An Afro-Luso-Brazilian Community in the Bight of Benin
African freedmen and freedwomen who migrated from Bahia and Rio de Janeiro to the Bight of Benin joined a long-established community of Portuguese and Brazilian slave merchants who had been based in the region’s coastal towns since the eighteenth century.
These formerly enslaved returnees attempted to keep their Brazilian lifestyle. Preserving their Brazilian way of life was not only an issue of customs and culture. Several freed African-born returnees owned enslaved people in Brazil, and several of them actually became slave merchants after reaching West Africa. Surely, many of these slave traders were not able to amass great fortunes, as other slave merchants of the region did, but some of them prospered. This Afro-Luso-Brazilian community is still today known as “Aguda.” This term, originally associated with the Portuguese settlers and also a synonym for “Brazilian” and “Catholic,” was gradually applied to all Brazilian returnees living in the Bight of Benin, though among them were also individuals who embraced Islam.Upon their arrival in Ouidah, freedpeople were assisted by the Brazilian slave merchant Francisco Félix de Souza, one of the most important dignitaries in the region. We do not know much about Souza’s early life. Born in Salvador in 1754, he first came to the region in 1792 and may have stayed for approximately three years. In 1800, he returned to the Bight of Benin and settled in Ouidah to work in the Portuguese fort São João Batista da Ajuda. This Portuguese trade outpost, in operation in the area since 1721, was administered directly from Bahia, which until 1763 was the capital of the Viceroyalty of Brazil, then a Portuguese colony. After this initial position, Souza became the fort’s director.
Souza’s earliest activities in Ouidah coincided with the reign of the infamous King Adandozan, who ruled Dahomey from 1797 to 1818, as already discussed in chapter 3.
Adandozan acquired a bad reputation because after taking power he may have sold locally born individuals into slavery. These victims included members of the Dahomean royal family who were allegedly involved in the plot that led to the assassination of his father, King Agonglo, including one of his wives Na Agontimé, as mentioned in chapter 2. Adandozan’s selling of noblemen and noblewomen into slavery was considered a transgression, even though previous kings had sold their political enemies into slavery as well. More likely the king’s bad reputation was a consequence of the economic and political crisis that marked his reign. Ouidah was in great decline because of the dramatic drop in the French slave trade that followed the victory of the Saint-Domingue Revolution. Further contributing to Ouidah’s decline were the final ban of the British slave trade in 1807 and Britain’s increasing efforts to prohibit the slave trade from Africa to Brazil, where most Africans who had been embarked in Ouidah were sent into slavery. The growing importance of Lagos threatened Ouidah’s position as the largest West African slave-trading port, creating quarrels among the Dahomean king and slave merchants from various European nations and Brazil.41 Following one of these quarrels, Adandozan sent Souza to prison. While incarcerated, Souza met Prince Gakpé, the king’s half brother and future King Gezo, who helped him to escape from prison. After this memorable flight, Souza probably settled in Little Popo, whence he supported Gakpé with goods and weapons to prepare for the putsch against Adandozan.When King Gezo had successfully deposed Adandozan, he repaid Souza for his support. The new king invited Souza to settle in Ouidah, granted him land, and awarded him with financial advantages and political power. Souza became Gezo’s most important agent in Ouidah’s slave-trading activities and one of the wealthiest slave merchants of West Africa. His privileged connections with the Dahomean royal family made him the founder of a dynasty of sorts.
His nickname “Chacha” became a title, and he was commonly referred to as the viceroy of Dahomey, even though this title did not exist.42The story of Souza, Adandozan, and Gezo is well known and was depicted in the novel The Viceroy of Ouidah by British writer Bruce Chatwin, which was later adapted to the big screen as the movie Cobra Verde by German filmmaker Werner Herzog.43 More recently, Gezo was also portrayed in the movie The Woman King, though inaccurately represented as a supporter of the slave trade abolition.44 During the nineteenth century, Souza became the main supporter and benefactor of the community of freedmen and freedwomen returnees in Ouidah. In this powerful capacity, he also distributed favors and, in exchange, obtained political support. Among the members of the Aguda community, however, there was an invisible line that separated and still today keeps apart the descendants of enslaved people who returned from Brazil to settle in the Bight of Benin and the descendants of slave merchants. Members of the community who are descendants of enslaved people could feel uncomfortable highlighting that their ancestors were enslaved people, whereas descendants of slave merchants were often proud of their ancestors, who are perceived by them as wealthy and prosperous men. But despite these divisions within the community, many Aguda families include descendants of both freedpeople and slave traders.45
Souza was not the only rich Brazilian slave merchant established in the Bight of Benin with connections with the Aguda community. Take the example of Domingos José Martins (also known as “Dominguinhos da Costa” and Domingos Martinez). Like Souza, he was one of the most important Brazilian slave traders in the region. Born in Salvador in Bahia, his activities in the Bight of Benin greatly contributed to the trade connections between Bahia, Ouidah, and Lagos. In 1834, after the slave trade to Brazil was outlawed, Martins traveled from Bahia to the Bight of Benin as part of the crew of a slave ship sent to Francisco Félix de Souza, but the British Royal Navy captured the slave vessel, and the crew members had to disembark in Ouidah, where Martins settled and started trading in enslaved Africans under Souza’s protection.
