The Dahomean Middleman System, 1727–c. 1818

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Supply Problem ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Trading Partners

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.

IV. The Establishment of the Sierra Leone Protectorate and the Insurrection of 1898

1956 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Effective Administration ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Tribal Areas

The Colony of Sierra Leone originated in settlements of freed slaves on the West African coast carried out on the initiative of British philanthropists in the later eighteenth century. For over a century, British responsibility was as far as possible restricted to the small mountainous peninsula on which Freetown stands, and to certain nearby islands; but influence was inevitably obtained over nearby coast and hinterland, and during the nineteenth century some additional territories were incorporated in the Colony, though not always brought under effective administration. In 1896 the remaining regions not conceded to be under French or Liberian influence were proclaimed a British Protectorate; which also included, for administrative purposes, certain chiefdoms formerly part of the Colony. In this period, therefore, the term ‘Colony’ is applied to the peninsula and islands originally settled, with a few predominantly tribal areas around the river Sherbro; the term ‘Protectorate’ to territories the size of Ireland, which form the great bulk of the area marked ‘Sierra Leone’ on a modern map, and whose social organization was at this time exclusively tribal. At the beginning of 1898 British officials began to collect a House Tax which had been imposed on three of the five districts of the Protectorate. In February, resistance to the tax by certain Temne chiefs developed into open warfare in the north, and at the end of April a series of savage attacks took place on British and American subjects, mostly of African birth and descent, among the Mende and Sherbro people further south. These two outbreaks constitute the insurrection to be studied in this paper.

Archaeological Perspectives on the Atlantic Slave Trade: Contrasts in Time and Space in Benin and Guinea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This chapter explores the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the European settlements of the New World on two settings along the West African coast. The Atlantic slave trade engaged societies ranging from complexly organised ‘states’ to loosely organised societies based on diverse local leadership. The chapter discusses archaeological investigations of one complex setting, that of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Hueda and Dahomey societies of the Bight of Benin, and contrasts those findings with preliminary results from the nineteenth-century sites along the Rio Pongo, Guinea, where the slave trade was conducted by a range of societies of less complex organisation. These investigations demonstrate that the specific responses of local African people to the Atlantic slave trade were highly variable.

PAWNS ON THE GOLD COAST: THE RISE OF ASANTE AND SHIFTS IN SECURITY FOR DEBT, 1680–1750

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH SPICKSLEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
Secure Control ◽  
African Coast ◽  
European Trade ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Debt Recovery

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Europeans on the Gold Coast took gold pawns as security for debt, but from the early eighteenth century, they turned increasingly toward the use of human pawns. This shift was the result of a transformation in levels of demand for gold amongst African sellers, most notably the Asante, who began to secure control over local gold sources from c. 1700. The change in demand for gold was accompanied by a rise in slave prices on the West African coast, but it was the indigenous system of debt recovery that proved crucial to the success of European trade.

scholarly journals Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of “Mina” (Again)

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 247-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Published Paper

The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.

scholarly journals The English Establishments on the Gold Coast in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1922 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 167-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eveline C. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
National Pride ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.

Kru Country

1999 ◽  
pp. 7-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Frost
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
European Trade ◽  
In The Beginning

‘Kru Country’ is the first chapter in the section titled ‘In the Beginning’ and describes the development of the Kru as European trade and traffic increased on the West African coast. The chapter defines the origins of the terms ‘Kru’ and ‘Kroo’ and assesses the emergence of the construct of the Kru as a result of various social and economic processes that occurred during a period of European colonial activity in West Africa. Frost also explores the changing nineteenth century European systems of trade, and the Kru’s influence on these systems, while providing a useful cultural context that includes a discussion on the significance of ‘bride-wealth’ on Kru migration.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

scholarly journals Trains of African Easterly Waves and Their Relationship to Tropical Cyclone Genesis in the Eastern Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdou L. Dieng ◽  
Saidou M. Sall ◽  
Laurence Eymard ◽  
Marion Leduc-Leballeur ◽  
Alban Lazar
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Dynamical Structure ◽  
African Easterly Waves ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Easterly Waves ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Tropical Depressions ◽  
The Relationship

In this study, the relationship between trains of African easterly waves (AEWs) and downstream tropical cyclogenesis is studied. Based on 19 summer seasons (July–September from 1990 to 2008) of ERA-Interim reanalysis fields and brightness temperature from the Cloud User Archive, the signature of AEW troughs and embedded convection are tracked from the West African coast to the central Atlantic. The tracked systems are separated into four groups: (i) systems originating from the north zone of the midtropospheric African easterly jet (AEJ), (ii) those coming from the south part of AEJ, (iii) systems that are associated with a downstream trough located around 2000 km westward (termed DUO systems), and (iv) those that are not associated with such a close downstream trough (termed SOLO systems). By monitoring the embedded 700-hPa-filtered relative vorticity and 850-hPa wind convergence anomaly associated with these families along their trajectories, it is shown that the DUO generally have stronger dynamical structure and statistically have a longer lifetime than the SOLO ones. It is suggested that the differences between them may be due to the presence of the previous intense downstream trough in DUO cases, enhancing the low-level convergence behind them. Moreover, a study of the relationship between system trajectories and tropical depressions occurring between the West African coast and 40°W showed that 90% of tropical depressions are identifiable from the West African coast in tracked systems, mostly in the DUO cases originating from the south zone of the AEJ.

A New Lautoconus Species Radiation from Gambia, West Africa

The Festivus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 164-172
Author(s):  
Edward Petuch ◽  
David Berschauer
Keyword(s):  
New Species ◽  
West Africa ◽  
River Mouth ◽  
Sympatric Species ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Species Radiation ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Reef Fauna

Six sympatric species of the cone shell genus Lautoconus Monterosato, 1923 have been discovered on an isolated rock reef near the Gambia River Mouth, Gambia, West Africa. Of these, four were found to be new to science and, together, they represent a previously unknown Gambian endemic species radiation. These include: Lautoconus fernandi new species, L. gambiensis new species, L. rikae new species, and L. wolof new species. The poorly-known Gambian endemic cone, Lautoconus orri (Ninomiya and da Motta, 1982) was also found to be a component of the rock reef fauna, as was the wide-ranging L. guinaicus (Hwass, 1792) (Senegal to Ghana). The Gambian cluster of sibling species represents the farthest-south separate radiation of Lautoconus known from the West African coast.

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