Of small things remembered: Beads, cowries, and cultural translations of the Atlantic experience in Yorubaland

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2-3, 2002, Pages 427-457

  Ogundiran, Akinwumi ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746093112     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3097620     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. For regional studies that support this assertion, see Robert Harms, Riverof Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (New Haven, Conn., 1981);
2. Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago, 2002);
3. Ann B. Stahl, Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past (Cambridge, 2001).
4. For syntheses, see Joseph Inikori, "Africa and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, " in Toyin Falola, ed., African History Before 1885, I, (Durham, N.C., 2000), 389-412;
5. Paul Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: AReview of the Literature, " Journal of African History 30 (1989), 365-94;
6. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992).
7. Notable exceptions have come mainly from anthropological studies withhistorical leanings. See, for example, Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade.
8. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 272-73.
9. Stanley Alpern, "What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master Listof European Trade Goods, " History in Africa 22 (1995), 5-43.
10. Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England(Cambridge, 2002).
11. Edna Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville, VA, 1998), 123.
12. Unless otherwise specified, the species of cowries mentioned throughoutthe text is Cypraea moneta. Moneta is the earliest cowry species recorded in West Africa. Native to the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, moneta cowrieshave an angular outline because of the four to six nodules on their uppersurface, and their length varies from 1.3cm to 1.9cm. O. Eluyemi, "Excavations at Isoya, " West African Journal of Archaeology [hereafter WAJA] 7 (1977), 109.
13. Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade(Cambridge, 1986).
14. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 300.
15. R. N. York, "Cowries as Type-fossils in Ghanaian Archaeology, "WAJA 2 (1972), 93-101.
16. This study is indebted, in this regard, particularly to Henry J. Drewal, John Pemberton, and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York, 1989);
17. Henry J. Drewal and John Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light inthe Yoruba Universe (Los Angeles, 1998).
18. Jan Vansina, "A Clash of Cultures: African Minds in the Colonial Era, " in Philip Curtin et al., eds., African History (London, 1995), 469.
19. Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Came to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 151.
20. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, " in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commoditiesin Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge, 1986), 66-67.
21. Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction, " in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things, 25.
22. Graham Connah, Three Thousand Years in Africa. (New York, 1981), 194-95;
23. Susan K. McIntosh and Roderick J. McIntosh, Prehistoric Investigations at Jenne, Mali (Cambridge, 1980), 162.
24. Akinwumi Ogundiran, "Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways tothe Cultural History of Yorùbá-Edo Region, Nigeria, 10th-19thcentury, " in Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, eds., African Historical Research: Sources and Methods (Rochester, N.Y., in press), 33-79.
25. Akinwumi Ogundiran, "Filling a Gap in the Ife-Benin Interaction Field (Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries A.D.), Excavations in Iloyi Settlement, Ijesaland, " African Archaeological Review 19, 1 (2002), 27-60.
26. B. Adediran, "The Early Beginnings of the Ife State, " in I. A.Akinjogbin, ed., The Cradle of a Race: Ife from the Beginning to 1980 (Lagos, 1992), 77-95.
27. Ogundiran, "Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways, 45-46.
28. John D. Fage, "Some Remarks on Beads and Trade in Lower Guinea inthe Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, " Journal of African History 3, 2(1962), 343-47.
29. Nehemiah Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sourcesfor West Africa (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 100, 107. Cited from original Arabicmanuscripts: Abi Bakr al-Zuhri, Kitab al-Ja'rafiyya (completed shortly after1154) and Muhammad al-Sharif al-Idrisi, Nuzhat almushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq(completed January 1154).
30. Al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-mushtaq, writes of the production and export ofcoral beads from the Mediterranean to the Sudan: "At Sabta [Ceuta] theyfish for the coral ... tree ... and at Sabta there is a market where it is cut, polished, made into beads (Kharaz), pierced and strung. From there it isexported to all lands, but carried mostly to Ghana and all the lands of the Sudan, because in those lands it is much used." Cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus, 130.
