FON PEOPLE: BENIN`S EMPIRE BUILDERS OF THE PAST KINGDOM OF DAHOMEY AND AN UNREPENTANT PRACTITIONERS OF VOODOO RELIGION
The Fon people also known as Fon nu, are a major West African ethnic and Fon linguistic group in the country of Benin, and southwest Nigeria.They are made up of more than 3,500,000 people. Fon is the largest ethnic group in Benin constituting about 40 percent of the population.
Fon people of Abomey,Benin and home of Vodoun worship performing traditional ritual
The Fon language is the main language spoken in Southern Benin, and is a member of the Gbe language group. The Fon are said to originate from Tado, a village in south east Togo, near the border with Benin. The Fon people are famous for founding the ancient Dahomey kingdom and their kings having Amazonian women warriors as his body-guards and war chieftains.
Fon woman from Abomey,Benin at traditional festival
Most Fon today live in villages and small towns in mud houses with corrugated iron gable roofs. Cities built by the Fon include Abomey, the historical capital city of Dahomey, and Ouidah on the Slave Coast. These cities were major commercial centres for the slave trade.
Fon beautiful women of Dahomey (Benin) showing bodily marks, Circa 1930
The Fon culture has mixture of Ewe and Yoruba presence in it. In the city of Abomey, as a result of Yoruba presence, Fon people there has their original culture mixed with Yoruba whom they defeated their Oyo kingdom whiles in the city of Ouidah,its more like that of their Ewe brothers and sisters with whom they all migrated from Tado.
Whether by part of empire of Dahomey by itself or their enemy states, many Fon slaves were sold to European traders, who exported to Americas. So, many descendants of the Fon now live in the Americas as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. In United States they were mostly in Louisiana,New Orleans. Together with other cultural groups from the Fon homeland region such as the Yoruba and Bantu, Fon culture merged with French, Portuguese or Spanish to produce distinct religions (Voodoo, Mami Wata, Candomblé and SanterÃa), dance and musical styles (Arará, Yan Valu). As a result of what the Fons did to their fellow brethrens through their slave trading activities,the Fons and other voodoo practicing tribes in Benin has instituted annual Voodoo festival for to invite all Africans in diaspora to visit their homeland. The festival falls on the second week of January every year at the Benin city of Ouidah.
Location
The Fɔn culture centered in Zou province around the old Fɔn capital of Abomey-Calavi, but also dominant in Cotonou and southern Atlantique areas such as Ouidah comunes.
fon people
Settlement
Fon live mostly in villages and towns, although there are some more isolated farming compounds. Rectangular mud brick houses and concrete brick dwellings with gabled or corrugated-iron roofs are predominant except along the ocean, where there are numerous palm-frond huts with straw- or palm-thatch gabled roofs.
Fon people of Benin
Small huts or buildings are often clustered in a single compound with an open court, all surrounded by a mud wall. In ocean-front fishing villages, fragile palm-frond fences give some privacy to clusters of small huts. People living in the same compound are usually members of the same patrilineage (to-fome ), although kinship is extremely open to outside recruitment; fictive kin may even predominate in certain cases. Large villages may have central marketplaces
Fon people of Abomey performing their Amazon warrior dance with wooden spears
Language
Fon people speak Fon language. Fon (native name Fon gbè, pronounced [fÉ”̃̄É¡͡bè]) is part of the Gbe language cluster and belongs to the Volta–Niger branch of the Niger–Congo languages. Fon is spoken mainly in Benin by approximately 1.7 million speakers, by the Fon people. Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an analytic language with an SVO basic word order. it has the following dialects: Agbome, Arohun, Gbekon, Kpase.
JOSEPH LANGANFIN,Benin. Representing the Abomey dynasty, Joseph Langanfin is the president of CAFRA, the council of Abomey’s royal families. With this title, he is considered as the official representative of the kings of Abomey. He presided at the centenary ceremonies for the death of King Glele, who was his great granfather
History/Origin
According to oral tradition, the Fon of Benin are descendants of the Aja people. According to them, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries some of the Aja people, originating from Tado, a village in south east Togo, to the banks of the Mono River, emigrated to the eastern part of its territory, now Benin, and founded the town of Allada. Later Aja of Allada establish a new state: Great Ardra, in which kings ruled with the consent of the village elders. Allada became the capital of Great Ardra.
Fon kids of Dahomey. Circa 1930
In c.1625, a dispute occurred between the three sons of the king, based in the succession to his father as king of Great Ardra. This dispute divided the kingdom into three parts: one brother, Kokpon, retained Great Ardra. Another brother, Do-Aklin, founded the city of Abomey, and the third, Te-Agdanlin, founded the city of Ajatche or Little Ardra (also called Porto-Novo by Portuguese traders who traded there). The Aja residents in Abomey slowly mixed with the local tribes, thus causing the "Fon" people.
Aduare Achumba, a visitor to the Temple of Pythons, reacts as a guide puts a python on her head in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. Ouidah, considered the major cultural city in the West African nation of Benin, held its annual Voodoo Festival on Thursday. Voodoo is an official religion in this nation of 9 million people and this year's festival honored the slaves taken from surrounding countries and sent into America and the Caribbean, people who brought the religion with them. AP / Sunday Alamba
Dahomey tribes people photographed for Hubert Howe Bancroft's The Book of the Fair, published in Chicago in 1893
Kingdom of Dahomey (c.1600–1900)
Dahomey was an African kingdom in the present-day Republic of Benin which lasted from 1600 until 1900. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau in the early 1600s and became a regional power in the 1700s by conquering key cities on the Atlantic coast. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey was a key regional state, eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo empire and being a major location for the Atlantic slave trade, possibly supplying up to 20% of the slaves to Europe and the Americas.
Painting of Dahomey Kingdom when the Whites came to meet it
In 1894, the kingdom became part of French West Africa as part of the territory of French Dahomey (which also included Porto-Novo and a large area to the north of Dahomey). French rule lased until 1960 when the independent country took the name Republic of Dahomey, to be changed to Benin in 1975.
The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy, significant international trade with European powers, a centralized administration, significant taxation systems, and an organized military. Notable in the kingdom were significant artwork, all-female military units known as the Dahomey Amazons, and elaborate religious practices of Vodun with the large festival of the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The Kingdom of Dahomey serves as the context for a number of works of fiction dealing with West African ideas and the slave trade.
History
The Kingdom of Dahomey was established around 1600 by the Fon people who had recently settled in the area (or were possibly a result of intermarriage between the Aja people and the local Gedevi). The foundational king for Dahomey is often considered Houegbadja (c.1645-1685) who built the Royal Palaces of Abomey and began raiding and taking over towns outside of the Abomey plateau.
Houegbadja's grandson, King Agaja, came to the throne in 1718 and began significant expansion of the Kingdom of Dahomey. In 1724, Agaja conquered Allada, and in 1727 he conquered the Whydah. This increased size of the kingdom, particularly along the Atlantic coast, which made Dahomey into a regional power. The result was near constant warfare with the main regional state, the Oyo Empire from 1728 until 1740. The warfare with the Oyo empire resulted in Dahomey assuming a tributary status with the Oyo empire.
The Kingdom of Dahomey became a major power in the Atlantic slave trade, with slaves supplied through raids of surrounding areas. Such was the importance of the slave trade, that King Adandozan (1797-1818) was replaced by his brother King Ghezo (1818-1858) largely because Adandozan had been ineffective at maintaining stable supply for the slave trade. Under Ghezo the empire reached its zenith with Ghezo defeating the Oyo empire in 1823, ending Dahomey's tributary status, and greatly expanding the slave trade.
However, in the 1850s, much of this changes with the rise of Abeokuta (a city dedicated to protecting people from slave raids by Dahomey) in the region and the imposition of a naval blockade by the British in 1851 and 1852 to halt the slave trade. Ghezo was forced to stop slave raids and agreed to stop slave trading. Attempts at resuming the slave trade were attempted in the late 1850s and 1860s; however, these never lasted long.
Mode of Execution, Dahomey, 1845 46 John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa, in 1845 and 1846, comprising a journey from Whydah, through the kingdom of Dahomey (London, 1847)
The coastal area began to be controlled by the French in the 1870s, with the French reaching agreement with the kingdom to turn the port of Cotonou into a protectorate in 1878. When King Béhanzin (1889-1894) took over the throne he began raiding French protectorates and renounced the agreement regarding Cotonou. The French began responding in the Franco-Dahomean wars from 1890 until 1894 which resulted in the French conquest of the kingdom and appointing King Agoli-agbo as a puppet king. When Agoli-agbo resisted French taxation attempts, the French dissolved the Kingdom and sent Agoli-agbo into exile.
French invasion of Dahomey.(The 1892 French invasion of Dahomey was greatly facilitated by the gunboat Topaz, which shadowed the French advance along the Queme River and helped to shatter several Dahomian attacks).
The Kingdom of Dahomey retained an important legacy with the French appointing many Dahomey leaders as canton chiefs in the new administrative structure. The French colony, which included the kingdom but also Porto-Novo and a large area to the north, took the name French Dahomey which lasted until 1960 when the Republic of Dahomey was created. The name Dahomey was retained until 1975 when the country's name was changed to Benin.
Political organization
Early writings, predominantly written by European slave traders, often presented the kingdom as an absolute monarchy led by a despotic king. However, these depictions were often deployed as arguments by different sides in the slave trade debates, and as such were probably exaggerations. Recent historical work has emphasized the limits of monarchical power in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Historian John Yoder has written in attention to the Great Council in the kingdom that its activities do not "imply that Dahomey's government was democratic or even that her politics approximated those of nineteenth-century European monarchies. However, such evidence does support the thesis that governmental decisions were molded by conscious responses to internal political pressures as well as by executive fiat." The primary political divisions revolved around villages with chiefs and administrative posts appointed by the king and acting as his representatives to adjudicate disputes in the village.
The king
The King of Dahomey (ahosu in the Fon language) was the sovereign power of the kingdom. All of the kings were claimed to be part of the Alladaxonou dynasty, claiming descent from the royal family in Allada. Succession through the male members of the line was the norm typically going to the oldest son, but not always.
Dahomey King Ardjoumani and his sons
The king was selected largely through discussion and decision in the meetings of the Great Council, although how this operates was not always clear. The Great Council brought together a host of different dignitaries from throughout the kingdom yearly to meet at the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Discussions would be lengthy and included members, both men and women, from throughout the kingdom. At the end of the discussions, the king would declare the consensus for the group.
The royal court
Key positions in the King's court included the migan, the mehu, and the yovogan, amongst many others. The migan was a primary consul for the king, a key judicial figure, and served as the head executioner. The mehu was similarly a key administrative officer who managed the palaces and the affairs of the royal family, economic maters, and the areas to the south of Allada (making the position key to contact with Europeans). With European contact, Agaja created another position the yovogan ("white person director" in Fon) tasked with managing trade relations with the Europeans. The kpojito (or "queen mother") was an important position who heard religious appeals, acted as council to the king, and plead for citizens in cases before the king. A final administrative position was the chacha (or viceroy) which operated to manage the slave trade in the port city of Whydah. The first chacha was created by Ghezo and was the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa.
Painting of Gezo, King of Dahomey (circa 1851). From "Dahomey and the Dahomans" - New York Public Library By Forbes, Frederick E.
