Ouidah. Robin Law
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be buried in Docomè quarter.136 The appropriation of such founding ancestors from among Hueda royalty is, however, significant as a claim of indigenous legitimacy, which was probably asserted against Dahomian overlordship, as well as and probably more than against European primacy. In Sogbadji, however, the claimed indigenous founder is of non-royal Hueda stock. The founder is usually named as Zossoungbo, said to have been a hammock-bearer to the Hueda king at Savi, whose descendants claim the hereditary headship of the quarter; but another Hueda family in Sogbadji, that of Déhoué, disputes priority of settlement with the Zossoungbos.137
The personnel of the ‘European’ forts was in fact predominantly African. The English fort in the 1700s, for example, was manned by only 20 white men, with 100 ‘gromettoes’, or African slaves.138 The ‘European’ quarters also included free Africans who were either in place before the establishment of the European factories or were attracted into their service subsequently. To the present day, these quarters are largely occupied by descendants of persons associated with the forts, including some Europeans who fathered families by local women, but mainly free African employees and slaves. Some of these families claim to be descended from persons employed in the forts before the Dahomian conquest in 1727, although most of those in place today seem to have arrived later, in the period of Dahomian rule. In addition to indigenous Hueda (and Hula) families, the populations of the ‘European’ quarters also included a large non-indigenous African element. Many of the fort slaves employed in Ouidah were from the Gold Coast to the west: in 1694 it was noted that ‘most’ of the slaves employed in the English fort were ‘Gold Coast negroes’, who were considered superior soldiers to the local Huedas; likewise in 1716 the slaves of the English fort at Ouidah (and also of the Dutch factory at Savi) were ‘almost all inhabitants of the Gold Coast, or Minas’.139 Conversely, it may be noted, slaves purchased in Ouidah and Allada were commonly employed by Europeans in their factories on the Gold Coast;140 this being reflected to the present day in the existence of ‘Alata [i.e. Allada]’ quarters in the Dutch and English sections of Accra.141 The logic of employing such ‘foreign’ Africans was, explicitly, that such outsiders were less liable to run away than slaves recruited locally, whose homelands were more accessible. Other fort slaves employed in Ouidah were imported from the interior; in effect, a portion of those purchased for export through the town was retained for local use. The slaves of the French fort in the eighteenth century were generally called ‘Acqueras’, a usage already established by the 1710s, and this was in origin the name of a specific ethnic group, reported to be located in the far interior, from which presumably many of the French fort slaves were derived.142 In 1723 the French fort reported that it had purchased ‘Chamba [Tchamba]’ slaves, this being another ethnicity in the interior (in northern Togo).143
Other African foreigners settled in Ouidah as free immigrants, attracted there by the opportunities for employment in the European trade. The most prominently visible category among such incomers were canoemen from the Gold Coast. As noted earlier, the indigenous people of Ouidah, although using canoes on the inland lagoons, had no tradition of navigation on the sea, whereas on the Gold Coast the inhabitants had employed canoes for sea-fishing and coastwise communication even before the arrival of the Europeans. Since at Ouidah (and elsewhere on the Slave Coast) European ships were unable to approach close to the shore (owing to the dangerous bars and surf), they regularly bought canoes and hired crews of canoemen on the Gold Coast on their way down the coast, in order to land goods and embark slaves.144 During the second half of the seventeenth century, indigenous Gold Coast merchants also began to travel to the Bight of Benin by canoe, to trade independently of (and in competition with) the Europeans, for cloth and other goods for resale on the Gold Coast: in 1688, for example, it was noted of the trade in African cloth at Ouidah that ‘the Blacks come with canoes there to trade in them, and carry them off continuously’.145
Most of the canoemen who came to Ouidah from the Gold Coast returned home on completion of their contracts, but some settled permanently in Ouidah. At the end of the seventeenth century, Cape Coast, the English headquarters on the Gold Coast, was said to be visibly depopulated because of the recruitment from there of canoemen by English ships trading at Ouidah, ‘after which they liking the place, live there, and seldom remember to come home again’.146 Some of these immigrant canoemen entered the service of the European factories in Ouidah on a long-term basis, as free employees, while other canoemen were recruited as pawns (bound to work while paying off debts) or slaves. In the 1710s, it was noted that the English and Dutch factories enjoyed the services of canoemen recruited respectively from Cape Coast and Elmina, whereas the French, having no Gold Coast establishments of their own, were at a disadvantage in this respect, and French ships had to hire canoemen on their voyage down the coast.147 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the French fort also had its own corps of canoemen, who in this case were slaves.148
The cosmopolitan character of Ouidah, arising from its coastwise connections with the Gold Coast, is illustrated by an incident in 1686, when one Gold Coast man, described as from Kormantin but ‘an ancient inhabitant here’, was murdered by another, from Elmina, the latter having been sent to collect a debt owed by the first man to a third party in Elmina.149 Some of these Gold Coast immigrants became prominent people in the local system: in the 1690s the official who served as interpreter to the English factory in Ouidah, who was also a substantial trader in slaves, called ‘Captain Tom’, was in origin from the Gold Coast.150 This Gold Coast element in the population is reflected in the currency of local versions of the personal names used in the Akan languages of the Gold Coast which allude to the day of the week on which a person was born: as for example, Kwadwo, Kwamina, Kwaku and Kofi (given to boys born respectively on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday), which occur in Ouidah in the forms Codjo, Comlan, Cocou and Coffi.
Early Ouidah
By the 1720s, Ouidah was thus made up of the combination of Tové, the original Hueda village, with the three quarters associated with the European forts, Ahouandjigo, Sogbadji and Docomè. The size of the settlement, along what was presumably its longest axis, from the French to the Portuguese fort, was only around 1 km in length. In comparison, the Hueda capital Savi was larger, being estimated in the 1720s to have a circuit of over 4 miles, or 6 km; while the Allada capital was said to have a circuit of 3–4 Dutch miles, that is 12–16 English miles, or around 18–24 km.151
The population of Ouidah at this time is a matter for speculation. The combined personnel of the European forts cannot have been more than a few hundred. In the 1710s the French fort had a total of 160 African slaves, including children as well as adults; by the 1770s this had grown only slightly to between 180–200, who were said to comprise 50 separate ‘families’, each living in its own ‘hut [caze]’ near the fort. The ‘European’ quarters also included free families whose members were employed by or provided services for the forts, who were perhaps roughly as numerous as the fort slaves; by c. 1789, when the French fort was reported to have 207 slaves, the total population of the French ‘village’, including free persons outside the fort, was thought to be nearly 500.152 The only scrap of evidence for the population of the settlement as a whole is an account of the establishment of the Portuguese fort in 1721, which refers to its location as being in a ‘quarter’ containing 300 households (‘hearths’), all the inhabitants of which were employed in the service of foreigners trading in the town.153 This high figure seems likely to refer to the town as a whole rather than the two pre-existing ‘European’ quarters only, and suggests (on the analogy of 200 persons in 50 ‘families’ reported for the French quarter in the 1770s) a population of between 1,000–1,500; the addition of Docomè quarter with the construction of the Portuguese fort would have raised this figure, but the total population of the town is still unlikely to have reached as high as 2,000. In comparison, while no figures are available for Savi, the Allada capital in 1660 was thought to have 30,000 inhabitants.154
In addition, there was a substantial transient population, in the form of African officials and merchants from Savi, as well as Europeans from visiting ships, and especially slaves in transit to embarkation from the shore. The total number of slaves annually passing through Ouidah, which peaked at around 15,000 in the early eighteenth century, was in fact