Ouidah. Robin Law
an African-born freed slave who had returned from Brazil to resettle in Africa, made out at Ouidah in 1864.35
More substantial, as well as of greater chronological depth, is the information provided by local traditions. Much of this material also exists already in written form. Two surveys of Ouidah traditions were made by French colonial officials, Marcel Gavoy in 1913 and Reynier in 1917; the purpose of the collection of this material was explicitly to understand the existing political system, in order to inform administrative arrangements under French colonial rule.36 Although these were published only many years later, they evidently circulated in Ouidah in typescript earlier, and have exercised considerable influence on local perceptions of history.
There is also a substantial tradition of local historical writing by African authors. Among such works by local writers, the earliest was a study of Ouidah ‘origins’ published in a Roman Catholic church journal in 1925–6, by Paul Hazoumé, a leading figure in the literary history of Bénin, who was in origin from Porto-Novo rather than Ouidah, but had worked for several years as a schoolmaster in the latter town.37 The most substantial local history (and an indispensable source and guide for the modern historian) is a book by Casimir Agbo, published in 1959.38 There are also a number of histories of particular Ouidah families. Traditions of the de Souza family, descended from the Francisco Felix de Souza mentioned above, were published by Norberto Francisco de Souza, a grandson of the founder and successor to the headship of the family, in 1955; and a more extended compilation of material from various sources was published by Simone de Souza, a Frenchwoman married into the family, in 1992.39 Substantial histories also exist of the Dagba family, descended from a man who served as Yovogan, or Dahomian governor, of Ouidah for an exceptionally long period in the nineteenth century (1823–1870s); and of the Quénum family, who were the most prominent indigenous Dahomian merchants in the town in the second half of the nineteenth century.40 This material available already in written form has been supplemented by local fieldwork undertaken by myself, during several visits to Ouidah between 1992–2001. Besides interviewing informants in the town, this has involved extensive conversations with experts in local history, including members of the staff of the Historical Museum of Ouidah: especially Martine de Souza, one of the museum guides (and a great-great-great-granddaughter of the original de Souza).
Something may be said here of the character of historical ‘tradition’ in Ouidah. First, it should be stressed that it is not exclusively ‘oral’; not only has much of it been recorded in writing, as has been seen, since the early twentieth century, but it has also evolved in interaction with written sources. Gavoy’s survey of 1913 already represents an attempt to combine local traditions with information derived from contemporary European sources; and this conflation of written and oral material has remained characteristic of local history writing in Ouidah ever since. Agbo’s Histoire, for example, cites the earlier studies of Gavoy and Reynier, together with published sources, as well as additional material of his own; the latter including reminiscences of persons with direct personal experience of the late pre-colonial period, as well as more strictly ‘traditional’ material relating to earlier times. In Ouidah, as in coastal West Africa more generally, the ‘traditions’ current nowadays in oral form are regularly subject to the influence of ‘feedback’ from written sources, including now especially Agbo’s own work.41
It should also be noted that local traditions provide relatively little in the way of a narrative of the history of the community as a whole, apart from certain major events, such as the original foundation of the town, the arrival of the first European traders, the Dahomian conquest in the 1720s, and the establishment in the town of Francisco Felix de Souza in the nineteenth century. Local historical memory is in general more focused on the component elements that make up the town. As it existed by the end of the nineteenth century, Ouidah comprised twelve quarters, each with its own distinct origins and history. These were: first, Tové, the original settlement, which predated European contact, on the east of the town; second, three quarters associated with the European forts which were established in the town in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – from west to east (which is also the chronological order of their establishment) Ahouandjigo (French), Sogbadji (English) and Docomè (Portuguese); third, two quarters on the north of the town, which represent the Dahomian administrative establishment installed after the conquest of the 1720s – Fonsaramè, the ‘Fon [i.e. Dahomian] quarter’ (the location of the residence of the Dahomian viceroy), and Cahosaramè, ‘Caho’s quarter’ (originally the site of the Dahomian military garrison, whose commander had the title Caho); and finally, six further quarters were added in the nineteenth century, all on the western side of the town, and all founded by individual merchants – Ganvè, founded by the Afro-French trader Nicolas d’Oliveira; three quarters associated with the Brazilian Francisco Felix de Souza, called Blézin, or in French Brésil (i.e. Brazil), Maro and Zomaï, and two established by indigenous African traders, Boya and Quénum quarters.42 Gavoy’s survey thus follows a sketch of the history of the town by separate notes on its various quarters, while Reynier’s is wholly organized around the distinctive histories of the twelve quarters, and indeed most of its material relates to the origins and history of individual families within them; and a large section of Agbo’s later Histoire reproduces this framework (along with most of Reynier’s detailed information). In addition, as noted above, some prominent Ouidah families have published their own histories; and my own fieldwork has also related mainly to the history of particular families and compounds in the town.
The focus of local tradition on individual families is paralleled by the mass of detailed documentation in contemporary sources, which record the names or titles of many individuals in Ouidah with whom the various European agencies had dealings. In many cases, the same persons figure in both traditional and contemporary sources; in fact, my own interest in the possibility of a study of the town’s social history was initially stimulated by the realization, in my first visits to Ouidah in the 1980s, that many of the names of families still living in the town were already familiar to me from the contemporary documentation of the pre-colonial period. The combination of traditional and contemporary sources often permits a quite detailed confrontation between the two, in which each can serve both as a control over and to elucidate obscurities in the other; and the history of particular families can be traced over several generations, in some cases back into the eighteenth century.
Map 2 Ouidah, showing the quarters and major historical sites
A further important ‘source’ for the history of Ouidah is the town itself, as it survives to the present. One consequence of Ouidah’s marginalization in the twentieth century was that it was not subject to radical redevelopment. There were some important changes: notably the elimination of the office of the Dahomian viceroy, together with his official residence, whose site was given for the construction of the Roman Catholic cathedral in 1901, and the demolition of the French fort (now a public square) in 1908. But the basic layout of the town as it existed in the second half of the nineteenth century was preserved; the major colonial developments were added on to the town, as an extension of it (to the north-west), rather than disturbing the character of its historical centre. It is thus quite possible to use the walking tour of the town in Richard Burton’s account from the 1860s to find one’s way around and identify the major monuments even today.43 Moreover, a detailed survey of the town’s architectural heritage was undertaken as a joint project of the Bénin government with the French Organization for Overseas Research in 1990–91, and provides invaluable information on the town’s history.44
The problem of perspective: Ouidah and the slave trade
Any study of an African ‘middleman’ community such as Ouidah in the precolonial period necessarily emphasizes the role of specifically ‘African agency’ in the operation of the Atlantic slave trade.45 I am very conscious, in part through some of the responses to earlier presentations of my own work, that this is a controversial issue, in so far as there is a widespread disposition to regard any emphasis on the voluntary cooperation of Africans in the slave trade as, by implication, an attempt to deny or minimize