No Way Back
During these long journeys between the hinterland and the coast, captive Africans resisted their enslavement. Occasionally they attempted to escape from coffles, but most often they were unsuccessful.
Fulani Muslim warriors enslaved Samuel Ajayi Crowther in Osogun, a town located northwest of Lagos (in present-day Nigeria) in 1821, when he was about thirteen years old. Reaching the coast took nearly fourteen months, as Crowther changed owners several times, traded first for a horse and later for currencies such as rum and tobacco.21 During this long journey, he saw many “grandmothers, mothers, children, and cousins, [who] were all led captives.... The aged women were to be greatly pitied, not being able to walk so fast as their children and grandchildren.”22 It was when he arrived on the coast that he “received, for the first time, the touch of a White Man, who examined me whether I was sound or not.” Describing how men and boys were bound together “with a chain of about six fathoms [12 yards or about 11 meters] in length, thrust through an iron fetter on the neck... and fastened at both ends with padlocks.” Crowther underscores the sentiment of anger among these captives who in vain resisted the horrible conditions of their imprisonment that lasted about four months before being embarked: “The men sometimes, getting angry, would draw the chain so violently, as seldom went without bruises on their poor little necks; especially the time to sleep, when they drew the chain so close to ease themselves of its weight, in order to be able to lie more conveniently, that we were almost suffocated, or bruised to death, in a room with one door, which was fastened as soon as we entered in, with no other passage for communicating the air than the openings under the eaves-drop.”23 Crowther’s experience of confinement anticipated what he would experience in the hold of a slave ship heading to the Americas.Joseph Wright was captured in approximately 1826. In his short autobiography, he identifies himself as Egba Alake, member of a people occupying the Egba region of southern Yorubaland, north of Lagos, in today’s Nigeria. Like many Africans captured in this region during the two first decades of the nineteenth century, his enslavement was part of the conflicts associated with the fall of the Yoruba Oyo Empire, including the Owu War that led to the invasion of Egba towns, as discussed in chapter 2. A coalition of Ife and Ijebu forces besieged Wright’s hometown. Hunger came next, and eventually the attackers took control of the city, destroying it and violating, enslaving, and killing his people: “The enemies satisfied themselves with little children, little girls, young men, and young women; and so they did not care about the aged and old people. They killed them without mercy.... Abundant heaps of dead bodies were in the streets, and there were none to bury them.”24
Wright was sold and moved to other cities several times. During this long journey, he witnessed the state of destruction of the neighboring areas. The invaders dug dead bodies from their graves to take their clothes and other valuable belongings. Many prisoners of these multiple attacks were sold into slavery. There were also slave markets along the way, where “many hundreds of slaves, we were put in rows, so that we all could be seen at one view by the buyers; and in about five hours another trade man came and bought me.” At some point, Wright was boarded on a canoe. After sailing all night, they stopped at another market, where the trader purchased more people: “At the time of evening, the canoe was loaded with slaves and we sailed for his home directly. We arrived about twelve o’clock in the night. The town where we had just arrived, by name of Ikko [Lagos], is the place where the Portuguese traded.” Eventually, the human cargo was brought to a Portuguese man who, after examining their bodies, sent selected captives to a slave pen: “When we entered into the slave fold, the slaves shouted for joy for having seen another of their countrymen in the fold.”25 Eventually, Wright was sold to the Portuguese, who paid for him with “tobacco, rum, clothes, powder, gun, cutlasses, brass, iron rods, and jackey [jaki], which is our country money.”26
Many other men, women, and children experienced similar fates.
