Portuguese Fort, Ouidah: history and future museum

In the center of Ouidah, behind whitewashed walls, stands a square fort of earth and lime. It was built in 1721 by a merchant from Bahia, destroyed by a king of Dahomey, rebuilt, abandoned, reoccupied, set on fire by its last occupants in 1961, and then turned into a museum.

Fort São João Baptista de Ajudá (Saint John the Baptist of Ajudá, from the Portuguese name for Ouidah) is one of the places where the history of the slave trade is easiest to read. Not because it was large: it was not. But because it lived through every era, from the Xweda kingdom to Benin's independence, and because until 1961 it was a small piece of Portugal in the middle of an African town.

Today it is under renovation. It is set to become the International Museum of Memory and Slavery (MIME). This pillar tells its story, what it held, and what is known about the project under way.

Three European forts in Ouidah

Around 1700, Ouidah, then the commercial capital of the Xweda kingdom, drew the great European slave-trading powers. Three of them built forts there.

The English: the Royal African Company built its fort in 1692.
The French: after a first trading post in 1671, they built a fort in 1704.
The Portuguese: their fort, São João Baptista de Ajudá, dates from 1721. According to some Portuguese sources, there was a Portuguese presence on the coast as early as 1680.

An important detail: these forts were not on the beach. They stood in town, about four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the sea. They served as warehouses, residences and places of negotiation, not as harbors. Captives were then taken to the beach along what is now called the Slave Route.

Of the three, only the Portuguese fort survives. According to Wikipedia, the remains of the English fort, known as Fort William, had already disappeared by the mid-19th century. The French fort, Saint-Louis de Grégoy, was razed in 1911 by the French governor of Dahomey. Sources do not always agree on founding dates: 1682 or 1692 for the English fort, 1671 or 1704 for the French one, depending on whether the first trading post or the fort itself is counted.

For English-speaking visitors, the vanished English fort is worth a thought. It belonged to the Royal African Company, chartered in London in 1672, the same company that ran Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast and shipped enslaved Africans to the English Caribbean and North American colonies. Ouidah was one of its main sources of captives around 1700. Today nothing remains of its fort, which makes the Portuguese fort the only surviving witness of that European presence in town.

Being inland had a consequence: the Europeans depended entirely on the goodwill of local kings, first Xweda, then Dahomean.

1721: a fort founded from Bahia

The Portuguese fort has an unusual story: it was not Lisbon's idea, but Bahia's.

It was built in 1721 on the initiative of Captain José Torres, a Bahia merchant and shipowner, who financed it and carried the materials on his own ship. The viceroy of Brazil, Vasco Fernandes César de Menezes, authorized the project without waiting for Lisbon's approval.

The fort was built by enslaved workers belonging to the Xweda king, on land a few hundred yards from the English and French forts.

That origin explains a lot. Trade between Ouidah and Bahia was direct: ships left Salvador with tobacco and gold and came back with captives. The fort served first and foremost the interests of Bahia's merchants. For much of its history, it was administratively attached to Brazil, and later to São Tomé.

Bahia, tobacco and Dahomey's embassies

The link between the fort and Bahia was not just administrative. It rested on one product: tobacco.

Bahia merchants shipped to the Costa da Mina, the Portuguese name for this coast, a so-called third-quality tobacco, cheaper to process and coated with molasses, which gave it a sweet taste much appreciated there. Portuguese regulations required that all tobacco sent to the Mina coast be of that grade; first-quality tobacco, reserved for Europe, was banned there, although some merchants shipped it anyway. According to Brazilian historians, 48 percent of the enslaved Africans brought into Portuguese America between 1701 and 1810 were acquired in exchange for tobacco or cachaça, the sugarcane spirit.

This direct trade between two shores of the Atlantic, bypassing Europe, was studied in depth by the photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger, who described it as an "ebb and flow" between the Bight of Benin and Bahia's Bay of All Saints.

The kings of Dahomey also maintained real diplomacy with the Portuguese world. According to the work of historian Ana Lucia Araujo, Dahomey sent at least five embassies to Brazil and Portugal, in 1750, 1795, 1805, 1811 and 1818, under Kings Tegbesu, Agonglo, Adandozan and Ghezo. In 1795, King Agonglo sent ambassadors to Salvador with letters for Queen Maria I of Portugal. In 1805, Adandozan's envoys traveled through Bahia to Lisbon. In 1811, four ambassadors arrived in Bahia with gifts for the Prince Regent; since the Portuguese court had moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, they no longer needed to cross the Atlantic to Lisbon.

The Ouidah fort was one of the footholds of these commercial and diplomatic exchanges.

A fort of earth

The fort was nothing like a stone fortress. According to descriptions compiled by Wikipedia, it formed a square about 100 meters (330 feet) on each side, with a tower at each corner. Inside were a church and officers' quarters.

Its walls, two to three meters thick, were surrounded by a moat about six meters (20 feet) deep. Four bastions each carried twelve iron cannons.

But unlike the great forts of the Gold Coast, built of stone with tiled roofs, the Ouidah fort was made of sun-dried earth, raised by African labor, with thatched roofs. It was vulnerable to fire and needed constant rebuilding. That technical detail would matter in its history.

Today the enclosure covers about one hectare (2.5 acres). According to Wikipedia, it contains the former residence of the Portuguese representative, a chapel, and garrison and barracks buildings. That whitewashed, restored setting is what museum visitors knew.

Under Dahomey: the siege of 1743

In 1727, King Agaja of Dahomey conquered the Xweda kingdom. The three European forts came under the new power. According to European sources of the time, they were now "subject to the insults" of the king of Dahomey.

The most violent episode came in 1743. On July 21, King Tegbesu attacked the Portuguese fort. He demanded that the Portuguese hand over refugees, called "Courano" in the sources, enemies of Dahomey sheltering in the fort. The fort's director, João Basílio, refused. He was arrested on his way to meet the king.

During the assault, the thatch caught fire. According to accounts, an African servant of the fort, Amoua, blew up the powder magazine so that the goods would not fall into the attackers' hands; other versions say he was captured or killed. Lieutenant Manuel Gonçalves was taken prisoner by the Dahomean commander Agahu. Several African defenders were killed, and the survivors were enslaved.

The three Portuguese officers were held for two months before being shipped to Bahia. Dahomey reasserted its control over Ouidah.

But the king needed trade. The fort was rebuilt as early as 1744, and the king even asked a Portuguese captain for a flag. In 1750, Tegbesu sent an embassy to Brazil to restore relations.

Decline, abandonment and return

After 1743, Portuguese trade at Ouidah gradually declined. Dahomey's demands drove prices up, and part of the trade moved east, to Porto-Novo, Badagry and Lagos.

In the early 19th century, the legal abolition of the slave trade by Britain and then other powers led to the abandonment of many forts. According to the Ouidah History Museum, the Portuguese fort operated as a fortified trading post until 1816, then served as a Catholic mission.

This is where Francisco Félix de Souza comes in. Born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1754 and in Ouidah by around 1788, he is said to have first worked at the fort. According to Wikipedia, in 1822 he raised the flag of the newly independent Empire of Brazil over the fort. As the town's leading merchant, backed by King Ghezo, he dominated its trade until his death in 1849. Our pillar on Francisco Félix de Souza tells his story.

In the 1830s, British and French trading houses reopened their forts for the palm oil trade. Portugal did not durably reoccupy its own until 1865.

Who ran the fort?

The list of the fort's officials, reconstructed by historians, tells its turbulent story on its own. According to the list published by Wikipedia:

In 1721, the first director was Francisco Pereira Mendes. The list describes a "re-foundation" of the fort under Portuguese Brazil, which suggests an earlier Portuguese post.
In 1743, João Basílio ran the fort at the time of the siege.
In the 19th century, Francisco Félix de Souza appears several times among the fort's officials, a sign of how entangled the Portuguese enclave was with the de Souza family's business.
From 1861 to 1865, the fort was entrusted to French Catholic missionaries, who had arrived in Ouidah in 1861.
On February 23, 1865, Portugal took the fort back. José Maria Borges de Sequeira was its first resident, until 1868.
The last official was António Agostinho Saraiva Borges, intendant from 1956 until August 1, 1961, the date of the annexation by the Republic of Dahomey.

Between those dates, the list shows several periods of abandonment. The fort was never a continuously manned stronghold: it was a post, sometimes active, sometimes empty, sometimes handed to others.

The smallest colony in the world

From 1865 to 1961, the fort became a geopolitical curiosity: a tiny Portuguese enclave in the middle of a territory that was becoming French.

Between 1885 and 1887, it served as the base for an attempted Portuguese protectorate over the Kingdom of Dahomey. The attempt failed. After the French colony of Dahomey was created in the 1890s, France nonetheless recognized, at Portugal's insistence, Portuguese sovereignty over the fort.

In 1911, the small detachment of soldiers from São Tomé and Príncipe withdrew. Only a residente, a kind of governor, remained, with an assistant and their families. The 1921 census counted five inhabitants. In 1958, the Guinness Book of Records described it as "the smallest colony in the world," garrisoned by "one officer and a few men."

For Ouidah's residents, the fort was by then mostly a familiar building downtown, flying a foreign flag.

August 1961: the fire

Dahomey became independent on August 1, 1960. A year later, the young republic's authorities sent Portugal an ultimatum: the enclave had to be handed over. The annexation is dated August 1, 1961, exactly one year after independence.

