Board of Trustees, Boston University

Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic
Experience in Yorubaland
Author(s): Akinwumi Ogundiran
Source: The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2/3 (2002), pp.
427-457
Published by: Boston University African Studies Center
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InternationalJournalof AfricanHistoricalStudies,Vol.35, No. 2-3 (2002) 427

OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED:BEADS,COWRIES,
ANDCULTURAL OF THEATLANTIC
TRANSLATIONS
EXPERIENCEINYORUBALAND

By AkinwumiOgundiran
The advent of transatlanticcommerce in Africa between the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries thrived on existing trading networks and consumer prefer-
ences, but the intensity of economic exchanges that followed in the seventeenth
through late nineteenth centuries transformedolder networks and created new
frontiersof commerce, new consumptionpatterns,and new forms of wealth and
power.1Likewise, the Europeandemandfor humancargoes in exchange for their
imports also led to social displacement,hardship,insecurityof lives and proper-
ties, and sociopolitical transformationsin many areas.The later theme has domi-
nated the historiographyof AtlanticAfrica, for good reasons.2On the other hand,
the ways that Atlantic importswere used as objects of culturaland political capi-
tal, altering the physical and cognitive realities of the people, and the impact of
the sheer volume and new varieties of commodities on culturaltransformations
are questionsrarelyasked in the historyof AtlanticAfrica, especially in the Bight
of Benin, between Allada/Dahomeyin the wvestand the Benin Kingdom in the
east. Rather, there has been a tendency in the historiographytowards an instru-
mentalist economic approachin which the impact of the Atlantic economy on
Africa and the importance of Africa to the Atlantic economy are reduced to
dollar/poundvalues. These approachesoften lead to facile questionsand analyses
that ignore or gloss over the lived Atlantic experiencein African societies.3 This
instrumental reasoning underlies David Eltis's argument that the slave and
commodity trades formed a very small percentage of total African economic
activity, for example, and were thereforenot a criticalfactorin the course of Afri-

1 For
regional studies that supportthis assertion, see Robert Harms,River of Wealth,River of
Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (New
Haven, Conn., 1981); Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical
Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago, 2002); Ann B. Stahl, Making History in Banda:
Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past (Cambridge,2001).
2 For syntheses, see Joseph Inikori, "Africa and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade," in Toyin
Falola, ed., African History Before 1885, I, (Durham, N.C., 2000), 389-412; Paul Lovejoy, "The
Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature,"Journal of African
History 30 (1989), 365-94; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge,1992).
3 Notable exceptions have come mainly from anthropological studies with historical
leanings. See, for example, Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade.
428 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

can history for most regions and most periods.4 Using a similar cue, Stanley
Alper, in a 1995 papertroublinglytitled "WhatAfricansGot for Their Slaves: A
MasterList of EuropeanTradeGoods,"providesan annotatedlist of tradegoods
sold by Europeans in the area between modem Liberia and Nigeria during the
period of the Atlantictradeand concludes that Africantradersobtainedthe mate-
rial worth of the enslaved individualsbound for Atlantic plantations.5This sim-
plistic conclusion, with all its politicalramifications,does not advanceany serious
quest to understandthe contributionof African labor, skills, and innovations to
the plantationeconomies of the Atlanticbasin,6nor does it illuminatethe role of
these goods in the incorporationof West and Central Africa into the Atlantic
world or theirimpacton the lived experiencein the subcontinent.
Scholars who have takenthe culturaland sociopoliticalcontexts in West and
Central into consideration,however, have asserted that the Atlantic experience
was in part about new forms of accumulation,wealth, and exchange on a scale
and form that the region had never experiencedbefore the sixteenth century,and
that the importedtrade goods "were more than luxury items ... for the personal
indulgence of a ruling elite."7 Edna Bay, for example, has argued that these
imports were tied to the political economy of power in the sense that they pro-
vided a means by which old and new "monarch(s)and powerfulpersons ... solidi-
fied their patronage"and their control of clients, dependents, or followers.8 A
critical gap in the historiographyof Bight of Benin is the impactof Atlanticecon-
omy on the cultural transformationsof the region. The iconic, indexical, and
symbolic meanings and social valuationof beads and cowries offer us a way to
understandthe cultural history of the Atlantic experience in the Bight, and the
collective memories of Atlantic commerce and the way it transformedsociety.
Given the culturallyspecific natureof the discussionsthat follow, the focus is on
Yorubalandwith occasional referencesto other partsof the Bight, especially the
Benin Kingdom9in the east.

4 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge,2000), 272-73.
5 Stanley Alpern, "What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade
Goods," History in Africa 22 (1995), 5-43.
6
Joseph Inikori,Africans and the IndustrialRevolutionin England (Cambridge,2002).
7 Edna Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of
Dahomey (Charlottesville,VA, 1998), 123.
8 Ibid.
9 Unless otherwise specified, in this article the Benin Kingdom will be referredto as "Benin"
and occasionally the Bight of Benin as "theBight."
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 429

Material Culture and Cultural History

Of all the importsto the Bight of Benin, cowries were by far the most dominant
duringthe 1650-1880 period, andthroughoutthe region,cowries were established
as local currencyfor commercialand social payments.10Inferencesfrom the pub-
lished figures of cowry importsby differentEuropeancompanies,though incom-
plete, indicatethat at least 30 billion cowries must have been shippedto the Bight
of Benin from the early 1500s to the thirdquarterof the nineteenthcentury.11As
Table 1 shows, cowries alone accountedfor 44 percentof the merchandisevalue
(in pound sterling)importedto the Bight by the English companiesbetween 1662
and 1703, while in none of the other four regions did cowry importsaccount for
more than 1 percent duringthe same period.12It is not surprising,therefore,that
cowries are ubiquitous artifacts in the archaeologicalsites of West Africa, and
they have been widely used as chronological indicators for dating sites and
occupation levels.13 As trade goods, the presence of cowries in archaeological
contexts is also indicative of direct or indirect connections with Atlantic trade
networks. This study seeks to address the following questions: Why and how
were cowries stripped of their external meanings and reconstitutedwithin the
frameworks of the Yoruba cultural traditions? What types and forms of
knowledge, beliefs, and ideas did cowries engender?How were cowries used to
construct, shape, and coordinate new forms of social, political, and economic
relationships following the rupturesassociated with the Atlantic economy? In
answering these questions, this paper argues that the pre-Atlantic practices of
social distinction shaped the demands, reception, and recontextualizationof
cowries, and that the post-fifteenth century social valuations of cowries
developed from the prior institutionalization of beads as objects of political
capital.

10 Unless otherwise specified, the species of cowries mentioned throughout the text is
Cypraea moneta. Moneta is the earliest cowry species recorded in West Africa. Native to the
Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, moneta cowries have an angularoutline because of the four
to six nodules on their upper surface, and their length varies from 1.3cm to 1.9cm. O. Eluyemi,
"Excavationsat Isoya," WestAfrican Journal of Archaeology [hereafterWAJA]7 (1977), 109.
11 Jan Hogendom and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge,
1986).
12 Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 300.
13 R. N. York, "Cowries as Type-fossils in Ghanaian Archaeology," WAJA 2 (1972),
93-101.
Table 1. Regional Distribution of Atlantic Imports, 1662-1

Merchandise Upper Guinea Gold Coast Bight of Benin Bight of Biafr

? % ? % ? % ? %

Textiles 5.8 12 331.2 77 23.4 27 1.8

Metals 12.6 27 27.2 6 7.3 8 72.2

Cowries 0.4 1 3.9 1 38.3 44 0.8

Personal 12.7 27 4.6 1 6.7 8 13

Decorations

Containers 2.5 5 10 2 3.6 4 1.3

Guns/Gunpowder 1.4 3 20 5 1.2 1 0.2

Supplies

Spirits/Alcohol 3.8 8 8.9 2 1.2 1 0

Miscellaneous 8.2 17 22.4 4 6.1 8 0.7

Total 47.4 100 428.2 100 87.8 100 90 1

*
AdaptedfromEltis, TheRise of AfricanSlavery,300.
OF SMALL THINGS REMEMBERED 431

What follows is an interdisciplinaryapproach that weaves oral traditions

(social memory) and their metaphorsof verbal representations(especially in the
domains of myth and legend) with documentary sources, mostly European
traders' and explorers' accounts; archaeological evidence; art historical
interpretationsof the aesthetics, meanings, and forms of the Yoruba material
culture;15and other forms of anthropological interpretationbased on Yoruba
philosophies and cognitive repertoire.The study is anchoredon the premise that
material culture, myth, and legends constitute a "cognitive constellation" that
shapes the perceptionof reality and provides insights about the world and about
new experiences.16In this regard,objects (whetherlocally or externally derived)
are critical to generating, transforming,and transmittingideas and values into
physical reality. The conversion of ideas into objects and of objects into ideas,
however, are two-way processes by which culture is created, codified, and
contained.Writingon one of these two-way processes,TimothyEarlestatesthat:

Ideas and objects united and are inseparable;ideas, unconnected to the

objects of worlds, have no means of being communicated,experienced,
used, and owned. Ideas must be materializedto become social, to become
culturalthings. Ourideas are privateand powerful for ourselves, but their
materializationbringsthem into the public arena.17
On the other side of the coin, the historical contexts in which beads and
cowries have been used in Yorubalanddirectus to conceive these two objects as
commodities with complex culturalbiographiesalong the cycles of production,
circulation, social investment, and culturaltranslation.18The social values that
make these cycles and the continuous movement and transformationof objects
possible are, in turn, politically and culturally mediated, and the politics of
assigning or constructing an object's value is in many contexts a politics of
knowledge and power. This is especially true for beads and cowries in
Yorubalandas objects of wealth, objects of status,or "commoditycoupons"at the
service of the productionand reproductionof social and political relations.19A

15 This
study is indebted, in this regard, particularlyto Henry J. Drewal, John Pemberton,
and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York, 1989);
Henry J. Drewal and John Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe
(Los Angeles, 1998).
16 Jan Vansina, "A Clash of Cultures:African Minds in the Colonial Era,"in Philip Curtin et
al., eds., African History (London, 1995), 469.
17 Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Came to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory
(Stanford,Calif., 1997), 151.
18 Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
(Cambridge,1986), 66-67-
19Arjun Appadurai,"Introduction,"in Appadurai,ed., The Social Life of Things, 25.
432 AKINWUMI OGUNDIRAN

biographicalapproachprovidesthe groundto understandthatthe social value and

meaning of any category of objects or a single object are not static but change
according to time, place, historical and culturalcontexts, and the position of the
object in the biographicalcycle.

