Ouidah. Robin Law

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in its earliest phase. Strictly, it later became ‘British’, but insistence on this distinction can tend towards pedantry, especially as the word for ‘British’ in Fon (as also in French) is in fact ‘English [Glensi]’; I have therefore continued to refer to the ‘English fort’ in conformity with local usage.

      33. John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa (London, 1847); Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans (London, 1851); Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (London, 1864).

      34. Published in French translation by Pierre Verger, ‘Cent-douze lettres de Alfaiate’, in Verger et al., Les Afro-américains (Dakar, 1952), 53–99 (cited hereafter as ‘Dos Santos correspondence’). Recent enquiries in Ouidah failed to confirm the continued existence of this letter-book in the dos Santos household there; it may be in the possession of a family member resident outside the town.

      35. Ibid., 21–3; with original Portuguese text in Pierre Verger, Os libertos: sete caminhos na liberdade de escravos da Bahia no século XIX (Salvador, Bahia, 1992), 121–4.

      36. ‘Note historique sur Ouidah par l’Administrateur Gavoy (1913)’, ED, 13 (1955), 45–70; ANB, 1E146, ‘Recherches sur l’organisation intérieure du commandement indigène’, by Reynier, Ouidah, 1 Dec. 1917, published as ‘Ouidah: organisation du commandement’, Mémoire du Bénin, 2 (1993), 30–68.

      37. Paul Hazoumé, ‘Aperçu historique sur les origines de Ouidah’, in 6 parts (apparently incomplete), in La Reconnaissance africaine, nos 4–5, 7–8, 10–11 (1925–6).

      38. Casimir Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah (Avignon, 1959). Other examples of the genre are Venance S. Quénum, Ouidah, cité historique des “Houeda” (Ouidah, [1982]); Dominique Avimagbogbênou Quénum, L’Histoire de Glexwe (Ouidah) (Dakar, 1999).

      39. Norberto Francisco de Souza, ‘Contribution à l’histoire de la famille de Souza’, ED, 13 (1955), 17–21; Simone de Souza, La Famille de Souza du Bénin-Togo (Cotonou, 1992).

      40. Léon-Pierre Ghézowounmè-Djomalia Dagba, La Collectivité familiale Yovogan Hounnon Dagba de ses origines à nos jours (Porto-Novo, 1982); Maximilien Quénum, Les Ancêtres de la famille Quénum (Langres, 1981). See also a shorter version of the Quénum family history: Faustin Possi-Berry Quénum, Généalogie de la dynastie Houéhoun à la collectivité familiale Azanmado Houénou-Quénum (Cotonou, 1993).

      41. On ‘feedback’, see David Henige, Oral Historiography (London, 1982), 81–7.

      42. The 12 quarters were listed by Reynier in 1917, although by then Boya and Ganvè were regarded as subdivisions of a single quarter. Subsequent amalgamations reduced the number of recognized quarters to six: by the 1930s, these were Tové, Ahouandjigo, Sogbadji-Docomè (amalgamated in 1936), Fonsaramè (now including Cahosaramè), Boya-Ganvè and Brésil (incorporating Maro, Zomaï and Quénum quarters). On the other hand, some subsections of the original 12 quarters have subsequently claimed autonomous status: e.g. the compound of the Hodonou family, formerly part of Fonsaramè, is nowadays regarded as a separate quarter, Hodonousaramè.

      43. Burton, Mission, i, 58–116, chapter IV, ‘A walk round Whydah’.

      44. Alain Sinou & Bernardin Agbo (eds), Ouidah et son patrimoine (Paris/Cotonou, 1991); see also the coffee-table spin-off, Alain Sinou, Le Comptoir de Ouidah, une ville africaine singulière (Paris, 1995).

      45. For the recent trend to emphasize the role of African agency in the slave trade, see, for example, David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 7.

      46. E. g. Lansiné Kaba, ‘The Atlantic slave trade was not a “black-on-black holocaust”’, African Studies Review, 44/1 (2001), 1–20.

      47. Van Ranke’s famous dictum about telling history wie es eigentlich gewesen was not, as it is commonly misunderstood, a claim that the historian can determine ‘objective’ truth, but rather a repudiation of the view that the historian should or could act as a judge.

      48. Although in the last period of the slave trade (in Ouidah, effectively from 1815) it was illegal under European law, though still legal in African systems of law.

      49. See William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The dynamics of the African slave trade’, Africa (London), 64 (1994), 275–86.

      50. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge, 1990), 92–9.

      51. PP, Despatches from Commodore Wilmot respecting his Visit to the King of Dahomey (1863), no. 1, 29 Jan. 1863.

      52. This was alleged, for example, by African-Americans resident in Ghana, in connection with controversies over the representation of the slave trade in a historical exhibition at Cape Coast Castle in the 1990s: Christine Mueller Kreamer, ‘Contested terrain: cultural negotiations and Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle exhibition, “Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade”’, in Austen, Atlantic Slave Trade.

      53. Agbo, Histoire, 34, 50.

      54. Ibid., 25.

      55. Burton, Mission, ii, 297.

      56. Christian Merlo, ‘Hiérarchie fétichiste de Ouidah’, BIFAN, Série B, 2/1–2 (1940), 7.

      57. Agbo, Histoire, 52–3.

      58. See the original version of the museum guidebook: Pierre Verger & Clément da Cruz, Musée historique de Ouidah (Porto-Novo, 1969). This emphasis is less prominent in a more recent version: Romain-Philippe Ekanyé Assogba, Le Musée d’histoire de Ouidah: Découverte de la Côte des Esclaves (Cotonou, 1990). However, the exhibition itself remains substantially unchanged.

      59. Peter Sutherland, ‘In memory of the slaves: an African view of the Diaspora in the Americas’, in Jean Muteba Rahier (ed.), Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (Westport, 1999), 195–211.

      60. Fieldwork, de Souza compound, Eulalie Dagba (Martine de Souza’s mother, and grand-daughter of Marie Lima); Lima compound, both 9 Dec. 2001. Joaquim Lima died in 1915, his wife Marie in 1948.

      61. Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 42. Joaquim Lima was probably a son of Joaquim de Cerqueira Lima, attested at Ouidah in the 1860s, whose father was an ‘emigrant’ from Brazil, formerly resident in Lagos: Burton, Mission, ii, 8–9.

      62. Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua (ed. Samuel Moore, Detroit, 1854); see also the modern edition, Robin Law & Paul E. Lovejoy (eds), The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton, 2001).

      63. He was interviewed on several occasions, including by Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Cudjo’s own story of the last African slaver’, Journal of Negro History, 12 (1927), 648–63; see also Natalie Suzette Robertson, ‘The African Ancestry of the Founders of Africatown, Alabama’ (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 1996). The date of his transportation is commonly given as 1859, but was more probably 1860.

      1

       Origins

       Ouidah Before the Dahomian Conquest

      The СКАЧАТЬ