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The King’s Chinese Spittoon: Global Commodities, Court Culture, and Vodun in the Kingdoms of Hueda and Dahomey (Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2021

Roberto Zaugg
Roberto Zaugg*
Affiliation:
Universität Bern
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Abstract

As key players in the transatlantic slave trade, the monarchies of Hueda and Dahomey (in modern-day southern Benin) connected themselves to global commodity flows. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, imported merchandise fueled practices of conspicuous consumption and ritualized largesse, the performance of which was pivotal in consolidating their rulers’ power. Focusing on specific items (tobacco, porcelain) and behavioral practices (smoking, spitting), this article examines how these goods were materially and symbolically integrated into courtly culture and associated with the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Vodun. In order to track recurring aspects of courtly scenography, to compare the signification of bodily practices in different parts of the world, and to identify material links engendered by global trade, it combines microhistorical investigation based on written records with archaeological findings, anthropological observations, and the analysis of visual sources and sculptural artifacts. The essay argues that royal palaces constituted crucial laboratories of aesthetic change and new cultures of elite consumption. In this process, exogenous elements not only enriched the material culture of the palaces, celebrating the monarchs’ global splendor; they were also charged with new meanings that inscribed foreign goods and related practices into specifically regional cultural codes.

Type
Microanalysis and Global History
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 115 - 153
Copyright
© Éditions EHESS 2021

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Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “Le crachoir chinois du roi. Marchandises globales, culture de cour et vodun dans les royaumes de Hueda et du Dahomey (xviie–xixe siècle),” Annales HSS 73, no. 1 (2018): 119–59.

I am grateful to the late Émile-Désiré Ologoudou, Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, Craig Koslofsky, Samuel Francis Adjei, Almut Höfert, Mario Del Pero, Saskia Cousin, Erwan Dianteill, and Yann Dahhaoui as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their precious suggestions.

References

1 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 432.

2 Berlin, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, VI. HA, FA Oettinger, 12, “Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf von Johann Peter Oettinger,” 74. A heavily manipulated version of this account was published by the great-great-grandson of the barber-surgeon: Paul Oettinger, ed., Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge. Deutsche Kolonialerfahrungen vor zweihundert Jahren. Nach dem Tagebuch des Chirurgen Johann Peter Oettinger (Berlin: Eisenschmidt, 1886). A partial translation of the latter text is included in Adam Jones, Brandenburg Sources for West African History, 1680–1700 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1985), 180–98. This manuscript is the object of a joint editorial project with Craig Koslofsky to be published by the University of Virginia Press. The first results of our collaboration were presented in Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg, “Ship’s Surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger: A Hinterlander in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1682–1696,” in Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850, ed. Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 25–44. On the Oettinger family papers, see Roberto Zaugg, “Les siècles des Oettinger. Écrits et mémoires d’une famille allemande au fil des générations (1682–1936),” in “Appel à témoins. Écrits personnels et pratiques socioculturelles (xvie–xxe siècles),” ed. Danièle Tosato-Rigo, special issue, Études de lettres 300, no. 1/2 (2016): 183–216.

3 “Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf von Johann Peter Oettinger,” 76.

4 Just a year after Oettinger, the captain of an English slave ship described a similar scene at the court in Savi: “[King Agbangla] was smoaking tobacco in a long wooden pipe, the bole of which … would hold an ounce, and rested upon his throne, with a bottle of brandy and a little dirty silver cup by his side.” See Thomas Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London: Ann. 1693, 1694, from England to Cape Monseradoe, in Africa: And Thence Along the Coast of Guiney to Whidaw, the Island of St. Thomas, and So Forward to Barbadoes,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill (London: J. Walthoe, 1732), 6:173–239, here p. 216.

5 On “scenes” as objects of global history, see Timothy Brooks, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Profile Books, 2009); Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, and Christine Göttler, eds., Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

6 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Europia Mania: Contextualizing the European Other in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Dahomey Art,” in Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters, ed. Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 237–69, here p. 239.

7 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

8 Kim Siebenhüner, “Things that Matter: Zur Geschichte der materiellen Kultur in der Frühneuzeitforschung,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 42, no. 3 (2015): 373–409, here p. 382, which interalia offers a discussion on the usefulness and limits of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory for historical research. On the expanding and increasingly global scope of historical scholarship dealing with material culture, see Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Gerritsen and Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016); Marian Füssel and Rebekka Habermas, eds., “Materialität der Geschichte,” special issue, Historische Anthropologie 23, no. 3 (2015).

9 Jean-Pierre Warnier, The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

10 On the analytical centrality of local contexts for global history, see Felix Brahm, Angelika Epple, and Rebekka Habermas, eds., “Lokalität und transnationale Verflechtungen,” special issue Historische Anthropologie 21, no. 1 (2013).

11 On the potentialities and challenges of global microhistory, see Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq.

12 Robin Law, “The Slave-Trader as Historian: Robert Norris and the History of Dahomey,” History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 16 (1989): 219–35, here p. 220.

13 Beatrix Heintze and Adam Jones, eds., “European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa before 1900: Use and Abuse,” special issue, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 33 (1987).

14 Adam Jones, “The Dark Continent: A Preliminary Study of the Geographical Coverage in European Sources, 1400–1880,” in Heintze and Jones, “European Sources,” 19–26.

15 Isabelle Surun, “L’exploration de l’Afrique au xixe siècle. Une histoire pré-coloniale au regard des postcolonial studies,” Revue d’histoire du xix e siècle 32 (2006): 11–17.

