A French colonial project on the island of Borodo
Carl Bernhard Wadstrom’s writings on new forms of European colonisation in Africa referred to above had applauded the Danes and the British for their innovative project. However, Wadstrom had had very little to say about French efforts.
While praising the liberal attitudes of the Chevalier de Boufflers, governor of Goree in the years 1786—1788, and the successful penetration into the unexplored region of Senegambia by Boufflers’ assistant, Geoffrey de Villeneuve, Wadstrom did not speak of any real French attempts at colonisation. Villeneuve would later insist that Boufflers had indeed begun to bring cultivation and civilisation to Africa in these years. In his 1814 publication on Senegal, Villeneuve made a strong argument for French colonisation and civilisation in Africa, claiming that ‘the Chevalier de Boufflers reflected on the importance of the project that I am proposing today [creating colonies in Africa]; he charged me with touring the peninsula, inspecting its production, the nature of the land and the population, and providing appropriate details to him on these points: everything accorded with his own views’.24 According to another colonial agent who resided in the region in these years, M. Durand, director of the Compagnie de la Gomme du Senegal, there seems to have been some substance to this claim. But Durand reserved his greatest praise not for Boufflers but for a certain Captain Jean-Francois Landolphe, who constructed a colony on the Gold Coast in the same period.Aside from Durand’s favourable review, very little information exists about Landolphe’s experiment. The historian J. Saintoyant praised it in his classical study on French colonisation, singling it out as an ‘audacious realisation’, one ‘breaking with the tradition of indifference’.25 To Saintoyant, what distinguished Landolphe’s colony from other French African settlements was that it was an exploitation which successfully employed local labour for cultivation, rather than being a mere comptoir.
In forming this judgement, Saintoyant had relied on Captain Landolphe’s own Memoires du Capitaine Landolphe, published in 1823, two years prior to the author’s death. The text traced his remarkable career, beginning in 1766 when Landolphe, the youngest of a family of twenty-two children from Auxonne, embarked as cabin boy on board the Royal-Louis, and ending thirty-four years later with Landolphe as captain and commander of the frigate La Concorde.26 During these years, Landolphe took several trips along the triangular trade route, survived shipwrecks, battled pirates near the Moroccan coast, fought as a privateer for the French Revolutionary government and was imprisoned by the British. He encountered General George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Victor Hugues, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Joseph Bonaparte and Napoleon himself. The Memoires, moreover, show Landolphe as patriotic and inquisitive—a copy of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie was always to be found in his cabin. According to his Memoires, the attempt to establish a colony in Africa represented his finest achievement. However, as we shall see, the portrait painted by his Memoires does not entirely line up with the documents concerning Landolphe’s colony held in French and British archives.In his Memoires, Landolphe noted that it was in 1771, while his superior traded slaves at Agathon, the hub for the Benin slave trade, that he first began to plan for a colony: ‘During this interval, I tried to learn the language of Benin, and seeing the natives’ happy disposition towards my compatriots, I formed the design of founding in the future, at this place, an establishment advantageous to the French nation.’27 On his subsequent visits to the region, he continued to develop his African ties, befriending the King of Benin and later also the neighbouring King of Owhere (Warri, Nigeria), with both eventually promising him territory on which to construct a colony. In the end it was the King of Owhere with whom Landolphe preferred to negotiate.
