Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  Amazon is a European name, inspired by the women of Greek myth, that was bestowed on the royal bodyguards and shock troopers of Dahomey, a kingdom whose power and influence was as great as that of ancient Rome’s. The Mino were established under King Houegbadja (ruled 1645–85) and were later developed by his son King Agadja (ruled 1708–32) into a militia of four thousand “black virgins,” who fought until the late nineteenth century. As the colonial record portrays, they were trained for and married to “the husband that clothes and feeds us”: war. They were renowned for their fierceness and discipline in battle, for their fearlessness and thirst for bloodletting. They are said to have performed brutal decapitations and to have used Danish guns obtained in exchange for slaves. Because of their power, and because their initiations and war making were closely tied to Vodun, a traditional religion indigenous to Dahomey, they were given a semi-sacred status.

  I looked for the Mino and their indigo legacy around me, but in truth Abomey felt like a town of ghosts. I was struck by the poverty; falling-down, tiny, unadorned modern block buildings filled the streets. When I reached the junction where the remains of the Amazon quarters were said to be, I found only the sunken frames of later-built houses.

  Women whizzed by on Mobylettes and scooters in a blur of the neon brights of Vlisco’s high-end Super Wax cloth, marketed especially to Benin and Ivory Coast. Every young woman, it seemed, had shaved her eyebrows and penciled in new ones with electric blue, fluorescent orange, or red—a newfangled expression of adornment once made with indigo. They seemed to live in a specter of a kind of hyper-modernity, flying across a decaying city built on ancient killing grounds.

  I reached the site of the royal palaces, the centuries-old seat of the government of the Kingdom of Dahomey that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With their spectacular architecture and the rich spoils of conquest housed in their halls and temples and tombs, I felt a glimmer of hope for some relic of that blue past. I joined a tour and walked through the many chambers and anterior structures, stunned by the beauty, and how complete and well preserved the historical record was in this region where everything of value as art or social document is extracted by the West or exchanged. But I was disappointed not to see any indigo.

  When the tour ended, I asked the guide about indigo, hoping there was something overlooked. He pulled me back along the corridors to the magnificent bas-reliefs, recast and preserved on the palace walls. They chronicle in signs and symbols and figures the ancient state record—predating colonial texts—of the reign of the twelve Fon kings of Dahomey, from 1600 to 1900. The Mino appear as small figures, with weapons, bare breasts, and blue wrappers, but they are simply a footnote to the kings’ record-making, powerful backup girls. The colors used in the bas-reliefs are soul-catching red and blue and yellow and green, in milky and mattelike hues. The guide explained to me that underneath these vivid colors are deeper layers of pigments made from dried and ground indigo leaves, as well as wild gingerroot, kaolin, wood powder, and lamp soot, used to color the hard earth taken from termite mounds.

  Inscribed in the walls is the legend of Dako Danzo, also known as Dakodonou, who reigned from 1620 to 1645 as the Kingdom’s second monarch. Dako stands out as a man of exceptional cruelty in three centuries of absolute monarchy, a system rare in precolonial Africa and the last to fall to European colonization.

  “This is Dako’s emblem,” the guide said. “You see what I am pointing to? This is a tinderbox. This is a war club. This is indigo.”

  Indigo was a simple image of a pot, with blue spheres inside, floating among the other images on the wall.

  Dako is said to have killed a farmer or indigo planter, Donou, in a pot of indigo, and to have made sport of the killing, rolling the corpse around in its fetid blue tomb. “Dako kills Donou as easily as breaking an indigo jar” is the motto preserved by history.

  “The farmer’s name, Donou, was taken by Dako: Dakodonou. This death gave origin to the name Dahomey,” said the guide.

  He could not explain much more, and though I’ve tried to uncover what the farmer’s death symbolized, and what the insult or deathly power of the indigo vat actually meant in that age, the story seems lost to history. Some records say that Dako killed his mother-in-law by the same means. All we can rely on is the image on the walls.

