While that is certainly true, I believe there's something else that's also had a role to play in popularising African clothing. It's a narrative that has gained significant traction amongst many Africans in Africa and the diaspora. It's the "Africa Rising" narrative.
This narrative captures the desire of many Africans to end the unfair caricaturing of their continent as a place, primarily, of hopelessness and despair. In 2001, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that Africa was "a scar on the conscience of the world". His solution was for the world to focus on that scar and heal it. His words fitted nicely into a narrative of the African continent that had, for a long time, gone unchallenged. Paternalism came before partnership.
Through the "Africa Rising" narrative many Africans want to challenge the "single story" problem by proudly bringing balance to tales of their homelands and cultures. The story of talented fashion designers in Zambia is one part of that. Chimamanda Adichie, the Nigerian writer, expressed the need for Africans to get better at telling their own stories. She said: "If I had not grown up in Africa and if all I knew about Africa was from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves."