William's Fort: the English Fort at Ouidah, 1680S–1960S

Chapter 6 William’s Fort: The English Fort at Ouidah, 1680s–1960s

Robin Law

‘William’s Fort, Whydah’, to give it its official name, was an English fortified trading post situated in the town of Ouidah, on the section of the West African coast which was known to Europeans during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as the ‘Slave Coast’, in what is today the Republic of Benin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey).1 The European forts on the West African coast became well known mainly through the important study by A.W. Lawrence published in the 1960s.2 This book concentrated on the forts of the English, especially those which were situated on the Gold Coast, modern Ghana (though it also included Fort James on the Gambia River). The fort at Ouidah, however, is barely mentioned. This neglect of the Ouidah fort may be partly due to its having been offi- cially abandoned in 1812 (and ending up after 1892 in a French rather than a British colony), but it is more likely due the fact that it no longer exists as a recognisable building. This is mainly because, unlike the major forts on the Gold Coast, it was built, not in brick or stone, roofed with tiles, but in mud, roofed with thatch, and was consequently subject to continuous reconstruc- tion. Already by the end of the 19th century, successive redevelopments had destroyed its appearance as a military fortification: in 1890, it was said that the English fort had ‘disappeared, it has become, after several transformations, an ordinary house’;3 the defensive moat which surrounded it was filled in during 1908.4 The property was subdivided, and its formerly open courtyards were built over; today, the former domain of the fort is divided in two by a street.

1 This article is a by-product of broader research into the history of Ouidah that was conducted between 1994 and 2001. See Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). 2 A.W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963); abbre- viated version, Fortified Trade-Posts: The English in West Africa, 1645–1822 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). 3 Édouard Foà, Le Dahomey (Paris: A. Hennuyer, 1895), 417. 4 Marcel Gavoy, ‘Note historique sur Ouidah par l’Administrateur Gavoy (1913)’, Études daho- méennes 13 (1955): 45–70, 51.

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The principal building now standing in the southern section of the site (which is what local people today identify as ‘the English fort’) is a purely residential construction in the ‘Brazilian’ style characteristic of the early colonial period: this was possibly the one noted in 1890, but is more likely a successor to it. The only surviving material remains of its earlier military character are a few cannons still lying in its courtyard.5 Awareness of the forts on the Gold Coast has also been greatly enhanced in recent years thanks to the prominence of some of them, notably Cape Coast and Elmina Castles, in the project of remembrance of the trans-Atlantic slave trade promoted internationally by unesco and locally by the Government of Ghana. In Ouidah, by contrast, the lack of relevant material remains has meant that the English fort, unlike its counterparts on the Gold Coast, has played vir- tually no role in local projects of commemoration of the slave trade, which have concentrated instead on ‘The Slave Route’ (‘La Route des Esclaves’) con- necting the town with the point of embarkation on the beach to the south.6 The history of the English fort at Ouidah is nevertheless of considerable in- terest by way of both comparison and contrast with the histories of the other forts on the Gold Coast. The most obvious difference was that the forts in Oui- dah, including the English, were built from the first with a view to trading in slaves, whereas the fort system on the Gold Coast was originally designed to se- cure access to (and if possible, control over) the supply of gold. The Gold Coast forts only became primarily concerned with the slave trade (and acquired their now familiar slave ‘dungeons’) from the late 17th century onwards. Another distinctive feature of Ouidah was that it hosted forts belonging to two other European nations, as well as Great Britain. The English establish- ment there, in the 1680s, had been preceded by a French factory established originally in 1671: this was initially unfortified, but was later replaced by a fort (‘Fort Saint-Louis de Juda’), built in 1704.7 A Portuguese fort (‘Fortaleza de São João Bautista de Ajudá’) was also built there in 1721.8 Of these, the French fort also no longer exists, having been demolished in 1908; the site is now a public square, with only a couple of cannons testifying to its former military role. The Portuguese fort alone survives as a recognisable military structure, although the present layout of the buildings seems to derive from 1865, when the fort was reoccupied after a period of abandonment, rather than from the original

5 The site is described in an official survey of the architectural ‘heritage’ of Ouidah: Alain Sinou and Bernardin Agbo (eds.), Ouidah et son patrimoine (Paris: orstom, 1991), 133. 6 See Robin Law, ‘Commemoration of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ouidah’, Gradhiva 8 (2008): 10–27. 7 Simone Berbain, Le Comptoir français de Ouidah (Juda) au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: ifan, 1942). 8 Pierre Verger, Le Fort Saint Jean-Baptiste d’Ajuda (Porto Novo: irad, 1966).