THE PROMINENT ROLE PLAYED BY Dahomey (Benin) in the supply of captives for enslavement in the Americas is illustrated by the abundant literature on this old West African kingdom. Ouidah (Whydah in the English documents), its port of trade, is a familiar name to students and scholars of the Atlantic slave trade. The extant literature however does not address several issues of Dahomey's involvement in the trade. The impact of the obnoxious traffic on the old kingdom and indeed on other contemporary sub-Saharan African polities is generally overlooked. Little attention, if any, is paid to the ways local populations resisted the slave trade and enslavement, thereby often giving the impression that any form of resistance began on board the slave ships or in the Americas.

Not much is known about the various forms of internal resistance to the traffic, thereby creating the assumption among many that captives surrendered like sacrificial lambs to their oppressors. By examining the primary form of resistance and protection provided by the nature of the environment, this chapter is an attempt at challenging such a view. The environment under consideration is made of a series of lacustrine villages in the southern region of the present-day Republic of Benin. Ganvié is the most important and the best known of these villages because of its exploitation as “one of the gems of the Republic of Benin's tourist and cultural heritage” (Zinsou 1994). Ganvié is also referred to as the Venice of Africa, extolled by Eustache Prudencio, the country's popular poet, in one of his famous poems. But even the least attentive tourists visiting the site can easily understand from the guide's explanations that those living in the so-called Venice of Africa and other adjacent lacustrine villages were not attracted there in the early eighteenth century by the beauty of the landscape. The search for security in a period of violence and fear created by slave raiders and traders forced feeing populations to seek a decent life in an environment that was then and still largely remains unattractive.

THE COUNTRY OF “THE MEN ON WATER”

During the era of the transatlantic slave trade, Lake Nokoué and the swamplands surrounding it provided an ideal refuge for various migrants who came to constitute a homogenous ethnic group, that of the Tofinu (see Bourgoignie 1972).