By Iron Possessed: Fabrice Monteiro’s Maroons: The Fugitive Slaves

At first glance, the still photographs by Fabrice Monteiro in his series Marrons, Les esclaves fugitifs (Maroons: The Fugitive Slaves) are the stuff of nightmare. They are hard to look at, and even harder to turn away from. These startling black-and-white photographs depict West African men wearing the kinds of metal devices used to inflict punishment under slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas. These include a heavy set of hooks, used to stop slaves from escaping through thick brush; a set of bells that made silent escape impossible; and heavy metal masks that prevented slaves from eating fruit or sugar cane while laboring in the fields.¹

Monteiro, of Belgian and Beninois descent, explains that he produced the work partly in remembrance of his enslaved paternal ancestor, who initially bore the Yoruba name Ayedabo Adogun Odo. Taken as a slave from the Benin region of present-day Nigeria to Brazil, Ayedabo was later “repatriated” from Brazil to Ouidah, having taken the name Pedro Monteiro. At this point, as the artist understands, his ancestor’s status hovered somewhere between slavery and freedom. He was engaged, under conditions evidently not entirely of his own choosing, in the domestic slave trade, on slave trading ventures north of Ouidah. (It is possible that Fabrice’s ancestor was under the control of Francisco Antonio Monteiro, mentioned as one of fourteen Brazilian slave traders in Ouidah in Richard Burton’s report as British Consul in Whydah to the British Parliament.) In this sense, the Maroons series can be understood as a critical reflection on the ethical complexities of complicity in a time of terror, a complexity that defies, the artist insists, simple black/white dichotomies.

The artist, based in Dakar, Senegal, initially undertook archival research at the Quai Branly in Paris. Among his inspirations were images of “Negro Heads” in Richard Bridgens’s book West India Scenery: With illustrations of Negro character, the process of making sugar … from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in, the island of Trinidad (c. 1836) (Fig. A) He also drew upon images in Thomas Branagan’s The Penitential Tyrant; or, Slave Trader Reformed (New York, 1807) (Fig. B). He carefully consulted the infamous Code Noir of 1685, governing the treatment of slaves in the French colonies. Building on his training as an industrial engineer, the artist created detailed design drawings of varied slavery-era instruments of punishment and torture. He presented these sketches to local blacksmiths in Ouidah, Benin, his ancestral city and an important transshipment point in the slave trade.

Monteiro then approached a number of men whom he met on the city’s streets, asking them to don the metal instruments and be photographed within a special box constructed for the purpose. Some men were initially concerned that the metallic masks were a form of witchcraft, but once they learned of Monteiro’s family history and his longing to honor and understand the experiences of his ancestor, they readily agreed to assist him.

Monteiro insists that he did not pose the models; rather they responded to the sensory, tactile power of the shackles: “I actually didn’t give any direction to the models. As soon as I would put the cold, heavy shackles around their necks, their expressions and attitude would change automatically. I just shot what they were giving me” (quoted in Libeskal 2014). The artist recalls that upon putting on the metal instruments, all the men began to sweat: “You could see, they felt the weight of it.”² He notes that his goal in this series is not specifically to address white complicity in the slave trade, but rather to pose universal questions about the origins of human cruelty and terror, anchored in avarice and unfettered global capitalism. “Sugar,” he notes, “was the oil of its day, and this drive for profit, this desire to legitimate this traffic in human beings, drove the rise of racialism, which we still live with today.” By the same token, he insists, the series holds up a mirror to all of us, asking to reflect...