Grove Koger
My parents bought me a copy of John Gunther’s fat 1955 volume Inside Africa sometime in the late 1950s, and I read it with alacrity from cover to cover. I don’t remember many details, however, aside from several of the pithy epigraphs opening its 46 chapters and the mention of one specific place whose peculiarity lodged it securely in my mind.
That place was the tiny Fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá, or the Fort of St. John the Baptist of Ajuda. Gunther pointed out that it “must be the smallest political entity in the world. It lies in [the French colony of] Dahomey, on the Guinea Coast a few miles from the French post of Ouidah. The Portuguese have held it since 1680. The territory consists of nothing but the Fort, and the garrison comprises exactly one officer (who is also the Resident) and a handful of men.
“My wife and I applied for visas to the Fort of St. John the Baptist, and were courteously given them by the Portuguese embassy in Washington. We were told that we were the first non-Portuguese in history ever to ask to go there.”
But did Gunther and his wife actually pay the fort a visit? Oddly enough, he doesn’t say. In any case, Dahomey annexed the mud-walled structure, which by then contained only a church and officers’ quarters, on August 1, 1961, and capured its two remaining inhabitants as they attempted to burn it down.
In late 1976, travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) visited Ouidah, in what had become the Marxist Republic of Benin, while researching a book. Early the following year, the writer found himself involved, unwittingly, in an attempted coup. Or was it a false flag operation intended to strengthen the hand of the country’s dictator? In any case, Chatwin was roughed up and jailed for a time before being freed and expelled.
The book that Chatwin was working on was The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), a short novel whose protagonist was modeled on ruthless slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa (1754-1849). Despite the facility of Chatwin’s writing, I can’t recommend the book, as it’s an unflinching chronicle of the appalling brutality and degradation that the anguished Kurtz called “the horror” in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness.
I’m fascinated by enclaves, those bits of territory surrounded by other, separate states or nations, and by the idea of “the smallest political entity in the world.” But there’s no getting around the fact that Portugal was once in the forefront of the slave trade, or that São João Baptista de Ajudá, which de Sousa ran for many years, was a trading post for slaves. Slavery was abolished in Portugal’s African colonies in 1869, but the practice lived on for decades more under the guise of “contract labor.” As late as 1909. Britain’s three leading chocolate makers stopped buying cocoa beans from the equatorial Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Príncipe due to the presence of slavery.
Portuguese citizens overthrew their hated dictatorship in 1974 in a bloodless coup, and a few years later the new Portuguese government arranged with Benin to restore São João Baptista de Ajudá, with the help of Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Today the fort houses an historical museum documenting, appropriately enough, the slave trade.
The top image is a photograph in the public domain of the Fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá in 1917 from the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Portugal, and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The second and third images are the covers of the 1955 Harper edition of Inside Africa and the 1980 Cape edition of The Viceroy of Ouidah, while the fourth is a painting of Francisco Félix de Sousa by an unknown artist. The fifth image is a photograph taken by jbdodane of what was once the house of the fort’s Portuguese Resident and is now the Historical Museum of Ouidah; it’s reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
World Enough 