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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 and a new baby girl who I love and adore.

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, 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. I've tried many types of medieval martial arts including medieval European fencing, Kukishin Ryu, and Zulu stick fighting, etc..

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.