Ouidah. Robin Law

       Origins

       Ouidah Before the Dahomian Conquest

      The history of Ouidah is intelligible only by reference to its geographical situation, which has however often been misunderstood and misrepresented in accounts of the operation of European trade in West Africa. It is commonly referred to as a ‘port’, but this is strictly inaccurate, indeed positively misleading.¹ Although it became an important centre for European maritime trade from the seventeenth century onwards, it is not in fact situated on the coast, but some 4 km inland, actually to the north of the lagoon which in this area runs parallel to the coast, and so separates Ouidah from the seashore. The slaves and other commodities exported through Ouidah had therefore to be taken overland and across the lagoon to the beach, rather than being embarked directly into European ships. At the coast itself, moreover, there is no ‘port’ in the sense of a sheltered harbour, but only an open roadstead. Indeed, heavy surf along the beach, and on sandbars parallel to it, makes it impossible for large vessels to approach close to the shore. European ships trading at Ouidah had therefore to stand 2–3 km off, and to communicate with the shore through smaller vessels, for which purpose African canoes were normally employed. The town’s relative isolation from the sea, combined with its proximity to the coastal lagoon, played a critical role in shaping its historical development, during as well as prior to its involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade.

      Although ‘Ouidah’ is the spelling of the town’s name current nowadays, it occurs in European sources between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in various other forms: in English most commonly ‘Whydah’, in Dutch ‘Fida’, in French ‘Juda’, and in Portuguese ‘Ajudá’. All these are attempts to render an indigenous name that would be more correctly written, by modern conventions, as ‘Hueda’ (or in a dialect variant ‘Peda’). Strictly and originally, Hueda was not the name of the town nowadays called Ouidah, but rather of the kingdom to which it belonged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whose capital was Savi, 11 km further north.² The people of Hueda belonged to the same linguistic group as the Fon of Dahomey, although historically distinct from them; this language family is nowadays generally called by scholars ‘Gbe’ (but formerly commonly ‘Ewe’ or ‘Adja’, and in French colonial usage ‘Djedji’).³ In contemporary sources, the name Hueda may have been noted first by Spanish missionaries visiting the kingdom of Allada to the north-east in 1660, who recorded it (apparently) in the form ‘Jura’ or ‘Iura’;⁴ more certainly, it enters the historical record in 1671 (as ‘Juda’), when the French first established a trading factory there.⁵ In 1727 the Hueda kingdom was conquered by the inland kingdom of Dahomey. As a political unit, it thereafter survived only in the form of a minor successor-state, formed by refugees from the Dahomian conquest, on the western shore of Lake Ahémé (Hen), about 20 km west of Ouidah, this relocated kingdom being distinguished as Hueda-Henji, ‘Hueda on [Lake] Hen’.⁶ However, the name Hueda (in its various European misspellings) continued to be applied to the coastal town, now subject to Dahomey. In the present work, to avoid confusion, the form ‘Hueda’ is used only to refer to the pre-1727 kingdom, and after 1727 to the successor kingdom-in-exile established to the west, while the modern form ‘Ouidah’ is used of the town.

      Strictly, although the town could properly be described as ‘[in] Hueda’, the use of this name to designate the town specifically is in origin a foreign, European terminology; and in local usage even today ‘Ouidah’ remains its normal name only in French. The correct indigenous name of the town, which is still usually used by its inhabitants when speaking in the local language, Fon, is Glehue (in French spelling, ‘Gléhoué’). This name also regularly occurs in contemporary European sources from the seventeenth century onwards. The earliest extant document written from Ouidah, a letter from an English trader in 1681, is dated, quite correctly, at ‘Agriffie in Whidaw’, i.e. Glehue in Hueda.⁷ Later, Europeans used versions of the name Glehue interchangeably with, although less commonly than, Ouidah: for example, in English ‘Grigue’, ‘Griwhee’ or ‘Grewhe’; in French sometimes ‘Glégoué’ or ‘Grégoué’, but most commonly ‘Gregoy’.⁸

      The French trader Jean Barbot, who visited the Hueda kingdom in 1682, gives the coastal village that served as its commercial centre a further different name, ‘Pelleau’.⁹ This name does not occur independently in reference to Ouidah in any later source, and Richard Burton, who enquired about it at Ouidah in the 1860s, found it ‘now unknown’.¹⁰ What seem to be versions of this name do occur, however, in European sources earlier in the seventeenth century, applied to a place on the coast between Popo (nowadays Grand-Popo, 30 km west of Ouidah) and Allada (whose principal coastal trading outlet was at Godomey, 30 km to the east): ‘Fulao’ and ‘Foulaen’.¹¹ From the situation indicated, this was presumably also identical with the later Glehue/Ouidah. The names ‘Pelleau’, ‘Fulao’ and ‘Foulaen’ probably represent Hula, or in an alternative form