Is it essential within the socio-political microcosm of Benin Republic? Does he count? Only his contemporaries who like him or not, adulate him or not, can say of Candide Azannaï, since it is about him that he has the gift of leaving no one indifferent. A strong character, outspoken, philosophical references pegged to the body, the politician who does not have his tongue in his suit pocket always swears never to let himself be strangled by any compromise tie whatsoever. La Dépêche Afric-Info went to have a bit of a chat with the former Minister and ex-companion of President Talon. For an appetizer, Candide Azannaï vehemently disapproves of the name given to the statue which now sits on the seaside in Cotonou. Azannaï did not go overboard to deplore the "degrading display of ignorance" that characterized this government initiative. "There have never been Amazons in Dahomey. The Dahomey Republic or Kingdom of DAN - XOMEY has never produced a single Amazon". Very bitter, the politician fulminates: "To represent an Amazon and to dedicate an esplanade to the Amazons in Benin, hear Dahomey is ridiculous, offensive and demeaning". Ongoing reforms, Candide Azannaï will say "that a reform that kills is not a reform". As for his rating of the current governance in Benin Republic, the verdict is clear: "there is no positive point because you know, contempt for democracy and denial of the rule of law are disqualifying eliminatory criteria , which discredits the so-called power of rupture and by extension Patrice TALON". Read the first part of this three-part interview.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Mr. Candide Azannaï we are going to tackle a subject which arouses a lot of interest and which hits the headlines. It is about the erection of this statue which has just been unveiled in Cotonou, by the sea and which would refer to a part of our history. It is, you doubt it, the statue of the Amazon. It makes a lot of ink and saliva flow, you are from a region where you often define yourself as a prince if I'm not mistaken. Even if this story concerns you, culturally speaking, it concerns all of Benin Republic. What do you think of this statue? What does this evoke in you?
Candide Azannaï: It's a shame such a statue and such an explanation from the Government about it. A statue called the representation of the Amazon in honor of the Beninese woman with a place called "Esplanade des Amazones" in COTONOU! What a degrading display of ignorance! It is a ruin of the great epic of the warrior women of one of the most significant kingdoms of our geographical space during the Resistance to the especially French colonial armies of Dodds and of the image of the Beninese woman of all times. More than a frustration, this government initiative is a disappointing lack of culture.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: You are frustrated that a statue of the Amazons is being erected. That statue of a brave warrior we're talking about!
Candide Azannaï: It is an ignorance to claim that an Amazon can figure as a reference in the art of identity first of the memorable Kingdom of Dan-Xomey then of Dahomey today Republic of Benin. To represent an Amazon and to dedicate an esplanade to the Amazons in Benin, hear Dahomey is ridiculous, offensive and demeaning. It is an ignorance vector of alienation. You know you can't base the visual identity, the communication identity of a people on the mythologies of another people. It doesn't happen anywhere.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: We are talking about Amazons, Mr Candide Azannaï...
Candide Azannaï: the name amazon is a Greek mythological imagination to justify the evidence of the omnipotence of the patriarchy of the primacy of man over woman. No Amazon has existed in the world until today. It is Greek mythological imagination which is not translatable, transposable to Africa. The word Amazon can designate female warriors who lived without men and who did not admit any among them. This word can also designate a woman of warrior courage and who has virile looks and tastes, just as it can designate a woman who rides a horse, rider, rider or the long and ample skirt worn by such women.
This word Amazon also designates a prostitute who solicits in the car. This is what any serious etymologist can retain as semantics when evoking the Amazon phonation. I am not making anything up. I neither invented ancient or modern Greek and I am not an encyclopaedist in French either. Amazon means prostitute. An esplanade of prostitutes! In Africa ! And it is in the Republic of Benin! The reality of the word Amazon therefore refers to a mythology without moral consistency and without consensual ethical outline. So no pure historian, unless he is a tourist falsifier of history, should fail to recognize that the word Amazon is a chimerical word as one can speak of Hercules, as one can speak of Aphrodite, of Apollo, of Artemis, of Athena, of Hermes, of Chimera, of Poseidon, of Titan, of the Cyclops and I don't forget among the Greeks... of Dragons among the Asians... If we get used to taking the word Amazon to symbolize an identity referent, one day we risk taking the Chinese dragon or the Egyptian Sphinx as an identity referent of Benin Republic. It is identity cheating, it is perdition, identity wandering, collective alienation. We cannot replace our Legba, our Tolègba either by a Sphinx or by a Dragon. Historically this does not make sense. Culturally it is ignorance. "There have never been Amazons in Dahomey. The Dahomey Republic or Kingdom of DAN - XOMEY has never produced a single Amazon".
La Dépêche-Afric Info: Are you implying that this statue does not symbolize the Amazons of Dahomey?
