Ouidah. Robin Law

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СКАЧАТЬ venture onto the sea prior to the arrival of the European traders. This was evidently due, on the one hand, to the greater difficulty of navigation on the sea in this region, due to the heavy surf and dangerous sand bars noted earlier, and, on the other, to the availability of the much easier facility for fishing and canoe-borne communication afforded by the lagoon. Indeed, the local people largely continued this avoidance of the sea even after the initiation of the European maritime trade; as will be seen hereafter, European ships trading at Ouidah had to bring both canoes and canoemen with them from the Gold Coast to the west, in order to communicate with the shore. Even after this introduction of seagoing canoes, little or no fishing in the sea was done at Ouidah, the canoes being employed only in servicing the overseas trade.⁷⁶ It has sometimes been suggested that African merchants from the Gold Coast may have conducted a canoe-borne maritime trade with the Slave Coast even before the arrival of the Europeans; but there is no evidence for such a trade before the mid-seventeenth century, and it is more likely that such contacts were initiated by the Europeans, and only subsequently imitated by the Gold Coast merchants.⁷⁷ Earlier, interest in the sea was probably restricted to foraging along the shore, for crabs, as recalled in the traditional story of Kpate’s meeting with the first European visitors cited above.

      Both the role and the importance of Ouidah were, however, transformed by the arrival of the Europeans and the initiation of maritime trade, which until the mid-nineteenth century was primarily in slaves. The Portuguese first explored along the Bight of Benin in 1472, and a regular trade began during the second half of the sixteenth century; from the 1630s the Portuguese monopoly of this trade was challenged by the Dutch, joined in the 1640s by the English and in the 1670s by the French. European trade was initially located at Grand-Popo, west of Ouidah; but by the beginning of the seventeenth century had shifted east to the kingdom of Allada, where the principal centre of the trade, and the site of the European factories, was initially at Offra.⁷⁸ In 1671, however, the French West Indies Company transferred its factory from Offra to Ouidah, initiating the latter’s rise to become the pre-eminent slave port within the region.

      The French establishment at Ouidah in 1671 is often assumed to mark the beginnings of European trade there.⁷⁹ However, it should be noted that King Hufon of Hueda in 1720 said that the Portuguese had been the first Europeans to trade in his kingdom.⁸⁰ Local tradition in Ouidah also generally identifies the first European traders welcomed by Kpate and Kpase as Portuguese, while the French are said to have arrived only subsequently. According to one (no doubt apocryphal) story, the first Portuguese in Ouidah buried an inscribed stone to commemorate their visit; and when they returned, to find the French now in residence, they were able to disinter it to establish their claim to precedence.⁸¹ The dates of 1580 or 1548 assigned locally for the arrival of the first Portuguese, as noted earlier, are merely speculative, but it must have occurred sometime during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. There are, indeed, a couple of earlier references, in the 1620s, to Portuguese trade at ‘Fulao’, which as noted earlier was probably an alternative name for Ouidah.⁸² But it is likely that any such early contact was not sustained, and that therefore the French establishment in 1671 remains significant as marking the beginnings of continuous European trade at Ouidah.

      The French move from Allada to Hueda was soon followed by the other principal European nations engaged in the trade, the English and Portuguese in the 1680s and the Dutch in the 1690s, leaving Ouidah as the dominant ‘port’ in the region by the end of the seventeenth century. The slave trade through Ouidah had reached a volume of probably around 10,000 slaves per year by the 1690s, and attained its all-time peak in the years 1700–13, when probably around 15,000 slaves annually were passing through the town;⁸³ at this period, indeed, Ouidah may have been accounting for around half of all trans-Atlantic exports of African slaves.⁸⁴

