Law Mann Western Africa Atlantic Community

West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast
Author(s): Robin Law and Kristin Mann

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, African and American Atlantic
Worlds (Apr., 1999), pp. 307-334
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674121
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West Africa in the Atlantic Community:
The Case of the Slave Coast
Robin Law and Kristin Mann
T SHE section of the West African coast known to Europeans as the

"Slave Coast" was, as the name implies, a major source for the
transatlantic slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. The two principal ports of embarkation for slaves in the region were
Ouidah and Lagos.1 The history of Slave Coast ports such as Ouidah and
Lagos cannot be understood or adequately represented in isolation, since
they were involved in wider regional and transatlantic networks. Within
Africa, the operation of the slave trade linked the coastal ports not only to
the countries in the interior that supplied slaves to the coast but also to one
another, especially through the coastal lagoon system, along which slaves
were commonly moved from port to port prior to embarkation.2 Across the
Atlantic, the commercial links established by the slave trade among ports in
West Africa, America, and Europe are well known, but the trade also gener-
ated transatlantic social and cultural connections whose importance has been
commonly underestimated. The scale and intensity of these bonds were such
that the coastal communities of the Slave Coast, or at least their commercial
and ruling elites, may be considered as participating in what can reasonably
be termed an "Atlantic community." The degree of involvement in this
Robin Law is professor of African history at the University of Stirling, and Kristin Mann is
associate professor of history at Emory University. An earlier version of this article was pre-
sented at the conference "West Africa and the Americas: Repercussions of the Slave Trade,"
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, February I997. It builds upon a paper by Kristin
Mann, "The Origins of the Diaspora between the Bight of Benin and Bahia during the Era of
the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, San
Francisco, November i996, and incorporates material from a paper by Robin Law, "The
Evolution of the Brazilian Community in Ouidah," Symposium on "Rethinking the African
Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil," Emory
University, Atlanta, Ga., April i998. The authors' thanks are due, for their constructive com-
ments and criticisms, to Ira Berlin, Alberto da Costa e Silva, Robert A. Hill, J. Lorand Matory,
and Joe Miller. The authors thank Jewell Green, Jamie Martin, and Sarah Zingarelli at Emory
University for their help with preparing the map.
1 The "Slave Coast" was conventionally defined as extending from the River Volta to
Lagos (or, sometimes, further east), corresponding roughly to the Bight of Benin (or, in terms of
modern political geography, the coast of Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria).
2 For connections along the lagoon, see Robin Law, "Trade and Politics behind the Slave
Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, I500-1800," Journal of African History, 24
(I983), 32I-38; Law, "Between the Sea and the Lagoons: The Interaction of Maritime and Inland
Navigation on the Precolonial Slave Coast," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 29 (I989), 209-37.
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LVI, Number 2, April i999
308 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
wider community varied from case to case and from period to period. The
wider Atlantic community itself was also subject to transformation, with the
importance of links specifically to Brazil increasing over time.
The basis for this interpretation is primarily empirical, that is, it derives
from the specific character of the evidence relating to the Slave Coast, which
in turn reflects the exceptional scale of that region's integration into the
Atlantic commercial system, and especially the intensity of its links with
Brazil. In stressing the latter, we do not claim absolute originality but
acknowledge in particular the late Pierre Verger's pioneering work on Afro-
Brazilian interconnections.3
Beyond that, however, this article engages a growing body of literature
concerned with the formation of Atlantic history and culture and, especially,
the role of Africans and African Americans within it. Bernard Bailyn has
recently drawn attention to the current popularity of the idea of "Atlantic
history." He documents a growing trend toward studying the Atlantic world
as a historical unit, as historians of Europe and of North and South America
have broadened their focus to include "the entire Atlantic basin, not simply
descriptively but conceptually." But, although Bailyn brings Africa into the
discussion briefly through a treatment of the Atlantic slave trade, his refer-
ences are primarily to works that equate Atlantic history with European civi-
lization. In his conception, Africa has played a very limited role in shaping
the history and culture of the Atlantic basin.4
In another recent contribution to this debate, Paul Gilroy has pro-
pounded the idea of a "black Atlantic" identity, which also treats the
Atlantic as "one single, complex unit of analysis," but one in which blacks
are "perceived as agents" equally with whites.5 He conceives the Atlantic as
"continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people-not only as
commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, auton-
omy, and citizenship." Formally, our approach has similarities to Gilroy's,
but the focus and content of our analysis are significantly different. These
differences are partly chronological and geographical: whereas Gilroy deals
with the period from the mid-nineteenth century onward and with the
Anglophone world, we are concerned with the earlier period of the slave
trade and, given the specific region of Africa on which we focus, with links
to the Lusophone world. More critical, Gilroy approaches the Atlantic com-
munity from the perspective of the North Atlantic diaspora (and, more espe-
3 See, especially, Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des negres entre Ie Golfe de Benin et
Bahia de todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe si'cle (Paris, i968) (translated as Trade Relations
between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century [Ibadan, I976]).
Verger was not, of course, the first scholar to emphasize African-American links; we believe,
however, that he was the first to conceive of these links in interactive terms, involving reciprocal
rather than unidirectional (Africa to America) links.
4 Bernard Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," Itinerario, 20, no. I (i996), 38-44. Bailyn
takes no account of the important revisionist work of John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the
Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-i680 (Cambridge, i992).
5 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, I993), 6,
I5-i6.
WEST AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY 309
Ash ~ ~ s
_4 _
be ~g) oSt Afrc
~~~C8 aPic Wet Afric
Prsnantco SOlO
,~~~~~
The Slave Coast
Mahi (
Dahomcy
Ak~lada
FIGUUR I
The South Atlantic and the Slave Coast
3IO WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
cially, of its intellectuals), in which Africa figures as an object of retrospec-

tive rediscovery, rather than as an active agent; our starting point is in Africa
itself, and our theme is the development and maintenance of continuous
commercial, social, and cultural links across the Atlantic. Moreover, we con-
ceive of the Atlantic community as transracial, rather than specifically
"black."
More directly relevant to our own concerns is a recent article in this
journal by Ira Berlin on the early stages of the creation of African-American
societies in mainland North America that stresses the role played by
"Atlantic creoles," Africans who had acquired European languages and cul-
ture on the coast of West Africa and who crossed the Atlantic as freemen (in
the service of European traders, for education, or as official emissaries of
African rulers) as well as slaves. Berlin's analysis arguably exaggerates both
the extent of cultural "creolization" in West African coastal communities in
early times and the numerical significance of such "creoles" among exported
slaves. Even though the argument may be empirically problematic for the
seventeenth century, the conceptual framework that Berlin develops, of a
cosmopolitan culture linking seaports on all sides of the Atlantic littoral, can
be fruitfully applied to later periods.6
Our perspective has been influenced, however, not only by modern
scholarship but also by our understanding of the perceptions of history cur-
rent among members of West African coastal communities themselves. A
recently published history of the da Silva family of Benin serves as an exam-
ple. The earliest member of this family who can be unproblematically docu-
mented is Francisco Rodrigues da Silva (d. i9ii), a trader at Ouidah in the
i870s, though he subsequently moved his residence east along the coast to
Porto-Novo.7 The family History as published is said to be based on a manu-
script written circa 1940 by Francisco's son Deusdado da Silva (d. 1956)-
then employed as a schoolteacher in the French colony of Senegal-that was
intended to vindicate his claim to Portuguese nationality and thus (in the
context of the times) to exemption from the disadvantageous status of
"French subject." The work traces the family's ancestry to one Joaquim
Rodrigues da Silva, who is credited with founding the Portuguese factory at
Jakin, east of Ouidah, in the seventeenth century. Joaquim's son, Jose
Rodrigues da Silva, served in the Portuguese factories at Jakin and Ouidah in
the 1730S and 1740S but subsequently set up as an independent trader.
Although he returned to Portugal, where he died in 179i, he had previously
married an African woman. The African da Silva family descends from this
union. His son George da Silva (1758-i820) was educated at Bahia in Brazil,
and George's son Firmiano da Silva (i81-i86o) was seemingly born in
6 Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-
American Society in Mainland North America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 53 (i996)
25i-88.
7 Rodrigues da Silva and Christophe da Silva, Histoire de lafamille Rodrigues da Silva sur la
Cdte du Be'nin (Cotonou, i992). Francisco Rodrigues da Silva was among traders at Ouidah
arrested by the local authorities after a British naval blockade of the port in i876-i877 for
alleged fraternization with the British; see lEdouard Fox, Le Dahomey (Paris, i895), 36.
WEST AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY 3II
Bahia, but both returned to live and die in Ouidah. Firmiano's son Francisco
Rodrigues da Silva (born at Ouidah i844), the merchant of the i870s, was
educated successively in Brazil and Portugal-and, subsequently, in the
i86os, in the new British colony of Lagos, where he learned English. There
are grounds for skepticism about this family history. None of the family's
early generations is independently corroborated, except for Jose da Silva,
who served in the Portuguese factories at Jakin and Ouidah in the eighteenth
century, and the claiming of this man as an ancestor may be speculative,
based on no more than finding the appropriate surname in Portuguese
records.8 But if the da Silva family history contains an element of literary
contrivance, it is nevertheless significant that such a family chose to con-
struct a specifically Atlantic identity. Although the da Silvas' transatlantic
