Ouidah

The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892

Robin Law

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780821415719
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445525
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the Slave Coast. This is the first detailed study of the town's history and of its role in the Atlantic slave trade. Ouidah is a well-documented case study of precolonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular of the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.

1

Origins

Ouidah Before the Dahomian Conquest

The history of Ouidah is intelligible only by reference to its geographical situation, which has however often been misunderstood and misrepresented in accounts of the operation of European trade in West Africa. It is commonly referred to as a ‘port’, but this is strictly inaccurate, indeed positively misleading.¹ Although it became an important centre for European maritime trade from the seventeenth century onwards, it is not in fact situated on the coast, but some 4 km inland, actually to the north of the lagoon which in this area runs parallel to the coast, and so separates Ouidah from the seashore. The slaves and other commodities exported through Ouidah had therefore to be taken overland and across the lagoon to the beach, rather than being embarked directly into European ships. At the coast itself, moreover, there is no ‘port’ in the sense of a sheltered harbour, but only an open roadstead. Indeed, heavy surf along the beach, and on sandbars parallel to it, makes it impossible for large vessels to approach close to the shore. European ships trading at Ouidah had therefore to stand 2–3 km off, and to communicate with the shore through smaller vessels, for which purpose African canoes were normally employed. The town’s relative isolation from the sea, combined with its proximity to the coastal lagoon, played a critical role in shaping its historical development, during as well as prior to its involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade.

Although ‘Ouidah’ is the spelling of the town’s name current nowadays, it occurs in European sources between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in various other forms: in English most commonly ‘Whydah’, in Dutch ‘Fida’, in French ‘Juda’, and in Portuguese ‘Ajudá’. All these are attempts to render an indigenous name that would be more correctly written, by modern conventions, as ‘Hueda’ (or in a dialect variant ‘Peda’). Strictly and originally, Hueda was not the name of the town nowadays called Ouidah, but rather of the kingdom to which it belonged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whose capital was Savi, 11 km further north.² The people of Hueda belonged to the same linguistic group as the Fon of Dahomey, although historically distinct from them; this language family is nowadays generally called by scholars ‘Gbe’ (but formerly commonly ‘Ewe’ or ‘Adja’, and in French colonial usage ‘Djedji’).³ In contemporary sources, the name Hueda may have been noted first by Spanish missionaries visiting the kingdom of Allada to the north-east in 1660, who recorded it (apparently) in the form ‘Jura’ or ‘Iura’;⁴ more certainly, it enters the historical record in 1671 (as ‘Juda’), when the French first established a trading factory there.⁵ In 1727 the Hueda kingdom was conquered by the inland kingdom of Dahomey. As a political unit, it thereafter survived only in the form of a minor successor-state, formed by refugees from the Dahomian conquest, on the western shore of Lake Ahémé (Hen), about 20 km west of Ouidah, this relocated kingdom being distinguished as Hueda-Henji, ‘Hueda on [Lake] Hen’.⁶ However, the name Hueda (in its various European misspellings) continued to be applied to the coastal town, now subject to Dahomey. In the present work, to avoid confusion, the form ‘Hueda’ is used only to refer to the pre-1727 kingdom, and after 1727 to the successor kingdom-in-exile established to the west, while the modern form ‘Ouidah’ is used of the town.

Strictly, although the town could properly be described as ‘[in] Hueda’, the use of this name to designate the town specifically is in origin a foreign, European terminology; and in local usage even today ‘Ouidah’ remains its normal name only in French. The correct indigenous name of the town, which is still usually used by its inhabitants when speaking in the local language, Fon, is Glehue (in French spelling, ‘Gléhoué’). This name also regularly occurs in contemporary European sources from the seventeenth century onwards. The earliest extant document written from Ouidah, a letter from an English trader in 1681, is dated, quite correctly, at ‘Agriffie in Whidaw’, i.e. Glehue in Hueda.⁷ Later, Europeans used versions of the name Glehue interchangeably with, although less commonly than, Ouidah: for example, in English ‘Grigue’, ‘Griwhee’ or ‘Grewhe’; in French sometimes ‘Glégoué’ or ‘Grégoué’, but most commonly ‘Gregoy’.⁸