31. Frank Willett, Baubles, Bangles and Beads: Trade Contacts of Medieval Ife(Edinburgh, 1977), 22.
32. Also, C. C. Davison, R. D. Giauque, and J. D. Clark, "Two Chemical Groups of Dichroic Glass Beads from West Africa, " Man, n.s. 6, 4 (1971), 645-59.
33. The grove is still mined for ancient beads and glass droppings today.Eluyemi, "The Technology of the Ife Glass Beads: Evidence from the Igbo-Olokun, " Odu 32 (1987), 200;
34. Frank Willett, Ife in the History of West African Sculpture (London, 1967), 24.
35. Eluyemi, "Technology of Ife Glass Beads."
36. Timothy Insoll and Thurstan Shaw, "Gao and Igbo-Ukwu: Beads, Interregional Trade, and Beyond, " African Archaeological Review 14, 1(1997), 14, 16;
37. Akinwumi Ogundiran, "Settlement Cycling and Regional Interactions in Central Yorubaland, A.D. 1200-1900: Archaeology and History in Ilare District, Nigeria" (Ph.D. thesis, Boston University, 2000), 175;
38. Willett, Baubles, Bangles and Beads, 16.
39. Robin Horton, "The Economy of Ife from c.A.D. 900-c.A.D. 1700, "in Akinjogbin, ed., The Cradle of a Race, 122-47.
40. For a chronological framework for this development, see Ogundiran, "Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways."
41. Despite the confusion of terms and descriptions provided by variousauthors, these blue tubular beads are clearly dichroic (segi) beads. These beadsare variously referred to in the literature as aggrey, agrie, akkerri, kori, akori, and coris, among others. See M. Kalous, "A Contribution to the Problem of Akori Beads, " Journal of African History 7, 1 (1996), 61-66;
42. Raymond Maunay, "Akori Beads, " Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1, 3 (1958), 210-14.
43. A.F.C. Ryder, "An Early Portuguese Trading Voyage to the Forcados River, " Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1, 4 (1959).
44. Paula Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin(Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 124..
45. P. Stevens, The Stone Images of Esie (Ibadan, 1978);
46. Adam Jones, West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Atlanta, GA, 1995), 54.
47. H. L. Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors [1903] (London, 1968), 42.
48. Robin Hallett, ed., The Niger Journal of Richard and John Lander (New York, 1965), 90. This inquiry makes sense since the crown of the king of Oyodescribed by Richard Lander as resembling a miter - a tall, ornamented cap - was"profusely ornamented with strings of coral."
49. Henry J. Drewal and John Mason, "Exhibition Preview: Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yorùbá Universe, " African Arts31, 1 (1998), 20.
50. Beads, generically called okùn, were socially constructed asprecious objects and means of indexing economic wealth and social status. Thusthe saying: "Okùnlolá, okùn nìgbí orò, " that is, "The okùn bead is the essence ofwealth." See also Drewal and Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul, 17. The Yorubaalso give names associated with beads to their children; these names include Okùnlolá ("a bead is honor") and Okùnbadejo("threaded beads match a crown").
51. Karin Barber, "Money, Self-realization, and the Person in Yorùbá Texts, " in Jane Guyer, ed., Money Matters:Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), 215.
52. I. Olomola, "Ife Before Oduduwa: A Reassessment, " in Akinjogbin, ed. The Cradle of a Race, 51-61.
53. Peter Garlake, "Excavations at Obalara's Land, Ife, Nigeria, "WAJA 4 (1974),
54. "Excavations on the Woye Asiri Family Land in Ife, Western Nigeria, " WAJA 7 (1977);
55. Akinwumi Ogundiran, Archaeology and History in Ilare District (Central Yorubaland), A.D. 1200-1900 (London, 2002), 97.
56. For example, Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari mentioned this in Masalik al-absarfi mamalik al-amsar (1337-1338), cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources, 260.
57. Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, 16-17.
58. Thurstan Shaw, "Prehistory, " in Obaro Ikime, ed., Groundwork of Nigerian History (Ibadan, 1980), 25-53.
59. Graham Connah, The Archaeology of Benin: Excavations and Other Researchesin and around Benin, Nigeria (Oxford, 1975);
60. I. Omokhodion, "Northwest Benin Sites and Socially Determined Artifact Distribution" (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1988).