connections may have been in part invented, they in another sense accurately
represent the historical milieu to which the family had belonged in the nine-
teenth century.
In a recent engagement with scholars seeking ways to understand
Africa's contribution to the Atlantic world, Paul E. Lovejoy has developed a
concept of the diaspora that begins in Africa during the era of the Atlantic
slave trade and moves outward, tracing influences that have been situated in
specific historical and cultural contexts from there to the Americas. He cites
as an example the insurrection of Muslim slaves in Bahia in 1835, which
Lovejoy links to the jihad (holy war) movement earlier in the nineteenth
century in the hinterland of the Slave Coast from which these slaves had
come.9 By contrast, scholars have often conceptualized links between Brazil
and West Africa in terms of a Brazilian diaspora to West Africa, as part of
the "influence of Brazil on Africa," which is seen as a counterpoint to but
distinct from the "influence of Africa on Brazil."10 These two perspectives,
however, represent different aspects of a single historical process that, to a
considerable degree, involved the same persons. Thus, the links and recipro-
cal cultural influences between Brazil and Africa are better understood
through the concept of an "Atlantic community": that is, through the study
of the historical development of a community of people with shared relation-
ships and cultural practices that bridged the Atlantic.
8 Deusdado is said to have undertaken research in the archives of the Portuguese fort at
Ouidah. Note that another man of the same surname, Francisco Xavier Rodrigues da Silva, was
an official of the Portuguese fort later (acting governor, i805-i806); if the da Silva family of the
i9th century was descended from an official of the fort, it might conceivably have been this
man.
9 Paul E. Lovejoy, "Identifying Enslaved Africans: Methodological and Conceptual
Considerations in Studying the African Diaspora" (paper presented at Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization Summer Institute, "Identifying Enslaved Africans: The Nigerian
Hinterland and the Creation of the African Diaspora," York University, Ontario, July I997).
See also Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, "The Changing Dimensions of African History:
Reappropriating the Diaspora," in Simon McGrath et al., eds., Rethinking African History
(Edinburgh, I997), i8i-200.
10 Jose Honorio Rodrigues, "The Influence of Africa on Brazil and of Brazil on Africa,"
Jour. ofAfrican Hist., 3 (i962), 49-67.
3I2 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Theorizing about the appropriate conceptual framework for understand-

ing both the incorporation of enslaved Africans into societies of the
Americas and the historical relationship between Africa and its descendants
abroad has proceeded to a point where much can be gained by submitting
the questions under debate to regionally and historically specific investiga-
tion. We now know enough about the history of the parts of Africa involved
in the slave trade, about the organization of the trade itself, and about the
history of the societies in the Americas to which slaves were taken to make
this sort of investigation possible. The goal of this article is to make a pre-
liminary contribution to this endeavor by documenting the rise and transfor-
mation of a population on the Slave Coast during the era of the slave trade
whose activities, interests, and outlook spanned the Atlantic.
The communities of the Slave Coast became part of a wider Atlantic

world through their participation in the slave trade. David Eltis, David
Richardson, and Stephen Behrendt have estimated that more than 1,900,000
slaves were shipped from the Bight of Benin (roughly coextensive with the
Slave Coast) between i662 and i863. They suggest that between i687 and
i8ii departures from the Bight of Benin exceeded i0,000 slaves per year and
that they probably continued at that level until i830.11
Traders from a number of nations participated in the slave trade on the
Slave Coast and shipped exports primarily to their own countries' settlements
in the Americas, but Portuguese, based mainly in Brazil, and native-born
Brazilians dominated it. Eltis, Richardson, and Behrendt have estimated that
six of every ten slaves that landed in the New World from the Bight of Benin
between i662 and i863 went to Bahia, whereas two went to the French
Americas-mainly Saint Domingue-and one went to the British Caribbean.
Shifts occurred in the proportions of slaves sent to different destinations,
with the English Americas taking the majority of slaves in the late seven-
teenth century, Bahia and the French Caribbean predominating until 1791,
and Bahia alone absorbing 75 percent of the slaves between 179i and i830. In
the final three decades of the trade, Spanish Cuba became a major market.
For most of the history of the trade, Ouidah was the principal shipper
of slaves on the Slave Coast, but in the i83os and 1840s Lagos replaced it as
the dominant port. Other ports in the region-Little Popo (Aneho), Agoue
and Great Popo to the west of Ouidah, and Jakin (Godomey), Porto-Novo,
and Badagry between Ouidah and Lagos-were of minor or intermittent sig-
nificance. The principal supplier of slaves to the coastal ports in this region
was initially the kingdom of Allada, but in the eighteenth century its place
was taken by Dahomey, which conquered both Allada and Ouidah in the
1720s. The Slave Coast-especially the ports east of Ouidah-also drew
1 1 David Eltis and David Richardson, "West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: New
Evidence of Long-Run Trends," Slavery and Abolition, i8 (I997), i6-35; Stephen Behrendt, Eltis,
and Richardson, "The Bights in Comparative Perspective: The Economics of Long-Term Trends
in Population Displacement from West and West-Central Africa to the Americas before i
(paper presented at SSHRCC and UNESCO Summer Institute, York University, July I997).
WEST AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY 3I3
slaves from the Yoruba area east of Dahomey, particularly from the kingdom
of Oyo.12
The slave trade existed to move unfree labor from Africa to the Americas
in exchange for textiles, tobacco, cheap liquor, and other commodities. It
required regular transportation and communication between these two
regions as well as with Europe. In the eighteenth century, for example, an
average of eighteen ships sailed from Bahia to the Slave Coast each year,
whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century the number increased to
twenty-two.13 Moreover, the slave trade required the construction and main-
tenance of effective commercial networks capable of buying and bulking a
perishable and rebellious human trade good in Africa, transporting it across
the Atlantic, and selling it in the Americas, with exchanges during the
process commonly resting on credit. The regular communication around the
Atlantic rim and particularly back and forth between the Slave Coast and
Bahia that the slave trade required created opportunities for the relocation of
traders and other free people as well as slaves. The need for efficient, reliable
commercial networks drew those who established themselves on the Slave
Coast into business and social relationships that spanned the Atlantic and
linked political and commercial elites along the coast. These networks, more-
over, facilitated the exchange of culture as well as trade. Just as slaves carried
African religions and Islam as well as material culture and ritual practices into
the Americas, so slave traders introduced literacy, numeracy, Christianity,
European languages, new consumer goods, artisanal knowledge, and building
styles to the Slave Coast.
Differences existed among the communities of the Slave Coast not only
in the chronology and scale of their participation in the slave trade but also
in the details of its local organization, which in turn shaped the character
and development of the Atlantic community along the coast. At Ouidah and
Lagos, strong African states existed whose officials participated directly in the
trade and endeavored to regulate it, both opening opportunities for outsiders
and constraining them. In the lesser ports west of Ouidah and between it and
Lagos, the local polities were weaker and less centralized, which at times cre-
ated opportunities for local big men to rise in trade and begin to concentrate
power in their hands or for Europeans and Afro-Europeans, Brazilians and
Afro-Brazilians to settle, trade, and found prominent families. In some
places, European companies or individuals maintained factories. Although
these establishments were often ephemeral, at Ouidah the French, English,
and Portuguese built factories between i67i and 1721 (which were subse-
12 For the history of Allada, Dahomey, and Oyo and their relations with the coastal ports,
see, for example, Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, I550-I750 (Oxford, i99i); Law, The
Oyo Empire, c. I6oo-c. 1836 (Oxford, I977); I. A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours,
I708-1818 (Cambridge, i967); Colin W. Newbury, The Western Slave Coast and Its Rulers
(Oxford, i96i).
13 These data are derived from a list of ships licensed to export tobacco to the area of the
Slave Coast and, presumably, to return with slaves that was compiled by Verger, Trade Relations,
576-83. Third-grade tobacco was the primary Brazilian commodity traded for slaves in West
Africa.
quently fortified) and maintained them throughout the eighteenth century.

The Portuguese fort was administered from Bahia, rather than directly from
metropolitan Portugal, and its officials were appointed from there. In
Ouidah, these forts bulked slaves and organized services for visiting ships.14
The personnel of the forts included not only Europeans (in the case of the
French and Portuguese forts, there were Christian chaplains as well as traders
and soldiers) but also African slaves and free employees, all of whom served
as important agents in the dissemination of European languages and customs
within the surrounding community. Some idea of the size of the local popu-
lation that worked at the forts can be derived from the contemporary obser-
vation that the Portuguese fort, built in 1721, was located in a quarter of
Ouidah where there were about three hundred houses, all the inhabitants of
which were employed in the service of foreign nations trading in the town.15
The long and intensive trade in slaves on the Slave Coast led to the
growth of a heterogeneous population involved in transatlantic commercial
and social networks that played an active role in shaping Atlantic commerce
and culture. Prior to legal abolition, links existed to England and France and,
after it, to Cuba. But, throughout the era of the slave trade, connections with
Bahia were closest and had the greatest social and cultural significance.
The two largest and most important groups that created the diaspora
connecting the Slave Coast and Bahia were the slaves forcibly shipped across
the Atlantic and the freed slaves who in the nineteenth century returned
from Brazil. Both groups continued to look across the Atlantic to define
their identity and way of life. Already by the late eighteenth century, the
concentration of slaves from the Slave Coast in Brazil, together with the lim-
ited opportunities they enjoyed to earn income of their own (especially in
urban Salvador), had created a market for products from West Africa, such
as Yoruba cloth, which was "held . . . in much esteem by the black popula-
tion" not only for its quality but also "because it is manufactured in a coun-
try which gave many of them, or their parents, birth." In the nineteenth
century, if not earlier, the trade from West Africa to Brazil also included
