The Zomaï Enclosure and its quarter

Captives in Ouidah were not held in one single place. The European forts, French, English and Portuguese, had their own cells, and major merchants and brokers kept private enclosures across the town. The Zomaï Enclosure was one of these barracoons, kept apart from the living quarters.

The name describes a material reality, not an image. The buildings were of beaten earth under thatch, without openings. Bringing in a torch or a lamp carried a major risk of fire, and the ban on flame was absolute. But the darkness served something else as well: it prevented captives from learning the layout and organising a revolt, it erased the difference between day and night, and it prepared bodies for the darkness of the holds that awaited them.

The oral tradition of Ouidah further holds that captives managed to set fire to the detention structures, and that the absolute ban on flame was imposed after that episode. This account is carried by local memory; we report it as such, without establishing it as an archival fact.

One dimension must be added, one that foreign accounts do not see. In Vodun thought, fire is also life, the hearth, the warmth of the living. A place declared zomaï, deprived of fire, was not merely dark: it was cut off from the community of the living and from the protection of the ancestors. The name carries that deprivation as much as the other.

A geographical clarification is finally needed, because it is almost always wrong elsewhere. The marked memorial trail of four kilometres links the Auction Square to the Door of No Return by way of the Tree of Forgetting and Zoungbodji. The Zomaï quarter lies within the town, off that trail. It is cited in the memorial accounts of Ouidah, it is not a stage of the path towards the sea.