The Whydah Historical Museum: Historical Context

The fort at Whydah played an important role during the transatlantic slave trade and was abandoned at its end.^{Footnote 3} The town of Whydah hosted many European establishments in this period, including Dutch and Danish lodges, the English Fort William (1682), and the French Fort Saint-Louis-de-Grégory (1704), while the Portuguese fort was constructed in 1721 by Joseph de Torres.^{Footnote 4}

Burnt down in 1961, the building was reconstructed and opened as a museum in 1967. The short history presented below will provide an understanding of the symbolic weight of the place and, as a consequence, the choice of themes of the exhibitions held in the fort. Setting up the Whydah Historical Museum inside the Portuguese fort demonstrates the desire to depict the history of the slave trade with a view to encouraging a certain image of “modernity” founded, as we will see, on a culturalist concept of hybridity.

The fort was originally constructed during a time of conflict between Portugal and its Brazilian colony. The conflict arose because the Portuguese wanted to maintain the system of triangular trade, whereas the merchants of the Portuguese colony of Bahia were looking to establish direct trade. The construction of the fort and of the Portuguese trading post in it, run by Bahian merchants, determined the place Brazil was to occupy in the Gulf of Guinea in the following years.^{Footnote 5}

Verger’s research brought together correspondence from the different political players who gravitated to the fort. Their letters, as can be seen in the following example, are both a rendering of the inter-African political situation and of the position of foreign powers located on the coast:

In 1726 the fort’s primary preoccupation was to create a balance of imports and exports, showing itself capable of responding to the large number of prisoners of war that were sold as slaves to foreign traders. The conquest of the Kingdom of Allada by King Agaja in 1724 and that of Savi and the Port of Whydah in 1727 meant that the Dahomeans became the only African nation in the area in contact with the Portuguese and other Europeans.^{Footnote 7} The Portuguese fort continued its activities for a long time after the French and English had left, insofar as that the Brazilians were the last to abolish the trade in slaves in 1850 and slavery itself in 1888. Assogba points out that the fort was then converted, and the buildings appear to have been transformed into orchards.^{Footnote 8} In 1861 the fort was inhabited by Catholic priests who had come over to convert the population to Christianity. The fort became the center of missionary activity, until Dahomey achieved independence, when it was transferred to Cotonou.^{Footnote 9}

Description of the Permanent Exhibition

The Legacy of Pierre Fatumbi Verger

Given the importance of Pierre Verger in the scenography of the history museum, we should take the trouble here to learn a little about him. He was born in France in 1902 and died in Bahia (Brazil) in 1996. He worked in Benin and Brazil for many years. Initiated in Vodun, he was given the name “Fatumbi.” His personal approach – a feeling he had scores to settle with his family and his society – led to his agreeing to become involved in a “meeting” with the “Other” as a means of either losing or reinventing himself. It seems important to distinguish between the practices carried on by Verger throughout his life and the political hijacking of his work. Even if Verger implicitly set tradition against modernity, we unfortunately retain only a sublimation of that opposition. From such a restricted point of view the author became the emblem of the concept of hybridity, built-up through the two carefully separated terms “Afro-Brazilian modernity” and “African tradition.”

Today Verger represents a major figure for Benin and Brazilian society insofar as his photographs and research have constituted and disseminated images of Benin and Brazil. His Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe du Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle ^{Footnote 20} is less well-known, but theoretically it gives structure to the presentation of his photographic work in the Whydah Historical Museum. He introduces his research, a precious document relating to the slave trade, by observing how cultural traits have been transferred and survive in new contexts:

Verger did not conclude from this phenomenon that the people had an unshakeable identity, resistant to the historical or political context it might find itself in. On the contrary, Verger specified later in his thesis that the recollection of a cultural identity from before the slave trade – the one he identified as originating from the time the slaves were still members of a specific community – was upheld by the planters. The joint memory was intended to make sure that men who had been deported and condemned to hard labor did not join forces to resist their destiny, their shackling, in common cause. He noted that the planters organized traditional celebrations every week so that the slaves would remember their place in society and what had made them different, before the slave trade, from other societies. Such ceremonies enabled plantation owners to revive and update the antinomies which opposed the slaves before they could be united by their new status in servitude.

