The Politics of Being Studied: Who gets to produce knowledge and who gets reduced to culture?

I started thinking about this while writing The Interior Work. The handbook is built around case studies, and I knew I wanted African designers to sit at the centre. Not in a chapter near the back. Not as cultural context. In the centre, where the argument lives.

I kept thinking about the way we talk about brands, the ones we return to when we want to explain positioning or strategy, and the ones we bring into a conversation to illustrate a particular aesthetic or cultural influence. There seemed to be a difference in the questions being asked of them: some brands were examined for how they thought, others were discussed for what they represented.

I have come to think of this as the difference between being studied for strategy and being studied for identity.

It is not that African designers are never discussed in international fashion or design publications. They are. Their work appears in editorials, exhibitions, trend reports and conversations about the influence of African aesthetics on contemporary design. The problem is what happens to the work in those conversations. Sometimes the attention settles on the cultural references, the materials, the patterns and the stories of origin, while the thinking behind the brand receives less scrutiny.

The designer becomes a reference point. The work is admired, but the decisions that produced it are not necessarily examined. I am interested in that distinction because the work is often doing much more than the discussion around it allows.

Take Thebe Magugu. His work draws on South African history, archival research and the lives of people whose stories he wants to bring into view. His collections develop ideas over time. The relationship between the research, the clothes and the stories surrounding them is part of how the brand communicates. These are decisions about narrative, positioning and continuity. They are also decisions about how to build a body of work that people can recognise as belonging to a particular creative mind. His South African context is essential to understanding his work. It is not the only reason to study it.

The same applies to Sindiso Khumalo, whose work brings textiles, historical references and stories of women into contemporary fashion. The meaning is not simply an image applied to a product. It is part of the material and the decisions behind it. There is a relationship between what is made, the knowledge it carries and the person encountering it. That relationship is worth examining as design, but also as a way of building a brand.

Christie Brown, founded by Aisha Ayensu in Accra, offers another set of questions. What does it take to build a fashion house around a recognisable point of view? How does a designer work with heritage and craftsmanship while developing a contemporary luxury proposition? How do creative decisions hold together as a business grows and the market around it changes?

These are not questions unique to African fashion. They are questions about building a brand. The fact that the answers emerge from a particular place makes them more specific, not less useful.

I do not want culture removed from the discussion. That would be to miss the point entirely. The histories, materials and relationships that inform these designers are part of what makes their work compelling. To separate the strategy from the culture would be to misunderstand how the work comes into being. What I want is for us to be able to examine both.

When a brand is discussed mainly as a cultural reference, the conversation can stop at what the work expresses. We notice the textile, the silhouette, the symbol or the story behind a collection. We talk about what it says about identity, heritage or place. Those conversations matter, but they do not tell us everything about the work.

We can also ask how the designer has built a recognisable point of view, what choices have shaped the business, how the brand communicates its ideas and what another designer might learn from the way it operates. The difference is not merely one of emphasis. It changes what we understand the work to be.

A designer’s cultural knowledge can be part of their strategic intelligence. Their relationship with a material, a place or a particular history can inform the decisions they make about product, storytelling and the people they want to reach. That knowledge is not an accessory to the work. It can be the basis of it. When we focus on the visible cultural references without examining the thinking behind them, we risk appreciating the result while overlooking the knowledge that made it possible.

There is a practical cost to this. Designers working in different places are making decisions under different conditions. The markets they serve, the materials they can access, the manufacturing relationships available to them and the histories informing their work all shape what is possible. A brand built in Accra or Cape Town is not operating under precisely the same conditions as one built in Paris or Copenhagen. That difference is worth studying. It gives us a wider understanding of how brands are built, rather than a narrower one.

I also think about what happens when these distinctions enter education.

The examples we teach with influence the way students learn to look at creative work. A case study offers more than a successful brand to admire. It gives the reader a way to examine decisions, understand their consequences and consider how the lessons might apply elsewhere. Over time, the brands that appear repeatedly in teaching materials become familiar reference points. Their approaches begin to feel like the natural starting point for understanding the discipline.

If students encounter African designers mainly in conversations about identity and cultural influence, they may have fewer opportunities to study those designers as strategists. They may learn to recognise the work’s cultural significance without being shown how to examine the decisions behind it.

This is not an argument that African brand education does not exist. It does, and there are people building resources that take the realities of the continent seriously.

The Africa Brand Leadership Academy, founded by Thebe Ikalafeng, is one example. Its approach to teaching brand leadership uses African case studies drawn from real businesses and covers subjects including branding, entrepreneurship, innovation and business leadership. It recognises that building brands in Africa requires an understanding of the conditions in which African businesses operate.

This matters demonstrates that African businesses are not short of strategic lessons. There is work being done to document those lessons and make them available to people who are building brands. The question is how widely this knowledge circulates, and whether it becomes part of the material through which brand strategy is taught and understood elsewhere.

A brand can be included in a publication without its strategic thinking becoming part of the argument. Inclusion alone does not tell us how the work is being read, or what the reader is being invited to learn from it. That is why I keep returning to the distinction between a case study and a reference image.

A reference image can be useful for what it offers another project: a colour, a texture, a silhouette or a feeling. A case study asks us to spend time with the work itself. It asks us to understand the choices, the context and the consequences. It gives the work room to change the way we think, rather than simply helping us illustrate an idea we already have.

African designers should not have to remain useful primarily as sources of inspiration for other people’s work when their own decisions have so much to teach.

There is also something troubling about the way recognition can work. A designer may have spent years developing a practice, building relationships with makers and customers, and refining a particular point of view. When that work begins to attract attention elsewhere, it can be described as a discovery. The language makes the moment of recognition seem like the beginning of the story.

But the work existed before the wider audience arrived. People were already making it, wearing it, buying it, studying it and sustaining it. What changed was who was looking.

I do not think every African designer needs international recognition, nor do I think inclusion in a Western brand book should be the measure of a successful practice. That would leave the existing system in charge of deciding what counts as valuable. The more important question is whether designers can define the value of their work on their own terms, and whether the people writing about them are prepared to engage with that work in its full complexity.

Recognition and understanding are not the same thing.

When I was structuring The Interior Work, I made a decision about the architecture of the handbook. The African brands would be primary material. Their work would form the basis of the case studies rather than appearing as supplementary examples of cultural influence. That decision changed the way I thought about the book. It was no longer simply a question of which brands to include. It was a question of what the reader would be invited to learn from them. I wanted to look at the thinking behind the work, the decisions that shaped the brands and the lessons those decisions might offer someone building a business of their own.

The examples we choose affect the questions we learn to ask. If we want a wider understanding of brand strategy, we need to study a wider range of businesses, and we need to let those businesses shape the way we understand the discipline.

There are already designers, writers, educators and studios doing this work. They are documenting practices, developing case studies and building resources that take African creative work seriously. That knowledge deserves to circulate, not only among people who already know where to find it, but among the wider community of designers and strategists who can learn from it.

I want to see African designers studied for the full complexity of their work. For the ideas that shape what they make, the decisions that sustain their businesses and the knowledge they bring to the discipline. I want their work to be part of the material through which other designers learn, rather than something they are encouraged to reference without being asked to understand.

The work is already there. The writing needs to catch up.