He became powerful in Ouidah, on the so-called Slave Coast of West Africa, now Benin, Togo, and parts of the Volta Region in Ghana.

Chatwin was caught up in the violence of a coup in Dahomey (now Benin), where Ouidah is located, when he was researching the book.

The novel was adapted for the 1987 film Cobra Verde, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski as Francisco Manuel da Silva.

That novel of West Africa has violence enough, and cruel superstition too, yet it is suffused with the common humanity of which I find not one dried drop in The Viceroy of Ouidah.

"[1]Years later, in a 1999 review of Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Chatwin, The Guardian described the Viceroy novel as "a rococo piece of candyfloss.