Military
The military of the Kingdom of Dahomey was divided into two units: the right and the left. The right was controlled by the migan and the left was controlled by the mehu. At least by the time of king Agaja, the kingdom had developed a standing army that remained encamped wherever the king was. When going into battle, the king would take a secondary position to the field commander with the reason given that if any spirit were to punish the commander for decisions it should not be the king. Unlike other regional powers, the military of Dahomey did not have a significant cavalry (like the Oyo empire) or naval power (which prevented expansion along the coast). The Dahomey Amazons, a unit of all-female units, is one of the most unique aspects of the military of the kingdom.
Group portrait of 'Dahomey Amazons', visiting Paris (Europe), Circa 01 / 02-1891
Economy
The economic structure of the kingdom were highly intertwined with the political and religious systems and these developed together significantly. The main currency for exchange was cowries, or shells for exchange.
Domestic economy
The domestic economy was largely focused on agriculture and crafts produced for local consumption. Until the development of palm oil, very little agricultural or craft goods were traded outside of the kingdom. Markets served a key role in the kingdom and were organized around a rotating cycle of four days with a different market each day (the market type for the day was religiously sanctioned). Agriculture work was largely decentralized and done by most families. However, with the expansion of the kingdom and the importance of the slave trade, agricultural plantations begun to be a common agricultural method in the kingdom. Craft work was largely dominated by a formal guild system.
Slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade was the primary international trade from the kingdom for much of its history. The slave trade was heavily organized by the king himself and the money provided him with significant funds to purchase guns, iron, and cloth. Although the king did make some money from domestic taxation, most of the funds to the king derived from the slave trade. The Dahomey coast was known in many European accounts at this time as the "Slave Coast" because of the active trade. Dahomey contributed possibly as much as 20% of the total Atlantic slave trade making it one of the largest suppliers to the trade. Historian Akinjogbin did contend that the entry into the slave trade by Dahomey was hesitant and that the early kings of Dahomey, primarily Agaja, were simply trying to improve the economic state of the kingdom and only engaged in the slave trade when other options did not work.
The slave trade had significant impacts on the kingdom. Historian Robin Law contends that the international slave trade provided a likely justification for much of the military policies of the kingdom. Similarly, when King Adandozan was unable to supply enough war captives for the international slave trade, domestic household and plantation use, and for sacrifices, he was replaced by Ghezo with the support of Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader, primarily to increase the trade.
Starting in the 1840s, the British empire began trying to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. Multiple missions tried to convince King Ghezo to end the trade, but he responded that domestic political pressure prevented him from ending the trade. However, he did increase palm oil plantations in order to try and develop economic alternatives. In 1851-1852, the British instituted a naval blockade on Dahomey in order to prevent the slave trade forcing Ghezo to promise to end the slave trade. Major military operations were halted at the same time.
Religion
The Kingdom of Dahomey shared many religious rituals with surrounding populations; however, it also developed unique ceremonies, beliefs, and religious stories for the kingdom. These included royal ancestor worship and the specific vodun (voodoo) practices of the kingdom.
Vodoun women in trance trying to grasp the the ungraspable
Royal Ancestor Worship
Early kings established clear worship of royal ancestors and centralized their ceremonies in the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The spirits of the kings had an exalted position in the land of the dead and it was necessary to get their permission for many activities on earth.
Dance of the chiefs (circa 1908). Celebration at Abomey, By Edmond Fortier (1862-1918)
Ancestor worship pre-existed the kingdom of Dahomey; however, under King Agaja, a cycle of ritual was created centered around first celebrating the ancestors of the king and then celebrating a family lineage.
The celebration at Abomey.Young girl with wooden statue of mystic chair.by Edmond Fortier (1862-1918)
The Annual Customs of Dahomey involved multiple elaborate components and some aspects may have been added in the 19th century. In general, the celebration involved distribution of gifts, human sacrifice, military parades, and political councils. Its main religious aspect was to offer thanks and gain the approval for ancestors of the royal lineage. However, the custom also included military parades, public discussions, gift giving (the distribution of money to and from the king), and human sacrifice and the spilling of blood.
Vodoun woman in trance
Most of the victims were captives from slave raids and were sacrificed through decapitation, a tradition widely used by Dahomean kings, and the literal translation for the Fon name for the ceremony Xwetanu is "yearly head business".
Dahomey Cosmology
Dahomey had a unique form of West African vodun or voodoo which linked together preexisting animist traditions with vodun practices. Oral history recounted that Hwanjile, a wife of Agaja brought the vodun to the kingdom and ensured its spread. The primary deity is the combined Mawu-Lisa (Mawu having female characteristics and Lisa having male characteristics) and it is claimed that this god took over the world that was created by their mother Nana-Buluku. Mawu-Lisa governs the sky and is the highest pantheon of gods, but other gods exist in the earth and in thunder.
Fon vodoun practitioners
Religious practice organized different priesthoods and shrines for each different god and each different
pantheon (sky, earth or thunder). Women made up a significant amount of the priest class and the chief priest was always a descendant of Dakodonou.
Kings of Dahomey
Gangnihessou, unknown – 1620
According to tradition, Gangnihessou came from a dynasty that originated in the sixteenth century. Based in Tado, a city on the banks of the Moro River (in modern day Togo), the dynasty rose to eminence on the basis of one of his four brothers, who became the king of Great Ardra. After the death of the king, his territories were divided among the three remaining brothers, one of which was Gangnihessou.
Gangnihessou came to rule around 1620 but was soon dethroned by his brother, Dakodonou, while traveling through the kingdom. His symbols were the male Gangnihessou-bird (a rebus for his name), a drum, a hunting stick and a throwing stick.
Dakodonou, 1620-1645
Dakodonou was the second King of Dahomey, who ruled from 1620 to 1645. Dakodonou is portrayed as a brutal and violent man. His symbols were an indigo jar (a reference to his murder of a certain indigo planter named Donou, whose body he made sport of by rolling it around in his indigo jar, and whose name he appended to his own original name, ‘Dako’), a tinder box, and a war club. Before dying, Dakodonou named his nephew, Aho Houegbadja, as his successor.
Houegbadja (or Webaja) 1645-1685
The third King of Dahomey was Aho Houegbadja, who succeeded his uncle, Dakodonou. He ruled from the time of his uncle’s death in 1645 until 1685.
Houegbadja established the political authority and boundaries of Abomey proper by naming the city as his capital. By building his palace (named “Agbome,” meaning “in the midst of the ramparts”) near Guedevi, an area located a few kilometers to the northwest of Bohicon, he established the area as the seat of political authority. He was responsible for forming the political culture that would continue to characterize Dahomey, with a reign that was marked by autocratic rule. Houegbadja’s symbols were a fish (houe), fish trap (adja), and war club hoe (kpota).
Akaba, 1685-1708
Houegbadja’s successor was his son, Houessou Akabawas, who became the fourth King of Dahomey. He ruled from 1685 to 1708.
Houessou Akaba’s reign was characterized by war and military expansion. His enemies, the Nago (Western Yoruba) kings, attacked Abomey and burned the town. But the warriors of Abomey ultimately defeated the Nago armies and the kingdom extended to include the banks of the Oueme River. Akaba failed, however, to capture Porto-Novo. Akaba’s symbols were the warthog and a saber.
Akaba died of smallpox in 1708. Because his only son, Agbo Sassa, was only ten years old, Akaba was succeeded instead by his brother, Dossou Agadja.
Agadja, 1708-1732
Ruling from 1708 to 1740, Dossou Agadja was the fifth King of Dahomey. Despite the fact that Agadja had gained the throne due to the youth of Agbo Sassa, the rightful heir, he refused to surrender power when the boy came of age and forced Agbo Sassa into exile.
Agadja’s reign was characterized by continual warfare. The Yoruba soldiers of the kingdom of Oyo defeated the army of Abomey. The peace terms required Agadja to pay tribute to the Oyo Empire, a system that continued for the next hundred years. The Tribute of the Kingdom of Abomey to the King of Oyo took the form of an annual tribute in young men and women destined for slavery or death in ceremonies, as well as cloth, guns, animals and pearls.
The kingdom of Abomey grew during Agadja’s reign, and conquered Allada in 1724. In 1727 it conquered the kingdom of Savi, and gained control of its major city, Ouidah. When Abomey conquered Savi and Ouidah, it gained direct access to the trading ports along the southern coast and took over the lucrative slave trade with the Europeans. As a result, Agadja’s symbol is a European caravel boat. Agadja’s victory over Ouidah came, in part, as a result of his use of a corps of women shock-troopers, called Dahomey Amazons by the Europeans after the women warriors of Greek myth, in his army. The Amazons became a dynastic tradition.
Agadja was succeeded by Tegbessou.
Tegbessou, 1732-1774
Tegbessou was the sixth King of Dahomey, ruling from 1740 to 1774. His reign was characterized by internal corruption and failed foreign policy. He killed many coup-plotters and political enemies, refused to pay tribute to the Yoruba, and lost many battles in the punitive raids that followed.
His main symbol is a buffalo wearing a tunic. His other symbols are the blunderbuss, a weapon he gave his warriors (his reign marked the first time the Dahomey Royal Army had ready access to firearms) and a door decorated with three noseless heads, a reference to his victory over a rebellious tributary people, the Benin Zou, whose corpses he mutilated.
During Tegbessou’s reign, the Dahomey enlarged the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbors. It is said 10,000 people were captured and sold into slavery, including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbessou made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750.
Tegbessou was succeeded by Kpengla.
Kpengla, 1774-1789
The seventh king of Dahomey, Kpengla, ruled from 1774 to 1789. His reign focused on expansion, and dramatically increased the size of the kingdom. In order to expand westward, he killed the chief of the Popo people, Agbamou, and spread his empire into modern day Togo. He destroyed the villages of Ekpe and Badagry (in what is now Nigeria), that were interfering with Dahomey’s regional monopoly on the slave trade.
King Kpengla (right, under parasol and carrying sword), leads a troop of Dahomey Amazons. Subjects can be seen kowtowing (left, foreground)
His main symbol is the akpan bird, a trade gun (flintlock), and an Amazon warrior striking her head against a tree. Kpengla was succeeded by Agonglo.
Agonglo, 1789-1797
Kpengla was succeeded by his son, Agonglo. The eighth King of Dahomey, he ruled from 1789 to 1797.
Agonglo instituted several reforms which pleased his subjects: taxes were lowered, and a greater distribution of gifts was made during the annual customs. He reformed the shape of the asen, or sacrificial altar, and supported the surface by ribs rather than a metal cone, typical of the earlier Allada style altars.
After the period of aggressive military expansion of his father, Agonglo consolidated the rule of the dynasty, his few military battles, however, were successful. His symbol is the pineapple.
Agonglo is notable in being the first of the Dahomean kings to marry a European woman. One of his wives was Sophie, a Dutch woman of mixed ancestry. Agonglo was succeeded by his eldest son, Adandozan.
Adandozan, 1797-1818
Technically the ninth King of Dahomey, Adandozan is not counted as one of the 12 kings. His name has largely been erased from the history of Abomey and to this day is generally not spoken out loud in the city. He became king when, in 1797, the previous king died, leaving the throne to his eldest son.
Adandozan’s symbols were a baboon with a swollen stomach, full mouth, and ear of corn in hand (an unflattering reference to his enemy, the King of Oyo), and a large parasol (‘the king overshadows his enemies’). These symbols are not included in Abomey appliques, for the same reasons that Adandozan is not included in Abomey’s history.