16 Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), especially pp. 27–39 for an insightful discussion on the sources for Dahomean history. See also Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which highlights the potentialities of integrating written, visual, and material sources.

17 Alexandre d’Albéca, “Au Dahomey,” Le tour du monde. Nouveau journal des voyages 68 (1894): 65–128, here p. 87.

18 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 53.

19 For the preceding centuries, see François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages [2013], trans. Troy Tice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

20 Thomas Vernet and Philippe Beaujard, eds., “L’Afrique orientale et l’océan Indien. Connexions, réseaux d’échanges et globalisation (Ier millénaire–xixe siècle),” special issue, Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 6 (2015): https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1719.

21 On trans-Saharan trade in the longue durée, see Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 2.

22 François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “Voyage aux frontières du monde. Topologie, narration et jeux de miroir dans la Rihla de Ibn Battûta,” Afrique et histoire 1, no. 1 (2003): 75–122.

23 In both the Franco-Arabic and English editions, ar-rūmiya is misleadingly translated as “European.” See Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, trans. Charles Defrémery and Beniamino Raffaello Sanguinetti (Paris: Impr. impériale, 1853–1858), 4:406; The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūa, A. D. 1325–1354, trans. Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Charles F. Beckingham (Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press/The Hakluyt Society, 1958–2000), 4:959. In Arabic sources of this period, the expression rūm (literally “Rome”) generally refers to the Roman-Byzantine Empire and, by extension, to the Balkan and Asia Minor territories which had once belonged to the latter. See ibid., 2:415 sq., where Ibn Battūta identifies Bilad al-Rūm as Asia Minor.

24 On prostration in African, Islamic, and Christian European ceremonials, see Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, “Voyage aux frontières du monde,” 101–3; and Christina Brauner, “To Be the Key for Two Coffers: A West African Embassy to France (1670/1),” Ifra-Nigeria E-Papers Series 30 (2013): http://www.ifra-nigeria.org/publications/e-papers/ifra-e-papers/63-brauner-christina-2013-to-be-the-key-for-two-coffers-a-west-african-embassy-to-france-1670-1.

25 The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 4:959. It cannot be excluded that this part of Ibn Battūta’s account was to a certain extent a narrative strategy, by which the author intended to highlight that despite the persistence of “pagan” elements the sovereign of Mali participated in a common Islamic court culture. Overall, however, there are consistent reasons to believe that the court of mansa Suleyman—whose brother and predecessor Musa I had established far-reaching contacts with Mamluk Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula during his pilgrimage to Mecca, or ḥajj, in 1324–1325—was truly characterized by a cosmopolitan material culture and by the coexistence of Islamic and pre-Islamic ceremonial codes. See Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, “Voyage aux frontières du monde,” 100–3. It is noteworthy, in this respect, that the impact of objects from Mamluk Egypt on the material culture of West Africa has been attested as far as the Akan forest zone in present-day Ghana: Raymond A. Silverman, “Material Biographies: Saharan Trade and the Lives of Objects in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century West Africa,” History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 42 (2015): 375–95.

26 Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, “Voyage aux frontières du monde,” 101, n. 96.

27 Robin Law, “West Africa’s Discovery of the Atlantic,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 44, no. 1 (2011): 1–25, here p. 2.

28 Philip J. Havik and Toby Green, “Introduction: Brokerage and the Role of Western Africa in the Atlantic World,” in Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Precolonial Western Africa, ed. Toby Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–26, here p. 7.

29 Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996); Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006); James D. La Fleur, Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Colleen E. Kriger, ed., “Material Culture and Commerce in Precolonial Africa,” special issue, History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 42 (2015); Stanley B. Alpern, “What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods,” History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 22 (1995): 5–43; Adam Jones, “Written Sources for the Material Culture of the Gold Coast before 1800: A Provisional Checklist,” in “Approches croisées des mondes akan II,” ed. Gérard Chouin, Claude-Hélène Perrot, and Gérard Pescheux, special issue, Journal des africanistes 75, no. 2 (2005): http://africanistes.revues.org/102.

30 See the analytical framework developed for nineteenth-century maritime East Africa by Jeremy Prestholdt, who defines domestication as “the reception and remaking of globally circulating goods … the process of making familiar or usable, controlling, and bringing into intimate spaces”: Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 8.

31 Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 [1997], trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

32 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kim Siebenhüner, “Approaching Diplomatic and Courtly Gift-Giving in Europe and Mughal India: Shared Practices and Cultural Diversity,” Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (2013): 525–46; Peter Burschel and Christine Vogel, eds., Die Audienz. Ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014); Christina Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers. Interkulturelle Diplomatie an Gold- und Sklavenküste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015). For a comparative view, see Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chap. 3.

33 In the last two decades, research on royal palaces in the Gbe region has been conducted to a good extent by archaeologists. For Dahomey, see J. Cameron Monroe, The Precolonial State in West Africa: Building Power in Dahomey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); for Hueda, see Kenneth G. Kelly, “Using Historically Informed Archaeology: Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Hueda/European Interaction on the Coast of Bénin,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4, no. 3/4 (1997): 353–66; Kelly, “The Archaeology of African-European Interaction: Investigating the Social Roles of Trade, Traders, and the Use of Space in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Hueda Kingdom, Republic of Benin,” World Archaeology 28, no. 3 (1997): 351–69; Neil L. Norman, “Hueda (Whydah) Country and Town: Archaeological Perspectives on the Rise and Collapse of an African Atlantic Kingdom,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (2009): 387–410.

