Ouidah. Robin Law

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СКАЧАТЬ 1671, when the French established their trading factory there, since they negotiated with the Hueda king for permission to settle it.²³

      The names ‘Kpase’ and ‘Kposi’ are sufficiently similar to raise suspicions that they might be variants of a single name, and I suggested earlier that Kpase/Kposi was originally a figure in Hula tradition, whose co-option into the list of Hueda kings is spurious.²⁴ But the two names are understood locally to be philologically distinct. At the very least, however, some degree of confusion (or conflation) between the two figures is indicated by traditional stories relating to the arrival of the first European traders in Ouidah. These agree in attributing the first contact with Europeans to a man called Kpate (‘Patè’), who is said to have been collecting crabs on the seashore when a European ship was passing, and raised a cloth on a pole as a makeshift flag to attract their attention;²⁵ in contemporary sources, Kpate’s name and story were first recorded in the 1860s.²⁶ Like Kpase, Kpate is worshipped as a deified hero. The office of priest of Kpate, or Kpatenon, remains hereditary within a family that claims descent from him, resident in Docomè, the quarter of the Portuguese fort. In different versions of his story, Kpate is associated either with Kpase, the Hueda king at Savi (to whom he allegedly introduced the European traders), or with Kposi, the Hula king settled locally (in whose entourage he originally arrived in Ouidah).²⁷ The former version, it may be noted, implies that Europeans were hitherto unknown; whereas the latter explicitly states that Kposi and Kpate were familiar with them already, from earlier experience at Grand-Popo. There is also a parallel (and evidently related) ambiguity about Kpate’s own ethnic affiliation. Some versions claim that he was, like Kpase, a member of the Hueda royal family;²⁸ current tradition in the Kpatenon family denies this, but agrees that Kpate was Hueda.²⁹ But other accounts state that he was Hula.³⁰ These two traditions, of foundation by the Hueda Kpase and the Hula Kposi, may perhaps be regarded as complementary rather than contradictory, since Ouidah clearly included both a Hueda and a Hula element: the different stories may therefore relate to the origins of different elements within Ouidah, rather than strictly representing alternative traditions of the foundation of the town as a whole.

      The Hula element in Ouidah is represented today most visibly by the cult of Hu, the vodun (god) of the sea, who was in origin the national deity of the Hula people. The priest of the cult, the Hunon (Hounon), nowadays has his compound in Sogbadji, the quarter of the English fort, which was established only in the 1680s;³¹ and one of the oldest-established Hueda families in this quarter, called Déhoué, claims to have invited the first Hunon to settle there, implying Hueda priority of settlement.³² However, the traditions of the Hunon priesthood itself claim that Déhoué was instrumental, not in the Hunon’s original settlement in Ouidah, but in his resettlement there after fleeing from the Dahomian conquest in the 1720s.³³ In any case, there is an older shrine of Hu, located in the area called Adamé, which is now included within the Maro quarter of Ouidah, but before the nineteenth century was beyond the south-western limits of the town; and it is this earlier shrine which is said to have been established by the Hula founder-hero Kposi. The cult was certainly established locally already in the seventeenth century, since European accounts of the Hueda kingdom in the 1690s refer to the worship of the sea, to whom offerings were made for calm weather to facilitate the operation of the European trade.³⁴ Hu’s importance was presumably enhanced, as these accounts imply, by the development of the trans-Atlantic trade, but he functioned as patron of watery spaces more generally, including the coastal lagoon; among lesser deities associated with him (and represented as his children) was the goddess Tokpodun, who was linked with the lagoon (and identified with the crocodile).³⁵ The Hula identity was in fact defined by their occupation of the lagoon environment, rather than by their connections with the sea as such. Certainly, the traditions of the Hunon priesthood claim that it was established in Ouidah already before the arrival of the first European traders, and insist that Ouidah was in origin a Hula settlement, in distinction from the Hueda town of Savi.