The traditional stories of Adandozan’s rule portray him as extremely cruel: he is said to have raised hyenas to which he would throw live subjects for amusement. He has been portrayed as hopelessly mad, struggling foolishly with the European powers.
The commonly told story is that he refused to pay Francisco Felix da Souza, a Brazilian merchant and trader who had become a major middle-man in the Ouidah slave market. Instead, he imprisoned and tortured de Souza, and then attempted to have his own ministers sell the slaves directly. According to legend, de Souza escaped with the aid of Gakpe, Adandozan’s brother, who returned from exile for that purpose. In return, de Souza helped Gakpe marshall a military force and take the throne with the assistance of the terrified council of ministers. Gakpe then put Adandozan in prison.
This traditional portrayal may be wrong: like Richard II of England in the Wars of the Roses, Adandozan may have been the object of a propagandistic rewriting of history after he lost the throne, turned into a monster by his successor as a means of excusing the coup d’état and legitimizing the new regime. All stories agree that Adandozan tried to force more favorable terms of trade with the Europeans involved in the export of slaves, and seriously undermined the power of the extended royal family and Vodun cult practitioners at court through administrative reforms.
It may be that these policies themselves provoked Adandozan’s powerful opponents to support a coup against him. In order to justify the coup, Gakpe may then have been obliged to have oral historians tell of the monstrous and mad Adandozan.
Ghezo (Gakpe) 1818-1856
Ghezo was the ninth King of Dahomey and is considered one of the greatest of the 12 historical kings. He ruled from 1818 to 1858. His name before ascending to the throne was Gakpe.
Ghezo’s symbols are two birds on a tree, a buffalo, and a clay jar sieve with holes in it held by two hands, a symbol of unity. Ghezo is said to have used the sieve as a metaphor for the kind of unity needed for the country to defeat its enemies and overcome its problems; it takes everyone’s hand to block the sieve’s holes and hold water. The pierced clay jar upheld by multiple hands has become a national symbol in Benin, a large portrayal of it is the backdrop of the speaker’s podium in Benin’s National Assembly.
Ghezo ascended to the throne after he overthrew his brother, Adandozan, in a coup d’état. The traditional stories state that Adandozan was a cruel ruler, but it is possible these stories may have been invented by Ghezo’s historians to justify the coup.
Throughout his reign, Ghezo waged a military campaign every year during the dry season. His prisoners-of-war were sold into slavery, thus fattening the royal treasury, increasing the annual budget, and making war a very efficient means of raising revenue. Due to the increased strength of his army and capital, Ghezo put an end to the Oyo tribute paying. He formalized his army, gave his 4,000 Dahomey Amazon female warriors uniforms, required soldiers to drill with guns and sabres regularly, and was able to repulse Oyo’s attack when it came.
From the time of King Ghezo onward, Dahomey became increasingly militaristic, with Ghezo placing great importance on the army, its budget and its structures. An intrinsic part of the army of Dahomey, which increased in importance as the state became more militaristic, was the elite fighting force known as the Amazons.
Ghezo was also seen as an extremely shrewd administrator. Because of his slave revenues, he could afford to lower taxes, thus stimulating the agricultural and mercantile economy: agriculture expanded, as did trade in a variety of goods with France. He instituted new judicial procedures, and was considered to be a just judge of his subjects. He was much loved, and his sudden death in a battle against the Yoruba was considered a tragedy.
However loved by his own people, Ghezo’s legacy includes his making a major contribution to the slave trade. He said in the 1840s that he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…”
Ghezo was succeeded by Glele.
Glele, 1856-1889
Badohou, who took the throne name Glele, is considered (if Adandozan is not counted) to be the tenth King of Dahomey. He succeeded his father, Ghezo, and ruled from 1858 to 1889.
Glele continued his father’s successful war campaigns, in part to avenge his father’s death, in part to capture slaves. Glele also signed treaties with the French, who had previously acquired a concession in Porto-Novo from its king. The French were successful in negotiating with Glele and receiving a grant for a customs and commerce concession in Cotonou during his reign. Glele resisted English diplomatic overtures, however, distrusting their manners and noting that they were much more activist in their opposition to the slave trade: though France itself had outlawed slavery at the end of the 1700s, it allowed the trade to continue elsewhere; Britain outlawed slavery in the U.K. and in its overseas possessions in 1833, and had its navy make raids against slavers along the West African coast beginning in 1840.
Glele, despite the formal end of the slave trade and its interdiction by the Europeans and New World powers, continued slavery as a domestic institution: his fields were primarily cared for by slaves, and slaves became a major source of ‘messengers to the ancestors’, in other words, sacrificial victims in ceremonies.
Near the end of Glele’s reign, relations with France deteriorated due to Cotonou’s growing commercial influence and differences of interpretation between Dahomey and France regarding the extent and terms of the Cotonou concession grant. Glele, already on his death bed, had his son Prince Kondo take charge of negotiations with the French.
Glele’s symbols are the lion and the ritual knife of the adepts of Gu; of fire, iron, war, and cutting edges.
Glele died on December 29, 1889, to be succeeded by Kondo, who took the name Behanzin.
Behanzin, 1889-1894
Behanzin, though the twelfth, is considered the eleventh (if Adandozan is not counted) King of Dahomey. Upon taking the throne, he changed his name from Kondo to Behanzin, as it was traditional for Dahomey kings to assume a throne name. He succeeded his father, Glele, and ruled from 1889 to 1894. Behanzin was Abomey’s last independent ruler established through traditional power structures, and was considered to be a great ruler.
Behanzin, King of Dahomey, 1892. Artist: Henri Meyer
Behanzin was seen by his people as intelligent and courageous. He saw that the Europeans were gradually encroaching on his kingdom, and as a result attempted a foreign policy of isolating the Europeans and rebuffing them. Just before Glele’s death, Behanzin declined to meet French envoy Jean Bayol, claiming conflicts in his schedule due to ritual and ceremonial obligations. As a result, Bayol returned to Cotonou to prepare to go to war against Behanzin, named king upon Glele’s death. Seeing the preparations, the Dahomeans attacked Bayol’s forces outside Cotonou in 1890; the French army stood fast due to superior weaponry and a strategically advantageous position. Eventually Behanzin’s forces were forced to withdraw. Behanzin returned to Abomey, and Bayol to France for a time.
Peace lasted two years, during which time the French continued to occupy Cotonou. Both sides continued to buy arms in preparation for another battle. In 1892, the soldiers of Abomey attacked villages near Grand Popo and Porto-Novo in an effort to reassert the older boundaries of Dahomey. This was seen as an act of war by the French, who claimed interests in both areas. Bayol, by now named Colonial Governor by the French, declared war on Behanzin. The French justified the action by characterizing the Dahomeans as savages in need of civilizing. Evidence of this savagery, they stated, was the practice of human sacrifice during the annual customs celebrations and at the time of a king’s death, and the continued practice of slavery.
The French were victorious in attaining the surrender of Behanzin in 1894, though they did not procur his signature of national surrender or treaty. He lived out the remainder of his life in exile in Martinique and Algeria. After his death, his remains were returned to Abomey.
His symbols are the shark, the egg, and a captive hanging from a flagpole (a reference to a boastful and rebellious Nago practitioner of harmful magic from Ketou whom the king hanged from a flagpole as punishment for his pride). But, his most famous symbol is the smoking pipe.
Behanzin was succeeded by Agoli-agbo, his distant relative and one-time Army Chief of Staff, the only potential ruler which the French were willing to instate.
Agoli-agbo
Agoli-agbo is considered to have been the twelfth, and last, King of Dahomey. He took the throne after the previous king, Behanzin, went into exile after a failed war with France. He was in power from 1894 to 1900.
Proclamation of the new King Agoli-agbo of Dahomey,-.From Le Petit Journal,19 th February 1894
The exile of Behanzin did not legalize the French colonization. The French general Alfred Dodds offered the throne to every one of the immediate royal family, in return for a signature on a treaty establishing a French protectorate over the Kingdom; all refused. Finally, Behanzin’s Army Chief of Staff (and distant relative), Prince Agoli-agbo was appointed to the throne, as a ‘traditional chief’ rather than head of state of a sovereign nation, by the French when he agreed to sign the instrument of surrender. He ‘reigned’ for only six years, assisted by a French Viceroy. The French prepared for direct administration, which they achieved on February 12, 1900. Agoli-agbo went into exile in Gabon, and the Save River. He returned to live in Abomey as a private citizen in 1918.
Agoli-agbo’s symbols are a leg kicking a rock, an archer’s bow (a symbol of the return to traditional weapons under the new rules established by the colonial administrators), and a broom.
Agbo. AGBOLI-AGBO DEDJLANI
King of Abomey
Benin
Dedjlani, a former policeman, waited six years to retire, and then proceeded with his secret coronation ceremonies.“Officially”, there is no longer a king in Benin. But on september 30, 1989, Dedjlani put on his royal shoes, and at the age of fifty four became King of Abomey.
Being monogamous, he was obliged to marry two more wives to take care of his royal household. When he goes out, tradition requires that he be sheltered under an umbrella with his emblem. One of wives must always be next to him, carrying the royal spitting bowl. The King also has to wear his scepter in permanence. Holding it in his hand or hanging on his shoulder, more than a symbol, the scepter is the King. The silver dust protector worn on the nose, dates from the nineteenth century, and was inherited from the King Gbehanzin. It protected the King’s nose from the dust, during the royal processions in Abomey.
Dahomey Amazons
The Dahomey Amazons were a Fon all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey. They were so named by Western observers and historians due to their similarity to the legendary Amazons described by the Ancient Greeks.
King Houegbadja, the third king, is said to have originally began the group which would become the Amazons as a corps of royal bodyguards after building a new palace at Abomey. Houegbadja’s son King Agadja developed these bodyguards into a militia and successfully used them in Dahomey’s defeat of the neighboring kingdom of Savi in 1727. European merchants recorded their presence, as well as similar female warriors amongst the Ashanti. For the next hundred years or so, they gained a reputation as fearless warriors. Though they fought rarely, they usually acquitted themselves well in battle.
From the time of King Ghezo, Dahomey became increasingly militaristic. Ghezo placed great importance on the army and increased its budget and formalized its structures. The Amazons were rigorously trained, given uniforms, and equipped with Danish guns obtained via the slave trade. By this time the Amazons consisted of between 4,000 and 6,000 women, about a third of the entire Dahomey army.
European encroachment into West Africa gained pace during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in 1890 the Dahomey King Behanzin began fighting French forces (mainly made up of Yoruba, who the Dahomeans had been fighting for centuries). It is said that many of the French soldiers fighting in Dahomey hesitated before shooting or bayoneting the Amazons. The resulting delay led to many of the French casualties. Ultimately, bolstered by the French Foreign Legion, and armed with superior weaponry including machine guns, the French inflicted casualties that were ten times worse on the Dahomey side. After several battles, the French prevailed. The Legionnaires later wrote about the “incredible courage and audacity” of the Amazons. The last surviving Amazon died in 1979.
Economy
Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Fon are farmers, fishermen, and market women. Nowadays they occupy all the positions and jobs to be found in government, civil service, business, and production. Staple crops are yams, maize, and manioc. (Millet was once important.) Beans, peas, peanuts, sorghum, sweet potatoes, onions, okra, peppers, gourds, papayas, bananas, plantains, mangoes, pineapples, oil palms, and some rice and cocoa are also grown. Animals raised include pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, chickens, guinea fowl, ducks, and pigeons. Fishing is of primary importance along the coast and in the Volta region. Cash crops include palm kernels, peanuts, copra, castor beans, kapok, and, by far the most important, coffee and cocoa.