       The European forts

      As far as the record goes, the first permanent European trading post in Ouidah (or indeed, anywhere in the Hueda kingdom) was established by Henri Carolof (Heinrich Caerlof), a German in the service of the French West Indies Company, as has been seen in 1671.⁸⁵ One version of local tradition claims that even before this, in 1623, a Frenchman called Nicolas Olivier had settled in Ouidah, and founded the quarter of the town called Ganvè, to the west of the site of the French fort.⁸⁶ But this story is certainly spurious: contemporary sources do not support the suggestion of any French activity at Ouidah before the 1670s. The Olivier (or d’Oliveira) family of Ganvè is in fact descended from a man who was director of the French fort in Ouidah at a much later date (1775–86); the attempt of the d’Oliveiras to claim priority of settlement may derive from rivalries for the leadership of the ‘French’ community in Ouidah in the nineteenth century.

      The French factory was abandoned when it was destroyed in a local war in 1692; a French captain who visited the Hueda kingdom in 1701 requested its re-establishment, but the king was initially willing only to allow the French a lodge in his capital Savi.⁸⁷ However, in 1704 a visiting French expedition secured permission not only for the re-establishment of a lodge nearer the coast, but also for its fortification; the Hueda king supplied over 400 men and women for the construction.⁸⁸ It subsequently became known officially as ‘Fort Saint-Louis de Gregoy [i.e. Glehue]’. The local traditions nowadays current of the establishment of the French fort, which attribute it to the reign of the fourth king of Hueda, Ayohuan (or Hayehoin), clearly relate to this subsequent refoundation, rather than to the original settlement in 1671, since Ayohuan is evidently to be identified with the king known to contemporary Europeans as ‘Aisan’ or ‘Amar’, who reigned in 1703–8.⁸⁹ The French fort was owned by a succession of trading companies until 1767, when it passed into the authority of the French crown. It was abandoned in 1797, but reoccupied by private French merchants (of the firm of Régis of Marseille) from 1842. The building, however, no longer survives, having been demolished in 1908; its site is now a public square, which is still however called ‘La Place du Fort français’.⁹⁰

      Assuming that the fort built in 1704 was on the same site as the earlier French factory, at the time of its original foundation in 1671 the latter must have been physically separate from the indigenous settlement of Tové, since the later fort was on the opposite (west) side of the town from Tové, the intervening space being occupied by the quarter of the English factory, Sogbadji, which was established later. This is consistent with the account of Barbot in 1682, which describes the French and English factories at Ouidah as situated ‘near to’, rather than actually in, the indigenous village.⁹¹ This arrangement was seemingly also paralleled in the kingdom of Allada earlier, where the original site of the European factories, Offra, was distinct from although close to the town of Jakin, although Offra eventually developed into a substantial and autonomous indigenous settlement also.⁹² This suggests the policy widely attested elsewhere in West Africa of segregating foreign traders in distinct quarters, on the outskirts of the indigenous towns. This practice is most familiar from the colonial period, when in Nigeria, for example, southern immigrants in northern cities were regularly segregated into ‘new towns’ (sabon gari), while in the south northern merchants settled in separate quarters called ‘zongos’.⁹³ (There is, in fact, a Zongo quarter in Ouidah itself, on the north-east of the town, which dates from the period of French colonial rule after 1892.) But in this colonial practice clearly followed indigenous pre-colonial precedents: in towns in the Borgu region in the north of modern Bénin, inland from Dahomey, for example, foreign Muslim merchants likewise formed their own quarters, such as the Maro quarter of Nikki and the Wangara quarter of Djougou.⁹⁴ This arrangement probably also accounts for the location of the principal market in Ouidah, called Zobé, which is still today situated south-west of Tové quarter, and between it and the quarters of the former English and French forts to the west.⁹⁵

      The second of the European factories to be established was the English. The Royal African Company, which held a legal monopoly of English trade in West Africa at this time, first projected a factory at Ouidah in April 1681; but this was abortive, the factor left there being recalled four months later to take over the company’s factory at Offra to the east.⁹⁶ СКАЧАТЬ