34 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24223, “Journal du voiage de Guinée et Cayenne par le chevalier Des Marchais” (1726), fol. 42. Six to seven aunes correspond to approximately seven or eight meters.

35 “Journal du voiage de Guinée et Cayenne par le chevalier Des Marchais,” fol. 126. Like tobacco, hammocks had already been a commodity of interregional trade in pre-Columbian tropical America: John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 104–6. In colonial Brazil hammocks were used for different purposes, including as a slave-carried mode of transport for upper-class people: Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos du xvii e au xix e siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1968), 89. They were also a standard item on the cargo lists of slave ships bound for Africa: Gustavo Acioli Lopes, “Negócio da Costa da Mina e comércio atlântico. Tabaco, açúcar, ouro e tráfico de escravos. Pernambuco (1654–1760)” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2008), 53. In the case of the Gbe region (Alpern, “What Africans Got for Their Slaves,” 30–31) and the neighboring Gold Coast (Jones, “Written Sources for the Material Culture,” 238), hammocks are not mentioned in edited sources before the 1660s. This suggests that they were introduced to this area through Atlantic trade, whereupon they acquired an exclusively status-specific transport function. On sumptuary restrictions pertaining to hammocks, see Abiola Félix Iroko, “Le transport en hamac dans le royaume du Danhomé du xviie au xixe siècle,” in Les transports en Afrique, xix e–xx e siècle, ed. Hélène d’Almeida-Topor, Chantal Chanson-Jabeur, and Monique Lakroum (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 159–77, as well as Aix-en-Provence, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Dépôt des fortifications des colonies 75, 104, “Relation du royaume de Judas” (post-1708, probably ca. 1715), fol. 50.

36 “Journal du voiage de Guinée et Cayenne par le chevalier Des Marchais,” fol. 57. An anonymous French writer specifies, however, that a table was actually set only when Europeans ate in the presence of the king, and even then the dignitaries had to eat sitting on the floor: “Relation du royaume de Judas,” fol. 29. William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts (1704; London: J. Knapton, 1705), 363, observes that nobody (except his wives) was “permitted to see [the king] eat.”

37 Kelly, “Using Historically Informed Archaeology,” argues that by locating the lodges inside the palace district at Savi, the monarchy attempted both to associate itself symbolically with the European traders and to establish a centralizing control over commercial operations.

38 On the rise and fall of the kingdom of Hueda, see Isaac Adeagbo Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours, 1708–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Robin Law, “Ideologies of Royal Power: The Dissolution and Reconstruction of Political Authority on the ‘Slave Coast,’ 1680–1750,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57, no. 3 (1987): 321–44; Law, “‘The Common People Were Divided’: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Political Factionalism in the Kingdom of Whydah, 1671–1727,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (1990): 201–29; Law, The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden: Research School, Centre of Non-Western Studies, 1997), chap. 2; Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), chap. 1; Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, “Organisation et contrôle de l’espace dans l’aire culturelle aja-fon (Sud-Togo et Bénin—xviie–xixe siècle),” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 2 (2010): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/738; Norman, “Hueda (Whydah) Country and Town.”

39 The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org.

40 Law, Ouidah, 30.

41 Paul Ozanne, “The Diffusion of Smoking in West Africa,” Odù: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies 2 (1969): 29–42; John Edward Philips, “African Smoking and Pipes,” Journal of African History 24, no. 3 (1983): 303–19; Allen F. Roberts, “Smoking in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 46–57.

42 Roslyn Adele Walker, The Arts of Africa in the Dallas Museum of Art (New Haven/Dallas: Yale University Press/Dallas Museum of Art, 2009), 94.

43 Jerome S. Handler, “The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 30, no. 1 (2009): 1–26, here p. 7; Linda Heywood and John Thornton, “Central African Leadership and the Appropriation of European Culture,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 194–224, here p. 199 sq.

44 See the representation of a smoking man on the famous royal Fa divination board from Allada, discussed in Adam Jones, “A Collection of African Art in Seventeenth-Century Germany: Christoph Weickmann’s ‘Kunst- und Naturkammer,’” African Arts 27 (1994): 28–43 and 92–94.

45 See for example the gifts offered to King Glele in 1863–1864: Richard Francis Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome: With Notices of the So Called “Amazons,” the Grand Customs, the Yearly Customs, the Human Sacrifices, the Present State of the Slave Trade, and the Negro’s Place in Nature (London: Tinsley, 1864), 1:xv. See also the letter of October 9, 1810, from King Adandozan to the prince regent of Portugal, who was then in Brazil, quoted in Ana Lucia Araujo, “Dahomey, Portugal, and Bahia: King Adandozan and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012): 1–19, here p. 12 (and the photographs on p. 15).

46 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1:239; Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 210. For the neighboring Gold Coast in the late eighteenth century, see the observations by the surgeon and botanist Paul Erdmann Isert, Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Columbien, in Briefen an seine Freunde beschrieben (Copenhagen: Morthorst, 1788), 231 sq. Isert had worked from 1783 to 1786 at the Danish fortress of Christansborg (Osu, Accra); he describes both the widespread consumption of tobacco by men and women and the clear preference for Brazilian tobacco.

