Introduction
In “People Without Things” Severin Fowles described the tendency in social science (including history) to bury things but privilege human actors as “the tyranny of the subject.”Footnote 1 The practice of marginalization of things in history was also described by anthropologist Daniel Miller as “the beginning of things-suppressed” which can be located in the religions that ascribed wisdom to those spiritual figures who had suggested that materiality represented “the mere apparent, behind which lies that which is real.”Footnote 2 This voice was echoed by Leif Jerram when he observed that materiality has been marginalized by scholars through “a casual vocabulary and a vigorous a priori epistemological holism.”Footnote 3 Like Daniel Miller, who recognized illusiveness of material culture,Footnote 4 Olson argued emphatically that the materiality of social life has not only been marginalized but also stigmatized.Footnote 5 Fowles noted that the turn to things by social scientists should be understood as a critical response to the textual turn of the 1970s and 1980s which had reduced the world into ever-shifting texts and privileged human interpreters and melted the material world into a mere “semantic placeholder.”Footnote 6
My goal in this paper is to explore a crucial but neglected way of understanding and interpreting African history. The objective is to answer three important questions on the significance of nonhuman actors in writing African history. Why have things and animals remained relegated to the subaltern status in African history? How do Africans view and relate with nonhuman agents, animals, and material objects? In what ways does the intersection between presence and absence manifest in things, and aid historian’s imagination of the past? How can the recognition and integration of things in the historical narrative help understand the unaccounted past? To answer the first question on why things are marginalized in historical narratives, I explored different definitions of history as a subject matter and examined methodological defects of archive as the dominant source of writing African history. The second question on the view of Africans on nonhuman actors is approached from African theoretical and philosophical standpoints. I draw on the Yoruba verbal and visual arts to understand the African theory of relationality of being in history. The third and fourth questions are engaged through deep reflection on the Yoruba cultural practice of relational ontology. For the purpose of analysis, both human and nonhuman actors are treated as things. Things are interchangeably substituted for matters, objects, and artifacts, while the age-long over-flogged conceptual delineation of organic and inorganic matters that subtly privilege the former over the latter is disregarded.
I therefore argue that recognizing animal and material turnsFootnote 7 in African history is a profound theoretical approach to understand how material objects and animals mixed with humans to form that categorization called society. This theoretical frame derives from the peculiarities of African epistemology that emphasizes relational ontology of social beings. This African way of constructing sociality is crucial to understand silence in African history. Hence, integration of animals and things in historical narratives will help understand the unaccounted past of Africa. It is important to emphasize that the goal of this paper is not to dehumanize history but rather to recognize nonhuman actors as part of African epistemic tradition. Again, the objective of this paper is not to belittle the efforts of distinguished scholars who have written on the importance of nonhuman actors in African history. Rather, this study is a modest contribution to enrich African methodological and theoretical kits.
Demystifying archives for a thingly African history
In a compilation of definitions of history published online by Mamta Aggarwal, the intellectual thoughts of the leading figures of historical scholarship are summarized. The ideas of history – by Thomas Carlyle that “World History is a biography of great men”; Lord Acton that “History is the unfolding story of human freedom”; Will Durant that “History is a narrative of what civilized men have thought or done in past time”; and Professor Renier that “History is the memories of societies” – center humans as the subject of history while ignoring matters as part of historical development.Footnote 8 The definition of history by Professor Arthur Marwick that it is “The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge” has left us with doubt. We are not sure whether “everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge” are recognized as things that cohabitate, co-act, co-travel, and share experience with human actors or not.Footnote 9 In E.H. Carr’s popular definition of history as “a continuous process between the historian and his facts, an unending dialog between present and the past,” things are subtly inscribed.Footnote 10 It is inscribed as historical facts which Carr cherished in the archival documents as his fourteen-volume history of the Soviet Union exemplify, a product of vigorous chasing, perusing documents, and stuffing “historical narrative with properly footnoted facts.”Footnote 11
