Ouidah. Robin Law

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СКАЧАТЬ suffered considerable destruction in the Dahomian wars of conquest between 1727 and 1743. Local tradition recalls that Tegbesu, in the campaign of 1743, ‘completely razed the town’.¹⁰⁹ This is confirmed and elaborated by traditions relating to particular quarters: Docomè, the quarter of the Portuguese fort, was ‘pillaged and burned’ by the Dahomians and its inhabitants were killed or taken captive or fled to the west, while in Ahouandjigo, the quarter of the French fort, the inhabitants were ‘almost all massacred’.¹¹⁰ Only Sogbadji, the quarter of the English fort, is said to have escaped relatively unscathed, because Agaja gave orders for it to be ‘spared’, in return for the assistance which Zossoungbo, the head of the quarter, had allegedly given in the campaign against Hufon.¹¹¹

      When Dahomian control of Ouidah had been firmly established, however, measures were taken to reconstitute the town. Tradition in Sogbadji recalls that Agaja charged Zossoungbo to invite those who had fled to return to the town. The traditions of other quarters also recall the repeopling of the town under Dahomian rule. In Ahouandjigo, it is said that the French complained to Agaja that the depopulation of the quarter by war had left them short of labourers, in response to which he sent them a new batch of 100 male and 100 female captives; the family that later held the headship of the quarter, Atchada, claims descent from the head of this new batch of fort slaves.¹¹² Other families in Ahouandjigo, however, claim origins antecedent to the Dahomian conquest, notably that of Agbo, hereditary servants in the French fort, which claims descent from the Hueda king Agbamu. In Docomè and Tové also, tradition stresses continuity with the pre-Dahomian community, despite the disruption of the Dahomian conquest. In Docomè, it is claimed that Ahohunbakla, the commander of the quarter’s forces against the Dahomians, survived the defeat and was invited by the Dahomians to continue to serve as intermediary in their dealings with the Europeans; Ahohunbakla in turn requested that a son of Amoua, his deputy commander, who had been killed in the war, should be associated with him in this role, and the headship of the quarter subsequently remained in the Amoua family.¹¹³ In Tové, following the defeat of Hufon, a man called Sale, who was married to a woman of the Kpase family, made his submission to Agaja, who charged him with recalling those who had fled from the quarter; Sale received from the Dahomian king the surname Tchiakpé, which is still borne by the family of his descendants in the quarter.¹¹⁴ Although there may be an element of fiction in the claiming of specifically royal descent, there seems no reason to question the Hueda antecedents of these families. Other families in Ouidah that claim to derive from the time of the Hueda monarchy and to have returned to resettle there after initially fleeing from the Dahomian conquest include those of the priests of several important vodun, notably of the sea-god Hu in Sogbadji and the earth-god Hwesi in Ahouandjigo.¹¹⁵ This survival of a substantial Hueda element in the population of Dahomian Ouidah, recalled in local tradition, is confirmed by a contemporary report of 1780s that ‘there are still at Juda many of the former inhabitants or their descendants’, who were recognizable by their distinctive facial marks.¹¹⁶

      The Dahomian conquest also, however, involved the introduction of new settlers and the extension of the town by the foundation of new quarters, thereby transforming the ethnic composition of the community. The principal new quarter established was Fonsaramè, which included the residence of the Dahomian viceroy, the Yovogan. This may have been created in part through the appropriation of land from existing quarters, since local tradition claims that the Yovogan’s palace occupies the site of the former residence of Agbamu, the supposed founder of Ahouandjigo quarter.¹¹⁷ But mainly it represented an extension of the town to the north. The second quarter associated with the Dahomian conquest was Cahosaramè, taking its name from the title of the commander of the Dahomian military garrison, which is said by tradition to date to the time of either Agaja or Tegbesu. This was originally, as noted earlier, a separate encampment outside the town, but it was later absorbed within the town as it expanded, presumably in the nineteenth century. The other six quarters of the town (Ganvè, Boya, Brazil, Maro, Zomaï and Quénum) were not founded until the nineteenth century.¹¹⁸

      In the long run, at least, the Dahomian element was not restricted to the new Fon and Caho quarters, since individual Dahomians also settled in older quarters of the town. Families of Dahomian origin include, for example, the Adanle family in Sogbadji, related to Hwanjile, the official ‘Queen Mother’ of Tegbesu, under whose auspices its founder settled in the town.¹¹⁹ Overall, it was the Fon rather than the Hueda element which came to predominate in the town, though this presumably owed something to assimilation over time as well as to the original ethnicity of settlers: in the 1930s it was reckoned that persons who considered themselves Fon outnumbered Hueda by a ratio of nearly 2: 1.¹²⁰ That the Ouidah community nevertheless continued to see itself as distinct from Dahomey and, by implication as a conquered people, subject to Dahomian rule as a foreign administration, reflected its problematic relationship with the Dahomian monarchy, rather than its biological origins.

      Notes

      1. For the Dahomian conquest of the coast, see Akinjogbin, Dahomey, 64–100; Law, Slave Coast, 278–97.

      2. See discussion in Law, Slave Coast, 300–08; as against the view of Akinjogbin, Dahomey, 73–81, that Agaja’s original intention was to bring the slave trade to an end.

      3. For the campaign, see esp. Robin Law, ‘A neglected account of the Dahomian conquest of Whydah (1727): the “Relation de la Guerre de Juda” of the Sieur Ringard of Nantes’, HA, 15 (1988), 321–8; Snelgrave, New Account, 9–18.

      4. So according to the Gregorian (or New Style) calendar, but 26 Feb. by contemporary English (Julian, or Old Style) reckoning. The date is regularly given in local sources as 7 Feb. 1727: first in A. Le Herissé, L’Ancien Royaume du Dahomey (Paris, 1911), 297, n. The source of this date is unclear, but it is certainly incorrect.

      5. Francisco Pereyra Mendes, Ouidah, 4 April 1727, in Verger, Flux et reflux, 145; Smith, New Voyage, 190–91.

      6. A. Akindélé & C. Aguessy, Contribution à l’étude de l’histoire de l’ancien royaume de Porto-Novo (Dakar, 1953), 153; Robin Law, ‘A lagoonside port on the eighteenth-century Slave Coast: the early history of Badagri’, CJAS, 28 (1994), 38–41. Three of the 8 quarters of Badagry are of Hueda origin (one of them having the same name as one of the quarters of Ouidah, Awhanjigo [= Ahouandjigo]); the senior chief of Hueda origin, the Wawu of Ahoviko quarter, claims descent from the royal family of the old Hueda kingdom.

      7. Snelgrave, New Account, 14–15.

      8. ANF, C6/25, unsigned letter [Dupetitval], Ouidah, 20 May 1728.

      9. Soglo, ‘Les Xweda’, 72–3. The name Mitogbodji, ‘ancestral dwelling’, was evidently given retrospectively, after its abandonment (Houéyogbé meaning, in contrast, ‘new home’). A contemporary account of the 1770s gives the name of the settlement of the exiled Hueda as ‘Ouessou’, which is not identifiable: de Chenevert & Bullet, ‘Réflexions’, 40.

      10. Van Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, no. 303: Hertog, Jakin, 26 June 1731. In 1733 the Hueda even made an unsuccessful attempt to seize control of Grand-Popo, burning half of the town before they were repelled: ANF, C6/25, Levet, Ouidah, 26 Aug. 1733 (lettre de nouvelles).

      11. Van Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, no. 252: Hertog, Jakin, 18 March 1727.

      12. Francisco Pereyra Mendes, Ouidah, 4 April 1727, in Verger, Flux et reflux, 145.

      13. Snelgrave, New Account, 115.

      14. Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 115, 161.

      15. Agaja was clearly not with the Dahomian army when it took Savi, since the Europeans taken prisoner there were taken to СКАЧАТЬ