Fifteen Colonial Thefts by Sela Adjei

Author:Sela Adjei
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

The Bocio in Western Knowledge

‘Devil’, ‘idol’, ‘fetish’, ‘amulet’, ‘talisman’, ‘charm’ or even ‘evil spirit’, ‘misshapen monster’, ‘magot’ (ugly figure) or ‘marmouset’ (grotesque statuette) are the terms that were used to describe the Danxomean bocio in Western literature from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.285 The vernacular name bo, in the Fongbè language, appeared for the first time in the writings of British diplomat Richard Burton and those of zoologist Alfred Skertchly.286 But the precise and complex meaning of bo and its sculpted version, the bocio, was only finally clarified at the end of the twentieth century in publications by the American art historian Suzanne Preston Blier. Her literal translation splits the word between bo, identified as medicine, power, and cio, the corpse, made present through sculpture.287 In other words, it is thanks to specific care work that repels the dangers of death that the carved figure becomes effective.288 The agency of the bocio depends on a combination of skills, people, gestures, words, products and manipulations dispensed by various specialists from the Vodun religion and the geomancy of the Fa. In the latter case, the royal diviners (bokonɔ) instructed the kings that military victory came with the bocio, such as those of Glèlè and Béhanzin.289 The bokonɔ would then intervene to activate and deactivate them. In the 2000s, the king of Abomey Houedogni Béhanzin explained to the French anthropologist and author Galia Tapiero: ‘when the king [Béhanzin’s bocio] left, the statue had already been neutralised. Which means that what you have [in Paris] is just a piece of wood.’290 Once cared for, these ‘Kingly Fa bociɔ’ were therefore reduced in the museum in Paris to a mere token of material culture, being detached from the Fa’s care.

However, it seems difficult on the Western side not to associate these figures with monuments of world sculpture. In this context, French ethnologists based in the French colony of Dahomey conducted studies of the artists of Abomey in 1959.291 These have been followed up until this day, reaching an international scale. We know that the kings were careful to choose artists associated with the royal court, who were capable of developing original and exceptional forms.292 In 1938, the North American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits described the special status of the sculptor recognised as an artist, who is clearly distinguished from the craftsman in Fongbè language. To carry out his work, the sculptor isolates himself and chisels hard wood, sometimes with a small axe, a knife, a chisel and abrasive sheets.293 In 1985, art historian Robert Farris Thompson identified Sosandande Likohin Kankanhau as the author of the royal bocio statue of Glèlè, to which we can also relate the bocio with the emblems of Béhanzin.294 Over time, the artist’s name became Sossa Dede in Western sources, whose most complete biography was written by the Beninese historian Bachalou ‘Ba’ Nondichao.295

As far as scientific studies of the bocio are concerned, the French anthropologist and colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse published the first article on the three polychrome bocio statues as soon as they arrived in Paris.

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