Historians study human actions in the past with a focus on significant human activities that were both transient and hardly evidential beyond the textual testimonies in archives while neglecting “matter.” The historian’s tasks, as Arthur Marwick argues, include imposition of order, pattern, and definition of relationships. Historians decide “what to put in and what to leave out aiming at no more than coherent narrative” without losing focus on how their narrative is shaped into an intelligent form.Footnote 12 Stephen Ellis has also observed that the role of a historian is not just to assemble “masses of verifiable facts … in a series, generally in a chronological one or a set of such series” but also to penetrate the minds of the actors involved in order to weave a coherent narrative.Footnote 13 This approach of selective elimination of nonhuman actors in the writing and understanding of the past has not only denied us a comprehensive view of history but also privileged texts and imposed a regime of textual absolutism. This textual absolutism derives its strength in the fetishization of the archive. As scholars particularly from the Global South are challenging the dominance of the Western epistemologies and paradigms in social science,Footnote 14 new perspectives and theories about archive are being developed. While Bailkin suggests we look at archive as a source and a site of dismantling and reconfiguration of imperial power,Footnote 15 Ndlovu-Gatsheni is concerned with anti-colonial or decolonial archive which is “an embodiment of ideas, theories, manifestos, slogans, concepts, critiques, hopes, utopic registers, trials and tribulations, prospects and possibilities, memories, texts and images; and is constitutive of inheritance for the entire world.”Footnote 16
In the critique of fetishization of the archive as a historical source, Stoler unraveled the weaknesses of colonial documents.Footnote 17 Stoler warns us to treat these documents with suspicion and doubt. She suggests the need to move from “archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” as this will open up opportunities to engage archive as “cultural agents of fact production, of taxonomy in the making and of state authority.”Footnote 18 Achille Mbembe has also echoed similar skepticism and emphasized non-reliability of archive as an ultimate historical source. Mbembe notes that over-reliance on the aspects of the Western archive that ignore other “epistemic traditions” could impede “our systematic forays beyond our current knowledge horizons.”Footnote 19 In his examination of the attitude of the nineteenth-century historians to facts, Carr notes that:
The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was justified by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the Ark of Covenant in the temple of fact. The reverent historians approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do the documents – the decrees, the treaties, the rent rolls, the blue books, the official correspondence, the private letters and diaries – tell us? No document can tell us more than the author of the document thought – what he thought had happened, ought to happen or would happen or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only he himself thought he thought.Footnote 20
Trouillot notes that the process of creating, assembling, retrieving, and narrating archives are characterized by many silences that weaken its evidential credibility.Footnote 21 According to Olsen, this void should be considered “as an outcome of a very effective history of things oblivion and displacement in western thinking rather than a lack of material experience and engagement. In other words, the problem is not that we lack practical knowledge. Quite the contrary, we have probably never been more experienced in dealing with things and technology.”Footnote 22 As the inadequacies and the question of reliability of archives as a methodological source are coming to the fore, scholars are burdened with the responsibility to search for historical evidences beyond textual records.
Another reason why historical narratives in Africa are almost entirely bereft of thingness is the dominant effects of Western epistemology on African knowledge production. Rowland Abiodun has observed that the methodological tools inherited by African historians from Western scholarship is seriously inadequate to address the challenges of studying African history.Footnote 23 The effect of Western epistemology notwithstanding, the energy of the first crop of African academic historians was focused on three important tasks. The first was the deconstruction of the Eurocentric view and racist narratives of African culture, while the second was to rescue the undocumented African experiences from the historical abyss. The third task of these historians was to solve the methodological questions in African historiography. Leading in this area were Kenneth O. Dike, Saburi Biobaku, Isaac Adeagbo Akinjogbin, Ade Ajayi, Adu Boahen, and Adiele Afigbo, to mention just a few. The imprints of these pioneer historians remain indelible in the area of methodological questions in writing the precolonial history of Africa. While Dike, through his Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885, demonstrates the African historian mastery of the use of archive, Akinjogbin’s work, Dahomey and Its Neighbours, 1708–1818 proved the significance of oral traditions in writing the precolonial history of Africa.Footnote 24 But in their writings, nonhuman agents were subdued in the mass of human experiences. Where nonhuman agents were mentioned, they were treated as indicators, intermediaries, or mere tools in historical narratives. Hence, the gaps in their approach lie in the anthropocentric interpretation of African oral traditions and sources. It will be uncharitable to ignore the impact of exceptional contributions of the pioneer studies. In Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century, Ajayi and Smith recognize the role of weapons in the Yoruba inter-group relations and wars of mutual destruction of the nineteenth century.Footnote 25 In a follow-up essay published in 1967 by the Journal of African History, Smith treats the Yoruba armament as a co-historical actor along with human agents. His description of the features and functions of the agedengbe sword, “a single-edged iron blade curving backwards which like the European falchion, would have a great shearing force,” was both vivid and impressive. Smith focuses on the attributes and functions of these weapons and thus ascribes roles to nonhuman agents, things, that participated in the war. A similar effort was made by Adejuwon from an art history perspective.Footnote 26
