Allada

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In a walled courtyard behind a house near Port-au-Prince, when the drums slow and the salutes turn from the hot spirits to the cool ones, the congregation sings a nation by its name. The name is Rada. Two centuries of Creole have worn it smooth, and most who sing it have never had cause to ask where the sound comes from. It comes from a place. Arada, Allada — an inland town of the Bight of Benin, a day’s walk back from the surf, from whose harbors their forebears were shipped across the water. To greet the Rada spirits in a Haitian peristyle is to speak the name of a Beninese town without knowing it, and the town is still there, on its low red plateau, holding the memory from the other end.

The hearth, and its many names

Allada stands in the Atlantique Department of southern Benin, at roughly 6.66 degrees north and 2.15 degrees east, some forty kilometers inland from the coast and about the same distance south of the old Dahomean capital at Abomey. It is at once a town, an arrondissement, and a commune; the commune spreads over about 381 square kilometers and counted 127,512 people in the census of 2013. To the eye it is an ordinary junction town of the plateau — a market, a highway north, red laterite roads running out to the villages — but the ground under it is the ground the Fon and the Aja name first when they tell where they began.

The modern town corresponds to what the old European trade papers called Great Ardra, or Grand Ardra, or Arda — the capital of a kingdom whose name they spelled in a dozen ways (Ardra, Ardres, Hardre, Arda, Arada, Arrada) before settling, in the local speech, on Allada. It was the senior of the early states founded by the Aja, the Gbe-speaking people who, by the reckoning of Fon and Aja oral history, came into this country around the twelfth or thirteenth century out of Tado, a town on the Mono River in what is now Togo. They did not arrive empty-handed. They carried their vodun with them — the powers set over the domains of the world by the creator — and where they settled they set the powers down, so that the founding of a town and the founding of its shrines were one act. Great Ardra became, in the account the tradition keeps, the eldest hearth of that transplanted fire.

The genealogy the tradition prizes above all is a parting. Around the year 1600, so the oral history holds, three brothers divided the rule of the land between them. Kokpon, the eldest, kept Great Ardra and its kingdom of Allada. Do-Aklin went north onto the plateau and founded Abomey, the seed from which the kingdom of Dahomey would grow. Te-Agdanlin went south toward the lagoons and founded Little Ardra — Ajatche — the town the Portuguese would rename Porto-Novo, “the new port,” and which is today the administrative capital of Benin. Three brothers, three kingdoms; and in the frame’s own account the three great powers of the southern country are not rivals who happened to share a border but siblings who happened to fall out. The wars that came later between Dahomey and Allada are remembered, in the oral memory, as a quarrel within a family rather than a war between strangers — which is a different and harder kind of grief.

The monument at the northern exit of Allada, on Place Toussaint-Louverture, honoring the Haitian liberator whom local tradition counts a son of the town. Ozz 229, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

How much of the three-brothers story is chronicle and how much is charter is a question the historians leave open, and rightly. Foundation narratives of this kind do work in the present: they rank the kingdoms, they fix who is elder and who is junior, they knit rival dynasties into one lineage. The migration from Tado, the seniority of Allada, the fanning out of the brothers — these belong to the register of remembered origin, the account a people gives of itself, and they are set down here as that account gives them, not as a surveyor’s report. What is not in doubt is the standing of Allada in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the mid-1500s the town is said to have held something on the order of thirty thousand people, and by 1600 it was the most prominent of the Aja states, a coastal-hinterland power that European ships knew by name. It was also, for a long stretch, a vassal and tributary of the Yoruba empire of Oyo to the east — a kingdom that ruled its own plateau but sent its tribute uphill to a greater one, and that would remember the arrangement bitterly.

The root the branches remember

Within the tradition Allada is not merely an old capital. It is a root. It is the place the vodun and the royal line are said to branch from, and to name it is to name the shared ancestry that binds Abomey to Porto-Novo and both of them back to the plateau’s first hearth. The Fon trace their descent, through the Abomey brother, to this ground; so do the Gun of Porto-Novo, through the brother who went south; so does Allada itself, through the brother who stayed. The town is thus the common ancestor of the three southern kingdoms in the most literal sense the oral history allows — the single point behind the fork.

It was, from early on, a vodun center of the Aja-Fon world: a seat of the priesthood, the vodunon who tend the powers, and of the ancestral cult through which a lineage keeps company with its dead. The vodun the Aja carried from Tado were installed here in convents and shrines, and the kings of Allada, like the kings who would rule at Abomey and Ouidah, held their office partly by their standing before those powers. To sit on the stool of Great Ardra was to answer for the kingdom’s dealings with Mawu-Lisa’s delegates on earth — the vodun of the sky and the iron and the serpent and the pox — and with the ancestors whose good will underwrote the harvest and the war. The details of the initiation and the convent are not set down here; they are the priesthood’s to keep, and are described in the record only from the public distance. What can be said plainly is that Allada was one of the places where the religion of the Aja-Fon took the ordered institutional shape it still carries: a creator behind the powers, the powers over the domains of the world, the priests before the powers, the ancestors behind the living.

