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156 Charles Piot
of Africa. In The Black Atlantic, the focus of transatlantic exchange and con-
nection is largely on the Caribbean, the United States, and Britain. Africa
bears little more than passing reference, and then, notably, only Liberia,
Sierra Leone, and Southern Africasites repatriated by freed American
slaves and intensively settled by Europeansare mentioned.1 Similarly, in
Halls important work on diasporic identity, Cultural Identity and Dias-
pora, Africa figures only as an imagined presence for Afro-Caribbean peo-
ples.2 This omission not only silences a major entity in the black Atlan-
tic world but also leaves unchallenged the notion that Africa is somehow
differentthat it remains a site of origin and purity, uncontaminated by
those histories of the modern that have lent black Atlantic cultures their
distinctive characterand thus risks reinscribing a conception of culture
that Gilroy, Hall, and many of the new diaspora scholars otherwise spendmuch of their work critiquing. This ellipsis also suggests, of course, that
Africa has played little role in the development of black Atlantic cultural
production, other than as provider of raw materialsbodies and cultural
templates/originsthat were then processed or elaborated upon by the im-
provisational cultures of the Americas.3
In this essay, I attempt to return Africa to the diaspora. But I aim to do so
not by characterizing it, as an earlier diaspora literature long did, as a site of
origin and symbolic return but rather by seeing Africa as itself diasporic
as derivative of the Atlantic slave system and made and remade by its en-
counter with modernity. Imagining the diaspora as prior to the homeland
might also enable us to read the black Atlantic and theories of identity de-
veloped by diaspora scholars like Gilroy and Hall back into the cultures ofthe mainland.
In order to make my case, I will examine the history of an area of French
West Africa, that of northern Togo, where I have conducted research over
the past twenty years.This region would appear to be an ideal place in which
to explore the idea that Africa is diaspora-derivative, for not only is its loca-
tion in the West African savanna remote from city and metropole but also
it retains all the visible signs of a seemingly pristine African culture: sub-
sistence farming, gift exchange, straw-roofed houses, rituals to the spirits
and ancestors. And yet I want to suggest that this place is better understood
as residing within the modern and as shapedand indeed thoroughly re-
madeby the slave trade.
I aim also to contribute to a refiguration of my own discipline of Afri-
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158 Charles Piot
way: from Africa, the homeland, to its diaspora in the Americas. Here is a
compelling example of the reverse processof a source that is remade by
its issue.
Gilroys Black Atlantic
Before turning to the northern Togolese material, I will briefly sketch
Gilroys argument in The Black Atlanticabout the nature of the diaspora and
its forms of cultural production. Gilroy characterizes the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century black Atlantic world as one of migrations and crossings,
both forced and voluntary, and as a place of ceaseless cultural exchange.
Seeking to break with more nationalistic, racialized, and Africentric read-
ings of black diaspora culture and to sever the primacy of connection thathas long been posited between black America and Africa, he rereads black
expressive forms and the works of North American black intellectuals in a
transoceanic, transnational perspective. Thus, he showshow African Ameri-
canmusic, from that of theFisk University Jubilee Singers in thenineteenth
century to contemporary hip-hop, is a hybridtranscultural product, and how
the works of Martin Delaney,W. E. B Du Bois, and Richard Wright, among
others, were deeply influenced by their travels in Europe and their encoun-
ters with Enlightenment culture. Gilroys aim is thus to portray the African
diaspora as multicentered and its cultural forms as inescapably hybrid (and
therefore resistant to any attempt to assign them an origin or purity).
Not simply a celebratory space of improvisation and creative cultural mix-
ing, however, Gilroys black Atlantic world is shaped from the start by racialviolence. Beginning with the middle passage, for Gilroy a key symbolic and
indeed originary moment (where time stopped and started again), and
continuing into and beyond plantation slavery, black diaspora cultures have
developed within regimes of political dominationand racial terror. Displace-
ment, loss, and violence, and the discrepant temporalities and modalities
which these experiences produced, are thus as constitutive of the cultures
of the diaspora as the heterodox identities that result from cultural mixing.