Deji Ogunremi’s Counting the Camels draws the attentions of African historians to nonhuman agency in history. The work is an exploration in the history of transport economy of the trans-Saharan trade with a particular reference to the camel as a powerful actor in the trans-Saharan trade.Footnote 27 The recent work on the history of animals by Saheed Aderinto is another great effort in recognizing animal agency in human history.Footnote 28 In the work, Aderinto draws our attentions to the little-explored aspect of colonialism in Africa, the animal experience in the encounter with the colonial rule. He notes that while most studies of colonial rule in Africa centers human agents in their narratives, at the core of colonial experience in Africa were also nonhuman agents, particularly animals. Aderinto demonstrates that, like the humans, animals were treated as colonial subjects and subjected to colonial policies. He notes that while social variables such as class, ethnicity, geographical regions, and religion contributed to the ways Africans shaped and were shaped by the colonial rule, animals experienced, shaped, and were shaped by factors such as habitats, geographical locations, biological, and psychological features. Similar scholarly efforts have been made by Sandra Swart. In The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past,Footnote 29 Swart calls on historians to recognize animals’ agency and pursue a more inclusive history. She adeptly weaves animals’ attributes and experiences into intelligible narratives and thus proposes animal-sensitive history. In Riding High, Swart emphasizes the centrality of horses in South African history. In short, Swart argues that horses matter in accounting for the South African past. She highlights the importance of horses in transportation, race, and war, particularly in the Cape Colony before 1850.Footnote 30 Perhaps in the future we will have more of the history animals made in Africa.
While the current study not only acknowledges the efforts of previous writers on the need to articulate animals’ agency in African history, it proposes methodological and theoretical lenses that view animals as one of the nonhuman historical actors that possess capacities to act and be acted upon. With particular focus on the Yoruba of West Africa, the paper provides an insight into the relational ontology of being in African history.
Animals in Yoruba history
In the introduction to Beast and Man, Mary Midgley states that “We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.”Footnote 31 Humans are animals, but a rational one. They are things, but a thinking thing. Charles Darwin’s analysis of the origin of man concludes that the biological status of human is akin to the apes from whence it evolved.Footnote 32 To think of the human body as an organic substance that is anatomically and physiologically composed of living cells and extracellular materials, is to think of the human as a living organism or animal. Citing Julia Adeney Thomas’s proposition of a dialog between history and biology,Footnote 33 Findlen argues that the human body contains bacteria, fluid, and mostly metallic elements.Footnote 34 In René Descartes’ dual principles of mind and substance, res cogitans (a thinking thing) and res extensa (extended substance) are mutually exclusive. Descartes notes that man is “a rational animal,” a “thinking thing,” res cogitans. Footnote 35 By a “thinking thing” Descartes means “a thing that doubts, that understands, that affirms, that denies, that wishes to do this and does not wish to do that, and also imagines and perceives by the senses.”Footnote 36 This Cartesian ontology of man as a thinking thing and extended substance represents the fusion of mind and body. But the somatic reality of man is not limited to his endogenous power to think, doubt, understand, deny, and affirm. Man is also shaped by his exogenous experience. Bjornar Olsen has warned that social scientists should overcome the feeling that “human body is the only flesh in the world” and that the world is not bound together only by human cognition.Footnote 37 Findlen also reminds us that this Cartesian argument holds when we delimit the line between mind and matter.Footnote 38
There is present in most African cultures a relational sense of being about human, animal, and things. Among the Yoruba of West Africa, for instance, the relationship of the more-than-human world is central to their epistemology. In their universe, humans, animals, and things are interrelated and relational. For them, the beginning of time is the beginning of things.Footnote 39 In the Yoruba story of origin and creation of the earth, both animals and things feature prominently. The most popular Yoruba myth notes that when the surface of the earth was watery without form, Olodumare (the Prime Mover) sent some heavenly beings led by Oduduwa to create solid land, plant, animals, and humans. Olodumare provided them with a quantity of sand, a chicken, snail, and one palm nut. Oduduwa poured some sand on the water. He lowered the chicken and the snail on the surface to spread and to compress the earth respectively. The palm nut was planted and the heavenly beings descended on the earth through the chain to create life. Hence, the beginning of life.Footnote 40 This story is not just about the creation of the earth, it is also about the order of existence of beings. The animals, palm nut, and the chain in the story preceded the creation of humans. The presence of animals and the chain in the story also testifies to how the Yoruba and other African societies conceive their reality. Within this holistic reflective view, the African universe therefore includes all actors and recipients of actions.
