Istwa Nou

Offra sat on the coast of what is now Benin and served as the sea outlet of the kingdom of Allada, whose rulers lived inland. English and Dutch chartered companies did their buying there for thirty years. Thousands of captives were marched down to it and loaded for the British and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. In 1690 a local war destroyed the town and the traffic there ended in one stroke. The business itself did not disappear. It moved a short way along the same coast to Ouidah, which grew into one of the largest embarkation points in the whole history of the trade and sent very large numbers of people to Saint-Domingue. This is worth holding onto, because the coast is usually described as though European demand alone decided where ships called. African political events decided it too. A war between African states closed one port and made another, and the consequences reached across the ocean.