Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port 1727-1892

"This one is all about the West African context for the slave trade. Ouidah was—and still is—a port town. But it would become one of the most important ‘free ports’ for Europeans to purchase enslaved people in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. It was a place controlled by Africans, by the local African leadership, in which Europeans operated and competed with each other for the supply of slaves. African slave vendors—like the King of Ouidah—established places like Ouidah so that Europeans could appear in large numbers to bid up the price of slaves. So, at certain points in the transatlantic slave trade the Africans were pushing the price up and certain African communities, undoubtedly distinct minorities, were profiting from the system and were in absolute control of how it operated. We should think of the word ‘African’ as being in inverted commas is because the concept of a pan-continental identity at the time is a complete fiction. This is as story of much smaller groups, different ethnicities, different linguistic groups, competing and often in violent rivalry with each other to get their hands on the business from the Europeans. Robin Law is an absolutely superb scholar of this West African dimension, which, I would argue, has often been neglected. His work is largely based on European sources, it has to be said, but in the case of this book he has supplemented them with oral traditions from West Africa. He gives a really fine-grained analysis of this notion of European weakness in Africa. The chronology of the book is really helpful, too, because it doesn’t just go through the period of the slave trade. It goes through into the 19th century. So, you can begin to understand—connecting back to Eric Williams—that, actually, after abolition, the Europeans, unsurprisingly, started to penetrate into the West African interior much more. So, abolition became the kind of friendly face that enables the Europeans to expand their control over the territory of West Africa. “The concept of a pan-continental identity at that time is a complete fiction” He studies this process via Ouidah and Dahomey. These places profited a lot from the slave trade, but then experienced European colonialism in Africa in the 19th century. As with Eltis, all of Robin Law’s books are absolutely superb, but this one does a really good job of shining light on an under-appreciated phenomenon. But also, with its unusual chronology—most books looking at this would focus on the period before or after abolition—this book connects the long history of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries through one narrative. Absolutely. And these differences remain in the 21st century. Some of the rifts in Nigerian society, in West African society in general, derive from the tensions between these groups, even though they are now within the same nation. It’s difficult both for the descendants of those people who were doing the enslaving and those enslaved. Those groups often won’t intermarry, for example, even today. So, the cultural and ethnic fissures that derived from the slave trade, and actually fuelled it in the first place, continue as a direct legacy into the present day. I think the view is—and I may be oversimplifying here—that those who derived from the political groupings formed by the economic benefits of running the slave trade are often in positions of privilege. They may be closer to political power. Those people who descend from those groups that tended to be enslaved, tend to work in more entrepreneurial contexts and therefore are just as likely to be wealthy, but for different reasons. They understood that they had these footholds on the West African coast, which in some cases they’d had for centuries—the first English forts in West Africa were established in the middle of the 17th century. They saw these as assets that they could use as launching pads for the securing of more natural resources. The legislation that abolishes the slave trade is, if you like, a wartime measure that’s designed partly to suppress the slave trade of other European countries. So, in order to do that, you need a pretty serious naval presence on the west African coast. Once you have that significant military presence there and you’ve been able to suppress your rival slave trade, that military presence was then used to subdue the local population and move in to seizing territory and resources in the African interior. So, I think what happened in the 1820s and 1830s does lead to the process we understand as they scramble for Africa. It’s inseparable from that."