Museographical Fabrication of the “Vodun Tradition” and “Afro-Brazilian Modernity”

What is the role of the museographical formula in this unilateral reinterpretation of the work of Pierre Verger? The museum is a political institution intended to enhance the status of the Afro-Brazilian population as an emblem of its “modernity,” which is implicitly identified in technological and industrial development. By contrast it produces the image of “tradition” as a residual guarantor of unchanging values, the prerogative of the native society that did not make the trip to the Americas. By concentrating on the photographic object, we can distinguish two methods of transmission which relate on the one hand to the practice developed in the context of field research and on the other hand to the museographical formula. We will see that in the first case photography operates as a tool, whereas its status changes in the second so that it becomes a testament to a discourse. The distinction allows us to understand some of the criticism of Verger’s work, especially in relation to the way he constructs his own idea of “tradition” as much as discovering it. As mentioned by Araujo in her article dedicated to Verger’s relations with the Aguda community, several sets of his photographs showing Candomblé ceremonies in Brazil and Vodun ceremonies in Dahomey, as well as pictures representing Afro-Brazilian traditions, were actually staged.^{Footnote 22} It is indeed possible to observe in his books the juxtaposition of pictures from Bahia and Brazil in the same way as they are presented in the Whydah Historical Museum.^{Footnote 23}

The mode of transmission proposed by the museography, as well as in the books he edited for the IFAN, plays a decisive role in the construction and the diffusion of Pierre Verger’s photography. We can observe, in particular, the new status attributed to his photographs when they become museum objects or edited images. They are taken out of the context of the approach that Pierre Verger developed, and this motivated the criticism by Melville Herskovits. Herskovits, afraid that Verger might destroy the “natural laboratory” of Bahia,^{Footnote 24} imagined objective research in which the ethnographer is as distant and neutral as possible, while Verger established steady contacts between a number of Brazilian and Benin communities.^{Footnote 25} From that perspective the photographs are used as a tool which is then explored by its re-contextualization. The exhibition of the photographs and there diffusion on the field contribute to the process of hybridization, which unfortunately is analyzed neither by the photographer nor by the museum. This perspective is quite new in anthropological research and in museum practice.^{Footnote 26}

Photography as a Tool/Photography as Testimony

As highlighted by Jérôme Souty in his work on Verger, photography for Verger is “a simple means of approaching the other and establishing a contact.”^{Footnote 27} Photography offers Verger the possibility of exploring different universes on the fringes of official accounts. He slips into the chinks of what history usually lets us see. This approach, which could be qualified as romanticism or humanism depending on your point of view, can often be found in travelers who have been driven by the rejection of the dominant culture from which they themselves originated. Unlike many ethnologists or anthropologists who take photographs in order to illustrate their research, Verger explored the world primarily by means of photography itself, which gave him recourse to other disciplines, enabling him to go deeper into the objects questioned by the images. In his introduction to Verger’s Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia Théodore Monod wrote: “Of course, Verger did not aspire to write a systematic, well-structured work like the ones expected from PhD students for example: his idea was more modest because he was aiming only at the effective accumulation of original and authentic materials.”^{Footnote 28}

Monod qualifies the work as a “monumental document” which he considers necessary to scholarly investigation, but which, according to him, is not yet one. Monod carefully distinguishes the production of archives as research that has been founded “scientifically.” The present article does not allow us to develop the question, but it is helpful here to remember the analysis that Jacques Derrida devoted to the archive.^{Footnote 29} Derrida emphasized the fact that the word archive, derived from the Greek arkhé, means both “origin and order.” So, an archive is also always telling us something, articulating the fiction and the subjectivity in relation to the reality that it seizes, centers, and interrupts.

An archive enables the elaboration of representations which are generally presented as revealing established fact–essential, but the artificial character of which we should always observe. It is effectively in this way that Verger shares his images with the people he photographs. Jérôme Souty reminds us of the originality of Verger’s approach: he did not point the lens directly at his subjects, but rather he kept the camera close to his body, operating it as if it were a passive recording device and allowing images to slip into shot:

The handling of the camera was part of a ritual, which gives the photographs an almost sacred character. They became a sort of relic. They were like witnesses to a “miracle,” that represented the “survival” and the spread of African cultural and religious practices in America, beyond or across the tragedy of the slave trade and slavery. However, these photographs circulated, Verger exchanged them and distributed them within different communities, and this confrontation of the images with various reactions – which he also photographed – places them in a dynamic that guaranteed them a fertile polysemy. They make up the “documents” or the “archives” which are shared both with the scientific community and with the “source” communities. In Haiti, for example, Alfred Métraux showed Vodun followers photographs taken by Verger of the rituals in Nigeria and Dahomey, and Brazilian photographs are related to Dahomey.^{Footnote 31} So, the images are constantly updated by the memory and interpretation of the people to whom they are shown. When Verger highlighted the confusion and stupefaction provoked within the religious communities by his photographs, he was entertained by it. The communities saw above all the similarities between religious worship in the different countries but doubted their distant origins, and Verger, in order to convince them, showed them elements that bore witness to the specificity of each of the images. He took care to show the clues which rendered each image irreducible:

What is important in Verger’s work is that the photographs are part of the practice of a collective and dynamic interpretation. As long as the images have the status of “archives” when submitted to a plurality of viewpoints, they escape from the crystallization of a discourse nourished by a mechanist mode of thought. Still, in the introduction to Dieux d’Afrique quoted above, Verger evoked the steps between Brazil, Dahomey, and Nigeria. He proceeded in four stages, accumulating at each stage materials that he then carried with him in order to share them with the Vodun communities located on the other continent. So his photographs are constantly re-contextualized and renewed by the different ways people look at them. They are part of a temporality which preserves them from the crystallization of a univocal meaning and from the risk of becoming a discourse object.