By then, Portuguese sovereignty came down to two people, including the intendant António Agostinho Saraiva Borges. Rather than hand the fort over, they set it on fire before leaving. Dahomey seized and annexed it.

The exact circumstances are still debated. Some accounts attribute the order to burn the fort to the government in Lisbon, then led by António de Oliveira Salazar, who refused any decolonization. We have not found a solid source confirming an explicit order, so we present it as a hypothesis.

Dahomey held a symbolic closing ceremony in 1965. Portugal only officially recognized the annexation in 1985, more than ten years after the 1974 Carnation Revolution ended the dictatorship and the Portuguese colonial empire.

The Ouidah History Museum

Declared a historic monument in 1964, the fort was restored and became the Ouidah History Museum, opened on September 6, 1967. Dahomey would only take the name Benin in 1975.

The museum displayed about 700 pieces in 11 rooms, devoted to archaeology, art and local history: objects linked to the fort, the Xweda and Dahomey kingdoms, the slave trade and the returns from Brazil. For many visitors, it was the first stop of a day in Ouidah, before the Slave Route.

The museum received support from France and the United States, and help from Portugal. Between 1987 and 1990, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a major Portuguese cultural foundation, funded its restoration and conservation; the project was inaugurated on August 10, 1990.

The irony has often been pointed out: the country whose last representatives burned the fort later helped, through a foundation, to restore it.

Closure and the future MIME

In 2020, the museum closed for works. Part of the collections was moved to the Maison du Brésil, where a temporary exhibition, "Et si Ouidah m'était conté" ("If Ouidah were told to me"), opened on August 3, 2020.

The fort is set to house the International Museum of Memory and Slavery (MIME), a Beninese government project led by the national heritage and tourism agency (ANPT). Here is what the available sources say:

The route: according to the project's graphic designer, a chrono-thematic journey through the history of slavery and deportation in the Beninese region over nearly 400 years, focused on the peoples of the Bight of Benin and on Ouidah.
The exhibition: according to the scenography firm Les Crayons, which led the early phases for the history museum before it became the MIME, the permanent exhibition was to cover Ouidah's history from its founding by the Xweda to independence, over 750 square meters, with a budget of 4.5 million euros before tax.
The team: architecture by Eremco, scenography by Les Crayons, museography by Decalog, lighting by Vaste, graphic design by Fabien Hahusseau and Julien Courtial.
The wider project: the project presented in 2020 also planned, around the museum, a 130-room tourist complex, memorial gardens and a replica slave ship, as part of national tourism investment the minister put at one billion euros.

What we do not know: the opening date. First announced for late 2020, the project was still described as under construction in 2024 and 2025. We have found no source confirming that the MIME has opened to the public. If you are planning a trip, check its status with ANPT or your guide.

What the fort tells us

Ouidah's fort says three important things about the slave trade.

First: it was not only European. The fort was built by enslaved workers belonging to the Xweda king, then placed under the king of Dahomey, who could besiege it, destroy it and demand its reconstruction. Trade followed the rules of African kingdoms, which profited from it.

Second: it was Atlantic in the full sense. The fort was founded from Bahia, not from Lisbon. Its captives went to Brazil, its 1743 prisoners were sent back to Bahia, and a merchant born in Salvador dominated the town in the 19th century. Ouidah's history reads as much from Brazil as from Europe. Our pillar on the Brazilian legacy continues that story.

Third: memory itself has a history. A tiny colony until 1961, burned, annexed, turned into a national museum, restored by a Portuguese foundation, soon an international museum: the fort sums up how Benin has turned its past into heritage.

The questions the future museum will face

Putting a museum of the memory of slavery inside a former slave-trade fort is not a neutral choice. The MIME will have to answer several questions visitors already ask:

How much weight should it give to the responsibility of Dahomey and the coastal traders, alongside that of the Europeans?
How can it tell the story of the Xweda, Ouidah's original people, conquered in 1727, without folding it into Dahomey's?
What place will it give to the returns from Brazil and the Aguda community, whose story begins precisely in the exchanges between Ouidah and Bahia?
And how will it present the collections of the former history museum, part of which moved to the Maison du Brésil?

These questions have no simple answers. That is also what will make a visit to the future museum worthwhile.

For African American visitors, one more question may matter: how will the museum tell the story of the few but well-documented links between Ouidah and the United States, such as the Clotilda of 1860, told in our pillar on the Door of No Return?

Visiting the fort

Location: central Ouidah, a few minutes' walk from the auction square, the Temple of Pythons and the basilica.
Status: under renovation for the MIME. Check before you go: access may be closed or limited.
In the meantime: the Maison du Brésil has hosted part of the collections and temporary exhibitions. The Fondation Zinsou museum, in the Villa Ajavon, is open with free admission.
With the route: the fort is a good starting point to understand the trade before walking the Slave Route to the Door of No Return.