Ouidah. Robin Law

for the trans-Atlantic slave trade were part of it, their commercial and ruling elites being involved in political, social and cultural networks, as well as purely business linkages, which spanned the ocean.²⁰ The study of such African towns, moreover, adds an important comparative dimension to our understanding of the growth and functioning of port cities in the Atlantic world in the era of the slave trade, since previous studies of Atlantic port towns in this period have concentrated on ports in the Americas.²¹ But such American ports were European colonial creations, which functioned as enclaves or centres of European power, a model that is not applicable to Atlantic ports in Africa, which remained under indigenous sovereignty (apart from the exceptional case of Luanda in Angola, which uniquely had already become a Portuguese colony in the sixteenth century).

      There have been a number of studies of particular West African coastal ‘port’ communities in the pre-colonial period, which have served to delineate a number of general issues in their history: the organization of overseas commerce, the relationships between ports and their hinterlands, the effects of their involvement in Atlantic commerce on their political and social structures and demographic growth, and the problems posed for them by the transition from the slave trade to exports of agricultural produce such as palm oil in the nineteenth century.²² Much of this work, however, has dealt with the general history of the states or communities in which ports were situated, rather than with the specific history of the port towns themselves. Examples are, within the Slave Coast, studies of two coastal communities west of Ouidah, the Gen kingdom (which included the port of Little Popo, modern Aného) by Nicoué Gayibor, and the Anlo confederacy (including the port of Keta) by Sandra Greene.²³ Those studies which have focused on the history of coastal towns specifically have generally related to communities which were ‘city-states’, in the sense of being independent of outside political authority: examples being, on the eastern Slave Coast, the study of Badagry by Caroline Sorensen-Gilmour; and beyond the Slave Coast, in the Bight of Biafra to the east, those of Bonny by Susan Hargreaves, of New Calabar by Waibinte Wariboko, Old Calabar by John Latham, and Douala by Ralph Austen and Jonathan Derrick.²⁴ In consequence, these have a rather different and more diffuse focus than the present work, which seeks to highlight especially the development and functioning of Ouidah as an urban community. The work which comes closest to my own concerns among earlier studies of West African port communities is Harvey Feinberg’s study of Elmina, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), to the west.²⁵ But Elmina was a very different sort of place from Ouidah, not only in being a ‘city-state’, but also in the preponderant influence exercised there by a European power, in the form of the Dutch West India Company, so that its history, in relation to that of Ouidah, is illuminating as much by way of contrasts as of similarities.

      The case of Ouidah may also serve to refine or qualify some of the conventional conceptual categories that have been applied to West African ‘port’ communities. In the most general terms, Ouidah can be interpreted as a ‘middleman’ community: this term being understood, as Austen and Derrick propose for the case of Douala, not only in relation to the exchange of commodities, but also with reference to the role of such coastal communities as intermediaries in the transmission of cultural influences, and in the longer term in mediating the accommodation of African societies to European economic and political dominance.²⁶ However, the more specific categories that have been developed in order to elucidate the interstitial position of African coastal ‘middleman’ communities seem more problematic. The concept of an ‘enclave-entrepôt’, applied to Elmina by Feinberg, for example, does not fit the case of Ouidah, where European power was much more limited, and which in this was a more typical case.²⁷ That of a neutral ‘port of trade’, propounded by economic anthropologists of the ‘substantivist’ school, such as Karl Polanyi, although elaborated with reference to the specific case of Ouidah, is not in fact sustained by the detailed empirical evidence relating to the operation of the Atlantic trade there.²⁸

      Chronologically, this study concentrates on the period of Dahomian rule over Ouidah, after 1727, although an introductory chapter deals with the town’s origins, including its earlier history under the Hueda kingdom. The justification for this emphasis relates basically to the nature of the available source material, which is much more abundant for the Dahomian period. This, however, also reflects the fact that Ouidah became much more important under Dahomian rule, not only as a commercial centre, but also now as a centre of provincial administration. The study effectively concludes with the French occupation in 1892, although with a brief epilogue treating the fate of the town under colonial rule. This has been done with some hesitation, since in general there is a strong case for downplaying the conventional perception of the establishment of colonial rule as a watershed, and for tracing continuities and transformations in the ‘middleman’ role into the colonial period, as was illuminatingly done by Austen and Derrick for the case of Douala.²⁹ However, whereas in the cases of ports that remained prominent into the colonial period – such as Accra in Ghana, and Lagos in Nigeria, as well as Douala in Cameroun – the reality of continuity is transparent, this is less true of Ouidah, where the imposition of colonial rule represented more of a historical break. The experience of Ouidah under colonialism was essentially of economic and political marginalization; although this process had begun already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was only intensified and accelerated by the changed conditions of colonial rule.

       Reconstructing Ouidah’s history

      Apart from its intrinsic interest as one of the leading African slave-trading ports, the case of Ouidah also warrants study because the documentation available for its history is exceptionally rich, and serves to pose or illustrate some significant methodological issues of more general relevance in the field of pre-colonial African history, especially in the possibilities of combination of information from different categories of material: basically, as between foreign (European) contemporary and local traditional sources.³⁰

      The greatest mass of detailed documentation for the history of Ouidah derives from the European commercial presence, although the most useful sources are not in fact those deriving directly and specifically from the conduct of European trade. The most informative sources for the eighteenth century are the records of the permanently organized fortified factories which the three leading European nations involved – the French, English and Portuguese – maintained in Ouidah;³¹ among which, the best preserved are those of the English.³² These provide detailed documentation of the forts’ day-to-day activities and interactions with the rest of the community, and thus constitute a rich source for the social and political, as well as the narrowly economic history of the town. With the legal abolition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, these forts were abandoned, leaving something of a hiatus in the evidence until the 1840s. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, documentation on the town’s history is provided above all by the records of the British government, relating to its campaign to suppress the now illegal slave trade, which included the maintenance of a vice-consulate in Ouidah between 1849 and 1852. The French government also intervened in Dahomey, to defend France’s commercial interests, from the 1850s, and likewise maintained a vice-consulate in Ouidah from 1863. Some material is also provided by Christian missions that operated in the town: British Methodists in 1854–67, and French Catholics in 1861–71 and again from 1884. There are also a number of detailed published accounts by European visitors to Ouidah in this period, among which the most informative are those of the Scottish explorer John Duncan in 1845, the British naval officer (engaged in the anti-slaving squadron) Frederick Forbes in 1849–50, and the British consul (and pioneer anthropologist) Richard Burton in 1863–4.³³

      Source material of local provenance also includes some contemporary written material, deriving from the community of settlers from Brazil that was established in the town in the nineteenth century. Occasional items of correspondence from or addressed to Brazilian traders resident in Ouidah are preserved in overseas archives, especially in Britain among papers seized from illegal slave ships intercepted by the British navy. Little comparable material seems to have been preserved in Ouidah itself, although it is frequently claimed that written records which once existed were destroyed by fire or other hazards. A few items do, however, survive in local possession (or at least did so until recently), notably a letter-book of the Brazilian trader José Francisco