Ouidah. Robin Law

      Ouidah is situated in the coastal area (in the Department of Atlantique) of the modern Republic of Bénin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey) in West Africa.¹ In origin, it is an indigenous African town, which had existed long before the French colonial occupation in 1892. In the pre-colonial period, it had belonged successively to two African states, first the kingdom of Hueda (whence the name ‘Ouidah’) and from 1727 that of Dahomey, from which the French colony took its name;² and the first language of its inhabitants today remains Fon, the language of Dahomey, with French inherited from the colonial period as the superimposed official language of administration and education. Today, Ouidah has a population of around 25,000, which by modern standards is quite modest, and it is dwarfed by the two leading cities of southern Bénin: the official capital Porto-Novo, 60 km to the east (with a population probably around 200,000), and the commercial centre and international port of Cotonou, 40 km to the east (perhaps approaching 1,000,000).

      In the precolonial period, however, Ouidah was the principal commercial centre in the region and the second town of the Dahomey kingdom, exceeded in size only by the capital Abomey, 100 km inland. In particular, it served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade. The section of the African coast on which Ouidah is situated, in geographical terms the Bight (or Gulf) of Benin, was known to Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Slave Coast’, from its prominence as a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade; and within this region Ouidah was by far the most important point of embarkation for slaves, far outshadowing its nearest rival, Lagos, 150 km to the east (in modern Nigeria). Ouidah was a leading slaving port for almost two centuries, from the 1670s to the 1860s. During this period, the Bight of Benin is thought to have accounted for around 22 per cent of all slaves exported to the Americas, and Ouidah for around 51 per cent of exports from the Bight.³ Given the current consensual estimate of between 10 and 11 million slaves exported from Africa in this period, this suggests that Ouidah supplied well over a million slaves, making it the second most important point of embarkation of slaves in the whole of Africa (behind only Luanda, in Angola).⁴

      This prominence of Ouidah in the Atlantic slave trade is reflected in the occurrence of versions of its name in various contexts in the African diaspora in the Americas. For example, there is a village called ‘Widah’ in Jamaica, originally a sugar plantation, presumably so named through being settled with slaves imported from Ouidah. In Haiti, one of the principal deities of the Afro-American vaudou religion, the goddess Ezili, is distinguished in one of her forms as Ezili-Freda-Dahomi, ‘Ezili [of] Ouidah [in] Dahomey’;⁵ although one modern account has argued that Ezili is a purely Haitian creation, without African antecedents, there is in fact in Ouidah to the present day a shrine of Azili (sic), a female river spirit, who is evidently the prototype of the Haitian goddess.⁶ The name of the town was also commemorated in that of the ship of the pirate Sam Bellamy, the Whydah, wrecked off Cape Cod in what is now the USA in 1717, but located and excavated by marine archaeologists, to become the subject of a museum exhibition in the 1990s, this ship having been originally, prior to its capture and appropriation by pirates, engaged in the slave trade and named after the West African town.⁷ Ouidah’s prominence in European commerce is also reflected in the application of the name Whidah-bird to a genus of the weaver-bird that is in fact common throughout tropical Africa but became familiar to the wider world through Ouidah; in English usage, the name was commonly corrupted into ‘widow-bird’ (whence, rather than directly from the name Ouidah, its zoological name, Vidua), under which form it was celebrated in a poem by Shelley.

      In more recent times, Ouidah has figured in a historical novel dealing with the slave trade, by Bruce Chatwin, based on the career of the Brazilian slave-trader Francisco Felix de Souza, who settled permanently in the town in the 1820s.⁸ In the 1990s a systematic attempt was made to exploit Ouidah’s historical role in the Atlantic slave trade for its promotion as a centre of ‘cultural tourism’, with the development of monuments to the slave trade and its victims along the road from the town to the beach where slaves were embarked, now designated ‘the slaves’ route [la route des esclaves]’.⁹ This also led to the town featuring in television programmes dealing with the slave trade, including a BBC ‘Timewatch’ programme in 1997 and an episode of the African travels of Henry Louis Gates, Jr, in 1999.¹⁰ What has hitherto remained lacking, however, is any study based on detailed research of the town’s history in general, or of its role in the Atlantic slave trade in particular: a deficiency which this volume seeks to redress.

       Situating Ouidah’s history

      The present work represents, at one level, a continuation of my earlier research on the history of the Slave Coast, and in particular its role as a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade.¹¹ A central concern of the present book, as of this earlier work, remains the organization of the African end of the slave trade, and the impact of participation in this trade on the historical development of the African societies involved. The present work, however, is informed by a significantly different perspective. My earlier analysis was very much written from the viewpoint of the Dahomian monarchy, in effect of the inland capital city of Abomey; and this focus is shared by other earlier work on the history of Dahomey, including the major published studies by Ade Akinjogbin (1967) and Edna Bay (1998), and the unpublished doctoral theses of David Ross (1967) and John Reid (1986).¹² This more recent research, on the other hand, in focusing on the coastal commercial centre of Ouidah, represents, if not quite a view from below, nevertheless a perspective from what was, in political terms, the periphery rather than the centre. It therefore foregrounds rather different aspects of the operation of the slave trade, including especially the evolution of the merchant community in Ouidah, and in particular the growth of a group of private traders that was distinct from the official political establishment, and whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.¹³

      African coastal entrepôts such as Ouidah played a critical role in the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, by helping to coordinate exchanges between hinterland suppliers and European ships, thereby accelerating their turn-round, and also by supplying them with provisions to feed the slaves on their voyage.¹⁴ In addition to extending and deepening understanding of the working of the slave trade, a study of Ouidah also represents a contribution to a second area of growing interest recently within African historical studies, urban history. Studies of urban history in Africa have tended to concentrate on the growth of towns during the colonial and post-colonial periods;¹⁵ but in West Africa especially, substantial towns existed already in the pre-colonial period, and Ouidah offers an exceptionally well-documented case-study of this earlier tradition of urbanism.¹⁶ Within southern Bénin, Ouidah provides the premier example of the ‘second generation’ of precolonial towns, which served as centres for European maritime trade: what have been termed, although somewhat infelicitously, ‘fort towns [villes-forts]’, in distinction from the ‘first generation’ of ‘palace-cities [cités-palais]’, which served as capitals of indigenous African states, such as Abomey.¹⁷

      The study of African coastal communities such as Ouidah also has a relevance for the currently fashionable project of ‘Atlantic history’, i.e. the attempt to treat the Atlantic as a historical unit, stressing interactions among the various states and communities that participated in the construction and operation of the trans-Atlantic trading system.¹⁸ Although proponents of Atlantic history have tended to concentrate on links between Europe and the Americas, it needs to be recognized that African societies were also active participants in the making of the Atlantic world.¹⁹ If there was an ‘Atlantic