Why and How Abojevi Zahwenu/Robert Antoine left Dahomey (Benin)?

Most researchers report that Abojevi Zahwenu/Robert Antoine left Dahomey (Benin) involuntarily as a result of a failed military operation. The following is part of an article written by Gerard A. Besson describing why and how Abojevi Zahwenu/Robert Antoine left Dahomey (Benin).  We know he loves women, is there a woman involved? Read on …

The movement of the ship was more than he could stand. It overwhelmed the fear, the disorientation and the certainty that his life was now forever altered.

The movement of the ship dominated his thinking. It affected him with the terrorising sensation of perpetually dying. The motion of the ship formed the central aspect of an association of ideas that remained with him all his life, whenever he smelled vomit, unwashed bodies, and odours emitted by humans when they are convinced of their own imminent death.

The permanent alteration of his life has occurred without warning. This itself was highly unusual, inasmuch as he was albeit his young age a highly respected member of diviners.

The circumstances leading to his capture by the merchant Ahmed Abdou had arranged themselves as the result of his preoccupation with clandestine encounters with the merchant’s niece, which had turned into an obsession. The indignity of his capture and subsequent sale to the Portuguese slaver had now placed him in this perilous box, the ship, upon this vast and mindless ocean on a journey of no return.  In the midst of never-ending motion, explosions not dissimilar to thunder cracked the sky.  The slaver was being attacked by a British Man-o-War! The shackled slaves were marched up onto the heaving deck and with kicks and curses loaded into long boats that were bobbing and spinning upon this ever shifting body of water to be taken to another, even more enormous ship.

Already, the Portuguese slaver was dropping to the stern of the British Man-o-War, seeming smaller by the second on the vast bosom of wetness. The British ship now set its sails for Trinidad.

Several hundred Africans were thus liberated on the high sea by Great Britain during the 1850s, when that country ran a blockade against the Portuguese slave traders. The slave trade had been abolished by the English in 1807, and the slaves had become fully set free in 1838. Now, it became an economic necessity for the British to force other nations to do away with slavery as well, since sugar and other imports from slave territories like Brazil were flooding the market at much cheaper prices than from the British colonies.

Among the hapless Africans, one stood out and proceeded to make his mark on the lives of many in Trinidad. He took the name of Robert, or Jean Antoine. He was, however, known as Papa Nannee or Mah Nannee.  A significant leader, he created a new home for his tribe, the Rada people, who had found their way to this island.