Beads as Index and Embodiment of Power, Wealth, and Status,

1000-1500 A.D.
The use of bone, shell, metal, and other beads has a very long history in West
Africa, reaching far back to about 6,000 years ago.20 Direct archaeological
evidence for the use of certain exotic stone and glass beads as status objects in
Yorubalanddate only to ca. 800-1000 A.D., with the emergenceof a new form of
political system in Ile-Ife centered on a ceremonial kingship institution.21This
institution later reached its maturationand was adopted in different parts of
Yoruba region during the thirteenth century.22 The poorly documented
archaeologicalrecordsbefore the eleventh centurymakes it difficult to ascertain
the extent to which beads were used as an index of status and authorityand the
types of beads involved. However, oral traditions indicate a substantial and
elaborate hierarchical system of social organization in central and eastern
Yorubalandbefore the eleventh century,23and stone sculptures (most likely of
important personalities) that possibly predated the eleventh century bear
representations of beaded attire.24Although fifteen categories of beads are
discernible in Yorubavocabularybased on color, material,size, and shape, only
six have the highest social value and are associated with royal personages and
other individualsinvested with authorityby divine kingshippowers. The five that
certainly preceded the advent of Atlantic economy can be classified into two
groups: the blue or blue and green translucentglass beads (segi) and their blue
racelet (kereu) variant on one hand, and the red chalcedony beads (akun), and
theirjasper (segida) and carnelian(ejiba/edigba)variantson the other. The sixth

20 GrahamConnah, Three Thousand Years in

Africa. (New York, 1981), 194-95; Susan K.
McIntosh and Roderick J. McIntosh, Prehistoric Investigations at Jenne, Mali (Cambridge, 1980),
162.
21 Akinwumi
Ogundiran, "Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways to the Cultural
History of Yorubai-Edo Region, Nigeria, 10th-19th century," in Toyin Falola and Christian
Jennings, eds., African Historical Research: Sources and Methods (Rochester, N.Y., in press),
33-79.
22 Akinwumi Ogundiran, "Filling a Gap in the Ife-Benin Interaction Field
(Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries A.D.), Excavations in Iloyi Settlement, Ijesaland," African
Archaeological Review 19, 1 (2002), 27-60.
23 B. Adediran, "The Early Beginnings of the Ife State," in I. A. Akinjogbin, ed.,The Cradle
of a Race: Ifefrom the Beginning to 1980 (Lagos, 1992), 77-95.
24 Ogundiran,"Chronology,MaterialCulture,and Pathways,45-46.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 433

type (and the thirdgroup)is the red coral bead, but the chronologyof its adventin
the Bight is unclear.It was possibly importedvia the Saharabefore the sixteenth
century but it is certain that coral beads became popularfollowing the advent of
the transatlanticcommerce.25
The precious glass beads that became the hallmarksof the Yoruba social
distinction system (less so for stone beads) originated from the termini of the
trans-Saharantrade routes along the Sudan, especially in the Niger Bend area,
starting from around the eleventh century. Almost all the Arabic sources that
mentiontrans-Saharanimportsto the Sudanare unequivocalon the importanceof
beads as one of the categoriesof tradegoods in additionto woolen and silk cloth,
salt, copper, and cowries.26The material culture of body adornmentsimported
into the Sudan consists of copper (nuhas), stringsof glass beads (includingmany
types of false onyx manufactured from glass), various exotic stone beads
including coral beads, and exotic sea shells, of which cowries were the most
widespread.27Many travelers who chose to travel light often carried with them
glass beads (nazm)as a means of economic exchange.28The earliestevidence that
Yorubaland was part of these trans-Saharannetworks of exchange has come
mainly from the archaeologicalrecords in Ile-Ife. The chemical components of
the excavated glass beads from Ile-Ife suggest that the glass and glass beads of
both medieval Europeanand Islamic sources reachedIle-Ife via the Middle Niger
sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries.29At Ile-Ife these glasses
were reheated,melted, possibly re-mixed, and fashioned into desirable forms of
beads used at the local and regionallevels to serve the sociopoliticalneeds of the
elite. Archaeologicalevidence for the local manufactureof beads at Ile-Ife comes
mainly from Olokun grove, located about two and a half kilometersnorth of the

25 John D. Fage, "Some Remarks on Beads and Trade in Lower Guinea in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries,"Journal of African History 3, 2 (1962), 343-47.
26 Nehemiah Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for WestAfrica
(Princeton, N.J., 2000), 100, 107. Cited from original Arabic manuscripts: Abi Bakr al-Zuhri,
Kitab al-Ja'rafiyya (completed shortly after 1154) and Muhammadal-Sharif al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-
mushtaqfi ikhtiraqal-afaq (completed January1154).
27 Al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-mushtaq, writes of the production and export of coral beads from the
Mediterraneanto the Sudan: "At Sabta [Ceuta] they fish for the coral ... tree ... and at Sabta there
is a market where it is cut, polished, made into beads (Kharaz),pierced and strung. From there it is
exported to all lands, but carried mostly to Ghana and all the lands of the Sudan, because in those
lands it is much used." Cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus, 130.
28 Other commodities that allowed for light travel and could be easily convertible to supplies
were "pieces of salt ... and a few spicy commodities," according to Ibn Battuta's account (Rihla,
completed December 1355). Cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus, 287.
29 Frank Willett, Baubles, Bangles and Beads: Trade Contacts of Medieval Ife (Edinburgh,
1977), 22. Also, C. C. Davison, R. D. Giauque, and J. D. Clark, "Two Chemical Groups of
Dichroic Glass Beads from West Africa,"Man, n.s. 6, 4 (1971), 645-59.
434 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

center of the ancient city where artifacts such as ceramic crucibles fused with
glass and beads in rich variety of blue, green, red, olive-brown, and turquoise
colors, and pieces of tuyeres, furnaces, pottery, and terracottasculptures have
been found. The other evidence of bead manufacturefrom the grove consists of
grooved or dimpledstones that were used for grindingand polishing beads.30The
most popularand culturallyvaluableof the glass beads producedat Ile-Ife before
the sixteenthcenturyis the dichroicbead,31a type that is usually blue in reflected
light and green in transmittedlight. Locally called segi, dichroicbeads have been
found at differentsites in Ile-Ife datedto the eleventh-fifteenthcentury,as well as
at Iloyi (Ilare District, Ijesaland)in thirteenth-centurydeposits, and at Old Oyo,
Gao, Koumbi Saleh, and Tedaghoustin contexts that range from the ninth to the
eighteenthcentury.32
As political structures modeled after the one at Ile-Ife spread across
Yorubalandbetween the twelfth and fourteenthcenturies,so too the adoptionof
the paraphernaliaof kingship proliferated.It has been arguedelsewhere that the
region-wide adoptionof beads as the insignia of political and culturalauthorityin
the eleventh through thirteenth century, and the near-monopoly that Ile-Ife
enjoyed in the productionand distributionof beads favored the development of
the latteras the primalcenter of kingshipinstitutionsin the Yoruba-Edoregion.33
There are historicalreferencesto the effect thatthe blue and yellow tubularglass
beads thatthe Portuguesewere buying in the early sixteenthcenturyon Benin and
Grand Popo Rivers had come from Ile-Ife. A Portuguese factor in Benin, for
example, was able to buy 33,382 blue tubularbeads34and 900 yellow beads in the

30 The
grove is still mined for ancient beads and glass droppings today. Eluyemi, "The
Technology the Ife Glass Beads: Evidence from the Igbo-Olokun,"Odu 32 (1987), 200; Frank
of
Willett, Ife in the History of WestAfrican Sculpture(London, 1967), 24.
31
Eluyemi, "Technology of Ife Glass Beads."
32 Timothy Insoll and Thurstan Shaw, "Gao and Igbo-Ukwu: Beads, Interregional Trade,
and Beyond," African Archaeological Review 14, 1 (1997), 14, 16; Akinwumi Ogundiran,
"Settlement Cycling and Regional Interactions in Central Yorubaland, A.D. 1200-1900:
Archaeology and History in Ilare District, Nigeria" (Ph.D. thesis, Boston University, 2000), 175;
Willett, Baubles, Bangles and Beads, 16.
33 Robin Horton, "The Economy of Ife from c.A.D. 900-c.A.D. 1700," in Akinjogbin, ed.,
The Cradle of a Race, 122-47. For a chronological framework for this development, see
Ogundiran,"Chronology,MaterialCulture,and Pathways."
34 Despite the confusion of terms and descriptions provided by various authors, these blue
tubular beads are clearly dichroic (segi) beads. These beads are variously referred to in the
literature as aggrey, agrie, akkerri, kori, akori, and coris, among others. See M. Kalous, "A
Contribution to the Problem of Akori Beads," Journal of African History 7, 1 (1996), 61-66;
Raymond Maunay, "Akori Beads," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1, 3 (1958),
210-14.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 435