Fon and Ewe market women—both wholesalers and retailers—have a near monopoly on the internal economy. Even in small villages, many women are traders and retailers, selling anything from homemade fermented corn porridge to Coca Cola, often specializing in a single item such as fresh or home-smoked fish, imported Dutch wax cloth, fresh fruits and vegetables, or trade beads.
Industrial Arts. Fon engage in pottery making, wood sculpting (mostly for religious use), and basketwork; in the past, every village had a blacksmith.
Fon people carrying pots at Abomey,Benin
Trade
Fon have traded with Yoruba and Hausa for as long as they have had their present identity. The slave trade and the salt trade brought other traders from the north of present Ewe and Fon regions, including as far north as Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and perhaps Mali and Niger. Portuguese traders reached the coast in the fifteenth century, even before the Ewe and Fon had migrated that far. By the seventeenth century, when the Volta region had become home to an Ewe polity and the Kingdom of Dahomey had regular relations with Ouidah, European commercial envoys were no longer a novelty on what was then called the Slave Coast. The Atlantic commerce in slaves was a significant aspect of Fon life for two centuries.
Market activities are central in all Fon regions. Women almost always have something to sell on market days, including foodstuffs they make themselves. They often buy their husband's or brothers' catch of fish fresh from the sea or river and take it straight to various markets. Or they smoke the fish and take them to markets farther inland. Today European, U.S., and Chinese goods are available even in small Fon village markets more than 150 kilometers from the coast, often taken there by local women who buy the goods in coastal cities.
Abomey-Calavi
Division of Labor
. Apart from the special status of kings in the Kingdom of Dahomey who did not perform manual labor, the main division of labor is along gender lines. Men do heavy agricultural labor such as clearing the land and staking yam vines; they fish, hunt, and build houses. Women participate in the above activities also, such as preparing the palm-frond walling or fencing necessary to hut building, taking charge of butchered animals and fish, and carrying out almost all agricultural tasks except the very heaviest.
Dance of warrior women,Abomey.
Women also carry headloads as heavy as any load men can carry. Although it is often said that only women headload, this is patently untrue. Women are in charge of most market activities, although they may hire men to help them. One of the few items usually sold by men in the market is beef, often brought by Hausa or other Muslim traders. Most other kinds of work, including cooking, may be done by women and men, and even the above-mentioned divisions of labor are not absolute. Women and children may join with men in pulling in the enormous and heavy fishing nets from the surf after a catch. Gender-specific cash savings and work collectives abound, enabling members to have their own banking as well as support in house building, clearing land, harvesting, fishing, marketing, and all other labors. Especially notable are the Fon dokpwe , or cooperative, or tontine (French). Both women and men engage in child care, although women are considered to have greater responsibility in this regard. Groups of men and groups of women may take care of any and all village children in their vicinity at any given time.
Fon woman,Sessimé’s, a Beninese Afropoprock musician
Land Tenure
Anyone from a particular region can farm on land that is not occupied by anyone else. Inside a settlement, a person wishing to employ land must ask permission of the village chief or the elders of the lineage owning the land. Formerly, rights have extended only to use of land; there was no absolute right to the land itself. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, land was by definition the property of the king. In most Ewe regions, land is inherited and administrated by elders of each patriline; any lineage member may build or farm on lineage land as long as she or he respects the rights of others nearby who are already established on the land. Widows of patriline members or other persons not members of the lineage may stay on the land and farm it, but it cannot pass definitively into another lineage.
Only in the last few generations has land come to be alienable from lineage tenure by being mortgaged or sold. Land not already belonging to a lineage (of which there is scarcely any now) may be acquired personally through simply clearing the land, or buying it non-Fon owners; the owner may dispose of such land without consulting lineage elders. Both women and men have rights to lineage land, often now called "inheritance of land," but, in areas where land is scarce, women have difficulty claiming such rights.
Kinship
Kin Groups and Descent. Descent is primarily patrilineal. Fon have exogamous patrisibs composed of lineages, but in the Kingdom of Dahomey the royal sib had exceptional rules. Princesses married commoners and their children belonged to the royal sib, as did the offspring of royal princes. Cross-cousin marriage is preferred among most Fon groups, particularly with mother's brother's daughter.
Holywood Actor djimon Hounsou is a Fon from Benin
Marriage and Family
Marriage. Most Fon marriages are patrilocal, although neolocal residence has become popular in the late twentieth century. Polygyny is the rule if a man has means to marry more than one wife. It is often said that an abuse of polygyny leads wives to leave their husbands for other men, often younger and as yet unmarried, so that women also tend to have more than one husband in their lifetimes. Fon marriages are of two general types, one more prestigious than the other. Prestigious marriage includes payments by the groom to the bride's father or premarital farm labor performed by a man for his future father-in-law. Such bride-wealth or work gives a man control over his children. When this is not performed, the mother and her family have all rights over the children; thus, this sort of marriage is less desirable or prestigious for a husband. Herskovits (1938) outlines thirteen different variations of these two major marriage categories. A man must never refuse a wife offered him, and divorce may be initiated only by the wife's family. In many Ewe groups, marriage is less marked by bride-wealth or bride-service, and even if a man offers only the required drinks and cloths to his bride and her family, he may claim the children as members of his own patriline. In case of separation, a father may keep his children with him, although in many cases wives are allowed to raise the children. Pregnancy makes a marriage complete. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, virginity was demanded of brides in prestigious marriages. Christian Fon proceed according to the arrangements prescribed in their churches.
Domestic Unit. Patrilineal three- or four-generational extended family compounds, as well as agnatic extended family compounds, are common. Another model is a nuclear-family household (often with children from previous marriages) that eventually is joined by other relatives, such as the couple's younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and foster children.
Fon Kid from Benin
If the husband has not vowed monogamy, in time, other wives and their children may come to expand the compound (each wife with her own hut or little house). In many cases, other wives and their children form separate households. Adolescent boys may have collective sleeping quarters separate from their mothers and sisters.
Fon kids at Ouidah,benin
Inheritance. Most Fon property, including land, is inherited patrilineally, although some lineage land remains. Cloth wealth and jewelry sometimes become lineage property too, along with ancestral stools. Individual property, which may include rights to land and fields, may be inherited patrilineally. In some areas the eldest son inherits land rights, but livestock and other individual property go to a man's sister's son. In Lome inheritance is mixed.
Socialization. Virtually everyone, but especially older siblings, takes care of the children. Grandparents, both female and male, also spend considerable time with children. Fishermen in from the sea often sit around in groups during the afternoon, playing boardgames and watching over young children at the same time.
Angelique Kidjo is a fon
Toddlers are passed from person to person, including adolescent boys, who appear to enjoy taking their turns. Mothers and all female relatives carry babies on their backs for much of the day; sometimes doting fathers or other male relatives also wrap babies and toddlers on their backs. Fon adolescents experiment with sexuality early in their teen years, and nowadays pregnancy at a young age, even if the mother is unmarried, is not especially discouraged in many communities. Thus virginity is not as highly valued as it once was.
Young Fon worshippers of a mermaid deity prepare for the Voodoo Festival, in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Young girls help their mothers, often caring for smaller children or carrying loads to market, boys as young as 10 may go to sea with the men and go over the side of the pirogue to drive a school of fish into the nets. Inland, young boys and girls help perform agricultural tasks and care for animals. Children are present at all important social and religious events and may, at a very early age, become "spouses" of important spirits or gods, thus inheriting sizable responsibilities and the special, often prestigious, identity, that goes with them. Children as young as 10 may go into trance during Vodu (Fon) possession ceremonies. They also enjoy such events as recreation and take advantage of opportunities for drumming, singing, and dancing performances; teenagers and young adults may court during and after such religious rituals.
Fon girl braiding her sisters hair at Ouidah,Benin
Political Organization.
Although the Fon kingdom had a centralized state with a powerful ahosu (King), since its collapse that structure is no longer available. Fon villages had village autonomy before they were consolidated into a kingdom in the seventeenth century, and thus each village chief was a "king" (toxosu ) to whom the heads of each compound answered. The Kingdom of Dahomey forced these chiefs to swear loyalty to the ruler or be sacrificed (some were sold into slavery). Sibs in Fon villages have considerable political influence, but the chief is hardly all-powerful.
His Majesty Agboli Agbo Dedjani, Last King of the Dan-Home Dynasty, Abomey, Benin (Dahomey), Africa
Social Control. Although during the colonial period chiefs had considerable control (and still do as far as administrative decisions are concerned), authority is widely distributed in villages and regions. Whereas Fon are nominally under the jurisdiction of French-inspired legal systems, the laws of the ancestors and the moral frameworks of Vodu worship tend to have just as much, if not more, authority than official law in many communities. Even in colonial and precolonial periods, the office of chief and the ranks of the elders were usually filled with men (and some women) who were linked to religious orders.
Fon women at Ouidah
Individual behavior for many is constantly interpreted and adjusted through the lenses of Afa (or Fa) divination, which includes the "laws of destiny," or the "law-deity who brought me here" (esesidomeda ). Thus, supernatural sanctions are more powerful than state legal systems for numerous Fon. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, kings were tyrannical according to numerous sources; village chiefs, in keeping with earlier practices, were not. Decisions of village chiefs had to be reported to the king, however, so that final control was in his hands. The king's tribunal of chiefs was expected to judge harshly so that the king himself could demonstrate clemency by lightening the sentence. During the colonial period, there was great tension between certain Ewe Vodu orders and colonial administrators who claimed the Vodu "courts" were presuming to take the place of official courts. Numerous shrines were thus destroyed by German and French authorities. Vodu worshipers often did not consider the powers of the colonial governments to be legitimate,
Fon people.
Conflict
Conflict in villages is typically brought to a group of "judges," including the chief, Vodu priests, and both male and female elders. The entire village has the right to attend, and whoever wishes to speak may do so. Often divorce cases, theft, assault, and instances of injury through witchcraft do not go before official courts of law. Even cases that do go before official courts of law, including murder, may be rejudged by Vodu priests and communities because the conflict at the source of the crime is not thought to be merely personal. All conflict is a reflection of the social body in its relationship to the rest of the cosmos.
Fon
Religion and Expressive Culture
Religious Beliefs. Various Vodu (Fon) orders are at the foundation of Fon religion. A High God exists, according to numerous informants. Among Fon, Mawu and Lisa are a couple, twins, or a female (Mawu) and male (Lisa) hermaphrodite divinity. Fon may say the world was created by Nana-Buluku, who gave birth to Mawu and Lisa. For others, Nana-Buluku, Mawu, and Lisa are all Vodus, and there is no all-powerful separate creator.
Gu or Egu, the warrior and hunter god of iron, is central among all Fon groups. There are a number of other Vodu orders, including Gorovodu, which is popular across Fon populations in Benin. Mama Tchamba, a related order, involves the worship of the spirits of slaves from the north that Ewe once owned and married. The selfhood of each individual is involved with these major deities and spirit personalities. They are also protectors, healers, judges, and consummate performers.
