Abson & Company: Slave Traders in Eighteenth- Century West Africa

Yorkshireman Lionel Abson was the longest surviving European stationed in West Africa in the eighteenth century. He reached William’s Fort at Ouidah on the Slave Coast as a trader in 1767, took over the English fort in 1770, and remained in charge until his death in 1803. He avoided the ‘white man’s grave’ for thirty-six years.

Along the way he had three sons with an African woman, the eldest partly schooled in England, and a bright daughter named Sally. When Abson died, royal lackeys kidnapped his children. Sally was placed in the king’s harem and pined away; her brothers vanished. That king became so unpopular as a result that the people of Dahomey disowned him.

Abson also mastered the local language and became an historian. After only two years as fort chief, he was part of the king’s delegation to make peace with an enemy, a unique event in centuries of Dahomean history.

This singular book recounts the remarkable life of this key figure in an ignominious period of European and African history, offering a microcosm of the lives of Europeans in eighteenth-century West Africa, and their relationships with and attitudes towards those they met there.