early sixteenth century within 20 months.35The fact that this consignment and
others from Benin and GrandPopo were resold to differentcommunitiesalong the
coast of West Africa indicatehow importantIle-Ife must have been to the system
of social distinctionsand political institutionsat the pan-regionallevel before the
sixteenth century.36The importance of beads as objects of social distinction,
power, and political capitalderivedfromtheirlong-distancesource,rarity,and the
control of the local supplyby the political elite. By the thirteenthcentury,it seems
that beads had come to embody the sanctioning, continuation, renewal, and
expansion of the political and ideological structures that they formerly only
represented.Beads were used as political capital in all the areas that adopted
monarchicalsystem of governmentin the Yorubaregion, including the Edo area
(especially the Benin Kingdom), and control over the production,importation,
and distributionof beads was the majormeans of maintainingideological control
over subjects and potential rivals. Writing of the chalcedony/jasper/carnelian/
coral beads and their importancein the political ideology of Benin (with similar
implicationsfor Yorubaland),PaulaBen-Amos states:
When the right of succession is in dispute, it is the possession of the ...
beads ... that can determinewho ultimatelysits on the throne.These beads
are not viewed as ornamental,but are consideredto have effective power
(ase), that is, the power to cause any vow or curse to come to pass.
Wearing these beads is a crucial component of what gives an Oba
(monarch)divine powers.37
Although we do not have directhistoricalrecordsof the natureof sumptuarylaws
in the region before the seventeenth century, oral historical references,
pre-sixteenth-century artistic representations,38and post-sixteenth century
Europeanrecords suggests that beads were prestige goods and that access to the
varieties used as badges of political office was restrictedto men and women of
authorityrecognized by the monarchicalinstitutions.A mid-seventeenth-century
Dutch manuscript,for example, indicates that the distributionof fine blue glass
beads and coral and chalcedony (carnelian/jasper)beads was the prerogativeof
the Oba of Benin, and thatthese beads were indices of political statusand wealth.
The award of these beads to individuals was temporary,as the beads could be

35 A.F.C. Ryder, "An Early Portuguese Trading Voyage to the Forcados River," Journal of
the Historical Society of Nigeria 1, 4 (1959).
36 Pacheco Pereira referred to the high demand for these blue tubularbeads as far away as
Elmina in Ghana in 1506. Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (trans. G.H.T. Kimble), Hayklut Society, vol.
35 (1937), 193.
37 Paula Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin
(Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 124..
38 P. Stevens, The Stone Images ofEsie (Ibadan,1978); Willett, Ife.
436 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

taken away from personnel who fell out of the king's favor.39It was also the
practice in Benin that the beads had to be returnedto the king on the death of a
chief.40The deep red coral and chalcedony beads41and the blue dichroic glass
beads rank among the noblest gifts and possessions as illustratedby the curiosity
of the citizens of Old Oyo during the visit of Richard and John Lander to the
imperialcapitalin 1827. It was reportedthat"commonpeople were all anxious to
know whether, among the other things ... [the Landerbrothers]had given their
king or his ministersany coral...."42
Studies of the iconography,symbolic meaning, and functions of beads have
demonstratedthat they "are signs of preciousness and auspiciousness, of good
fortune," and of "economic wealth and spiritual well-being" in the Yoruba
world.43A good sense of the socioeconomic value of beads as the ultimate
embodiment and manifestationof personalwealth and status is expressed in the
following panegyricrecordedin the Yorubatown of Okuki in the 1970s in honor
of Enukonipe,a nineteenth-centurypersonality:
Omoajimaisun,osinsegi, Childof one who wakesto thread,one who threads
segi beads
Babami 6-ji-un-kitikiitu-sinyun-epa My father,one who rises at the crack of dawn to
thread"groundnut" coral
Omo6waraAremut6 f6n segi daa'gb6 Child of OwaraAremu,who scatterssegi beads in
theforest
6 ni toriasewe He said it's becauseof the pluckersof leaves (leaf
sellers)
0 ni torias6gi He said it's because of the breakers of sticks
(firewoodsellers)
6 ni toriilapati lagbesuasua He saidit's becauseof the destitutewho traversethe
bushfarandwide

39 Adam Jones, WestAfrica in the Mid-SeventeenthCentury(Atlanta,GA, 1995), 54.

40 H. L. Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs,Art and Horrors [1903] (London, 1968), 42.
41 In the merchandise century,Dutchtraders
list proposedfor Beninin the mid-seventeenth
emphasized that the red beads must be well polished and "the redder the better." Jones, West
Africa, 193.
42 Robin Hallett, ed., The Niger Journal of Richard and John Lander (New York, 1965), 90.
This inquiry makes sense since the crown of the king of Oyo described by Richard Lander as
resemblinga miter-a tall,ornamented
cap-was "profusely withstringsof coral."
ornamented
43 Henry J. Drewal and John Mason, "ExhibitionPreview: Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and
Light in the Yoriiba Universe," African Arts 31,1 (1998), 20. Beads, generically called okun, were
socially constructed as precious objects and means of indexing economic wealth and social status.
Thus the saying: "Okiinlola, okun nigbi or6," that is, "The okiin bead is the essence of wealth."
See also Drewal and Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul, 17. The Yoruba also give names associated
with beads to their children; these names include Okinlola ("a bead is honor") and Okinbadejo
("threadedbeads match a crown").
OF SMALL THINGS REMEMBERED 437

The panegyric provides an eloquent testimony to the mentality associated

with the use of beads in the Yorubaworld. It illustrateshow Enukonipeacquired
beads through hard work, and how he used his wealth (in beads) to make
sacrifices and social payments so that the people on the margins of economic
exchange may benefit from his wealth. In returnfor his expensive sacrifice, he
expected to be blessed with the "abundanceof good things."44Likewise, "Status
and rank are acknowledged by wearing beads" to "distinguishtheir owners and
alert the viewer to matters of position, knowledge, and power." Hence, all
individuals trusted with the responsibility to maintain balance in the Yoruba
cosmos through the mediation and manipulation of forces-rulers, priests,
diviners, and elders-"wear beads as a mark of their special position and
potentials, for the riches associated with beads also signify their good fortunein
living productive,purposefullives with sacredsupport."45 By the ninthcentury,if
not earlier,archaeologicalevidence shows thatthese individualswere represented
in stone, terracotta,and metal sculpturesbedecked with beads on the head, neck,
wrist, waist, and ankles so that all the articulating(and vital) parts of the body,
from head to toe, are encircled with and sealed in beads to protect "the unseen
forces thatmake up the inner,spiritualessence" of these individuals.46

Cowries: Origins and Transformations

Historian Isola Olomola has suggested that the crowns of Yoruba potentates
before the ninth centurywere made of cowries,47but the general lack of cowries
in archaeological contexts that predatethe fifteenth century, and the paucity of
cowry motifs on sculpturesof the elite cast serious doubtson that possibility. We
have only indirect evidence that cowries were known in the Yoruba area before
the Atlantic trade. That evidence is in the form of cowry-shape reliefs on the
pottery and terracotta sculptures found in ritual contexts at Ile-Ife and Ilare
districts, all from twelfth- to fifteenth-centuryarchaeological deposits.48 The
cowry-form motifs are sometimes arrangedhorizontallyon the shoulderor body
of ritual vessels, and sometimes vertically from the shoulder to the base of the

44 Karin Barber, "Money, Self-realization, and the Person in YoriubaTexts," in Jane Guyer,
ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West
African Communities (Portsmouth,NH, 1995), 215.
45 Drewal and Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul, 26-27.
46 Ibid., 18.
47 I. Olomola, "Ife Before Oduduwa:A Reassessment," in Akinjogbin, ed. The Cradle of a
Race, 51-61.
48 Peter Garlake, "Excavations at Obalara's Land, Ife, Nigeria," WAJA 4 (1974),
"Excavations on the Woye Asiri Family Land in Ife, Western Nigeria," WAJA 7 (1977);
Akinwumi Ogundiran, Archaeology and History in Ilare District (Central Yorubaland), A.D.
1200-1900 (London, 2002), 97.
438 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

vessel. Eleventh-throughfifteenth-centuryArabicsources informus thatcowries,

beads, and copper were used as currency in western Sudan.49As early as the
eleventh century, moneta cowries were being imported from the Indian Ocean
across the Saharainto the upperand middle Niger area, where they were used as
ornamentsand exotic goods. By the fourteenthcentury,cowries were established
as currency within the sphere of the Mali Empire.50 The accessibility of
Yorubalandto Niger Bend commercebetween the eleventh and fifteenthcenturies
would suggest that cowries, like copper and glass, arrivedin the Yoruba region
via the forest-Sudanictrade routes.51Cowries had a limited use in pre-Atlantic
Yorubaland, however. Unlike beads, cowries were not used as part of elite
paraphernaliafor depicting status or political position. Rather,their use seems to
have been limited to the ritual and religious areas, in propitiatorysacrifices and
divinationactivities, and they were also possibly imbuedwith ornamentationand
aestheticvalues.
In contrast,early Europeanaccountsindicatethatcowries were in circulation
as currency in the neighboringBenin Kingdom, east of Yorubaland,during the
late fifteenthcentury.The Portuguesetraderswho pioneeredEuropeanvoyages to
the West African coast in the 1480s reportedthat cowries were used in Benin for
economic transactions.Accordingto PachecoPereira,"theyuse them [cowries] to
buy everything, and he that has most of them is the richest,"52but the extent of
their usage as currency and how prevalent they were before the late fifteenth
century cannot yet be determined. Some cowries have been reported in what
appearsto be pre-fifteenth-centuryarchaeologicaldeposits but their contexts are
not well defined, and the cowry species have not been identified.53The general
paucity of cowries in pre-Atlanticiconographyand archaeologicalcontexts does
not support the view that cowries, especially the moneta species, were widely
used in Benin, and the ones that Pacheco Pereiranoticed in Benin marketsin the
1480s were possibly introducedduringthe very first Portuguesecontacts with the
Benin Kingdom(1472-1480).
The first major importsof moneta cowries into West Africa via the Atlantic
arrivedin Benin from the IndianOcean via Lisbon in 1515.54The Benin political