Vodoun practitioners at Ouidah voodoo festival in Benin
All Vodu orders work hand in hand with Afa (or Fa) divination, a complex interpretive framework within which each person has a life sign (kpoli ), of which there are a total of 256. Each sign is connected to a set of plants and animals, stories and songs, dietary taboos, Vodus, and dangers and strengths, all associated with each other, as though clan-related. Events, projects, activities, and relationships also have their own Afa signs. Everything in the universe is related to Afa texts and themes, as though nature itself were divided into exogamous clans.
Some Fon have become Christians; given their proximity to the coast, these ethnic groups were among the first to accept Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Certain Christian groups originating in West Africa, such as Aladura and Celeste, have a considerable following on the coast.
Fon christian Celestial believers
Religious Practitioners. Vodu priests are usually men, but postmenopausal women may become priestesses. The great majority of spirit hosts or "wives" of the Vodus are women. Priests, priestesses, and "wives" of the Yehve deities (Sosi, Avlesi, Dasi, etc.) do not usually practice trance. Afa diviners are almost always men, although it is said that a woman can become a diviner if she wishes.
vodoun devotees
Ceremonies. Vodu ceremonies are compelling performances for both insiders and outsiders. Worshipers who begin dancing to the drum music may go into trance. Spirits who possess their "wives" may have messages for the community, may take part in judging certain cases of conflict, and may heal the sick. Above all, they are dancing gods, and there are aesthetic conventions that have long traditions.
Fon people of benin performing their Vodoun rituals
In Vodu orders where possession is not usual, ceremonies are all the more dazzling because of the perfection of their collective execution. Rows of dancers, all clothed in ceremonial attire, move across a ritual space as one person, performing specific movements. Drums always provide a sort of text or context for movement, including narrative associations and instruction. Ceremonies are events during which symbolic associations are reinforced, individual and collective identity is stated, certain aspects of identity and power are recalled and redistributed, healing and admonishment take place, and, above all, collective exhilaration, ecstasy, and awe are produced. Ceremonies are always gifts to the gods.
A man slaughters a goat at the Temple of Pythons during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Afa divination involves numerous complicated rituals based on a binary system of questions and responses, and permutations of the 256 life signs associated with collections of oral texts.
vodounsi
Arts.
Fon artists are widely known for their appliqué hangings with legendary motifs from the Kingdom of Dahomey and Vodu culture. Elaborate engraving or carving of calabashes is another Fon art. Brass casting (using the cireperdue, or lost-wax method) has been practiced by the Fon since early times. Brass workers belonged to special guilds in the Kingdom of Dahomey; they created some of the more striking objects constituting the king's wealth. Silverwork was also mastered. Fon still carve wooden bocio figures for spiritual practices, as well as Legba statues (guardian deities) and other Vodu god-objects. Earthen Legbas are also common. Some god-objects, entirely abstract in form, are confected as a collage-sculpture, with numerous ingredients including cowry shells, goat horns, cows' tails, birds' claws, iron bells, and tree roots, all united with red clay and glazed with the blood of sacrificial animals. Drums of many different kinds are produced for specific ceremonies. Vodu costumes for spirit possession may be richly adorned with cowries sewn on in patterns. All of the objects necessary for Fa (Fon) divination are also created with great care and elaboration; thus they are sometimes bought by Europeans as objects of art. Stools are important to Fon lineages. They are often carved with narrative detail so that their symbolic significance is inscribed for future generations to see.
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Costume for Adzohu, a sacred dance-drumming from the Fon people of Benin, West Africa
Festivals
GeledeTraditional Festival of the Fon people in South Benin
Gelede is a cult dedicated to Mother Earth. It is celebrated by the whole community to promote fertility of both the people and the soil. Each mask is sculpted and represents a different character but only the initiates know the true nature and secrets of those symbolic characters.
The masks are brightly painted and move like puppets linking myths and moral stories through mime. It is both educational and quite hilarious. The delighted crowd laugh and clap their hands as they watch in appreciation. It is a fascinating mix of street theatre and magical theatre.
Gelede Mask festival
Egun, traditional Celebration
Egun masks represent the spirits of the deceased and according to the locals; they "are" the deceased.
The men wearing the masks representing Egun are initiates of the cult. Dressed in brightly multicolored clothing, they emerge from the forest and form a procession through the streets of the village, leaping towards any foolish spectator who dares to get too close.
Egun gun traditional masked dancers at Egun festival at Abomey,Benin
You don’t want the Egun to touch you because if he does; there is a danger of death, so watch out! Some people touched by the Egun immediately collapse but fortunately they recover instantly. When they arrive, the masks perform a kind of bull fight which is designed to scare the crowd but instead is greeted with bursts of laughter!
Zangbeto, traditional Celebration of the Fon in South Benin
Zongbeto festival at Ouidah,Benin
The Zangbeto mask is very tall and covered with colored straw. It represents wild non human spirits (the forces of nature and of the night that inhabited the Earth before human beings). The mask wearers belong to a secret society and keep their identity hidden as the non-initiated cannot know who they are.
When Zangbeto comes out, it is a big important event for the village. Its performance guarantees protection against bad spirits and malicious people. The spinning movement of the mask symbolizes the spiritual cleaning of the village and Zangbeto also performs miracles to prove its powers.
Zongbeto and his minder at a Zongbeto festival in Ouidah,Benin
Voodoo Festival at Ouidah (Benin), Jan 10 2013
Dances, libations, masks (some official speech) feature the morning. The first part of the festival ends at about 15h00 and then it continues in the city.
Fon Vodoun practitioners at a festival in Ouidah,Benin
Peoples are never tired to exalting their voodoos. All of them reach a large square where the Eguns masks come together. Masks come for dancing, chasing away the bad spirits , and playing with people like a kind of "corrida".
In the evening Ouidah is exhausted but not yet fully satisfied. The festival goes on in the depths of the courtyards, waiting to meet again the next year so renewing the faith in Voodoo.
Gandaxi Ceremony – Nov. 2012 – Mar. 2013
This is the most important ceremony performed by the King of the Dahomey. Each King has to organize a Gandaxi Ceremony at least once during his reign with the aim to show his people the extent of his wealth as well as the greatness of his mystic power.
The power of the king is based on two dimensions: a temporal dimension and a spiritual one represented by the voodoo religion.
Left: Jean Zossoujbo, a guide at the Temple of Pythons, shows a python to a visitor to the temple in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. Right: A Voodoo worshiper dances during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Sunday Alamba
The next Gandaxi will take place – after the last one was held 30 years ago – from November 2012 to March 2013 and will be divided into two periods lasting 4 ½ months altogether. The first month will be entirely devoted to organization and closed to the public. Then, great surprises will be waiting for us!!!
Medicine. Today many Fon seek medical assistance in modern clinics and hospitals and go to Westerntrained doctors. They may also frequent local healers and Vodu priests who employ plants and carbonized ingredients, as well as rituals to address illness and conflicts playing themselves out in a person's body and soul.
Vodu medicine is not hostile to modern biomedicine. Upon asking Afa, though divination, what to do about illness, a sufferer may be told by Fa to go to a doctor in town. Vodu medicine is particularly effective in cases of madness. Ingestion of roots and plants, as well as "speaking pain and desire" to the Vodus make it possible for the alienated to mourn losses and go on with life once again.
Fon mystic healer/voodoun practitioner and a guide,Jean Zossounjbo, a guide, shows a python at the Temple of Pythons in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Death and Afterlife
Upon death, certain aspects of the person are lost forever in their individuated form, whereas other aspects, for example, the djoto, or reincarnation soul, will come back in the next child born to the lineage. The luvo, or death soul, may linger for some time after death, looking just like the person in life and frightening loved ones with demands for attention and its cravings to be still with the living. According to some informants, the person as constituted in life does not survive death, but parts of the personality may indeed continue and even join with Vodus, as part of the conglomerate energy and personality of a deity. Others say that the spirit realm mirrors human life in every aspect, so that after death individuals go on in much the same way as before. Funerals are the single most important event in a person's history, more lavish and expensive than any other celebration or feast. Groups of drummers are hired, and mourners may dance throughout the night for several nights in succession. Attending funerals and contributing to them financially and with food and drink are among the most binding obligations for lineage members, neighbors, friends, chiefs, and Vodu worshipers (above all, for those who belong to the same order as the deceased).
Tribal marks
Irving Penn, Scarred Dahomey Girl, Dahomey, 1967
source:http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3458001484.html
Amazon Warriors from Dahomey, 1893 and Human spectacle shows
by: jeffreygreen
Exhibiting captives as trophies was both widespread and ancient, but as European awareness of Africa developed in the 19th century entrepreneurs took advantage of railways and presented Africans around Europe, on stage, and in exhibition centres. Zulus were exhibited in England from 1850, for example. The men, women and children who were presented are part of European popular culture and were seen by hundreds daily. Linking groups of Africans to recent conquests and battles in Africa seemed to attract crowds, and the legendary women soldiers of Dahomey (modern Benin) provided an additional attraction. Dahomey Warriors or Amazon Warriors were exhibited in France soon after their lands were taken by the French in 1890. In 1893 over fifty Africans were exhibited at London’s premier entertainment centre, the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill.
Dahomey Amazon warriors practicing their military skills and posing for the camera. Circa 1893
The group first appeared in May 1893. The Daily Telegraph said ‘Nothing so original has been seen in England for many a long day’ and the Daily Chronicle noted ‘A strong attraction, both for its novelty and the alacrity with which it displays the drill of a savage army’ whilst the London Standard said it was ‘the sight of the season’ and the Africans were the ‘finest of the races of Africa’. They made four appearances daily and numbered 58 people. On 17 June 1893 the showbusiness weekly the Era noted that they ‘go through their war dance and perform athletic feats with marvellous agility’. A group of East Anglian brewery workers on an annual outing visited and the Africans were noted by the Essex County Standard of Colchester (16 September). The brewery staff would have spread the news in Colchester, Eye, Ipswich, Cambridge and Halesworth.
July 1893 timetable of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway showing the
advertisement of Exhibition of Amazon warriors from Dahomey
By October the Warriors were indoors, at London’s Oxford Music Hall. The Era of 7 October noted the senior woman was named Gumma. The Standard advertisement of 17 October said they were ‘grand specimens of Muscular Womanhood’. It was the semi-naked women who attracted crowds to the extent that a shop keeper took the matter to court, for they were accommodated at the Canterbury Music Hall and left every day for the Oxford Music Hall ‘which had the effect of collecting together large crowds nightly’ (Pall Mall Gazette 19 October). Extra police were on duty, the Africans had adopted all the suggestions from the police, and were ‘well wrapped up’. The judge said that if people were ‘foolish enough and curious enough to collect in order to see them, notwithstanding their want of sufficient overcoats – (laughter) – the Court, he thought, should not be asked to prevent them so collecting’. The plaintiff claimed his wholesale clock and watch business was suffering. Many newspapers reported this court case (Standard 19 October; Morning Post 21 October and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 22 October).
Amazon warriors from Dahomey at Crystal Palace for exhibition. Circa 1893
On 18 December they started their show at the Waverley Market, Edinburgh’s Christmas and New Year Carnival (Glasgow Herald 19 and 26 December 1893) and from 8 January 1894 they were at the Olympia in Newcastle. The Newcastle Weekly Courant of 30 December 1893 noted the ‘inhabitants’ numbered fifty, and that, as at the Crystal Palace, Lockhart’s elephants were on show too.
