The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Though the Europeans were relatively peaceful in the harbors of the Slave Coast, their new African friends were not. Sometimes the princes employed European mercenaries, and sometimes the Europeans interfered in local politics to ensure a succession to one of the thrones of the ruler who they thought would collaborate best with them. That occurred in 1671 even in Allada, as well as in 1703 in Whydah (when the director of the English fort, Peter Duffield, imposed his candidate). The issue behind these conflicts was often the requirement to kidnap as many neighbors as possible, in order to fulfill the demanding export opportunities. For a time, Allada was successful in persuading the other cities of the region to exclude Whydah from the slave-raiding territories in the north, and the foreign representatives all had to report that captives had become scarce between 1714 and 1720. The French, English, and Dutch collaborated to send weapons to assist Whydah against Allada, but the king of the former, the youthful Huffon, was unable to put these to good use. After a while, a modus vivendi was established, Allada allowing enough slaves through to maintain Whydah’s prosperity.

  To the northeast of these feuding but wealthy little ports lay two inland kingdoms: the Weme (Ouémé), on the river of that name—the only river of any significance here; and Dahomey, with its capital at Abomey, whose territory was separated from the coastal zone by an extensive swamp known as “the Lama.” It does not seem as if there was a kingdom at all in Dahomey before about 1625, and the place may have been founded by an exile from Allada. In the early eighteenth century, King Agaja, one of the most formidable African rulers with whom the Europeans came into contact,II and his captains were “great admirers of fire arms [that is, muskets] and have almost entirely left off the use of bows and arrows.”6 The Dahomeyans also had a high standard of discipline in comparison with their neighbors. Much blood was shed, and prisoners were regularly sacrificed with an almost ancient Mexican sense of dedication.

  In the early eighteenth century, Agaja conquered his near neighbor, the king of Weme, and so gave notice that he was a power to be reckoned with. That led to an appeal for help from a defeated candidate in a struggle for succession in Allada and that, in turn, led to Dahomey’s conquest of that monarchy, too. Bullfinch Lambe, the representative of the RAC, was present at the final battle for Allada, and saw eight thousand captives being counted afterwards, among the bodies, where, “had it rained blood, it could not have lain thicker on the ground.”7

  Some of the other local leaders (for example, the king of Jaquin) then submitted to Agaja who, after careful preparations stretching over three years, turned on Whydah, at that time on the brink of civil war. King Huffon put up no resistance and fled; five thousand people were killed, and over ten thousand enslaved. All the European posts were sacked, and their directors imprisoned. The Dahomeyans, it is true, were next year defeated by the Oyo, for whose cavalry, despite their firearms, they were no match. But they retained what they had won on the coast on condition of paying a tribute to their own conquerors.

  The trade in slaves from Whydah was in the doldrums for several years after the Dahomeyan conquest. The exiled Whydah people, the Dahomeyans, the Oyo, and the Europeans all struggled for control. The English and French commanders were both killed. But soon after concluding a treaty with the Oyo, King Agaja revived the commerce of slaves with the Europeans from Whydah. That he wanted to keep all the captives on whom he could lay his hands in order to work them on his own farms appears to be a myth: what he seems to have disliked was having to treat with middlemen to deal with the Europeans. Nor did he want his own Dahomeyans enslaved. The king did interrupt the old deliveries of slaves from the far interior and tried to control them. But he sold the captives whom he obtained in war on a considerable scale, and began again, with alacrity, the business of raiding the territories to the north, which his predecessors in control of these ports on this so-called Slave Coast had carried out. The slave trade from Dahomey was not the royal monopoly which it is sometimes represented to have been—many chiefs were also permitted to trade—but King Agaja until 1740, and then his son King Tegbesu, and his grandson King Kpengla after him, all played a decisive part in this commerce. New trading posts were built, and the old rhythms of trade were revived on a larger scale than that before 1725. Hundreds of Dahomeyans assisted in the regulation of the slave trade, of course, being usually paid in cowries.