61. According to Thomas Wyndam, who led a group of English merchants to Beninin 1553, the monarch of Benin received merchants and traded in person withthem. Afterwards the trade was open to the other elite, and this would gofurther down the social hierarchy. R. Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, VI (1965), 149 .
62. For similar practices in the sixteenth century reported by the Portuguese, see A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 (London, 1969), 53-65 .
63. See also R.C.C. Law, "Slaves, Trade, and Taxes: The Material Basisof Political Power in Precolonial West Africa, " Research in Economic Anthropology 1 (1978) 44.
64. Thomas Phillips, "Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, " in A. and J. Churchill eds., Collections of Voyages and Travels 6(London, 1732), 228.
65. Bernard Belasco, The Entrepreneur as Culture Hero: Preadaptations in Nigeria Economic Development (New York, 1980), 82.
66. King Gezo of Dahomey suggested this when asked reason why he would notuse any other form of currency in his kingdom, Robin Law, "Cowries, Gold, and Dollars: Exchange Rate Instability and Domestic Price Inflation in Dahomeyin the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, " in Guyer, ed., Money Matters, 65.
67. Hogendorn and Johnson, The Shell Money, 2.
68. For summaries see, Adam Jones, German Sources for West African History, 1599-1669 (Wiesbaden, 1983), West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century, 68;
69. R.C.C. Law, "Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500-1800, " Journal of African History 24(1983).
70. Law, Oyo Empire, 219.
71. David Richardson, "Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700-1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution, " Journal of African History 30 (1989), 1 -22.
72. Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics, 103-104.
73. Following about a century of weak royal authority in the political andeconomic sectors of the Benin Kingdom, and the shifts of control to chieflyfactiors in the capital and provinces, the early 1700s marked the beginning ofefforts to regain the powers of the monarchy. It was, however, Oba Eresoyen whoachieved the full consolidation of the monarch's authorities over the chieflypowers, and over political and economic activities at about the same time thatthe Atlantic economy - especially exports of slaves, ivory, and cloth - reachedits highest peak. Thus the supposed quarrel between Oba Eresoyen and Olokunrefers to the political weakness of the Benin monarchy since about 1608, whichin turn affected its ability to dominate Benin participation in the Atlanticeconomy. Likewise, the peace that Oba Eresoyen made with Olokun refers to theconsolidation of the monarchy's power over the political and external tradeaffairs during the eighteenth century. See Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics, 40-41;
74. Thomas Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthology, 2nd ed.(London, 1975), 167;
75. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 88-89.
76. There have been attempts to appraise the cultural biography of Olokuncritically, and to see how it relates to the social memory of the Atlanticeconomy in the Bight of Benin. See Belasco, The Entrepreneur as Culture Hero;
77. Akinwumi Ogundiran, "Osun, Yemoja, and Olokun: Gender, Commerce, andthe Making of Atlantic Goddesses, " Paper presented at the Conference on"Gendering the Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and the Nigerian Hinterland, " Dartmouth College, Nov. 22-24, 2002.
78. Margaret T. Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 74.
79. R. C. C. Law, "Early European Sources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500-1700): A Critical Survey, " History in Africa 13 (1986), 245-260.
80. Norma Rosen, "Chalk Iconography in Olokun worship, " African Arts 22, 3 (1989), 44.
81. Ralph Austen, "The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontationsof Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions, " Williams and Mary Quarterly 58, 1 (2001), 7.
82. C. A. Gregory, "Cowries and Conquest: Towards a Subalternate Quality Theory of Money, " Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 2 (1996), 195. This narrative was originally collected and published in the Ayizolanguage in 1979, and was later translated into English.
83. Austen, " Slave Trade as History and Memory, " 8.
84. Toyin Falola and G. A. Adebayo, Culture, Politics and Money Among the Yorùbá (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 42.