Thousands had seen them but we have no idea what impressions were made or if there were any long-lasting memories. Ethnic exhibitions or human zoos were common for decades but identifying the individuals and learning what they thought of the white public remains guesswork. It is known that a small group of Africans from Sierra Leone worked as ‘Dahomey Warriors’ in Brighton in 1908, and that Joseph Lee, an African American from Maryland, worked for years as Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn Lobagola and published books in the 1920s. Images were everything it seems.
Amazons of Dahomey in Battle. Illustration from Illustrated Travels edited by H W Bates (Cassell, c 1880).
The logistics of travel, accommodation, food and daily care remain to be investigated, although it is known that groups such as the West India Regiment’s band which played at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924 were accommodated in army barracks. Human rights groups often protested, and governments put pressure on colonial authorities, but it was not until the television age that such exhibitions fell from favour.
Béhanzin, King of Dahomey, one of the last African Resistant to French Colonization
Béhanzin (Gbêhanzin) Hossu Bowelle or the ‘King Shark‘ was one the most powerful kings in West Africa at the turn of the 19th century. He was the eleventh king of Dahomey, and the last independent ruler of Abomey before French colonization. Who was really Béhanzin?
Born in 1844 in Abomey, Béhanzin was the eleventh king of Dahomey from 1889 to 1894. His name, Kondo, was changed to Béhanzin after he succeeded to his father Glèlè. His personal symbols were the shark, the egg, and two coconut palm trees, while those of his father were the lion and the ritual knife of Gu. His name actually meant ‘the egg of the world or the son of the shark‘. His great love for the freedom of his country, culture, and people led him to courageously and fiercely defend the land of his ancestors. He led the resistance and fight for the Dahomey’s freedom.
This statue of a man with the head and torso of a shark, represents Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey (Benin).
Dahomey was one of most powerful kingdoms of West Africa, deriving its power from trade and its superior army. Dahomey’s army was one of the strongest and best-organized armies in West Africa and was comprised of both men and women, including the Amazons, a superior and dreaded fighting force of female warriors. At the time, Béhanzin masterfully led an army of 15000 men and 5000 amazon women. One of the Amazon leaders was Seh-Dong Hong-Beh (which means “God speaks true“) who led an army of 6000 amazons against the Egba fortress in Abeokuta in 1851.
Seh-Dong Hong-Beh, leader of Dahomey Amazons (by Frederick Forbes in 1851)
In 1882, France declared a protectorate over Porto Novo, a vassal state of Abomey, without consulting with the indigenous people, as was (and still is) the practice with Europeans colons. By 1885, the French occupied the entire coastal strip West of Porto Novo. In 1889, King Glèlè and his son Béhanzin, who considered these coastal areas to be part of the kingdom of Dahomey, declared that the Fon people could no longer tolerate France’s actions.
In February 1890, the French occupied Cotonou; Béhanzin, now king after Glèlè’s sudden death, prepared for war. Béhanzin’s army, with rifles supplied by the Germans, were getting too strong for neighboring French colonies. Béhanzin’s forces attacked the French simultaneously on two fronts—militarily at Cotonou and economically by destroying the palm plantations at Porto Novo. The latter precipitated an early end to the hostilities. A treaty was signed, with the French continuing to occupy Cotonou, for which Béhanzin exacted an annuity; he made France pay for the use of Cotonou port. The peace lasted for two years. However, France was determined to annex Dahomey before the British or Germans did. Béhanzin, knowing that he would have to defend his sovereignty, continued upgrading his army in preparation for renewed war.
Combat de Dogba au Dahomey, 19 September 1892
He declared a treaty made with France by his father, Glèlè, in 1868 null and void, from this war began. In 1894, Béhanzin was defeated by Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a Senegalese mulatto, who was sent to fight against him with powerful French armed forces. Béhanzin, not wanting his people to be massacred, surrendered his person to Dodds, without signing any instrument of national surrender or treaty. Béhanzin thought that he will get a chance to talk to the French president and find a way or sign a conciliation agreement for his country, unfortunately, the French tricked him and instead of going to France, Behanzin was exiled to Martinique. With Béhanzin and his immediate family adamantly refusing to sign a treaty making Dahomey a French protectorate, the French installed their choice, Agoli-Agbo, as king; Agoli Agbo, the puppet, did not last more than 6 years (when he asked for more freedom to rule, he was deported to Gabon). Dahomey was then placed under France’s protection and it eventually became a French colony. Béhanzin died in 1906 in Algeria. In 1928, his son, Ouanilo (who was also France’s first African attorney in 1920) had his body moved to Dahomey. Ouanilo’s remains will be restituted to Benin almost 80 years after his death.
General Alfred-Amedee Dodds on the cover of ‘L’Illustration’ 20 May 1893
Béhanzin once said: «Vous pouvez arracher l’homme de son pays, mais vous ne pouvez arracher son pays du cÅ“ur de l’homme, ni arracher un grand homme de l’histoire.» [You can remove a man from his country, but you can never remove his country from a man's heart, or erase a great man from history]. Béhanzin truly loved his people, and when he saw that his army was being massacred by the French, he cried for his beautiful and strong amazons, and pronounced the most beautiful ode to them
King Behanzin in exile in Algeria
[Où sont maintenant les ardentes amazones qu’enflammait une sainte colère? ... Qui chantera leurs splendides sacrifices? Qui dira leur générosité? ... comment accepterais-je sans eux une quelconque abdication? Comment oserais-je me présenter devant vous, braves guerriers, si je signais le papier du Général? ... pour la survie de mon peuple, [j'accepte] de rencontrer dans son pays, selon sa promesse, le président des Français. –
Where are now the ardent amazons who were inflamed by a mighty anger? … Who will praise their splendid sacrifices? … Who will tell about their generosity? … How could I accept any sort of abdication without them? How could I dare presenting myself to you, brave warriors, if I signed the general’s paper?… for the survival of my people, [I agree] to meet in his country, according to his promise, the president of the French].
Behanzin, the Last King of independent Dahomey
Please watch this great documentary about the life of Béhanzin, the last king of the Dahomey (part 1 – 4), and one of the last resistant to French colonization. Why was he defeated? He said himself: «malgré la justesse de notre cause, notre vaillance et notre détermination, ils n’ont pu l’emporter et s’accaparer de la terre de nos aïeux que par la force de leur science» [despite the legitimacy of our cause, our courage, and determination, they could only win and take the land of our forefathers because of the force of their science]. Check out the website djime.com entirely dedicated to Béhanzin and his heritage. To learn more about Dahomey’s Amazons, check out the Smithsonian blog. This facebook page provides details about the organization of the amazons in the army. Don’t forget to offer your support to the Agongointo Musée du passé vivant dedicated to the kingdom of Dahomey.
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Fon people of Abomey,Benin and home of Vodoun worship performing traditional ritual
The Fon language is the main language spoken in Southern Benin, and is a member of the Gbe language group. The Fon are said to originate from Tado, a village in south east Togo, near the border with Benin. The Fon people are famous for founding the ancient Dahomey kingdom and their kings having Amazonian women warriors as his body-guards and war chieftains.
Fon woman from Abomey,Benin at traditional festival
Most Fon today live in villages and small towns in mud houses with corrugated iron gable roofs. Cities built by the Fon include Abomey, the historical capital city of Dahomey, and Ouidah on the Slave Coast. These cities were major commercial centres for the slave trade.
The Fon culture has mixture of Ewe and Yoruba presence in it. In the city of Abomey, as a result of Yoruba presence, Fon people there has their original culture mixed with Yoruba whom they defeated their Oyo kingdom whiles in the city of Ouidah,its more like that of their Ewe brothers and sisters with whom they all migrated from Tado.
Whether by part of empire of Dahomey by itself or their enemy states, many Fon slaves were sold to European traders, who exported to Americas. So, many descendants of the Fon now live in the Americas as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. In United States they were mostly in Louisiana,New Orleans. Together with other cultural groups from the Fon homeland region such as the Yoruba and Bantu, Fon culture merged with French, Portuguese or Spanish to produce distinct religions (Voodoo, Mami Wata, Candomblé and SanterÃa), dance and musical styles (Arará, Yan Valu). As a result of what the Fons did to their fellow brethrens through their slave trading activities,the Fons and other voodoo practicing tribes in Benin has instituted annual Voodoo festival for to invite all Africans in diaspora to visit their homeland. The festival falls on the second week of January every year at the Benin city of Ouidah.
Location
The Fɔn culture centered in Zou province around the old Fɔn capital of Abomey-Calavi, but also dominant in Cotonou and southern Atlantique areas such as Ouidah comunes.
fon people
Settlement
Fon live mostly in villages and towns, although there are some more isolated farming compounds. Rectangular mud brick houses and concrete brick dwellings with gabled or corrugated-iron roofs are predominant except along the ocean, where there are numerous palm-frond huts with straw- or palm-thatch gabled roofs.
Fon people of Benin
Small huts or buildings are often clustered in a single compound with an open court, all surrounded by a mud wall. In ocean-front fishing villages, fragile palm-frond fences give some privacy to clusters of small huts. People living in the same compound are usually members of the same patrilineage (to-fome ), although kinship is extremely open to outside recruitment; fictive kin may even predominate in certain cases. Large villages may have central marketplaces
Fon people of Abomey performing their Amazon warrior dance with wooden spears
Language
Fon people speak Fon language. Fon (native name Fon gbè, pronounced [fÉ”̃̄É¡͡bè]) is part of the Gbe language cluster and belongs to the Volta–Niger branch of the Niger–Congo languages. Fon is spoken mainly in Benin by approximately 1.7 million speakers, by the Fon people. Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an analytic language with an SVO basic word order. it has the following dialects: Agbome, Arohun, Gbekon, Kpase.
JOSEPH LANGANFIN,Benin. Representing the Abomey dynasty, Joseph Langanfin is the president of CAFRA, the council of Abomey’s royal families. With this title, he is considered as the official representative of the kings of Abomey. He presided at the centenary ceremonies for the death of King Glele, who was his great granfather
History/Origin
According to oral tradition, the Fon of Benin are descendants of the Aja people. According to them, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries some of the Aja people, originating from Tado, a village in south east Togo, to the banks of the Mono River, emigrated to the eastern part of its territory, now Benin, and founded the town of Allada. Later Aja of Allada establish a new state: Great Ardra, in which kings ruled with the consent of the village elders. Allada became the capital of Great Ardra.
In c.1625, a dispute occurred between the three sons of the king, based in the succession to his father as king of Great Ardra. This dispute divided the kingdom into three parts: one brother, Kokpon, retained Great Ardra. Another brother, Do-Aklin, founded the city of Abomey, and the third, Te-Agdanlin, founded the city of Ajatche or Little Ardra (also called Porto-Novo by Portuguese traders who traded there). The Aja residents in Abomey slowly mixed with the local tribes, thus causing the "Fon" people.
Aduare Achumba, a visitor to the Temple of Pythons, reacts as a guide puts a python on her head in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. Ouidah, considered the major cultural city in the West African nation of Benin, held its annual Voodoo Festival on Thursday. Voodoo is an official religion in this nation of 9 million people and this year's festival honored the slaves taken from surrounding countries and sent into America and the Caribbean, people who brought the religion with them. AP / Sunday Alamba
Dahomey tribes people photographed for Hubert Howe Bancroft's The Book of the Fair, published in Chicago in 1893
Kingdom of Dahomey (c.1600–1900)
Dahomey was an African kingdom in the present-day Republic of Benin which lasted from 1600 until 1900. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau in the early 1600s and became a regional power in the 1700s by conquering key cities on the Atlantic coast. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey was a key regional state, eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo empire and being a major location for the Atlantic slave trade, possibly supplying up to 20% of the slaves to Europe and the Americas.
