L'Art de cour d'Abomey, le sens des objets by Gaëlle Beaujean

The interest of Gaëlle Beaujean's work, L'Art de cour d'Abomey, le sens des objets, resides in the fact that it constitutes a meritorious assemblage of knowledge about Abomey, capital of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey, situated in the southern part of present-day Republic of Benin. It does not, however, fulfill the expectations raised by the second part of its title.Abomey and the Fon kingdom of Dahomey are at the heart of what is certainly the best documented and known region of west Africa. Indeed, many voyagers, diplomats, traders, and navigators left logbooks and travel reports. During the French war of conquest and colonization, soldiers in their travel diaries or field notes, and then administrators, geographers, and historians, made sometimes exceptional contributions to the knowledge of this kingdom and its historical, political, religious, social, and artistic particularities.Since the independence of the colony of Dahomey in 1960, interest in the ancient kingdom of Abomey among European researchers, photographers, museum collectors, ethnographers, as well as Beninois historians, linguists, musicologists, and geographers has not diminished, and the corpus of erudite studies has been amplified and enriched.UNESCO recognized the uniqueness and quality of the royal buildings of Dahomey, acknowledging, in 1985, their distinctive aesthetics, architecture, and history. Later, in 2008, UNESCO included in their Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity certain ceremonies and aspects—shared at the regional level—of the Gelede complex, as well as the practices, practitioners, modes of apprenticeship, tales, and myths of the divination system of the Fa (Faa, Ifa). A compilation that addresses itself to a public larger than that of specialists in these matters is thus always of interest.This work has many positive aspects. It clarifies and calls attention to historical details that are known little or not at all. It is also a deluxe edition with abundant iconography, which includes color photographs of well known pieces as well as rarer objects.Based on the title, Art de cour d'Abomey, le sens des objets, however, one expects to discover new perspectives on the art of this realm, when in fact this is for the most part a history textbook.This book is based on previously published studies or narratives, ranging from those datable to the seventeenth century (Delbée 1671), to recent contributions, all of which can fill the shelves of a library. The first notable reports on the region, dating from the middle seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, relate not to Abomey, however, but to the kingdom of Allada (Ardres, Ardra) and the small states of the coast (Des Marchais 1730).The author maintains a certain ambiguity by evoking a king of Abomey from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The emergence of this kingdom, however, took time. Upon leaving Allada, the group of individuals, related by kinship and alliance, who would later found the Fon kingdom of Dahomey, were received on the plateau of Abomey by the people there, the Guedevi. Having grown quite powerful, this group turned against its hosts and waged war to impose itself and expand its territory. These various episodes are illustrated in bas-reliefs inscribed in the walls of the royal buildings (Waterlot 1926, Biton 2000).1When can we speak of a kingdom and a king? It would be necessary first to define the notion of king within the cultural framework of this period. Abomey represents its first leaders (or kings?) in a rather nebulous way in its official genealogy and recognizes that they were not consecrated correctly or in a traditional way. These two kingdoms of Allada and Abomey, the first well established, the second in the process of constitution, had common or similar aspects, but they were not a single entity, distinguished, as they were, by different recent histories and claims on different historical periods. Many differences separated these states, although they shared a common origin.Thus, Abomey appears on the international scene only in the eighteenth century; it reached the ocean only after having conquered the coastal kingdoms and, in 1724, the wealthy but weakened kingdom of Allada. In this way, it transformed its status from that of a reservoir of slaves for the coastal market, to that of a direct commercial and political partner of the Europeans, who were stationed on the beaches and in lodges attached to the royal buildings of Allada, reserved for the representatives of most favored nations. By conquering Allada, Abomey further indicated that it no longer recognized any allegiance with this kingdom.We have no direct information on the kingdom of Abomey before the middle of the eighteenth century. Only the oral traditions provide information that is very useful, but in their structures and internal preoccupations these are far from a chronology.Regarding this book's sources, it is regrettable that they are not consistently cited, despite their importance in the development of the subject. One notes a number of omissions of references to works or passages of works from which conclusions clearly have been borrowed, impairing an analysis of the historical evolution of knowledge which might inform contemporary reflections. For example, there are few lines where the source of an assertion is not cited, as when the author writesThis assertion draws, without a doubt, on the work published almost eighty years ago by Bernard Maupoil, an exceptional colonial administrator who died in deportation who advanced this point of view in a long 1943 article in Le journal de la Société des africanistes, accompanying his thesis. The title of this article clearly indicates its relevance to the quote above (Maupoil 1943b, t. XIII: 1-94): “Contribution à l'étude de l'origine musulmane de la Géomancie dans le bas-Dahomey.” That this article does not appear in the present work's bibiliography is an unfortunate omission.One notes as well some approximations or surprising errors, such as that which appears in the description of the ogumagan, the rosary used by the bokonon (“priest” in Fa), in the practice of Fa. The author writes (p. 89): “Le bokonon compose son signe grâce au jet de seize noix de palme réunis en un chapelet.” I myself know of no Fa rosary that has sixteen palm kernels strung together, as the author indicates, though I had the occasion to examine a number of them when I worked in the Département d'Afrique noire of the Musée de l'Homme and also in Benin during various projects.2 Whether made of vegetable or mineral material, Fa rosaries always include four nuts, neither more nor less. Several authors, since the 1930s, have written solid studies of Fa and none of them has mentioned a sixteen-nut rosary (Trautmann 1939; Maupoil 1943a; Hounwanou 1984). The nuts are split open, giving eight half-nuts linked together by a cord, chain, or string, which bears at each end either a cowrie or a pearl (masculine/ feminine and right/left) in order to indicate the direction in which the figures should be read.During a consultation, the bokonon throws the rosary, and the nut halves each manifest a position, open or closed (I or II), determining a figure which helps him to evoke the tales or myths linked to the geomantic house designated by the Fa, which he searches in his memory. There are thus 256 basic possibilities (dou), linked to Fa.To return, finally, to the general purpose of the work, the ambiguity of its title lies in the relationship that the author seems to establish between the intended object, namely, “the court art of Abomey” and the proposed interpretation, namely “the meaning of objects.” If the notion of “court art” is to be analyzed according to the meanings that can be attributed to these productions—and to the concept, both reductive and vague, of “objects”—one would hope for an analysis of the status of this art that would be based on accumulated knowledge about the society that produced it, and possibly an analysis of the meaning that these artifacts, to which we now attribute the status of art, have been able to acquire over time, from the era of Abomey's kindling to our present era, taking into account the changing historical understandings of the descendants of this kingdom, as well as outsiders’ views.Even the quote taken from “Nails in the Mona Lisa,” (“This is why the apprenticeship is very long”; Bazin 2008), which seems to propose a new orientation, a new meaning, or a new reading does not shed much light on the path taken—quite the contrary.The end of the book, which welcomes the policy of restitution by France of pieces from the Dodds collection to the Republic of Benin, gives the impression that the second part of the title may be catering, regrettably, to the mood of the moment. This without truly engaging in an analysis of the relativity and permanence of the meaning that every society articulates in its self-representation, regarding its past, its history, and the way these resonate with the present. L'art de cour d'Abomey, le sens des objets—long awaited by specialists in the region who hoped for a vast historical panorama coupled with capable aesthetic analysis—does not really meet this expectation. It is, nonetheless, an intelligent compilation.In conclusion, this book, which must be based on a thesis, has the qualities and defects inherent in a work written to fulfill university standards. A more independent, certainly more ambitious, approach to this art is anticipated in future work. The path of research on aesthetics, both those internal to the societies producing the artefacts and those applied from outside—including those of heritage registry— is yet to be taken. This path is still open.