palm oil, kola nuts, black soap, calabashes, and various spices. The growth of
Yoruba cults among slaves and ex-slaves in Brazil further created a demand
for religious and ritual objects made in West Africa.16 Conversely, the
Brazilians who settled in West Africa, including even ex-slaves of African ori-
14 The only detailed study of the operation of one of these forts is Simone Berbain, Le
comptoirfranfais de juda (Ouidah) au XVIIIe sicle (Paris, I942).
15 Memoir, "Da Fortuleza Cezarea que o Capt Jos6 de Torries levantou na Costa da Mina
no Porto de Ajuda, no Vice Reinado de Visc Fernandez Cesar de Meneses," Colonial Minister
of Portugal, vol. i (July-December I9I7), i62, quoted in Verger, Trade Relations, ii2.
16 John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo
(London, i823), 97 (quotation); Pierre Verger, "Nigeria, Brazil, and Cuba," Nigeria Magazine
(October i960), II3-23; A. G. Hopkins, "An Economic History of Lagos, i880-i9I4" (Ph.D.
diss., University of London, i964), 32; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros, estrangeros: os
escravos libertos e sua volta a Africa (Sdo Paulo, i985), ii9; Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the
Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York,
I946), 274.
WEST AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY 3I5
gin or descent, continued to define themselves as such and to cultivate a dis-

tinctively "Brazilian" way of life. For example, former slaves living at Ouidah
in the i840s expressed nostalgia for their time in Bahia, which they claimed
had been "their happiest days."17
When most Africanists speak of the Brazilian diaspora to the Slave

Coast, they think of the freed slaves who returned to the coast in large num-
bers from the i830s.18 The freed slaves played a decisive role in the history of
the diaspora because their return created a population of several thousands,
permanently resident on the coast, that identified with Bahia, its language,
religions, and cultures. Continuing commercial, cultural, and intellectual
communication among the members of this group and family, friends, co-
religionists, and business associates in Bahia kept the transatlantic commu-
nity alive when it might otherwise have perished following the abolition of
the slave trade. And yet, to understand fully the construction and character
of the Atlantic community requires focusing on the longue duree and looking
also at the period prior to the return of freed slaves in the mid-nineteenth
century. For the diaspora has been created and re-created over a long period
of time through the regular movement of people, goods, ideas, and culture
back and forth between the Slave Coast and Bahia. Given that we know
more about the mid-nineteenth century returned slaves and their contribu-
tion to the construction and maintenance of the Atlantic community, we
will focus, in the first instance, on the earlier phases of this historical
process.
The earliest surviving detailed account of European trade on the Slave
Coast, relating to the kingdom of Allada in i6oi, notes the presence of
Portuguese residents. It might be assumed that these were merchants from
metropolitan Portugal, but subsequent evidence suggests otherwise. In the
i65os and i66os, a prominent figure in Allada, serving as one of the king's
interpreters, was one Matteo Lopes, a professed Christian, who is indeed
described as "of Portuguese nationality" but was nevertheless black.
Likewise, at Ouidah to the west, the king in i694 had in his service a
"Portuguese Negro," also a Christian, called Jodo Fernandes, who served as
his gunner and physician. It is not specified precisely where Lopes and
17 John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa (London, i847), i, 20i. This benign view of the
experience of slaves in Bahia is echoed in more recently recorded local tradition in Ouidah; see
Casimir Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah du XVIe au XBe sicle ([Avignon], I959), 52.
18 See the excellent work done on the subject by Verger, Trade Relations; Jerry Michael
Turner, "Les Bresiliens: The Impact of Former Brazilian Slaves upon Dahomey" (Ph.D. diss.,
Boston University, I975); da Cunha, Negros; Marianno Carneiro da Cunha, From Slave Quarters
to Town Houses: Brazilian Architecture in Nigeria and the People's Republic of Be'nin (Sao Paulo,
1985). See also, most recently, Lisa A. Lindsay, "'To Return to the Bosom of Their Fatherland':
Brazilian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Lagos," Slavery and Abolition, I5 (I994), 22-50;
Milton Roberto Monteiro Ribeiro, "Aguda-Les 'Bresiliens' du Benin: enquete anthropologique
et photographique" (These de Doctorat, Lcole des Hautes Ltudes en Sciences Sociales,
Marseille, i996); Bellarmin C. Codo, "Les afro-bresiliens de retour," in Doudou Diane, ed., La
chaine et le lien: Une vision de la traite ne'griere (Paris, i998), 95-IO5.
3i6 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Fernandes came from, but it was more likely the West African island of So
Tome, the local Portuguese headquarters in the region, than Brazil. The
king of Allada reigning in i670 is said to have been educated in a monastery
on that island.19
Diplomatic contacts between African and European states initiated in
the early modern era also helped create the Atlantic community, with emis-
saries traveling repeatedly between Africa, Europe, and America. On the
Slave Coast, the earliest instance so far traced was in i657, when the king
Allada sent an envoy named Bans to Spain (via Cartagena in South
America) to request the sending of Christian missionaries. After baptism in
Spain (as Don Phelipe Zapata), the ambassador returned to Allada with a
party of Catholic priests in i66o; the mission also brought with it, as inter-
preter, an Allada man, presumably an ex-slave, who had resided in Spain for
forty-four years and married there. Ten years later, in i670, the royal inter-
preter Matteo Lopes undertook a second mission for the king of Allada,
accompanied by some of his wives and children, traveling via Martinique to
France (and an audience with King Louis XIV) and returning safely to West
Africa later in the same year.20
As far as the evidence goes, during the seventeenth century persons
such as Lopes, Fernandes, and Zapata may have been isolated individuals,
not sufficiently numerous to have had a major social and cultural impact. In
the eighteenth century, however, the number of individuals settled on the
Slave Coast who were not only engaged in the slave trade but also had social
relations and cultural experience that crossed the Atlantic was much more
substantial. These included not only returned former slaves and Africans
who had traveled to Europe or America as free men but also Europeans who
had settled and founded families in Africa.
In the eighteenth century, intermarriage between locally resident
Europeans and African women was mainly associated with the permanently
organized European forts at Ouidah. Although most of the European per-
sonnel of these forts died or returned home after brief periods, those who
stayed longer often took local wives and fathered offspring. For example,
Jodo Basilio, who served as an official in the Portuguese fort for more than
twenty years before being deported back to Bahia in 1743, fathered two
mulatto children (by different African women), whom he took back with
him to Brazil. One of the governors of the English fort, Lionel Abson,
resided in the town for no less than thirty-six years, eventually dying there
in i803. He married a number of local women; with one he fathered several
children. He sent his eldest son, George, to be educated in England, where
he learned to read and write. George Abson was back in Ouidah by 1793,
19 Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea,
trans. and ed. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (London, i987), 224-25; Robin Law,
"Religion, Trade, and Politics on the Slave Coast: Roman Catholic Missions in Allada and
Whydah in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Religion in Africa, 2I (199I), 42-77 (quota-
tions on 45, 46).
20 Law, "Religion, Trade, and Politics on the Slave Coast," 42-77.
when a visiting English trader observed that his behavior "gave proof that his
morals had derived no advantage from the imperfect education which he had
received in England." George assisted his father in his dealings with ships
trading at Ouidah; he was still alive and operating as a trader when his father
died in i803, but he left no descendants identifiable there today.21
One of Abson's contemporaries in command of the French fort at
Ouidah, Joseph Ollivier de Montaguere (1775-1786), also married locally,
taking as a wife a woman of mixed Afro-French ancestry called Sophia with
whom he had two sons, Nicolas and Jean-Baptiste. Unlike Abson, Ollivier de
Montaguere returned home to France, but his wife and sons remained
behind; the wife, according to tradition, was entrusted to the care of King
Kpengla of Dahomey and then to his successor Agonglo (r. 1789-1797), with
both of whom she had children. Both Nicolas and Jean-Baptiste Ollivier,
according to family tradition, were sent to be educated in France-though
no corroboration of that has yet been traced in contemporary sources.22 If
they had been born earlier, the Ollivier brothers would presumably have
been employed, like George Abson, in the service of the French fort at
Ouidah. But the French fort was abandoned in 1797, and they instead set up
as independent traders in Ouidah, founding a family and a quarter of the
town that still exist today. The family name, however, is today given a
Portuguese form, d'Oliveira, reflecting its absorption into the larger
Portuguese-speaking community in the nineteenth century.
Outside Ouidah, foreign traders resident on the Slave Coast in this
period were more commonly African ex-slaves (or descendants of slaves) who
had returned from the Americas or Europe. An example was Joao de
Oliveira, born in the interior of the Slave Coast and taken as a slave to
Brazil. He left Bahia for the Slave Coast in 1733 and settled east of Ouidah.
He was evidently still a slave when he returned to Africa, but he sent money
back to Brazil to purchase his freedom. Oliveira was remembered in an offi-
cial Portuguese source as having set himself up on the coast as the "greatest
Portuguese protector, helping them to carry out trading negotiations speedily
with the people or to protect them from suffering from the deterioration and
losses to which tobacco is subject in this climate." The same source credited
him with opening the slave trade at Porto-Novo in the 175os and Lagos in
the 1760s, "with his own labour and at his own expense." Despite his long
residence in West Africa, Oliveira retained a close and continuing emotional
and cultural association with Bahia, including a relationship with his former
owner's family. While living on the coast, he heard that his former owner
had died, leaving his widow destitute, and he is said to have "helped" the
woman for as long as she lived. Having been converted to Christianity in
21 Verger, Trade Relations, 151, 177 n. 37; Adams, Remarks, 55; John M'Leod, A Voyage to
Africa (London, i820), 8o.
22 Simone de Souza, La famille de Souza du Bdnin-Togo (Cotonou, i992), i8-i9. Nicolas
and Jean-Baptiste Ollivier are said to have been sent to Marseille; this detail, at least, looks
anachronistic, since this town only became of major importance in French trade with West
Africa in the period of legitimate trade in palm oil (from the i840s).
3I8 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Brazil, he also remitted money there for the building of a chapel and made
"numerous donations of slaves" to religious fraternities. In 1770, after thirty-