Painting of Dahomey Kingdom when the Whites came to meet it
In 1894, the kingdom became part of French West Africa as part of the territory of French Dahomey (which also included Porto-Novo and a large area to the north of Dahomey). French rule lased until 1960 when the independent country took the name Republic of Dahomey, to be changed to Benin in 1975.
The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy, significant international trade with European powers, a centralized administration, significant taxation systems, and an organized military. Notable in the kingdom were significant artwork, all-female military units known as the Dahomey Amazons, and elaborate religious practices of Vodun with the large festival of the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The Kingdom of Dahomey serves as the context for a number of works of fiction dealing with West African ideas and the slave trade.
History
Dahomey girl. Circa 1891
Houegbadja's grandson, King Agaja, came to the throne in 1718 and began significant expansion of the Kingdom of Dahomey. In 1724, Agaja conquered Allada, and in 1727 he conquered the Whydah. This increased size of the kingdom, particularly along the Atlantic coast, which made Dahomey into a regional power. The result was near constant warfare with the main regional state, the Oyo Empire from 1728 until 1740. The warfare with the Oyo empire resulted in Dahomey assuming a tributary status with the Oyo empire.
The Kingdom of Dahomey became a major power in the Atlantic slave trade, with slaves supplied through raids of surrounding areas. Such was the importance of the slave trade, that King Adandozan (1797-1818) was replaced by his brother King Ghezo (1818-1858) largely because Adandozan had been ineffective at maintaining stable supply for the slave trade. Under Ghezo the empire reached its zenith with Ghezo defeating the Oyo empire in 1823, ending Dahomey's tributary status, and greatly expanding the slave trade.
However, in the 1850s, much of this changes with the rise of Abeokuta (a city dedicated to protecting people from slave raids by Dahomey) in the region and the imposition of a naval blockade by the British in 1851 and 1852 to halt the slave trade. Ghezo was forced to stop slave raids and agreed to stop slave trading. Attempts at resuming the slave trade were attempted in the late 1850s and 1860s; however, these never lasted long.
Mode of Execution, Dahomey, 1845 46 John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa, in 1845 and 1846, comprising a journey from Whydah, through the kingdom of Dahomey (London, 1847)
The coastal area began to be controlled by the French in the 1870s, with the French reaching agreement with the kingdom to turn the port of Cotonou into a protectorate in 1878. When King Béhanzin (1889-1894) took over the throne he began raiding French protectorates and renounced the agreement regarding Cotonou. The French began responding in the Franco-Dahomean wars from 1890 until 1894 which resulted in the French conquest of the kingdom and appointing King Agoli-agbo as a puppet king. When Agoli-agbo resisted French taxation attempts, the French dissolved the Kingdom and sent Agoli-agbo into exile.
The Kingdom of Dahomey retained an important legacy with the French appointing many Dahomey leaders as canton chiefs in the new administrative structure. The French colony, which included the kingdom but also Porto-Novo and a large area to the north, took the name French Dahomey which lasted until 1960 when the Republic of Dahomey was created. The name Dahomey was retained until 1975 when the country's name was changed to Benin.
Political organization
Early writings, predominantly written by European slave traders, often presented the kingdom as an absolute monarchy led by a despotic king. However, these depictions were often deployed as arguments by different sides in the slave trade debates, and as such were probably exaggerations. Recent historical work has emphasized the limits of monarchical power in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Historian John Yoder has written in attention to the Great Council in the kingdom that its activities do not "imply that Dahomey's government was democratic or even that her politics approximated those of nineteenth-century European monarchies. However, such evidence does support the thesis that governmental decisions were molded by conscious responses to internal political pressures as well as by executive fiat." The primary political divisions revolved around villages with chiefs and administrative posts appointed by the king and acting as his representatives to adjudicate disputes in the village.
The king
The King of Dahomey (ahosu in the Fon language) was the sovereign power of the kingdom. All of the kings were claimed to be part of the Alladaxonou dynasty, claiming descent from the royal family in Allada. Succession through the male members of the line was the norm typically going to the oldest son, but not always.
The king was selected largely through discussion and decision in the meetings of the Great Council, although how this operates was not always clear. The Great Council brought together a host of different dignitaries from throughout the kingdom yearly to meet at the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Discussions would be lengthy and included members, both men and women, from throughout the kingdom. At the end of the discussions, the king would declare the consensus for the group.
The royal court
Key positions in the King's court included the migan, the mehu, and the yovogan, amongst many others. The migan was a primary consul for the king, a key judicial figure, and served as the head executioner. The mehu was similarly a key administrative officer who managed the palaces and the affairs of the royal family, economic maters, and the areas to the south of Allada (making the position key to contact with Europeans). With European contact, Agaja created another position the yovogan ("white person director" in Fon) tasked with managing trade relations with the Europeans. The kpojito (or "queen mother") was an important position who heard religious appeals, acted as council to the king, and plead for citizens in cases before the king. A final administrative position was the chacha (or viceroy) which operated to manage the slave trade in the port city of Whydah. The first chacha was created by Ghezo and was the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa.
Military
The military of the Kingdom of Dahomey was divided into two units: the right and the left. The right was controlled by the migan and the left was controlled by the mehu. At least by the time of king Agaja, the kingdom had developed a standing army that remained encamped wherever the king was. When going into battle, the king would take a secondary position to the field commander with the reason given that if any spirit were to punish the commander for decisions it should not be the king. Unlike other regional powers, the military of Dahomey did not have a significant cavalry (like the Oyo empire) or naval power (which prevented expansion along the coast). The Dahomey Amazons, a unit of all-female units, is one of the most unique aspects of the military of the kingdom.
Group portrait of 'Dahomey Amazons', visiting Paris (Europe), Circa 01 / 02-1891
Economy
The economic structure of the kingdom were highly intertwined with the political and religious systems and these developed together significantly. The main currency for exchange was cowries, or shells for exchange.
Domestic economy
The domestic economy was largely focused on agriculture and crafts produced for local consumption. Until the development of palm oil, very little agricultural or craft goods were traded outside of the kingdom. Markets served a key role in the kingdom and were organized around a rotating cycle of four days with a different market each day (the market type for the day was religiously sanctioned). Agriculture work was largely decentralized and done by most families. However, with the expansion of the kingdom and the importance of the slave trade, agricultural plantations begun to be a common agricultural method in the kingdom. Craft work was largely dominated by a formal guild system.
Slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade was the primary international trade from the kingdom for much of its history. The slave trade was heavily organized by the king himself and the money provided him with significant funds to purchase guns, iron, and cloth. Although the king did make some money from domestic taxation, most of the funds to the king derived from the slave trade. The Dahomey coast was known in many European accounts at this time as the "Slave Coast" because of the active trade. Dahomey contributed possibly as much as 20% of the total Atlantic slave trade making it one of the largest suppliers to the trade. Historian Akinjogbin did contend that the entry into the slave trade by Dahomey was hesitant and that the early kings of Dahomey, primarily Agaja, were simply trying to improve the economic state of the kingdom and only engaged in the slave trade when other options did not work.
The slave trade had significant impacts on the kingdom. Historian Robin Law contends that the international slave trade provided a likely justification for much of the military policies of the kingdom. Similarly, when King Adandozan was unable to supply enough war captives for the international slave trade, domestic household and plantation use, and for sacrifices, he was replaced by Ghezo with the support of Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader, primarily to increase the trade.
Starting in the 1840s, the British empire began trying to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. Multiple missions tried to convince King Ghezo to end the trade, but he responded that domestic political pressure prevented him from ending the trade. However, he did increase palm oil plantations in order to try and develop economic alternatives. In 1851-1852, the British instituted a naval blockade on Dahomey in order to prevent the slave trade forcing Ghezo to promise to end the slave trade. Major military operations were halted at the same time.
Religion
The Kingdom of Dahomey shared many religious rituals with surrounding populations; however, it also developed unique ceremonies, beliefs, and religious stories for the kingdom. These included royal ancestor worship and the specific vodun (voodoo) practices of the kingdom.
Vodoun women in trance trying to grasp the the ungraspable
Royal Ancestor Worship
Early kings established clear worship of royal ancestors and centralized their ceremonies in the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The spirits of the kings had an exalted position in the land of the dead and it was necessary to get their permission for many activities on earth.
Dance of the chiefs (circa 1908). Celebration at Abomey, By Edmond Fortier (1862-1918)
Ancestor worship pre-existed the kingdom of Dahomey; however, under King Agaja, a cycle of ritual was created centered around first celebrating the ancestors of the king and then celebrating a family lineage.
The Annual Customs of Dahomey involved multiple elaborate components and some aspects may have been added in the 19th century. In general, the celebration involved distribution of gifts, human sacrifice, military parades, and political councils. Its main religious aspect was to offer thanks and gain the approval for ancestors of the royal lineage. However, the custom also included military parades, public discussions, gift giving (the distribution of money to and from the king), and human sacrifice and the spilling of blood.
Vodoun woman in trance
Most of the victims were captives from slave raids and were sacrificed through decapitation, a tradition widely used by Dahomean kings, and the literal translation for the Fon name for the ceremony Xwetanu is "yearly head business".
Dahomey Cosmology
Dahomey had a unique form of West African vodun or voodoo which linked together preexisting animist traditions with vodun practices. Oral history recounted that Hwanjile, a wife of Agaja brought the vodun to the kingdom and ensured its spread. The primary deity is the combined Mawu-Lisa (Mawu having female characteristics and Lisa having male characteristics) and it is claimed that this god took over the world that was created by their mother Nana-Buluku. Mawu-Lisa governs the sky and is the highest pantheon of gods, but other gods exist in the earth and in thunder.
Fon vodoun practitioners
Religious practice organized different priesthoods and shrines for each different god and each different
pantheon (sky, earth or thunder). Women made up a significant amount of the priest class and the chief priest was always a descendant of Dakodonou.
Kings of Dahomey
Gangnihessou, unknown – 1620
According to tradition, Gangnihessou came from a dynasty that originated in the sixteenth century. Based in Tado, a city on the banks of the Moro River (in modern day Togo), the dynasty rose to eminence on the basis of one of his four brothers, who became the king of Great Ardra. After the death of the king, his territories were divided among the three remaining brothers, one of which was Gangnihessou.
Gangnihessou came to rule around 1620 but was soon dethroned by his brother, Dakodonou, while traveling through the kingdom. His symbols were the male Gangnihessou-bird (a rebus for his name), a drum, a hunting stick and a throwing stick.
Dakodonou, 1620-1645
Dakodonou was the second King of Dahomey, who ruled from 1620 to 1645. Dakodonou is portrayed as a brutal and violent man. His symbols were an indigo jar (a reference to his murder of a certain indigo planter named Donou, whose body he made sport of by rolling it around in his indigo jar, and whose name he appended to his own original name, ‘Dako’), a tinder box, and a war club. Before dying, Dakodonou named his nephew, Aho Houegbadja, as his successor.
Houegbadja (or Webaja) 1645-1685
The third King of Dahomey was Aho Houegbadja, who succeeded his uncle, Dakodonou. He ruled from the time of his uncle’s death in 1645 until 1685.
