USA Africa Dialogue Series - OBITUARY: Dr. Brigitte Kowalski

OBITUARY: Dr. Brigitte Kowalski

It is with great sadness and profound emotion that I wish to announce the death, on Tuesday, February 22, 2011, of Dr. Brigitte Kowalski, an historian of the Yoruba, Brazilian architecture and landscape in West Africa, and African art history. Extremely collegial and friendly, Brigitte had participated in many conferences and workshops in different parts of the world. Her death in Guyana, far away from her base in France, is a testimony to the life and career of a truly global citizen, dedicated and relentless scholar, teacher, mother to two boys and a grandmother.

Dr. Kowalski's Ph.D. thesis, "The Afro-Brazilian architectural heritage of the Slave Coast," represents the first of its kind in the documentation and analysis of Afro-Brazilian houses in West Africa. Taking on its mistaken lumping together with the colonial architecture, the thesis shifts the focus to where it belongs, thus yielding impressive new conclusions on the nineteenth century. She is the first to give us a long list of about three hundred houses (in Lagos, Badagry in Nigeria, Porto Novo, Whydah, Grand Popo in Benin Republic, and Aneho or Petit Popo in Togo). Her impressive data on these unique houses supply us with their characteristics and representation on the landscape in a way that links architecture to culture, politics and economy. She successfully coined a label, "architectural  patrimony," which reflects the cultural inheritance represented in the houses. In an impressive essay published in 2002, she provides a rigorous analysis on the spread of this architecture among the Egba and Egbado of southwestern Nigeria.
       With the aid of houses and other physical objects, Dr. Kowalski was able to reveal various new aspects of the precolonial history of the Yoruba, in particular on Ile Ife and Adja Tado cultures and Yoruba kingdoms before 1500 AD; migrations (Yoruba, Huela and Hueda); history after 1500 (new kingdoms: Abomey, Porto Novo, Lagos, Abeokuta); the coastal cities: Petit Popo, Grand Popo, Abomey Calavi, Ouidah, Badagry, Lagos; the slave trade and the return of the emancipated slaves; and the contribution of the emancipated slaves to social and economic mutations.
It is a mark of her talent that she did her research so well and engagingly. She analyzed the situation of the slave coast during the eighteenth century and the important role played by Ouidah in the slave trade. She focused on Badagry and described the organization of the slave trade there, shared between different surrounding kingdoms (Cotonou, Ouidah, Abomey) trading with Europeans nations. Her purpose was to show the complexity of the history of the slave trade, and the implication of slave traders, the European nations and African kingdoms in the trade. She also opened a new area of research to focus on the effects of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic trade on the kingdoms of the Guinea Gulf in Africa, especially Yoruba kingdoms and Hausa city-states, and on connections between the Americas and Africa through the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World.  
Based in France for many years, she undertook a postgraduate degree in African Arts, and lectured in Ecole du Louvre, Paris. After degrees in archaeology, she turned to African Arts and "Civilizations studies." Her long stay in Benin Republic made her a human encyclopedia in Afro-Brazilian architecture. She pursued researches on African architecture as witnesses of African History and migrations inside and outside Western Africa. Her purposes were to determine the consequences and effects of the slave trade on cultures and movements of population between Hausaland and the Gulf of Guinea, and between the Gulf of Guinea and the Americas and Caribbean islands. She prepared some projects on the rehabilitation of historical sites in Nigeria in collaboration with Craterre, a member of the UNESCO project on Africa and Legacy, a Nigerian association in Lagos.

She mounted exhibitions, and used visual aids to facilitate the understanding of complex subjects. Her exhibition catalogue, L'Afrique au temps des comptoirs (Africa in the Atlantic Slave trade), reflects a broad range of reading as well as the skills to package ideas for maximum visual effect. Two years ago, in collaboration with Marie Rodet, she prepared an exhibition and conference on the slave trade with the Museum of Angoulême in the South West of France.  The exhibition was based on the paintings of an artist from Benin republic, Julien Sinzogan, and on the African collection of the museum. In addition, she teamed with others to organize a conference on "Slave Trade, Slavery and Abolitions" in November 2009 in Angoulême.
        She made a name for herself at the annual conference on Africa hosted by the University of Texas at Austin where she made many friends among the younger generation of scholars. This friendship developed into academic collaboration, including her support for curating the museum of African art. I was privileged to have been invited as one of the guests to view this remarkable exhibition where I witnessed, first hand, the remarkable generosity and kindness of Dr. Kowalski.
      May her soul rest in peace and may her surviving mother, sibling, children and friends find consolation in the richness of her life and the warmth of her being.

Toyin Falola, The University of Texas at Austin
 
 
 
 

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue