Who Owned the Pattern
For three decades a woman in Lomé could hold the sole right to sell a particular printed cloth across a large part of West Africa, and the fortunes that built are why Togo's wax traders were called the Nana Benz. That right was never written into any law — it was a commercial convention, and it was withdrawn by a company in the Netherlands.
Six yards is the unit. That is what a woman buys at Assigamé, the Grand Marché in Lomé, and it is what a tailor needs to make a full outfit — wrapper, top, headtie. The cloth is printed on both faces by a resist process that leaves the characteristic crackle in the dye, and the good stuff is heavy enough that you can feel the difference between it and the copies with your eyes shut. It does not arrive with a name. The market gives it one, customers repeat it, and within a season a design is known across four countries as the eye of my rival or your foot my foot, and the name is worth more than the pattern.
For roughly thirty years, from the late 1950s, a small number of Togolese women controlled which of those designs entered West Africa and who was allowed to sell them. They were called the Nana Benz — nana for mother, benz for the cars — and the story is usually told as one about remarkable individuals, which it was. It is more useful as a story about a property right that had no legal existence at all.
What the exclusivity actually was
The trade began in Accra in the 1940s and moved to Lomé by the end of the 1950s, because Togo ran a low-tariff entrepôt and Ghana did not. The cloth came from Dutch printers, above all Vlisco in Helmond, and reached the coast through the United Africa Company, Unilever's West African trading arm. What a Nana Benz held was the sole wholesale right to particular designs: the printer produced a pattern, one trader in Lomé took the whole run, and nobody else in her territory could obtain it. A large operator could hold exclusive rights to more than sixty separate designs at once, and beneath her sat a pyramid of sub-distributors and market retailers stretching into Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and further. The system peaked in the 1970s. The cars were real, and so was the political weight: a state with very little industry and a great deal of trade taxed what came through that market, and the women who moved it were treated accordingly.
January 1994
Two things broke it, and the order matters. First the customers thinned out. Togo's political crisis of the early 1990s produced a general strike that ran for months across 1992 and 1993, shut the economy and sent hundreds of thousands of people over the borders into Ghana and Benin; an entrepôt whose whole business is other people's regional trade cannot survive that. Then, on 12 January 1994, the CFA franc was devalued by half against the French franc, from fifty to a hundred. Every imported thing doubled in local money overnight. A six-yard piece of Dutch wax stopped being a normal purchase and became a wedding-scale one, and a great many households simply moved down-market and did not move back.
They were never selling cloth. They were selling the fact that nobody else in the town had it — and that was a favour rather than a title, granted by a printing works in the Netherlands and revocable by the same.
Fighting the dragon
Then came the copies. From the early 2000s Chinese mills printed the same designs on lighter cotton at a fraction of the price and sold them into the same markets, and Vlisco's revenue fell by more than 30 per cent over the first five years of the century. The company's answer, which it referred to internally from 2003 as fighting the dragon, was to move closer to the customer: it took over the West African distribution the United Africa Company had run, opened its own branded boutiques in Lomé and elsewhere, and reorganised the terms on which distributors held its cloth. That dismantled the exclusive wholesale right — which was not one asset among several. It was the entire business. The women who remained became retailers operating branded outlets under contract, which is a different job with a different ceiling. One recent account puts the number of Nana Benz down from around fifty to around twenty.
The nanettes
The response came from the generation below, and it was not nostalgia. Younger Togolese traders — nanettes, little Nanas — stopped waiting for a European printer to allocate them anything and went to the source. They fly to China, work with mills on samples and colourways, commission designs, and import under their own names: Femme de Caractère, Prestige, Binta, Rebecca Wax. Six yards of Chinese print at Assigamé runs to something like 9,000 CFA, roughly €14 or US$16, against several times that for the Dutch cloth, so the margins are thinner and the volumes have to be larger. Nobody is buying a Mercedes on it and nobody in government is courting them. But they hold the part of the chain the Nana Benz never held — the design brief and the brand — and that is a real relocation of where the value sits, from Helmond to Lomé by way of Guangzhou.
The building
On the night of 11 January 2013 the main building of the Grand Marché caught fire and burned for hours; crews came over the border from Ghana at Aflao to help put it out. The government said it was arson and arrested opposition figures; the opposition said the accusation was the point. Either way the traders lost their stock and their floor space, and they have been working from stalls around the site ever since. The state announced a replacement — five storeys, 8,656 square metres, room for about 2,500 traders — and the finance minister put the works at 60 per cent complete in September 2024, close to twelve years after the fire. Dédé Rose Gameli Creppy, generally described as the last of the Nana Benz, died on 5 June 2023 with the market she had traded in still a building site.
What the Nana Benz built was formidable and it was also structurally fragile in a way that had nothing to do with how well they ran it. Their asset was an exclusivity conferred by a supplier, enforceable only for as long as that supplier found it convenient, and no amount of commercial skill in Lomé could have prevented a strategy meeting in the Netherlands from ending it. The nanettes are working the opposite way round, holding the relationship with the factory and the name on the cloth rather than a licence to distribute someone else's. Whether that survives the next cheap printer is genuinely unknown. It will be decided in Assigamé, though, and not in Helmond, which is the difference.