Animals feature prominently in African totemic discourse. Animals are inserted as actors in the human system of moral conduct and to solve their problems in nature. Richard Tapper’s observations of two major ways through which animals are problematized in human society are very relevant and useful to analyze the Yoruba view of animals.Footnote 41 Tapper notes that the first way is the cultural construction of animals as metaphors in a dialectic manner. In this case, animals are treated as human agents with an idealized model or standard of order. Thus, animals are treated as agents and social beings, “with motives, values and morals; difference between them and human are implicitly denied.”Footnote 42 Second, animals are treated as the other, “The Beast, Brute, the model of disorder or the way things should not be done.”Footnote 43 He further observes that by featuring in didactic stories, animals fulfill the purposes of allowing “the teachers and learners to avoid articulating difficult and embarrassing truth about humanity; at another level they create a distinction between humans and animals; and they reinforce human morality by giving it a natural basis.”Footnote 44
In the African social system, animals are constructed as social beings and idealized as agents in their own right. They are classified into two, namely domestic and wild animals. While domestic animals co-live with humans in the house or compound, wild animals occupy forest regions or space in Africa. This classification notwithstanding, agency of animals in human society are derived from their natural features and their social values. Their natural features are usually constructed on the nature of their endogenous and exogenous values.Footnote 45 These features are recognized and coded in African traditional archives such as proverbs, poems, chants, traditions, and so on.
An indispensable lens through which relational theory of being and existence between human and nonhuman agents/animals in African history are coded is through the Yoruba system of personal and collective oriki. Oriki is the Yoruba verbal art that traces the origin, evokes the essence and the praise of its character. The Yoruba hold the belief that everything – humans, animals, natural and material things – possess oriki. This verbal art takes different forms and includes praise poems, chants, incantation, vocalized curse, satire, proverbs, songs, cognomen, and dirge.Footnote 46
Through the art of oriki, the Yoruba exemplify the importance of a relational system between humans, animals, and things.Footnote 47 This verbal art unveils nonhuman attributes exhibited by human actors. While oriki such as Omo Ekun (the child of Tiger) and Ogidan (Lion) depict toughness, bravery and power, Ajanaku (Elephant) portrays might and splendor. These attributive features associated with human characters are underlined by some historical experiences that are linked to the ancestors of their lineages.
Some of these animal totems are also engraved on doorposts or walls as the family emblems. The verbal invocation of these oriki not only recalls the historical experience of the ancestors but also inspires and reminds the living of their personality and expected roles in society.
Oriki Ile Otutu
Omo Otutu bi Osun
Omo Adalemofoogun loto
Omo Oba a ji boyinbo seleri
Odadanda, Irunmole agba
Oba Ooni Ajagun, Oba ti ndoka dere to si derin
Bo wajagun a si dekun pasebi je.
Omo paramole to koro iwosi
Omo osinlade mero odundun
Omo osinlade mero alubosa
A kii Jagbare ka sina ti mo ba ja lori esin otutu ni mo nre
Odunrun esin ni nje ni koto otutu
Eyi o ri o mugun esin olojo
Eyi o ri o mugun esin kimoyero
Kimoyero moko ti baba re tori tobo
Omo ariigbin loko fi dooro he omo akindindin rin esa.