49 For example, Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari mentioned this in Masalik al-absarfi mamalik al-
amsar (1337-1338), cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpusof Early Arabic Sources, 260.
50 Hogendom and Johnson,Shell Money, 16-17.
51 Thurstan Shaw, "Prehistory," in Obaro Ikime, ed., Groundwork of Nigerian History
(Ibadan, 1980), 25-53.
52 Hogendornand Johnson,Shell Money, 19.
53 Graham Connah, The Archaeology of Benin: Excavations and Other Researches in and
around Benin, Nigeria (Oxford, 1975); I. Omokhodion, "Northwest Benin Sites and Socially
Determined ArtifactDistribution"(Ph.D. dissertation,Michigan State University, 1988).
54 Hogendor and Johnson,Shell Money, 19.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 439

class, centered on the monarch, monopolized commercial activities with the

Europeantradersduringthe sixteenth century,55and it was in that kingdom that
we have the first evidence of the monetizationof cowries in the Bight of Benin.
From there,the monetizationof cowries spreadwestwardsfollowing the sequence
of African/Europeantrading ports on the coast so that by the end of sixteenth
century, cowry money had been adopted in Allada and was spreading to the
Yorubahinterlands.The impetusfor the pan-regionaladoptionof cowry currency
came from the imperialexpansionof Old Oyo and Dahomey,the expansionof the
local economy, and the high tide of cowry imports via coastal ports in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sense that domestic economy in the
Bight of Benin was almost entirely monetized by the seventeenth century is
conveyed by ThomasPhillips, an English trader,who observed:"whenthey go to
market [in Whydah] to buy anything they bargain for so many cowries ... and
without these shells they can purchasenothing."56The state, ratherthan Atlantic
commerceitself, was responsiblefor the monetizationof cowries by levying taxes
and toll paymentsin cowries. This process of monetizationtook place againstthe
backgroundof the pre-Atlanticrarityand sacrednessof the objects, and achieved
four goals: (1) it standardizedthe local economic exchange system; (2) it allowed
for a more efficient control of the terms of external trade, especially with the
Europeans;(3) it allowed for a more efficient managementof the "everincreasing
volume and variety of trade goods,"57and (4) it allowed the state to effectively
appropriatewealth througha single value registerthat could not be counterfeited.
By promoting and facilitating the conduct of economic and social exchanges in
cowries, the state also ensured that by its bulky nature,the currency would be
difficult to conceal and would thereforemake it difficult to evade royal taxes.58It
will be demonstrated below that the incorporation of cowries into the state
political economy and state ideology after the sixteenth century paralleled the

55 According to Thomas Wyndam, who led a group of English merchantsto Benin in 1553,
the monarch of Benin received merchants and traded in person with them. Afterwards the trade
was open to the other elite, and this would go furtherdown the social hierarchy.R. Hakluyt, The
Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, VI (1965),
149.For similar practices in the sixteenth century reportedby the Portuguese, see A. F. C. Ryder,
Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 (London, 1969), 53-65. See also R.C.C. Law, "Slaves,
Trade, and Taxes: The Material Basis of Political Power in Precolonial West Africa," Research in
Economic Anthropology 1 (1978) 44.
56 Thomas Phillips, "Journalof a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London," in A. and J.
Churchilleds., Collections of Voyages and Travels6 (London, 1732), 228.
57 Bernard Belasco, The Entrepreneur as Culture Hero: Preadaptations in Nigeria
Economic Development (New York, 1980), 82.
58 King Gezo of Dahomey suggested this when asked reason why he would not use any
other form of currency in his kingdom, Robin Law, "Cowries, Gold, and Dollars: Exchange Rate
Instability and Domestic Price Inflation in Dahomey in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,"
in Guyer, ed., Money Matters, 65.
440 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

ways royal control of precious stone and glass beads and the ideology of power
and knowledge were intertwinedin Yorubakingdomsin earlierperiods.
Cowries affected the populationsof the Bight moreprofoundlythan any other
Atlantic importsbecause they touchedthe daily lives of individuals.This is espe-
cially the case "atthe low end of the income distributionwhere people who never
owned another[Atlantic]importwould frequentlyhave used the cowrie ... in local
markets for ... purchases of food and other necessities."59Hence, cowries best
illustrate Yoruba participationin the Atlantic trade, and served as the medium
through which the Yoruba sought to understandtheir world in relation to the
Atlantic economy. The cultural translation of the Atlantic experience in
Yorubalandfound expression in the multiple roles of cowries from their use as
currency and social payments (e.g., brideprice,tributes,taxes) to their ascribed
aesthetic qualities and their embodiment of transformative/ritualpotency.
Although ivory and cotton cloth were the chief commodities exported from
Yorubalandin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 60 and palm oil in the
middle of the nineteenth century, it was "the general rise in the volume of the
Atlantic slave trade after the 1630s"61and the rise of Allada as the funnel for
these human cargoes into the other partsof the Atlantic basin that broughtmost
moneta cowries to the region from the seventeenththroughthe first half of the
nineteenth centuries.62Therefore, cowries were often referred to as "slave
money" in the Bight of Benin. The eighteenth century marked the peak of the
Atlantic slave trade63and also the peak in the importationof cowries into the
Bight. It has been estimated that the Dutch and English traderswho dominated
cowry importsduringthe centurybroughtslightly over 10 billion single shells to
the Bight,64an increaseof about60-70 percentover the precedingcentury.65

59 Hogendornand Johnson, The Shell Money, 2.

60 For summaries see, Adam Jones, German Sources for West African History, 1599-1669
(Wiesbaden, 1983), West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century, 68; R.C.C. Law, "Trade and
Politics behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500-1800," Journal
of African History 24 (1983).
61 Law, Oyo Empire,219.
62 Hogendornand Johnson,Shell Money, 110.
63 David Richardson, "Slave Exports from West and West-CentralAfrica, 1700-1810: New
Estimates of Volume and Distribution,"Journal of AfricanHistory 30 (1989), 1-22.
64 The other traders came from France, Denmark, Hamburg, and Portugal, but their
contributionsto the imports were very small. Hogendornand Johnson,Shell Money, 58.
65 Estimates of cowry imports to West Africa from the records of the East Indian Company,
and
Royal African Company (England), and the Dutch VOC for some of the years between 1650
1699 indicate that about 6,726,242 pounds of cowries were possibly shipped to Africa in the
seventeenth century. Figures are missing for some of the companies in some of the years,
however. Estimating that one pound contained approximately 397 individual cowries, and
allowing for the missing figures and the prominence of the Portuguese in the cowry trade during
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 441

The dramaticincrease in the volume of cowry imports and the eighteenth-

century expansion of hegemonic powers in the Bight, chiefly Benin, Dahomey,
and Old Oyo, facilitated a profoundexpansion in the sphere of cowry currency
circulation and intensified commercial activities more than ever before in the
region. Both on the coast and in the hinterlands,new culturalpracticesdeveloped
and were associated with the use of cowries, and the traditionsthat explain the
origins of cowries also became elaborate.The official Benin oral tradition,for
example, rightly associates the prosperity in cowry accumulation in the
eighteenth-centurywith the reign of Oba Eresoyen(1735-1737), but this tradition
representsthe boom in the supply of cowries as a productof the peace that the
Oba made with Olokun, the deity of the ocean in Yoruba-Edoregion. According
to the tradition:

Oba Eresoyen once quarreledwith Olokun,the god of the sea, and closed
the way so Olokun could not get water. Throughthe mediationof a palm
wine tapper,Eresoyen agreed to release the water. As a reward Olokun
heaped up cowries to the sky for Eresoyen and they were packed to the
palace.66
The above projectsthe ideology that it was the peaceful coexistence between the
king of the land (Oba of Benin) and the king of the ocean (Olokun) that could
ensurebalance in the cosmos and wealth for the Oba and the Benin citizenry.The
reign of Oba Eresoyen was, no doubt, a major turning point in the history of
Benin vis-a-viz the Atlantic economy-his reign markeda boom period in trade
with the Europeans,increasedmonarchicalauthorityand influence, and imperial
expansion-but the traditionfuses the multiple layers of time, events, processes,
and personalities that lasted from about 1608 to 1737 into a single relationship
between Oba Eresoyenand his AtlanticOceancounterpart,Olokun.67

the first half of the seventeenth century, perhaps 3 to 4 billion cowries entered the Bight of Benin
and adjacent markets in the seventeenth century. Calculations and estimates are based on the data
presentedin Hogendornand Johnson, Shell Money, 43-46.
66 Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation,and Politics, 103-104.
67
Following about a century of weak royal authorityin the political and economic sectors of
the Benin Kingdom, and the shifts of control to chiefly factiors in the capital and provinces, the
early 1700s marked the beginning of efforts to regain the powers of the monarchy. It was,
however, Oba Eresoyen who achieved the full consolidation of the monarch'sauthorities over the
chiefly powers, and over political and economic activities at about the same time that the Atlantic
economy-especially exports of slaves, ivory, and cloth-reached its highest peak. Thus the
supposed quarrelbetween Oba Eresoyen and Olokun refers;to the political weakness of the Benin
monarchy since about 1608, which in turn affected its ability to dominate Benin participation in
the Atlantic economy. Likewise, the peace that Oba Eresoyen made with Olokun refers to the
consolidation of the monarchy's power over the political and external trade affairs during the
eighteenth century. See Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation, and Politics, 40-41; Thomas Hodgkin,
Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthology, 2nd ed. (London, 1975), 167; Ryder, Benin and
the Europeans, 88-89.
442 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

