On Ouidah Asen

In 1989 Suzanne Preston Blier published an article based on her close reading of the fi eld materials compiled by Melville and Frances Herskovits during their 1931 sojourn in Dahomey. Received negatively by some of Herskovits’s close scholarly descendants and admirers, the article nevertheless was a useful addition to scholarship on southern Benin, for it put valuable perspective on the fi eld research methods used by one of the foundational scholars of Dahomean studies, widely hailed as the father of African studies. For those of us who had followed Herskovits into the Dahomean fi eld and used his extensive writings on Dahomey as a guide, Blier’s comments helped to clarify inconsistencies; it became apparent that Herskovits’s shortcomings were the product of an extraordinarily brief but intense fi eld experience. Herskovits’s work is but one of literally hundreds of extant sources on Dahomey, one of the most richly documented areas of Africa. Th e Dahomean literature is now enlarged by contributions that Blier and others, including myself, have added. Both Blier and I have carried out continuing archival and fi eld research on the area of the former kingdom of Dahomey over roughly the same academic generation (Blier starting in 1984 and I in 1971). As scholars who have worked to sift through the massive corpus of Dahomean literature, we know the diffi culties of contradictory sources and the perils of errors and misunderstandings made by earlier sources that have then been picked up and repeated with authority by later scholars. In my own case, despite care for comprehensiveness, I have been corrected in print and thus have experienced fi rst-hand the painful reality that all of our scholarship in time will be revised and corrected. Given the importance of accuracy in scholarly work, I write to raise a Dahomey-related research question that could well benefi t from more attention from a future generation of Africanist art scholars. Both Blier and I have written about asen, the portable altars to the dead common in twentieth century southern Dahomey/Benin, which are beginning to draw closer attention from the scholarly and museum communities (Blier 1998:110, 2004:107, 2005:54; Bay 1985, 1987, forthcoming). Of particular recent interest have been the elaborate wroughtiron asen that I identifi ed in 1985 as characteristic of a Ouidah style. Because Ouidah asen are increasingly visible in exhibitions, it would seem appropriate to clarifi y what we now know about them and what remains to be learned. Indeed, the exercise is timely since Holland Cotter, writing recently in the New York Times, incorrectly attributed a superb Ouidah asen to Yoruba culture (2005). Cotter drew his mistaken attribution from the Museum for African Art’s exhibition “Resonance from the Past: African Sculpture from the New Orleans Museum of Art.” Th e asen photo’s caption identifi es the asen as “Fon/ Hweda/Yoruba peoples, town of Ouidah.” While this appropriately designates the ethnic make-up of Ouidah town, it is less accurate as an indicator of the appropriate ethnic affi liation of the object type, which is Fon. Th e conical asen form is associated with the honoring of certain non-kin spirits among the Yoruba, Fon, and related peoples, but the creation and use of ancestral asen is an innovation of Fon culture and is not generally found among the Yoruba. In a publication forthcoming in Fall 2007, I trace the invention of ancestral asen to the mid-nineteenth century Fon court of Dahomey, from which ancestral asen use diffused in the colonial period to a broad expanse of peoples in southern Benin. Blier’s catalogue notes for the “Resonance from the Past” exhibition provide information on this excellent example of the Ouidah asen style (2005:54). She calls the smith/sculptor of the piece the “Master of the Long-Horned Ram” because of his handling of the twisted, inward-curving horns. Blier has commented in print on a similar asen that is now owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1998:110, 2004:54). In fact, a third asen, formerly in the collection of William Arnett and now owned by the Carlos Museum of Emory University, includes a ram with the same distinctive horns (Fig. 1). All three are certainly by the same hand. Indeed, if ram horns are not enough evidence, my own fi eld research has shown that asen in Ouidah, like those in Abomey, were at times characterized by a master smith’s “signature” on the afl efl e, the pendants that hang from the circular asen platform. All three asen have the same unique afl efl e design, a horizontal “B” form topped with leafl ike appendages that are likely representations of kponuhwan, spear-tips associated with the Fon/Yoruba divinity of iron, Gu/Ogun (Adande and Tornay n.d.). Future researchers in Ouidah may fi nd that smiths there can recognize the asen maker by this signature, as comparable signatures dating to the 1930s were identifi ed by smiths in Abomey during my own fi eldwork. Blier suggests that the Master of the LongHorned Ram may in fact have been Akpele Kendo Akati, a smith who worked in Abomey in mid-nineteenth century and who is said by his family to have been the creator of the famous Gu fi gure owned by the Musee du quai Branly in Paris (2005:54).1 Indeed, she asserts that the Boston MFA’s asen by the same hand is “From the atelier of Akati Akpele Kendo” (2004:107). Akati was originally Yoruba, captured from Dassa in the nineteenth century wars and settled as a slave-artisan in the Yoruba quarter of Abomey. Th is would make Holland Cotter’s attribution of the Ouidah asen as “Yoruba” technically correct, on grounds that it was created by a Yoruba smith. However, the attribution of these asen to Akati is unlikely for a number of reasons. First, the style of the three Ouidah asen is distinctively diff erent from that of asen made in Abomey, where Akati was based.2 Each region of southern Dahomey/Benin has localized styles for making ancestral asen and one rarely if ever sees an asen typical of another center in a family’s compound, even though, as Blier points out, branches of the same smithing families might reside in distant cities. Second, the artisans established by the monarchs in Abomey worked exclusively for the kings. How and why would a king’s smith create an object for someone in Ouidah? Moreover, it is probable that prior to the French conquest in 1892–94 ancestral asen with elaborate fi gural tableaux were made only for the kings and queen mothers of Dahomey. Th e use of elaborate ancestral asen appears to have become common in Fon culture only in the twentidialogue