1659 to 1726 · Africanspan
Ouidah became West Africa's chief slaving port before 1700
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By the end of the seventeenth century Ouidah, on the coast of what is now Benin, was the leading slave trading port in West Africa. Merchants from several European nations and from Brazil kept establishments there at the same time, and they went on trading alongside one another while their home countries were at open war, because the local authorities required it and because each of them needed the beach more than they needed the quarrel. The captives embarked at Ouidah in this early phase were mainly Ewe speakers from the country behind the port, and the origins shifted considerably in later decades as Dahomey pushed its wars further inland. The British and Dutch Caribbean took most of the people leaving the port during this expansion. The religion of this coast crossed the ocean with them, and the Rada rite in Haiti is named for Allada, a kingdom a short distance inland from Ouidah.
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