The role of the Atlantic Ocean (Okun) and Olokun (lit., lord/owner of the
ocean) in the advent of cowries in the sixteenth century, and its voluminous
importationin the eighteenth century as the payment for exports has been a
recurrenttheme in the way differentsocieties in the Bight rememberand attempt
to explain their encounterswith the Atlantic economy. First, the monetizationof
cowries increasedthe rangeof theirculturalattributesas these importedsea shells
were recontextualized not only as the symbol of wealth, but also as the
embodiment of fertility, abundance,and self-realization.Likewise, their supply
route, the ocean, assumed a central image in the discourse of material
accumulationand wealth. There are indications that Olokun was a deity of the
ocean/sea, especially among the coastal Yorubafishing communities,before the
advent of the Atlantic economy.68The culturalattributesand biographyof both
Okun and Olokun increasedwith the advent of Atlantic commerce, however. In
additionto being the divinity of the ocean and patron-deityof fishermen,Olokun
also became the god/goddess of wealth, keeper of the rich storehouse of beads,
giver of children,owner of a palace of cowries (riches)beneaththe ocean, and the
patron-deityof tradersand potentatesinvolved in direct tradewith the European
factors. Among the coastal peoples, especially the Ijebu-Yoruba, Olokun is
representedas the rulerof the earth's water mass,69the source of all life, wealth,
and prosperity.The importanceof the Olokun deity in Ijebu and other coastal
areas more than in the Yorubahinterlandspossibly derivedfrom their location as
the first region to participate directly in the Atlantic commerce.70Given the
significance of the ocean as the conduitfor the new indices of wealth that arrived
with the advent of the Atlantic commerce, it is not surprisingthat the materials
central to the iconographicrepresentationof Olokun were not locally produced
commodities but items that were importedinto the Bight via the ocean and that
were crucial to the process of social distinctionin the region-cowries, imported
copper/brass,iron bars and cooking pots, chinaware,andbeads of glass and exotic
stone manufacture.71

68 There have been attempts to appraise the cultural biography of Olokun critically, and to
see how it relates to the social memory of the Atlantic economy in the Bight of Benin. See
Belasco, The Entrepreneuras Culture Hero; Akinwumi Ogundiran,"Osun, Yemoja, and Olokun:
Gender, Commerce, and the Making of Atlantic Goddesses," Paper presented at the Conference on
"Gendering the Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and the
Nigerian Hinterland,"DartmouthCollege, Nov. 22-24, 2002.
69 MargaretT. Drewal, YorubaRitual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington, Ind., 1992),
74.
70 R. C. C. Law, "EarlyEuropeanSources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500-1700): A
Critical Survey,"History in Africa 13 (1986), 245-260.
71 Norma Rosen, "ChalkIconographyin Olokun worship,"African Arts 22, 3 (1989), 44.
OF SMALL THINGS REMEMBERED 443

The foregoing demonstratesthat the incorporationof cowries into the daily

and practical lives resulted in the transformationof old deities, such as Olokun,
and the creationof new ones in orderto acconmmodate the new conditionsbrought
about by the Atlantic economy. Likewise, new narratives were developed to
explain the cause and effect of the adventin cowry currency,especially the boom
in cowries' supplies during the eighteenth-century.Yet, the complex and varied
modes by which cowries were transferred into the region (through both
commodity and humancargo exports) also broughtabout multiple discourses on
their origins. This would be the case in the eighteenthcenturywith the dramatic
increases in human cargoes in West and CentralAfrica, as new areas and ports
were broughtinto the tradingnetworksof the Atlantic basin. Thus, in contrastto
the elitist traditionsof Eresoyen'sreconciliationwith Olokun as the cause for the
stupendous arrival of cowries in the Bight during the century, there are other
traditionsin Benin that speak of cowries as shells fished from the Atlantic Ocean
using slave corpses as bait. This latter imagery explains the convertibility of
human life into cowries and evokes a sensibility of wealth accumulation by
capture, servitude, and enslavement.Ttension between elitist and commoner (or
perhaps, popular) discourses on the participationof Benin and the Bight in the
Atlantic economy notwithstanding,they both mask the geographical source of
cowries (Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic), the final destinations of the enslaved
people, and the global economic system that sustainedthe Atlantic commerce in
the Bight.72A more pointednarrativefrom the westernpartof the Bight (from the
Ayizo, one of the vassals of Dahomey Kingdom) not only speculates on the
origins of cowries in the local economy, and their impact, it also explicitly
accuses the political elite, representedby the king of Dahomey, in the human-
cowry conversion.An Ayizo informantrecalls that:
In the beginning of the world we had the forge and we forged things, we
had weaving-looms and we wove our clothes.... we had boats from which
we caught fish. We had no guns. We had no cowrie-money(akwa). If you
went to the marketyou took beans in order to exchange them for sweet
potatoes. You exchanged something for something else. Then the king
brought the cowrie-money. What did the king do in order to bring the
cowrie-money? He caught people and broke their legs and their arms.
Then he built a hut in a banana plantation,put the people in it, and fed
them bananas until they became big and fat. The king killed the people
and he gave orders to his servantsto attachstrings to their bodies and to
throw them into the sea where the cowrie-shells (akwa) lived. When the
cowrie-shells startedto eat the corpses, they pulled them in, collected the

72 Ralph Austen, "The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage
Documents and CommunalTraditions,"Williamsand Mary Quarterly58, 1 (2001), 7.
444 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

shells, and put the live cowries in hot water to kill them. That is how
cowrie-moneycame to exist.73
The above indictment of the monarch and the political elite of Dahomey
contrasts with the self-righteous and elitist narrative associated with Oba
Eresoyen of Benin. The Ayizo story captures the cultural meaning of the
human/cowry and death/wealth matrices by explaining the advent of cowry
currencyin terms of the zero-sum universe of many African societies, in which
the amountof wealth is consideredfinite and wealth could only be drawn "from
the propertyand vital energies of someone else."74
Moving inland in Yorubaland,one encounters a narrativethat reflects the
effects of cowries in the expansionof the region's economy. A narrativecollected
by Jacob Olupona in the Ondo Yoruba area relates cowries to the
institutionalizationof the marketeconomy in thatregion:

After the first marketof the Ondo had been established,the people were
faced with the problemof which form of exchange to use. It was decided
that Olodumare[the Supreme deity] should be met and the problem be
presented to Him for solution.... Olodumare instructed that a ritual
[sacrifice be made and delivered to] ... Aje [the goddess of trade and
wealth]. After a lot of persuasion,and several days of waiting, the vulture
... and two women volunteeredto take the sacrifice to Aje. However, only
... the vulture eventually met with Aje. The women stood at a distance.
On getting to Aje, the vulturenarratedits mission. Aje... respondedto the
vulture'srequestby giving it some cowry shells, which were to be used as
medium of exchange. The vulturethankedher, swallowed the cowries to
ensurethatthey were not lost, and traveledback to the waiting ... crowd....
[The vulture then] vomited the cowries and handed them to the waiting
women. In appreciationof the role played by vulture, it was elevated to
the level of sacredness. Hence, the Ondo [people] were forbidden from
killing the bird.75
The story demonstrateshow cowry currency substantiateda particularform of
socioeconomic relation.The position of the vulture as the mediatorbetween the
Aje and women is of interesthere. Whereasthere was collaborationbetween the
vultureand women in the sacrificialappealto Aje, it was the vulturethat actually

73 C. A. Gregory, "Cowries and Conquest: Towards a Subalternate Quality Theory of

was
Money," Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 2 (1996), 195. This narrative
collected and published in the Ayizo language in 1979, and was later translated into
originally
English.
74 Austen," Slave Tradeas History and Memory,"8.
75 Toyin Falola and G. A. Adebayo, Culture, Politics and Money Among the Yorubd(New
Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 42. See also Jacob Olupona, Kingship,Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian
Community(Stockholm, 1991), 154-57.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 445

secured the cowries and carried them to the market, a matricentricsphere of

activities and influence. Vultures feed mainly on carrion and they symbolize
greedy and ruthlesspeople who prey on others,but in the narrativethey heralded
the introductionof cowries. Is the above story a referenceto the Europeanslavers
who broughtcowries to the Bight in large amounts,or to local slave raidersand
traderswhose activitiesensuredthe continuousflow of cowries into the hinterland
market/economy,or to the political elite who legitimized the use of cowries as
currency and controlled the tradeto the coast? There are many agencies at work
here but the basic orientation of the myth involves acceptance that the events
comprising the cowry exchange exhibit mutual interdependencybetween the
agent of death and destruction (the vulture), and agents of creation and
distributionof wealth (women and the market).Moreover, the Ondo story also
seems to suggest a female/male dichotomy in which the patricentricpolitical
sphere imposed the value register (cowry currency)on the matricentricmarket.
Despite the apparent dichotomies, the spheres complement each other. For
example, the most importantfemale chief in Ondo, the Olobun (literally, the
female ruler)has a primaryrole in the economic well-being of the Ondo Kingdom
but she also "playsan importantrole in the installationrites and ceremoniesof the
Osemawe [the male ruler] of Ondo."76Moreover,the primacy of cowries to the
institution of the Olobun is illustrated by the fact that the most important
paraphernaliaof her authorityconsists of a calabashcontainer"on top of which
stringed white cowries shells ... [are always] placed in a special order."77Thus,
the cowries that came via the Atlantic coast are a crucial component of the
political personageof the Olobun.

