arusha.

The South African top statesman, just like Nyerere, has chosen to drop the international official dress ‘the suit’ and has since then been always seen wearing these shirts made from Batik textiles. The congressman is often seen wearing Batik, even on formal occasions. Shirts in this style are fondly known as “Madiba shirts” in South Africa, but here the top attires are simply called ‘Mandela shirts.’

In both the late seventies and early eighties, local people here used to spot another style of dressing, ‘Kaunda suit’, named after the former Zambian President, Keneth Kaunda, who founded the attire. This type of dressing consisted of matching pair of trousers with an upper coat spotting a rounded neck.

Meanwhile, the Arusha based female designer, Gaudensia Magessa, who in 2003 had set out on a mission to research and come up with a specially made attire to serve as the National dress, seems to have given up the effort due to what she recently described as lack of both motivation and support.