seven years' residence on the coast, Oliveira retired to Brazil, together with
the slaves he had accumulated, because of his desire "to spend the rest of his
life among a Catholic people, and to die having received all the sacraments
of the Church." Ironically, on arrival in Bahia, he was initially arrested on
suspicion of smuggling, but he was released after a month in prison, and his
property was restored to him.23
In Porto-Novo a little later, the leading trader was one Pierre, whose
African name was "Tammata." In origin a Hausa (from what is today north-
ern Nigeria), he had been exported as a slave but was taken up by a French
slaving captain, who had him educated in France, where he learned "reading,
writing, and accounts." Pierre subsequently served his master on trading
voyages to Africa, in reward for which he was not only freed but lent capital
to set up as an independent trader, and he eventually resettled in Africa. He
was established at Porto-Novo, and serving as secretary to the king, and con-
tinued in this capacity until at least 1788. Given the conjuncture of commer-
cial links at this time, Pierre enjoyed the considerable advantage of "speaking
the Housa, Eyeo [Oyo], and French languages." He described himself in
1787, writing to the authorities in France, as "raised in the French nation
and attached to this respectable nation by gratitude and principle." In Porto-
Novo, he dressed "as a European" and adopted various European fashions,
including using silver cutlery and European-style furniture ("elegant sofas
and chairs") and playing the French horn and billiards; his billiard room was
adorned with "portraits of various members of the Bourbon family." He cre-
ated a quarter of Porto-Novo that still exists today called after his name
Fiekome ("Fie's [that is, Pierre's] Quarter").24
A contemporary and rival of Pierre in Porto-Novo was Antonio vaz
Coelho, described as a "free negro, born in Brazil, where he had been taught
to read, write, and keep accounts." He had made "several voyages" to Porto-
Novo as a trader, and he eventually settled there. He became "a very
respectable trader" and married into "the first families" of the community,
consequently acquiring "considerable influence . . . [and] a great ascendancy
in the public councils" (though he did not, like Pierre, leave traceable
descendants in the town). He was noted for arming his dependents with
blunderbusses and is credited with the introduction of brass swivel guns on
the war canoes employed on the coastal lagoon. His canoes, with their blun-
derbusses and cannon, played a prominent role in campaigns against neigh-
boring coastal towns in the 1780s, reportedly saving the Porto-Novo forces
from defeat on two occasions.25
In Ouidah, a prominent figure in the 1780s was another former slave
from Brazil, Dom Jeronimo, whose African name was "Fruku," though the
23 Verger, Trade Relations, 477-78.

24 Adams, Remarks, 82-87; Verger, Trade Relations, i86; Adolphe Akinded1 and Cyrille
Aguessy, Contribution a l'etude de l'histoire de l'ancien royaume de Porto-Novo (Dakar, I953), 73.
25 Archibald Dalzel, The History of Dahomy (London, 1793), i69n, i9i, I97n.
detailed circumstances of his return to Africa were rather different. He was

by origin a prince of Dahomey, playmate to the future King Kpengla (r.
1774-1789), who had been sold into slavery in Brazil by Kpengla's father and
predecessor Tegbesu (r. 1740-1774) but was then redeemed by Kpengla after
his accession, following twenty-four years in slavery.26 That an individual
slave could be traced and identified in America is remarkable testimony to
the effectiveness of transatlantic communication and cooperation. Unlike de
Oliveira or Pierre, Jeronimo operated, not as an independent trader, but as a
commercial official, part of the Dahomian ruling establishment. On
Kpengla's death in 1789, he was even a contender for succession to the
Dahomian throne.
Other members of Slave Coast communities acquired knowledge of
European languages and culture through travel abroad as free men. In Little
Popo, the founder of the Lawson family, Latevi Awoku, is said by tradition
to have acquired the name Lawson from the captain of an English slaver,
who took him to England to be educated. He is evidently to be identified
with the man called "Lathe," met by the Danish trader Paul Erdmann Isert
in 1784, who had risen from humble origins to the rank of "caboceer"
(chief), having "served as a servant for the English" in his youth and learned
Portuguese and Danish as well as English. Although not himself literate, in
1784 he had one son in England and one in Portugal who were learning liter-
acy and numeracy. The son who was in England was presumably Akuete
Zankli, alias George Lawson (d. i857), who is said to have been educated in
England and to have served as steward on a Liverpool slaver on a voyage to
Jamaica before returning to Little Popo in i8i2. Although George Lawson
identified primarily with England, the family continued to maintain a range
of overseas links and were described in i85o, for example, as "some living as
Portuguese, others as Englishmen."27
Whereas the Lawson family acquired prominence in Little Popo through
its overseas connections, in other cases members of existing ruling families
went abroad for education. In Badagry, for example, the dominant chief in
the later 1770s, the Jengen, had been educated in Brazil. When he was over-
thrown by his political rivals in 1782, he was deported back to Brazil. A few
years later, in 1787, a son of this man returned from Brazil and was report-
edly seeking assistance from Lagos and Porto-Novo to reinstate himself in
Badagry. At Lagos, in 1789, a French slave ship delivered a passenger named
"Lougue," said to be the thirteen-year-old nephew of the Oba (King) Ologun
Kutere; although nothing more was said of the boy, he also might have been
returning from education in Europe. Subsequently, King Adandozan of
Dahomey (r. 1797-i8i8) sent two of his brothers to be educated in England.
26 Ibid., 222-23; Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours, ii6, II, I78-79.
27 Fio Agbanon II, Histoire du Petit-Popo et du royaume Guin) ed. N. L. Gayibor (Lomr,
I99I), 40, 42-43; Paul Erdmann Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Erdmnann
Isert's 'Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia, " ed. and trans. Selena Axelrod
Winsnes (Oxford, i992), 62 (quotation), 9o; F. E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans (London,
i850), i, Ioo.
They were mistakenly sold into slavery in Demerara, but, through the inter-
vention of some Liverpool traders, they were rescued and returned to
Dahomey in i803.28
With the expansion of the slave trade during the eighteenth century,
diplomatic contacts between African states and their trading partners over-
seas became more frequent, as African rulers sought to encourage and regu-
late the commerce. In 1726, for example, King Agaja of Dahomey sent an
English trader, Bulfinch Lambe, with a letter to the king of England. Lambe
was accompanied by an African interpreter, Captain Tom (alias "Adomo
Tomo"), formerly employed in the English factory at Jakin. Initially, instead
of delivering the letter, Lambe sold Tom as a slave in Maryland; but, after a
few years, he changed his mind, liberated Tom, and took him to England.
There Tom had an audience with King George II, received instruction in
the English language, and was baptized as a Christian. But after initial social
success, the embassy proved a political failure when the letter delivered in
King Agaja's name was officially judged to be a forgery. Tom, however, was
safely delivered back to Dahomey, where his undoubtedly much improved
linguistic ability and experience gained abroad were turned to official advan-
tage through his appointment as assistant to the "English Chief," or the offi-
cial charged with dealing with English traders at Ouidah.29
On the Slave Coast, such diplomatic contacts were especially regular
with Brazil. Pierre Verger has compiled a register of no fewer than seven
official embassies that arrived in Brazil from various states on the Slave
Coast between 175o and i8i2 to discuss matters relating to commerce. In
1750, King Tegbesu of Dahomey sent an ambassador to Bahia, accompanied
by "an interpreter from his nation who knew sufficient Portuguese," and
two "noblemen"-the latter "so that they could be taught the language and
be informed about the customs of the Portuguese." These envoys went back
to West Africa the following year. In I770, when Joao de Oliveira returned
to Bahia, he had with him four "Caboceers of the King of Onim [that is,
Lagos]," who had presumably been sent on diplomatic business. These
envoys were seized on de Oliveira's arrest, apparently because they were
believed to be his slaves, but they were later freed and repatriated to Lagos.
In I795, King Agonglo of Dahomey sent two ambassadors to Bahia, accom-
panied by Luiz Caetano, a mulatto slave from the Portuguese fort at Ouidah
who had deserted into his service, to act as interpreter. They were sent from
Bahia to Portugal, where they arrived in I796 and were baptized as
Catholics. One of the ambassadors died in Portugal, but the other (now
called Joao Carlos de Braganca) was dispatched to Brazil and then to
Dahomey. Instructions were given to find the ambassador a wife in Brazil,
28 Dalzel, History of Dahomy, i8i; Verger, Trade Relations, i88; Jean Mettas, Repertoire des
expeditions ne'grieres franfaises au XVIIIe sikcle (Paris, I978), 732; M'Leod, Voyage to Africa,
i02-o6.
29 Robin Law, "King Agaja of Dahomey, the Slave Trade, and the Question of West
African Plantations: The Mission of Bulfinch Lambe and Adomo Tomo to England, I726-32,"
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, I9 (I99I), I37-63.
"either . . . a black woman or . . . a light mulatress," but that did not take
place, as the governor of Bahia explained, because of the ambassador's
"choice of various slaves and other free persons whom I did not find quali-
fied for this purpose." The ambassador returned to Dahomey in I797,
accompanied by two Catholic priests, but their attempt to convert King
Agonglo was overtaken by the latter's assassination in a palace coup d'etat.30
In I805, the new King Adandozan of Dahomey in turn sent two ambas-
sadors to Bahia accompanied by a Brazilian mulatto (a trader, taken prisoner
in a recent attack on Porto-Novo) as interpreter. The embassy was again
passed on to Portugal and then returned to Dahomey via Bahia. In i807,
"Prince Ajan" (later Oba Osinlokun) of Lagos sent an ambassador and a "sec-
retary" to Bahia, with a letter to take to the king of Portugal. On this occa-
sion, the governor of Bahia did not permit them to proceed to Portugal,
however, and they were sent back to Lagos the following year. In i8io, the
king of Porto-Novo sent an embassy to Bahia with a letter that was sent to
the prince regent of Portugal, who was then at Rio de Janeiro; and, while
they were still in Bahia, at the beginning of i8ii, an embassy from Dahomey
also arrived there. Both were sent back in i8i2, and their leaders were pre-
sented with silver tea sets.
This history of regular diplomatic contacts with Brazil, together with the
occasional instances of successful redemption of persons from slavery in the
Americas noted earlier, lends credibility to the story told in Dahomian tradi-
tion that King Gezo, on his accession in i8i8, sent an embassy to Brazil in an
attempt to locate and redeem his mother Agotime, who had been sold into
slavery by his predecessor Adandozan.31 Given the duration and extent of
diplomatic relations between the Slave Coast and Brazil as well as the impor-
tance of the slave trade to the economies of both regions, it seems entirely
appropriate that the first recorded recognition of Brazilian independence by
