Ouidah. Robin Law
(Agbodrafo), in modern Togo, 70 km west of Ouidah, while to the east it is navigable as far as Godomey, where a brief overland portage can be made to Lake Nokoué, from where navigation continues further east to Lagos and beyond, in modern Nigeria. Some nineteenth-century sources claim that the navigation along the lagoon to the east was originally continuous from Ouidah into Lake Nokoué, the interruption at Godomey being due to recent silting.65 However, it was reported already in the seventeenth century that the lagoon was ‘lost in the earth’ at Jakin (Godomey);66 recollections of uninterrupted travel by canoe eastwards seem to relate to an artificial clearing of the northern branch of the lagoon, the Toho, which was only temporarily effective.
It is not strictly accurate to describe Ouidah as a ‘lagoonside port’, any more than as an ‘Atlantic port’,67 since it is in fact situated over 3 km north of the permanently navigable waterway. Although the width of the lagoon varied both seasonally and from year to year, and in times of very heavy rainfall (as happened, for example, in 1686) the intervening land might be flooded, permitting canoes to carry goods over part of the distance to the town, this was clearly exceptional.68 Nevertheless, Ouidah was sufficiently close to the lagoon to be able to benefit from the canoe-borne traffic along it: in the 1680s, for example, an English trader at Ouidah noted that trade could be done with Little Popo to the west for slaves, locally made beads and corn, communication being ‘by the river’, i.e. the lagoon.69 Slaves were also supplied to Ouidah from Offra to the east, although it is not specified that these were brought by canoe.70 In the nineteenth century, communication between Ouidah and Godomey was more usually on foot, although the journey was sometimes made by canoe along the lagoon.71 Beyond Godomey, Lake Nokoué and the lagoons further east provided a continuous navigable waterway, which was regularly used for trade. For example, in the mid-seventeenth century salt manufactured in the coastal area of Allada was being taken by canoe to Lagos, and thereby to ‘Lukumi’, or the Yoruba interior, from which locally made cloth was brought in exchange; and later Yoruba cloth was also taken further west to Ouidah.72 Very probably, such trade had also existed prior to the arrival of the Europeans, although its scale was certainly increased by their presence, Europeans purchasing African-made cloth and beads (both for resale on the Gold Coast to the west) and corn (for the provisioning of slave ships), brought along the lagoon, as well as slaves.73
The importance of trade along the lagoon also afforded opportunities and temptations for piracy, although here again this would presumably have become more profitable after the initiation of the European maritime trade and the stimulus it gave to the lagoon traffic. Burton in the 1860s was told that Ouidah had been ‘originally a den of water-thieves and pirates’.74 This is corroborated by a contemporary account of the mid-seventeenth century, relating to ‘Foulaen’, which as noted earlier seems to be identical with Ouidah, which reports that it was accustomed to send ‘robbers’ to raid the coastal towns of Allada to the east.75
In contrast to the lagoon, the sea beyond it can have played only a marginal material (as opposed to religious) role in the life of early Ouidah. Unlike on the Gold Coast to the west, the inhabitants of the Slave Coast did not venture onto the sea prior to the arrival of the European traders. This was evidently due, on the one hand, to the greater difficulty of navigation on the sea in this region, due to the heavy surf and dangerous sand bars noted earlier, and, on the other, to the availability of the much easier facility for fishing and canoe-borne communication afforded by the lagoon. Indeed, the local people largely continued this avoidance of the sea even after the initiation of the European maritime trade; as will be seen hereafter, European ships trading at Ouidah had to bring both canoes and canoemen with them from the Gold Coast to the west, in order to communicate with the shore. Even after this introduction of seagoing canoes, little or no fishing in the sea was done at Ouidah, the canoes being employed only in servicing the overseas trade.76 It has sometimes been suggested that African merchants from the Gold Coast may have conducted a canoe-borne maritime trade with the Slave Coast even before the arrival of the Europeans; but there is no evidence for such a trade before the mid-seventeenth century, and it is more likely that such contacts were initiated by the Europeans, and only subsequently imitated by the Gold Coast merchants.77 Earlier, interest in the sea was probably restricted to foraging along the shore, for crabs, as recalled in the traditional story of Kpate’s meeting with the first European visitors cited above.