For Gilroy, Toni Morrisons novel Beloved poignantly captures many of
these themes, not only eloquently evoking the way in which the quotidian
experience of slaves combined rupture and loss with creative improvisation
and pleasure, but also transcoding the terror of plantation life with memo-
ries of the middle passage.8 Through the haunting event that frames the
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entire book (Sethes killing of her infant daughter to prevent her return to
slavery), Morrison provocatively redefines infanticide as agency and death
as freedom and thus forces the reader to confront the inescapable terror that
saturated the slave experience.9
The history of the diaspora also leads,Gilroy suggests, to a retheorizing of
the history of modernity as not simply one that can be thought in terms of
the culture of Reason but also one that should make explicit the complicity
between occidental rationality and racial terror. Thus he rereads Hegels
master-slave allegory as modernitys precondition and (re)positions the
middle passage and plantationslaverycapitalismwith its clothes off as
modernitys inside rather than its aberrational outside.10 Moreover, invoking
Duboiss notion of double consciousness, Gilroy suggests that black Atlan-
tic peoples simultaneously reside both inside and outside the modern andthus inhabit a space that gives them a critical purchase on modernity itself.
Black expressive culture, especially music, becomes a key register in which
such critical consciousness emerges, and through which it seeks transcen-
dence in what Gilroy refers to as a politics of transfiguration.
Sights of Tradition/Sites of the Modern
Any attempt to account for the nature and meaning of contemporary cul-
tural production on the African mainland needs to begin, I would suggest,
where Gilroys analysis of the cultures of the diaspora does: with the slave
trade. Between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the
continent was ravaged from top to bottom by slave raiding, with to million Africans captured and exported to the Americas anda less widely
known factan even greater number (between and million) captured
and displaced to other centralized polities within Africa itself. During this
time every village on the continent was touched, and most remade, by their
encounter with slave raiders and expanding kingdoms.
I focus here on one example from the area with which I am most familiar,
that of the Kabre people of northern Togo. Kabre inhabit a savanna region,
a vast plain blanketed with tall grasses and cereals and filled with sprawl-
ing farming settlements kilometers from the Togolese coast. During
the slave-trade era, this coastal hinterland was on the cusp between two
of the great slaving complexes in West Africa, Ashanti and Dahomey. By
the mid-eighteenth century, those kingdoms looked to this hinterland zone
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for the majority of their slaves. Indeed, it was from this area that many
slavesperhapsas manyas one millioncame during the years,
when the Atlantic trade was at its height. While the coastal kingdoms were
the main protagonists in the trade, and while most of the slaves taken in
this area eventually made their way to these coastal entrepts, those king-
doms themselves did little raiding in the hinterland, leaving that to various
societies of the interior: Mamprusi, Dagomba, Mossi, Bariba. These preda-
tory savanna states, possessors of what Jack Goody felicitously called the
means of destruction (guns and horses),11 raided not only one another but
also, and especially, the areas less centralized polities, who in turn often
sought refuge in mountainous or riverine areas. Kabre, one of these less
centralized groups located in a hilly region of northern Togo, still today
have vivid memories of this time of raiding. Elders can recall stories toldby their parents and grandparents of raids by a group of fierce, mystically
powerful warriors from northern Benin called Samasi (Bariba). Armed with
guns (obtained from Europeans at the coast in exchange for slaves) and on
horseback, they rode into the mountains, sacking homesteads and snatch-
ing people.
While predatory raiding was the dominant form of slave acquisition, it
was by no means the only one. Some societies instead paid slave tribute
anywhere from dozens to hundreds of persons a yearto the centralized
polities. Agreeing to tributary relations of this sort may have had the advan-
tage not only of allowing those societies to avoid the killing that raiding en-
gendered but also of giving them greater control over whowas enslaved than
did the random raid. Slaves were also sold on the open market by variouspeoples, both noncentralized groups like the Kabre and kingdoms seeking
to dispose of their captives. In large marketplaces in the savanna that people
still recall today slaves were purchased by private merchants who conveyed
them to the coastal kingdoms of Dahomey and Ashanti. Such sale, like slave
tribute,may have been a strategy to keep raiders at bay and to ensure greater
local control.12
Needless to say, these slaving practices produced massive dislocationsand
movements of people into and out of various polities in the area and beyond,
the flight of many into refuge areas, the incorporation of others into expand-
ing states, and, of course, the dispatching of hundreds of thousands south
into the Atlantic system. As a result of these movements, by the end of the
slave era around , this hinterland area was characterized by a distinc-
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Atlantic Aporias 163
relocated to southern Togo.17 As such, these rituals constitute a type of his-
torical memory and aptly illustrate Michael Taussigs point that the mimetic
is a modality of historical consciousness.18 They also indexically link these
past events to oppressions in the present, thus helping to produce a present
that forever stands in relation to its past and to the struggles of those who
went before.
