Dahomey Research Articles

On the Origins of the Récades of the Kings of Dahomey

On the Origins of the <i>Récades</i> of the Kings of Dahomey

The Brutish Museums By Dan Hicks

What is the role of a museum “curator”? To take care of and safeguard the objects in the museum’s collection? Or to cure the misdeeds of the past? Increasingly, it seems that those in charge of museums see themselves not as guardians of their historic treasures, but as the shameful and reluctant custodians of ill-gotten booty. The great collections of the world are falling over themselves to disembarrass themselves of anything that might be associated with a disagreeable part of history. In 2010, Yale University agreed to return a collection of antiquities to Peru, following a court claim by the Peruvian government; the items in the collection had been taken from the Inca site of Machu Pichu in the 1910s. In February 2019, the City of Stuttgart announced that it was returning to what is now Namibia a whip and a bible that were looted in 1893. Most recently, the French National Assembly voted in September 2020 to return 26 artefacts, currently in the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum, that were taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey following its defeat in the Franco-Dahomean Wars of the 1890s.1 The most famous, and controversial example is, of course, the claim by Greece for the return of the ‘Elgin’ or ‘Parthenon’ (depending on whether you are a ‘keeper’ or a ‘returner’) Marbles from the British Museum. But in every case, there is the same pattern: the wrongs of the past should be righted by repatriation of items of cultural, or totemic, significance.

The “Makpo” Recade: Prestigious Object of the Kings of Dahomey and its Sculpture Materials

The “Makpo” recade in Fon language (language and an ethnic group from South Benin, formerly Dahomey) means message stick or fury’s stick which is a royal specter. In the kingdom of Dahomey, royal power is represented by 7 badges. The “Makpo” recade is one of its badges. It is an object specific to the kings of Dahomey who wore them on the left shoulder. Their functions are numerous. It derives from the hoe and undergoes an evolution over time. The objective of the study is to identify the materials and the wood species used for the manufacture of the recades in order to understand the choice of sculptors and the cultural importance that the materials used could have. The oral accounts of the resource persons (dignitaries of the royal court and holders of the history of Dahomey), the visit to the museum ‘Le petit Musee de la Recade’ (Benin), and the documentation made it possible to collect the data allowing analysis of the results. The data collected were compared with the timber identification data described and codified by Tropical Timber Atlas and meeting NF EN standards. Out of 11 recades analyzed, the materials determined are wood, metals and ivory. Wood is the most used material which gives a sacred cultural side to the recades because of the specific choice of species.

Urbanizing Forest: Archaeological Evidence from Southern Bénin

Abstract Until recently archaeological evidence predating the historically known Kingdom of Dahomey in southern Bénin has been next to non-existent. The situation changed when deep and long drainage channels were dug into the fertile soils at the modern town of Bohicon. In the sides of these channels, rich cultural remains appeared, confirming the assumption that high rates of soil accumulation have caused low archaeological visibility in the forest/former forest belt of West Africa. Geophysical mapping and extensive excavations have revealed two large settlements of 500-600 hectares each, partly overlapping but separated by 2000 years. This paper presents both sites – Sodohomé 1, the earliest site encountered so far in southern Bénin, and Sodohomé 2 (or Sodohomé-Bohicon) which dates to AD 900-1150/1220. Although the first has produced some remarkable results, for instance, an iron spearhead that is the oldest securely dated non-meteoritic iron object in Africa known so far, the focus is on the latter site where evidence demonstrates the existence of a true town with craft specialisation, industrial-scale iron production, long-distance trade and wide communication networks.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston

