Ouidah. Robin Law
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stressed was not Hueda’s ability to import European firearms but the financial resources that enabled it to hire mercenary soldiers from other African communities for its wars.199 In relation to the dominant hinterland state of Allada, however, its potential power was limited by sheer demographic weight: it was estimated (probably with some exaggeration) that Allada had twenty times the population of Hueda, a disproportion beyond what could be offset by greater financial resources.200 Also, Hueda’s potential power was compromised in the early eighteenth century by chronic internal divisions, which may well have been exacerbated by competition over revenues from the Atlantic trade, although this was certainly not their only cause.201
The ultimate fall of Hueda to conquest by Dahomey in 1727 on the face of it also presents no mystery. In addition to Hueda’s persisting internal divisions, which critically undermined its efforts at self-defence on this occasion, the Dahomian forces were decisively superior qualitatively, Dahomey having developed both a superior military organization and a more systematic military ethos than any other state in the region. This does not, however, demonstrate the irrelevance of the Atlantic slave trade to questions of military power, since the militarization of Dahomey was itself a consequence of the impact of that trade, Dahomey having been a major supplier of slaves for sale at the coast since at least the 1680s and its forces being by the 1720s equipped with imported European firearms obtained in exchange for such slave exports. The imbalance of military power between Hueda and Dahomey reflected the division of labour that operated within the African section of the slave trade, in which coastal communities such as Hueda operated mainly as middlemen, while the actual process of violent enslavement was left to military states in the interior such as Dahomey.202 The Dahomian conquest of Hueda is thus an illustration, rather than a refutation, of the importance of the Atlantic slave trade in shaping local economic and political developments.
Notes
1. Finn Fuglestad, ‘La questionnement du “port” de Ouidah’, in Oystein Rian et al. (eds), Revolusjon og Resonnement (Oslo, 1995), 125–36.
2. For the history of the Hueda kingdom, see esp. Robin Law, ‘“The common people were divided”: monarchy, aristocracy and political factionalism in the kingdom of Whydah, 1671–1727’, IJAHS, 23 (1990), 201–29; Gilles Raoul Soglo, ‘Les Xweda: de la formation du royaume de Sayi (Saxe) à la dispersion, XVe–XVIIIe siècle’ (Mémoire de maîtrise, UNB, 1994/5).
3. Ewe and Adja are properly the names of particular subgroups of the linguistic family (in eastern Ghana and Togo), while Djedji derives from the name given to speakers of these languages in Brazil; ‘Gbe’ is a neologism, derived from the word for ‘tongue’ (and hence ‘language’) in these languages.
4. Basilio de Zamora, ‘Cosmographia, o descripcion del mundo’ (MS of 1675, in Bibliotheca Publica do Estado, Toledo, Collecçion de MSS Bornon-Lorenzo, no. 244), 47; Joseph de Naxara, Espejo mistico, en que el hombre interior se mira prácticamente illustrado (Madrid, 1672), 278.
5. As related retrospectively (1688) by Jean Barbot: Paul Hair et al. (eds), Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712 (London, 1992), ii, 635–6.
6. This Hueda successor-state has been little studied; but see Soglo, ‘Les Xweda’, 70–78.
7. Robin Law (ed.), The English in West Africa 1681–83: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England 1681–99, Part 1 (London, 1997: hereafter cited as English in West Africa, i), no.476: John Thorne, Glehue, 24 May 1681.
8. The suggestion of Burton, Mission, i, 61–2, that the name ‘Glehue’ was given to the town only after the Dahomian conquest in 1727 is clearly incorrect.
9. Barbot, On Guinea, ii, 635.
10. Burton, Mission, i, 108.
11. ‘Fulao’, e.g. in Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo evangelico de todos Etiopes (Seville, 1627), 51; ‘Foulaen’, in Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten (2nd edn, Amsterdam, 1676), 2nd pagination, 115.
12. For the Hula, see esp. A. Félix Iroko, Les Hula du XIVe au XIXe siècle (Cotonou, 2001), which concentrates on the original Hula homeland to the west. For traditions of Hula migrations to settle at Godomey and other places to the east, see Thomas Mouléro, ‘Histoire et légendes des Djêkens’, ED, ns, 3 (1964), 51–76.
13. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais en Guinée, isles voisines et à Cayenne (2nd edn, Amsterdam, 1731), ii, 34. Here as often, the published version of this work includes material not in the original manuscript: ‘Journal du voiage de Guinée et Cayenne, par le Chevalier des Marchais’ (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: fonds français, 24223).
14. Fieldwork, Glehue Daho compound, 3 Dec. 2001; Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 225.
15. Described in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 223.
16. Brue, ‘Voyage fait en 1843, dans le royaume de Dahomey’, RC, 7 (1845), 55 (giving the name as ‘Passi’).
17. Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 47–8.
18. Ibid., 47; but see, for example, Agbo, Histoire, 203, who describes the claim as ‘hazardous’.
19. This version first in Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 48. But the other early recension of local tradition, by Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 47, is vaguer: Kpase merely ‘belonged to the Pedah [Hueda] family of which the head was the King of Savi’. The earliest recorded reference to Kpase, in the 1840s, presents him as a purely local figure, ‘cabocir [chief] of a small hamlet in the vicinity of Grégoué [Glehue]’: Brue, ‘Voyage’, 55.
20. So Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 52, and later sources deriving from him, which list only five kings down to and including Hufon (1708–27). However, other versions of the Hueda king list include several additional names: one lists 13 kings of whom Kpase is the eighth, another 14 with Kpase the fourth; for discussion, see Soglo, ‘Les Xweda’, 47–51. Some of the additional kings listed (Yé, Amiton) appear in fact to be persons who ruled over sections of the Hueda in exile after the Dahomian conquest of the kingdom.
21. Mouléro ‘Histoire’, 43–4; also Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 51–2.
22. Hufon’s attack on Kposi is linked by tradition to his war against King Agaja of Dahomey (in 1727), but accounts differ in detail: Mouléro says that Hufon attacked Kposi because he refused to assist him against Agaja, but Reynier says that Hufon’s attack on Kposi came first, and Kposi incited Agaja to attack Hufon in revenge.
23. Barbot, On Guinea, ii, 636.
24. Robin Law, The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden, 1997), 42.
25. E.g. Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 48–9; Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 38.
26. Burton, Mission, i, 146. An earlier (1840s) version of the tradition of the arrival of the first Europeans mentions only Kpase, not Kpate: Brue, ‘Voyage’, 55.
27. For the former version, see Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 48–9; for the latter, Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 51–2.
28. Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 38, 47.
29. Fieldwork, Kpatenon compound, 3 Dec. 2001. This version claims that Kpate was settled in Ouidah even before Kpase, and gave him land to settle there.
30. E.g. Merlo, ‘Hiérarchie fétichiste’, 6.
31. The Hunon’s compound in Sogbadji is described Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 201.
32. Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 36; fieldwork, Déhoué compound, 9 Jan. 1996. Another account claims that the Hunon settled in Sogbadji only during the reign of King Glele of Dahomey (1858–89): K. Fall et al., ‘Typologie des cultes vodoun’, in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 72.
33. Fieldwork, Dagbo Hounon compound, 18 Jan. 1996.
34. Thomas Phillips,