Benin: Dahomey and the Slave Coast

A narrow country with a heavy past

Benin is a thin strip of West Africa, a few hundred kilometres of Atlantic coast widening as it runs north to the Niger River. Its 13 million people are divided among many groups — Fon and Adja in the south, Yoruba in the south-east, Bariba and others in the north — and it is the birthplace of Vodun, the religion carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people to become Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil. The country was called Dahomey until 1975, after the kingdom that once dominated it — a state whose power and wealth were built on selling captives to Europe.

A short history

1. 16th–17th c.

   The Aja kingdoms

   Allada, Whydah and Dahomey take shape on and behind the coast.

2. c. 1600–1894

   The Kingdom of Dahomey

   A centralised military monarchy on the Abomey plateau, with a standing army and a female corps.

3. 1720s

   Reaching the sea

   Dahomey conquers Allada and Whydah and takes over the coastal slave trade.

4. 18th–19th c.

   The Slave Coast

   Around a million people are shipped from Ouidah, mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean.

5. 1890–1894

   Franco-Dahomean Wars

   France defeats King Béhanzin and annexes the kingdom.

6. 1 August 1960

   Independence

   The Republic of Dahomey, followed by a decade of coups.

7. 1975

   The People's Republic of Benin

   Mathieu Kérékou declares a Marxist-Leninist state.

8. 1990

   The National Conference

   A sovereign assembly ends one-party rule; Benin becomes a democracy.

The rise of Dahomey

Behind the coast, on the plateau around Abomey, the Fon people built a kingdom in the early 17th century that would become one of the most formidable states in West Africa. Dahomey was an absolute monarchy with a permanent professional army — most strikingly a corps of several thousand women soldiers, the Agojie, whom Europeans called the Dahomey Amazons. Under a line of ambitious kings it expanded by conquest, and in the 1720s it broke through to the Atlantic by conquering the coastal kingdoms of Allada and Whydah.

The kings ruled from the Royal Palaces of Abomey, a great walled compound whose earthen bas-reliefs recorded their victories. Each king was expected to enlarge the kingdom and to honour his ancestors at the Annual Customs, ceremonies that included the sacrifice of war captives — a practice central to the state's ideology and endlessly dwelt on by European visitors.

The slave port

Dahomey's wealth and its firearms came from the Atlantic trade. This stretch of coast was known to Europeans simply as the Slave Coast, and its principal outlet, Ouidah, was the second-busiest slave-trading port on the continent after Luanda. Portuguese, French, English and Dutch forts stood there; the king held a monopoly on the trade; and the army's campaigns against neighbouring peoples doubled as slave raids. Over the course of the trade, perhaps a million people were marched down to the beach at Ouidah and shipped away, most of them to Bahia in Brazil and to the French Caribbean.

When Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and its navy began blockading the coast, King Ghezo tried to shift Dahomey to exporting palm oil instead, but the change was slow and the raiding and selling continued into the 1880s. The trade also left a lasting human trace in both directions: Vodun and Fon culture crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved, and a community of returned Afro-Brazilian ex-slaves settled Ouidah and Porto-Novo in the 19th century.

Conquest and colony

France, established at Porto-Novo and Cotonou on the coast, came into conflict with King Béhanzin over control of the shoreline. In two Franco-Dahomean wars, in 1890 and 1892–94, French columns with modern rifles and artillery and Senegalese troops defeated the Dahomean army, burned Abomey, and captured Béhanzin, who was exiled to Martinique. Dahomey became a French colony and was folded into French West Africa.

Colonial Dahomey was small and poor, but its mission schools produced an exceptional number of educated Africans, who went on to staff the French administration across West Africa — earning the territory the nickname "the Latin Quarter of Africa", and some resentment from its neighbours.

Coups, and a Marxist republic

Dahomey became independent on 1 August 1960, and then spent 12 years as one of the most politically unstable countries in Africa — five or six military coups, and a presidency rotated among three regional strongmen. The turmoil ended in 1972 when Major Mathieu Kérékou seized power. In 1974 he declared the state Marxist-Leninist, and in 1975 he renamed the country the People's Republic of Benin, nationalised the economy, and aligned it with the Soviet bloc. By the late 1980s the experiment had failed: the treasury was empty, salaries went unpaid, the banks collapsed, and strikes spread.

The National Conference

Bankrupt and besieged by protest, Kérékou did something unexpected. In February 1990 he convened a "national conference of the active forces of the nation" — a broad assembly of political, religious, union and civic figures — and it seized the initiative: it declared itself sovereign, stripped the president of power, and mapped out a transition to multiparty democracy. Kérékou accepted the verdict. A free election in 1991 made Nicéphore Soglo president, one of the first times an authoritarian ruler in mainland Africa had been voted out and had stepped aside peacefully.

Benin's conference became the template for similar assemblies across French-speaking Africa, and for two decades the country was held up as a model of democratic stability, with power changing hands repeatedly at the ballot box — Kérékou himself returned as an elected president in 1996, then retired when his terms were up. Since 2016, though, President Patrice Talon has narrowed the space: electoral changes left recent votes with only pro-government parties on the ballot, opposition leaders have been jailed or exiled, and international ratings of Benin's democracy have fallen sharply.

What Benin carries

Benin's history turns on Dahomey — a kingdom powerful and organised enough to be remembered with pride, and whose power rested on capturing and selling other Africans on a scale matched almost nowhere else. That past is now openly marked, on the beach at Ouidah and in the restored palaces of Abomey, to which France began returning looted royal treasures in 2021. The democratic breakthrough of 1990 gave the country a second thing to be known for; whether it holds is now an open question.