Whydah (Ouidah) and the Kingdom of Hueda

What was Whydah (Ouidah) like around 1715?

The names Whydah, Ouidah, the Portuguese Ajudá and the Dutch Fida all come from Xwéda, or Hueda, the name of a people and their kingdom on the coast of today’s Benin. The town that European sailors called Whydah was the Hueda town of Glehue. It was not a harbour. It stood a few kilometres back from the sea and ships anchored in the open water offshore, which sailors called “Whydah Road”. Goods and people crossed the heavy surf in canoes.

The kingdom’s capital was Savi, a royal town with a daily market, about seven miles inland according to the English slave-ship captain William Snelgrave. Hueda tradition says its founder, Haholo, came from Tado and built Savi, and that his successor founded Glehue. Hueda had once paid tribute to the larger kingdom of Allada, but by the late 1600s it was independent and growing rich.

Who ruled Whydah, and how did King Huffon control the trade?

Africans, not Europeans, set the rules at Whydah, though European ships came because plantations in the Americas demanded enslaved workers. Huffon (also written Hufon or Haffon) became king in 1708, reportedly as a teenager, and ruled until 1727. Every European ship had to pay customs and give gifts to the king before it could trade. The king had the right to sell first, and market rules fixed prices. The local money was cowrie shells, which Europeans brought from the Indian Ocean.

The main European trading houses, called factories, stood at Savi beside the royal palace, given and protected by the king. Near Glehue the French had a fort from 1704 and the English Royal African Company one from the 1680s or 1690s. The Dutch kept a small post for a time. The Portuguese began their fort in 1721, on a site the Hueda king chose. That fort now houses the Ouidah Museum of History.

In 1704, before Huffon’s reign, the Hueda court ruled that European nations must not attack each other’s ships at Whydah, even when their countries were at war in Europe. Huffon kept this rule, and Snelgrave called the road “a free Port for all European Nations”.

How large was the Whydah slave trade?

From the 1670s to the 1860s, more than a million people were shipped from Ouidah into slavery in the Americas, according to the historian Robin Law. Only Luanda, in Angola, sent more. The Bight of Benin as a whole supplied about a fifth of all the captives taken across the Atlantic, and about half of them left from Ouidah. The years from about 1700 to 1727 were Hueda’s busiest. Snelgrave guessed that over 20,000 people a year were shipped from Whydah and nearby places at the peak, but that was a slave trader’s estimate.

Most of the people sold were captives brought from inland, taken in wars and raids between neighbouring peoples. Each was a person with a family, a language and gods of their own, forced onto ships bound for the Americas. In 1717 the French ship La Concorde bought 516 captives here; later Blackbeard captured her and made her his Queen Anne’s Revenge. The London slave ship Whydah Gally was named after the port, and in 1717 she became the flagship of Black Sam Bellamy.

What was the religion of the Hueda people?

The chief god of the Hueda kingdom was Dangbé, the royal python. European visitors in the 1700s described great public processions to the snake temple. The Temple of Pythons in Ouidah is still active today, kept by families linked to the old kingdom, and the town is a national centre of Vodun, the religion of the region.

What happened when Dahomey conquered Hueda in 1727?

Dahomey was an inland kingdom whose king, Agaja, had conquered Allada in 1724. In late February 1727 his army invaded Hueda, and on 9 March it took Savi and destroyed it. Soon afterwards the European factories at Savi were burned, and the Europeans there were taken prisoner and later released.

The human cost was very great. Thousands of Hueda people were killed, and many thousands more were captured and sold into slavery. Reports at the time spoke of about 5,000 dead and 10,000 or more captured; these are rough figures. King Huffon escaped by canoe to the west and, with his followers, founded a Hueda state in exile. They tried several times to win back their homeland, and Huffon died in exile some years later. Other Hueda people settled at Porto-Novo and Badagry.

Historians still debate why Agaja attacked. Most, including Robin Law, think he wanted direct access to the European trade. The trade was badly disrupted for several years, but in time Ouidah became Dahomey’s main port and stayed one of the busiest slave-trading ports in Africa for more than a century.

What happened when pirates came to Whydah?

In January 1722 Black Bart Roberts sailed into Whydah Road with two ships. Eleven slave ships lay at anchor, most of their crews ashore buying captives, and all surrendered. Roberts demanded 8 pounds of gold dust from each, and most masters paid. When one master refused, the pirates set his ship, the Porcupine, on fire with about 80 enslaved Africans still chained aboard, and they died. The story is told mainly in the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, so the number is approximate.

Are the Door of No Return and Tree of Forgetting in Ouidah historic?

They are modern memorials to the people who were taken away. In 1994 UNESCO launched its Slave Route Project in Ouidah, after a proposal by Benin and Haiti. Along the Route des Esclaves, a road of about 3 to 4 kilometres from the town to the beach, artists placed around a hundred sculptures, many by Cyprien Tokoudagba.

• The Tree of Forgetting and similar stations were created for the Ouidah 92 Vodun festival, held in 1993. They recall a tradition that captives walked around a tree to forget their homeland, but historians have found no record of this from the time of the slave trade.
• The Door of No Return, an arch on the beach designed by Fortuné Bandeira, was unveiled in 1995.
• The route’s sites are on Benin’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage; they are not yet World Heritage Sites.