The king had twice come to Landolphe’s rescue, in 1778 and in 1782, when Landolphe failed to navigate his ships La Negresse and later La Charmante Louise out of the Benin River before the summer season. The king had taken pity on the French and invited them to lodge at his capital.28 Accepting this offer, Landolphe spent time there inspecting the surrounding area, which he described as ‘very fertile; pineapples grow without cultivation. One finds an extreme abundance of oranges, lemons, melons, and pumpkin. Purslane grows in the streets. Sorrel, wild spinach and other legumes are just as common [and] the forests furnish expensive woods.’29 In addition to its fertility, Owhere’s milder climate and proximity to the coast prompted Landolphe to consider founding a settlement there. The Memoires also reveal how the King of Owhere continuously worked to win Landolphe over, probably spotting a great opportunity to gain access to coveted European goods. To this end, the king entrusted his nephew, Prince Boudakan, to Landolphe’s care and instructed the Frenchman to take him to France and introduce him to French culture.30Back in France, Landolphe managed to obtain royal support for his project. He also found a willing sponsor from Saint-Malo, the Brillantais Marion firm. Together they formed the Compagnie d’Owhere et de Benin. Prince Boudakan attracted considerable interest at the Court of Versailles—even drawing compliments from the Saint-Domingue slave-owner Moreau de Saint-Mery—and as a result Landolphe and Brillantais further obtained an exclusive three-year privilege to the Benin trade, together with the vessel Le Perou and two smaller boats.31 On 17 July 1786, Landolphe and Prince Boudakan, together with a crew numbering 140 men, including the botanist Ambroise Palisot de Beauvois, set sail from Rochefort bound for Africa where they would settle on Owhere territory.32 All of this is largely confirmed by archival sources.
Landolphe’s Memoires also record how settlers and Owhere locals set about constructing a colony. A vast area of land was cleared for agriculture. Animals, such as sheep, pigs, chickens, cattle and horses, were purchased and kept round the village. A fishing farm was added to ensure a daily supply of ray, flatfish, carp, mullet and scale—enough fish, Landolphe wrote, to feed the 400 people under his care. To protect the colony from enemy attack, a fort was built with four bastions and armed with thirty-two cannon. In addition, the village was encircled by a 6-metre wide and 2-metre deep trench. Recalling the difficulty of building the colony, Landolphe noted: ‘I could never have overcome so many obstacles solely with the help of the Europeans.’33 He also insisted that he paid the blacks for their services in European goods. Concerning the economic aspect of the project, Landolphe noted that the colony made its earnings by selling agricultural produce. Wood, vegetables, fruit, meat, salt and water were sold to European traders in exchange for European goods. These, in turn, were resold to locals in exchange for ivory, African art and other items. To expand his business, Landolphe purchased more land in 1788. At the peak of its success, the colony made a daily profit of more than 30,000 francs.34
The prosperous settlement portrayed by Landolphe in his Memoires is not confirmed by archival sources. In fact, they hint at an altogether different enterprise. It is striking that while Landolphe remained completely silent on the subject of slave-trading at his colony, even stating that he tried to dissuade the locals from selling each other into slavery, French and British archival sources dating from the time of the colony make explicit reference to slavery. The French governor at Juda (Whydah), Olivier de Montaguere, presented Landolphe’s colony as part of a solution to boost the slave trade. His memorandum to the colonial administration in 1786 read:
Far from disapproving of the project of an establishment by Monsieur Landolphe I find it advantageous, and if it was possible to form the two other ones [two further settlements], we would be assured that our colonies would not lack any slaves, and that these establishments would guarantee a reliable trade from which the State would doubly benefit.35
Similarly, the Comte de Flotte, commander of the newly established Station d’Afrique, reported back to the colonial administration in 1787 that ‘the establishment of le sieur Brillantois Marion is advantageously situated for trade...