Reviewed by: Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston Randy J. Sparks Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Amistad, 2018. 208 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-0627-4820-1. Once largely forgotten, Alabama native Zora Neale Hurston is now widely regarded as a "genius of the South," as writer Alice Walker put it, and her best-known works are now featured on college syllabi across the country. A new book by her is a major event, and Barracoon is sure to join Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on any list of her most important works. The book grew out of a series of interviews she conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis or Kossola, as he was known in his Yoruba homeland. Lewis was a survivor of the Clotilda, the last African slaver to arrive in the United States, which landed outside Mobile in 1860. When she completed the manuscript in 1931, Viking Press expressed interest, but only if she rewrote Cudjo's distinctive English to make it more palatable to white readers, something she refused to do. She shopped it around to other publishers, but none were willing to publish it without those revisions. As a result, the manuscript went unpublished and remained in Hurston's papers until now. There can be little doubt that Hurston was right to refuse those publishers' demands, for Lewis's voice is a powerful one and fundamental to the book's success. Lewis was not an easy subject—sometimes he was willing to talk, but other times he was more reticent, more interested in weeding [End Page 246] his garden than in taking questions from Hurston who bribed him with cured ham and other treats. His story is a remarkable one. Even though over twelve million Africans crossed the Atlantic as victims of the international slave trade, firsthand accounts of African captivity and the Middle Passage are extremely rare, making Lewis's narrative an invaluable historical document. He was captured during a bloody military conflict between the kingdom of Dahomey and the Isha, a small sub-group of the Yoruba to which he belonged. Once the Dahomey army captured his hometown, he and the other captives were marched to the coast and sold from the port of Ouidah, located on the Bight of Benin, a major entrepot in the illegal slave trade of the nineteenth century. United States shippers played an important role in that trade, but primarily in voyages to Cuba and Brazil. There are only thirty recorded voyages to the U.S. mainland from the closing of the trade in 1808 until 1860 when the Clotilda landed its human cargo. The expedition was the brainchild of the three Meaher brothers, Jim, Tim, and Burns, who operated a shipyard on the Alabama River, and a business associate, Captain William Foster, who was listed as the ship's owner. After a difficult voyage Foster arrived at Ouidah and negotiated for the purchase of 130 captives, equally divided between men and women, but he was forced to sail with only 116 onboard (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives a lower number of 110 captives). He narrowly avoided capture by British naval cruisers and successfully crossed the Atlantic without a single loss of life. When the ship arrived in Mobile Bay, it sailed to an isolated located where it was burned and the captives were transferred to a steamboat and taken up the Alabama River to a plantation. (After years of searching, the remains of the ship were discovered in May 2019.) Some of the enslaved Africans were sold, the rest divided between the Meahers and Foster. According to Hurston, the Meahers were tried and convicted in federal court and fined for their role in the expedition, though in fact they and Foster were tried and acquitted. When Kossola, renamed Cudjo, and the other enslaved Africans learned that they had been freed in 1865, they dreamed of [End Page 247] returning to Africa, but lacked the means to do so. They demanded land from Meaher, who scoffed at that demand, but agreed to...

Beninese therapeutic pluralism. Historical roots and bioethical issues

Retracing the history of the spread of modern medicine in the former Kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Bénin (sub-Saharan Western Africa), aims to provide a peculiar perspective of colonial domination that, as well known, has dramatically passed through the form of controlling bodies that is not wrong to define as "biopolitical". The aim of the essay is attempting to show how the gesture aimed at trampling the cultural identity of the people of Benin. Passing through the denial of traditional therapeutic culture - which is disregarded, as to this day the primary medical reference remains that of traditional medicine - re-proposes itself in forms that are apparently opposites in the attempt, only theoretical, of contemporary politics to recover and defend the local therapeutic tradition, conjecturing hypothetical forms of peaceful and equal coexistence between traditional and modern medicine. The angle of intercultural bioethics, far from the long-standing multiculturalism, will allow us to have a glimpse into the emerging ethical-political dilemmas regarding this issue, as well as underline how the defense of therapeutic traditions, ascribable to the right of cultural identity, represents a form of guarantee of the human and of his rights. A true "white man's burden", to consider responsibly in the perspective of an inclusive citizenship, on which in today's times it’s urgent to reflect upon.

Interações atlânticas entre Salvador e Porto Novo (Costa da Mina) no século XVIII

O artigo discute as dinâmicas atlânticas entre Salvador e Porto Novo, na Costa da Mina, durante o século XVIII. A despeito do foco da historiografia brasileira no tráfico baiano em Uidá, os portos a leste – os chamados “portos de baixo” – foram importantes terminais de deportação de africanos para as Américas. O artigo explorará ainda as dinâmicas entre Porto Novo e o Daomé, principal reino traficante do golfo do Benim no século XVIII, que reivindicava o “monopólio” do tráfico na região. O jogo político do tráfico de escravos envolvia entidades africanas locais, traficantes de diversas carreiras e autoridades coloniais. Observar as interações entre a Bahia e Porto Novo iluminará as diferentes fases do comércio atlântico no golfo do Benim no século XVIII

The English Interpreters in Dahomey, 1843–1852

ABSTRACTCommercial and diplomatic relations between Africans and Europeans in West Africa in the pre-colonial period depended on the existence of persons who had sufficient knowledge of both European and African languages to be able to act as interpreters between the parties, and such persons were more usually Africans than Europeans. This article collates biographical information on four persons who served as interpreters to successive British visitors to the kingdom of Dahomey between 1843 and 1852, including official government missions seeking to persuade the Dahomian king to cooperate in the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. The lives of such men may be thought of as involving the ‘transcending’ of ‘boundaries’, not only in acting as brokers in contacts between Africans and Europeans, but also in themselves occupying an ambiguous liminal position between the two. In their role as interpreters, they were subject to contradictory pressures, from the Dahomian state and the various European interests involved in the negotiations, and at the same time sought to advance their own personal interests. Beyond the intrinsic interest of these biographies, this article is conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from mainly European sources.