  The guide pointed me to the old quarter of town as a place to search for indigo cloths, and indeed, I soon spied, over the lip of an earthen wall, a calabash, or dried gourd bowl, and a gathering of small blue fibrous balls—pounded and rolled indigo leaves spread out to dry in the sun. A goat kept passing over them, scattering them more widely on the ground. Against the wall of a small house were four clay dye pots covered with rubber pans, and hanging on a stack of cement blocks were three blue-black cloths, puckered at one hem from the stitched patterning that would be untied to reveal a design of white resist to the dye.

  Inside the house I found an old woman and several very small children. None of them spoke English or French, but we signed until we had some understanding. Madame Honegbeto, the old lady, showed me the cloths that were drying; simple, lovely patterns on thin calico like the ones I’d purchased in Lomé. She took a stick and began to stir one of the dye pots. I thought for a while about staying on there and trying to learn more, but a funny pull in me said I should leave, taking only what I’d seen. I can’t explain it really, except that it felt like the contentment of arriving at something after long ardor, then looking in, but not wanting to linger. It was as if staying would require more of both of us than I wanted.

  I stooped to look at the indigo balls, small and whorly and dense but light as paper. Their sweet, acrid smell had become as familiar as the smell of cedar in my grandmother’s drawers. The old lady gave me some of them, wrapped in a small scrap of a cloth. It was a generous gift; the balls were costly. They filled my head with the pleasure I’d come to know, and all the way home to Accra, I would keep them in my bag and sniff at them. But before I reached home, they grew moldy, and when Eurama spotted insects in them, she swept them into the gutter without a glance. A photo I took in the old woman’s yard shows traces of them. The balls are strewn about, a goat is disappearing from the frame, and the surroundings look desolate and gray, as if they are relics from a world long past.

  Walking farther into the center of Abomey, I spied the daughters of the Amazons everywhere, in polyester dresses from China, blue jeans, and couture-tailored Vlisco. Indigo cloth was easy to find, in the same patterns that the girls wear in the Penn photos. I’d discovered that those designs are quotidian, made with a few balls of indigo thrown into synthetic dye. They are sold almost everywhere in Abomey—in tourist shops, by the roadside, in cafés—where you can also find cheap copies of the colorful Fon appliqués, much celebrated by collectors, fashioned after the bas-reliefs, adorned with signs and figures and, almost always, a tiny indigo pot.

  I decided then to travel southwest from Abomey, hoping to reach Porto Novo before nightfall. In the late afternoon I arrived in the Yoruba city. The dress and language were Yoruba; the people had a posture, a different way of being, a distinct fire in the belly, that was familiar to me. I thought about going on and crossing into Nigeria. I was so close now to Lagos, the gateway to the blue lands of southwestern Nigeria. I could sleep in Porto Novo and arrive in Ibadan, the professor’s hometown, before nightfall the next day. But I decided instead on a slow return west. The borders between Benin and Togo and Ghana were calling out to me again.

  Seven

  Not Everything You Can Own, Ivory Coast

  Koua Aya’s compound was cool. The light filtered into her workroom and illuminated the bent, shaven heads of the old women working beside her. Pots, some as high as my thigh, were still slick with water, the light yellow-brown color of an infant’s stool. Others were fired a deep glinty brown. Delicate birds alighted on a vase, a ram’s head morphed into a woman’s thighs, and small, studlike designs circled the rim of a plate, all splendid, otherwordly forms.
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  Koua Aya was tiny and lithe. Her head too was shorn, the sign that she was past menopause, and had reached the age and stature of a master of fecundity and earth. She was laughing when I arrived and told her I’d come to Tanoh Sakassou by road from Accra, a twenty-two-hour trip, in search of her studio. Long ago I’d bought a vase from her workshop in a New York museum and put the tag that accompanied it in my notebook, hoping I might one day visit her compound, not thinking then that she might be my gateway to indigo dyers. Where there is indigo dyeing, someone suggested to me, there are pots. It was a revelation for my attempt not to flounder and squander my time as I set out for the land of the Baule.