My point in sketching this history is that the major experiences Gilroy
identifies as inherent to the middle passage and plantation slavery and,
thus, as constitutive of black Atlantic culturesracial terror, the destruc-
tion of family and community, the rupture of linear historywere also in-
trinsic to this area of West Africa, and indeed to villages across the con-
tinent. Moreover, it bears emphasizing that the Atlantic slave trade was a
foundational event when time stopped and started again for peoples ofthe mainland like Kabre as much as for those of the diaspora, and that
everyday and ceremonial life is saturated with the sort of (re)memory work
that Gilroy identifies as intrinsic to black Atlantic cultures and that is so
powerfully illustrated in Toni Morrisons novel Beloved. Finally, as I illustrate
below, those processes of transculturation, of ceaseless cultural exchange
and cross-fertilization, of improvisational mixing and hybridity that are pro-
duced by histories of dislocation throughout the diaspora have also defined
cultural process in places like Kabre at least since the advent of the slave
trade, if not before.
Haircuts, Plastic Dolls, and Airplane Spirits
In the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on a few moments in the cul-
tural life of the Kabre community where I lived during the s and s,
in order to illustrate some of the ways in which Kabre appropriate and cre-
atively redeploy cultural signifiers from black Atlantic culture. They do so, I
will suggest, in ways not unlike those discussed by Gilroy and Hall for black
Atlantic peoples more generally.
One morning in July , just after school had let out for the summer
and male teens in the Kabre village of Kuwd where I was then living were
preparing to depart for the south, I happened by the homestead of a friend
just as he was sacrificing a chicken for his sixteen-year-old son.The son was
preparing to leave to work on a brothers farm in southern Togo, and his
father was enlisting the protection of house ancestors for the journey. As I
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stopped to greet them, a young woman who had just entered the homestead
noticed that the son had a new haircutshaved at the base, long on top
and she immediately burst out laughing, playfully mocking him for having
cut his hair like a Fulani (herders who live in the plain surrounding the
Kabre massifs). The young man retorted that it wasnt Fulani he was imitat-
ing but the hairstyle of those American blacks he had seen on MTV the last
time he had visited his older brother in Lom, the capital city. When, later
that day, I saw the same young man and a friend leaving Kuwd, adidas bags
looped over their shoulders, the friend was sporting the same haircut. Here,
then, are voyaging teens equipping themselves for the journey south with
both ancestral protection and the latest global coiffurea coiffure, I hasten
to add, drawn from late modern black Atlantic culture.
But the gesture deserves further parsing, for heads are not empty signi-fiers, and the means of these dandies identification with the modern is not
idly chosen. For Kabre, the head is considered the seat of mystical power
and knowledge, and therefore the most important part of the body. It is also,
of course, the highest part of the body and is used metaphorically, as in En-
glish, to designate those at the top of hierarchies: the head of the house,
the head of the initiation class, and so on. Thus, too, when sacrificing ani-
mals to spirits, it is the skull that is left behind at the spirits shrine to show
that a sacrifice has taken place there. Moreover, during initiation it is the
head, more than any other body part, that receives special attention: each
initiation grade has its own unique coiffure and/or head adornment (por-
cupine quills placed in the hair, antelope horns mounted on the head) that
not only symbolize an initiates changing status but also aim to appropriateprotective powers associated with various animals.19
No idle symbol, then, the Kabre head is site of multiple inscriptions, both
personal and cultural. Trading on this set of associations, these traveling
teens, recent initiates both, are playing with and signifyin(g) on the head, at
once marking their liminal status as travelers and drawing attention to the
mystical powers that they hope will protect them on their journey, while at
the same time proclaiming their identity as members of global teen culture
and in the process differentiating themselves from the local. This signify-
ing practice thus slides between local and global signifiers, simultaneously
accessing local semiotic and global mass cultural archives.20
Note, too, in this episode another feature typical of black Atlantic cultural
process.This, like those sites celebratedby Gilroy, is a world of promiscuous
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mixing in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakers and civil servants, fetishists
and catechists exist side by side and coauthor an uncontainably hybrid cul-
tural landscape. If modernity is constantly trying to draw boundariesaround
itself by differentiating itself from that which is nonmodern (tradition),21
Kabre refuse such boundaries and the distinctions that accompany them.
They are as at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the mod-
ern and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also as
desirable.