Cowries, Wealth, Self-Realization, and Rituals

The events, social actions, and practicesthat had their origins in the seventeenth
and eighteenthcenturies,and thatcontinuedtill the nineteenthcenturymarkedout
cowries as an importantessence of self-realizationin Yorubalandand the Bight in
general. There are references in both oral traditionsand Europeanaccounts that
the public display of cowry (currency) accumulation reached a frenzy trend
duringthe eighteenthcenturysimultaneouswith the peak in the supply of cowries
to the region. Oba Eresoyen (1735-1770) is rememberedin the oral traditionsof
Benin as the king who "builta house of money"because he "decoratedthe walls
and palace of his palace with cowries"78This ostentation did not stop in the
palace. Importantchiefs and princesof eighteenth-centuryBenin also built cowry-

76 Rowland Abiodun, "Hidden Power: Osun, the Seventeenth Odu," in Joseph M. Murphy
and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds., Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the
America (Bloomington, Ind., 2001), 22.
77 Abiodun, "HiddenPower,"22.
78 Ben-Amos, Art, Innovation,and Politics, 104.
446 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

decoratedfloors. In the last quarterof the eighteenthcentury,what appearedto be

the public quartersof the residence of High Chief Ezomo Ekeneza was described
as "elegantly encrustedwith small Indian shells, called cauris,"79and four other
cowry floors survived to the 1960s.80 The region-wide adoption and
standardizationof cowries as currencyand value registerbroadenedthe base of
marketexchange, and being rich in cowries became centralto the maintenanceof
political power. The economic opportunitiesof the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries allowed more people to engage in a wider range of commercial
activities, independentof political authorities.The result was the creationof new
men and women with new wealth,people whose wealth gave them the potentialto
challenge the old political order.
There are glimpses in the oral traditions,includingthe Ifa divinationcorpus,
that suggest some individualstook partin ritualsaimed at instantaneouswealth-
in-cowries.81 The Oyo traditions reported by Samuel Johnson suggest that
Basorun Gaha (the prime minister of Old Oyo ca. 1754-1774) "requestedhis
medicine men to make him charms to get him plenty of cowries" with the
complaintthat despite all his wealth and power, he did not have enough cowries
to supporthis position.82Gahawas given a medicinalsoap to wash with, with the
promisethat he would realize his wish before sunset.Following Gaha's use of the
soap, a fire broke out in his house that engulfed his compoundand destroyed all
his property.Due in partto the fear of his power and influence,every sector of the
society from the capital to the provinces of the empire vied to contributemost to
the repairing and replenishing of his residence. Ultimately the prime minister
came out richer than he had been before the fire. In astonishment at this
unexpectedturnof events, the Basorunasked his medicine man, "Is this the way
you promised to get me cowries?" to which the latter replied: "Yes ... by what
other means could you have amassed such an abundancein so short a time?"83
There is no way to verify the historical accuracyof this incident (since Samuel
Johnson recorded the story almost a century after the event), but the story
provides a window to the imaginations,beliefs, and rumorsthat prevailedduring
the period of the Atlantic commerce. The case of Basorun Gaha reveals that by
the eighteenth century holders of political power could be easily isolated and
marginalizedwithout the necessary cowries to supporttheir power. Gaha's cash
crisis had apparentlybeen exacerbatedby his incorrigiblesons whose "lordingit

79 J. F. Landolphe, Memoirs du Capitaine Landolphe,contenant l'histoire de ses voyages, II

(ed. J. S. Quesne) (Paris, 1823), 98.
80 Ryder, Benin and the Europeans,202.
81 Wande Abimbola, personalcommunication(Boston), May 1998.
82 Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas(Lagos, 1921), 182.
83 Ibid., 183.
OF SMALL THINGS REMEMBERED 447

all over the country [Old Oyo provinces] deprived him of the revenues which
might have come to him."84BasorunGahano doubtfaced competitionfrom other
individuals actively engaged in trade who were better positioned to accumulate
the new currency. These men, whetherhis sons or not, had the potential to buy
political power thatcould underminethe primeminister'spoliticalbase.85
The cultural recontextualization of cowries as the essence of money and
wealth, and their use in the reproductionand transformationof unequal social
relations went a long way to shape the local construction of the self and the
objectificationof humanbodies and laborin monetaryand materialterms.86In the
context of the Yorubaparticipationin the Atlanticeconomy, cowries were central
to these two primaryforms of conversion:slave/cowries (total) and labor/cowries
(partial).Although the former refers to a direct exchange of human bodies and
souls for cowries, the later defines the monetization of labor and exchange as
merchants and the political elite (and nineteenth-centurywarlords) employed
servants, pawns, slaves, and wage earners as potters, dyers, weavers, and farm
laborers in the production of goods and services that supported transatlantic
commerce. Both processes centered on cowries as the most significant value
register for measuringthe adult individual's self-realizationduringthe period of
transatlanticcommerce. Whereas sumptuarylaws could create obstacles for the
accumulation of dichroic glass beads, chalcednony/jasper/carnelianand coral
beads, the acquisition of cowries was not subject to such restrictions. Rather,
cowries "democratized"the marketeconomy and the accumulationof wealth in
the region.
Centralto the process of self-realizationwas the propitiationof one's inner
head (Orf) with cowries, the essence of market-basedaccumulation.According to
a nineteenthcenturydescriptionby SamuelJohnson,

The Ori [head] is the universalhouseholddeity worshippedby both sexes

as the god of fate. It is believed that good or ill fortune attends one,
according to the will or decree of ... [Ori]; and hence it is propitiatedin
orderthatgood luck mightbe the shareof its votary.87
Orf is an individualized,personaldeity, and nineteenth-centuryreportsstate that
adult men and women used cowries to make altarsto their Ori, the spiritualinner

84 Ibid., 182.
85 Whatever the true story of the inferno's origin might have been, this narrativeis a good
case of the cultural sensibilities of the Atlantic wealth and cowries in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
86 Lesley Sharp, "The Commodification of the Body and its Parts," Annual Review of
Anthropology29 (2000), 293.
87 Johnson, History of the Yorubas,27.
448 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

head and protectorof one's fortuneand destiny. The shrineconsists of Ibori (lit.,
cover for the head), conical in shape, filled with many potent objects tightly
sealed in leather and covered with cowries. This conical object, often with a
protrudingball on top, is the Yoruba symbol of personhood;as the individual's
spiritualhead, it defines a person's place in the universe.The Ibori is then placed
inside a container,lie Ori (lit., house of the head), a pyramid-shapedshrinemade
of the same types of materials.Ile-Ori is the symbol of power that protects and
conceals the inner/spiritualhead, keeps and protects the Ibori from the public
gaze, protects its privacy, and preventsit from damage from "evil eyes" and the
elements of nature. It "conveys one's commitment to respect oneself and, by
extension, all the forces shapingone's journeyin life...."88
Archaeological evidence from centralYorubaland,especially in and around
Ile-Ife, indicates thatthe object that formedthe focus or shrine/altarof Ori before
the Atlantic period (twelfth to fifteenth century) was in the form of stylized
conical-shapedterracottaheads.89It is not yet clear whetherthese terracottaheads
were associated with beads and other forms of materialculture, but the use of
cowries for making the altar-shrinecould only have begun after the sixteenth
centurywith the abundantand steady supply of cowries to the Bight of Benin and
the Yoruba hinterland.At the peak of cowry supply in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenthcenturies,as many as 12,000 cowries were used to make a shrine
of Ori, and the manufacturerwould receive the same number of cowries as
wages.90However, in contrastto the cowry-based Ori shrine of the commoners,
the Ori shrines of monarchs were made of beads. The former reminds us of a
democratizedaccumulationwhere how much one acquiredwas a productof hard
work and good luck (i.e., opportunities and favorable decisions in market
dealings) while the latterreflects the continuedcentralityof beads as symbols of
royal, inherited, and divine power. Moreover, whereas cowries were readily
available, beads, especially those associated with political power and authority,
were scarce and sumptuary laws and conventions created a further artificial
scarcity.Althoughthe worshipof Ori and its conceptualizationas a deity possibly
began before the advent of the Atlantic trade, the centrality of cowries to the
making of Ibori and its Ile-Ori is evidence thatcowries became the value register
for harnessingthe spiritualand temporalpowers of successful men and women
afterthe sixteenthcentury.The invinciblequalityof Ori and its "powerto control
or influence the outcome of any situation"possibly received a broadercultural
interpretationwith the advent of cowries as the most importantindex of self-
realization.This interpretationemphasizesindividualaccumulationover corporate

88 Drewal and Mason, Beads, Body, and Soul, 199.

89 Willett, Ife, 136.
90 Johnson,History of the Yorubas,27.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 449

accumulation,and accentuatesthe shift in the renditionof the image of Ori from

stylized human terracottaheads to impersonaland symbolic form in conical and
circularbox shapes made of stiff calico and otherpotent ingredientscovered with
cowries, a reflection of the less personaldynamicsin the flow and acquisitionof
cowries via the Atlanticcommerce.
Late-nineteenth-centuryobservers convey the sense that Ori was the most
universal and, next to Ifa (the deity of divinationand wisdom), the most portable
of all Yorubadeities.91Travelers,war refugees, traders,and all those who were
away from home often resortedto the worship of their Ori. The point in time in
which Ori became such an importantdeity is difficult to pinpoint from oral
traditions but it is significant that Ori is identified as a late bloomer in the
pantheonof the divinities. S/he originallywas on roughlyequal footing with other
deities and was also involved in a protractedfeud with them, but Or won the feud
and became the leader of the Yorubapantheonby controllingthe destinies of all
the divinities. Orf then proceededto show his/her ability and power to transform
the destiny of all creaturesby assigning to the deities "theirdifferent functions"
for which "they are revered today"92The foregoing, I argue, speaks to the
transformingpower of cowries and the Atlantic economy that supplied them.
Society was not only restructuredeconomicallyas a resultof the integrationof the
hinterlandinto the economy but the political system and social organizationwere
also reordered-and this restructuring influenced the creation of new
mythologies, ideologies, and belief system. The spirit of individualism
representedin Ori demonstratesthateven powerfuldivinities could not escape the
consequences of these changes. Just as the circulationof cowries was changing
the relationships among individuals, spouses, families, and people of different
statuses, these processes became codified in the religious system as the victory of
Ori over all the other divinities, and were iconographically representedin the
cowry-basedshrineof Ori. 93
It has been suggested thatthe shrineof Ibori and its temple, Ile-Ori served as
a way of storing away cowry currency to guard against inflation, and as an
entreaty by an individual to his/her Ori that "the endlessly slippery, circulating
medium"could "stay with him [her], not to desert him [her] for a rival."94It is
significant that the immobile cowries were not used as an altar to the deceased.

