A work of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: On an appliqué cloth given by King Gezo of Dahomey to the President of France

Around 1850, King Gezo of Dahomey (ruled 1818-1858) sent several objects to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the then President of France. Bonaparte would begin his imperial rule of France as Napoleon III in 1852. Two of these objects are appliqué cloths depicting Dahomey female warriors in battle. In this paper, I argue that those works are products of the Transatlantic Slave Trade at several levels. The first level is that of the work’s meaning and purpose. I argue that they were given by Gezo as a thank you to France for allowing him to resume their raiding and selling of captives in the context of engagisme, a ‘free emigrants’ scheme set in French overseas colonies of Africa and the Caribbean after the official abolition of slavery. I suggest that it is shown by historical evidence and by the scene depicted in the work. The second level is that of the materials and objects. Materials used to make the cloth were imported by Dahomey in exchange of individuals in the context of the slave trade and so were items depicted on the work. I also address the question of the depiction of women warriors on the cloth, which I argue was motivated by the growing interest of European observers in them. This paper is organized as follows. First of all, I describe the object and show how it sheds light on the history of Dahomey appliqués depicting battle scenes. In a second part, I deal with the meaning and purpose of the work. In the third part, I address the question of materials and objects used to create the work and those depicted in it. In the fourth part, I discuss the reasons behind the depiction of female warriors on the cloths.

In a work published in 1991, Suzanne Preston Blier suggested that the royal Dahomey tradition of depicting battle scenes on appliqué cloths is probably a 20th century invention. Before the time of the writing of this paper, there was indeed no clear evidence of such works before the French colonization.

However, in 1989, several works from the kingdom of Dahomey started to be exhibited in the Musée de L’Homme, Paris. Unlike many royal Dahomey objects in French collections which were looted by the French troops of the General Alfred-Amédée Dodds after their final defeat of the troops of Behanzin, the then king of Dahomey, in 1894, those objects were sent as diplomatic gifts by an earlier king of Dahomey, Gezo, who ruled between 1818 and 1858, to the French president Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Those gifts were sent between 1850 and 1856. Among those objects were two appliqué clothes depicting Dahomey warriors battling animals and other individuals. As such, they challenge Blier’s claim about the origin of Dahomey appliqué cloths depicting battle scenes. The width and length of those works are respectively 318 x 173 cm (fig. 2) and 270 x 185 cm (fig. 3).

They are made of imported silk and cotton. These cloths bear some differences with more recent Dahomey appliqué cloths showing battle scenes. The first one is the technique used. In the cloths sent by Gezo to France, the silhouette of the motifs has been cut on a white monochrome textile before the motif was inserted and sewn in it. This way, the scene could be read from the recto as well from the verso. This technique and effect are not found in later known Dahomey appliqués. They are unknown by nowadays Yemadjè artisans, who are the descendants and heirs of the later cloth weavers of the precolonial kings of Dahomey. This distinction led Beaujean (2019) to suggest that these works were the work of another workshop, that of Hantan and Zinflou, which are said by oral tradition to have brought the craft of appliqué cloths in Abomey, the capital city of the kingdom of Dahomey in the 18th century. There is another difference between these 1850s and many more recent cloths depicting battle scenes. In the latter, the Dahomey warriors are depicted in the periphery of a larger figure, which may be a deity or of an allegorical representation of the king. In the 1850s ones, there is no such central figure, but three Dahomey warriors of similar size. One is located on one side of the picture. He is wrestling a lion on one work and holding it on his back on the other. In both works, two other warriors looking on the same direction as the other soldier are hunting down unarmed individuals. In the first 318 x 173 cm cloth (fig.2), the two other soldiers are attacking individuals with rifles, while in the 270 x 185 cm second one (fig.3), they are doing so with what appear to be swords. Aside of those weapons, they also have what appear to be clubs or récades. As in several later appliqué cloths depicting battle scenes from Dahomey, Fon warriors are depicted in a skin complexion within the range of vovo ‘red,’ which encompasses light brown, red, orange and pink. Their opponents are depicted in a different complexion, which in the 1850s cloths is black. All human characters in the scene wear short trousers. In the 1850s works, as well as in several later works of this genre, the Dahomey soldiers wear sleeveless shirts whose motifs are those of other cloths cut out and applied on the monochromous ground cloth. In the first, Dahomey warriors appear to wear a cap, while on the second they appear to wear caps with the motif of a caiman, which was the insignia of a regiment of Dahomey women warriors. The association of the second work with female warriors is also shown by the stylization of breasts of the Fon characters which is not shown on the other work.