  “There is no petrol in Côte d’Ivoire, and you are here?” she teased. Our driver stood anxiously near the road. I’d hired a car in Bouaké and set off to the village without much of an address, trusting to wit. The driver had warned that we’d need to return before dusk; we must not tarry on the road or burn through our less-than-full tank. I picked frantically among the pots, possessed by a mounting anxiety. It was not the fuel crisis; in Ghana and Togo and Benin and Mali there had always been someone at the roadside offering a jerry can or siphon for the right price, so I assumed I could buy contraband petrol. No, I was afraid that this world I’d just alighted in, beauty and spirit-filled, would slip away without my being able to enter it at all. I might return the next day, but when the journey there took so long, each hour was precious, and something in the air told me that another trip might be impossible. I picked out more pots than I could carry back to Accra and then to New York, surprised and embarrassed at this new urge to hoard.

  As the shop boys pulled newspaper from a storage shelf, I spied on the shelf the dark blue rough hide of something rolled.

  “Oh, is that indigo?” I asked. They pulled it down and unfurled three yards of cloth made from bark fibers—tightly amassed, soft, rootlike threads that had been dyed and then pounded or rubbed with indigo powder. It was stunning. Bark cloth is most commonly associated with Uganda, where the art has a recognized history of more than six hundred years. I had not considered it at all part of an indigo legacy. I asked Koua Aya about it, and she explained that the art was a tradition of the Beng people; someone had commissioned the cloth and would use it as a ceremonial mat or for ceremonial attire. She described the process of cutting down a tree, stripping the trunk, making a pulp, forming and drying it, then sending it to a local dyer.

  “We hide these things. To make it, you have to take down a whole tree, and it is illegal,” one of the boys explained. “So the police raid the places where it is sold.”

  I asked them if I could buy it, hearing Eurama hiss in my ear, “Not everything you can own, my dear Catherine. The beautiful ones are not for any one of us, really.”

  Koua Aya laughed and shook her head. “It belongs to someone,” she said. But she handed a knife to one of the boys and instructed him to cut a small piece from the edge for me, and they tucked it in between the pots. She promised to tell me more about it, and send me to the dyers, when I returned in the morning.

  The driver was hovering now at the door, and his fidgeting presence unsettled me. We said good-bye, and during the car ride to Bouaké, I smelled and fingered the patch of cloth like a flower, worried about the road ahead.

  In Bouaké, a sure tension hovered over everything. There was talk of a worsening gas strike, of a bus strike scheduled for the next day. Rumor had it that the gas shortage had been orchestrated and was the advent of a police and military strike.

  I was traveling with Eurama’s son, Kwesi, on his first trip outside Ghana. He had just finished college and was going to be starting a job at a bank in Accra. He wanted to see fabled Abidjan, spoken of as Africa’s Paris, the capital of Ivory Coast. We had gone there first. As we traveled, I explained that he was “my husband’s small brother” to signal that I was not a tourist and he was not my silly boyfriend, because relationships—probably more than anything—define every West African encounter. But despite our story-making, everyone had assumed that Kwesi, with his neat khakis, polo shirts, and Anglophone cosmopolitan swagger, was South African. Customs officers, hoping he had South African rands, had harassed us at endless checkpoints ever since we crossed the border from Ghana into Ivory Coast.

  It was hard to understand what was happening; no one would speak to us in English and ignored our broken French (a particular Ivorian conceit toward Anglophones), and so Kwesi and I looked for Ghanaians at the taxi terminal and in the market, hoping to find someone who would tell us clearer news and change our cedis to CFA francs. We wandered for a long time, searching among the money-changers and the mechanics, until we found a tailor’s shop blaring Ghanaian gospel music. The tailor warned us that something big was brewing and advised us to go back to Abidjan.

  We spent the night in Bouaké, and the tensions around us seemed to intensify in the night traffic. We tossed and turned to the sounds from the street below. I slowly let go of the chance of meeting Koua Aya again and in the early morning we boarded a bus for Abidjan, surprised that I did not feel my usual stubbornness about staying on. Six months earlier there had been a coup in Ivory Coast, and I had taken others’ advice and waited it out, listening to the news for assurance that the situation had become more stable. By the time I planned the trip, these same people advised, “It could be your last good chance for a while.”