47 Walker, The Arts of Africa, 282.

48 Apparently local tobacco was consumed primarily by the “Inland Negroes,” whereas the inhabitants of the coastal region preferred to smoke “Brasil Tobacco”: Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 306. Not all tobacco was directly sold by the Portuguese to the Africans. Once it arrived on the West African coast, part of the cargo was bought by other European vessels. It was also used to pay the duties which, from the second half of the seventeenth century, Portuguese vessels trading on the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin owed to the Dutch West India Company. See Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres, 28–46; Jean-Baptiste Nardi, O fumo brasileiro no período colonial. Lavoura, comércio e administração (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1996); Lopes, “Negócio da Costa da Mina e comércio atlântico”; Michael Zeuske, “Sklaven und Tabak in der atlantischen Weltgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 303, no. 2 (2016): 315–48, here p. 318 sq. Significantly, archaeological excavations by Paul Ozanne seem to indicate that the 1660s to 1690s—that is, the first decades of direct trade between Brazil and West Africa—were a crucial phase for the development of pipes in the region of Accra and that the practice of smoking was transferred inland from the coastal area. See Brian Vivian, “On Tobacco Pipes in Asante,” in Chouin, Perrot, and Pescheux, “Approches croisées des mondes akan II,” https://journals.openedition.org/africanistes/122, which offers an updated refinement of Ozanne’s typology of pipes. James Boachie-Ansah, “Smoking Pipes and the Dating of Post 16th Century in Ghana: The Evidence from Ahwene Koko,” West African Journal of Archaeology 16 (1986): 53–70, discusses the possibility that certain types of African-made pipes may have been introduced from the Sahel region to present-day Ghana by Mande traders as early as the mid-seventeenth century.

49 Isert, Reise nach Guinea, 232: “Taba”; Johann Gottlieb Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Chwee, Twi): Based on the Akuapem Dialect, with Reference to the Other (Akan and Fante) Dialects (Basel: Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, 1875), 12: “tawa.”

50 From azɔ (the Fongbe word for “smoke” and—by extension—for “tobacco”) and aguda (“Brazilian/Portuguese”). The generic term azo for tobacco is already mentioned in a Fongbe word list compiled by a French slave ship captain in 1726 (“Journal du voiage de Guinée et Cayenne par le chevalier Des Marchais,” fol. 88v). The word aguda is first attested in a vocabulary collected in 1741 from West African slaves in Brazil (Law, Ouidah, 37). In the Gbe and Yoruba region it has also been used to label the former African slaves from Brazil who resettled to the Bight of Benin during the nineteenth century. It is often assumed that aguda is a corrupted form of Ajudá, the Portuguese rendering of Hueda (see, for example, Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 169). This etymology is however disputed (Law, Ouidah, 37). An alternative etymology was proposed by Paul Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1937), 5, who considered that the word came from agoudan, meaning an indolent and vainglorious person. The compound word agudazɔ occurs for the first time—to my knowledge—in this same book by Hazoumé. Nevertheless, it seems clear that its etymological roots go back to the heyday of the Brazilian slave trade in Dahomey. For a wide-ranging study on the diffusion of loanwords for tobacco from coastal areas to hinterland regions, see Jan Vansina, “Deep-Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa,” History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 16 (1989): 341–62.

51 Neil L. Norman, “From the Shadow of an Atlantic Citadel: An Archaeology of the Huedan Countryside,” in Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. J. Cameron Monroe and Akan Ogundiran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142–66, here pp. 156–58.

52 Robert Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, King of Dahomy, an Inland Country of Guiney to Which Are Added the Author’s Journey to Abomey, the Capital and a Short Account of the African Slave Trade (London: W. Lowndes, 1789), 147; Renzo Mandirola and Pierre Trichet, eds., Lettres du Dahomey. Correspondance des premiers pères de la Société des missions africaines (avril 1861–avril 1862) (Paris: Karthala, 2011), 302 and 330.

53 Werner Peukert, Der atlantische Sklavenhandel von Dahomey, 1740–1797. Wirtschaftsanthropologie und Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1978), 208 sq. for the estimates and 210 for the citation.

54 Law, Ouidah, 130.

55 Monroe, The Precolonial State in West Africa, 96.

56 Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey, 30.

57 Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 123–28.

58 Peukert, Der atlantische Sklavenhandel von Dahomey.

59 Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

60 Other sumptuary restrictions regulated the use of hammocks (see note 35 above), parasols, European shoes, chairs, and even bedspreads. See Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1:181; and Blier, “Europia Mania,” 242–45.

61 “Relation du royaume de Judas,” fol. 29. See also fol. 23 (on the king’s constant smoking) and fol. 32 (on the display of tobacco, pipes, and liquors by the dignitaries).

62 “Relation du royaume de Judas,” fol. 42. For analogous norms in the Mali Empire, see The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 4:960.

63 Archibald Dalzel, The History of Dahomy, an Inland Kingdom of Africa: Compiled from Authentic Memoirs (London: T. Spilsbury, 1793), ix.

64 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 369; Klavs Randsborg and Inga Merkyte, Bénin Archaeology: The Ancient Kingdoms (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), chap. 8; Neil L. Norman, “Sacred Vortices of the African Atlantic World: Materiality of the Accumulative Aesthetic in the Hueda Kingdom, 1650–1727 CE,” in Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic, ed. Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 47–67. In keeping with a common practice in both scholarly literature and local discourse, I use the term “Vodun” to indicate the religious culture of the Gbe region, comprising practices and beliefs related to deities, ancestors, and a variety of power objects and substances. On the complex etymology and multiple meanings of the term—which is often used as a synonym of “deity”—see Suzanne Preston Blier, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 37–47.

