Gold Coast and Dahomey

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade from the Gold Coast to the Americas dramatically increased. This growth coincided with the expanding political, economic, and military influence of the Asante Kingdom.

The Fon Kingdom of Dahomey (in today’s southern Republic of Benin) emerged in the seventeenth century. As the kingdom expanded, warfare also became its main form of acquiring enslaved individuals. As in the Kingdom of Kongo, the tradition established during the reign of King Wegbaja, who ruled the kingdom from approximately 1645 to 1685, prevented selling Dahomean residents.

During the reign of King Agaja, Dahomey conquered the Kingdom of Allada in 1724 and the Kingdom of Hueda in 1727. These kingdoms were two epicenters of the external slave trade from the Bight of Benin. These conquests led to an expansion of Dahomey’s territory that gave the kingdom access to the Atlantic seaport of Ouidah, once part of the Kingdom of Hueda. In the following years, Dahomey became a central player in the Atlantic slave trade and constantly led military campaigns against its neighbors, including the Mahi in the north, the Ewe in the west, and Yoruba-speaking polities from the northeast (including the Yoruba town of Ketu) to farther east in the Egba region, corresponding to today’s region of Abeokuta in Nigeria. Dahomey could keep prisoners of war enslaved locally to perform a variety of tasks such as agricultural work, as well as in professions such as soldiers, healers, diviners, and artisans. Other captives were sacrificed during the Annual Customs. These religious ceremonies (figure 2.1) attended by European agents such as Archibald Dalzel, the director of the English fort in Ouidah between 1767 and 1770, were designed to honor royal ancestors and deities of Vodun, a religion characterized by trance, spirit possession, and the worship of numerous gods.²⁷ The festivities were also occasions for the king to display and distribute material wealth.²⁸ However, as the Atlantic slave trade evolved during the eighteenth century, most of these captives were sold to European and American merchants established on the coast.²⁹

Figure 2.1.

Despite its power, Dahomey domination in the region was constantly challenged. Since the seventeenth century, the Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo had expanded its territory to become the largest and richest West African empire in the eighteenth century. After several incursions in the 1720s and 1730s, Oyo made Dahomey a tributary state in 1748, a position that lasted until 1823, even though Dahomey frequently refused to pay tributes.³⁰ Royal artisans narrated these conflicts and other wars in appliqué hangings, a technique still employed by Abomey artisans who sell their works to tourists at the palace’s courtyards. These military campaigns are also depicted in bas-reliefs displayed on the walls of the eighteenth-century earthen royal palaces of Abomey, the kingdom’s former capital city. Produced by artisans in the service of the kings, the rich bas-reliefs depict the emblems of the various rulers as well as warriors fighting and beheading their opponents. For example, one bas-relief on the facade of King Glele’s palace shows a Dahomean warrior pointing a shooting gun at another warrior holding a bow. Other bas-reliefs show Daghessou, a mythical personage with an animal head and horns and a human body, holding a firearm and other kinds of weapons. The facade of King Gezo’s palace displays bas-reliefs depicting Dahomean women warriors (labeled by European chroniclers as “amazons”) carrying prisoners of war on their backs. Another represents horses transporting the head of a neighboring polity’s chief. Ultimately, these poignant visual accounts of the wars Dahomey waged against other polities illustrate how warfare was used as a method to acquire slaves in the area during the period of the Atlantic slave trade.³¹

Like any kind of art produced in a royal court, the bas-reliefs were instruments of royal propaganda intended to memorialize the feats of the various Dahomean rulers.

Many men and women were captured in the hinterland of the Bight of Benin during the wars that ravaged the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even though sometimes the firsthand accounts left by the victims of the Atlantic slave trade are unclear on whether they were captured during a specific war or kidnapped as byproducts of these conflicts. Between 1728 and 1732, the Dahomean army captured the healer Domingos Álvares in the Mahi country at the north. From there he was brought to Jakin (a port near present-day Godomey between Porto-Novo and Ouidah, in the Republic of Benin) and sold into slavery in Brazil.³⁵ In 1782, a freedwoman named Belinda petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in the newly independent United States to obtain a pension from the estate of her deceased owner, the wealthy loyalist Isaac Royall Jr.³⁶ Likely written by her attorney, the petition is a third-person narrative recounting Belinda’s enslavement in West Africa and her ordeals as an enslaved woman in Antigua and colonial Massachusetts.³⁷ According to the narrative, she was captured before the age of twelve, placing her enslavement in the 1720s.