No abstract

R. Law — Entre mer et lagune : les interactions de la navigation maritime et continentale sur la Côte des Esclaves avant la colonisation. Sur la Côte des Eslaves, c'est-à-dire sur la portion de la côte d'Afrique de l'Ouest comprise entre la Volta et la rivière Lagos, les peuples autochtones, avant l'arrivée des Européens, ne connaissaient pas la navigation maritime. Cependant, les lagunes qui s'étendent parallèlement à la côte étaient parcourues par des embarcations, et une économie maritime originale, reposant sur la pêche et la fabrication du sel avait vu le jour. Le commerce européen qui se développa à partir du xvie siècle, ne se substitua pas au commerce lagunaire préexistant mais le stimula et prit appui sur lui ; les lagunes servant de réservoir d'esclaves et d'autres marchandises pour le commerce européen. Les traitants européens de la Côte des Esclaves utilisaient des embarcations et des marins de la Côte de l'Or et de régions littorales situées plus à l'ouest pour assurer les liaisons avec le rivage. Au xvne siècle, les marchands de la Côte de l'Or vinrent commercer en bateau sur la Côte des Esclaves, en concurrence avec les Européens. La ville d'Aneho (Petit Popo), située à l'ouest de la Côte des Esclaves, servait de lieu de transbordement entre le système de navigation maritime et celui des lagunes.

Ethnicity was evidently critical for the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, on both the African and the European sides of the trade. For Africans, given the general convention against enslaving fellow citizens, ethnic identities served to define a category of “others” who were legitimately enslavable. For African Muslims this function was performed by religion, though here too, it is noteworthy that the classic discussion of this issue, by the Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba in 1615, approaches it mainly in terms of ethnicity, through classification of West African peoples as Muslim or pagan. Europeans, for their part, regularly distinguished different ethnicities among the slaves they purchased, and American markets developed preferences for slaves of particular ethnic origins. This raises interesting (but as yet little researched) questions about the ways in which African and European definitions of African ethnicity may have interacted. Both Africans and Europeans, for example, commonly employed, as a means of distinguishing among African ethnicities, the facial and bodily scarifications (“tribal marks”) characteristic of different communities—a topic on which there is detailed information in European sources back at least into the seventeenth century, which might well form the basis for a historical study of ethnic identities.In this context as in others, of course, ethnicity should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid and subject to constant redefinition. The lately fashionable debate on “the invention of tribes” in Africa concentrated on the impact of European colonialism in the twentieth century, rather than on that of the Atlantic slave trade earlier—no doubt because it was addressed primarily to Southern, Central and Eastern rather than Western Africa.

Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became self-sufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.

The kingdom of Dahomey is often presented as the classic instance of the operation of a royal monopoly of the Atlantic trade in West Africa. Detailed study establishes, however, that there was never any such royal commercial monopoly in Dahomey, although there were attempts to establish such a monopoly in the 1780s and in the 1850s. The kings of Dahomey enjoyed a number of commercial privileges, and controlled the distribution of the war captives taken by the Dahomian army, but they were never the sole sellers of slaves. There was always an important group of private merchants in Dahomey, who were mainly concerned with marketing the slaves imported into the kingdom from the interior. The replacement of the slave trade by the palm oil trade in the nineteenth century strengthened the position of the private merchants, since they were able to move into the production of oil as well as marketing it. The kings of Dahomey also engaged in the production of oil for export, but were not able to establish as complete control of the production of oil as they had exercised over the ‘production’ of slaves.