any foreign power, in I824, was transmitted by a Portuguese claiming to
serve as ambassador for the oba of Lagos, the "Emperor of Benin," and
"other Kings of Africa."32
In the present state of the evidence, it is debatable whether the numer-
ous persons residing on the Slave Coast who had links across the Atlantic in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries should be considered a single
"community," rather than a range of individuals involved in diverse and dis-
tinct commercial and social networks. Links existed to England and France
as well as to Brazil, though the connections with Brazil were clearly predomi-
nant. On the Slave Coast, Atlantic-oriented people seem likewise to have
depended principally upon their individual links with local ruling families;
how far persons with different overseas orientations also established commer-
30 Verger, Trade Relations, 219, 224, 229, 23I.

31 Edna G. Bay, "Dahomean Political Exile and the Atlantic Slave Trade" (paper presented
at the SSHRCC and UNESCO Summer Institute, York University, July I997). Whether
Agotime was in fact recovered from Brazil is disputed.
32 Verger, Trade Relations, 24I-42; Alberto da Costa e Silva, As relafdes entre o Brasil e a
Africa Negra, de 1822 a ia Guerra Mondial (Luanda, i966), 7.
cial, social, and family relations among themselves within West Africa is
unknown. The Atlantic community on the Slave Coast, however, acquired a
greater coherence in the early nineteenth century, when it became more
exclusively oriented toward Brazil and when its internal business, social, and
family connections are more fully documented.
The involvement of the Slave Coast ports in the wider Atlantic world
changed significantly in the first half of the nineteenth century, following
the legal abolition of the slave trade. The most obvious effect of abolition
was to accentuate even further the importance of links to Brazil. The aboli-
tion of colonial slavery by France in I794 and of the slave trade by Britain in
i8o8 led quickly to the disappearance of French and British slavers from the
coast and was soon followed by the abandonment of the two countries' forts
at Ouidah.33 But, although Portugal (in I8I5) and subsequently independent
Brazil (in i826) also declared the prohibition of slaving in West Africa north
of the equator, in practice the slave trade to Brazil expanded after the French
and British departed and continued until I850.34 In consequence, the
transatlantic links of the Slave Coast ports, which had been relatively multi-
national in the eighteenth century, now became much more heavily
Brazilian, although links to other parts of the Lusophone world existed as
well, and Spaniards, mostly from Cuba, also began to appear on the coast
from the i82os. Not until the rise of the palm oil trade with Europe from the
I840s would British and French influence again become significant.
This atrophying of French and British contacts can be seen clearly in
Ouidah; when merchants of these nations reoccupied the former French and
British forts in the I840s, the French found that, although families
descended from the former slaves of their fort were still in place, only one
person among them could speak any French-and he only "very few
words"-and the official interpreter for the British, Gnahoui, was found to
speak Portuguese better than English.35 At Lagos, which became a major
port for the Atlantic slave trade at precisely the time when it was becoming
overwhelmingly Brazilian, external contacts were primarily to Brazil before
the middle of the nineteenth century.
Changes in the organization of the slave trade following legal abolition
also contributed to the consolidation of the Brazilian diaspora on the Slave
33 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime
Business (Madison, I979), 43-47; Stephen D. Behrendt, "The Annual Volume and Regional
Distribution of the British Slave Trade, I780-I807," Jour. ofAfrican Hist., 38 (I997), 205;
Verger, Trade Relations, 209-i2. Although the French slave trade was re-legalized between i802
and i8i8, French slaving at Ouidah did not significantly revive.
34 Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave
Trade Question, i807-i869 (Cambridge, I970), chaps. I-2.
35 Forbes, Dahomey, ii, I75; De Monleon, "Le Cap de Palmes, le Dahomey et l'le du
Prince en I844," Revue Coloniale, 6 (I845), 5 (quotation). King Gezo of Dahomey (r. i8I8-I858)
is said to have sent his official interpreter for the French, Bokpe, to France to improve his profi-
ciency-presumably, in the context of the reestablishment of French trade in the I840s; see
[Reynier], "Ouidah: organisation du commandement [I9I7]," Me'moire du Bdnin, 2 (I993), 33.
Coast. The higher risk and greater capital outlay per slave associated with the
illegal trade led to concentration in the Bahia traffic. Three big merchants
predominated in the i82os-Antonio Pedrozo de Albuquerque, Jose de
Cerqueira Lima, and Joaquim Jose de Oliveira. The first two continued into
the I83os and were joined by Joaquim Pereira Marinho and Jose Alvez da
Cruz Rois and his son Joaquim, who went on to dominate the slave trade at
Bahia in the I840s.36 This concentration was reflected on the West African
coast, where at Lagos, for example, these same men owned many of the slav-
ing voyages.37
At the same time, efforts to suppress the slave trade after I8I5 increased
the importance of resident agents in the Slave Coast ports. The conventions
that Great Britain signed with Portugal, Spain, and Brazil between 18I7 and
I842 authorized the British naval squadron patrolling the West African
waters to search ships flying the three countries' flags and seize those with
slaves, and eventually slaving equipment, on board. Although these measures
did little to end the slave trade, they dictated that slave ships should spend as
little time as possible anchored off the coast of Africa with slaves, or later
equipment, on board. That created a need for resident agents or independent
traders who could buy and bulk slaves at factories on shore rather than on
shipboard, as had usually occurred prior to abolition. To avoid capture by
British cruisers, these people arranged rapid and clandestine embarkation of
complete cargoes of slaves when the vessels sent to transport them arrived off
the coast.38
At Ouidah, the effective abandonment of the Portuguese fort, whose
contacts with Brazil lapsed from circa i8o6, created an opportunity for a
Brazilian, Francisco Felix de Souza (d. I849), to establish himself as a big
African-based slave trader. De Souza had originally come to Ouidah as a sub-
ordinate official in the Portuguese fort, and, when his superiors died, he
became its acting director. In the face of official neglect of the fort, however,
he set up as an independent trader, initially at Badagry and then at Little
Popo rather than at Ouidah itself. Following a dispute with King Adandozan
of Dahomey, de Souza supported the successful coup d'etat that placed the
king's brother, Gezo, on the throne in i8i8. As a reward, he was appointed
sole agent for the king's trade at Ouidah, with the title of "chacha," and he
dominated the slave trade there until the I840s.39
At Lagos, the big Bahian merchants stationed agents or entered partner-
ships with independent Brazilian traders already there. New private traders
also began to arrive in the town and at some of the lesser ports on the coast,
36 David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New
York, I987), I48-63-
37 These data come from House of Commons Sessional Papers, i82I-I85I, Class A.
Correspondence with British Commissioners . .. relating to the Slave Trade.
38 Eltis, Economic Growth, I53.
39 David Ross, "The First Chacha of Whydah: Francisco Felix de Souza," Odu, 3d Ser., 2
(i969), i9-28. For de Souza family traditions, see Norberto de Souza, "Contribution a I'histoire
de la famille de Souza," Etudes Dahomeennes, I3 (I955), I7-2I; Simone de Souza, La famille de
Souza.
hoping to make their fortune in the booming slave trade. During the I830s,
at least twenty-two Portuguese, Brazilians, and Spaniards resided at Lagos
and traded slaves.40 Some either survived or elected to remain only a short
time, but others built residences and storage facilities, forged alliances with
the oba or prominent chiefs, entered domestic and commercial relationships
with local women, and began employing domestic slaves and free laborers.
Two such Brazilians were Manuel Joaquim d'Almeida and Joaquim de Brito
Lima, both of whom had had earlier experience with the coast as captains of
slave ships.41 The leading locally based Brazilian slaver in the generation fol-
lowing de Souza, Jose Domingos Martins ("Domingo Martinez," d. i864),
also set up initially at Lagos in the I83os; but, in I846, he relocated to Porto-
Novo, where he traded with King Gezo of Dahomey, and, after de Souza's
death in I849, established a second residence in Ouidah.42 The arrival of
such resident agents and new independent traders thus led to a growth in the
size of the Brazilian population on the coast and its spread beyond Ouidah.
The "Brazilian" community on the Slave Coast was mixed-by race,
class, and geographical origins.43 The slave traders who settled on the Slave
Coast included white Brazilians who married local women and fathered
"Afro-Brazilian" families, such as Francisco Felix de Souza and Domingo
Martinez.44 But they also included persons who were themselves Afro-
Brazilians, ex-slaves who re-emigrated to Africa as free persons. The most
prominent of these was Joaquim d'Almeida (d. I857), whose indigenous
name was "Azata." He was by birth a Mahi (from the interior north of
Dahomey) who had been owned in Bahia by Manoel Joaquim d'Almeida.
Joaquim d'Almeida traveled back and forth between Bahia and the Slave
Coast on slaving voyages and made some money trading on his own account.
Ultimately, he freed himself and in I845 settled at Agoue, where he worked
both as an independent trader and as an agent for others, including his for-
mer owner M. J. d'Almeida. Others who came to form part of the Brazilian
community were in fact Africans who had never been to Brazil but had
40 House of Commons Sessional Papers, I83I-I839, Class A. Correspondence with British

Commissioners . . . relating to the Slave Trade.
41 On M. J. d'Almeida's activities at Lagos and elsewhere, see Verger, Trade Relations, 365,
467; and House of Commons Sessional Papers, I83I, I837-I838, 184I, Class A. Correspondence
with British Commissioners. .. relating to the Slave Trade, Cases of the Nossa Senhora da Guia,
Lafayette, Fumega, and Agusto. On J. J. de Brito Lima, see House of Commons Sessional Papers,
i826, I84I, Class A. Correspondence with British Commissioners . . . relating to the Slave
Trade, Cases of the Bon Fim and Guiana; House of Commons Sessional Papers, I852, Papers
Relative to the Reduction of Lagos, Commodore Wilmot to Commodore Bruce, Dec. i, I85I,
Enclosure in no. 76; Public Record Office, London, FO 84/950, Consul Campbell to the earl of
Clarendon, Mar. 24, Dec. i, i854.
42 David A. Ross, "The Career of Domingo Martinez in the Bight of Benin, I833-64,"
Jour. ofAfrican Hist., 6 (i965), 79-90.
43 Bellarmin C. Codo, "Les 'Br6siliens' en Afrique de l'Ouest, hier et aujourd'hui" (paper
presented at UNESCO and SSHRCC Summer Institute, York University, July I997).
44 De Souza and Martinez were sometimes described in contemporary accounts as "mulat-
toes." According to family traditions, the former's mother was Amerindian; see Turner, "Les
Br6siliens," 89.
assimilated Brazilian culture on the West African coast as slaves or clients of

Brazilian settlers. For example, Pedro Felix d'Almeida of Ouidah came origi-
nally from Little Popo but was brought up in de Souza's household, where
he learned to speak and write Portuguese.45
The growth of the commercial community on the Slave Coast created a