My second example is taken from ceremony. In the mid-s, a twenty-
year-old Kabre initiate from the south of Togo introduced an innovation into
the dress ofkengnaa, the penultimate initiation grade. He purchased a plas-
tic eighteen-inch doll of a baby and attached it to his antelope horns for the
dance ofwaara, the most important of all Kabre initiation dances. The dollwas widely admired, and by the mid-s, when I first witnessed the cere-
mony, plastic dolls on the horns had become all the rage, with dozens of
initiates in eachnorthern community imitating thissouthern innovator. De-
spite what struck me at the time (though, I hasten to add, not the Kabre)
as the off-putting presence of this plastic add-on to an otherwise elegant
local ceremonial dress, the symbolism of these dolls is entirely consistent
with other items kengnaa place on their horns for this dance, as well as with
Kabre appropriations (common throughout their ceremonies) of an outside
domain associated with power. Thus, the dolls are attached to the horns next
to just-harvested ears of corn and millet, small bottles of milk, and other
symbols of fertility. Referred to as white child or colonial child (anasara
pera), however, and thus unlike the other items, these dolls are coded Euro-pean/colonial. Just as the dress of initiates draws from the outside, then,
and just as the ceremonies attempt to appropriate the outside powers of the
bush, so too is this recent innovation an attempt to appropriate and subvert
the fertility and power of the colonial/postcolonial other.
But this innovation also has a more complex Atlantic genealogy as well.
The initiate who was responsible for introducing it had first seen such dolls
used in non-Kabre vodu ceremonies in southern Togo during the s.
However, there they were used in fertility rather than initiation rituals.
Moreover, I was told that the use of these dolls in southern Togo was an
attempt to imitate vodu ceremonies from Haiti. I am unable to elaborate
further on the specific reasons for the appropriation, except to say that the
transatlantic traffic between Haiti and southern Togo/Benin has long been
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Figure . Atlantic Genealogies: Kabre Initiation Dress. Photograph courtesy Charles Piot.
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Atlantic Aporias 167
heavy, for as the homeland of African vodu, this area has drawn religious
practitioners and merchants back and forth across the Atlantic since at least
the mid-nineteenth century.22 It is thus not uncommon to find borrowings
of this sort on both sides of the Atlantic. Here, then, is a doll from Haiti
where it performs locally in a ceremonial context rife with West African as-
sociationsthat is appropriated first into a West African vodu context and
then into a non-vodu culture in northern Togo. A traveling signifier if there
ever was one.
I should add here that while my intent in this essay is to draw attention
to continuities between black Atlantic and African cultural dynamics, there
are also significant ways in which Kabre cultural practice and the logic that
informs that practice departsfrom that described by scholars like Gilroy and
Hall. As intimated in both of the above examples, Kabre are preoccupiedwith modes of appropriating power and fertility (both human and super-
natural). Such appropriation in turn depends on the generation of various
gendered capacities that are produced, differentiated, and recombined in
various ritual contexts. These rituals are also circumscribed by a logic of
the gift in which flows of gift-commodities (to both spirits and humans)
are seen not only as life-enhancing within communities but also as produc-
ing human-spirit and ethnic boundaries.23 Considering some of these logics
might lead us to expand our conception of black Atlantic cultural econo-
mies of flow and to think beyond the more performative model of identity
in exchange that is implicit in much of Gilroys work.
To give just one more example of the promiscuous circulation of mean-
ingfulobjects and material signs acrossthis Atlantic world, I turn to contem-porary Togolese political culture. Togos president Gnassingb Eyadma, a
Kabre from the north who has held power in the south for over thirty years,
is widely known for his appropriation of occult power into the workings of
the state.One of the most striking examples occurred in the mid-s after
his private plane crashed on a trip to the north and he walked away the only
survivor. Eyadma seized the moment to publicly proclaim that he had been
protected by a (southern) Ewe vodu spirit, Gu (Ogun), the deity of iron. He
then initiated an annual pilgrimage to the site of the crash on the anniver-
sary of the day the plane went down. There, dressed in white (Gus color),
Eyadma sacrifices all-white animals on the metal fuselage of the plane, an
event that is broadcast on state TV. Needless to say, Eyadmas fashioning of
a spectacular presidential biography is not politically innocent. He knows
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168 Charles Piot
all too well that his hold on power is only enhanced by the perception that
he is invincible because he is in alliance with occult powers.
