Ouidah

Ouidah grew as the port of the Hueda kingdom, whose capital lay inland at Savi. Known locally as Glexwe, it was a place where European companies were allowed to trade but not to rule: the French, English and Portuguese each built a fort in the town during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Portuguese fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá going up in 1721. Dahomey's King Agaja conquered Hueda in 1727 and took the coast, and Ouidah became Dahomey's outlet to the Atlantic.

For more than a century it was one of the busiest slaving ports in Africa. Captives seized in Dahomey's wars and raids inland were marched to the town, held in compounds, sold at the auction square and taken through the surf in canoes to ships waiting offshore, most of them bound for Brazil and the Caribbean. Brazilian traders settled here, the best known being Francisco Félix de Souza, who helped Ghezo to the throne and took the title of chacha, and formerly enslaved people returning from Brazil in the 19th century formed the Agudá community whose names and houses still mark the town.

After the trade was suppressed Ouidah turned to palm oil, and French rule from the 1890s left it a provincial town while Cotonou took its commerce. Catholic missions made it a religious centre, and the Portuguese held their fort as a tiny enclave inside French territory until 1961. In the early 1990s the town hosted a festival of Vodun arts and cultures that reconnected it with the African diaspora, and the memorials along the Slave Route, including the Door of No Return arch on the beach, were made by Beninese artists working with the architect Yves Ahouen-Gnimon. Vodun became an officially recognised religion in 1996.

Ouidah is regarded as the spiritual capital of Vodun, and the religion shapes the town's calendar. Shrines to Legba stand at compound gates, convents train initiates, and priests of Dangbe, the serpent deity, keep the royal pythons whose temple faces the basilica across a square — a pairing that says a good deal about how Catholicism and Vodun coexist here, often within the same family. Each January the national Vodun holiday fills the town with ceremonies, drumming, gin poured to the spirits, and dancers in the raffia Zangbeto and cloth Egungun masks, watched by pilgrims from Brazil, Haiti, the United States and across West Africa.

The Agudá, descendants of Brazilian traders and of returnees from Brazil, are the other strand of the town's identity. Portuguese surnames such as de Souza, da Silva and Paraíso are common, the merchant houses carry Brazilian plasterwork and shutters, and the Bourian masquerade, with its horse figure and brass band, comes from the same source.

Memory is the town's public business. Guides at the fort, the auction square and the Tree of Oblivion explain the slave trade to Beninese school parties and foreign visitors alike, and the return of descendants from the Americas is treated as a homecoming rather than tourism. Angélique Kidjo, Benin's best-known singer, was born here. Visitors are expected to behave with corresponding seriousness at memorials and shrines.

Ouidah is a small town: the commune counted about 77,000 people at the 2002 census and has grown since, spreading inland from the old streets rather than towards the sea. Its pace is provincial, and much of its working population commutes or has family in Cotonou, 40 kilometres east.

The economy rests on fishing from the lagoon and the sea, on farming — maize, cassava, market vegetables and coconuts — on trade along the coastal highway, and on visitors, who support guides, craft sellers, small hotels and the beach lodges. The town also has schools and seminaries, and the religious institutions are significant employers in their own right. Families of Vodun priests, of Agudá descent and of returnee communities hold positions that matter locally far beyond their numbers.

Days start early and quietly: the market in the morning, a long hot middle of the day when the streets empty, and life returning at dusk around the maquis and the churches. Erosion of the shoreline is a steady worry along this stretch of coast, and the January festival is the one week when the town is unmistakably busy.

Ouidah eats the food of the southern lagoons: maize and fish, and plenty of chilli. The staple is akassa, fermented maize dough wrapped in leaves and eaten with a tomato, okra or leafy-green sauce, or amiwo, the same dough cooked in a red tomato and palm-oil stock and usually served with chicken. Fish comes fresh from the sea, or smoked and dried from the lagoon, and the coastal maquis grill whole sea fish, prawns and crab over charcoal.

Street food follows the same pattern as elsewhere in the south — akara, fritters of ground cowpeas fried at the roadside in the morning; ablo, small steamed cakes of maize and rice flour eaten with fried fish and pepper sauce; gari, coarse cassava meal, soaked with sugar and water or cooked with egg and tomato. Roasted groundnuts, fresh coconut and pineapple are sold along the road to the beach.

The town's Brazilian inheritance shows in its cooking as well as its architecture: dishes brought back by the Agudá in the 19th century, among them feijoada-style bean stews and coconut sweets, are still made for family and church occasions. Palm wine is tapped inland and distilled into sodabi, the clear spirit poured at Vodun ceremonies and drunk at every celebration, and bissap, made from hibiscus flowers, is the usual soft drink.