Discover · Memory · Benin-Brazil
Pierre Verger spent fifty years documenting, photo after photo, archive after archive, the living bridge between the Bight of Benin and Bahia. His work grounds every serious study of the subject, ours included.
1902-1996
born in Paris, died in Salvador de Bahia
1948
first mission to Benin, IFAN grant
1953
initiated babalawo, renamed Fatumbi
62,000+
photographic negatives left to his foundation
From photographer to ethnologist
Pierre Verger was born in Paris in 1902. A photographer from his thirties, he traveled the world for over a decade, Polynesia, Japan, Africa, the Americas. In 1946, he settled in Salvador de Bahia. There he discovered Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian religions, and decided to become one of the most rigorous researchers of his time on the subject.
In 1948, a grant from the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire took him for the first time to the Bight of Benin. He would never stop building the bridge between the two shores.
Ouidah, 1953
In 1953, Verger is initiated as babalawo, priest of the Fa, the divination oracle. He receives the name Fatumbi, "Ifa reborn him" in Yoruba. This was not a symbolic gesture from a visiting researcher: it was a genuine entry into the tradition, granting him access few outsiders have ever had, before or since.
The founding work
In 1966, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle is published. It is the first exhaustive documentation, ship by ship, trading post by trading post, of the routes that linked Ouidah, Agoué and Bahia for two centuries. No serious article on the Agudás or on Jeje Candomblé can be written without citing it.
Verger dies in Salvador de Bahia in 1996. His foundation there holds more than 62,000 negatives and 8,000 prints today, the largest visual archive ever assembled on Afro-Atlantic cultures.
Sources
Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Mouton, 1966.
Pierre Verger, Dieux d'Afrique, Paul Hartmann, 1954.
Bérose, International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, entry "Verger, Pierre (1902-1996)."
BnF, Patrimoines Partagés France-Brésil, Pierre Verger entry.
Fifty years after his first journeys, the bridge between Ouidah and Bahia remains open. ONG Wa Afriki guides those who want to cross it.