A Dialogue with King Agaja: William Snelgrave’s 1727 Ardra Diary and the Contours of Dahomian-European Commercial Exchange

Abstract:The rise of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the first quarter of the eighteenth century was a watershed event in the political history of precolonial West Africa. This article draws on a newly rediscovered copy of William Snelgrave’s diary who visited King Agaja of Dahomey in April 1727. The diary provides the fullest account to date of Agaja’s motives for invading Whydah in March 1727. In addition, the Diary provides the earliest evidence confirming the bona fides of Bulfinch Lambe’s 1731 mission to England to establish commercial relations with King George II.

2012 National Society of Genetic Counselors Presidential Address: Maintaining Our Professional Identity in an Ever‐Expanding Genetics Universe

2012 National Society of Genetic Counselors Presidential Address: Maintaining Our Professional Identity in an Ever‐Expanding Genetics Universe

Power by design

This article examines the role of royal architectural design in strategies to promote political order in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a major West African state which emerged in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade. Historical and ethnographic sources are marshaled to identify an underlying normative architectural tradition in Dahomean palace construction, a tradition defined by distinct zones devoted to public ritual and semi-public political negotiations. Analysis of the ground plans of six royal palace complexes from the precolonial city of Cana is then deployed to trace the evolution of the latter zone over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of spatial patterns reveals an overall rise in the spatial complexity of, as well as a radical expansion in the control of movement through, royal palace complexes over time. This pattern, I argue, was part of broader material attempts to promulgate a sense of social and political order in a period defined by turbulence and unpredictability.

Love Me Black or Love Me White by Agnes Arany, Adam Makkai

Aleksandar Hemon's obstacles to love. Fiction, page 65 Heeduk Ra's poetry of partition. Verse, page 75 David Grossman's ethical compulsions. Miscellaneous, page 77 FICTION Kangni Alem. Esclaves. Paris. J.C. Lat tes. 2009. 260 pages. 18. isbn978-2 7096-3324-6 Esclaves, Kangni Alem's third novel, differsfromtheoften ironiccriticism of modern Togolese society found inhis Cola-Cola Jazz and Canailles et charlatans. Based on seven years of historical research inWest Africa and Brazil, Esclaves examines slav ery during the nineteenth century, particularly how African rulers and European slave traders interacted. The protagonist is a "master of rituals" in the kingdom of Daho mey, on the gulf ofGuinea. He is a weak man who submits to events rather than controlling them. He even takes different names as they are given tohim by others.He aids in theoverthrow of theking he sup posedly respects. Raped at sword point by an Amazon, then enslaved by Portuguese slave traders, he is taken to Brazil, where he is con verted to Islam and is given the name Sule. He is a minor participant in the failed slave revolt of 1835 and, with many others, is deported back toAfrica. There he learns of the fateof thedeposed king,whom he had betrayed, but also that he is the fatherof a child delivered in a post-mortem caesarean operation after the Amazon was killed. Learn ing that former slaves who were returned to Africa with him now call themselves "Afro-Brazilians" and have become slave traders, he takes revenge, his only assertive act, by burning theirhouses and slave prisons. Alem bases much of his story on history, interspersingreal events with the life of his fictional pro tagonist. The "master of rituals" col laborated with a Portuguese slave trader, Francisco Felix de Souza, who arrived inAfrica in 1788 and deposed Adondozan, the king of Dahomey, in 1818.Wanting tokeep slaves towork forhim, Adondozan had tried to stop the transatlantic trade. The revolt in 1835 in Bahia, led by Muslims, failed because a woman slave betrayed the leaders. In the novel thiswoman becomes Sule's jealous former lover. In a pro logue to the novel, based on a true incident,a reconditioned slave ship ishired in 1840 to take timberfrom England to Australia. The ship is destroyed in a storm just before reaching its goal, perhaps, as we learn later,because itwas the ship onwhich Sule was sent toBrazil and he had performed rituals tohaunt it. Esclaves is filled with action rather than psychological analysis. Historical documentation is smooth ly incorporated into the story.On occasion, Alem amusingly inverts common stereotypes; women in Dahomey gossip about thesize ofde Souza's genitals. The greed of European nations was the reason for the transatlantic trade. Africans, however, face moral = problems in considering the slave = trade: the complicity ofmany rulers, = whose societies had known slavery = long before the arrival of theEuro- = peans, and the continued squabbles = between Africans andWest Indians = (of the type "your ancestors soldmy = ancestors"). In theepilogue, entitled = "the banality of evil," even Afro- = Brazilians become slave traders. = Esclaves has generated much discus- = sion among African readers. = Adele King = Paris = Agnes Arany.Love Me Black or Love E Me White. Adam Makkai et al., tr. = New York / Bloomington, Indiana. E iUniverse.2009. vii + 232 pages, ill. E $16.95. isbn 978-1-4401-1625-4| Love Me Black or Love Me White E falls somewhere between fic- E tion and fact in content, some- E where between imaginative nar- E rative and travelogue in genre. E Like the central figure in the sto- E ries, Agnes Arany has traveled E and lived throughout much of the E world, from Budapest to Russia, E Egypt, Singapore, Hong Kong, and E Hawaii. As a result, the interest E lies as much in the atmosphere of E disparate worlds as in the actions E of the characters, forArany has a E sharp eye for even minor details E in Budapest apartments and cafes, E a Coptic monastery, a seedy Rus- E sian town in the provinces, or an E Ii aseptic luxury building in Singa , pore set in squalid surroundings. 1 At the same time, Arany expos , es injustices: racism that...