Both the role and the importance of Ouidah were, however, transformed by the arrival of the Europeans and the initiation of maritime trade, which until the mid-nineteenth century was primarily in slaves. The Portuguese first explored along the Bight of Benin in 1472, and a regular trade began during the second half of the sixteenth century; from the 1630s the Portuguese monopoly of this trade was challenged by the Dutch, joined in the 1640s by the English and in the 1670s by the French. European trade was initially located at Grand-Popo, west of Ouidah; but by the beginning of the seventeenth century had shifted east to the kingdom of Allada, where the principal centre of the trade, and the site of the European factories, was initially at Offra.78 In 1671, however, the French West Indies Company transferred its factory from Offra to Ouidah, initiating the latter’s rise to become the pre-eminent slave port within the region.
The French establishment at Ouidah in 1671 is often assumed to mark the beginnings of European trade there.79 However, it should be noted that King Hufon of Hueda in 1720 said that the Portuguese had been the first Europeans to trade in his kingdom.80 Local tradition in Ouidah also generally identifies the first European traders welcomed by Kpate and Kpase as Portuguese, while the French are said to have arrived only subsequently. According to one (no doubt apocryphal) story, the first Portuguese in Ouidah buried an inscribed stone to commemorate their visit; and when they returned, to find the French now in residence, they were able to disinter it to establish their claim to precedence.81 The dates of 1580 or 1548 assigned locally for the arrival of the first Portuguese, as noted earlier, are merely speculative, but it must have occurred sometime during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. There are, indeed, a couple of earlier references, in the 1620s, to Portuguese trade at ‘Fulao’, which as noted earlier was probably an alternative name for Ouidah.82 But it is likely that any such early contact was not sustained, and that therefore the French establishment in 1671 remains significant as marking the beginnings of continuous European trade at Ouidah.
The French move from Allada to Hueda was soon followed by the other principal European nations engaged in the trade, the English and Portuguese in the 1680s and the Dutch in the 1690s, leaving Ouidah as the dominant ‘port’ in the region by the end of the seventeenth century. The slave trade through Ouidah had reached a volume of probably around 10,000 slaves per year by the 1690s, and attained its all-time peak in the years 1700–13, when probably around 15,000 slaves annually were passing through the town;83 at this period, indeed, Ouidah may have been accounting for around half of all trans-Atlantic exports of African slaves.84
The European forts
As far as the record goes, the first permanent European trading post in Ouidah (or indeed, anywhere in the Hueda kingdom) was established by Henri Carolof (Heinrich Caerlof), a German in the service of the French West Indies Company, as has been seen in 1671.85 One version of local tradition claims that even before this, in 1623, a Frenchman called Nicolas Olivier had settled in Ouidah, and founded the quarter of the town called Ganvè, to the west of the site of the French fort.86 But this story is certainly spurious: contemporary sources do not support the suggestion of any French activity at Ouidah before the 1670s. The Olivier (or d’Oliveira) family of Ganvè is in fact descended from a man who was director of the French fort in Ouidah at a much later date (1775–86); the attempt of the d’Oliveiras to claim priority of settlement may derive from rivalries for the leadership of the ‘French’ community in Ouidah in the nineteenth century.
The French factory was abandoned when it was destroyed in a local war in 1692; a French captain who visited the Hueda kingdom in 1701 requested its re-establishment, but the king was initially willing only to allow the French a lodge in his capital Savi.87 However, in 1704 a visiting French expedition secured permission not only for the re-establishment of a lodge nearer the coast, but also for its fortification; the