  At the bus terminal there was a boutique selling Baule indigo wrappers, cheap copies of the cloth I’d chased in Bobo-Dioulasso, woven from machine-manufactured threads. I’d seen many weavers on the road from Abidjan, their ground looms stationed along the highway, their cloths hung for sale from trees and on racks. In the flash of an eye from a moving car they were quite lovely, but they had not even been facsimiles of the complex old Baule mastery. I searched through similar cloths at the boutique, admiring the work. I purchased two wrappers and a heavy woven man’s cloth that was thoroughly modern, royal blue with fluorescent pink and green and yellow details. I was beginning to appreciate that in West Africa new is not a devaluing measure. Innovation is king, right alongside tradition. I marveled at this fact as much as at the bark cloth.

  I was sad to be leaving at a moment of so much discovery. We’ll go back to Abidjan and see how things settle, I told Kwesi. Something told me we wouldn’t return.

  The morning after we arrived in Abidjan, Kwesi and I rose early and set out to explore the city. The tensions of Bouaké had only increased there, and it became hard to hide our discomfort as we waited too long for a bus that would take us into the city’s commercial center. At first we blamed the delay on the surprisingly cool, soaking rain. We eventually saw a taxi and flagged it down. It took us to the main thoroughfare; we alighted at a junction where it should have been easy to get further transportation. The junction was crowded with pedestrians, but there were no cars on the road. We waited more than twenty minutes without seeing any vehicles, and then slowly, one by one, cars and buses began to round the bend. Then traffic seemed to slowly increase. But nearly every vehicle had a soldier at the wheel, and those cars began to race against the few driven by private citizens, heading them off, pulling the passengers out, and leaving them standing in the road.

  We soon heard shots, and the crowd farther down from us convulsed with panic, which lit the people around us like a wildfire. Kwesi and I ran with them back down the road leading away from the city center. By now the rain was falling hard. Several miles up the sloping highway, everyone was walking in the rain. Shots still rang in the air. In our line of grim travelers, no one was talking, and no one would respond to our questions. For nearly a mile, no cars passed us—then the sound of a motor would cut the air, and everyone would grow tenser, then breathe relief as the soldiers passed without incident.

  More than an hour later we arrived at our hotel to eerie quiet. We sat at the bar and watched the minister of communications—a dark, hedged soul, his words barely enunciated—explain that the soldiers were on strike because they’d received
no pay since the coup that had brought Robert Guéï to power less than a year before. As a result the borders, the airports, the banks, the TV and radio stations, and all businesses in the city were closed. Kwesi and I looked at each other, unable to talk, as this dramatic news surrendered to a video of an Ivorian band doing a cover of a D’Angelo song. Hotel guests, who had appeared at the first sound of official news reporting, milled about, impeccably dressed, in the suits and jewels and fancy coiffures that Ivorians favor as day wear.

  Kwesi and I waited there for more than an hour, hoping to hear something more, then retreated to our rooms to rest. We were worried, but that refuge seemed the only way to fight the anxious pull at our bodies.

  I tried to read but kept obsessing about what I’d left behind in Bouaké. I had little chance of returning there now, I knew. This was my fifth trip to Ivory Coast, the others while I was on extended layovers on flights between Ghana and other West African destinations. I would have another opportunity to visit Koua Aya, I reasoned. I didn’t know that Bouaké was about to become a frontier in a civil war.

  In the late afternoon, after we had spent hours in the dark suite under the unnerving hum of the air conditioning, the sounds of shelling seemed to stop. I called Kwesi, and we rejoined the crowd at the bar who watched the same Ivorian band doing R&B music covers. We decided to venture outside.

  We sat for a long time by the roadside near the hotel, scared to go far. As the sun descended and the mosquitoes began their wild reign, the hotel staff huddled in small groups near the back gate, talking, and I approached them to see what they could tell me of the situation. No one had news, but they were anxious to get home before dark. The thought of their leaving made the hotel suddenly seem open and vulnerable, its garden refuge no longer desirable. I felt truly panicked, but everyone else, even Kwesi, showed a studied calm, and I tried to master my countenance.