Ouidah. Robin Law
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quarters of Ouidah, added by Reynier in 1917. The more elaborate account of the local historian Casimir Agbo published in 1959, which has become canonical, reproduces most of their material, but also supplements and revises it in significant ways.102
One interesting, though unsurprising, aspect of these traditions is that they present a much more heroic account of Hueda resistance to the Dahomian conquest in 1727 than the contemporary accounts suggest. In the story as told in the traditions, Hufon is in fact alleged to have twice defeated the Dahomian forces sent against him by Agaja, mainly by virtue of his possession of cannon but also because he had arranged for the removal of the hammers from muskets he had earlier supplied to the Dahomians. Agaja is said to have been successful only at a third attempt, and then through treachery, employing agents in Ouidah to discover and send on the missing hammers for the muskets and to render Hufon’s cannon ineffective by pouring water on their supplies of gunpowder. These measures to undermine the Hueda forces are usually credited to a daughter of Agaja, called Na-Geze, whom he married to Hufon for this purpose. A variant story, however, credits the neutralization of Hufon’s cannon rather to Zossoungbo, the head of Sogbadji quarter of Ouidah, who, when summoned by the king to join the muster of the Hueda forces against the Dahomians, instructed his men to carry out this sabotage.103 The tale of the Dahomian princess Na-Geze is a version of a widespread traditional stereotype, in which women given or taken in marriage betray the secret (material or spiritual) of a king’s power, and is more illuminating about general perceptions of the ambiguous position of women, subject to divided loyalties between their natal and marital families, than about the circumstances of the fall of Hueda; if it relates at all to Ouidah’s historical experience, it may reflect conditions under Dahomian rule, when royal women married to local officials and merchants were commonly perceived to act as spies for the king.104 But the alternative story blaming the Hueda Zossoungbo may well represent a genuine recollection of the role of internal treachery, as recorded in contemporary sources. The emphasis on the decisive role played by imported artillery and firearms in these stories, on the other hand, evidently also serves purposes of local pride, by implication underlining the importance of Ouidah and its trade in supporting Dahomian military power after the conquest.
The Ouidah traditions also distinguish, more starkly than the contemporary accounts, between the original conquest of the Hueda kingdom in 1727 and the extension of Dahomian control over Ouidah, which is presented as being effected only after several years of further struggle. It is claimed that after 1727 the Dahomians, although now occupying the Hueda capital Savi, were initially unable to establish control over Ouidah, because the inhabitants of the latter were supported by the European forts with their cannon, so that possession of the town remained contested between the Dahomians and the Hueda – a representation which, as has been seen, although simplified and exaggerated, has some basis in events as recorded in the contemporary sources. Eventually, however, in the course of a clash in which the Hueda had been initially the victors, the tables were turned when the Hueda alienated the Europeans by firing on the English fort and killing its governor’s wife, provoking the European forts to turn their artillery on the Hueda, and the Dahomians were then able to conquer the town, in the process attacking and destroying the Portuguese fort. According to Gavoy’s version, the Hueda were led in this war by a chief called Foli, while the Portuguese fort was defended by Amoua, both of whom were captured and executed by the victorious Dahomians. Reynier adds that the forces of Ahouandjigo and Docomè quarters were led against the Dahomians by their respective founders, the royal princes Agbamu and Ahohunbakla, with Amoua merely a lieutenant of the latter; Agbamu as well as Amoua was killed, but Ahohunbakla survived to transfer his service to the Dahomians after the conquest. Agbo, however, synthesizes the traditional stories to rather different effect, presenting Agbamu as ‘king’ rather than merely chief of a quarter, with Foli as his subordinate military commander, implying that Agbamu was the successor to the Hueda kingship, who had set himself up as king in Ouidah after the fall of Savi.105 In this version, therefore, it is the supposed overthrow of Agbamu in Ouidah in 1743, rather than that of Hufon in Savi sixteen years earlier, which is presented as representing the end of the Hueda monarchy.