as well as to obstruct the trade of other nations’.36 Legroing, sent by De Flotte to visit the colony, reported in a similar fashion that its location was very advantageous for trade.37 Landolphe’s own report of 1783 to the colonial administration also supports this thesis. Entitled Memoir on the Benefits to be Found in the Trade of Blacks in the Kingdoms of 'Where and Benin, the report advocated Owhere as an untapped source of slaves.38 It also predicted that Prince Boudakan, at that time in France, would generate a revolution d’esprit upon his return to Owhere as a result of his adoption of French manners. The memorandum concluded that a French settlement at this point would guarantee a ‘blooming French commerce’.39The somewhat conflicting suggestions about the raison d’etre of Landolphe’s establishment as either an attempt to bring African land into cultivation based on good relations with the local population, or as an additional point from which the French could trade in slaves, may be due to the philanthropic gloss added to Landolphe’s Memoires by its editor, J.S. Quesne. Quesne attempted to lend credibility to the abolitionist nature of Landolphe’s colony, writing approving and applauding comments of Landolphe’s so- called humanitarian activities in the footnotes. Quesne, who might have thought himself the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the nineteenth century, also revealed, in his Confessions published in 1828, that Landolphe had rejected offers from his famous friends and philosophes, such as Jean Francois de La Harpe and the novelist, naturalist and abolitionist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, to edit his Memoires, in favour of Quesne.40 Quesne’s attempt to inscribe Landolphe’s colony into the history of French abolitionism and the civilisation of Africa obscures the complex nature of Landolphe’s venture. It is certainly interesting to note that Saint-Pierre, a friend of Landolphe, had offered to write his story.
Similarly it is worth noting, in support of Landolphe’s emphasis on the cultivation of African land, that Landolphe was accompanied on his trip to Africa by the botanist, Palisot de Beauvois, who later published a book on his work undertaken at Owhere. Entitled Flore d’Oware et de Benin, the 1804 volume explains how Palisot joined Captain Landolphe’s expedition and mentions Captain Landolphe’s interest in cultivating plants for purposes of commercial export.41Of the many representations of Landolphe’s colony, the comments of De Flotte to the colonial administration are perhaps the most revealing. Referring to the establishment as being overseen by the Sir Brillantais Marion, and not Landolphe, De Flotte exposed the colony’s dual identity. To Brillantais and the French colonial administration, the colony was part of an attempt to further the French slave trade, as well as to guarantee France’s monopoly on trade in Benin and Owhere. While Landolphe, too, would agree that the establishment was partly about slave-trading, for him, it was also about cultivation and the use of free labour.
Sources in British archives confirm this. John Cleminson, a British trader in Africa, stated in his complaint of 1789:
It is shameful to see a French fort fixed on the Gold Coast to annoy the trade of the British shipping, such intrusions formerly would have been instantaneously looked into and the intruders [driven] back to their Gallic shore to mourn the loss sustained in their unlawful practices.42
It is clear, then, that Landolphe had been able to challenge British trade in the region. But it was also the case that Landolphe purchased and cultivated more land. As the British sources also reveal, Landolphe had
purchased a lot of ground on each side [of] the entrance of the River from the King of Warrie but he purchased it for a company of merchants who are long since tired of it and have for some gratuity, as he says, made it over to the Crown of France and the government has appointed him governor.43
Landolphe rigorously obstructed British trade. This obstructionism finally caused British traders to burn down the colony. In his Memoires Landolphe describes how he was woken on the night of 1 May 1792 by the noise of barking dogs. Opening his door, he spotted a line of armed men at the gallery of his establishment. Shortly after, his room was invaded, and he was shot in the leg and left for dead. The attackers then set the entire establishment on fire.44 It is puzzling that British traders should demolish a French agricultural colony for no good reason, unless this colony was also proving a rival to British trade. In this way, Landolphe probably got as close to attempting cultivation and colonisation in this region as Franco-British rivalry and the booming slave trade of the 1780s permitted.
The island of Borodo, where Landolphe founded his colony, seems to have functioned as a space where cultivation based on free labour could co-exist alongside the slave trade. A statement made by Durand in 1802 in his Voyage au Senegal supports this theory. Writing about Landolphe’s colony twenty years before the publication of Landolphe’s Memoires, Durand compared the British destruction of the colony at Borodo to the annihilation of the British philanthropic experiment at Sierra Leone by French raiders. Durand concluded that only when European disputes were no longer fought in Africa would Europe be of service to that continent: ‘Then and only then can we realize the hope of bringing freedom, hope and civilization to the blacks, only then can we get to know their country, and finally establish strong happy colonies.’45