A Cowrie’s Life: The São Bento and Transoceanic Trade in the Sixteenth Century

ABSTRACT

A collection of money cowries (Monetaria moneta) was discovered in the early 1980s inside a bronze cannon salvaged from the wreck site of the São Bento (1554), at the mouth of the Mzikaba River, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Using an approach inspired by ‘object biography’, I consider the presence of these cowries in a museum, their possible Maldivian origin, their interrupted West African future and their wider social, economic and ecological entanglements as a global trade item circulating in a pre-industrial world. This exploration sheds some light on the slave trade linking the Indian Ocean and Atlantic in the sixteenth century and the intertwined itineraries of cowries and slaves.

KEYWORDS:

• Portuguese shipwreck
• São Bento
• money cowries (Monetaria moneta)
• KwaZulu-Natal Museum
• sixteenth-century Indian Ocean slave trade
• Maldivian reef fishery
• Yoruba
• Ori shrines
• object biography

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Isabel Hofmeyr, Jonathan Cane and Charne Lavery for the Ilha workshop experience and for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. Joni Brenner, Charne Lavery, Anitra Nettleton, Gavin Whitelaw and two anonymous reviewers provided me with insightful comments on drafts. Ryan Poinasamy helped with document editing. I thank Mudzunga Munzhedzi, Igor Muratov, Phillippe Bourjon, Wits Art Museum and the High Museum of Art for their photographs. Thanks go also to Bonnie Auret, Geoff Harris, David Herbert, Aron Mazel, Sean Porter and Gavin Whitelaw, who fielded many questions. During my time at Wits University I ran a postgraduate ‘object biography’ project with several colleagues in which students were required to research a single object from the Wits Art Museum collections for an entire semester. Seeing them work so obsessively to produce stories that seemed impossible was an inspiration to me.

Notes

1 Incomplete records and fluctuations of standards across space, time and different languages make exact numbers impossible to calculate, but some numbers and equivalences are provided to give a sense of the scale and functioning of the cowrie industry.

2 Contemporary coronation practices of the Ife king involve a cowrie crown being placed on the head of a man who takes on the role of a ‘slave’ named Eledishi, who is linked to Olókun, the god of wealth, trade and beads (Blier 2015, 374, 423–24). This too suggests a long entanglement of cowries in a complex of ideas around personal power and enslavement.