Good as Gold

In the video below, learn more about the historic city of Saint-Louis, Senegal. Saint-Louis hosts an annual end-of-year parade known as the Fanal to honor, celebrate, and promote the famous local women known as signares, as well as the history of the city itself. The city’s inhabitants reenact the images of the signares, who are remembered for their elegance, wealth, and extravagant gold jewelry, through theatrical performances, costume, dance, and sumptuous—yet historically grounded—sartorial expression.

The iconic Faidherbe Bridge, whose arches have inspired several gold jewelry styles, opens the film. The bridge is named after Louis Léon César Faidherbe, the colonial general who extended France’s control over most of modern Senegal from his base in Saint-Louis. Despite his legacy as an occupier, he is considered a “founder” of modern Senegal by local residents and is also honored and portrayed in the parade.

Film created by Aramis Studio, 2015.

nspired by the distinct fashion sense of historic signares, Beninois-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro created a series of images evoking these legendary characters. He worked with Senegalese women in Dakar, and on site at Gorée Island and Saint-Louis, who reimagined themselves as contemporary signares—highlighting not just their beauty, but their strength, power, and business acumen. As Monteiro states, “it is not a reportage, but a reconstruction . . .” By reconstructing signares from a feminist perspective, Monteiro and the models are able to recover, reconstruct, and reify the power of women in the present.

Note the historic architecture—homes previously owned by signares—and the famous Faidherbe bridge in the images. These elements, in particular the arches of the bridge, have inspired several of the jewelry designs in this exhibition.

Signares were a malleable class of cultural brokers. They glided between the rigid, European-led distinctions that defined race and class in a colonial period that otherwise diminished the agency of local Senegalese men and women. They were famed for their bold display of gold jewelry, distinctive conical headdresses, and voluminous cloth ensembles—styles born of European and African systems of dress. They were often directly involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island, with its infamous “door of no return,” was owned by one such woman.

Yet, signares are primarily remembered in Senegal as beautiful and discerning role models who made the most of the limited political and cultural options available to them at the time. Today, many successful women identify themselves as contemporary signares, and their specific gestures are evident in portrait poses, as seen especially throughout 20th- and 21st-century photographic practices.

Senegalese women have played a major role in trade as well as politics since the Portuguese established ocean trade networks in the 15th century. Signares (from the Portuguese word senhoras) are perhaps the best known. These upwardly mobile, 18th- and 19th-century Euro-African women who enjoyed economic and cultural power were renowned as much for their beauty and sophistication as for their business savvy. Many entered into temporary marital unions with Europeans who found the alliance and its benefits, particularly the women’s trade connections and language fluency, to be mutually advantageous.