In west Africa, Agaja, the dada (king) of small but aggressive Dahomey, attacked Ardra and Ouidah, Fon kingdoms that traded slaves to the French and British. Agaja, son of the founder Houegbadja, faced constant challenges from his dominant neighbour, the Oyo Kingdom. Its alafins (kings) commanded a formidable cavalry and were enriched by their huge trade in slaves with the Europeans. Dada Agaja accepted Oyan tributary status, but that did not stop him deciding to seize a slice of the Franco-British slave trade that was now reaching a terrible intensity. Agaja watched how the ports of Ouidah and Allada (Ardra) generated massive profits. ‘The king [Haffon of Ouidah] is an absolute boar,’ noted an English naval surgeon. ‘If he can’t obtain a sufficient number of slaves he marches an army and depopulates. He and the king of Allada adjoining commit great depredations inland.’
Ruling from Savi, his capital, surrounded by the factories of the Europeans, Haffon sat on a throne given by the Compagnie Française des Indes Occidentales, wearing a crown presented by the British RAC, sourcing and controlling his human merchandise. In 1724, Agaja of Dahomey first seized Allada, then in 1727 Ouidah, killing Haffon and shattering his occult power by eating his sacred pythons. When Agaja purged dissidents, he sold them as slaves to Brazil. Amassing a regular army of 10,000, he expanded the existing female bodyguard, recruiting female prisoners, manumitted slaves, runaways, whom he trained to kill and seize slaves to sell to the Europeans. Based at Agaja’s capital at Abomey, these forces terrified their neighbours with attacks on innocent villages in which old and young were slaughtered while strong males and females were kidnapped and marched to the slave markets. Even today, their descendants recount stories of these exploits. The female guards only reflected the power of women at the Dahomean court, where all the inhabitants of the Big House palace were called ahosi – royal wives – including the male ministers, while the actual princesses, all of whom had special roles at court, sat as a Council of Wives, which could overrule the dada. (In Oyo, when an alafin was unpopular, he was strangled by his wives.)
Agaja and his son Tegbesu, who succeeded him in 1740, ran a slave-trading monopoly, earning an estimated £250,000 per annum. Tegbesu killed or enslaved his rivals including his brother Truku, who was sold to Brazil. Tegbesu negotiated deals with the Europeans, receiving them ‘on a handsome chair of crimson velvet, ornamented with a gold fringe, smoking tobacco, with gold-laced hair, a plume of ostrich feathers, a rich crimson damask robe’. Under the Dahomeans, Ouidah became west Africa’s busiest slave port: after 1700, between twenty-five and fifty ships sailed annually to the Americas.
Nearby, west of Dahomey, inland from the Gold Coast (Ghana), an Akan leader, Osei Tutu, united bands of hunters and farmers, using Dutch guns, to defeat a rival gold-rich kingdom, Denkyira, and crown himself asantehene – king. In 1680, creating a capital inland at Kumasi, Osei Tutu advised by his priest Anokye adopted a curved seat of solid gold, the Sika Dwa Kofi, delivered from the sky, as the mark of his kingship and the spirit of the Asante people. After the founder’s death in 1719, his successor Opoku Ware ‘ruled violently as a tyrant, delighting in his authority’, noted the Gonja people, who were victimized by Asante. ‘People of all horizons feared him greatly.’
The asantehenes were chosen from the family by an assembly of 200, dominated by four families, advised in power by a council of eighteen officials and the queen mother – ohemmaa. Their palace was ‘an immense building’; their craftmanship in gold trophy heads and jewellery was exquisite. Among their medical traditions, they had long practised a form of inoculation against smallpox. By the end of the century, 25,000 lived in their capital (at a time when Glasgow had 77,000, New York 40,000) and they ruled around one million. The Asante initially imported Portuguese slaves from Angola to work their mines and farms, serve at court and, at the death of asantehenes, suffer sacrifice. But now they raided the interior to supply slaves to the British and Dutch, trading gold, cloth and nuts in return for weapons and metals.
The enslaved were force-marched, chained in atrocious coffles by Afro-European agents, many of them female. At Cacheu, Portugal’s west African slave port, the most powerful trader was Bibiana Vaz, who launched a coup against another female slave trader, Crispina Peres, who was accused of ‘fetishism’ (surely a syncretized version of Catholicism and African religion) and deported to Lisbon to be tried by the Inquisition.