65 Erwan Dianteill and Michèle Chouchan, Eshu, dieu d’Afrique et du Nouveau Monde (Paris: Larousse, 2011); Toyin Falola, ed., Èṣù: Yoruba God, Power, and the Imaginative Frontiers (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2013).

66 For examples on the doors of Yoruba temples, see Joan Wescott, “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu-Elegba, the Yoruba Trickster: Definition and Interpretation in Yoruba Iconography,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 32, no. 4 (1962): 336–54, here p. 340. For examples on Fa divination trays, see Paris, musée du Quai Branly, “Plateau de divination,” inventory no. 73.1997.4.135; and Zürich, Rietberg Museum, “Orakeldeckel, opon ifa,” inventory no. 2005.1. The seventeenth-century Allada divination tray mentioned in note 44 above is different in this regard, as the smoker depicted seems to be a human figure rather than the trickster-god. Nevertheless, the very fact that the act of smoking is represented on this object used in the context of Fa divination and thus associated with Legba, is certainly significant and also appears to attest—albeit in a less direct way—to the link between Legba and tobacco consumption.

67 Dianteill and Chouchan, Eshu, 69. Significantly, in Haiti he is also called “Maître Carrefour,” or Master Crossroads.

68 Wescott, “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu-Elegba,” 347. On transgression, see Dianteill and Chouchan, Eshu, 76–81.

69 Ibid., 39 (Brazil), 68 (Haiti), and 93 (Cuba).

70 Unless otherwise indicated, all information about the history of porcelain is based on Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

71 Ibid., 18–21; Anne Gerritsen, “Ceramics for Local and Global Markets: Jingdezhen’s Agora of Technologies,” in Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, ed. Dagmar Schäfer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 161–84.

72 Besides Finlay’s synthesis in The Pilgrim Art, 233–37, and the literature quoted there, see Bing Zhao, “Chinese-style Ceramics in East Africa from the 9th to 16th Century: A Case of Changing Value and Symbols in the Multi-Partner Global Trade,” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 6 (2015): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1836.

73 Innocent Pikirayi, “The Zimbabwe Culture and Its Neighbours: Origins, Development, and Consequences of Social Complexity in Southern Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 915–28; Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros, chap. 31.

74 Timothy Insoll, “Archaeological Research in Timbuktu, Mali,” Antiquity 72, no. 276 (1998): 413–17; Sam Nixon, “Tadmekka. Archéologie d’une ville caravanière des premiers temps du commerce transsaharien,” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 4 (2013): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1237.

75 Lists of trading goods for the Gold Coast sometimes include European containers in metal, earthenware, or stoneware; see the indexes in Jones, Brandenburg Sources, and Robin Law, ed., The English in West Africa, vol. 1, The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681–1699 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997–2006). By contrast, I have not been able to find (in the edited source material) commodity lists mentioning Asian ceramics. I thus presume that these entered West African markets in limited quantities, probably as gifts for local elites. It is important to recall, however, that such gifts often accompanied the “customs” which Europeans had to pay in order to access the coastal markets, and that subsequently some of the gifts became actual commodities in intra-African transactions. On Euro-African gift-giving, see Christina Brauner, “Connecting Things: Trading Companies and Diplomatic Gift-Giving on the Gold and Slave Coasts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 4 (2016): 408–28.

76 James Boachie-Ansah, “Excavations at Fort Amsterdam, Abandze, Central Region, Ghana,” in Current Archaeological Research in Ghana, ed. Timothy Insoll (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 37–61, here pp. 46–48. Findings from Elmina include porcelain shards from seventeenth-century China and Japan, as well as from eighteenth-century Meissen: Christopher R. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 152.

77 Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), 18.

78 Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 60.

79 For an analysis of the construction and (possible) sources of this complex text, see Rémi Dewière, “Le Discours historique de l’estat du royaume de Borno. Genèse et construction d’une histoire du Borno par un captif de Tripoli au xvii e siècle,” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 4 (2013): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1170.

80 Rémi Dewière, “L’esclave, le savant et le sultan. Représentations du monde et diplomatie au sultanat du Borno (xvi e–xvii e siècles)” (PhD diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2015), 480.

81 Rémi Dewière, Du lac Tchad à La Mecque. Le sultanat du Borno et son monde (xvi e–xvii e siècle) (Paris: Éd. de la Sorbonne, 2017), 38.

82 Araujo, “Dahomey, Portugal, and Bahia,” 12.

83 Kelly, “Using Historically Informed Archaeology,” 363.

84 Boachie-Ansah, “Excavations at Fort Amsterdam,” 58. It has even been suggested that the appearance of the mogyemogye (the ritual vessel for pouring libation on the golden stool of the Asante) was influenced by the shape of Rhenish stoneware jugs: DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina, 120.

85 Brett D. Hirsch, “The Taming of the Jew: Spit and the Civilizing Process in The Merchant of Venice,” in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 136–52.

86 Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924; Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 415.

87 As a sixteenth-century Portuguese Jesuit put it, when he became aware that one could actually refrain from expelling one’s saliva: “We [Europeans] spit all the time and everywhere; the Japanese usually swallow their spittle”: Luís Fróis, Européens et Japonais. Traité sur les contradictions et différences de mœurs, écrit par le R. P. Luís Fróis au Japon, l’an 1585 (Paris: Chandeigne, 2009), 20.

88 However, some eighteenth-century authors considered that excessive spitting (induced by smoking) could alter this balance and thus lead to “melancholy”: Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1993), 81 sq.

