the modernist x BDP present - The BDP Talk Series.#6 : Ewan Harrison - Kingsway Stores and the Ends of Empire in West Africa

Kingsway Stores of Nigeria was part of a British owned retail chain that had grown through the first half of the 20^th century through the sale of imported luxury goods to British colonial civil servants and expatriate businessmen. At independence, the chain sought to market its existing range of clothing and home-wear to a new African clientele. Building on patterns of colonial intervention in the domestic lives of indigenous people, the Kingsway stores led marketing campaigns including exhibitions and ideal home shows, to sell a vision of modern, and indeed, modernist, domesticity to the African consumer, through newly constructed modernist department stores on prominent urban sites. This talk charts Kingsway’s responses to decolonisation, and the operative uses it made of modernist design in order to prolong its business in the region.