  Europeans of all the slave-trading nations would thereafter often embark on the regular journey from Whydah 120 miles inland to the king’s palace at Abomey, to observe the royal celebrations and the human sacrifices, to admire the exhibitions of silks and textiles, or to stand aghast at the place set round with skulls “as thick as they can lie one by another,” while their agents negotiated at the coast in Whydah.

  These monarchs of eighteenth-century Dahomey imposed law by brutality: they cut off the head of anyone who stole a single cowrie. The kings carried out periodic arbitrary, ruthless, and effective purges of provincial officials. Tegbesu and Kpengla were surrounded by an ample court of soldier women (“Amazons,” according to most Europeans), and were tyrants to be placated and not fought, a perennial subject of fascination for European traders.

  In the late eighteenth century Dahomey went through a depression as a slave-trading center, and the kings tried many expedients in order to stimulate the commerce. For example, since the monarch and his family had come, like so many other Africans, to appreciate the Brazilian market more than any other, attracted by that sweet if third-rate Brazilian tobacco, King Adandozan (Kpengla’s successor) sent an emissary to Bahia in 1795 to suggest that his realm should become the exclusive source of supply of slaves from the coast of Mina for Brazil. The governor of Bahia rejected the idea, not only because he thought that monopoly would increase prices, but because he was fearful of the political consequences of bringing many slaves from the same place, all speaking the same language. The king then sent an emissary to Lisbon, only to receive the same polite rejection of his ideas. Despite the rebuff, Whydah recovered and, in the 1790s, was once more seen as one of the most important slaving centers, especially favored by the last generation before the French Revolution of slave captains from Nantes. The incompetent English representative at Whydah, Lionel Abson, wrote in 1783 to Richard Miles, the commander at Cape Coast, “Since I have been on the coast, I have never seen the quantity of Frenchmen arrive that has lately.”8

  By that time, a new port, Porto-Novo, had opened on the extreme east end of this windward coast, on the sea, not the lagoon, and there a branch of the old rulers of Allada managed to establish themselves. Another group of Allada exiles set themselves up at Badagry, as a result of the initiative of a Dutch free-lance captain, Heinrik Hertogh, the founder of the city. Both Porto-Novo and Badagry were prosperous in the late eighteenth century, though the latter was destroyed in 1784 by the king of Dahomey. Popo continued to be a resort of exiles from Whydah, and sometimes these outcasts attacked their old home—once, in 1763, being repelled only thanks to the intervention of the British commander of the trading post, William Goodson. Beyond, originally a colony of Benin, to the east, lay Onim, the island on which the modern Lagos stands. Onim was an important slave port in the late 1780s, obtaining most of the cargoes from merchants from the lagoons to the west. The freedom of action of these ports, despite Dahomeyan power, was due to the protection of the Oyo empire.

  The Oyo, indeed, always in the background of Dahomeyan politics, were now the principal suppliers of slaves to all these ports, using a large market, Abomey-Calavi, as their chief trading center. Abiodun, the emperor (alafin) of the Oyo after 1774, had been a trader in potash before his accession, and looked on the new city of Porto-Novo as, as he put it, his own “callabash.” By the 1780s, it was in consequence more prosperous than Whydah. The Oyo not only ensured that the merchants there had prisoners of war to sell, but also bought slaves from their Arab northern neighbors and resold them to their southern ones, including the Dahomeyans, whose independence was thus shown to be gro
wing as limited in commerce as it had been for so long in politics. The Oyo still dominated the region, directly or indirectly, at the end of the eighteenth century, despite repeated efforts by the Dahomeyans to escape their shadow. Only in the 1790s was Oyo power in relative decline, and the alafin went so far as to ask for the assistance of King Kpengla of Dahomey in certain military activities, a move which was to prove his and his people’s eventual undoing.

  Perhaps two million slaves were exported from this stretch of coast between the river Volta (Little Popo) and Lagos-Onim between, say, 1640 and 1870, about half (900,000 or so) being carried by Portuguese or Brazilian traders, with the British (360,000), the French (280,000), the Dutch (110,000), the Spaniards, and the North Americans following behind.