These accounts, however, clearly represent a conflation of the campaign of 1743 with subsequent fighting against the exiled Hueda established to the west. ‘Foli’, as seen earlier, was actually the commander of the Little Popo forces who joined the exiled Hueda in their initially successful attack on Ouidah in 1763; and the story of the Hueda provoking retaliation from the English fort by killing the governor’s wife also belongs to this later campaign.106 The displacement of the latter incident to the original conquest in local narratives was already noted in the 1860s.107 Agbamu, on the other hand, was the name of the king of the Hueda in exile who was killed by the Dahomians in 1775. The traditional account thus runs together a number of originally discrete episodes, each of which was in its way decisive: the campaign of 1743 was the last occasion when the Hueda had been able temporarily to reoccupy Ouidah, that of 1763 was the defeat of their last attempt to repossess the town and that of 1775 marked the definitive subjugation of the Hueda community in exile. Together, they could reasonably be taken to represent the consolidation of Dahomian control over Ouidah, through the destruction of the independent power of the Hueda.
This representation also has the important implication of stressing continuity between the pre-1727 Hueda kingdom and the post-1727 Ouidah community and therefore the status of the latter as a victim of foreign conquest. Already in the 1860s, it was noted that the Dahomian conquest of Ouidah remained vivid in local memory and was recounted in terms that appropriated the leaders of post-1727 Hueda raids on the town as defenders of local independence, and even represented the Hueda invasion of 1763 as a local rebellion against Dahomian rule.108 The sense of subjection to the Dahomians as foreign conquerors was evidently central to the self-image of Ouidah, despite the reality that, demographically, it became a predominantly Dahomian town.
The repeopling of Ouidah
Ouidah suffered considerable destruction in the Dahomian wars of conquest between 1727 and 1743. Local tradition recalls that Tegbesu, in the campaign of 1743, ‘completely razed the town’.109 This is confirmed and elaborated by traditions relating to particular quarters: Docomè, the quarter of the Portuguese fort, was ‘pillaged and burned’ by the Dahomians and its inhabitants were killed or taken captive or fled to the west, while in Ahouandjigo, the quarter of the French fort, the inhabitants were ‘almost all massacred’.110 Only Sogbadji, the quarter of the English fort, is said to have escaped relatively unscathed, because Agaja gave orders for it to be ‘spared’, in return for the assistance which Zossoungbo, the head of the quarter, had allegedly given in the campaign against Hufon.111
When Dahomian control of Ouidah had been firmly established, however, measures were taken to reconstitute the town. Tradition in Sogbadji recalls that Agaja charged Zossoungbo to invite those who had fled to return to the town. The traditions of other quarters also recall the repeopling of the town under Dahomian rule. In Ahouandjigo, it is said that the French complained to Agaja that the depopulation of the quarter by war had left them short of labourers, in response to which he sent them a new batch of 100 male and 100 female captives; the family that later held the headship of the quarter, Atchada, claims descent from the head of this new batch of fort slaves.112 Other families in Ahouandjigo, however, claim origins antecedent to the Dahomian conquest, notably that of Agbo, hereditary servants in the French fort, which claims descent from the Hueda king Agbamu. In Docomè and Tové also, tradition stresses continuity with the pre-Dahomian community, despite the disruption of the Dahomian conquest. In Docomè, it is claimed that Ahohunbakla, the commander of the quarter’s forces against the Dahomians, survived the defeat and was invited by the Dahomians to continue to serve as intermediary in their dealings with the Europeans; Ahohunbakla in turn requested that a son of Amoua, his deputy commander, who had been killed in the war, should be associated with him in this role, and the headship of the quarter subsequently remained in the Amoua family.113 In Tové, following the defeat of Hufon, a man called Sale, who was married to a woman of the Kpase family, made his submission to Agaja, who charged him with recalling those who had fled from the quarter; Sale received from the Dahomian king the surname Tchiakpé, which is still borne by the family of his descendants in the quarter.114 Although there may be an