Is agbada now the equivalent of a suit?

As you all know, like a 3-piece woolen or fabric suit, the Western legal regalia was a product of a particular geo-cultural and largely temperate environment. Within the African geo-cultural environment, there are attires that are environmentally-friendly, physical health-friendly and much more amenable to both a modern office setting and a modern courtroom. And yes, lots of people do wear the latter to work.

But I usually laugh and shake my head in silent pity whenever, in a typical tropical setting, such as Nigeria, I notice an African professional on his way to work (including work in the courtroom) adorned in a 3-piece suit and sweating profusely. (I used the possessive pronoun "his" because I hardly see any woman in a 3-piece suit although I may be wrong on this score.) I pity the fellow and wonder silently whether with all his sweating under a blazing sun, he could still think clearly when he arrives in the courtroom. Inside a typical molou passenger bus, one tends to encounter similarly dressed fellows, sweating even while the fully-loaded bus is in motion. This is an example of a geo-cultural fashion mismatch adorned as an adopted mode of dressing, adopted wholescale without, in some cases, being adapted to suit the geo-cultural environment of the cultural borrower.

In a variety of ways, we have not adequately decolonized our aesthetics, our axiology, our minds, and our self-conception though I acknowledge that our mixed heritage (what Ali Mazrui called the Triple Heritage) includes our colonial past. Against the backdrop of that mixed heritage and a contemporary world marked significantly by cultural adaption and cultural hybridization, it’s inevitable that we cannot and need not forsake everything that derived from our colonial past and its concomitant tools of indoctrination. At the same time, as we keep all that is valuable and useful for a healthy society from our mixed heritage, let’s also preserve, refine and valorize the functional elements of our own indigenous cultural heritage—elements which sustained our forefathers and foremothers without whom we would not have had a past, any past of the cultural dimension of our being, to stand on in the comity of the human cultural landscape.