But again there is a transatlantic, not just a local, story beneath the appro-
priation. Eyadma wasin constant conversation duringthe s and s
with Zaires President Mobutu Sese Seko (among other African leaders)
about a range of topics from their mutual authenticitcampaigns to strate-
gizing about police and military tactics to discussing ways to manage ethnic
divisions in their countries. These leaders were also in dialogue with presi-
dents from the Afro-Caribbean, most notably Haitis Franois Duvalier. Mo-
butus and Eyadmas deployment of occult politics, in particular, is said
to have been inspired by Duvalier, who was of course notorious for link-
ing his own power (and that of his secret police) to the power of vodu
spirits.A less seemly appropriation story, to be sure, but one that also deserves
further contextualization. For the association between state terror and the
occult shared by each of these postcolonial sites points toward their com-
mon prior history as colonized peoples under the rule of a violent absolutist
state whose technologies of power seemed ever mysterious and fetishized
and of the occult resources people drew on during that time to fight back
and carve out their own space of power. Indeed, it should not be surpris-
ing that postcolonial power is mimetic of the violence and occult politics of
colonial rule and that this dark past keeps imploding into the present. But
alsoand this is my point throughoutwe are here reminded, albeit in a
different register, that societies across this Atlantic world shared common
histories rooted in and derived from the colonial modern.
Black Atlantic studies can only be enhanced by including rather than ex-
cluding Africa and exploring the complex traffic in meanings that has long
circulated throughout this Atlantic world and produced crosshatched his-
tories of the black modern. Far from unidirectional, these meanings have
circulatedpromiscuously from Africato theAmericasand Europe, and from
Europe and the Americas back to Africa, thoroughly remaking all parties
in the process. If the burden of my essay has been to suggest that Atlanti-
cists pay more attention to Africa (and to show that the cultural histories
they write are not only similar but also tied to those of the African main-
land), it should also be clear that I aim as well to prod Africanists into taking
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the work of Atlantic scholars like Gilroy more seriously. For Gilroys work
not only provides models of cultural process that are useful in analyzing
cultures on the mainland but also enables us to (re)conceptualize culture
across vast oceanic spaces. The category black Atlantic thus provokes us
to think more expansively about the units of analysis we employ, in the pro-
cess providing fertile ground for reimagining area studies beyond the old
parochialisms.
Notes
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA,
), , , .
Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference,
ed. J. Rutherford (London, ).
I can only speculate as to why these scholars have not been more attentive to Africa, but
I imagine that it has at least as much to do with the atavistic nature of much of the Afri-
canist literaturewhich, until recently, paid little attention to those issues of modernity
and hybridity with which diaspora scholars have been preoccupiedas with any short-
sightedness on their part.
JohannesFabian, Time andthe Other:How Anthropology Makes ItsObject (NewYork, ).
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Con-
sciousness in South Africa, vol. (Chicago, ) and Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dia-
lectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. (Chicago, ); Karin Barber, ed.,
Readings in African Popular Culture (Bloomington, ); Peter Geschiere, The Moder-
nity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, ); Liisa
Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees
in Tanzania (Chicago, ); James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine (Cambridge, UK,
) and Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
Copperbelt (Berkeley, ).
Indeed, if I criticize Gilroy and other Atlantic scholars for ignoring Africa, I would also
criticize Africanist anthropologists for not paying attention to the work of these Atlantic
theorists and for failing to explore the connections between Africa and the larger Atlan-
tic world.
J. Lorand Matory, The English Professors of Brazil, Comparative Studies in Society and
History (January ).
Gilroy, Black Atlantic, .
Ibid., .
Ibid., , .
Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (London, ).
See Charles Piot, Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin during the Era of the Slave
Trade, Journal of African History (): .
See Jack Goody, Population and Polity in the Voltaic Region, in The Evolution of SocialSystems, ed. J. Friedman and M. J. Rowlands (Pittsburgh, ).
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170 Charles Piot
In ibid., . Ignoring this history, an earlier anthropology studied these two types
of polities as if they were pure Durkheimian social forms. Thus the contrast between
acephalous and centralized societies became the cornerstone of mid-century Africanist
anthropology (see Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems [Lon-
don, ]), and a generation of anthropologists set about cataloguing the dynamics of
and variation between these two types. And yet the contrast between these two types of
societies was, in this area at least, the product of a quite distinctive history. If anything,
these two types of polities suggest a morphological contrast between societies on two
sides of the slave divide: those who were raided and those who did the raiding.
Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, ).
As reprisal for losing World War I, Germany was forced to cede Togoland as well as its
other African colonies to France and Britain, who divided it in half. The British half was
incorporated into the Gold Coast, while the French half was renamed Togo.
Piot, Remotely Global, , .
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, ).
Piot, Remotely Global, .
Of course, we ought to further interrogate the directionality of this mimetic act. To wit,
the MTV images these Kabre youths were imitating are no doubt informed by the long
genealogy of hair/head significationsin African American culture, whoseroutes/roots are
deeply influenced by African cultural forms. On signifyin(g), see Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York, ).
Timothy Mitchell and Lila Abu-Lughod,Questions of Modernity, Items .():
.
See Matory, English Professors of Brazil.
See Piot, Remotely Global.
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