  • • •

  Next in his journey along the slave harbors of Africa, the late-eighteenth-century traveler would come to the five “slave rivers” encountered by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, of which the largest, the Rio Fermoso, or Benin, led to the city and kingdom of that name. That monarchy, apparently of Yoruba origin, had been, through its port of Ughoton, a major exporter of slaves at about the turn of the sixteenth century. This was the territory where the Florentine merchant Bartolommeo Marchionni had from the king of Portugal his lucrative license to trade slaves in the late 1480s. But Benin was not a major slave zone after 1530, and the oba (king) tried to cut off the traffic completely in 1550. Cloth, an excellent pepper, and elephants’ tusks then became the main exports. The Portuguese had earlier tried hard to convert the oba of Benin and his subjects to Christianity, but neither the Franciscans in the sixteenth century nor the Capuchins in the late seventeenth met with more than politeness.

  Because of the risks to health, including the currents and the sandbars, this part of Africa was considered a dangerous zone by European seamen. One famous rhyme went:

  Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin;

  Few come out, though many go in.

  The beautiful river Benin (Fermoso) itself seemed especially hazardous. That was where, appropriately, the first English captain to go to the place, Thomas Wyndham, had died in 1553.

  Another Northern European, the Dutch traveler Pieter de Marees, about 1600 thought that the king of Benin had a great many slaves, and that it was the women’s task to carry water. But they may have been more servants than slaves and, anyway, they were not for sale, or at least not to Europeans. The success with which Benin avoided trading in slaves after 1550 showed that such restraint could be exercised if an African king really willed it.

  In the late seventeenth century, some slaves began to be sold again by the oba or his chiefs to the Portuguese. In the 1720s, his slaves were also being bought by Dutch, French, and eventually and above all, English traders, when the prices of ivory and cloth had fallen. The oba even removed his ancestor’s sixteenth-century ban on selling males. Though he maintained the trade as a royal monopoly, the business fell into the hands of the ezomo, a grand vizier of the kingdom. This official, sitting in his throne room encrusted with cowries, supported by his own captives, and who had his visitors’ feet washed in a large brass bowl before presiding at, for example, a yam festival, including human sacrifices, was henceforth the potentate with whom the European traders had to deal in Benin.

  The French, led by the Burgundian captain Jean-François Landolphe—who had long experience of the slave trade and had worked for the Compagnie de Guyane—set up a short-lived factory at Ughoton, on the lower Benin River, in 1778, for trading goods (ivory and cloths) as well as slaves, and then established another more effectively near the river’s mouth in Itsekiri territory in 1783. (Landolphe brought home to Paris a nephew of the olu, or king, of the Itsekiri in 1784.) But yellow fever took its toll of the French traders; Landolphe was outmaneuvered by Liverpool shippers; and he never fulfilled his plans of making Benin a port where he could buy three thousand slaves a year.

  There was a strong English interest in this territory by the mid-eighteenth century, some of the demand being satisfied by Itsekiri traders. Thus five ships left Liverpool in 1752 to buy 1,280 slaves in Benin.

  All the same, neither the oba nor his ezomo organized a major slave-trading network in the style of Ashanti or Dahomey (or, as will be shown, Calabar), and they were never able, because unwilling, to satisfy European demand.

  Beyond Benin, on the Rio dos Forcados, “the swallowtails,” was a principality called Ode Itsekiri, ruled by a family of princes who were related to those of Benin. They had in the 1560s begun to take the place of Benin as a supplier of slaves to São Tomé and then to the new trade to the Americas. The Itsekiri, like their neighbors and rivals, the Ijo, were known for their powerful, long war canoes, with which they dominated the lower waters of the Benin River, and with which they ensured a regular supply of captives to sell to whosoever would buy from them.

