Ouidah. Robin Law

my starting point is within the history of Africa rather than of the slave trade as such, that I approach the latter from the perspective of its mode of operation and effects within Africa. Nor do I personally subscribe to the view that the involvement of some Africans in the operation of the slave trade serves to exonerate either the European societies or the individual Europeans who engaged in it. In part, this is because it implicitly assumes a sort of moral calculus, positing a fixed quantum of responsibility available for distribution, which would seem bizarre if applied in other contexts – in a case of murder, for example, where contributory responsibility assigned to others would not, I think, normally be thought to cancel or even diminish the guilt of the murderer. Beyond this, in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke,⁴⁷ I am in general sceptical about the enterprise of assigning guilt retrospectively, where this runs the risk of applying standards of moral or legal judgement in an ahistorical manner, as in the case of the slave trade, which, although nowadays consensually stigmatized as a ‘crime against humanity’, was for most of its history legal under both European and African law.⁴⁸ The historian is more properly concerned with issues of causation than of moral judgement of past events. Here, the view that the Atlantic slave trade was driven by supply conditions within Africa rather than by demand in the Americas seems to me perverse.⁴⁹ Even in narrowly economic terms, it is difficult to square with the statistics of the trade, which were characterized, at least from the late seventeenth century onwards, by a combination of increasing volume of exports with rising prices, implying that this expansion was demand-driven.⁵⁰ Beyond this, at a more basic level, it was after all not Africans who turned up in ships at ports in Europe or America offering cargoes of slaves for sale. As King Glele of Dahomey said in 1863, to a British mission urging him to abolish the trade, ‘He did not send slaves away in his own ships, but “white men” came to him for them . . . if they did not come, he would not sell’.⁵¹

      It may also be said that, in stressing African agency in the slave trade, this work is consistent with the perceptions of the people of Ouidah themselves, who are of course in many cases descendants of the slave merchants prominent in the town’s earlier history. It is sometimes suggested that Africans are nowadays reluctant to admit the ‘complicity’ of their ancestors in the slave trade.⁵² In Ouidah, however, there has been little disposition to deny this aspect of the community’s history. The local historian Casimir Agbo, for example, explicitly invokes the partnership that operated between European slave-traders and the local African authorities: ‘The Europeans were very accommodating in their relations with the Hueda kings . . . and the latter benefited from the situation . . . [this] secured large resources to the throne’; likewise, when Ouidah was brought under the rule of the kings of Dahomey after 1727, ‘all these judicious arrangements [for the administration of the town] and above all the slave trade enriched the kings and their representatives’.⁵³ When the French authorities demolished the former French fort in Ouidah in 1908, this provoked protests from the community that it was a valued monument of local history, and in particular of its long association with France.⁵⁴ Why the French demolished the fort is not clear, though many people in the town nowadays believe that it was out of feelings of shame at France’s earlier role in the slave trade; if this is so, it is ironic, since local people evidently did not have any such feelings of shame.

      There has been, at least until very recently, a local consensus that the slave trade was a good thing for Ouidah. Burton in the 1860s found that Kpate, the man who according to tradition welcomed the first European traders to Ouidah (and thereby inaugurated the town’s participation in the slave trade) was ‘worshipped as a benefactor to mankind’;⁵⁵ and the cult of Kpate continues to the present. Under French colonial rule, when Ouidah, although now commercially marginalized, remained a leading centre of French education and literate culture, the emphasis in celebration of Kpate shifted from the material benefits of the slave trade to its role in the penetration of European influence: in the 1930s, it was noted that Kpate was venerated as ‘the hero of the importation of European civilization’.⁵⁶

      This perspective evidently focuses on the implications of the slave trade for the local community, those who benefited directly or indirectly from the sale of slaves, rather than for the victims of the trade. The experience of the slaves themselves does not appear to have figured largely in local understandings of the trade. Attitudes to the slave trade in Ouidah have also, however, been affected by the fact that some of those exported as slaves returned to resettle in West Africa. One quarter of Ouidah, Maro, in the south-west of the town, was settled by former slaves returning from Brazil, beginning in the 1830s. Casimir Agbo, while acknowledging the brutalities involved in their original enslavement and transportation, nevertheless maintains, on the authority of some of these returned ex-slaves, that slaves ‘were quite well treated in the Americas’, and in particular that ‘almost all’ gained their freedom and ‘most’ returned home to Africa (whereas, in fact, only a very small minority of those exported into slavery were able to return). Again, he stresses their role in the dissemination of European culture: their enslavement in America enabled them to get ‘a taste of civilization’ and by their return they ‘contributed to the civilization of their country of origin by the modern habits which they transmitted to their descendants and relatives’.⁵⁷

      In more recent projects of historical commemoration in Ouidah, emphasis has continued to be placed upon the cultural interactions deriving from the slave trade, though now with increasing interest in the town’s role in transmitting the African religious traditions visible in America, especially the vaudou religion of Haiti, Brazilian candomblé and Cuban santería, as well as in the Brazilian influence in West Africa. Reciprocal cultural influences between Brazil and Bénin are thus central to the representation of the history of Ouidah in the exhibition in the Historical Museum established in the 1960s;⁵⁸ while the transmission of African religion to the Americas was celebrated in the UNESCO-sponsored ‘Ouidah ’92’ conference (actually held in January 1993), which took the form of a ‘world festival of vodun arts and cultures’. It can be argued that this emphasis on the cultural consequences of the slave trade serves implicitly to silence the sufferings of its victims.⁵⁹ However, the victims of the trade were also commemorated in monuments constructed in connection with the ‘Ouidah ’92’ conference along the ‘slaves’ route’ from the town to the sea, notably the ‘Door of No Return [La Porte du Non-Retour]’ at the embarkation point on the beach. And in 1998 an explicit ‘ceremony of repentance’ was instituted in Ouidah, held annually in January, at which speeches are made requesting forgiveness from the descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora for the community’s historical role in their forcible transportation.

      In writing the history of Ouidah, there is no doubt that part of the problem of perspective arises, in my own case, from the experience of courteous welcome and generous assistance received in the course of my research from members of the Ouidah community nowadays, and a perhaps inevitable tendency to read this friendliness back into the historical representation of their ancestors. It is difficult in any case to attempt to reconstruct the history of a community from within without historical empathy sliding into a degree of emotional sympathy. However, the most important dimension of the problem relates to the more basic technical problem of the nature of the sources. Not only does this study depend mainly on European rather than African sources, but even the African sources available reflect the perspective of local beneficiaries of the slave trade – Dahomian administrators and local merchants, or persons providing ancillary services (such as porters and canoemen) – rather than of its victims. Moreover, in so far as local traditions principally represent the collective memories of particular families, they inevitably recall slave-traders such as Francisco Felix de Souza in relation to their descendants, as benevolent founding ancestors, rather than in relation to the slaves whom they sold, as exploiters of their fellow-humans.

      Local tradition does give some access to the experience of enslavement, to the extent that many slaves were retained within Ouidah, rather than being sold into export; and such slaves also have descendants, who may preserve some memory of their lives. Martine de Souza, for example, is descended not only from the slave-trader Francisco Felix de Souza, but also, in the maternal line, from a slave; one of her great-grandmothers, Marie Lima, being in origin a captive taken, at the age of 15, by the Dahomian army in an attack on the town of Meko to