Ouidah. Robin Law

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СКАЧАТЬ century the kings of Allada sought to redivert trade away from Ouidah through a ‘port’ under their own control, now Jakin, which inherited the commercial role of Offra, and initially with some success. But this process was overtaken by the Dahomian conquest of both Allada and Hueda in the 1720s, which served to remove obstacles to the passage of trade to Ouidah; and, even more critically, by the subsequent Dahomian destruction of Jakin in 1732, which reconfirmed the concentration of trade at Ouidah.¹⁸³

      A second factor in the shift from Offra to Ouidah is implied in a letter from the English Royal African Company to the king of Hueda in 1701, which states that the English had moved there because of the ‘ill treatment’ which they had received in Allada.¹⁸⁴ One aspect of the better treatment offered at Ouidah was that the Hueda kings accepted lower levels of ‘customs’ for permission to trade. In the 1680s the French at Ouidah were paying the value of 25 slaves per ship for customs, whereas at Offra they had paid 50; total charges, including the hire of porters and canoemen, came to between 32 and 35 slaves per ship at the former, but between 70 and 80 at the latter.¹⁸⁵ By the 1690s, the rate of customs at Ouidah had fallen further, to only 8 slaves, 6 to the king and 2 to the ‘caboceers’, or chiefs.¹⁸⁶ A second aspect was the problem of theft, and the failure of the Allada authorities to repress it; another observer in 1701 explained that no trade was done any longer at Allada, because of the reputation of its people for ‘cheating and stealing’.¹⁸⁷ Correspondence from the English company’s Offra factory in the early 1680s also alludes to problems in recovering debts.¹⁸⁸

      To the extent that the greater attractiveness of Ouidah over Offra related to the policies pursued by their rulers, these were subject to change over time. By the 1710s the differential in customs between Ouidah and its rivals had been substantially reduced, although not entirely eliminated; the charges for permission to trade at Jakin, now the principal port of Allada, being only 12 slaves in all (6 to the king, 4 to the governor of Jakin, one each to two other chiefs), doubtless driven down by the need to compete with Ouidah.¹⁸⁹ By the 1690s also, Ouidah itself had acquired a reputation for the prevalence of petty theft, both by porters carrying goods up from the beach and from the European warehouses, the people of Ouidah being considered worse thieves than those of the Gold Coast.¹⁹⁰ There is no record, however, of problems at Ouidah over issues of credit: an account of trading in the 1690s stresses rather the meticulousness of the African merchants there in the prompt settlement of their debts.¹⁹¹

      That the trade nevertheless remained concentrated at Ouidah was in part due, as noted earlier, to the political history of the region, as this affected relations between Allada (and later Dahomey) in the interior and Ouidah and Jakin at the coast. But in addition, it seems likely that Ouidah’s continued dominance reflected in large part the forces of inertia. It is noteworthy that the pattern of concentration of the slave trade at a single port within the Bight of Benin is paralleled in other regions of western Africa, as for example the dominance of Bonny in the Bight of Biafra; and indeed it also mirrors the situation in Europe, where a single port was likewise commonly dominant within the slave trade of each European nation, for example Liverpool in England and Nantes in France. As a recent analysis co-authored by Eltis himself has suggested, this pattern of concentration probably reflects, in both Europe and Africa, cost savings arising from access to market information in established ports.¹⁹² On the Bight of Benin itself, on the European side of the trade, existing investment in the forts in Ouidah also operated to discourage relocation elsewhere.