  Even worse than the rivers of Benin in terms of health was the Rio Reale, the Bonny River to the English, on the Bight of Biafra for, in the late eighteenth century, the death rate from malaria, at least on the British ships which slaved from there, was over ten a voyage, twice as bad as in any other slave region. The captains were trading in the estuaries of the delta of the great Niger, here to be seen also in the form of the Cross River and the Old Calabar River, between which innumerable creeks provided an elaborate network of waterways into the interior. The entire territory was most unhealthful. The nineteenth-century traveler and entrepreneur Macgregor Laird would call the lower reaches of the Niger “one extensive swamp, covered with mangrove and palm trees [from which] the fen-damp rose in the mornings, cold and clammy to the skin, like the smoke from a damp wood fire.”9

  The Bight of Biafra was an important zone of slave trading as early as 1700: at least 4,500 slaves a year were exported in 1711-30, and perhaps a third of all the slaves carried by Britain in the eighteenth century came from these ports, as did possibly a quarter of all the slaves carried to North America. The main anchorages here were Old Calabar, at the mouth of the estuary (called Iboku by the Efik); Adiabo, ten miles up the river Calabar; and Mbiabo, on the Cross River (Curcock to Europeans). Lower down, near the sea, was Duke Town, called after its leader, Duke Ephraim, which later became the core of New Calabar. Beyond were Bonny and Opobo, still rather small cities at the end of the eighteenth century.

  The Portuguese knew of the Cross River and its tributary the Calabar, but they did not trade there and, in 1600, the Dutch traveler Pieter de Marees advised traders to avoid the place, because there was nothing to be gained, with always a danger of being wrecked. There was, indeed, a large reef in front of the Old Calabar River. But by the 1600s, the English had learned to avoid that, and were trading extensively, buying slaves for Barbados, as well as monkeys and ivory for England. By 1700, so many English ships were “gone to old Calabar” that other Europeans knew that “you cannot have trade there.” The slaves of Calabar were considered the least satisfactory, since they were rebellious. In the course of the next hundred years, the place became, however, with its many rivers, one of the most favored of slave regions, for the French and Dutch as well as the English.

  The Efik traders, an Ibibio-speaking people, had moved southeast to these waterways in the seventeenth century (according to legend because of a quarrel over an ax); when they matured from fishermen to become traders, in slaves among other things, they founded a powerful commercial brotherhood, known as the Egbe. The leaders of this association, realizing the importance of having a trading language with the Europeans, developed an engaging version of English, which used the words of that tongue with a syntax based on Ibibio. James Barbot, a slave captain at the end of the seventeenth century (a brother of Jean, the memorialist), speaks of these leaders as Duke Aphrom (Ephraim), King Robin, King Mettinon, King Ebrero, and even Old King Robin. The titles were allusions to leaders rather than monarchs. Most slaves sold in Old Calabar in the seventeenth century came from the relatively near-at-hand Ibo hinterland but, a hundred years
later, they were often bought at fairs many miles inland. The strong preference for exchange was for copper bars to begin with, then iron ones. For a time, copper bracelets constituted a kind of currency. Some of the sons of these traders visited England and, in consequence, schools were established at home in Old Calabar for “the purpose of instructing . . . the youth belonging to families of consequence.” Materials for building houses were also obtained from Europe, and one black African trader called his house Liverpool Hall: Antera Duke, one of the slave traders, noted in his diary in the late eighteenth century, “After 10 o’clock, wee go chop for Egbo Young house, Liverpool Hall.”10

  The most famous of the Efik slave traders, Eyo Nsa (Willy Honesty to the English), was not in fact an Efik, for he had himself been brought to Old Calabar as a slave. He became a successful general in the Efik service, especially in fighting the pirates at the mouth of Ikpa Creek. He married an Ambo princess and, in later life, became rich as a slave trader. He had an immense household of slaves, whom he sold when the price was right.

  Imports from Europe were seized on in the region of Calabar as wonderfully helpful to the local economy. Old wooden agricultural implements could be tipped with European iron and so made more efficient. The salt-boiling communities recognized that they benefited from the import of brass “neptunes” (large basins) and the imports of textiles were most useful to a people which had previously produced little. On the other hand, in this zone the population declined constantly from the 1690s till 1850, presumably as a direct consequence of the trade in slaves: the most serious decline in population in Africa in these years. (This whole territory was, however, one of the few areas of Africa where there was a real shortage of land for the population, so a drain of slaves may have been advantageous.)