89 Norbert Elias, On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations [1939], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2012), 151–57, here p. 152.

90 Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France parmi les honnestes gens (Paris: Josset, 1671), 172 sq.

91 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), chap. 7.

92 Álvaro Velho, Roteiro da primeira viagem de Vasco da Gama à India, ed. José Marques (Porto: Faculdade de letras do Porto, 1999), 78; A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499, trans. E. G. Ravenstein (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898), 56.

93 Hsueh-man Shen, ed., Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China’s Liao Empire, 907–1125 (New York/Milan: Asia Society/Five Continents, 2006), 310.

94 Tellingly, in south-eastern China spittoons were frequently included in marriage dowries: Adrien von Ferscht, “No Spitting in the Silver Vase: The Chinese Export Silver Spittoon that Thought It Was a Vase!” http://chinese-export-silver.com/2013/02/.

95 Christiaan J. A. Jörg, Chinese Ceramics in the Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: The Ming and Qing Dynasties (London: Wilson, 1997), 118; Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 24.

96 Goodman, Tobacco in History, 81.

97 Nouveau dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1718), 384.

98 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, 155.

99 Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1979), 1058; Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 296; Ann Arbor, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, National Security Advisor Files, Memoranda of Conversations between Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping, November 27, 1974, and October 21, 1975.

100 Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 169.

101 The spittoons are decorated with carvings depicting human heads, leopards, and birds—symbols of the king’s power and of his authority over people and animals. Later, the asantehene also used spittoons made in gold, brass, and clay. Personal letter from Samuel Francis Adjei, director of the Prempeh II Jubilee Museum, Kumasi, November 13, 2012.

102 Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, “Calebasses dahoméennes (Documents de la mission Dakar-Djibouti),” Journal de la Société des africanistes 5, no. 2 (1935): 203–46.

103 Henk den Heijer, ed., Naar de koning van Dahomey. Het journaal van de gezantschapsreis van Jacobus Elet naar het West-Afrikaanse koninkrijk Dahomey in 1733 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 148 sq. Foldable fans, a Sino-Japanese item introduced to Europe by Portuguese traders and subsequently imitated by European artisans, were another item which had already undergone multiple cross-cultural transfers before arriving in Dahomey. A commodity list from the Dutch factory at Offra in the kingdom of Allada attests that between October 1690 and November 1691, the Dutch West India Company imported 9,395 fans (kwispel) of different kinds to this region, and that seventy fans decorated with crystal and agate were enough to buy a slave. The Hague, Nationaal Archief, Tweede West-Indische Compagnie, 1024, “Generaale Reeckening” (Offra, November 30, 1691).

104 Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, 95. On the ajalala scenography, see Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 11.

105 According to an account based on a 1682 visit to Hueda, Agbangla was “usually dressed in the Arab fashion, in a robe of violet taffeta”: Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712, ed. Paul E. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 2:638. By contrast, in 1693 he wore a “red velvet nightgown” (“Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf von Johann Peter Oettinger,” 76) and in May 1694 he was described wearing a “loose gown of red damask” (Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London,” 216). By the year 1698, only “those of the Royal Family” were allowed to wear red clothes (Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 350). Jones (Brandenburg Sources, 194, n. 53) has suggested that this red “gown” might be the “Japanese silken night-robe” offered to Agbangla by Dutch traders in 1691. The 1691 commodity list of the Dutch factory in Offra (“Generaale Reeckening”) highlights the economic value of these luxury items, attesting that for nine “Japanese silk gowns” one could get six slaves.

106 Father Cipriano Pires Sardinha (from Minas Gerais) and Father Vicente Ferreira Pires (from Salvador de Bahia) visited Dahomey as envoys of the Portuguese Crown in 1796–1798. The account of this mission was sent to the prince regent of Portugal in 1800 by (the possibly mulatto) Father Vicente. However, it seems that a significant part of this text was authored by the more erudite Father Cipriano, a former student of the University of Coimbra, the son of a freed creole slave and her master, and the grandson of a West African captive. See Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Return as a Religious Mission: The Voyage to Dahomey Made by the Brazilian Mulatto Catholic Priests Cipriano Pires Sardinha and Vicente Ferreira Pires (1796–1798),” in Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, ed. Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “The Eighteenth-Century Luso-Brazilian Journey to Dahomey: West Africa through a Scientific Lens,” Atlantic Studies 11, no. 2 (2014): 256–76.

107 Clado Ribeiro da Lessa, ed., Viagem de África em o reino de Dahomé. Escrita pelo padre Vicente Ferreira Pires no ano de 1800 (São Paulo: Companhia editora nacional, 1957), 59.

108 John McLeod, A Voyage to Africa, with Some Account of the Manners and Customs of the Dahomian People (London: J. Murray, 1820), 47.

109 Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans: Being the Journals of Two Missions to the King of Dahomey, and Residence at his Capital (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), 1:78. The makpo is a hoe-like “scepter” which kings used to give their messengers to empower them to speak in their name. It is also called a recade (from Portuguese recado, meaning “message”). See Alexandre Adandé, Les récades des rois du Dahomey (Dakar: Institut français d’Afrique noire, 1962).

110 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1:240. On sneezing, see Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 341.

111 Suzy Landau of Fort-de-France relates stories handed down by her great aunt in the documentary film by André Marie Johnson, Gbêhanzin, le rêve inachevé (Bénin, 2007); Maryse Condé, Les derniers rois mages (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 16 and 61.

