Ouidah. Robin Law
numbers might be held for some time locally, in the European factories: the English factory in 1687 was said to have space to lodge between 600 and 800 slaves.155
In its spatial organization, Ouidah clearly differed radically from towns further inland that served as capitals of states, such as Savi and Allada (and later, Abomey), which were centred around the royal palace.156 Ouidah was multi-centred, focused on the three European forts; in so far as it had a single centre, this was perhaps the Zobé market.157 However, to what extent Ouidah yet formed a coherent community, rather than an assemblage of discrete settlements, is doubtful. In the early eighteenth century, the indigenous ‘village of Grégoué’ (i.e. Tové quarter) was still described as separate from the French and English forts, which were ‘a very short distance’ away.158 The establishment of the Portuguese fort in 1721, immediately south of Tové and east of the English fort and Sogbadji quarter, produced greater contiguity of settlement, grouped around the market of Zobé; but the French fort with Ahouandjigo to the north-west remained physically distinct. In fact, it is not clear whether, within the Hueda kingdom, the town was administered as a unit or, perhaps more likely, the three European forts were individually responsible to the king of Hueda, and separately from the local indigenous authorities. There was a Hueda chief called ‘Prince Bibe’ or ‘Captain Bibe’, who is named along with the king as negotiating to permit the establishment of the French at Ouidah in 1671 and who in 1682 seems to have been residing at Ouidah, rather than at the capital Savi.159 In the early eighteenth century, a list of Hueda chiefs who served as ‘governors’ of ‘provinces’ within the kingdom includes one entitled ‘Gregoué Zonto’, who was presumably the governor of Glehue;160 and maybe this is the title which ‘Prince Bibe’ held.161 But whether he had overall administrative responsibility for the town, including the European forts, is doubtful; more probably, he was governor of the indigenous ‘village’ only.
The operation of the European trade in the Hueda kingdom gave rise to a number of new official positions. Most important was that of ‘Captain of the White Men’, as Europeans correctly translated the indigenous title Yovogan, or Yevogan, which is already attested in the 1680s,162 and from the 1690s was held by a man called ‘Carter’.163 There was also an assistant to the Yovogan called ‘Agou’, and separate ‘captains’ for the European nations with factories in Hueda: the French (whose captain was called ‘Assou’), English (served in the 1690s by ‘Captain Tom’), Dutch and Portuguese.164 But these officials who dealt with European traders did not, like their counterparts under Dahomian rule later, form a local administration for Ouidah; in fact, there is no evidence that they even resided there. In 1718 the Yovogan Carter was reported to be building a new house outside the capital Savi, where he was in consequence now expected to attend less regularly, but this residence was not at Ouidah; a later map of the Hueda kingdom shows Carter’s village situated to the east of Savi, while that of the ‘French captain’ Assou was even further from Ouidah, to the north-west of the capital.165
Ouidah in this period did not engross the conduct of the European trade, since much of the business of European traders had to be transacted at the capital Savi. The emphasis in some modern accounts on the ‘separation of the political and commercial capitals’ as a feature of the organization of the slave trade in Hueda is in fact misconceived – or, more precisely, it incorrectly reads back into the period of the Hueda kingdom a distinction that emerged only after the Dahomian conquest.166 When the English Royal African Company first sent a ship to trade in Hueda, in 1681, its chief factor ‘bought slaves at Sabba [Savi], the king’s town’, while his assistant was ordered to ‘Agriffie [Glehue], the lower town [i.e. Ouidah]’, where he presumably managed the landing of goods.167 This pattern continued even when permanent factories were established in Ouidah. The French trader Barbot in 1682 thus noted that ‘it is with the king that you do the trade’, i.e. at the capital Savi, while the goods were ‘brought from the vessel to the lodge’ at Ouidah; and the chief of the English factory at Ouidah in 1685 reported that he ‘went up to the king’s town’ to buy slaves for an English ship trading there.168 It has been suggested that, although this was the practice earlier, by the first decade of the eighteenth century the trade had been localized at Ouidah, rather than Savi; but there is no basis for this in the contemporary evidence.169 In 1716, for example, it was still explicitly noted that slaves brought for sale were lodged in prisons ‘in the place where they are traded, this place is Xavier [Savi], the king keeps his residence there’.170 At this period the Dutch West India Company, as noted earlier, actually maintained its factory at Savi rather than at Ouidah. By 1716 the English and French companies, in addition to their forts in Ouidah, also maintained lodges at Savi; in fact, the local French and English directors normally resided in Savi, leaving the forts at Ouidah under subordinate officers.171 When the Portuguese established their fort at Ouidah in 1721, they also maintained a subsidiary lodge in Savi.172 The factories at Ouidah served only as storehouses for goods and for slaves in transit to and from Savi; an English trader in 1694 noted that the factory at Ouidah ‘proved very beneficial to us, by housing our goods which came ashore late, and could not arrive at the king’s town (where I kept my warehouse) ere it was dark’, and also when slaves could not be embarked owing to bad weather.173
European activities in Ouidah provided economic opportunities for the local inhabitants mainly in the form of employment in ancillary services, such as the supply of provisions and firewood, and especially as porters and canoemen. It has been argued that European trade in Africa, even at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century, was simply too small in scale, measured by per capita export earnings, to have had any major impact on indigenous societies.174 While this may have some a priori plausibility for West Africa as a whole and for many particular societies in its interior, it is clearly not applicable to coastal communities such as Ouidah which were heavily involved in the trade. The value of slave exports through Ouidah by the end of the seventeenth century was enormous, in relation to the population of the town; 10,000 slaves per year in the 1690s, when the price of an adult male slave in the local currency of cowry shells was 10 ‘grand cabess [large heads]’ (40,000 shells), equivalent to £12.10s. (£12.50), would have represented (allowing for lower prices paid for women and children) the value of around 320 million cowries (£100,000), at a time when the wage for a porter per journey (in effect, per day) in Ouidah was 3 ‘tockies’, or 120 cowries (9 pre-decimal pence, £0.033/4).175 But most of the income from this trade would have accrued to officials and merchants in the capital Savi (and beyond, to the officials and merchants of states in the interior from where many of the slaves were purchased), rather than to the inhabitants of Ouidah. It is difficult to estimate what sums would have been expended on goods and services in Ouidah itself, but some indication is provided by the statement of Barbot in 1682 that every ship had to pay the value of five to six slaves for the carriage of goods from the shore to the factory in Ouidah, and the same again for the canoes that landed goods and embarked slaves at the beach.176 In the case of the canoemen, since many of these were hired from the Gold Coast rather than permanently resident in Ouidah, these earnings were partly, indeed perhaps predominantly, repatriated to the Gold Coast, rather than being expended or retained locally.177 But, assuming 40 ships per year, and the price of a slave to be that of an adult male, payments for porters alone at this rate would have amounted to around 8.8 million cowries (£2,750) a year, representing wages for over 73,000 person-days, or, assuming that workers took one day of rest in each four-day ‘week’, continuous year-round employment for around 270 porters.
Porterage and other services for the European trade, of course, represented only one of the major sources of income for people in Ouidah, along with fishing, salt-making and agricultural production. The continuing importance of fishing, in particular, is attested by a European account of the town in the early eighteenth century, which observes that its wealth derived as much from the fact that its inhabitants were ‘all fishermen and canoemen’ as from the presence of European factories.178 There is little basis on which to estimate the relative importance of the European trade in comparison with other sectors of the local economy. One stray figure recorded in the 1690s is that the revenue derived by the king of Hueda from a toll levied on fishing was the value of 100 slaves, presumably