What happens when the photographs are removed from the context in which they are used, in other words when they are no longer exchanged within the communities but displayed on a wall in a museum? Does the defining of the images within a discourse give them a scientific legitimacy – deplored by Monod – or does it, instead, position them in a fixed and sterile dichotomy? The selection and disposition of the photographs at Whydah in the different rooms devoted to the diaspora displays the influence of the Afro-Brazilian communities in Dahomey and Brazil.

We have highlighted the difference between the photographs and the objects which testify to those influences, so this exhibition forges a discourse which seems simultaneously to increase the value of the contribution of “modernity” in Dahomey by introducing foreign elements such as construction techniques, clothing fashions, and rules of civility, and consolidates an image of “African tradition.”

The photographs change status from the moment they are placed in a museographical space, in other words when they are positioned in a place which has been validated by the discourse laid out on the accompanying texts. No longer part of the practical context that Verger set them in by presenting them to different communities, the photographs become, within the confines of the museum, a demonstration of a dogmatic purpose. Their purpose now is to transmit the image of the greatness of Africa, to be the guarantors of a tradition, although for the most part it is pure fantasy. We can agree with Souty when he states that:

We can say that, even if the discourse is elaborated by Verger, it is accentuated and becomes ideological when represented by an institution as “a historical truth.” We can see Verger’s double bind as photographer and as cultural actor. While he is dealing with his images as a tool to invoke exchanges with local communities, crossing borders and memories, once integrated into the museum space those images change character and serve the purposes of the discourse of the institution. We can develop this double perspective of photography through Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura,” which will show us how exhibiting the photographs reifies them: in building up the image of an “African tradition” the opportunity for remembrance and reinvention of identities – a dynamic process – is lost.

The “Aura” of a Photograph as Paradigm of Museographical Transmission

“In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.”^{Footnote 34}

Benjaminian philosophy enables us to expand on the criticism of the model of transmission as elaborated in the museum insofar as it is inherent in a particular construction of the concepts of “modernity” and “tradition.” Through Benjamin we can detach ourselves from the discourse object which serves to close the polysemy of Verger’s photographs when they are organized in the closed and a-temporal space of the museum. Benjamin in fact enables us to withstand that model and the culturalist idea of hybridity by reminding us that there is a “transmission which is catastrophic”:

Benjamin highlights the link between a concept of modernity which is identified with progress and a policy of transmission which composes the historical phenomenon in past objects by attributing a meaning that is both determined and unilateral. The policy is catastrophic in the sense that it removes the ambivalence from the phenomena in order to furnish them with meaning. The phenomena thus become discourse objects in a representation that is fragmented like a jigsaw puzzle. Benjamin’s philosophy of history distinguishes that policy, which he denounces as a “catastrophe,” from a policy which he says takes into account the “rift.” The rift then is an ambivalent constituent in what appears only to the eyes of “today” to be “the past” whose desire is by definition in conflict with it. The modernity that Benjamin denounces is what proceeds by covering over the rift. It transforms the phenomena into emblems, or “spoils of war”:

The celebration of heritage stems from a policy of transmission the finality of which consists in making the victory of the current system emblematic. Benjamin thus qualifies the political operation of transmission, which transforms the phenomena into “spoils of war,” calling it barbaric in that it sacrifices the work necessary to make the phenomena transmittable, allowing for their transmission as idealized emblems to reflect the ideals of a given society. The necessary work that makes the phenomena transmittable is precisely what Pierre Verger does in traveling from one continent to the other, exchanging photographs and producing new photographs at the same time as people are looking at the images. In his case, the technical medium used for the transmission appears and is problematized by the very images he shows. Meanwhile, the images are absorbed by the discourse of the institution once they are exhibited in the museum.

With Verger’s practice, the communities perceive themselves as subjects of time into which different phenomena converge. Mystification of culture – which means its “auratic” character – is blocked as long as the technical medium (the technical reproducibility generated by photography) remains visible and is problematized. It is precisely this dynamic process which guarantees that tradition is stripped of its conformism and enables the viewer to have an experience of the present, which means to experience himself as subject to time.