In the first half of the nineteenth century, Ouidah was profoundly affected by the legal banning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the adjustments which this necessitated in the conduct of commerce, and by the related development of a substantial Brazilian community in the town. In the early stages of both processes, the central figure was Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave-trader who settled permanently in Ouidah in the 1820s. Unfortunately, this critical period in Ouidah's history is in many respects obscure, because of the deficiencies of the available evidence. The detailed documentation provided for the eighteenth century by the European forts ceased when these were abandoned in the early nineteenth century, and European visitors remained rare thereafter until the mid- 1840s. For the 1820s and 1830s, the most informative contemporary material is to be found in the records of judicial proceedings relating to illegal slave-ships captured by the British navy; but these provide only fragmentary (and not always reliable) information on what was going on on shore. To a greater degree than either before or after, the internal history of Ouidah in this period has therefore to be reconstructed on the basis of local oral traditions.

The legal prohibition of the slave trade

The legal banning of the slave trade was a complex and protracted process. As far as it affected Ouidah, the first important move was the abolition of slavery in French colonies by the revolutionary government in 1794, which was itself a recognition of the reality of the destruction of slavery in the principal French colony of Saint-Domingue by the slave insurrection of 1791. Although slavery was relegalized by Napoleon in 1802, the attempt to restore the institution was not effective in Saint-Domingue, serving merely to provoke the proclamation of that country's independence as the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Although French slaving revived after 1802, very few French ships seem to have called at Ouidah. The practical effect, therefore, was that what had lately been the principal market for slaves exported from Ouidah now disappeared.

Ouidah is situated in the coastal area (in the Department of Atlantique) of the modern Republic of Benin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey) in West Africa. In origin, it is an indigenous African town, which had existed long before the French colonial occupation in 1892. In the pre-colonial period, it had belonged successively to two African states, first the kingdom of Hueda (whence the name ‘Ouidah’) and from 1727 that of Dahomey, from which the French colony took its name; and the first language of its inhabitants today remains Fon, the language of Dahomey, with French inherited from the colonial period as the superimposed official language of administration and education. Today, Ouidah has a population of around 25,000, which by modern standards is quite modest, and it is dwarfed by the two leading cities of southern Benin: the official capital Porto- Novo, 60 km to the east (with a population probably around 200,000), and the commercial centre and international port of Cotonou, 40 km to the east (perhaps approaching 1,000,000).

In the precolonial period, however, Ouidah was the principal commercial centre in the region and the second town of the Dahomey kingdom, exceeded in size only by the capital Abomey, 100 km inland. In particular, it served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade. The section of the African coast on which Ouidah is situated, in geographical terms the Bight (or Gulf) of Benin, was known to Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Slave Coast’, from its prominence as a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade; and within this region Ouidah was by far the most important point of embarkation for slaves, far outshadowing its nearest rival, Lagos, 150 km to the east (in modern Nigeria). Ouidah was a leading slaving port for almost two centuries, from the 1670s to the 1860s. During this period, the Bight of Benin is thought to have accounted for around 22 per cent of all slaves exported to the Americas, and Ouidah for around 51 per cent of exports from the Bight.

The British blockade of Ouidah in 1876–7 was ineffective, indeed counterproductive, in terms of its declared objectives. The attempt to intimidate the Dahomian authorities had backfired; British prestige and influence in Dahomey were weakened rather than strengthened. In fact, the most obvious and immediate consequence of the blockade was the collapse of British trade at Ouidah. In the following year, it was noted that, although Turnbull, the agent of the firm of Swanzy who had provoked the British intervention, was still resident at Ouidah, he was doing little business, because local people were afraid to be associated with him. A few years later, Swanzy sold its establishment in the English fort to a German firm, C. Goedelt of Hamburg; the transfer was announced in a letter from the German government to Glele in 1882. Thereafter, British interest in Dahomey and Ouidah effectively ceased; subsequent attempts by Dahomey to elicit British intervention, as a counterweight to the growing threat of French imperialism, came to nothing.

The British intervention also had the effect of provoking French countermeasures to assert and protect their interests in the area. In April 1878 a French officer, Paul Serval, visited Ouidah and obtained a new treaty confirming the cession of Cotonou to France. The status of this treaty, which, like that of 1868, was negotiated with the local authorities in Ouidah only, was doubtful, and it was later repudiated by Glele. But the matter was not yet put to the test, since the French, beyond stationing a Resident at Cotonou, took no immediate steps to establish effective occupation of the town, which remained under Dahomian administration. In relation to its European rivals, however, the French claim had been reasserted. The British responded by extending the territory of their own Lagos colony further westwards to occupy Ketonou, 15 km north-east of Cotonou, thus threatening communication between Cotonou and Porto-Novo, in 1879.

