The coast stretching from the Volta estuary to the Mono carried, for nearly three centuries, a blood-chilling name: the Slave Coast. Aneho, then Petit Popo, was one of the departure points of the trade that tore millions of Africans from their land.
A geography of passage
Petit Popo occupied a strategic position on the Gulf of Guinea coast. Halfway between the fortified trading posts of Elmina and Cape Coast to the west and the Kingdom of Abomey to the east, the city was a natural stopover for slave ships. The lagoon offered shelter to boats. Local kings controlled access to interior trade routes.
The trade: between Guin kings and European captains
Unlike Ouidah, Petit Popo never housed a permanent European slave fort. The Portuguese, Dutch, Danes and English stopped there, negotiated, loaded, and left. This allowed Guin sovereigns to maintain greater autonomy in transactions. The captives came from the interior, sometimes from very far away: from Mossi country, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the edges of Ashanti country. At the height of the trade around 1780, several hundred captives passed through Petit Popo each year.
Abolition and reconversion
The abolition of the trade by Great Britain in 1807 and France in 1815 did not immediately end the commerce. The Royal Navy deployed a squadron along the West African coast. Petit Popo became a clandestine embarkation point. It was only around 1850 that the trade truly ceased. The Guin kings converted their economy to palm oil, cotton and copra. The city began a new phase of its history.
Memory today
Aneho has no slavery museum. There is no imposing memorial. The memory of the trade is more discreet, more ambivalent. It lives in family stories, in songs evoking the disappeared, in neighborhood names recalling inhabitants' origins.
Archaeological traces and buried memory
Few material traces remain. The memory is in the landscape:
- The beach from which pirogues departed for ships offshore
- The lagoon, transit route for captives from the interior
- Family names evoking Brazilian origins (Olympio, de Souza)
- Oral histories transmitted in certain families, never written
The paradox of Guin memory
Several reasons explain why Aneho never institutionalized its slavery memory:
- Guin elites served as intermediaries, making official memory ambivalent
- No permanent European fort to serve as a symbolic site
- Authorities prioritized other heritage sites
- A tradition favoring oral transmission over museum curation
What the visitor can do
On the beach at twilight
Walk the sand thinking of the pirogues that departed. This beach is a place of memory.
In the Afro-Brazilian quarter
Observe the Aguda houses — heritage of the return of slave descendants from Brazil.
With the elders
Some agree to speak if one knows how to listen. Their accounts constitute the living memory.