112 Gil Blas, “Le crachoir de Behanzin,” La chronique médicale 13 (1906): 313.

113 On the staging of social hierarchies during greeting rituals in the Gbe region, see Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 341. Such ceremonial practices are equally evident in other polities, such as the kingdom of Kongo and the Yoruba state of Oyo: see José Pellicer de Ossau y Tovar, Mission evangelica al reyno de Congo por la Serafica religion de los Capuchinos (Madrid: Domingo Garcia i Morràs, 1649), fols. 70v–71; and Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa; to Which is Added the Journal of Richard Lander from Kano to the Sea-Coast (London: John Murray, 1829), 77. Earlier mentions can be found in relation to the Ghana Empire in the eleventh century, the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century, and the Songhai Empire in the sixteenth century. See, respectively, the texts by Al Bakrī in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, ed. John F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 62–87, here p. 80; The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 4:960; and Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained [1550], trans J. Pory, ed. R. Brown (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), 3:824 sq.

114 On ceremonial questions concerning courtly encounters between European representatives and Dahomean kings, see Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers, 225–70.

115 On fly-whisks as status symbols, see Ivor Wilks, “The Golden Stool and the Elephant Tail: An Essay on Wealth in Asante,” Research in Economic Anthropology 2 (1979): 1–36; Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

116 Dalzel, The History of Dahomey, plate 4.

117 See the appliqué cloth depicting such a dignitary with the members of his entourage bearing different status symbols—a spittoon, an umbrella, a pipe, a fan, a hammock, and a treasure chest—published and discussed in Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938), 2:340 and plate 51.

118 Gaëlle Beaujean-Baltzer, “Du trophée à l’œuvre. Parcours de cinq artefacts du royaume d’Abomey,” Gradhiva. Revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie 6 (2007): 70–85, here pp. 80–85. See also Gaëlle Beaujean, “L’art de cour d’Abomey. Le sens des objets” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2015).

119 As is well attested, parasols have been used throughout Africa and Asia as symbols of authority for centuries. On oral traditions concerning the introduction of parasols to Dahomey, see Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 111.

120 Oettinger’s late-seventeenth-century report on Hueda (“Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf von Johann Peter Oettinger,” 77) and Burton’s mid-nineteenth-century one on Dahomey (A Mission to Gelele, 1:280) both mention that tobacco pouches were ostentatiously exhibited as status symbols by high-ranking officers.

121 The woman holding the spittoon is the second from the left, kneeling next to the king.

122 Where an official was once put to death for having dared to use a golden spittoon, considered a prerogative of the emperor: Shen, Gilded Splendor, 310.

123 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1:181. By contrast, the earlier interdiction concerning the use of glass cups was obsolete by the 1860s, though in the nineteenth century it became prohibited to see the king drinking: Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers, 260.

124 In certain Muslim societies of the Central Sudan, where smoking was discouraged by religious prescriptions, there was instead a strong demand for kola nuts. However, despite the fact that the kola trade routes from Asante to present-day northern Nigeria passed just north of Dahomey, kola consumption did not attain a comparable relevance in this region during the period under consideration: Paul E. Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980), 3 and 24 sq.; Lovejoy, “Kola Nuts: The ‘Coffee’ of the Central Sudan,” in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt (London: Routledge, 2007), 103–25, here p. 104 sq.

125 Herskovits, Dahomey, 2:269–80. Sometimes, the seller additionally spits into the mouth of the customer when handing over the power object: Claude Rivière, Anthropologie religieuse des Évé du Togo (Lomé: Nouvelles Éditions africaines, 1981), 185 sq. For a critical appraisal of the research methods of Herskovits, see Suzanne Preston Blier, “Field Days: Melville J. Herskovits in Dahomey,” History in Africa: A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis 16 (1989): 1–22.

126 Blier, African Vodun, 74–80.

127 Blood is another bodily fluid with such a function. In initiation ceremonies, the sacrificial blood of animals is used to bind the new devotees to an individual deity: Herskovits, Dahomey, 2:121. Moreover, during xwetanu festivals, the blood of human victims was crucial in “watering the graves” of the deceased kings, that is, in conveying the sacrificed “wealth in people” to the honored royal ancestors. In this sense, bodily fluids allowed for communication between the realms of the living (Gbɛtomɛ) and the dead (Kutomɛ).

128 Cited in James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 209.

129 Herskovits, Dahomey, 2:136 and 223; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 124.

130 An oral account collected (from unidentified informants) during the 1930s by Hazoumé offers an intriguing clue in this respect. The son of an influential advisor of the king of Porto Novo, Hazoumé studied at a Catholic missionary school and later at the École normale in Senegal and the Institut d’ethnologie in Paris, becoming an outstanding intellectual of colonial and postcolonial Dahomey. In Le pacte de sang au Dahomey, the first ethnographic study on Vodun written by a local scholar, he describes the belief that one could inflict a person with tuberculosis by making a chameleon lick his or her sputum (p. 48). Although this story was recorded in an extremely different (and chronologically distant) context, it seems to converge with that found in the eighteenth-century Inquisition records on Domingos Álvares. According to both sources, Vodun culture associated sputum with tuberculosis, a disease that provokes coughing and the expulsion of contagious phlegm. On Hazoumé, see Dictionary of African Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6:47–49.

131 My thanks to the late Émile-Désiré Ologoudou—sociologist and dignitary of the Oro cult—for drawing my attention to the protective function of this practice (personal communication, Ouidah, January 9, 2012). The first Western observer to have understood this use of spittoons seems to have been Alfred Burton Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Languages… (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), 99.