Omo kukute o la mi wo, eni mi kukute ara re lomi. Footnote 48
The Eulogy of Otutu compound
The son of calmness like the Osun river,
The son of house structure that separates not its charms,
The son of king that negotiate with the white men,
With all means an elderly irunmole (deity),
The Ooni King Ajagun, the king that turns into python and anaconda,
If he wishes he turns into a tiger and kills the evil doer.
The son of paramole (snake) that detests insults,
The son of a crown maker that knows the secret of odundun,
The son of a crown maker that knows the secret of onions.
We don’t mount and miss the way once I have mounted Otutu’s horse I locate my destination,
Over hundreds of horses eat in Otutu’s pit,
Which ever pleases you, you mount, horse has no specified day to mount,
Which ever pleases, you mount
Horse has no specified number of riders
Kimoyero established farmstead beside his father’s farm because of monkeys
The son of the branch of a felled tree that no one can attempt to fell no more, anyone that attempts to fell a tree’s branch falls himself.
The image in Figure 1 and the above poem/oriki describe the ancestral lineage, attributes, political, and social status of the Otutu family. While the sculpted lion at the entrance door personifies the majesty and the royal lineage of the Otutu, the oriki is a verbal poem that documents various attributes of the ancestors. It is also assumed that every member of the Otutu lineage has the tendency to display the attributes wholly or in part. Both the animal totem at the compound entrance and the oriki exemplify how humans deploy animal images and metaphors to explain animality in human nature and social relations.
A three-dimensional sculpted animal figurine at the entrance of the Otutu Compound in Ile-Ife, Osun State. Photo by Ibrahim Owojori.
Like humans, animals also possess their oriki. An animal’s oriki usually combines physiological features of the animal as idealized by the humans. Two instances would suffice this claim. Among the Yoruba, a gazelle, popularly known as etu or egbin, is defined as a beautiful and elegant animal. Its beauty, comeliness, and elegance are so fascinating to the Yoruba that they often ascribe the attribute of this animal to a beautiful person or thing. Hence the saying odara bi egbin – as beautiful as a gazelle. When a woman is called egbin, it means she is attractive. Egbin’s oriki is described thus:
Similar trends are also found in the Yoruba folklores (alo), oral tradition (aroba) myths, and legends. Animals are inserted in the stories to either teach lessons or to explain some vague experiences. These stories, often narrated as moonlight stories by the elders, combined moral lessons with humor transmitted from one generation to another. Among the Yoruba and Igbo, a tortoise is usually swapped for human character. A tortoise is cast as the primary actor or villain. It is depicted as a smart and cunning character who lives and makes rational decisions like humans. It is constructed as lazy, greedy, selfish, and opportunist, and one who likes to benefit from the toils of other animals. A similar instance is found among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, where Anansi or Ananse, the spider, is the primary folktale character. It is associated with intelligence, knowledge, and trickery.Footnote 50 The process of inserting animal characters in African folk tales is in essence to encode important information or teach children some didactic lessons. This construction is not unconnected with the sluggishness and inactivity of the tortoise. The imagined lives of these animals are framed in African folktales and lore to teach morals and frame narratives of power relations and balance in life. Recognizing animals as social and historical actors will help historians understand how animals penetrated and exited human lives.
For some historians, anthropologists and archaeologists, animals and material culture constitute mere objects of historical interpretation and relevance as long as they serve as an indicator, intermediary, metaphor, and personification of human actors. This approach to things suppresses the role of nonhuman actors as active participants of historical events. In the introduction of What Is an Animal?, Tim Ingold observes that boundaries delimitation between humans and nonhuman actors is the core question of major classes of life forms.Footnote 51 Although to enlist nonhuman actors in historical enquiry may pose some methodological challenges to historians, it is the duty of historians to incorporate the experiences of these actors. Ewa Domanska has suggested that social scientists should activate “unconventional sources” that underscore animal and human relations or bonds.Footnote 52 Andrew McEwen’s “‘He Took Care of Me:’ The Human-Animal Bond in Canada Great War,” enumerates a methodological approach to this historical problem.Footnote 53 He deploys anecdotes in memoirs, interviews, memories, and poetry to understand human-animal-bonding (HAB) in the Canadian army during the Great War. This approach helps him reveal that along with the human soldiers, animals such as horses and mules served in the war. Like humans, these animals were exposed to danger, inclement weather, diseases, and psychological traumas.Footnote 54 In addition, these animals were great companions and supporters during the hours of stress and depression. He notes that this methodological approach, unlike empirical data, lacks precision, is subjective, and often relies on hindsight. African historians also have epistemic responsibilities to listen and air the voices of animals in order to construct coherent narratives of unaccounted past.