demand for artisans to perform skilled work in the slave trade and to supply
the taste of prosperous slave traders for Brazilian-style homes, goods, and
services. Some of these early artisans may have been free, but many were
slaves brought from Brazil or sent there for training. In 1841, for example, a
Brazilian slave trader at Ouidah sent three slaves to Bahia to be trained as
masons, and, in I849, Oba Kosoko of Lagos was sufficiently impressed with
the usefulness of what Brazilian carpenters and coopers could produce that
he tried to buy slaves with these skills and export them to Lagos, reversing
the direction of the transatlantic slave trade. Material evidence of the pres-
ence of some of these artisans may still survive in the buildings of the coast,
although we know too little about the history of most of the Brazilian struc-
tures to date them. But few or no material remains of the work of others
have survived because they performed services or produced perishable goods.
Jose Paraiso, an ex-slave from Brazil who settled at Porto-Novo, worked
originally as a barber, and, according to one account, he had been purchased
from Brazil for this purpose by Domingo Martinez. Jose Francisco dos
Santos, a free Brazilian settled in Ouidah, although later a slave trader, was
originally a tailor in the service of the de Souza family (and kept the surname
Alfaiate, "The Tailor," in later life).46
The social heterogeneity of the Brazilian community was further com-
pounded by the more substantial return of free blacks to West Africa, most
with no involvement in slave trading, which began with the deportation of
persons believed by the Brazilian authorities to have been implicated in the
Bahia slave revolt of I835. These immigrants included women and children as
well as adult men, and, because Islam had been important in the revolt, they
included Muslims as well as Catholics.47 A group of 200 free blacks was
deported to Ouidah immediately after the rebellion; they settled there,
according to tradition, through the support or permission of de Souza,
founding the quarter of the town called Maro. In I847, Oba Kosoko of
Lagos agreed to guarantee the safety of Brazilian repatriated slaves who set-
tled in Lagos, and, during the following decade, his successor Akitoye
granted land to a number of them, though both rulers imposed a tax on
freed slaves immigrating to their territory. The British consul sent to Lagos
45 Verger, Trade Relations, 402-03, 418, 465-67; Turner, "Les Br6siliens," i02-05, I3I.
46 Verger, Trade Relations, 538; Bello to Kosoko, Bahia, Oct. I5, Nov. 8, i849, House of
Lords Sessional Papers, I852-I853, Slave Trade Correspondence, XXII, 338-39; Turner, "Les
Br6siliens," I02-05; de Souza, Lafamille de Souza, 53.
47 Turner, "Les Brisiliens," 29-54; Lindsay, "'To Return to the Bosom of Their
Fatherland,"' 39-42. For the Brazilian Muslims on the Slave Coast, see Robin Law, "Islam in
Dahomey: A Case Study of the Introduction and Influence of Islam in a Peripheral Area of
West Africa," Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, 7 (i986), i08-09; T.G.O. Gbadamosi, T
Growth of Islam among the Yoruba, i84I-1908 (London, I978), 28-29.
in the I850s to help suppress the slave trade and encourage the growth of
commerce in other commodities also extended assistance to Brazilian repa-
triates and encouraged the settlement of more than I30 families.48 Many of
these freed slaves had worked as artisans in urban Salvador, and they found a
ready market for their skills on the African coast. Others managed to save a
little capital and make their living in small-scale trade. But few if any
enjoyed the wealth of the successful slave traders.
Finally, the foreign commercial community on the Slave Coast was
more variegated in its geographical origins than the use of the term
"Brazilian" might suggest, including persons from Portuguese territories all
around the Atlantic rim. This diversity became especially pronounced in the
I850s, as the last of the illegal slave traders shifted the location of their activ
ities in an effort to escape pressures to end the commerce and to supply the
continuing Cuban market. Samuel da Costa Soares, a leading figure in the
slave trade to Cuba in the I850s, who settled at Agoue and founded a family
there, was from metropolitan Portugal and sent his children to be educated in
Lisbon rather than Brazil. Francisco Jose de Medeiros (d. I875), who settled at
Agoue in the I85os but moved to Ouidah in the i86os, was from Madeira.
Other, less prominent Ouidah families claim founders originating from the
island of Sao Tome and from Angola.49 The link to Sao Tome was reinforced
by the official reoccupation of the Portuguese fort at Ouidah in I844 because
the garrison and clergy for the fort chapel were supplied from that island.50
There were also Spanish/Cuban as well as Portuguese/Brazilian slavers estab-
lished on the coast. One such was Juan Jose Zangronis, or Sangron (d. I843),
son of a leading slave merchant of Havana, who settled at Ouidah in the I830s,
acting as consignee for cargoes shipped by his father. The Sastre family of
Great Popo is descended from another Spanish trader, who came from the
Canary Islands. There was also a less-well-known (and smaller) re-emigration
to West Africa of ex-slaves from Cuba as well as from Brazil. In the long run,
however, the "Brazilian" community absorbed such originally non-Lusophone
settlers and, indeed, even some families of non-Iberian origin, such as the
Afro-French Ollivier (d'Oliveira) family of Ouidah.51
This heterogeneity of origins poses a number of historical questions for
which presently we can offer only partial answers. First, how and why did a
48 Jodo Jose Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia
(Baltimore, I993), 220; "Note historique sur Ouidah par l'Administrateur Gavoy (I913)," JEtudes
Dahome'ennes, I3 (I955), 69-70; [Reynier], "Ouidah," 44-45; Lindsay, "'To Return to the Bosom
of Their Fatherland,"' 26.
49 Turner, "Les Bresiliens," I25-27; [Reynier], "Ouidah," 40, 58.
50 The reoccupation was intermittent in I844-I86i but continuous from i865. Personnel
supplied from Sdo Tome in some cases came ultimately from further afield. In the I870s, the
fort garrison consisted of "Congo" soldiers, recruited presumably from Angola, and the chap-
lain was "a Hindu priest from Goa"; see J. Alfred Skertchly, Dahomey as It Is (London, I874),
I74; Serval, "Rapport sur une mission au Dahomey," Revue Maritime et Coloniale, 59 (i878), I95.
51 House of Commons Sessional Papers, I837, Class A. Correspondence with British
Commissioners . .. relating to the Slave Trade, Case of the Mosca; Turner, "Les Bresiliens," I3I;
Rodolfo Sarracino, Los que volvieron a Afica (Havana, i988). Today, local tradition describes
the founder of the Sangron family of Ouidah as Brazilian; see de Souza, Lafamille de Souza, 7
Brazilian identity develop and become dominant in the first half of the nine-
teenth century among the Atlantic population on the coast? Second, how
was a Brazilian community constituted and how were people incorporated
into it? Answers to the first question must lie in part in the duration of ties
to Brazil and the numerical preponderance of immigrants from that region
among the coast's Atlantic settlers. However, Bahia's dominance of the
region's external trade from i8o8 into the I840s must also have played a role.
Most of the slave traders on the coast after i8o8, even those who originated
elsewhere, were part of a predominantly Brazilian commercial network. The
great political power of two Brazilians residing on the coast-F. F. de Souza
and Domingo Martinez-undoubtedly also contributed to the
"Brazilianization" of its Atlantic population. Just as Brazil's leading role in
the coast's external trade was ending, moreover, the infusion of more immi-
grants from Brazil in the form of freed slaves revitalized connections with
that country.
The Brazilian community was defined above all by its use of the
Portuguese language. The Roman Catholic religion was also an important,
though not necessary, signifier of Brazilian identity and helped incorporate
people into the community-though a significant minority of the returned
ex-slaves were Muslims and continued to practice Islam.52 Instances of the
attachment of Brazilian settlers to Catholic Christianity can be found- even
before the establishment of an officially organized church. At Agoue, for
example, a "Christian lady returned from Brazil" is said to have built a
chapel in I835; it burned down soon after, but a decade later Joaquim
d'Almeida built a second, more lasting one equipped with "the necessary
objects for saying mass." At Lagos a little later, another Brazilian ex-slave,
"Padre" Antonio-not in fact an ordained priest, but a layman-built a
chapel and began conducting services. In addition to worship and Catholic
religious festivals, Brazilian-style dress and cuisine also displayed identity
and helped forge community.53 Beyond this shared culture, critical integra-
tive mechanisms were intermarriage and the incorporation of new arrivals
into relationships of clientage with established families such as the de
Souzas.54 Much more research needs to be done on these questions, however,
particularly on the evolving relationship between the early Brazilian commu-
nity and the freed slaves who arrived from the I830s. What is clear is that, in
this period if not earlier, economic and social links operated not only
between different families within each coastal community but also between
different coastal communities. The business and social activities of the
52 The role of Catholicism as an integrative factor was, however, complicated (at least in
the case of Ouidah) by competition between the local branch of the Portuguese church, based in
Sdo Tome, and the French Catholic Mission, which arrived in the i86os; see Turner, "Les
Bresiliens," I57-58, i9i-96, 244-45.
53 Verger, Trade Relations, 533 (quotation), 549-50; da Cunha, From Slave Quarters to Town
Houses, 24-30.
54 For example, de Souza, Lafamille de Souza, documents early marriage alliances with t
Sangron, dos Santos, Martins, de Medeiros, and Sastre families (as well as with the indigenous
royal family of Little Popo).
Brazilian community reinforced connections along the lagoon system as well

as across the Atlantic, with Brazilian settlers commonly relocating from one
community to another or maintaining residences in more than one commu-
nity simultaneously.55
A further source of ambiguity in the external orientation and subjective
identity of this community, though this is a matter whose implications are
likewise as yet little researched, was the political secession of Brazil from
Portugal in i822. This secession had direct repercussions in West Africa,
where the title to the Portuguese fort in Ouidah, although currently unoccu-
pied, was disputed between the two countries but was confirmed to Portugal
in the negotiations for the recognition of Brazilian independence in I825. In
the illegal slave trade across the Atlantic, national allegiances were fluid and
opportunistic, with slave ships juggling among different national registra-
tions, depending on which could offer the best protection against the atten-
tions of the British naval squadron. In Ouidah, Francisco Felix de Souza
notoriously flew the Portuguese and Brazilian flags alternately, according to
the professed nationality of the ships he was dealing with. De Souza contin-
ued to assert his personal status as a Portuguese national and, indeed, his
claim to have inherited command of the Portuguese fort at Ouidah; but this
self-identification was probably as much for practical as for sentimental rea-
sons, because Portuguese ships with no slaves on board were (until I839)
legally immune from arrest by the British antislaving squadron.56 The con-