91 J.D.Y. Peel, "Gender in Yoruba Religious Change," Journal of Religion in Africa 32, 2
(2002), 150.
92 Rowland Abiodun, "UnderstandingYoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase,"
African Arts 27 (3), 77.
93 It is therefore not surprisingthat during a Christianevangelism session in Ibadan in 1868,
a woman, a likely convert, gave her opinion that the adoption of Christianitywould not make them
abandontheir loyalty to Ori, "theirgod and maker."W. S. Allen, CMS Journal,October25, 1868.
94 Barber,"Money, Self-realization,and the Person,"217.
450 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

Rather,on the death of the owner of the shrine,both the Ibori and Ile-Ori would
be destroyed and the cowries returnedto circulationby distributingthem to the
deceased's survivors who could spend the money as they wished. This process,
from the constructionof the Ori shrineto its destructionand disbursementof the
cowries, seems to testify to the Yoruba understanding of the Atlantic
commerce-that the wealth derived from commerce, especially the flow and
values of cowries, was unpredictable.It was not a currencyover which the state or
the lineage had control. Its accumulationdepended on the individual, and the
greatness and respectabilitythat it accordedwere not guaranteedto the survivors
of the deceased. This period was significant for the ideology of individualism
articulatedin Yoruba discourses of the Atlantic experience, a period when the
"traditional"process of labor allocation was challenged by the needs of the
Atlanticeconomy, and when the genderdivision of laborincreasedthe activity of
women in textile productionand gave them an upper hand in the region's retail
business.95This was also a periodwhen young men moved to majormarkettowns
and to the coastal region to pursuemercantileinterests,96and in which new towns
developed along the traderoutesto providethe food and othersupplies needed by
caravan traders and porters incessantly moving between the hinterlandand the
coast. 97
The fact that the enshrinedcowries of a deceased individual were released
and shared among his/her relatives indicates that the temporary "wealth
immobilization"was also a form of saving and redistributionof wealth.98Wealth
in cowries was also immobilizedby hoardingand storage-in pits dug underthe
house floor, usually in privaterooms, or in farmsto avoid theft, to save for future
expenses, or to conceal wealth. Cowrieswould have also been storedto minimize
the effect of inflation, especially between the 1830s and 1888, with the hope of
returningthem to circulationwhen their exchange value increased.Stories of the
accidental discovery of pots filled with cowries are elaborately representedin
Yorubalegends and myths and in many chaptersof the Ifa corpus regardinghow
poor individuals, orisa devotees, and Orunmila (the deity of Ifa divination)
accidentally found blue beads and cowries in the ruins of old settlements and

95 Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition (London, 1829), 21; William H.

Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland1854-1858 (Ibadan, 1972); Hallett, The Niger
Journal, 71.
96 According to Law, Oyo Empire, 232, the monarch and non-royal chiefs of Old Oyo sent
their sons and trading agents to many of these hinterland and coastal market towns to secure
competitive advantagesfor themselves.
97 Akinwumi Ogundiran, "An Archaeological Tale of Two Houses: Domestic Architecture
and Social Formation in Yorubaland, ca. 1550-1750," paper presented at the 16th Biennial
Conference of Society of AfricanistArchaeologists,University of Arizona, Tucson, 2002.
98 Jane Guyer, "Wealth in People and Self-realization in EquatorialAfrica," Man (n.s.), 28
(1993), 257.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 451

estates.99Archaeologicaldiscovery of such caches have been reportedat Iloraand

Isoya, both in nineteenth-centurycontexts.100Two caches at Site I in Isoya
accounted for 26 percent of the 315 cowries found in the settlement.One of the
caches consisted of cowries kept in three groups within a shallow pit beneaththe
house floor.
As embodiment and signifier of wealth and all the fortunes of life, cowry
shells became an important component of grave goods after the seventeenth
century, a phenomenon not seen in the archaeologicalcontexts of the previous
centuries.In mortuarycontexts, cowries and othergrave goods representmaterial
evidence of interactionbetween the deceased and their survivorsalthoughthe full
meanings of these interactionscannoteasily be reconstructedfrom archaeological
records. Twenty percent of the cowries recordedin Isoya were from burials, and
eight out of the ten burials excavated contained cowry artifacts (Table 2). The
number of cowries associated with each of the burials ranges from two to 202.
The sample size (nine males and one female) is not large enough to understand
whetherthe numberof cowries variedaccordingto sex and age, and the excavator
does not tell us about the overall pattern in the distribution of the cowries.
Nevertheless,we know thatcowries were placedbetween the femursof five of the
bodies.101As grave goods, cowries could serve as a social and symbolic
replacement of the personal belongings of the deceased based on the idea that
cowries were the essence of wealth and self-realization.The numberof cowries
included in each of the graves might thereforeindicatethe level of wealth, social
status,and/orthe age and sex of each of the deceased-or the level of affluence of
the deceased's relatives at the specific time each of the burials took place.102
Some of the cowries interred with the deceased could also be the objects of
prayers and supplications by the survivors to the deceased so that their living
descendantscould achieve prosperityand good fortunehere on earth.

99 William Bascom, Ifa Divination: CommunicationBetween Gods and Men in West Africa
(Bloomington, Ind., 1969), 525.
100Eluyemi, "Excavations at Isoya"; Mr. Ajekigbe, Curator, Department of Archaeology
and Anthropology, University of Ibadan,personalcommunication,May 1990.
101Eluyemi, "Excavationsat Isoya," 107.
102 Likewise in southeastern Nigeria and Central African region where copper was
established as the chief value register, observers have described the large "quantities of copper
rods, manillas, and basins inhumed with rich Kalabariand Ijo traders,and ... importantTio men of
affairs." Archaeological evidence also shows that the "cemeteries of the Upemba Depression are
replete with croisettes," and that "copper bangles are standard grave goods" in the Zimbabwe
Plateau and Zambia. Eugenia Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and
Culture(Madison, Wisc., 1984), 271.
452 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

Table 2. The Distribution of Cowries According to Sex and Age in

Burials, Site I (Isoya).103

Burial Units Sex Age Group No of Cowries

SK1 M Adult 45
SK2 M Old 39
SK3 M Old 42
SK4 M Old 15
SK5 M Adult 180
SK6 F Adult -
SK7 M Old 202
SK8 M(?) Old 2
SK9 M Adult 32
SK10 M Adult -

The presenceof cowries in the groin areaof five of the humanremainsraises

a numberof questions, however: Was this patternmeant to provide assets to be
expended by the deceased in his/her journey to the afterlife destinations?Since
the cowries were placed near the reproductiveorgans of the deceased, were they
expected to multiply so that the deceased would not lack the provisions needed
for the final journey? Or do these cowries signify complex Yorubabeliefs about
fertility and resurrectionby rebirth?Moreover, since the cowries were grave
goods directly supplied by the mournersand survivors, in what ways did they
connect the deceased with the living? These are questions we cannot answer in
any specific way without knowing more about the details of burial and the
motives of the participants,but we can generally assume that multiple motives
and intentions shaped the ritual placement of the cowries. Since cowries, like
beads, were tied to notions of fertility and abundance,as grave goods cowries
were supplicationsto ancestorsand the dead for good fortune-money, children,
long life, and good health.
The use of cowries for ritual signification and embodimentwas profoundly
elaboratedin other contexts as well. The occurrenceof cowries as ritual objects
studdedin the platformsand floors of residentialand religious structureshas been
documentedin archaeologicaland ethnographiccontexts in Yorubaland.At Isoya

103Adaptedfrom Eluyemi, "Excavationsat Isoya," 107.

OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 453

Site I (about 14km south of Ile-Ife), for example, 51 cowries were found on a
raised earthenplatformabove the house floor "arrangedin such a way that three
shells in the center are surroundedby two rings of cowries, one containing25 and
the other 23 shells."104Oral informationindicates that the concentric patternof
the cowries symbolized good luck, and the threeshells at the centerwere meantto
ward off misfortune.105Similarly,three monetacowries were found insertedinto
the entrancefloor of one of the rooms excavatedin a courtyardstructureoccupied
sometime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at Okun (ca. 1600-1750),
ca. 24km north of Ilesa.106The continuity of this practice as a wide regional
phenomenon is demonstratedin the ethnographiccontext at Ondo where "three
cowries stuck into the floor"were found in a religious/sacrificiallocus duringlate
the 1970s.107The potency of using three cowries as a ritual signification for
wardingoff evil eyes and actions in Yorubabelief is rooted in the sociolinguistic
meaning of "three"(eta). E-ta etymologically means "to shoot off," as in ta ibon
(shoot a gun) and ta ofa (shoot an arrow). The signifying verb ta means "to
forcefully repel"or "throwoff." Hence, three (eta) cowries form the core of ritual
signification that we see in both the archaeologicaland ethnographicrecords for
repelling destructiveagencies fromone's domain.
The ritual/religious arena in which cowries have been most prominent is
divination, and it is also in this area that one could learn about the
transformationalrole of the Atlantic commerce on Yoruba gender relations and
the social constructionof gender. The two most popularand importantforms of
divination in Yorubalandare opele (the use of the sacred divination chain) and
eerindinlogun (cowry divination, which involves the use of sixteen cowries).
Whereas men use both methods, women are prominent only in the cowry
divination system. The importantrole of cowries in the divination process, the
control of that role by a female deity, Osun, and the domination of cowry
divination by women provide a window to understandthe configuration of the
social memory of the Atlantic trade vis-a-vis gender relations in Yorubaland.
Several verses in the Ifa corpus state that "Orunmila[the deity of all divinations]
created the sixteen-cowry divinationsystem and gave it to Osun as a rewardfor
saving his life ... [and afterwards]both became married."108 Osun was the first to
practice cowry divination and she taught it to other divinities including Obatala,