      The question of priority of settlement as between the Hueda and Hula is difficult to resolve, but Hula claims to precedence are supported by evidence relating to the hierarchy of status among the gods worshipped in Ouidah. The national deity of the Hueda was Dangbe, the royal python, originally associated with agricultural fertility, who was incarnated in actual snakes that were maintained in his shrines.³⁶ Dangbe remains today one of the most important vodun of Ouidah, with his principal shrine located in the centre of the town.³⁷ Local tradition nowadays asserts that the cult was instituted in Ouidah from its beginnings by the Hueda founder-hero Kpase.³⁸ In the Hueda kingdom as a whole, as reported in the 1690s, first rank among the gods was held by Dangbe, to whom the sea-god Hu was considered a ‘younger brother’.³⁹ The principal shrine of Dangbe at this period, however, was located at the Hueda capital Savi, rather than in Ouidah; its relocation in Ouidah being a consequence of the destruction of Savi in the Dahomian conquest in the 1720s.⁴⁰ In Ouidah itself in recent times, it is in fact Hu rather than Dangbe who has been regarded as first in status among local vodun; in contemporary sources, the primacy of the Hunon within the priesthood of Ouidah was first recorded in the 1860s.⁴¹ In local tradition, this reordered ranking of the vodun is linked to the Dahomian conquest in the 1720s, the Hunon then being given ‘a special delegation of the royal authority of Abomey’ over the priests of the other cults, including that of Dangbe.⁴² It seems likely, however, that in this the Dahomians were merely recognizing and confirming the pre-existing local hierarchy, the point of their edict being probably to maintain the local primacy of the Hunon, in spite of the removal of Dangbe’s principal shrine into the town.

      The Hula connection might also help to resolve a puzzle about the name of the town, Glehue, commonly explained as meaning ‘Farmhouse’.⁴³ It has been argued that the form of this name is linguistically Fon, rather than Hueda; and this has led to the suggestion that it represents a Fon ‘translation’ of a hypothetical original Hueda name, Single.⁴⁴ This, however, seems improbable, since, as has been seen, the name Glehue was already in use before the Dahomian conquest, being attested in contemporary European sources from the 1680s onwards; and it is difficult to understand why Europeans should have adopted a Dahomian form of the name, rather than the one current locally. Possibly the name was originally Hula rather than Fon, since names of this form also occur in Hula country;⁴⁵ however, even if Ouidah was not a Hula settlement, the Europeans, approaching it from the sea and therefore via the Hula, might have employed a Hula version of its name.

      The principal local history of Ouidah, by Casimir Agbo, dates the foundation of the town by Kpase to ‘around 1550’.⁴⁶ This date is evidently based upon an earlier suggestion, by the French administrator Gavoy, that the encounter of Kpase and Kpate with the first Europeans to visit Ouidah occurred around 1580, with an allowance added for Kpase’s rule prior to this event.⁴⁷ The traditions of the priesthood of Kpate, however, give an alternative and earlier date for his encounter with the Europeans, 1548.⁴⁸ It may also be noted that the traditions of the Hunon priesthood give a list of eight predecessors in the title prior to the present incumbent, for whom dates of tenure are supplied which indicate that the first took office in 1452; but since this involves an improbably long average tenure of over 50 years each (and a term of office for the first Hunon of over 120 years, 1452–1581), this should evidently be taken symbolically, as an assertion of antiquity (and by implication, priority) of establishment, rather than literally.⁴⁹ There is no reason to suppose, however, that any of these dates have any firm basis. Gavoy’s date of c. 1580, for example, although sanctified by frequent repetition, was by his own account merely a speculative estimate made on the basis that the last king of Hueda, Hufon, displaced by the Dahomian conquest of 1727, was the third successor to (and great-grandson of) Kpase, on the assumption of an average length of reign/generation of 30 years (though the mathematical calculation is bungled).⁵⁰ However, it is known from contemporary sources that the king of Hueda recalled in local tradition as the son and immediate successor of Kpase, Agbangla, was reigning from the 1680s, dying in 1703.⁵¹ This might be held to suggest that Kpase and his foundation of Ouidah belong rather to the middle of the seventeenth century. But this is surely to СКАЧАТЬ