Candide Azannaï: There have never been Amazons in Dahomey. The Dahomey Republic or Kingdom of DAN - XOMEY has never produced a single Amazon. Remember instead that the Kingdom of DAN - XOMEY produced warrior women called Agodjiés who do not exist anywhere else in the world. I would like to refer you to the work of Yves ANEZO on this subject. The Amazons are mythological imaginations for the purpose of didactic arguments of illustration, of justification of the superiority of man and of the vein of women's claim to take care of certain social functions said to be exclusively male, especially war. It is to celebrate masculinity, not to honor femininity, that we must grasp the interest of this mythological invention among the Greeks. And this is where it becomes more than ridiculous but a real concern across an entire Government! It is inconceivable! It should be remembered that these Amazons are "fearsome fighters who were however defeated by male heroes. (Art and Literature of Greek Mythology)".
The most taught cases are those of Theseus who killed Antiope, of Hercules who killed Hippolytes and of Achilles who killed Penthesilea… Antiope, Hippolytes, Penthesilea… are all Amazons defeated, defeated and killed by the male mythological heroes Theseus, Hercules, Achilles... Curious intellectuals will discover the line of Plato who wanted to use it to plead equality in education between the two sexes only and only when children are young. In short!
La Dépêche-Afric Info: How then to designate these brave warriors?
Candide Azannaï: Documentation of female warriors in Africa dates back to the Kush kingdoms of the Nubian region. These female warriors, protectors and defenders of the kingdom, formed formidable armies led by the Candacians, a female title equivalent to that of Pharaoh. Much later, there were famous queens and women warriors everywhere in Africa. Factual sources attest to this and the queens ZINGAH of present-day Angola, Aminatou Zazzaou of the Hausa, Moremi Ajasoro of Ile-Ife in southwestern Nigeria, Makeda of Saba, Nefertiti of Egypt (18th Dynasty), Cleopatra of Egypt (born in Egypt but not Egyptian in 69 BC), Ranavalona of Madagascar, Nandi of Zulu (born in 1760), Muhumuza of Rwanda (died in 1945), Yaa Asantewa of Ashanti, Empress Kandake of Ethiopia are the famous and real representations of it… Queen TASSI HANGBE, Queen of Dan - Xomey has no less merit. According to some sources, she would have been at the origin of the erection under her controversial reign of the elite regiment of warrior soldiers of her kingdom following the vacancy of the throne on which reigned her twin brother AKABA. While I was re-examining my certainties about the AGOODJIE, I was comforted by a relevant study titled: “AGOODJIE, WOMEN WARRIORS OF DAHOMEY. » MUSEUM VODOU STRASBOURG published on 04/11/2018 by JEAN YVES ANEZO whom I recommend and whose documentation may well be authoritative. The AGOODODJIÉ are on the spiritual level spiritual wives of the sacred land of Dan - Xomey and wives of the king. They are guardians and protective ramparts of the Dan - Xomey, of the throne and of the king. They come from diverse and varied backgrounds and are either girls or women offered, volunteers, periodically co-opted by lot, slaves. They are all subsequently ennobled and sacralized. They commit to celibacy and wear scarifications, even excision, live in barracks, are sacred women, practice rigorous and specific training. They wear clothing, ornaments and armaments in times of peace as in times of military campaigns, benefit from rewards from the Queen (then from the King), rules set their demobilizations and their retirements... Everything is codified up to the distinctive colors of their accoutrements according to the circumstances…
Minister ABIMBOLA pained me to hear him justify the erection of the so-called Amazon statue and the place called Esplanade des Amazones. An absurdity! We cannot take rough words from uneducated, very illiterate and very little elitist colonial soldiers, from certain slave traders, sometimes from spies disguised as colonial priests or evangelists, in any case too uneducated for the most part to confuse the brave and untranslatable warriors from Dan-Xomey to mythological imaginary Amazons through the peddling of a wandering of vocabulary that the lack of culture around power says of rupture seeks to stick to us as an identity referent for women in Benin Republic.
This Government with regard to this statue and the whole of the tourist project circumscribed to this statue called the Amazon and to the place called Esplanade des Amazones that it shelters is in the trap of a wandering of vocabulary vector of a falsification of history and identity alienation. So you see this poses the problem of identity art. What is identity art? Identity art is made based on historical evidence around the historical element. Historical elements restore the memory of history. Public monuments are pretexts and memorial fixations that restore history. How does this statue restore the history of the warrior women of Dahomey? In nothing. Cotonou has never been the base of the elite regiment of female warriors of Dan - Xomey and it is a historical account to speak of the Esplanade des Amazones in COTONOU. This statue is going to be razed.
La Dépêche-Afric Info: This statue will be shaved, you say? No kidding ?
Candide Azannaï: Sooner or later it will be razed because it does not represent us. It is a falsification of history. It is a desecration of the memory of the female warriors of Dan-Xomey, a devaluation of their status and a dishonorable insult to their supreme sacrifices. It is a depraving offensive reduction to Beninese women that one tries to represent by a confusedly polysemous mythology that can also mean and designate a prostitute.