This concentration of French interest on Cotonou reflected in part the relative weakness of Dahomian control there, but also its increasing commercial importance and the relative decline of Ouidah.

Although in the early 1850s Dahomey had appeared to be embracing the transition from the slave trade to that in palm oil with some success, later in the decade the oil trade began to run into difficulties. Most immediately, these were caused by a fall in the world price of palm oil. The price in the UK reached a peak of ￡48 per ton in 1854, but then declined, averaging only around ￡43 during the rest of the 1850s and falling below ￡40 in the 1860s. How far this was reflected in prices paid on the African coast is unclear. As was seen in the previous chapter, the expansion of oil exports at Ouidah had been stimulated by a rise in prices to $8 per measure ($142 per ton) by 1852, and Gezo then decreed a further rise to $12 per measure ($213 per ton). By 1857, however, the price is quoted as 3 gallons to the dollar, or $6 per measure ($107 per ton) (see Table 6.1). On the face of it, therefore, prices were substantially lower from the mid-1850s; and in apparent confirmation, Burton in 1863/4 reported local complaints of ‘commercial depression’. Interpretation of these prices, however, is complicated by the depreciation of the local cowry currency, due to the importation of large quantities of the cheaper Zanzibar cowries from the 1840s onwards. Already in 1850, Forbes noted that, although the ‘head’ of 2,000 cowries still had a ‘nominal’ value of one dollar, actual silver dollars passed at between 2,400 and 2,600 cowries and cowries fell further to 5 heads for $3 (3,333 cowries to the dollar) in 1851, 2 heads (4,000) to the dollar by the beginning of 1852 and 21⁄2 heads (5,000) by 1863/4. This devaluation of cowries was reflected in an inflation of local prices: Burton in 1863/4 reported that prices in the Ouidah market had doubled during the previous ten years.

Ouidah under Dahomian rule was more than simply a site of European trade. Even in narrowly economic terms, it was also a centre for fishing and salt production, as well as for local trade, especially along the coastal lagoon. It also served, as has been seen, as a seat of Dahomian provincial administration and as a military garrison town. Nevertheless, its central function was in trade with Europeans; this is not just a Eurocentric perception, it was shared by the Dahomians themselves, as reflected in the title of the administrator of the town, Yovogan, ‘Chief of the white men’. Ouidah was a ‘white man's town’, not in the sense of being under European control but in that its principal function was as the site of trade with Europeans.

The Dahomian kings continued the policy of the earlier Hueda kings, of maintaining Ouidah as a neutral port where hostilities among Europeans were prohibited. In 1755, for example, Tegbesu sent to Ouidah to remind the directors of the European forts that ‘the road should be free and nobody should be molested while at anchor there’; in 1762, when British ships fired on a canoe delivering supplies to the French fort, he again sent to protest and to ‘desire all white men to live in friendship and let all palavers drop’. In 1791, when war with France was again threatening, the British were still confident that Ouidah would remain a safe haven, since ‘the king of Dahomey is so absolute a monarch there as never to suffer any Europeans settled in his dominions to have any controversies of any hostile nature whatever’. The policy began to break down only after 1794, when the French revolutionary government, having ended its own slave trade and thus no longer having any interest in the security of the Ouidah ‘port’, began a systematic campaign of piracy against British and Portuguese shipping at Ouidah and elsewhere on the Bight of Benin.

The history of Ouidah is intelligible only by reference to its geographical situation, which has however often been misunderstood and misrepresented in accounts of the operation of European trade in West Africa. It is commonly referred to as a ‘port’, but this is strictly inaccurate, indeed positively misleading. Although it became an important centre for European maritime trade from the seventeenth century onwards, it is not in fact situated on the coast, but some 4 km inland, actually to the north of the lagoon which in this area runs parallel to the coast, and so separates Ouidah from the seashore. The slaves and other commodities exported through Ouidah had therefore to be taken overland and across the lagoon to the beach, rather than being embarked directly into European ships. At the coast itself, moreover, there is no ‘port’ in the sense of a sheltered harbour, but only an open roadstead. Indeed, heavy surf along the beach, and on sandbars parallel to it, makes it impossible for large vessels to approach close to the shore. European ships trading at Ouidah had therefore to stand 2-3 km off, and to communicate with the shore through smaller vessels, for which purpose African canoes were normally employed. The town's relative isolation from the sea, combined with its proximity to the coastal lagoon, played a critical role in shaping its historical development, during as well as prior to its involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade.