A shrine-figure of Legba, guardian of the crossroads, at the sacred lake Awouto in the Allada country, tended with palm oil and offerings. Netho639, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

And the name traveled further than any of its kings. The oldest and most venerable division of the spirits in Haitian Vodou is the Rada nation — the lwa rasin, the “root” spirits, the cool, sweet-tempered, dependable powers who are greeted with the familial titles of a household, “Papa” and “Kouzen,” and who are kept carefully apart from the hot Petro lwa in the order of the rite. The word Rada is a cognate of Arada, of Allada; the pantheon of the Rada loa and the rituals that serve them derive, in the plain statement of the record, from Arada in old Dahomey, carried across the Atlantic by the people taken from this coast and remembered by the port they were shipped through. Legba, who must be greeted first at any Vodou service as he is greeted first at any Fon shrine, stands among the Rada; so do Damballa the serpent and his companion Ayida-Wedo, cousins under new names of the powers the Aja set down at Allada. That the name of one inland Beninese town should become the name of an entire nation of spirits an ocean away is the measure of the place. It is where the Aja-Fon reckon their own beginning, and where, in a strange doubling, the diaspora reckons the origin of its coolest and most ancestral powers — the same word doing the same work at both ends of the crossing.

Out the door, and the name that crossed

The reason the name crossed is not a happy one, and the record keeps it soberly. Allada was one of the great embarkation regions of the seventeenth-century Bight of Benin, a gate through which an enormous traffic in human beings passed toward the ships. By the documented estimates, something on the order of 125,000 people were sold from Allada between about 1640 and 1690 — roughly 55,000 in the single decade of the 1680s. The kingdom’s kings taxed and controlled this trade as a prerogative of the stool, and European visitors came inland to treat with them. The Frenchman known as the Sieur d’Elbée, who was at the court around 1670, left an account of a royal parade in which the king’s troops passed with spears, shields, swords, and muskets — the muskets a sign of how far the Atlantic trade had already reached up into the country, arming the very kingdoms whose captives it carried away. The full weight of that history, the Route des Esclaves and the Door of No Return, belongs to the coast at Ouidah, the port down which the captives of this whole region were finally marched; but the inland kingdoms fed it, and Allada was among the largest feeders.

Then the family quarrel turned final. In 1724 the kingdom of Dahomey — the northern brother’s kingdom, grown into a disciplined military state — invaded Allada under its king Agaja and broke it. The record reports thousands killed and more than eight thousand of Allada’s people, most of them Aja, taken captive and sold into New World slavery. The sovereign kingdom of Great Ardra, elder of the three, passed under the rule of the younger house at Abomey and never rose again as a state. It is a bitter closing of the founding story: the hearth conquered by one of its own branches, the eldest line sold down the road it had itself helped to open.

The historian Robin Law, whose studies of the Slave Coast reconstructed the kingdom from the European factory records and the oral traditions together, set Allada in a triangle of powers whose fortunes rose and fell with the trade — Allada senior at first, then eclipsed on the water by its own coastal dependency at Ouidah, and finally swallowed whole by the plateau kingdom to the north. What the documents show, read against the traditions, is a state that lived by the sea it could not see and died by the trade it had helped to build: a hinterland court taxing a commerce in people, arming itself with the muskets that commerce brought, and in the end feeding its own subjects into it when the balance of arms tipped against the stool. The three-brothers charter had made the northern kingdom a junior sibling; by 1724 the junior sibling held the elder’s throne, and the genealogy that once ranked Allada first now explained, to the Fon who told it, why the conquest had felt like a wound in the house rather than a defeat by a stranger.

Those captives did not vanish from the record. In the plantations of Saint-Domingue and the towns of Brazil, people taken from this region formed nations of their own among the enslaved — “Arada,” “Rada” — clustering by the coast and the kingdom they had been shipped from, and keeping the powers they had carried in their heads because those could not be taken from them at the ship’s rail. Out of that keeping came the Rada rite that sits at the ancestral heart of Haitian Vodou, the cool spirits who are served first and trusted most. The town on the plateau thus survives twice over: once as itself, still standing, still an ancestral vodun town of Benin, and once as a word in a liturgy sung by the descendants of the people it lost.

The town keeps one further thread to that diaspora, and holds it as tradition rather than as chronicle. Local memory names Gaou Guinou, a prince of Allada carried across to Hispaniola in the trade, as the forebear — by the common telling, the grandfather — of Toussaint Louverture, the general who led the enslaved of Saint-Domingue to the founding of Haiti. Whether the genealogy is exact no document can now say, and it is offered here as the town offers it, a remembered link rather than a proved one. But Allada has raised a monument to it: at the northern edge of the town, on a square that carries his name, a statue of Louverture stands with a sword in each hand, “the proud son of Allada” brought home in bronze — the captive line returning, in effigy, as a liberator.

One thing the record insists on separating is the town and its powers from the caricature that the diaspora’s name attracted. In the colonial press and later on cinema screens, “voodoo” became a byword for the sinister and the savage — a fright-show assembled far from Benin, from fear and box-office and the long habit of making a conquered people’s religion into a horror. The Rada spirits whose name Allada gave are the opposite of that invention. They are the cool, ordered, ancestral powers of a coherent religion, greeted as kin and served by a trained priesthood according to a fixed rite; their whole character, in the tradition that keeps them, is steadiness. The caricature is a thing said about the religion, in other countries and other centuries, and it is named here only to be set aside.

Vodun itself is no relic. It is a recognized national religion of Benin, honored since 1996 with a public holiday on 10 January, and Allada’s standing as an ancestral vodun town belongs to that living recognition — the shrines still tended, the festival still kept, the vodunon still at their work. The Aja who founded the town, the Fon and Gun who trace their descent through its brothers, the Ewe kin to the west, are living peoples, and the powers the Aja set down here are served in Benin and Togo and across the whole span of the crossing. Say the town’s name slowly and it splits into its two lives: Allada on the plateau, where the Aja-Fon count their beginning, and Rada in the peristyle, where the children of the ones who were carried off count the beginning of their gentlest powers — one hearth, and the far fire it lit.

→ Related: Mawu Lisa · Legba · Gu · Dan · Sakpata · Ouidah · Abomey · Dankoli · The Ewe · The Aja · The Gun