It is a leveling by vice of an unworthy representation of the Beninese woman. Anecdotes circulate according to which a princess of Abomey of venerable memory would have reframed, would have scolded journalists who would have made the mistake of calling her Amazon. She would have said no, "I'm not an Amazon, I'm a princess. I'm not an amazon, I'm a princess, get the hell out of me". This completely apt reaction says a lot about the leveling by ignorance that broods over the Amazon sound. I will quote you an author. Indeed, here is what Jean Yves ANEZO wrote about the AGOODODJIÉ, these exceptional women warriors who do not exist anywhere else in the whole world: "They did not therefore constitute a free feminine society, but an army corps like the others ; created, organized, maintained by the powerful, eminently virile will of a God-King, serving only this living God and what he symbolized, who took everything from them. to be Amazons such as Western thought has constructed, mythologized and fantasized over the millennia. Moreover, their recent reality compared to their supposed counterparts of antiquity, must distance them from myth and fantasy; and, by that no doubt, to protect their history and therefore their memory by referring only to the facts... "As regards the Amazons of Greek mythology on the other hand, continues ANEZO: "You just have to look at the representations. She is rebellious, bloodthirsty and vindictive, but does she not express the characteristics of a woman ready for anything, free of her body and her life? These imaginary amazons - Need we remind you? - do not correspond to the reality of the agoodjié… ANEZO will say and I support him with reason: “That is why you will not hear me call them “amazons”, but “women warriors” or “agoodjié”. By an anecdote I will make you laugh a little, perhaps. More than a quarter of a century ago, I had to name one of my daughters, and we were looking for a strong name because when I saw her in the cradle, she has characteristics that must be those of a tall woman, very intelligent, very beautiful and particularly brave. My father (Peace to his Soul) who should endorse my daughter's first names had told me, it is true that she will be very brave and worthy of the lineage of our valiant warriors, but she is not an Amazon and does not will not be an Amazon, not at all. For my father to tell me details of the AGOODODJIÉ as he liked to hang out on the double OO between the G and DO before the DJ, as a phonological instance, to specify and insist on CANDACE, a title worn by great women warriors who were equivalents of the Pharaohs. Great women of the region of the island of MEROE. Between Sudan and Ethiopia there is a magnificent island, the island of Meroe, the region of female warriors. I ended up naming my daughter, Candace. It was she who had assisted me with exceptional selfless efficiency during my time at the head of the Ministry in charge of National Defence. Look at the case of South America. The conquistadors saw the Native American warriors with long hair behind, they believed it was women's hair, by a river and they called the river Amazonia because those Native American warriors had the physical taper, some resembling that of women of the Indo-European type. Despite the Amazon river of the "Amerindian Amazons", there was indeed their decimation, not to say, the massive extermination of the Amerindians by the bloodthirsty barbarian conquistadors... I come back to insist on the art of identity which is a pure and which is based on something magnificent.
The identity art of a people of a nation or a community imperatively requires a purity of its original format a sincerity in the sense of the authenticity of its designation as belonging to this people to this nation or to this community at the risk of distorting the base of the history concerning them by pushing them towards a collective alienation caused by the falsification of history, more serious of their identity. Identity art is a patriotic art and not a worldly art of defilement of the spirit of the Nation in the Hegelian sense. No, the female warriors of the Dan-Xomey are not Amazons.
The Beninese woman does not identify with the Amazon. With regard to the intellectual and memorial calamity which consists in shaping with a naive and insolent face, like a shameless and impolite young girl who does not respect anyone, a statue to devalue, insult and pervert the representativeness of Beninese women and those of our intrepid warriors of venerable memories, I don't want our daughters to look like this intrusive statue. It will never be enough to adorn with inappropriate war gadgets from metal molds to forms far from restoring our historical characters to simulate and make us believe in our women warriors, the MINONS, our untranslatable and incomparable AGOODODJIÉ of Dan - Xomey. I say, no amazon existed in Benin Republic. This term Amazon, at the origin of its mythological imagination by the Greek patriarchy is a negation of feminine values and later, it means a prostitute who solicits in the car (Conf. Le Robert, Cultural Dictionary in French language under the direction of Alain Rey, Paris, 2005). Go a little culturally informed before trying to decide in matters of identity that engage the whole Nation. People are free to call themselves Amazon of ancient or modern times and other nicknames or nicknames...
Admittedly, President Nicephore SOGLO, a high-level intellectual identified himself with Hercules of mythology but he never said that Hercules is the identifier of Benin Republic. No, I can call myself Tarzan, Dragon and other chimeras but Tarzan cannot be a public, national identifier for Benin Republic. As soon as we speak of identity art from Benin Republic, we must know that we are in a historical rendez-vous and that the aesthetics of identity art is not only in the bluffing fascinations but in the restitution authentic elements that testify to the history and the greatness of people who produced and knew these facts of history. One day our enlightened and decidated People will raze this statue and all other monuments and places of intellectual and memorial fraud pushing to the alienation of identity only because in reality of hypothetical dividends expected from unhealthy projects of unacknowledged tourist scams. I hate that we want to represent the woman of Benin Republic by the Greek mythological word Amazon which means among other infamies, negations, prostitute. We must continue to believe in our People who, with certainty, will take up all the challenges on their way. I thank you by indicating my availability to serve the general interest. Thanks.
Interview by "La Dépêche-Afric Info"
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
