Walking the slave route in Benin

Ouidah, Benin

On a free afternoon in Benin, I decide to walk the slave route in Ouidah, the port from which perhaps a million Africans were transported on the Middle Passage to the Americas. Near the old slave market or Place Chacha, named in memory of the slaver Francisco Félix de Souza, about whom Bruce Chatwin wrote a book, I encounter a group of black Americans following the same path. Now in 1776 — even before the abolitionist Wilberforce — the British Member of Parliament for Hull, David Hartley, was the first to introduce to Parliament a debate “that the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men” — but I have no proof that he was my ancestor. The truth is that I was surprised when the black Americans on this emotional journey asked me to join them, because I did not think they’d be pleased to have a white African tagging along. “Aidan, you’re my brother,” Martin Johnson from Louisiana exclaims after I introduce myself. “We’d be happy for you to join us.”

Departing slaves would circle a tree known as the Tree of Forgetting, in a ceremony that erased their African lives

Overlooking the Place Chacha is a villa, supposedly still owned by de Souza’s descendants, while nearby is the spot where the slaves purchased at auction were branded for their new owners. The Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, Dutch and Danes all set up shop in Ouidah. But our guide, Didier, stresses that it was the local African kingdoms which traditionally kept large numbers of slaves in their palaces and then gained immense wealth off the back of the Atlantic trade in humans.

Next on the route is the Zomai House, a barracoon, or slaves’ dungeon, where thousands of slaves were kept each year, waiting for their ships to arrive. If they became weakened by starvation or illness, Didier says, they were tossed into a pit to die. A mass grave on the route is now the site of the Memorial of Zoungbodji, where a sculpture by the local artist Fortuné Banderia shows lines of slaves in manacles.

As we progress through Ouidah, it becomes clear that much of it is a building site, with aims to construct a theme park about the history of the slave trade in a sleepy African town with only vague memories of what happened here for several centuries. Plans are to build museums and reconstruct a slavers’ ship. All this is thanks to Benin’s President Patrice Talon, himself the descendant of slave traders, who is also redesigning the capital Cotonou with some remarkable new buildings and a 100ft statue of a female African soldier.

In a dusty street nearby, Didier says that departing slaves would circle a tree known as the Tree of Forgetting, in a ceremony that erased their African lives and prepared them for the life of a slave. At some point in this journey, Africans were told to drop the names they were given at birth.

“The best way to change you was to change your name to a Christian one,” says Didier. “But as we know, Jesus was not a white man with blue eyes — he was a black-skinned man.” This is clearly designed to impress the black American audience, but Didier can’t say he has any of us convinced of what Jesus looked like. Lloyd, a member of the Black American Party, says to Didier: “They took away their freedom when they left Africa, but these people were still free in their minds, whatever happened to them in America.”

The last stage of the route is the Gate of No Return, an arch that commemorates all the enslaved Africans who were marched down to the beach, gagged, branded and manacled, to embark on the transport ships. It’s a modern monument designed by the artist Banderia, since nothing exists of the original slave trade here aside from the slavers’ forts, but the arch does have great emotional power. It shows lines of Africans being marched out into the waves, towards the ships and away from the Tree of Forgetting. On either side of the arch are the effigies of a voodoo god, Egungun, standing there to welcome home back through the same gate the souls of Africans who died in the New World.

I suggest to Martin and the others that we should walk down to the ocean, to complete the pilgrimage, and they all agree. As we stroll down to the waves, Martin tells me he thinks Donald Trump will not be so bad for the US. He reveals to me that his party are all involved in the business of importing cashew nuts to America and that Benin is among the largest producers of cashews in the world. I ask Martin what’s going through his mind. He says that he’s glad his ancestors survived the ghastly journey across the Atlantic so that his family could do well through the generations and return to Africa to do something worthwhile.