Things in African history: Yoruba thoughts
The bifurcation of being into living and nonliving things has privileged anthropomorphic narratives that translate nonhuman animals and things in a utilitarian term.Footnote 55 Thinking of humans, historical actors, as a substance, a thing, or matter (even with their thinking capability) is a useful entry point to rethink and understand how they cohabit, co-function, and relate with other things external to them. As LeCain argues, historical materialism commences when we view body as a “quintessential object lesson in material entanglements.”Footnote 56
Since the paleolithic period, humans have survived and adapted to their ever-changing environment through the development and use of tools through technologies.Footnote 57 As Olsen argues, one major historical trend from the Olduvian Gorge to the postmodernia is the continuous mixing of human and things as more and more tasks are assigned to nonhuman actors.Footnote 58 He notes it is “Only by increasingly mobilizing things could humans come to such experience episodes of history such as the advent of urbanization, state formations, industrialization, and postindustrialization.”Footnote 59
Things are historical actors in their own rights and should be treated as such along with other actors. In the African cosmos, all things are relational and interrelated. Among the Yoruba, things are broadly categorized into two: natural things and material things. Natural things were created by Olodumare as part of the structure and order of the world; material things were created by humans to make life easy for themselves.Footnote 60 Hence, animals, plants, stones, sunlight, trees, rivers, and so on, and material objects possess agency power. There are ubiquitous evidences of how African people construct their collective identity around natural objects and mobilize material objects in the state creation. The history of Abeokuta, a Yoruba town, for instance, is woven round the agency of a popular granite stone that served as a refuge for the Egba in the face of attacks during the nineteenth century. The agency of the stone is imagined and constructed in the form of a savior during the period of insecurity. The stone is not ascribed human attributes, yet it is framed both as a powerful mediator in the Egba historical experience and a crucial determinant in their social institution, traditions, and behavior.Footnote 61
In some African societies, it is believed that natural things possess lives too. They believe that things in nature had once lived like humans. This cultural intelligence is variously expressed among the Yoruba. Instances abound in the Yoruba Ifa corpus. Throughout the 256 chapters (Odu) of Ifa, natural and material things are personified in human figures. An instance of how natural things assumed human attributes is reported in the Odu Ate Inu Ilosun:
The verse talks about Efufu lele (whirlwind) that plotted to rob Ile (land) of all its properties. Efufulele consulted its babalawo (Ifá priest) who counseled it to perform sacrifice. It neglected the advice and proceeded with the plan. When Efufu lele attacked Ile, it swept all materials off the ground. After a few minutes, all the objects that were swept off the ground fell back to the earth. Hence, the Yoruba usually say, “Laala to ba losoke, ile lon bo,” which means whatever goes up will eventually come down. Both whirlwind and land in the above story are natural things conceptualized as beings capable of motives, morals, values, and actions.
In one of the verses of Odu Iwori-Okanran, Ifá relates the story of three friends, Ile (House), Ona (Road) and Oja (Market) who consulted their babalawo (a diviner or Ifá priest who is also the representative of Orunmila) on what to do to attract people to their company. Their babalawo advised them to perform some sacrifices. Of the three friends, only House performed the sacrifice. Road and Market did not heed the advice of their babalawo. Hence, people do not live on the Road or Market but in the House. When people wake up in the morning, they set out on the Road and walk to the Market to trade but return home in the evening to sleep. Road’s and Market’s experience of people is transient. In the evening, people carry all the money and items witnessed by the Road and Market back home. The verse is as follows:
In the above two Ifa verses, land, whirlwind, house, road, and market are accorded human attributes. This personification is derived from the Yoruba belief that human-made objects had lived like humans in the remote past.