The French trader Jean Barbot, who visited the Hueda kingdom in 1682, gives the coastal village that served as its commercial centre a further different name, ‘Pelleau’.⁹ This name does not occur independently in reference to Ouidah in any later source, and Richard Burton, who enquired about it at Ouidah in the 1860s, found it ‘now unknown’.¹⁰ What seem to be versions of this name do occur, however, in European sources earlier in the seventeenth century, applied to a place on the coast between Popo (nowadays Grand-Popo, 30 km west of Ouidah) and Allada (whose principal coastal trading outlet was at Godomey, 30 km to the east): ‘Fulao’ and ‘Foulaen’.¹¹ From the situation indicated, this was presumably also identical with the later Glehue/Ouidah. The names ‘Pelleau’, ‘Fulao’ and ‘Foulaen’ probably represent Hula, or in an alternative form Pla, which is the name of an ethnic group (whose language belongs, like Fon and Hueda, to the Gbe family) which according to tradition originated in Grand-Popo (whose correct indigenous name is, in fact, Hula) and migrated east to settle at various places along the coast, including in particular Jakin (modern Godomey).¹² ‘Offra’, the name given by Europeans to their principal place of trade in Allada during the second half of the seventeenth century (which was situated close to, though distinct from, Jakin), is clearly another variant of this name. The application of this name to Ouidah presumably reflects the fact that an important, perhaps originally the dominant, element in its population was Hula rather than Hueda.

The foundation of Ouidah

Stories of the foundation of Ouidah are in fact contradictory. The original settlement, which predated European contact, is generally identified today with the quarter called Tové, on the north-eastern side of the town; and this is consistent with a report of the early eighteenth century that the indigenous village of Glehue was situated to the east of the French and English forts there.¹³ There is also, however, a compound called ‘Glehue Daho’, i.e. ‘Great Glehue’, to the west of Tové (nowadays considered to fall within Fonsaramè, the Dahomian quarter of the town); although now occupied by a Dahomian family, Nassara, this is also sometimes claimed to represent the original pre-Dahomian settlement, as its name implies.¹⁴

The founder of Ouidah is regularly named in local tradition as Kpase (in French spelling, ‘Passè’), who is in consequence the subject of a cult in the town to the present. After his death, he is said to have metamorphosed into a tree that still survives as the focus of his shrine, in what is known as Kpasezun, ‘Kpase’s Forest’, located in Tové quarter, or, rather, originally in the bush beyond Tové, but nowadays absorbed within the town.¹⁵ In contemporary sources, however, the earliest reference to the story of Kpase and his cult in Ouidah is only from the 1840s.¹⁶ The inhabitants of Tové are said to have been dispersed in the Dahomian conquest of 1727, but subsequently resettled there under Dahomian rule; they were led in this resettlement by a nephew of Kpase called Tchiakpé, who founded a family that still exists in the quarter.¹⁷ The dominant family in Tové in recent times, which also controls Kpase’s shrine, called Adjovi, rose to prominence only in the nineteenth century, but claims descent from Kpase (although this claim is disputed by others in the town).¹⁸

Kpase is normally supposed to have been a king of Hueda,¹⁹ usually identified as its second ruler, son and successor to the founder of the kingdom, who is named as Haholo.²⁰ While this has become the canonical version, however, a different account of the origins of Ouidah is given in the traditions of the Hula kingdom of Jakin, whose capital was originally Godomey but was removed, after the destruction of that town by the Dahomians in 1732, further east to Ekpè, and subsequently (after the destruction of the latter in turn in 1782) to Kétonou. These recount the migration of the Hula founder-king, called Kposi (‘Possi’), from Grand-Popo to settle at Glehue, which by implication he founded. This account envisages a period when Glehue was independent of the Hueda king at Savi, with whom Kposi is said to have delimited a frontier. However, subsequently the Savi king is said to have made war on Kposi, driving him to move east to settle at Godomey.²¹ Although the traditions state that this displacement occurred in the reign of Hufon (Houffon), the last Hueda king before the Dahomian conquest (reigned 1708–27),²² it is clear that if historical it must in fact have been earlier; Glehue was evidently already subject to Savi by 1671, when the French established their trading factory there, since they negotiated with the Hueda king for permission to settle it.²³

The names ‘Kpase’ and ‘Kposi’ are sufficiently similar to raise suspicions that they might be variants of a single name, and I suggested earlier that Kpase/Kposi was originally a figure in Hula tradition, whose co-option into the list of Hueda kings is spurious.²⁴ But the two names are understood locally to be philologically distinct. At the very least, however, some degree of confusion (or conflation) between the two figures is indicated by traditional stories relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps & Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Origins: Ouidah before the Dahomian conquest
• 2. The Dahomian Conquest of Ouidah
• 3. Dahomian Ouidah
• 4. The Operation of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• 5. De Souza’s Ouidah: The era of the illegal slave trade 1815–39
• 6. The Era of Transition: From slaves to palm oil 1840–57
• 7. Dissension & Decline: Ouidah under King Glele 1858–77
• 8. From Dahomian to French Rule 1878–92
• Sources & Bibliography
• Index