By 1838, Martins had moved to Lagos. Taking advantage of his Brazilian network, he imported gold and other goods, with which he purchased African captives to be illegally transported and sold in Brazil. In just a few years, he became the most important slave merchant in Lagos.46 Ten years later, for example, on June 7 1843, the slave ship Furia, which sailed from Lagos to Bahia illegally transporting 529 enslaved men, women, and children consigned to Domigos José Martins, was intercepted by the British Royal Navy.47By 1844, Martins went to Bahia, but in 1845 he sailed again from Brazil to the Bight of Benin.48 By this time, Oba Kosoko had overthrown Oba Akitoye, Martins’s former supporter in Lagos, which is probably why Martins decided to relocate in Porto-Novo (today’s Sèmè near today’s Porto-Novo, the capital of the Republic of Benin). This slave-trading port was controlled by the Kingdom of Porto-Novo, in competition and often in conflict with the Kingdom of Dahomey. From there, he established another outpost in Ape Vista (today’s Cotonou).49 But Martins was versatile and also maintained a trading post in Ouidah, where his old benefactor Souza still controlled the slave trade.
In Ouidah, Lagos, or Porto-Novo, Martins joined the Aguda community’s second generation but kept traveling back and forth to Bahia, where he had family and owned real estate.50 He became so influential in the region that, following Souza’s death, King Gezo considered appointing Martins as Souza’s successor. But as Martins was not willing to relocate to Ouidah, he declined the offer. With the rise of the new legitimate trade in palm oil, Martins supported it as complementary to the illegal slave trade. His stance paid off. In 1849, the British identified him as the most important trader of the Bight of Benin. For example, in February 1850, the British Royal Navy apprehended his slave-trading brigantine Serpente off Porto-Novo, and in April 1850, it captured the brigantine Dois Amigos that departed from Bahia to the coasts of Africa.51 Over time, Martins increasingly clashed with the king of Porto-Novo as the rival kingdom, Dahomey, continued to be his main supplier of enslaved Africans.
In 1851, the conflicts with the king of Porto-Novo led Martins to move back to Ouidah, where he was appointed as a caboceer (local chief). At this point British pressures to abolish the slave trade in the region were becoming successful. In January 1852, King Gezo signed a treaty with the British abolishing the slave trade in Dahomey, but Martins certainly continued trading in enslaved Africans as the British often accused him of not respecting the slave trade prohibition. Although he may have considered returning to Bahia, the slave trade to Brazil was outlawed for the second time in 1850, and he may have feared being prosecuted for his illegal trading activities. Bankrupted in 1859, he avowed that he had given up the slave trade only in 1863. Martins died in Ouidah in 1864. He had married one of Souza’s daughters, with whom he had at least one child. Like other Brazilian and Portuguese slave merchants, Martins certainly left descendants in Ouidah, even though he was probably not able to pass down many assets.
By 1850, several former slave returnees were also actively involved in the slave trade in Ouidah, Agoué, Porto-Novo, and Lagos.52 Among these freedmen was Joaquim de Almeida, to whom we were introduced in chapter 8. In 1835, when the Malê Revolt broke out, he was already freed and became a prosperous slave trader, leading his activities between Bahia and the Bight of Benin. According to his family’s oral tradition, disseminated by several scholars, he married Mino, a freedwoman he met in Brazil. Mino was said to have been a wife or a descendant of the infamous King Adandozan.53 Thus, Almeida and his spouse settled in Agoué, even though he pursued his slave-trading activities eastward in Ouidah (see map 1 at the front of the book), where his activities contributed to breaking Souza’s monopoly of the slave trade in the region.54 According to the British officer Frederick Forbes, who sojourned in the region, Almeida was the most affluent slave merchant established in Ouidah in the 1840s.55 His reputation as one of the “three most active slave agents on the coast of Africa” along with Domingos José Martins remained intact until as late as 1853.56 Like the Souza family, the Silva family is among the most prominent Aguda clans of the Republic of Benin.
Today, its most famous representative, Urbain-Karim Elisio da Silva, maintains a private museum in Porto-Novo, where he tells the story of the Aguda community and the African diaspora from his personal perspective. However, the trajectory of his first ancestor bearing the name Silva (a very common last name in Brazil and Portugal), is more uncertain than that of other leading members of the Aguda community such as Souza, Martins, and Almeida. According to one version of the oral tradition, the first Silva in the Bight of Benin was José Rodrigues da Silva, a Portuguese slave merchant who started trading enslaved Africans at the port of Jakin (near present-day Godomey) by the middle of the eighteenth century. Silva married a daughter of the oba of Benin. The couple sent one of their sons to Bahia, where he married a Brazilian woman. Together they had a son, Firmiano Georges José Rodrigues da Silva, who married Angélica Rosa da Conceição. The couple relocated in Ouidah in the first half of the nineteenth century and had a son baptized Francisco Rodrigues da Silva. But the name Silva had also been transmitted by the patriarch to other children he had with other local African women, including a son named Honório Aruna Georges Rodrigues da Silva.Despite the oral tradition, historians did not find evidence linking his family to José Rodrigues da Silva. But through his maternal side, Urbain-Karim Elisio da Silva also had connections with Brazilian returnees. His great-grandfather was José Abubakar Paraíso, a Yoruba speaker captured during the wars that led to the fall of the Oyo Empire and sent into slavery to Bahia in the early nineteenth century. There are several conflicting versions of Paraíso’s trajectory as well.57 What we do know is that once he was emancipated, Paraíso was possibly already converted to Islam and returned from Bahia to the Bight of Benin approximately in 1850. After disembarking at the port of Badagry (in present-day Nigeria) he settled in Porto-Novo, where he became a prominent figure among the community of Yoruba speakers. Like many returnees who settled in the Bight of Benin, Silva’s ancestors reinvented themselves, and despite facing numerous hardships, they prospered.