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, as discussed in chapter 2, was captured in Djougou, in the Bight of Benin in 1844. Like other captives who left accounts telling how they were enslaved and gradually moved to slave ports in the coastal areas until reaching the port of Lagos, Baquaqua was sold several times. In the long route to reach the coast, he passed through villages and inhabited forest regions, sometimes with “no regular road,” and “crossed several large streams of water.”27 Although reporting that his captors treated him well during the day, they “tightly kept” him during the night to prevent him from escaping.28After stopping for several days in various places, traveling during the day and resting in the woods at night, Baquaqua eventually arrived in Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. According to him, gates surrounded the city, and a “toll was demanded on passing through.” Although he did not see the royal palaces, he was told that “the king’s house was ornamented on the outside with the human skulls.”29 Finally, Baquaqua was led to Ouidah, where he saw a white man for the first time. Along with other captives, he was transported by canoe through the lagoon to be embarked at a nearby port, probably Little Popo. Because during this period the slave trade from the Bight of Benin to the Americas had been banned, this measure was aimed to avoid attracting attention from the British squadron patrolling the coast.30 Before being embarked, the group was put into a slave pen. A man holding a whip oversaw them, while another one branded them with a hot iron. Sold and branded, Baquaqua and his companions of misfortune were then “chained together, and tied with ropes round about our necks, and were thus drawn down to the sea shore.”31
After being captured in Banté, north of Kingdom of Dahomey, Oluale Kossola (alias Cudjo Kazoola Lewis) was moved to the coast, even though his account suggests that the Dahomean army first headed east.32 On his way to Ouidah, he passed through Abomey, which, like Baquaqua, he described as a city surrounded by gates.
Kossola also reported on the “house of the king” and mentioned that “de house de king live in hisself, you understand me, it made out of skull bones.... Dey got de white skull bone on de stick when dey come meet us, and de men whut march in front of us, dey got de fresh head high on de stick.”33In Dahomey, vanquished enemies were decapitated during wars and their heads carried as trophies. As early as in 1727, the British ship captain and slave merchant William Snelgrave witnessed the Dahomean army returning from a battle and carrying heads of dead prisoners as trophies of war.34 This was not a fabulation by European observers. King Adandozan, who ruled Dahomey between 1797 and 1818, sent a letter to Prince Regent Dom João Carlos de Bragança of Portugal in 1810, in which he described a campaign against the Mahi country, when his army killed people and took off the jaws of his enemies “to display at the doors of my house, and nailed them to wood sticks.”35 Skulls of defeated enemies were symbols of power intended to intimidate not only Dahomey subjects and neighboring polities willing to challenge Dahomey supremacy but also external agents from Europe and the Americas. Bulfinch Lambe, Robert Norris, Richard Burton, and Frederick E. Forbes, who sojourned in Abomey between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reported that kings purchased heads and that human skulls not only were employed to mount the thrones of Dahomey’s rulers but also tiled some rooms of the Abomey palaces.36 The display of human skulls certainly shocked British visitors. But the practice of displaying trophy heads on spikes was far from exclusive to Abomey and existed in European cities such as London and Paris during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
After staying three days in Abomey, Kossola and the other captives were led to Ouidah, the main port of embarkation of the Bight of Benin, controlled by the Kingdom of Dahomey and its agents.
In Ouidah, they were placed in a barracoon “behind a big house,” which by then was probably the building of the Portuguese fort São João Batista da Ajuda as by the time of Kossola’s enslavement the other European forts were abandoned. With its construction concluded in 1727, the fort was located approximately two miles from the beach. The three-week period of Kossola’s confinement in the barracoon was not very long. Although enslaved in 1860, when the slave trade for the Americas had been made illegal and dramatically declined, Kossola also reported the existence of other slave pens: “Dey got plenty of dem but we doan know who de people in de other pens.” Like Cugoano, Crowther, and Baquaqua, it was during his waiting period at this coastal barracoon that Kossola saw white men for the first time “and dass somethin’ he ain’ never seen befo’.” In this last period of confinement before boarding the slave ship, the slave traders and other agents scrutinized the bodies of enslaved men, women, and children: “Dey make everybody stand in a ring—’bout ten folkses in each ring. De men by dey self, de women by dey self. Den de white man lookee and lookee. He looke hard at de skin and de feet and de legs and in the mouth. Den he choose.”37