104Ibid.,109.
105 According to information collected from Chief James Awosope, the former Araba of Ife
(chief priest of the Ifa Oracle), by Eluyemi, "Excavationsat Isoya," 110.
106Ogundiran,Archaeology and History in Ilare District, 66.
107 Jacob Olupona, Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community(Stockholm,
1991), 39.
108 Wande Abimbola, "The Bag of Wisdom: Csun and the Origins of Ifa Divination," in
Murphy and Sanford,eds., OsunAcross the Waters, 141.
454 AKINWUMI OGUNDIRAN

one of the oldest deities in the Yorubapantheon.We see in these narrativesan

inversion of order and empowerment.Osun was a junior divinity by age in the
Yorubapantheon,being among the last set of deities to emerge afterthe fifteenth
century, and she was also female. Yet all the other deities who practice cowry
divinationare said to be indebtedto Osun for that knowledge. Although Osun is
privileged in the myths and legends as the first diviner who used cowries, the
institutionalizationof Osun as a deity-a culmination of the establishment of
Osogbo as a tradingtown aroundthe seventeenthcentury-most likely antedated
the use of cowries for ritualand divinationpurposes.109
Following the archaeologicaltrail of cowries' function in ritual contexts in
pre-Atlantic Yorubaland, it is likely that divination was one of these ritual
contexts. There is nothingto suggest thatboth women and men were not actively
involved in divination before the advent of the Atlantic economy, but the
following factors suggest not only a pan-regionalrestructuringof the Yoruba
pantheon during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also intense
transformationand negotiation in gender relations: (1) the linking of a junior,
female, and post-sixteenth-century deity to cowry divination; (2) the
institutionalizationof cowry divinationas a feminineform of divinationand opele
divination as a male preserve; (3) the patronage and prestige that the state (a
patricentricsphere) accordedopele divination,and the latter's incorporationinto
state affairs while cowry divinationwas excluded; and (4) the patriarchalcontrol
that Orunmila(a male divinity) has in mythology over both cowry and opele
divinations
The feminizationof cowries and the gender-baseddichotomybetween cowry
and opele divinationpossibly derived from the increasedparticipationof women
in the vast redistributionof cowry wealth in Yorubalandand the transformations
in genderrelationsthat developedfrom the linkage of domestic economy with the
transatlanticcommerce. The centrality of Osun (and, by extension, women) to
Atlantic commerce was so great that she was incorporated into the Yoruba
pantheon as the seventeenth member (and only woman) of the principal
divinities,110an indicationthat the orderand structurespreservedin the original
pantheon were disrupted by the new economy. The addition of Osun to this
pantheonrepresentedan effort to reestablishequilibriumin the Yorubaworld as a
result of the economic and political rupturesthatfollowed the incorporationof the
region into the Atlantic economy. The expansion in the economy of the Yoruba
hinterland and the wealth that the commercial development generated were

109Ogundiran,"Osun,Yemoja, and Olokun."

110 D. Ogungbile, "Eerindinlogun: The Seeing Eyes of Sacred Shells and Stones," in
Murphyand Sanford,eds., OsunAcross the Waters,193.
OF SMALLTHINGSREMEMBERED 455

therefore embodied in the personality of Osun.111Hence, Osun, the last of the

majordivinities, is consideredin Yorubamyth as the providerof nourishmentof
wealth, fame, and honor to all the other divinities and to all her adherents.The
four most mentionedindices of wealth associatedwith Osun-cloth, beads, brass,
and cowries-are all imported goods via the Atlantic and the most important
objects of social distinction.Likewise, the occupationsthatOsun is famous for are
trading and dye and cloth manufacture,economic activities significant for the
impactof the Atlanticeconomy.112

Conclusions
Beads, especially of red chalcedony/jasper/carnelian stone and the blue dichroic
glass, were established by the ninth to eleventh century as the index for high-
status positions in Yorubaland.The importanceof these beads to the production
and reproductionof the Yorubasociopolitical structuremade necessary the local
and regional control of these objects of political capital. Cowries, especially the
moneta species, were presentin very small quantitiesbefore1500, but they seem
not to have been widely used or known and not to have formedpartof the official
paraphernaliaof the political elite. Nevertheless, cowries were used in contexts
linked to ritual activities, and their distributionwas possibly controlledalong the
Niger Bend/rainforesttradingroutes.The Atlantictradewould change this pattern
of distributionby the end of the sixteenthcentury.The politicizationof cowries as
standardsof economic exchange directly equatedthe values of cowries with "the
values of the dominant[political]powers"startingfrom the sixteenth century.ll3
By diverting cowries to the market and elevating them to the status of a
"universal"value register,enablingthe transfersembodiedin taxes, tolls, fines, or
tributes, the political elite ensured the continuous demand for cowries in the
economy of the Bight of Benin. Hence,just as the productionand controlof beads
were intertwinedwith the process of state formationand status/powerindexing, so
did cowries finance the post-sixteenth-century political entities and their
harbingers.The social valuationof cowries in Yorubalandbetween the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries did not therefore emerge in a vacuum, nor was it
imposed by the European traders. It was a cultural and political economic
reinterpretationof the pre-sixteenth-centurycultural construction of beads as
political objects. The proliferationof cowries, vast numbersof which pouredinto
the coast afterthe sixteenthcentury,broadenedthe scope of commercialactivities

111 Diedre Badejo, Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power, and Femininity (Trenton,
N.J., 1996).
112 Another characteristic linking Osun with the Atlantic experience is her preference for
maize beer (maize being a product of the Americas via the Atlantic) instead of the locally derived
guinea-cornbeer or palm wine that other divinities often drink.Abimbola, "Bag of Wisdom," 151.
113Gregory, "Cowriesand Conquest,"210.
456 AKINWUMIOGUNDIRAN

and precipitatedboth socioculturaland ideologicalchange in Yorubalandbetween

the seventeenthand early nineteenthcenturies.Releasedfrom sumptuarylaws and
conventions,the accumulationof cowries was democratizedand, as the essence of
wealth and self-realization,cowries acquirednew meaningsin Yorubacosmology
and practicallives.
Given the active meanings that accruedto cowries between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries, it is not surprising that their symbolic, sacred, and
metaphoricalvalues as the harbingerof all good things, including prosperityand
wealth, have outlastedtheir functionsas currency.The social valuationof cowries
in Yorubalanddid not end with the interventionsof Britishcolonial rule in setting
new values of exchange for the local market. Cowries are still treated as the
essence of money (including all moderncurrencies),they are "the money of the
gods,"114and they embody good wishes and success. Cowries have been
incorporated into many domains of the Yoruba religious and socioeconomic
expressions, forming part of the paraphernaliaof a number of deities and the
ingredients of a number of potent medicinal portions mainly to ward off
destructiveelements. As partof the divinationparaphernalia,cowries continue to
serve as an interfaceof communicationbetweentemporaland spiritualforces. Yet
they are also feared and are subject to suspicion.115The imprintsof the Atlantic
bodily dismemberment through transatlantic and domestic slavery no doubt
generatedpracticalconsciousness that are now the undercurrentfor the popular
rumorsand beliefs that humanbodies are convertibleinto wealth and money.116
Althoughmost people who handledcowries did not participatein the slave-cowry
exchange, they were aware of the ultimate interface of exchanges that brought
cowries to the shores of the Bight of Benin in exchange for humancargoes. One
result is that the different positions of people and societies in the transregional
cowry circulationhave given cowries a rich and diverseculturalbiography.
The collective memory of the Atlantic commerce and the ways this memory
is expressed in the culturalbiographyof small things such as beads, cowries, and
other artifactshave immense potentialfor understandingthe lived experience of
the Atlantic era in Yorubaland. Critical interdisciplinaryapproaches provide
unique insights that the culturalbiographiesof beads and cowries are important
parts of the biographies of peoples, cultures, and societies in Yorubaland,and
generally in the Bight of Benin. Imported Atlantic commodities not only
diversified African materialcultures and socioeconomic lives, but the meanings

114James Lorand
Matory, Sex and the Empire that Is No More: Gender and the Politics of
Metaphorin Oyo YorubaReligion (Minneapolis, 1997), 210.
115Ibid., 170.
116 Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Ritual Killing in Nigeria-Men Bought Skull to be Millionaires,"
InternationalHerald Tribune(August 22, 2001).
OF SMALL THINGS REMEMBERED 457

of these goods were also transformed.The social values placed on these objects,
in turn, led to new ideas, beliefs, and practices, and new forms of social and
gender relations.117The iconic, symbolic, and economic qualitiesof these objects
are relevant for a deep appreciationof how long-term processes of economic
systems of pan-regionaland global proportionsreproducedand transformedlocal
culture,and how, in turn,the global processes were reorderedin meaningfulways
at the local level.118 The study of African cultural interactions with Atlantic
commodities provides many opportunitiesto understandthe variegatedprocesses
of participationin the economy of the Atlantic basin before the emergence of
imperial capitalism on the continentin the nineteenthcentury.The narrativeand
cultural biographies associated with the Atlantic imports is one area where the
pursuit of "African agency" could yield fruitful results because they bring us
closer to African lived experience and historical representation.This approach
calls for the mobilization of archaeology,folkloric traditions,anthropology,and
history; a good sensitivity to meaning and local discourses in historical analysis;
and an awarenessof the numerousways in which differentAfricanagents "inform
and shape the perceptions of self'119 and of their world. Historicizing African
materialculture will go a long way to unravel the historical processes of global
and pan-regionalsignificance thathave shapedthe contoursof humanexperience
in the Atlanticbasin. The culturalbiographyof beads and cowries certainlyoffers
the opportunityto write a cultural history for the Yoruba, providing historical
contexts and meanings for many of those institutionsand practices that have so
far been falsely consigned to "timelesstradition,"not realizingthatmany of these
structuresdeveloped in the specific context of Atlanticencounters.

117 Kris L. Hardin and Mary Jo Arnoldi, "Introduction:Efficacy and Objects," in Mary Jo
Arnoldi, Kris L. Hardin, and ChristraudGeary, eds., African Material Culture(Bloomington, Ind.,
1996), 1-28.
118 G. Marcus and M. Fischer, Anthropologyas Cultural Critique:An ExperimentalMoment
in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986), 44; Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical
Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1981), 5.
119Henry J. Drewal, John PembertonIII, and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba:Nine Centuries of
African Art and Thought(New York, 1989), 158.