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African Arms

The Artist

Greetings, my name is Adam Alante. I was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University. I am married to my beautiful and lovely wife, Cheye, who I owe my life, and together we have two little sons who I love and adore. My family is woven by a vivid cultural heritage. My mother, Pamela, is a great artist (from who I inherited my love of art) with a maternal line of artists going back generations to her native ancestry. My father traces his roots back to the Bejaa tribe of Guinea Bissau, who still to this day practice traditional beliefs and are of the medival kingdom of Kabu, which was the authority of the great Mali empire in Africa's far west. My father and his family come from St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States. They are descendants of the original inhabitants who helped the Spanish defend the city against the British and my father's grandmother was of the Agua Dulce natives of the area. Even my wife's maternal DNA is Native American and through maternal oral stories traces her blood to the North Carolina Moratok.

As far back as I can remember, art has been a big part of my life. Downtown New Haven itself has a very artistic atmosphere that surrounded me all my life. As a young boy I always paid attention to detail and hated when things fell short of what they were designed to be. Whenever I bought an action figure or a model as a kid there would always be something that the makers slacked on. A figurine's gun or sword paint would blend with their hand, their knife paint would blend with their hip, their bodies would be disproportional, or the figurine/model would simply lack details that made the character who they were. I would take paints, krazy glue, fabrics, even my mother's nail polish (which she hated), and random household items to fix or add the details that would turn the figurine/model into a small size recreation of the character it was depicting. From there I went on to create my own models from scratch with clay and paints. The models I created and revised helped me to become a student at ECA school of the Arts in downtown New Haven.

In my later teen years I became very interested in old world history and attracted to its weapons and martial arts. Today I'm what I would call an intense martial artist and have the cuts and bruises to prove it. I've tried many types of medieval martial arts from all over the world including medieval European fencing, Kukishin Ryu, and Zulu stick fighting. Spear and shield techniques of a universal African style that have been popularized by the Azande warriors is my current work out. I often spar with hardwood or steel weapons and prefer the raw styles of martial arts which, if done with some degree of safety, is a healthy teacher of respect for the deadly weapons one wields.

Blacksmithing caught my interest in 2002, the year I began to study the techniques of making combat worthy blades relentlessly and learning through raw experience the do's and don'ts of the art. At that time, I also put my attention towards African weapons and would sculpt wooden examples out of very dense, heavy heartwoods to practice with and evaluate the function of their design. And then it came to me in 2004, that rather than wait for scholars and historians to become better "acquainted" with functional historical African weapons, I would need to craft them myself in order to fully understand the properties of functional African arms.