      Karl Polanyi linked the concentration of the slave trade at Ouidah to its status as a ‘port of trade’, which was politically ‘neutral’ and militarily ‘weak’, and therefore acceptable to traders of the different nationalities involved.¹⁹³ This idea of a ‘neutral’ place of trade does, indeed, have considerable plausibility, not only in abstract theory but also in the documented history of this particular region: in the later eighteenth century, the lagoonside port of Abomey-Calavi, on the shore of Lake Nokoué, east of Ouidah, was described as a ‘neutral place’, which functioned as ‘a sort of free fair, where the different nations go to trade’.¹⁹⁴ It is doubtful, however, whether this analysis has any bearing upon the rise of Ouidah as an Atlantic port in the late seventeenth century. Ouidah was indeed maintained by the Hueda kings as a ‘neutral’ port as regards traders of different European nations, as decreed in the treaty of 1703 forbidding hostilities among Europeans, and this policy was clearly among the factors that attracted European traders there: as the director of the French fort noted in 1716, it was ‘the only place of neutrality where the vessels of every nation are bound to find a secure retreat in time of [intra-European] war’.¹⁹⁵ This, however, was a neutrality imposed upon Europeans by the strength of the Hueda state, rather than a reflection of the latter’s ‘weakness’; and Hueda was not in any sense recognized as a ‘neutral’ area by its African neighbours. Although Hueda was certainly a small and therefore relatively weak power in relation to the interior state of Allada, which was its principal supplier of slaves, its independence of Allada was sustained in the face of systematic opposition from the latter (including an actual military invasion in 1692), rather than accepted as serving its convenience.¹⁹⁶

      Eltis also observes that ‘the question of why, with all the income from its Atlantic trade and a significant military capacity, Whydah was unable to maintain its independence or, indeed, become a major power has yet to be addressed’, and suggests that this might indicate that ‘the transatlantic slave trade was not the central event shaping African economic and political developments’.¹⁹⁷ This also seems an idiosyncratic reading of the literature. Hueda did, in fact, develop as a significant regional ‘power’ in the coastal area in the late seventeenth century, extending its authority at least briefly over Grand-Popo to the west and disputing control of Offra with Allada to the east;¹⁹⁸ and contemporary Europeans, at least, thought that its military power was enhanced by the wealth it derived from the Atlantic trade, although it is noteworthy that the factor they stressed was not Hueda’s ability to import European firearms but the financial resources that enabled it to hire mercenary soldiers from other African communities for its wars.¹⁹⁹ In relation to the dominant hinterland state of Allada, however, its potential power was limited by sheer demographic weight: it was estimated (probably with some exaggeration) that Allada had twenty times the population of Hueda, a disproportion beyond what could be offset by greater financial resources.²⁰⁰ Also, Hueda’s potential power was compromised in the early eighteenth century by chronic internal divisions, which may well have been exacerbated by competition over revenues from the Atlantic trade, although this was certainly not their only cause.²⁰¹

      The ultimate fall of Hueda to conquest by Dahomey in 1727 on the face of it also presents no mystery. In addition to Hueda’s persisting internal divisions, which critically undermined its efforts at self-defence on this occasion, the Dahomian forces were decisively superior qualitatively, Dahomey having developed both a superior military organization and a more systematic military ethos than any other state in the region. This does not, however, demonstrate the irrelevance of the Atlantic slave trade to questions of military power, since the militarization of Dahomey was itself a consequence of the impact of that trade, Dahomey having been a major supplier of slaves for sale at the coast since at least the 1680s and its forces being by the 1720s equipped with imported European firearms obtained in exchange for such slave exports. The imbalance of military power between Hueda and Dahomey reflected the division of labour that operated within the African section of the slave trade, in which coastal communities such as Hueda operated mainly as middlemen, while the actual process of violent enslavement was left to military states in the interior such as Dahomey.²⁰² The Dahomian conquest of Hueda is thus an illustration, rather than a refutation, of the importance of the Atlantic slave trade in shaping local economic and political developments.

      Notes

      1. Finn Fuglestad, ‘La questionnement du “port” de Ouidah’, in Oystein Rian et al. (eds), Revolusjon og Resonnement (Oslo, 1995), 125–36.

      2. For the history of the Hueda kingdom, see esp. Robin Law, ‘“The СКАЧАТЬ