African Fabric, and synchronicity

Sometimes synchronicity strikes with happy web connections.  Today I was planning to write about the newest occupant of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.  It is a ship in a bottle. Not just any old ship but an accurate replica of Nelson's HMS Victory. And not the little maquette you see in this picture, but big enough for the technicians to crawl inside and build the ship. Only the other day I was linking to the conservation of Nelson's undress uniform and here is another textile link to him.  There was lots of press coverage of the ship's unveiling on the plinth, but I picked this picture out from a teachers' resource page because it shows the artist's choice of fabric for the sails.  The artist used richly patterned textiles usually seen on African dress, although he had to replicate them for scale and in order to use light-resistant dyes.  As the BBC's arts correspondent explains: ' These are not the bright white sheets of Nelson's original; they're made of a richly patterned fabric more commonly associated with African dress, a regular motif in Shonibare's work. But the fabric isn't from Africa; it's from Brixton market. The reason it is associated with African dress is not indigenous craftsmanship but the mass production of the material by the Dutch, who sold it to their West African colonies. The design, in fact, is not even African: it's based on Indonesian batik.' 
The bottle's creator used these fabrics to  'bring together historical and global themes and reflects the legacy of British colonialism and its expansion in trade and Empire, made possible through the freedom of the seas brought about by Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.'
And as I planned this post this morning, I idly surfed onto a blog which is new to me, called Style Court, and found a post themed on vintage covers for the book 'Out of Africa' by Karen Blixen with, in its turn, an African textiles reading list.   Lovely.