nection to Portugal, however, acquired more practical significance with the
reoccupation of the Portuguese fort at Ouidah from I844, and, in the after-
math of the ending of the slave trade to Brazil in I850, it offered the basis of
an alternative role and identity, which became especially functional in a con-
text of increasing imperialist pressure from Britain and France. Francisco
Felix de Souza's eldest son and his successor in his title of "chacha," Isidoro
Felix de Souza, in particular, contacted the Portuguese authorities on Sao
Tome to secure appointment as governor of the Portuguese fort in I85i, and
the de Souzas continued to cultivate the Portuguese connection as a support
for their position in Ouidah to the I880s.57
From the I830s, the evolution of the Brazilian community on the Slave
Coast also interacted with a parallel movement of re-settlement by freed
slaves and their descendants from the British colony of Freetown in Sierra
55 This coastwise dimension of Brazilian activities on the Slave Coast is well brought out
in the historical novel by Ant6nio Olinto, A Casa da aqua (Rio de Janeiro, i969) (translated as
The Water House [London, I970]).
56 R[ichard] J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa, i8I5-i9io: A Study in Uneconomic
Imperialism (Stanford, Calif., i966), 69; Carlos Eugenio Correa da Silva, Uma Viagem ao
Establecimento Portuguez de S. Jodo Baptista de Ajuda na Costa da Mina em i865 (Lisboa, i866),
59-60; House of Commons Sessional Papers, I828, I840, Class A. Correspondence with British
Commissioners . .. relating to the Slave Trade, Cases of the Trajano and Emprehendor.
57 Correa da Silva, Viagem, 62, 8i-82. The appointment was renewed for subsequent hold-
ers of the title of "chacha," younger brothers of Isidoro: Francisco Felix de Souza (surnamed
"Chico"), in i865, and Julido Felix de Souza, in I884.
Leone.58 In certain contexts, Brazilians and Sierra Leoneans might see them-
selves as having common interests and a common identity, by distinction
from the societies in which they had settled, through their shared allegiance
to Christianity and European culture, and there was a certain amount of
intermarriage between them.59 But the two groups nevertheless remained
essentially distinct, commonly occupying separate residential areas in coastal
towns. They were divided not only by language but also by religious alle-
giance; the Sierra Leoneans were associated with the Anglophone Protestant
missions, and the Brazilians, with the Roman Catholic Church.
The Brazilian community on the Slave Coast was forged, not through a
process of one-way migration, but rather through the maintenance of con-
tinuous contacts across the Atlantic. That has been well documented among
the repatriated ex-slaves, but it was also true among the earlier slave
traders.60 Several Brazilians and Afro-Brazilians traveled back and forth
between America and Africa or (like Jodo de Oliveira in the eighteenth cen-
tury) returned to Brazil after periods of residence in Africa; and, even when
such persons definitively settled in Africa, they commonly maintained family
and other social ties with Brazil, often, for example, sending their children to
be educated there. Some of these people, indeed, owned slaves and landed
property and maintained households on both sides of the Atlantic.
The conduct of the slave trade required the construction and mainte-
nance of dense, interlocking business relationships, often reinforced by social
bonds. Slave traders on both sides of the Atlantic needed correspondents on
the other who would serve as agents and creditors. Brazilians on the coast
named their business associates as godparents and guardians of children sent
to be reared and educated in Brazil and as executors of their wills. Legal abo-
lition perhaps reinforced this dependence of business relationships on infor-
mal social ties, since the now-illegal slave trade no longer enjoyed an
institutionalized framework for the enforcement of contracts. Such business
and social relations sometimes existed even between former slaves and their
former owners-as, for example, between Joaquim d'Almeida and M. J.
d'Almeida.
The history of the de Souza family of Ouidah provides numerous illus-
trations of the continuing importance of such links with Bahia. The founder
Francisco Felix de Souza evidently thought of returning to Brazil, for which
he obtained a passport in i82i. His eldest son Isidoro Felix de Souza,
58 See, especially, Jean Herskovits Kopytoff, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The "Sie
Leonians"in Yoruba, 830-i890 (Madison, Wis., 1965).
59 But to only a limited degree. In late-I9th-century Lagos, Sierra Leonean elite males
took 8o% of their Christian wives from within the Sierra Leonean community; they took only
8% from Brazilian families; see Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social
Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, i985), 93.
60 Turner, "Les Bresiliens," 85-I54; Lindsay, "'To Return to the Bosom of Their
Fatherland,"' 43-44; da Cunha, From Slave Quarters to Town Houses, 20-40; J. Lorand Matory,
"Return, 'Race,' and Religion in a Transatlantic Yoruba Nation" (paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, San Francisco, November i996).
although born in Africa (Ouidah, i802), was sent back to Brazil to be edu-
cated and to perform military service before returning to West Africa,
according to family tradition in i822. A younger brother, Antonio Felix de
Souza (surnamed "Kokou"), is said to have been sent to school in Portugal,
where he learned horsemanship. Similar links were maintained in subsequent
generations. Antonio Kokou in i85i had sons being educated in Brazil, but
they were called home in the insecurity following that country's final sup-
pression of the slave trade.61 When Isidoro died in i858, the claim of one of
his brothers, another Antonio Felix de Souza (surnamed "Agbakoun"), to
succeed to the family title of chacha was rejected by the Ouidah merchant
community on the grounds that "he had never been in Brazil" and therefore
"had no idea of the interests of most of them." The family's personal con-
nections with Brazil survived the ending of the slave trade: another brother,
Julido Felix de Souza (who ultimately became chacha, 1883-1887) traded
palm oil to Brazil and is said to have traveled there "on several occasions" in
connection with his commercial activities.62
The second leading Brazilian slave trader on the Slave Coast, Domingo
Martinez, likewise returned briefly to Brazil, in 1844-1845. He evidently took
with him (or perhaps had previously sent there) some of his children by
African wives. By the time he made his will in 1845, prior to returning to
Africa, he had five offspring (one son, four daughters), two born in Bahia in
18Z4-1825 and three in Africa in 1840-1841; all were then in Bahia,
"entrusted to the care of my friends." The daughters remained in Bahia and
married there; but the son, Rafael Domingos Martins, eventually joined his
father in Africa and was at Ouidah when Martinez died in i864. In Africa,
Martinez had meanwhile fathered more children; in 1857, when he was con-
templating returning once more to Brazil, he tried to obtain passports to
send six of his children there for education.63
The will of the ex-slave Joaquim d'Almeida, written in Bahia in 1844
before his departure to settle permanently in Africa, nicely illustrates the
continuing transatlantic connections of another Brazilian slave trader on the
coast. It began with provisions for masses to be said in Bahia for the repose
of his soul, for alms to be given there to the poor, and for the interment of
his body in the habit of the order of Saint Francis at the monastery in Bahia
(but, in fact, he died and was buried in Agoue). He appointed his former
owner and current business associate, M. J. d'Almeida, an executor of his
will and also made a bequest to him. After declaring his Brazilian assets in
the form of a house, nine slaves, shares of slaving voyages, and slaves in the
hands of agents, he asked to have specific debts paid on the African coast
and in Bahia. He made provision for various persons he was leaving behind
in Bahia. He freed a "Nago" (Yoruba) slave woman who belonged to another
61 Verger, Trade Relations, 408; de Souza, La famille de Souza, 42; Ross, "The Career of
Domingo Martinez," 85.
62 Foa, Le Dahomey, 3P; de Souza, Lafamille de Souza, 55.
63 Richard Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (London, i864), i, 73-74. The text
of the will is in Verger, Trade Relations, 425-27 (quotation); see also 4I4-I5.
WEST AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY 33I
man and made a bequest to her "to ease my conscience considering the good
services she had given me." He also freed a creole girl Benedita and two slave
women, a "Mina" (that is, from the Gold Coast) and a "Nago," whom he
owned "as a reward for their good services to me." He named as his heirs a
minor, Soteiro, son of the Mina woman he had freed, and the creole girl
Benedita, presumably his children, though illegitimate, because the will later
stated: "I have neither descendants nor forebearers who by right can inherit . . .
my possessions." Intriguingly, d'Almeida named as second after Soteiro one
Thomazia de Souza Paraiso, "a freed African woman, of the Gege nation
[that is, from the Dahomey area], now living somewhere on the African
coast," one of the people to whom he owed a debt. He named as second after
Benedita his former owner, M. J. d'Almeida. As further evidence of the
dense social connections spanning the Atlantic and linking slave traders and
some former slaves, M. J. d'Atmeida and Joaquim d'Almeida used the same
business agent in Bahia, Caetano Alberto da Franca, and they both
appointed this man executor of their wills. Da Franca was "a light skinned
mulatto (pardo)," who had served on slaving voyages between i8i8 and 1824.
When he died in 1871, one of M. J. d'Almeida's sons paid for masses to be
said for the repose of his soul.64
The correspondence of a Brazilian trader settled in Ouidah, Jose
Francisco dos Santos ("Alfaiate"), further illustrates the involvement of West
African coastal traders in transatlantic networks. The extant letters are from
two distinct periods: 1844-1847, when dos Santos was engaged in the illegal
slave trade, and i862-i871, by which time he had shifted into legitimate
trade in palm oil (and also kola nuts for the Brazil market). The correspon-
dence documents the maintenance by dos Santos of social and cultural ties
with the Brazilian homeland. In the 1840s, both his mother and his young
son, Jacinto da Costa Santos, were in Bahia, and there are frequent refer-
ences to arrangements for their maintenance and for his son's education and
baptism. By the i86os, the son was living with his father at Ouidah, and he
remained there, founding a dos Santos family that still survives in the town.
In i863, Jacinto made a brief visit to his grandmother in Brazil-ironically,
to dissuade her from joining her son and grandson in Africa. One of dos
Santos's correspondents in the i86os, who transmitted payments to his
mother, was the same Caetano Alberto da Franca who had links to M. J. and
Joaquim d'Almeida. The dos Santos correspondence also documents the sup-
ply of everyday goods and services across the Atlantic: in i86z, he sent his
watch to Bahia for repair and his spectacles to be set in gold frames, and he
subsequently placed orders for sundry tools, cigars, clothing, poison to kill
termites, and calendars.65
As in the eighteenth century, the transatlantic network of business and
social relations in this period sometimes incorporated, at least to some
64 Will of Joaquim d'Almeida, in Verger, Trade Relations, 405, 475-77.

65 Correspondence of Jose Francisco dos Santos, in Pierre Verger, Les afro-americains