Although ‘Ouidah’ is the spelling of the town's name current nowadays, it occurs in European sources between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in various other forms: in English most commonly ‘Whydah’, in Dutch ‘Fida’, in French ‘Juda’, and in Portuguese ‘Ajuda’. All these are attempts to render an indigenous name that would be more correctly written, by modern conventions, as ‘Hueda’ (or in a dialect variant ‘Peda’).

The political and commercial situation on the Slave Coast was transformed by the rise of Dahomey, under its king Agaja (died 1740), who conquered Allada in 1724 and Hueda in 1727. This profoundly affected Ouidah, which became subject to Dahomey from 1727 and was left as its exclusive outlet for trade with the Europeans after the Dahomians destroyed the rival ‘port’ of Jakin in 1732.The origins of the Hueda–Dahomey war of 1727 have been treated at length elsewhere, and detailed rehearsal would be out of place here; it need only be stated that the general view of contemporary European observers – that Agaja sought control of Ouidah principally in order to secure more effective and unrestricted access to the European trade – remains persuasive. For present purposes, it is the consequences rather than the causes of the war that are of central importance.

The Dahomian forces invaded Hueda in March 1727, and quickly overran it. The capital Savi was taken on 9 March and destroyed; the European factories there, which had survived the initial sack of the town, were burned down by the Dahomians a few days later. Many thousands of the inhabitants of the kingdom were killed or enslaved and sold, and others fled, settling in communities along the coast to both east and west of Ouidah, where the lagoon and other inland waterways afforded a degree of protection against the land-based forces of Dahomey.

There is thus a Hueda quarter, Houedakome, in Porto-Novo, to the east, and a significant Hueda element also settled in Badagry, further east again. The Hueda king Hufon, together with many of his subjects, however, fled westwards, to found the kingdom later known as Hueda-Henji. They first took refuge, as reported immediately after the conquest, on ‘an island on the sea coast … lying near [Grand-] Popoe’. In early 1728 the place where Hufon was residing was named as ‘Topoy’, which may represent ‘Tokpa’, a generic toponym meaning ‘on the waterside’; but ‘Topoy’ was attacked and destroyed by the Dahomians soon after, and Hufon evidently removed to a less accessible site. Hueda tradition indicates that the initial settlement of the exiles was at Mitogbodji, an island in the southwest of Lake Aheme; but Hufon subsequently moved his capital to Houeyogbe, further north, on the western shore of the lake.

In contrast to the obscurity of the history of Ouidah during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, a relative abundance of documentation becomes available from the 1840s onwards. Principally, this comes from a series of foreign, mainly British, visitors, who left extended accounts, beginning with the missionary Thomas Birch Freeman in 1843 and including the explorer John Duncan in 1845. In addition, by the 1840s British and French merchants were engaged in trade in palm oil at Ouidah, some records of whose activities are preserved. This was followed by the involvement in Dahomian affairs of European governments, beginning with Portugal, which reoccupied its fort in Ouidah in 1844. British negotiations with the Dahomian authorities for the ending of the slave trade from 1847 involved a series of missions that passed through Ouidah and the maintenance of a vice-consulate in the town in 1849 and 1851–2; besides the official records of these contacts, one of those involved, the naval officer Frederick Forbes, published a lengthy account of his experiences in three visits to Ouidah in 1849–50. The French government, responding to the perceived threat of preemption by the British, also negotiated with Dahomey for commercial privileges, beginning with a treaty in 1851 and continuing in further diplomatic missions in 1856 and 1858. In addition, a British Methodist mission operated in Ouidah from 1854, which, although a failure in terms of its own agenda of evangelization, nevertheless provides useful documentation of its interactions with the local community. There is also an unprecedentedly detailed local source for this period, in the correspondence of the Brazilian trader Jose Francisco dos Santos, which survives for the years 1844–7. The papers of the Lawson family of Little Popo to the west likewise include correspondence from the period 1843–53, which makes frequent reference to links to Ouidah.

Besides being relatively well documented, the 1840s and 1850s also comprise a critical period of transition in the history of Ouidah, with the decline of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of an alternative export trade in palm oil.