Ouidah. Robin Law
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were, in comparative terms, the fortunate ones, in escaping the brutality of the middle passage and the harsher exploitation that was generally the fate of those taken into slavery in the Americas; indeed, it is recalled that, when Marie Lima’s mother visited Ouidah, in an attempt to secure her daughter’s liberation and return home (probably after the French conquest of Dahomey in 1892), she declined to leave. Partly in recognition of this, the descendants of slaves in Ouidah tend to maintain an identification as clients with those of their ancestors’ owners, even when not actually absorbed into the family through intermarriage.
The experience of those who were transported into trans-Atlantic slavery is in comparison very poorly represented in the surviving documentation. A few of those sold into export, as noted above, were able to return to Africa, and some of the families founded by repatriated former slaves in Ouidah preserve some recollection of the circumstances of their original enslavement in Africa. Joaquim Lima, for example, was himself descended from an ex-slave from Brazil, and tradition in his family recalls that its founder, who was probably his grandfather, was originally from Mahi, north of Dahomey, and had been seized as a slave when he went to Abomey in an attempt to redeem his brother, who had earlier been taken captive by the Dahomian army.61 But firsthand accounts by victims of the Atlantic slave trade are very rare. Of over a million slaves who were exported through Ouidah, only two appear to have left any sort of personal record. One of these, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, was exported through Ouidah to Brazil in 1845, and published his autobiography in the USA in 1854.62 A second, Kazoola, alias Cudjo Lewis, was taken from Ouidah to Alabama, USA, in 1860; his story was recorded over 50 years later, when he was a very old man.63
Given that their sufferings and exploitation were the basis of the prosperity of Ouidah, as well as of the much greater opulence of the slave-owning European colonial societies in the Americas and of slaving ports in Europe, the slaves themselves arguably ought to occupy centre-place in an analysis of the history of the town during its period as a port of the Atlantic slave trade. But, although an attempt has been made in what follows to give attention to what the slave trade meant for the slaves who passed through Ouidah in transit to the Americas, as well as for the permanent inhabitants of the town, it cannot be claimed that proportionally, in terms of the amount of space their experience is accorded, they are adequately represented. The dedication of this book to their memory is offered as a compensatory gesture of acknowledgement of this inevitable failure.
Note on spelling
The spelling of local words and names in this study presents considerable difficulty. The Fon language can be transcribed in a variety of ways. Most accurately, a phonetic script is employed, which includes some letters additional to (or with different values from) the standard Latin alphabet. This script is not widely used in writing, however, Fon words and names being more commonly spelled in the standard Latin alphabet, thereby losing some of the distinctions made in the phonetic script. Very often, moreover, spelling follows French conventions, offering for example ‘ou’ for ‘u’, ‘dj’ for ‘j’, ‘c’ for ‘k’. As an illustrative example, the name of the kingdom from which that of the town of Ouidah is derived may be written ‘Xwedā’ in the phonetic script, ‘Hueda’ in the Latin alphabet, or ‘Houéda’ in the French spelling.
The conventions adopted in this work are a compromise among the conflicting demands of accuracy, consistency and recognizability. For ordinary Fon words, titles and common personal names and for the names of pre-colonial kingdoms and ethnic groups, the quasi-phonetic transcription in the standard Latin alphabet is generally employed: as, for example, ‘Hueda’. For the names of towns, and of families that still exist in Ouidah, however, it seemed proper to use the forms that are currently in use, which are generally in the French form: for example, the names of two villages to the south of Ouidah are given as ‘Zoungbodji’ and ‘Djegbadji’ (which is what a visitor will find on local signposts), rather than ‘Zungboji’ and ‘Jegbaji’; and those of three of the major merchant families of the town as ‘Adjovi’, ‘Codjia’ and ‘Gnahoui’ (which is how family members nowadays spell these names), rather than ‘Ajovi’, ‘Kojia’ and ‘Nyawi’. Spelling conventions were, of course, not standardized until recently, so that early written sources employ spellings that are inconsistent with each other, as well as being inaccurate by modern standards. In general, such deviant forms are employed in this work only in direct quotations from sources; otherwise modern spellings are preferred. In a few cases, however, corrupt early forms of local toponyms have become sanctioned by usage, and remain in general use today, and these are retained here, examples being the names of the kingdom ‘Dahomey’ and its capital ‘Abomey’ (rather than the more strictly correct ‘Danhomé’, ‘Agbomé’). A special problem is posed by the case of Ouidah itself, whose name is commonly given in Anglophone literature (including earlier work of my own) in the form ‘Whydah’, which was the usual English spelling in the pre-colonial period. But here considerations of familiarity have to yield to the usage of the community itself, in which ‘Ouidah’ is the spelling in current and official use.
Notes
1. The French colony became the independent Republic of Dahomey in 1960, the change of name to Bénin occurring in 1975. The Republic of Bénin should be distinguished from the kingdom of Benin, situated in what is today Nigeria.
2. In the present work, to avoid confusion, the name Dahomey is used only with reference to the pre-colonial kingdom, the modern territory being referred to as Bénin.
3. David Eltis & David Richardson, ‘West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade: new evidence of long-run trends’, S&A, 18 (1997), 16–35; David Eltis et al., ‘Slave-trading ports: towards an Atlantic-wide perspective’, in Robin Law & Silke Strickrodt (eds), Ports of the Slave Trade (Stirling, 1999), 12–34.
4. These figures relate to the period 1650–1870. Perhaps a further 1 million slaves were exported before 1650; the Bight of Benin would have contributed a much smaller proportion of this earlier trade, and Ouidah very little.
5. Alfred Métraux, Le Vaudou haïtien (Paris, 1958), 22.
6. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley, 1998), 58; for Azili in Ouidah, see Chapter 3.
7. Barry Clifford, Expedition Whydah (New York, 1999).
8. Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah (London, 1980). For de Souza, see below, Chapters 5–6.
9. For slave trade commemoration in Ouidah, see Thereza A. Singleton, ‘The slave trade remembered on the former Gold and Slave Coasts’, S&A, 20 (1999), 150–69; Roberta Cafuri, ‘Silenzi della memoria: la tratta degli schiavi’, Africa (Rome), 55/2 (2000), 244–60; Robin Law, ‘Memory, oblivion and return in commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade in Ouidah’, Republic of Bénin, in Ralph Austen (ed.), The Atlantic Slave Trade in African and Diaspora Memory (forthcoming, Durham, N.C.). See also the official Bénin government publication, Nouréini Tidjani-Serpos & Patrick Écoutin, Ouidah, La Route des esclaves (English version, Ouidah, The Slave Route) (Cotonou, n.d.); and two local tourist guide-books: Martine de Souza & Mère Jah Evejah, Bienvenue à Ouidah au Bénin/Welcome to Ouidah in Benin (Ouidah, [1998]); Martine de Souza, Regard sur Ouidah/A Bit of History (Ouidah, 2000).
10. ‘The African Trade’, BBC 2, 1998; ‘The Slave Kingdoms’, episode in the series ‘Into Africa with Henry Louis Gates, Jr’, BBC 2, 1999.
11. Esp. Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1991).
12. I.A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and its Neighbours 1708–1818 (Cambridge, 1967); Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville, 1998); David A. Ross, ‘The autonomous kingdom of Dahomey 1818–1894’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1967); John Reid, ‘Warrior aristocrats in crisis: the political effects of the transition from the slave trade to palm oil commerce in the nineteenth-century kingdom of Dahomey’ (PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 1986).
13. For a preliminary treatment, see Robin Law, ‘The origins and evolution of the merchant community in Ouidah’, in Law &