132 Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey, 48.

133 Herskovits, Dahomey, 2:44. On the diverse roles of the king’s wives (axɔsi)—who, together with the king, the eunuchs, and the princesses, were the only persons to live inside the palaces—see Bay, Wives of the Leopard.

134 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, 155.

135 A similar concern may have inspired the practice described for seventeenth-century Kongo: “When [the king of Kongo] spits, immediately a Servant covers the Saliva with Earth”: Pellicer de Tovar, Mission evangelica al reyno de Congo, fol. 70v.

136 I refer to the third edition in twelve volumes: James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1906–1915). The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890.

137 In a sub-chapter titled “Spittle Tabooed,” Frazer (The Golden Bough, vol. 3, chap. 5.9) lists a heterogeneous array of practices and beliefs concerning saliva, stretching from South America to New Zealand, some of which are associated with monarchs. However, instead of analyzing specific taboos in their contexts, he treats them as universal epiphenomena of the magical stage in human evolution.

138 For an overview see Luc de Heusch, “The Symbolic Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship: Rediscovering Frazer,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 2 (1997): 213–32; David Graeber, “The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–62. The distinction between the extremely rare cases of divine kings (Pharaohs) and the more common pattern of sacred rulers was conceptualized by Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and applied to anthropological studies by de Heusch, who rejected the category of “divine kings” for African monarchs. A new conceptualization of the latter term has recently been developed by Graeber, who argues that the divine aspect of these rulers does not consist in their godly nature: they are “divine” (or, one might say, god-like) because they embody both justice and the threat of an arbitrary and indiscriminate violence against their own subjects.

139 According to Warnier, The Pot-King, 187 sq., smoking and pipes are an important element in the court culture of the Grassfield monarchies because smoke “makes [the royal] breath visible,” and this breath is itself a transmuted form of the ancestral life-substance. One could also cite the large and highly decorative ceramic ceremonial pipes of the Bamum kings: it was believed that the smoke of these pipes—which were lit in ritual contexts by a “holy fire” symbolizing the monarchy’s continuity—would chase away evil spirits and fructify the kingdom’s subjects and their crops. See Christraud M. Geary, Things of the Palace: A Catalogue of the Bamun Palace Museum in Foumban (Cameroon) (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983), 108; Suzanne Preston Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form (London: L. King, 1998), 36. On the basis of historical sources, it is difficult to state whether such conceptions of smoke also played a role in the case of the Gbe monarchies.

140 It is noteworthy that the act of spraying raffia wine and saliva on the crowd, performed by the fon of Mankon during the annual festivals, seems to bear some resemblance to the case of Asante, where—as the British envoy Joseph Dupuis observed during his stay in Kumasi in 1820—“the sovereign commonly spurts his saliva over the courtiers” as a sign of blessing. See Joseph Dupuis, Journal of a Residence in Ashantee: Comprising Notes and Researches Relative to the Gold Coast, and the Interior of West Africa, Chiefly Collected from Arabic MSS and Information Communicated by the Moslems of Guinea; To Which is Prefixed an Account of the Origin and Causes of the Present War (London: H. Colburn, 1824), 178.

141 Warnier, The Pot-King, 185.

142 Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 78.

143 Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 79, 112, and 218.

144 On xwetanu see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “La fête des coutumes au Dahomey. Historique et essai d’interprétation,” Annales ESC 19, no. 4 (1964): 696–716; Robin Law, “‘My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 30, no. 3 (1989): 399–415; Bay, Wives of the Leopard; J. Cameron Monroe and Anneke Janzen, “Le festin dahoméen. Femmes du palais, politiques internes et pratiques culinaires en Afrique de l’Ouest au xviii e–xix e siècle,” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 5 (2014): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1632.

145 Of course, ancestral cults “were not distinctive to royalty, but practiced by commoners also” (Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 78). However, to the extent that the intervention of the royal ancestors was crucial to the well-being or the disgrace of the entire kingdom (and not only of the royal lineage), the xwetanu held a unique political significance and its performance was central to kingship itself.

146 Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 112.

147 Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200 sq.

148 Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 212.

149 Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa, 112–16.

150 Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 342–96.

151 As with the Vodun shrines described in Norman, “Sacred Vortices of the African Atlantic World,” the material culture of palaces was thus informed by an “accumulative aesthetic”; or, as Blier puts it in “Europia Mania,” 264, by an “artistic cannibalism.”

152 King Louis XIV had two large silver spittoons, weighing no less than fifty-four kilos each. Decorated with fleurs-de-lis as well as with ram and lion heads “evoking the might of the king and the monarchy,” these precious artifacts may also have had a representative function. However, the fact that these objects—which are attested in the inventories of the royal household—are never mentioned in the numerous descriptions of the Sun King’s court seems to suggest that the sumptuous spittoons were never publicly displayed in the context of royal audiences. See Antoine Maës, “L’ameublement du salon d’Apollon, xviie–xviiie siècle,” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles § 48, http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/12144.

153 On private, semi-public, and public spaces within and in front of Dahomean palaces, see Monroe, The Precolonial State in West Africa, 178–90.

154 Neil L. Norman, “Powerful Pots, Humbling Holes, and Regional Ritual Processes: Towards an Archaeology of Huedan Vodun, ca. 1650–1727,” African Archaeological Review 26, no. 3 (2009): 187–218, here p. 193.