85. See also Jacob Olupona, Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community (Stockholm, 1991), 154-57.
86. Rowland Abiodun, "Hidden Power: Osun, the Seventeenth Odu, " in Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds., Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the America (Bloomington, Ind., 2001), 22.
87. Abiodun, "Hidden Power, " 22.
88. J. F. Landolphe, Memoirs du Capitaine Landolphe, contenant l'histoire deses voyages, II (ed. J. S. Quesne) (Paris, 1823), 98.
89. Wande Abimbola, personal communication (Boston), May 1998.
90. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (Lagos, 1921), 182.
91. Lesley Sharp, "The Commodification of the Body and its Parts, "Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000), 293.
92. Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 27.
93. Willett, Ife, 136.
94. J.D.Y. Peel, "Gender in Yoruba Religious Change, " Journal of Religion in Africa 32, 2 (2002), 150.
95. Rowland Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase, " African Arts 27 (3), 77.
96. It is therefore not surprising that during a Christian evangelism sessionin Ibadan in 1868, a woman, a likely convert, gave her opinion that theadoption of Christianity would not make them abandon their loyalty to Ori, "their god and maker." W. S. Allen, CMS Journal, October 25, 1868.
97. Barber, "Money, Self-realization, and the Person, " 217.
98. Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition (London, 1829), 21;
99. William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland 1854-1858(Ibadan, 1972);
100. Hallett, The Niger Journal, 71.
101. Akinwumi Ogundiran, "An Archaeological Tale of Two Houses: Domestic Architecture and Social Formation in Yorubaland, ca. 1550-1750, " paperpresented at the 16th Biennial Conference of Society of Africanist Archaeologists, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2002.
102. Jane Guyer, "Wealth in People and Self-realization in Equatorial Africa, " Man (n.s.), 28 (1993), 257.
103. William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1969), 525.
104. Eluyemi, "Excavations at Isoya"; Mr. Ajekigbe, Curator, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan, personalcommunication, May 1990.
105. Eluyemi, "Excavations at Isoya, " 107.
106. Likewise in southeastern Nigeria and Central African region where copperwas established as the chief value register, observers have described the large"quantities of copper rods, manillas, and basins inhumed with rich Kalabariand Ijo traders, and ... important Tio men of affairs." Archaeologicalevidence also shows that the "cemeteries of the Upemba Depression arereplete with croisettes, " and that "copper bangles are standard gravegoods" in the Zimbabwe Plateau and Zambia. Eugenia Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and Culture (Madison, Wisc., 1984), 271.
107. According to information collected from Chief James Awosope, the former Araba of Ife (chief priest of the Ifa Oracle), by Eluyemi, "Excavations at Isoya, " 110.
108. Ogundiran, Archaeology and History in Hare District, 66.
109. Wande Abimbola, "The Bag of Wisdom: Osun and the Origins of Ifa Divination, " in Murphy and Sanford, eds., Osun Across the Waters, 141.
110. Ogundiran, "Osun, Yemoja, and Olokun."
111. D. Ogungbile, "Eerindinlogun: The Seeing Eyes of Sacred Shells and Stones, " in Murphy and Sanford, eds., Osun Across the Waters, 193.
112. Diedre Badejo, Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power, and Femininity (Trenton, N.J., 1996).
113. Another characteristic linking Osun with the Atlantic experience is herpreference for maize beer (maize being a product of the Americas via the Atlantic) instead of the locally derived guinea-corn beer or palm wine thatother divinities often drink. Abimbola, "Bag of Wisdom, " 151.
114. Gregory, "Cowries and Conquest, " 210.
115. James Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire that Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (Minneapolis, 1997), 210.
116. Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Ritual Killing in Nigeria - Men Bought Skullto be Millionaires, " International Herald Tribune (August 22, 2001).
117. Kris L. Hardin and Mary Jo Arnoldi, "Introduction: Efficacy and Objects, " in Mary Jo Arnoldi, Kris L. Hardin, and Christraud Geary, eds., African Material Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 1-28.
118. G. Marcus and M. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: AnExperimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986), 44;
119. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structurein the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), 5.
120. Henry J. Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York, 1989), 158.