(Dakar, I952), 53-IOO-
degree, members of indigenous coastal elites as well as foreigners and slaves

or former slaves who came to work or settle on the Slave Coast. A second set
of letters, found in Oba Kosoko's palace when the British attacked Lagos in
1851, shows his continuing connections with Bahian business associates and
friends. The correspondence deals primarily with the sale of slaves shipped
by the oba to commission agents in Brazil, but it also provides glimpses of a
broader involvement. Like de Souza, Martinez, and dos Santos, Kosoko sent
youths to be educated in Brazil, but they were slaves-Simplicio, Lorenzo,
and Camilio-rather than sons, who returned to work as his clerks. And,
like dos Santos, Kosoko looked to Brazil to satisfy his desire for certain con-
sumer goods and services, ordering tiles, dyes, compasses, bells, cloth, and
silver-handled knives and attempting to send muskets for repair. Moreover,
the letters contain more than the formulaic expressions of friendship
expected between business associates. In 1849, for example, one Colonia
wrote to Kosoko: "Do me the favour to present my mother's compliments to
all your wives and children; and do me the favour also to make my compli-
ments to all your headmen, and accept yourself my assurances of friendship,
as I am your friend."66
This article has explored the role of the Atlantic slave trade in the rise
and transformation on West Africa's Slave Coast of a population that linked
the region to the Americas and Europe as well as to Africa. This group
existed first and foremost to move many thousands of slaves across the
Atlantic each year. The creation of efficient commercial networks, however,
also fostered continuing demographic, social, and cultural exchanges that
shaped not only the history of the community itself but also that of the
regions of the world connected by it. Diverse actors helped create the
Atlantic population on the Slave Coast-European and Brazilian traders and
their African wives and mulatto offspring, African rulers and the emissaries
they sent abroad to help attract slavers and other foreigners to the coast, for-
mer slaves who returned to West Africa as individuals to the 183os and in
groups thereafter. Prior to legal abolition, moreover, links existed to Britain
and France and their settlements in the Americas as well as to Brazil and
other parts of the Portuguese empire. After it, however, connections to
Brazil predominated and became sufficiently dense and close that a Brazilian
community developed on the Slave Coast, which both linked its towns and
crossed the ocean to Bahia. This community was defined not only by com-
mon economic activities and interests but also by shared language, religion,
and family and other social ties. The well-known return of the Brazilian
repatriated ex-slaves to the region after 1835 built on a prior history of
Brazilian settlement on the coast.
The Brazilian community on the Slave Coast was dynamic, as had been
the earlier Atlantic population there. Although beyond the scope of this arti-
cle, it is important to note in closing changes in the second half of the nine-
66 Correspondence of Oba Kosoko, in House of Lords Sessional Papers, i852-i853, Slave

Trade Correspondence, XXII, 340.
teenth century that further transformed this community. The long slave
trade to Brazil finally ended in 1850, and, although the commerce to Cuba
continued for a few years longer, it too was eliminated after i863. The clos-
ing of the Brazilian slave trade coincided with British intervention in a suc-
cession dispute at Lagos, which led to the expulsion of all foreign slave
traders from the town and, in i86i, to British annexation of the kingdom. A
number of Brazilian slave traders expelled from Lagos resettled at Ouidah or
lesser towns on the coast. The Sierra Leoneans on the Slave Coast believed,
on the other hand, that the growing British presence at Lagos would create
conditions conducive to the development of the palm oil trade and spread of
Protestant Christianity in the town. A number of them relocated to Lagos in
hopes of benefiting from these advantages and enjoying British protection.
Thus, the ending of the slave trade to Brazil was accompanied by a shifting
of the Brazilian and Sierra Leonean populations on the coast, although this
was partially offset by the migration of Brazilian repatriated slaves to Lagos
at this time. Henceforth, the origins of the Brazilian population at Ouidah,
Porto-Novo, and elsewhere on the western Slave Coast were more heteroge-
neous than at Lagos, including many families founded by the early slave
traders and their dependents as well as by repatriated free slaves.
With the end of the slave trade also came the rapid growth of a new
Atlantic commerce-that in palm oil with Europe. A number of Brazilian
slave traders and their families had difficulty adjusting to the commercial tra
sition, which undermined their economic and political power on the coast:
Francisco Felix de Souza was heavily in debt by the time of his death in 1849,
and even Domingo Martinez, who engaged extensively in the oil as well as the
slave trade, was rumored to be close to bankruptcy by the late I850s. Among
those who did make the change into palm oil, the new trade brought a shift in
Atlantic orientation, since the main markets for oil lay in Europe rather than
in Brazil. In the i86os, the correspondence of dos Santos at Ouidah, for exam-
ple, although still mainly to Brazil, also included letters to merchants in
France and Britain. When dos Santos contemplated an overseas journey in
i863, it was to France, for medical treatment in Paris (with an excursion by
train to Marseille, to visit a former trading partner), rather than to Brazil.67
The development of Lagos as the primary port in the region, accompa-
nied as it was by the imposition of British colonial rule, the return of Sierra
Leonean liberated slaves, and the arrival of northern European Protestant
missionaries, led to the rapid development there of a complex, cosmopolitan
colonial world in which the former slaves from Brazil were only one among a
number of significant external influences. The Brazilian population there did
not remain as powerful as at Ouidah and Porto-Novo, where even after the
imposition of French colonial rule it continued to play a formative role in
local politics and culture.68
67 Ross, "The First Chacha," 25; Ross, "The Career of Domingo Martinez," 87; Jose
Francisco dos Santos to Lartigue, July 6, i863, in Verger, Les afro-ame'ricains, 91.
68 Jerry Michael Turner, "Democratic Instincts in Dahomey (Benin Republic), I929-30
and i989-96: Afro-Brazilian Political Behavior on the Benin Gulf' (paper presented at the
The Atlantic community on the Slave Coast was not unique within
western Africa, though it had a distinctive character, by comparison with
similar groups elsewhere, because of its preponderant orientation toward
Brazil and the prominence in it of repatriated free slaves. On the Gold Coast
(modern Ghana) to the west, for example, transatlantic links were rather to
Britain, the Netherlands, and Denmark (and to their American colonies),
and the Atlantic commercial elite derived more commonly from intermar-
riage between European traders and African women.69 On the Bight of
Biafra to the east, links were (at least by the second half of the eighteenth
century) overwhelmingly to Britain and took the form of indigenous mer-
chants sending children to Europe for education-creating (at least in the
case of Old Calabar) an unusual level of literacy in English among the coastal
elite.70 Even in other areas whose primary orientation was to the Portuguese-
speaking world, their situation and experience were significantly different
from that of the Slave Coast. In the Senegambia and on the Upper Guinea
coast, small numbers of Portuguese known as lanfados had settled in Afri
coastal communities and intermarried with local women from the fifteenth
century, giving rise to Luso-African populations connected to the Portuguese
empire primarily through the Portuguese communities of the Cape Verde
archipelago. Although these groups maintained a loose cultural orientation
toward Portugal, as its economic and political power declined in the seven-
teenth century and French, British, and Dutch traders moved into the region
the Luso-Africans' commercial ties were increasingly to other parts of
Europe. In Angola, the long duration and vast scale of the slave trade pro-
duced a Lusophone community that was larger and wealthier than elsewhere,
with commercial, social, and cultural ties stretching deep into the slave-gath-
ering interior as well as across the Atlantic to Brazil-in this case, to Rio de
Janeiro rather than to Bahia. The colonial status of Angola, however, gave
this community a different character from elsewhere on the coast; and nei-
ther there nor in Upper Guinea did returned freed slaves play the same role
as on the Slave Coast.71
Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, San Francisco, November I996); Elisee
Soumonni, "Some Reflections on the Brazilian Legacy in Dahomey" (paper presented at the
Symposium, "Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the
Bight of Benin and Brazil," Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., April I998).
69 For an illustrative case, see the study of the family descended from the Irish trader
Richard Brew (d. I776), Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study
(London, i969).
70 In the late i8th century, "many" of the inhabitants of Old Calabar were reported to be
literate in English, and there were local schools "for the purpose of instructing in this art the
youths belonging to families of consequence"; see Adams, Remarks, I44.
71 Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, i545-i800 (Oxford, I970), 200-22;
Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade
(Madison, Wis., I975), 95-I09; George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and
Trade in Western Africa, i000-i630 (Boulder, Colo., I993), 12I-97; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death:
Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, i730-i830 (Madison, Wis., i988), 246-3I3.

Law Mann Western Africa Atlantic Community

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Law Mann Western Africa Atlantic Community

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West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast

Author(s): Robin Law and Kristin Mann

Robin Law and Kristin Mann

T SHE section of the West African coast known to Europeans as the

be ~g) oSt Afrc

~~~C8 aPic Wet Afric

The Slave Coast

The South Atlantic and the Slave Coast

cially, of its intellectuals), in which Africa figures as an object of retrospec-

Theorizing about the appropriate conceptual framework for understand-

The communities of the Slave Coast became part of a wider Atlantic

quently fortified) and maintained them throughout the eighteenth century.

gin or descent, continued to define themselves as such and to cultivate a dis-

When most Africanists speak of the Brazilian diaspora to the Slave

23 Verger, Trade Relations, 477-78.

detailed circumstances of his return to Africa were rather different. He was

30 Verger, Trade Relations, 219, 224, 229, 23I.

40 House of Commons Sessional Papers, I83I-I839, Class A. Correspondence with British

assimilated Brazilian culture on the West African coast as slaves or clients of

Brazilian community reinforced connections along the lagoon system as well

64 Will of Joaquim d'Almeida, in Verger, Trade Relations, 405, 475-77.

degree, members of indigenous coastal elites as well as foreigners and slaves

66 Correspondence of Oba Kosoko, in House of Lords Sessional Papers, i852-i853, Slave

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