Ouidah. Robin Law
Company did maintain a factory (which was not fortified) in the Hueda kingdom between 1703 and 1727, but this was situated at the capital Savi, rather than Ouidah.114 Although the company’s local chief factor in 1726 obtained permission to build a lodge ‘where the other nations have their forts’, i.e. in Ouidah, this was not in fact carried out;115 and after the destruction of Savi, including the European factories there, in the Dahomian conquest of 1727, the Dutch company no longer maintained any establishment in the area. Although it is of course possible that some later individual Dutch trader maintained a factory in Ouidah, this can only have been ephemeral, and the authenticity of the ‘traditional’ site is suspect.
The idea of a Danish fort in Ouidah seems to have arisen from a misreading of the same early eighteenth-century account that wrongly mentioned a Dutch fort there.116 Contemporary sources, again, do not corroborate this; the factor of a Danish ship that traded at Ouidah in 1784–5 lodged in the English fort.117 Recent tradition asserts that the Danish fort was on the site occupied in the late nineteenth century by the French firm of Cyprien Fabre, immediately east of the English fort, but this is probably a confusion; contemporary evidence suggests that the former occupant of this building was the British trader Hutton, who after relinquishing the English fort to the British vice-consulate in 1852 occupied premises east of the fort, which after his death (in 1856) passed into the possession of a Spanish merchant, and by the mid-1860s into the hands of the Dahomian crown.118
The European forts were distinctive within Ouidah by being built, in part, in two storeys, being consequently known locally as singbo (or singbome), ‘great houses’.119 Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the Ouidah forts were structures of much less military strength than the better-known examples on the Gold Coast. Unlike the latter, those at Ouidah were built in local materials – in mud rather than in brick or stone, which left them subject to rapid dilapidation if not regularly maintained, and with thatched rather than tiled roofs, which made them more vulnerable to fire. Their relative weakness is demonstrated by the fact that the Dahomians were able to capture and/or destroy forts in Ouidah on three occasions, the Portuguese in 1727, the French in 1728 and the Portuguese again in 1743; on the latter two occasions at least, the destruction of the forts was due to the buildings catching fire and causing the explosion of stores of gunpowder. Moreover, the Ouidah forts were located a considerable distance from the sea, and therefore their cannon could not, like those on the Gold Coast, command the landing-places for their own supplies; in consequence, as Europeans explicitly recognized, even if they could defeat direct attack they could be starved into surrender.120 In the early eighteenth century, both the English and the Dutch pressed for permission to build forts at the seaside, but the Hueda king, Hufon, refused, precisely because he was aware of the power that English and Dutch forts exercised on the Gold Coast, and feared that the erection of such a fort at the shore would make the Europeans ‘masters of his port’. When the trade at Ouidah was disrupted by the activities of European pirates in 1719–20, Hufon did authorize the construction of a stone fort on the beach by the French, in order to protect ships trading in his dominions, but, again, the idea was not pursued.121
The forts in Ouidah operated as secure places of storage for goods and slaves, rather than exercising any serious military power over the local community. The concept of an ‘enclave-entrepôt’, which has been applied to coastal towns on the Gold Coast in which Europeans settled, such as Elmina, does not seem applicable to Ouidah, which was in no sense an enclave of European authority, or even of their informal predominating influence.122 In Ouidah, there was never any question that the European establishments were in the final analysis subject to local control, rather than representing independent centres of European power.123 This was explicitly expressed in the policy of the Hueda kings of forbidding fighting among Europeans in the kingdom, even when their nations were at war in Europe, which was formalized in 1703, when the king obliged the local agents of the Dutch, English and French companies to sign a treaty prohibiting hostilities in the Ouidah roadstead, or within sight of the shore, on pain of payment of damages to the value of eight slaves;124 one chief of the English fort was deported in 1714, after a fracas with his French counterpart, which was deemed to be a breach of this treaty.125
Each of the three European forts in Ouidah became the centre of a quarter of the town, occupied by persons in the service of the forts. These were commonly called the French, English and Portuguese quarters (or, in contemporary European sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘towns’, ‘villages’ or ‘camps’), or in local parlance Zojage-ko, Glensi-ko and Aguda-ko (ko meaning ‘quarter’).126 Of these names, ‘Glensi’ is merely a local version of the name ‘English’, but the others call for further comment. ‘Zojage’ is explained as meaning ‘Fire has come to earth’, which is said to have been an exclamation of wonder uttered by Zingbo, the companion of Kpate, upon sight of the first Europeans to land at Ouidah (alluding to their ‘red’ skin colour, which was thought to resemble fire).127 This story implies that it was originally applied to Europeans in general (these first visitors being in fact Portuguese), but it was subsequently restricted to the French in particular; when first documented in a contemporary source, in a vocabulary collected in Brazil among African slaves from the Dahomey area, it already designated the French specifically.128 ‘Aguda’ is a term of uncertain etymology, which is commonly understood nowadays to mean ‘Brazilian’, and when first attested, in the same vocabulary, was applied specifically to Bahia, as opposed to Portugal; but in West Africa in the nineteenth century its reference was national rather than geographical, applied to ‘Portuguese’ in general, including Brazilians, rather than to Brazilians as distinct from Portuguese.129
In recent times, the three ‘European’ quarters of Ouidah have more commonly been known by other names, that of the French fort being called Ahouandjigo, that of the English Sogbadji, and the Portuguese Docomè, these names being first attested in the contemporary record in the 1860s.130 The name ‘Ahouandjigo’ is translated as ‘where war cannot come’, and is usually explained by tradition as recording an undertaking by the Hueda king Ayohuan not to make war on the French fort there;131 it seems more likely, however, that it alluded to the policy of the Hueda kings of forbidding fighting among Europeans at Ouidah, which was reaffirmed in the treaty signed in 1703, the year before the establishment of the French fort. That of ‘Sogbadji’ for the English quarter refers to So, the vodun of thunder, meaning ‘So’s enclosure’; it is said to have been the place where the bodies of persons killed by lightning were taken, from which they could be redeemed for burial only on payment of a fine.132 The etymology of the name ‘Docomè’, ‘Do quarter’, is uncertain.133
Although their origins are understood at one level to be connected with the establishment of the European forts, it is noteworthy that all three of these quarters celebrate indigenous Hueda persons rather than Europeans as their actual founders; by implication, these were already settled locally before the arrival of the various European groups whom they welcomed. Ahouandjigo claims to have been founded by a prince of the Hueda royal family called Agbamu (in French ‘Agbamou’); a prominent family in the quarter, that of Agbo, claims descent from him.134 Docomè is said to have been founded by a man called Ahohunbakla (‘Ahohounbacla’), who belonged to the same family as Kpate, the hero who welcomed the first Europeans, who is also sometimes said to have belonged to Hueda royalty.135 Both Agbamu and Ahohunbakla are also said to have survived to lead their quarters in resistance to the Dahomian conquest of the town in the 1720s–40s. The details of these traditions are suspect. The claim in both cases that the founder of the ward was also its leader against the Dahomians, although chronologically possible (at any rate, if Agbamu is assumed to have been associated with the building of the French fort in 1704, rather than the original establishment in 1671), may be doubted; it seems more likely that Agbamu and Ahohunbakla are composite or symbolic figures, into whose careers as recorded in the traditions events from different epochs have been telescoped. Indeed, as will be seen in the next chapter, it is clear that the historical Agbamu cannot have been either the founder of Ahouandjigo or its leader against the Dahomians, since he was in fact a king of the Hueda in exile, two generations after the Dahomian conquest. It may also be suspected that the name ‘Ahohunbakla’ is