Asen, ancestors, and vodun: tracing change in African art

Asen, metal sculptures of southern Benin, West Africa, are created to honor the dead and are meant to encourage interaction between visible and spiritual worlds in ancestral rites associated with the belief system known as vodun. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the former Kingdom of Dahomey, Bay traces more than 150 years of transformations in the manufacture and symbolic meanings of asen against the backdrop of a slave-raiding monarchy, domination by French colonialism, and postcolonial political and social change. Bay expertly reads evidence of the area's turbulent history through analysis of asen motifs as she describes the diverse influences affecting the process of asen production from the point of their probable invention to their current decline in use. Paradoxically, asen represent a sacred African art form, yet are created using European materials and technologies and are embellished with figures drawn from tourist production. Bay’s meticulously researched artistic and historical study is a fascinating exploration of creativity and change within Benin’s culture.

‘Les Epouses du Leopard’ : Vers une Approche-Genre de L’histoire du Danxome ?

Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey by Edna G. Bay. University of Virginia Press, 1998, 350pp. ISBN 0-8139-1791-3 – ISBN 0-8139-1792-1 Wives of the Leopard is probably the last book published on Danxome, although it was published by the Virginia University Press as far back as 1998.² Given the rapid pace of review of fresh ideas in the academic world, writing about this subject some ten years after publication might look anachronistic.However, I presume that, for most of us, this book remains very current for two critical reasons: firstly, while it may constitute old stuff for the Anglophone academia, their francophone colleagues may yet not be very conversant with it. Secondly, for us Beninese, this book raises such vital questions that transcend time and space...

CONTINUITY, REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION ON THE SLAVE COAST OF WEST AFRICA? ROYAL ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICAL ORDER IN PRECOLONIAL DAHOMEY

ABSTRACTThe Kingdom of Dahomey has played a central role in our understanding of political organization in West Africa in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Research has focused on two major questions: whether or not Dahomey possessed revolutionary qualities that allowed it to maintain order in this turbulent era, and the role of militarism in fostering stability. Mounting archaeological evidence from the Republic of Bénin can contribute to our understanding of Dahomean political dynamics over time. Spatial patterns in royal palace construction, materialized regionally and architecturally, are examined in this essay. These data suggest that Dahomey achieved real administrative advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the expansion of regional control and the successful integration of a complex administrative hierarchy.1

OBITUARY

Daniel Martin B.Sc., M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S.E. was born in Carluke on 16 April 1915, the only child of William and Rose Martin (née Macpherson). The family home in which he was born, Cygnetbank in Clyde Street, had been remodelled and extended by his father, and it was to be Dan's home all his life. His father, who was a carpenter and joiner, had a business based in School Lane, but died as a result of a tragic accident when Dan was only six. Thereafter Dan was brought up single handedly by his mother.After attending primary school in Carluke from 1920 to 1927, Dan entered the High School of Glasgow. It was during his third year there that he started studying calculus on his own. He became so enthused by the subject that he set his sights on a career teaching mathematics, at university if at all possible. On leaving school in 1932, he embarked on the M.A. honours course in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. At that time the Mathematics Department was under the leadership of Professor Thomas MacRobert; the honours course in Mathematics consisted mainly of geometry, calculus and analysis, and the combined honours M.A. with Natural Philosophy was the standard course for mathematicians. A highlight of his first session at university was attending a lecture on the origins of the general theory of relativity, given on 20th June 1933 by Albert Einstein. This was the first of a series of occasional lectures on the history of mathematics funded by the George A. Gibson Foundation which had been set up inmemory of the previous head of the Mathematics Department. From then on, relativity was to be one of Dan's great interests, lasting a lifetime; indeed, on holiday in Iona the year before he died, Dan's choice of holiday reading included three of Einstein's papers.

From Ethnography to the African Novel: The Example of Doguicimi (1938) by Paul Hazoume (Dahomey)

From Ethnography to the African Novel: The Example of Doguicimi (1938) by Paul Hazoume (Dahomey)

Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (review)

Bay, Edna G. 1998. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Wives of the leopard: gender, politics, and culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey

Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey

Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey