Ouidah. Robin Law

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СКАЧАТЬ framework (along with most of Reynier’s detailed information). In addition, as noted above, some prominent Ouidah families have published their own histories; and my own fieldwork has also related mainly to the history of particular families and compounds in the town.

      The focus of local tradition on individual families is paralleled by the mass of detailed documentation in contemporary sources, which record the names or titles of many individuals in Ouidah with whom the various European agencies had dealings. In many cases, the same persons figure in both traditional and contemporary sources; in fact, my own interest in the possibility of a study of the town’s social history was initially stimulated by the realization, in my first visits to Ouidah in the 1980s, that many of the names of families still living in the town were already familiar to me from the contemporary documentation of the pre-colonial period. The combination of traditional and contemporary sources often permits a quite detailed confrontation between the two, in which each can serve both as a control over and to elucidate obscurities in the other; and the history of particular families can be traced over several generations, in some cases back into the eighteenth century.

      Map 2 Ouidah, showing the quarters and major historical sites

      A further important ‘source’ for the history of Ouidah is the town itself, as it survives to the present. One consequence of Ouidah’s marginalization in the twentieth century was that it was not subject to radical redevelopment. There were some important changes: notably the elimination of the office of the Dahomian viceroy, together with his official residence, whose site was given for the construction of the Roman Catholic cathedral in 1901, and the demolition of the French fort (now a public square) in 1908. But the basic layout of the town as it existed in the second half of the nineteenth century was preserved; the major colonial developments were added on to the town, as an extension of it (to the north-west), rather than disturbing the character of its historical centre. It is thus quite possible to use the walking tour of the town in Richard Burton’s account from the 1860s to find one’s way around and identify the major monuments even today.⁴³ Moreover, a detailed survey of the town’s architectural heritage was undertaken as a joint project of the Bénin government with the French Organization for Overseas Research in 1990–91, and provides invaluable information on the town’s history.⁴⁴

       The problem of perspective: Ouidah and the slave trade

      Any study of an African ‘middleman’ community such as Ouidah in the precolonial period necessarily emphasizes the role of specifically ‘African agency’ in the operation of the Atlantic slave trade.⁴⁵ I am very conscious, in part through some of the responses to earlier presentations of my own work, that this is a controversial issue, in so far as there is a widespread disposition to regard any emphasis on the voluntary cooperation of Africans in the slave trade as, by implication, an attempt to deny or minimize the culpability of Europeans in it.⁴⁶ My own motive and purpose are quite other: it is because my starting point is within the history of Africa rather than of the slave trade as such, that I approach the latter from the perspective of its mode of operation and effects within Africa. Nor do I personally subscribe to the view that the involvement of some Africans in the operation of the slave trade serves to exonerate either the European societies or the individual Europeans who engaged in it. In part, this is because it implicitly assumes a sort of moral calculus, positing a fixed quantum of responsibility available for distribution, which would seem bizarre if applied in other contexts – in a case of murder, for example, where contributory responsibility assigned to others would not, I think, normally be thought to cancel or even diminish the guilt of the murderer. Beyond this, in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke,⁴⁷ I am in general sceptical about the enterprise of assigning guilt retrospectively, where this runs the risk of applying standards of moral or legal judgement in an ahistorical manner, as in the case of the slave trade, which, although nowadays consensually stigmatized as a ‘crime against humanity’, was for most of its history legal under both European and African law.⁴⁸ The historian is more properly concerned with issues of causation than of moral judgement of past events. Here, the view that the Atlantic slave trade was driven by supply conditions within Africa rather than by demand in the Americas seems to me perverse.⁴⁹ Even in narrowly economic terms, it is difficult to square with the statistics of the trade, which were characterized, at least from the late seventeenth century onwards, by a combination of increasing volume of exports with rising prices, implying that this expansion was demand-driven.⁵⁰ Beyond this, at a more basic level, it was after all not Africans who turned up in ships at ports in Europe or America offering cargoes of slaves for sale. As King Glele of Dahomey said in 1863, to a British mission urging him to abolish the trade, ‘He did not send slaves away in his own ships, but “white men” came to him for them . . . if they did not come, he would not sell’.⁵¹

      It may also be said that, in stressing African agency in the slave trade, this work is consistent with the perceptions of the people of Ouidah themselves, who are of course in many cases descendants of the slave merchants prominent in the town’s earlier history. It is sometimes suggested that Africans are nowadays reluctant to admit the ‘complicity’ of their ancestors in the slave trade.⁵² In Ouidah, however, there has been little disposition to deny this aspect of the community’s history. The local historian Casimir Agbo, for example, explicitly invokes the partnership that operated between European slave-traders and the local African authorities: ‘The Europeans were very accommodating in their relations with the Hueda kings . . . and the latter benefited from the situation . . . [this] secured large resources to the throne’; likewise, when Ouidah was brought under the rule of the kings of Dahomey after 1727, ‘all these judicious arrangements [for the administration of the town] and above all the slave trade enriched the kings and their representatives’.⁵³ When the French authorities demolished the former French fort in Ouidah in 1908, this provoked protests from the community that it was a valued monument of local history, and in particular of its long association with France.⁵⁴ Why the French demolished the fort is not clear, though many people in the town nowadays believe that it was out of feelings of shame at France’s earlier role in the slave trade; if this is so, it is ironic, since local people evidently did not have any such feelings of shame.

      There has been, at least until very recently, a local consensus that the slave trade was a good thing for Ouidah. Burton in the 1860s found that Kpate, the man who according to tradition welcomed the first European traders to Ouidah (and thereby inaugurated the town’s participation in the slave trade) was ‘worshipped as a benefactor to mankind’;⁵⁵ and the cult of Kpate continues to the present. Under French colonial rule, when Ouidah, although now commercially marginalized, remained a leading centre of French education and literate culture, the emphasis in celebration of Kpate shifted from the material benefits of the slave trade to its role in the penetration of European influence: in the 1930s, it was noted that Kpate was venerated as ‘the hero of the importation of European civilization’.⁵⁶

      This perspective evidently focuses on the implications of the slave trade for the local community, those who benefited directly or indirectly from the sale of slaves, rather than for the victims of the trade. The experience of the slaves themselves does not appear to have figured largely in local understandings of the trade. Attitudes to the slave trade in Ouidah have also, however, been affected by the fact that some of those exported as slaves returned to resettle in West Africa. One quarter of Ouidah, Maro, in the south-west of the town, was settled by former slaves returning from Brazil, beginning in the 1830s. Casimir Agbo, while acknowledging the brutalities involved in their original enslavement and transportation, nevertheless maintains, on the authority of some of these returned ex-slaves, that slaves ‘were quite well treated in the Americas’, and in particular that ‘almost all’ gained their freedom and ‘most’ returned home to Africa (whereas, in fact, only a very small minority of those exported into slavery were able to return). Again, he stresses their role in the dissemination of European culture: their enslavement in America enabled them to СКАЧАТЬ