 In 1847, the Dahomey and British authorities signed a treaty of commerce and friendship. In 1849 and 1850, Queen Victoria sent two diplomats, Beecroft and Forbes, to convince Gezo to stop Dahomey’s participation to the slave trade to Brazil. Gezo originally refused, citing the lack of lucrativeness of the suggested alternatives, namely the trade in cotton, coffee and palm oil. He is reported to have claimed that his people were accustomed to the reality of the war and the slave trade and not to that of agriculture. He is reported to have said in 1850: “my people are a military people, male and female (…) I cannot send my women to cultivate the soil, it would kill them. My people cannot in a short space of time become an agricultural people. War has destroyed all the neighbouring countries, and my people have to go far for food. All my nation — all are soldiers, and the Slave Trade feeds them.” In 1851 however, Gezo’s power had become fragilized after Dahomey military defeat against the Egba city of Abeokuta, which was supported by the British. He thus officially accepted to put an end to Dahomey’s engagement in the slave trade under the threat of a British naval blockade. In 1851 however, Gezo signed a commercial treaty with France. The treaty guaranteed Dahomey’s monopoly on the trade of palm oil. As pointed out by Beaujean (2019), this is in this context that the works under study were sent as diplomatic gifts to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. I however argue that the meaning of these works are at odds with their alleged association with the shift from the slave trade to that of palm oil. Instead, they appear to be a statement about Dahomey commitment to their earlier martial pursuits, rather than its supposed transition to a more agricultural lifestyle. The scenes depicted in the two works do not appear to be slave-hunting scenes, as Dahomey warriors seem to be gunning down and cutting the legs of the enemies they are pursuing. However, they show Dahomey warriors attacking unarmed individuals and directly associate the attack of individuals with the hunting of an animal, here a lion. As pointed out by Gezo in 1850, even though all attacks by Dahomey soldiers were not launched to capture individuals to be sold to Europeans, the Slave Trade was feeding all his nation, of which he claimed the members were all soldiers. The visual statement about Dahomey’s commitment to the attack of foreign unarmed people is corroborated by historical evidence. As pointed out by Beaujean herself, it seems that the French authorities had somehow turned a blind eye on the continuation of the illegal slave trade in Whydah, the main port of the kingdom. Furthermore, after 1848, the French government had looked to overcome the lack of cheap manpower in its American colonies caused by the recent abolition of slavery. It came up with a new scheme, that of engagisme. While it was officially presented by French authorities as a noble enterprise, engagisme consisted, for French traders, in buying captives made by Africans in order to free them and forcefully send them to the Americas where they would work under conditions very similar to that of slaves years before. For Gezo, this scheme was satisfying, as it allowed Dahomey to resume raids and obtain money from them as it was in the case before the abolition of slavery. I argue that it was this situation which led Gezo to send diplomatic gifts to French Emperor Napoleon III between 1850 and 1856, rather than the official explanation which regards them as sealing a deal on the trade of palm oil.

According to Beaujean (2019), the two appliqué cloths under study depict women warriors. As I have already pointed out, the Dahomey warriors are only shown with feminine biological attributes-their breasts-in only one the two cloths. Whether the cloth showing sexually undifferentiated warriors depicts men or not, the other was specifically created to depict women warriors. One can wonder about the motivations behind their depiction. Could it be linked to Gezo’s assertion about all his subjects, male and female, being warriors? I suggest that this deliberate choice of depicting women warriors is linked to the growing interest of European observers in them. As the only documented entirely female elite troops in history, the Dahomey female warriors were the object of significant interest from European visitors, notably the French. Gezo seems to have been aware of this interest and eager to use it in its commercial exchanges with them. After receiving French gifts in the context of the 1851 treaty, Gezo is hence quoted to have said that he wished that the ‘King of France’ had ‘Amazons’ and that he could send 500 of some of his own to him. Although the Dahomey women warriors was an indigenous phenomenon, it appears that the decision of depicting sexually differentiated women warriors in the works under study was shaped by the interests of the French. As shown by Bryson (2003) in the case of the American-Japanese relations, this use of the use of women in art as a commodity in male-dominated global diplomatic exchanges of the 19th century is certainly not without parallels. In the case of Dahomey and France, this practice would later result in the display of disarmed Dahomey women warriors in French zoos and public exhibitions after the defeat of Dahomey by France as if to mark the integration of the former in the French colonial empire.

In this short paper, I have discussed the relationship between two appliqué cloths sent by King Gezo of Dahomey to France in the middle of the 19th century and the transatlantic slave trade, a commercial enterprise in which both parties were deeply involved. I argued that the objects were created to reassert Dahomey’s commitment to war and the slave trade and that they materially and visually bore testimony to it through the materials they are made of and those they are depicting which were directly obtained through the slave trade. Other features of the work testify to the circulation of ideas, motifs and interests in the wider context of the commercial relations between Europeans and Dahomey of the 19th century.