To follow the recent post on appliqué banners from the Kingdom of Dahomey, here is a rare postcard from circa 1900 (Publisher and photographer (?) R.H.A. Prince) showing a partial view of a truly appliqued ceremonial umbrella from the royal court at Abomey.
Click on the photo to enlarge.
Gerald and Dorit Paul Galleries, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Free
“The new exhibition Majestic African Textiles presents a spectacular array of royal and prestige cloths, masking and ritual garments, and superbly beaded and embellished objects. Featuring more than 60 pieces drawn from the IMA’s permanent collection and augmented with a few major loans, the show highlights a significant and diverse group of richly patterned and elaborately decorated textiles from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Organized geographically and representing various African ethnic groups, Majestic African Textiles is the first exhibition at the IMA to gather together a large number of these prized pieces to showcase their splendor and significance.”
Photos © Indianapolis Museum of Art. Click to enlarge
These remarkable appliqué banners are among the most important items of royal court art from the Kingdom of Dahomey, now in the Republic of Benin. Until they transferred their role to the making of tourist arts in the mid twentieth century, families of specialist textile workers at the court in Abomey supplied dramatic wall hangings that praised the king and illustrated key aspects of his social identity and achievements. The Quai Branly collection, without doubt the most important outside the Palace Museum in Abomey itself, includes early C20th examples and some pieces presented to the French ruler Napoleon III in 1856.
The banner above, made by the Yémadjé family in 1911 or 1912 as a copy of a banner in the palace collection, shows King Glèlè, represented as the lion devouring his enemies, at lower left a male panther, mythical ancestor of the royal dynasty, around them the soldiers of the king capturing his enemies. (Source: Gaëlle Beaujean-Baltzer ed. Artistes D’Abomey – Fondation Zinsou, 2009)
Above – one of the banners presented to Napoleon III in 1856.
Gabin Djimassé, a Benin historian, wrote the following brief history of the banners:
“Unlike the forge, appliqué cloth had not been present in Danhomè. It bacame known in the kingdom in the reign of King Agadja (1711-1742). The craft owes its origin to this king who captured two master appliqué workers in the region of Avranku, in the north of Porto-Novo, and set them up at Abomey, entirely at his own service. they were Hantan and Zinflou (Hankantan, Zinflou mondo), names which translate literally as “The sepals of cereals which served to make fire are finished, and darkness has set in.”
It is important to note that the appliqué cloth of the two craftsmen was made on a background of raffia, rather than cloth, which is used nowadays. the king took time to supply cloth to these families of craftsmen, for it was one of the rare and precious products that was imported, exchanged by French traders for slaves.
This art progressed greatly in the reign of King Agonglo (1789-1797), especially wit h the arrival of Yemadje in Abomey. Unlike Hantan and Zinflou, Yemadje was endowed and “married” by King Agonglo. This unusual situation made the man an ahossi, that is to say a “wife” of the king. as such he had access to the whole palace, including the interior court which was generally reserved for the king and his wives. The king led his private life in the inner court. Through such proximity with the king, Yemadje finally supplanted Hantan and Zinflou. As from then he became the principal appliqué worker, to whom all royal commissions were confided.” (Source: Gaëlle Beaujean-Baltzer ed. Artistes D’Abomey – Fondation Zinsou, 2009)
The Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, holds one of the world’s most significant collections of West African textiles, with particular strength in some of the former French colonies. The entire collection is accessible on line via their website. Check the textiles button then enter the country name in the box below.
K224 - A superb silk man's kente with six different warp striped patterns and a fine variety of supplementery weft float designs. Cloths with mixed pattern strips were called "Mmaban", meaning mixed, but each warp stripe pattern had it's own name.
The second and sixth strips appear to be variants of a design that Rattray (1927:241) calls "Asonawo mmada" - "The clan tartan of the Asona tribe; the father of King Bonsu Panyin was Owusu Ansa, who belonged to the Asona clan, the first of that clan ever to be the father of an Ashanti king. The pattern is said to have originated in this fact." The third strip is called "Oyoko ne Dako" - the Oyoko and Dako clans (Rattray 1927:239) after two rival clans in the royal matrilineage who fought a civil war in the early C18th. Strip four is unidentified. Strip five is called "Mamponhemaa" - Queen mother of Mampon (Ross 1998:113).
Although mixed strip rayon cloths are fairly common a silk example of this quality is extremely unusual and would most likely have been commissioned for a king or senior chief in the early decades of the C20th. Condition is excellent.
For size, price, etcetera please visit our gallery of Asante kente here. Click on the photos above to enlarge.
Fragment of a commemorative cloth in the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris showing Chief Ababio, Jamestown, Accra.
The same chief can be seen in two photographs in the book Ghana Photo Memories (Filigranes Editions/Africultures, 2007) that showcases the work of the photographer J.K.Bruce Vanderpuije, whose studio, now operated by his elderly son, is still to found in Jamestown.
Chief Ababio II of Jamestown, 1934.
Chief Ababio II of Jamestown, 1939
The Queen mother of Jamestown and her attendants, 1932.
All photos by J.K. Bruce Vanderpuije. Click to enlarge.
“El Anatsui’s father Fiawodzo Anatsui, wearing a narrow band- woven cloth on the of the Price of Wales’s visit to the Gold Coast colony in 1925” – photo from El Anatsui: Art and Life by Susan Mullin Vogel (Prestel 2012.)
Anatsui’s father was a master weaver and I think may be assumed to have woven this remarkable cloth himself. The texts we can see read “Lean liberty is better than fat slavery” and “God save the King.” Woven texts in English, usually some kind of homily or brief saying drawn from Christian literature rather than the Ghanaian tradition of proverbs were often a feature of some Ewe cloths in this period and can be seen as an expression of pride in newly attained literacy. However the style of this cloth with it’s detailed figurative motifs and in particular the clusters of small geometric patterns on a plain ground is distinctive.
The only similar cloth I am aware of is shown below in a photograph from Malika Kraamer’s Phd thesis Colouful Changes: Two Hundred Years of Social and Design History in the Hand-woven Textiles of the Ewe-speaking Regions of Ghana and Togo (1800-2000) (SOAS, 2005).
Kraamer notes (page 446) that this cloth is called “father of the chief” and was woven in the 1940s by a weaver called Togbe (chief) Gana. I wonder is perhaps he was an apprentice of Anatsui senior.
The majority of these cloths were collected at the start of the twentieth century by Francois de Zeltner, who published an article on bogolan in 1910. We can note both that some are remarkable similar to designs produced a century later, and that some are notably different.
Click on the photos to enlarge.
The Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, holds one of the world’s most significant collections of West African textiles, with particular strength in some of the former French colonies. The entire collection is accessible on line via their website. Check the textiles button then enter the country name in the box below.
Senegal – Soninke or Wolof fold resist indigo, early C20th.
Senegal – Soninke or Wolof fold resist indigo, early C20th.
Senegal – Wolof stitch resist indigo early C20th.
Senegal – Soninke or Wolof tied resist indigo, early C20th.
Senegal – Wolof stitch resist indigo early C20th.
Ivory Coast, tied resist indigo – attributed to the Baule. Collected 1900.
Click on the photos to enlarge.
The Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, holds one of the world’s most significant collections of West African textiles, with particular strength in some of the former French colonies. The entire collection is accessible on line via their website. Check the textiles button then enter the country name in the box below.
