Madiki Lemon, the "English Captain" at Ouidah, 1843–1852: an Exploration in Biography

I

The history of the commercial entrepôts on the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the pre-colonial period is far from being a neglected topic, but has attracted considerable academic research.¹ The potential value of a biographical (or prosopographical) approach to the social history of such coastal communities has also long been recognized, the classic pioneering example being Margaret Priestley's study of the Brew family of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), founded by the locally settled Irish slave-trader Richard Brew (died 1776).² The case of the Brews, however, presents exceptionally favorable conditions for the reconstruction both of individual biography and of collective family history, in that the founder was literate and generated a considerable corpus of written records which survives to the present, while for subsequent generations of the family the early establishment of an institutionalized form of British proto-colonial administration on the Gold Coast also yielded relatively abundant documentation.

Elsewhere on the coast, and more particularly for individuals and families lower down the social scale, the amount of evidence available is likely to be much more limited and fragmentary. The present article represents a tentative attempt at a biography of a person of much lesser eminence than Richard Brew or his descendants, which may therefore be regarded as a venture into the field of subaltern history.³ To the extent that it also concerns someone who generated no documentation of his own, but whose life has to be reconstructed from incidental references in the records of the external agencies with whom he had dealings, it is also conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from European (and Eurocentric) sources.

The present study originated as a by-product of earlier research on the social history of Ouidah, a coastal town in the modern Republic of Bénin;⁴ and its more recent revision has been stimulated by work currently in progress on an edition of the journals of Louis Fraser, who served as British vice-consul to the kingdom of Dahomey, resident in Ouidah, in 1851–2.⁵ In the pre-colonial period, Ouidah was the principal Atlantic "port" of Dahomey, and hence a major supplier of slaves for export to the Americas, and from the 1840s also of palm oil as a raw material for European industry. One of the objectives of my earlier research on Ouidah was to explore the possibility of correlating information from two categories of source material: oral traditions of families which exist in the town at the present,⁶ and contemporary European accounts, mainly relating to the conduct of the export trade. Through this combination of source material, it proved possible to trace the histories of some Ouidah families, especially those prominent in overseas commerce, back to the nineteenth and in some cases even into the eighteenth century. This article relates to a member of one such family, called Lemon. This is nowadays a very prominent family, not only locally in Ouidah but in the wider national arena of the Republic of Bénin: a senior member of it at the present, Idelphonse Lemon, has been a leading civil servant and politician, serving for example as a Minister in the democratic transitional government of 1990–1991, and an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency of Bénin in the election of 1991. In the nineteenth century, however, it belonged to the lower echelon of the Ouidah elite.

II

The commercial prominence of Ouidah was reflected in the existence of fortified posts belonging to the three principal European slavetrading nations, the Portuguese, English and French, each of which formed the nucleus of a quarter of the town. Although only the Portuguese fort survives nowadays as a recognizable building, the quarters of the former English and French forts also retain their identities to the present. The "English" quarter is more commonly called cnowadays by its indigenous name, Sogbadji. Several of the families which live in Sogbadji today recall their descent from persons who were employed in the English fort...