Ouidah. Robin Law

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      In more recent projects of historical commemoration in Ouidah, emphasis has continued to be placed upon the cultural interactions deriving from the slave trade, though now with increasing interest in the town’s role in transmitting the African religious traditions visible in America, especially the vaudou religion of Haiti, Brazilian candomblé and Cuban santería, as well as in the Brazilian influence in West Africa. Reciprocal cultural influences between Brazil and Bénin are thus central to the representation of the history of Ouidah in the exhibition in the Historical Museum established in the 1960s;⁵⁸ while the transmission of African religion to the Americas was celebrated in the UNESCO-sponsored ‘Ouidah ’92’ conference (actually held in January 1993), which took the form of a ‘world festival of vodun arts and cultures’. It can be argued that this emphasis on the cultural consequences of the slave trade serves implicitly to silence the sufferings of its victims.⁵⁹ However, the victims of the trade were also commemorated in monuments constructed in connection with the ‘Ouidah ’92’ conference along the ‘slaves’ route’ from the town to the sea, notably the ‘Door of No Return [La Porte du Non-Retour]’ at the embarkation point on the beach. And in 1998 an explicit ‘ceremony of repentance’ was instituted in Ouidah, held annually in January, at which speeches are made requesting forgiveness from the descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora for the community’s historical role in their forcible transportation.

      In writing the history of Ouidah, there is no doubt that part of the problem of perspective arises, in my own case, from the experience of courteous welcome and generous assistance received in the course of my research from members of the Ouidah community nowadays, and a perhaps inevitable tendency to read this friendliness back into the historical representation of their ancestors. It is difficult in any case to attempt to reconstruct the history of a community from within without historical empathy sliding into a degree of emotional sympathy. However, the most important dimension of the problem relates to the more basic technical problem of the nature of the sources. Not only does this study depend mainly on European rather than African sources, but even the African sources available reflect the perspective of local beneficiaries of the slave trade – Dahomian administrators and local merchants, or persons providing ancillary services (such as porters and canoemen) – rather than of its victims. Moreover, in so far as local traditions principally represent the collective memories of particular families, they inevitably recall slave-traders such as Francisco Felix de Souza in relation to their descendants, as benevolent founding ancestors, rather than in relation to the slaves whom they sold, as exploiters of their fellow-humans.

      Local tradition does give some access to the experience of enslavement, to the extent that many slaves were retained within Ouidah, rather than being sold into export; and such slaves also have descendants, who may preserve some memory of their lives. Martine de Souza, for example, is descended not only from the slave-trader Francisco Felix de Souza, but also, in the maternal line, from a slave; one of her great-grandmothers, Marie Lima, being in origin a captive taken, at the age of 15, by the Dahomian army in an attack on the town of Meko to the east, in modern Nigeria (in 1882), and sold in Ouidah to a prominent Brazilian trader, Joaquim João Dias Lima, who took her as his wife.⁶⁰ But those retained in local slavery were, in comparative terms, the fortunate ones, in escaping the brutality of the middle passage and the harsher exploitation that was generally the fate of those taken into slavery in the Americas; indeed, it is recalled that, when Marie Lima’s mother visited Ouidah, in an attempt to secure her daughter’s liberation and return home (probably after the French conquest of Dahomey in 1892), she declined to leave. Partly in recognition of this, the descendants of slaves in Ouidah tend to maintain an identification as clients with those of their ancestors’ owners, even when not actually absorbed into the family through intermarriage.

      The experience of those who were transported into trans-Atlantic slavery is in comparison very poorly represented in the surviving documentation. A few of those sold into export, as noted above, were able to return to Africa, and some of the families founded by repatriated former slaves in Ouidah preserve some recollection of the circumstances of their original enslavement in Africa. Joaquim Lima, for example, was himself descended from an ex-slave from Brazil, and tradition in his family recalls that its founder, who was probably his grandfather, was originally from Mahi, north of Dahomey, and had been seized as a slave when he went to Abomey in an attempt to redeem his brother, who had earlier been taken captive by the Dahomian army.⁶¹ But firsthand accounts by victims of the Atlantic slave trade are very rare. Of over a million slaves who were exported through Ouidah, only two appear to have left any sort of personal record. One of these, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, was exported through Ouidah to Brazil in 1845, and published his autobiography in the USA in 1854.⁶² A second, Kazoola, alias Cudjo Lewis, was taken from Ouidah to Alabama, USA, in 1860; his story was recorded over 50 years later, when he was a very old man.⁶³

      Given that their sufferings and exploitation were the basis of the prosperity of Ouidah, as well as of the much greater opulence of the slave-owning European colonial societies in the Americas and of slaving ports in Europe, the slaves themselves arguably ought to occupy centre-place in an analysis of the history of the town during its period as a port of the Atlantic slave trade. But, although an attempt has been made in what follows to give attention to what the slave trade meant for the slaves who passed through Ouidah in transit to the Americas, as well as for the permanent inhabitants of the town, it cannot be claimed that proportionally, in terms of the amount of space their experience is accorded, they are adequately represented. The dedication of this book to their memory is offered as a compensatory gesture of acknowledgement of this inevitable failure.

       Note on spelling

      The spelling of local words and names in this study presents considerable difficulty. The Fon language can be transcribed in a variety of ways. Most accurately, a phonetic script is employed, which includes some letters additional to (or with different values from) the standard Latin alphabet. This script is not widely used in writing, however, Fon words and names being more commonly spelled in the standard Latin alphabet, thereby losing some of the distinctions made in the phonetic script. Very often, moreover, spelling follows French conventions, offering for example ‘ou’ for ‘u’, ‘dj’ for ‘j’, ‘c’ for ‘k’. As an illustrative example, the name of the kingdom from which that of the town of Ouidah is derived may be written ‘Xwedā’ in the phonetic script, ‘Hueda’ in the Latin alphabet, or ‘Houéda’ in the French spelling.

      The conventions adopted in this work are a compromise among the conflicting demands of accuracy, consistency and recognizability. For ordinary Fon words, titles and common personal names and for the names of pre-colonial kingdoms and ethnic groups, the quasi-phonetic transcription in the standard Latin alphabet is generally employed: as, for example, ‘Hueda’. For the names of towns, and of families that still exist in Ouidah, however, it seemed proper to use the forms that are currently in use, which are generally in the French form: for example, the names of two villages to the south of Ouidah are given as ‘Zoungbodji’ and ‘Djegbadji’ (which is what a visitor will find on local signposts), rather than ‘Zungboji’ and ‘Jegbaji’; and those of three of the major merchant families of the town as ‘Adjovi’, ‘Codjia’ and ‘Gnahoui’ (which is how family members nowadays spell these names), rather than ‘Ajovi’, ‘Kojia’ and ‘Nyawi’. Spelling conventions were, of course, not standardized until recently, so that early written sources employ spellings that are inconsistent with each other, as well as being inaccurate by modern standards. In general, such deviant forms are employed in this work only in direct quotations from sources; otherwise modern spellings are preferred. In a few cases, however, corrupt early forms of local toponyms have become sanctioned by usage, and remain in general use today, and these are retained here, examples being the names of the kingdom ‘Dahomey’ and its capital ‘Abomey’ (rather than the more strictly correct ‘Danhomé’, ‘Agbomé’). A special problem is posed by the case of Ouidah itself, whose name is commonly given in Anglophone literature (including earlier work of my own) in the form СКАЧАТЬ