In most African societies, material objects are recognized as part of agents of sociality. Their positions oscillate between subject and object of social action. For the Yoruba, material objects are capable of initiating or receiving actions. Latour has aptly argued that objects are capable of authoring actions.Footnote 64 For some historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, material culture constitutes mere object of historical interpretation and relevance as long as it serves as an indicator, intermediary, metaphor, and personification of human actor. This approach to things suppresses the role of nonhuman actors as active participants of historical events. Whenever things are suppressed in historical narrative, historians limit the range of probable causes or explanations for a historical event. In other words, the place of material things is not limited to the object position; they also act as and target other material things as objects. This view is reflected in the story of gun in the Odu Ifa Ogundameji thus:
The above Ifa verse frames gun as a living thing or object that possesses capacity to initiate action. Gun is not constructed as a mere mediator in human actions but as an actor in its own right. For instance, the history of violence in Africa can be understood through the lens of firearms. African historians can frame history of things such as gun to understand complex folds of human past. The recent work of Saheed Aderinto, Gun and Society in Colonial Nigeria, testifies to this.Footnote 66 Aderinto treats firearms as a commodity, “a vital global commodity, which possessed divergent symbolic meaning and characters across locations….”Footnote 67 By putting firearms squarely at the center of armed conflict and criminality, he does not just examine the dynamics of violent encounter between the British and Africa but also proves that without gun, there was no gun society in pre-twentieth-century Africa. The “gun frame” adopted by Aderinto tells the stories of colonial experience and signifies the view that within the very colonial society, there were many societies of which the gun society was an integral part. A similar instance is found in Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century by Ajayi and Smith. These authors recognize the roles of weapons in the Yoruba inter-group relations and wars of mutual destruction of the nineteenth century.Footnote 68 In a follow-up essay published in 1967 by the Journal of African History, Smith treats Yoruba armament as a co-historical actor along with human agents. His description of the features and functions of the agedengbe sword, “a single-edged iron blade curving backwards which like the European falchion, would have a great shearing force,” was both vivid and impressive. Smith focuses on the attributes and functions of these weapons and thus ascribes roles to nonhuman agents, things, that participated in the war. A similar effort was made by Adejuwon from an art history perspective.Footnote 69 Adejuwon assembles few artifacts preserved in the Ife museums and imagines as well as creatively draws the absent ones to analyze the intersection of things and humans in nineteenth-century Yoruba warfare. This approach helps us understand how the presence of things creates their absence.
History is the study of absence in the present. The presence of historical artifacts is a paradox of absence. Historical artifacts and relics are ignored by historians because they are silent and sometimes elusive or hidden even in their own materiality. This tendency to remain silent has been summarized by Miller as “the humility of things.”Footnote 70 He further notes that the significance of objects lies beyond their evidential feature and physicalness and in their concealability. He notes, “the less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behavior … They determine what takes place to the extent we are unconscious of their capacity to do so.”Footnote 71
Conclusion
From the above analyses, things, artifacts, objects, matters, or material cultures are useful ingredients of thinking for historians. What matters is not just the materiality of presence, but the absence it reverberates and inspires or arouses in the historian. Material objects are not just evidential artifacts for historians but also things to think with. They are historical actors alongside human actors. Whether located in situ or housed in an artificial place like a museum, material objects occupy space that transcend here and now. They collapse space and time and bring absence into presence. As historical actors, they perform actions and are capable of creating, validating, legitimizing, or shaping human actions and identity. Things are not human-others, they are our exogenous self and the mirror through which we see and understand our complex material form. When called upon or activated, things perform the role of actors either as subjects or objects. Without things, we are nothing. It is within a frame that flattens the mountain top ascended and occupied by the human to the plain ground-level of things that history could be an objective study of the past. Lest anybody declares my intention as an anti-anthropocentric or posthuman advocate, this is a trek towards recognizing and understanding the role of pluriversal actors in historical events. When we redefine the world of social, sociality, and sociability of history, and do not just assign responsibility but allow each thing to take center stage to play its natural role, history will become more meaningful, intelligible, and rational.