Houegbadja established the political authority and boundaries of Abomey proper by naming the city as his capital. By building his palace (named “Agbome,” meaning “in the midst of the ramparts”) near Guedevi, an area located a few kilometers to the northwest of Bohicon, he established the area as the seat of political authority. He was responsible for forming the political culture that would continue to characterize Dahomey, with a reign that was marked by autocratic rule. Houegbadja’s symbols were a fish (houe), fish trap (adja), and war club hoe (kpota).
Akaba, 1685-1708
Houegbadja’s successor was his son, Houessou Akabawas, who became the fourth King of Dahomey. He ruled from 1685 to 1708.
Houessou Akaba’s reign was characterized by war and military expansion. His enemies, the Nago (Western Yoruba) kings, attacked Abomey and burned the town. But the warriors of Abomey ultimately defeated the Nago armies and the kingdom extended to include the banks of the Oueme River. Akaba failed, however, to capture Porto-Novo. Akaba’s symbols were the warthog and a saber.
Akaba died of smallpox in 1708. Because his only son, Agbo Sassa, was only ten years old, Akaba was succeeded instead by his brother, Dossou Agadja.
Agadja, 1708-1732
Ruling from 1708 to 1740, Dossou Agadja was the fifth King of Dahomey. Despite the fact that Agadja had gained the throne due to the youth of Agbo Sassa, the rightful heir, he refused to surrender power when the boy came of age and forced Agbo Sassa into exile.
Agadja’s reign was characterized by continual warfare. The Yoruba soldiers of the kingdom of Oyo defeated the army of Abomey. The peace terms required Agadja to pay tribute to the Oyo Empire, a system that continued for the next hundred years. The Tribute of the Kingdom of Abomey to the King of Oyo took the form of an annual tribute in young men and women destined for slavery or death in ceremonies, as well as cloth, guns, animals and pearls.
The kingdom of Abomey grew during Agadja’s reign, and conquered Allada in 1724. In 1727 it conquered the kingdom of Savi, and gained control of its major city, Ouidah. When Abomey conquered Savi and Ouidah, it gained direct access to the trading ports along the southern coast and took over the lucrative slave trade with the Europeans. As a result, Agadja’s symbol is a European caravel boat. Agadja’s victory over Ouidah came, in part, as a result of his use of a corps of women shock-troopers, called Dahomey Amazons by the Europeans after the women warriors of Greek myth, in his army. The Amazons became a dynastic tradition.
Agadja was succeeded by Tegbessou.
Tegbessou, 1732-1774
Tegbessou was the sixth King of Dahomey, ruling from 1740 to 1774. His reign was characterized by internal corruption and failed foreign policy. He killed many coup-plotters and political enemies, refused to pay tribute to the Yoruba, and lost many battles in the punitive raids that followed.
His main symbol is a buffalo wearing a tunic. His other symbols are the blunderbuss, a weapon he gave his warriors (his reign marked the first time the Dahomey Royal Army had ready access to firearms) and a door decorated with three noseless heads, a reference to his victory over a rebellious tributary people, the Benin Zou, whose corpses he mutilated.
During Tegbessou’s reign, the Dahomey enlarged the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbors. It is said 10,000 people were captured and sold into slavery, including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbessou made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750.
Tegbessou was succeeded by Kpengla.
Kpengla, 1774-1789
The seventh king of Dahomey, Kpengla, ruled from 1774 to 1789. His reign focused on expansion, and dramatically increased the size of the kingdom. In order to expand westward, he killed the chief of the Popo people, Agbamou, and spread his empire into modern day Togo. He destroyed the villages of Ekpe and Badagry (in what is now Nigeria), that were interfering with Dahomey’s regional monopoly on the slave trade.
King Kpengla (right, under parasol and carrying sword), leads a troop of Dahomey Amazons. Subjects can be seen kowtowing (left, foreground)
His main symbol is the akpan bird, a trade gun (flintlock), and an Amazon warrior striking her head against a tree. Kpengla was succeeded by Agonglo.
Agonglo, 1789-1797
Kpengla was succeeded by his son, Agonglo. The eighth King of Dahomey, he ruled from 1789 to 1797.
Agonglo instituted several reforms which pleased his subjects: taxes were lowered, and a greater distribution of gifts was made during the annual customs. He reformed the shape of the asen, or sacrificial altar, and supported the surface by ribs rather than a metal cone, typical of the earlier Allada style altars.
After the period of aggressive military expansion of his father, Agonglo consolidated the rule of the dynasty, his few military battles, however, were successful. His symbol is the pineapple.
Agonglo is notable in being the first of the Dahomean kings to marry a European woman. One of his wives was Sophie, a Dutch woman of mixed ancestry. Agonglo was succeeded by his eldest son, Adandozan.
Adandozan, 1797-1818
Technically the ninth King of Dahomey, Adandozan is not counted as one of the 12 kings. His name has largely been erased from the history of Abomey and to this day is generally not spoken out loud in the city. He became king when, in 1797, the previous king died, leaving the throne to his eldest son.
Adandozan’s symbols were a baboon with a swollen stomach, full mouth, and ear of corn in hand (an unflattering reference to his enemy, the King of Oyo), and a large parasol (‘the king overshadows his enemies’). These symbols are not included in Abomey appliques, for the same reasons that Adandozan is not included in Abomey’s history.
The traditional stories of Adandozan’s rule portray him as extremely cruel: he is said to have raised hyenas to which he would throw live subjects for amusement. He has been portrayed as hopelessly mad, struggling foolishly with the European powers.
The commonly told story is that he refused to pay Francisco Felix da Souza, a Brazilian merchant and trader who had become a major middle-man in the Ouidah slave market. Instead, he imprisoned and tortured de Souza, and then attempted to have his own ministers sell the slaves directly. According to legend, de Souza escaped with the aid of Gakpe, Adandozan’s brother, who returned from exile for that purpose. In return, de Souza helped Gakpe marshall a military force and take the throne with the assistance of the terrified council of ministers. Gakpe then put Adandozan in prison.
This traditional portrayal may be wrong: like Richard II of England in the Wars of the Roses, Adandozan may have been the object of a propagandistic rewriting of history after he lost the throne, turned into a monster by his successor as a means of excusing the coup d’état and legitimizing the new regime. All stories agree that Adandozan tried to force more favorable terms of trade with the Europeans involved in the export of slaves, and seriously undermined the power of the extended royal family and Vodun cult practitioners at court through administrative reforms.
It may be that these policies themselves provoked Adandozan’s powerful opponents to support a coup against him. In order to justify the coup, Gakpe may then have been obliged to have oral historians tell of the monstrous and mad Adandozan.
Ghezo (Gakpe) 1818-1856
Ghezo was the ninth King of Dahomey and is considered one of the greatest of the 12 historical kings. He ruled from 1818 to 1858. His name before ascending to the throne was Gakpe.
Ghezo’s symbols are two birds on a tree, a buffalo, and a clay jar sieve with holes in it held by two hands, a symbol of unity. Ghezo is said to have used the sieve as a metaphor for the kind of unity needed for the country to defeat its enemies and overcome its problems; it takes everyone’s hand to block the sieve’s holes and hold water. The pierced clay jar upheld by multiple hands has become a national symbol in Benin, a large portrayal of it is the backdrop of the speaker’s podium in Benin’s National Assembly.
Ghezo ascended to the throne after he overthrew his brother, Adandozan, in a coup d’état. The traditional stories state that Adandozan was a cruel ruler, but it is possible these stories may have been invented by Ghezo’s historians to justify the coup.
Throughout his reign, Ghezo waged a military campaign every year during the dry season. His prisoners-of-war were sold into slavery, thus fattening the royal treasury, increasing the annual budget, and making war a very efficient means of raising revenue. Due to the increased strength of his army and capital, Ghezo put an end to the Oyo tribute paying. He formalized his army, gave his 4,000 Dahomey Amazon female warriors uniforms, required soldiers to drill with guns and sabres regularly, and was able to repulse Oyo’s attack when it came.
From the time of King Ghezo onward, Dahomey became increasingly militaristic, with Ghezo placing great importance on the army, its budget and its structures. An intrinsic part of the army of Dahomey, which increased in importance as the state became more militaristic, was the elite fighting force known as the Amazons.
Ghezo was also seen as an extremely shrewd administrator. Because of his slave revenues, he could afford to lower taxes, thus stimulating the agricultural and mercantile economy: agriculture expanded, as did trade in a variety of goods with France. He instituted new judicial procedures, and was considered to be a just judge of his subjects. He was much loved, and his sudden death in a battle against the Yoruba was considered a tragedy.
However loved by his own people, Ghezo’s legacy includes his making a major contribution to the slave trade. He said in the 1840s that he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…”
Ghezo was succeeded by Glele.
Glele, 1856-1889
Badohou, who took the throne name Glele, is considered (if Adandozan is not counted) to be the tenth King of Dahomey. He succeeded his father, Ghezo, and ruled from 1858 to 1889.
King Glele of Dahomey (1858-1889) left, and Ghezo (right)
Glele continued his father’s successful war campaigns, in part to avenge his father’s death, in part to capture slaves. Glele also signed treaties with the French, who had previously acquired a concession in Porto-Novo from its king. The French were successful in negotiating with Glele and receiving a grant for a customs and commerce concession in Cotonou during his reign. Glele resisted English diplomatic overtures, however, distrusting their manners and noting that they were much more activist in their opposition to the slave trade: though France itself had outlawed slavery at the end of the 1700s, it allowed the trade to continue elsewhere; Britain outlawed slavery in the U.K. and in its overseas possessions in 1833, and had its navy make raids against slavers along the West African coast beginning in 1840.
Glele, despite the formal end of the slave trade and its interdiction by the Europeans and New World powers, continued slavery as a domestic institution: his fields were primarily cared for by slaves, and slaves became a major source of ‘messengers to the ancestors’, in other words, sacrificial victims in ceremonies.
Near the end of Glele’s reign, relations with France deteriorated due to Cotonou’s growing commercial influence and differences of interpretation between Dahomey and France regarding the extent and terms of the Cotonou concession grant. Glele, already on his death bed, had his son Prince Kondo take charge of negotiations with the French.
Glele’s symbols are the lion and the ritual knife of the adepts of Gu; of fire, iron, war, and cutting edges.
Glele died on December 29, 1889, to be succeeded by Kondo, who took the name Behanzin.
Behanzin, 1889-1894
Behanzin, though the twelfth, is considered the eleventh (if Adandozan is not counted) King of Dahomey. Upon taking the throne, he changed his name from Kondo to Behanzin, as it was traditional for Dahomey kings to assume a throne name. He succeeded his father, Glele, and ruled from 1889 to 1894. Behanzin was Abomey’s last independent ruler established through traditional power structures, and was considered to be a great ruler.
Behanzin was seen by his people as intelligent and courageous. He saw that the Europeans were gradually encroaching on his kingdom, and as a result attempted a foreign policy of isolating the Europeans and rebuffing them. Just before Glele’s death, Behanzin declined to meet French envoy Jean Bayol, claiming conflicts in his schedule due to ritual and ceremonial obligations. As a result, Bayol returned to Cotonou to prepare to go to war against Behanzin, named king upon Glele’s death. Seeing the preparations, the Dahomeans attacked Bayol’s forces outside Cotonou in 1890; the French army stood fast due to superior weaponry and a strategically advantageous position. Eventually Behanzin’s forces were forced to withdraw. Behanzin returned to Abomey, and Bayol to France for a time.
Peace lasted two years, during which time the French continued to occupy Cotonou. Both sides continued to buy arms in preparation for another battle. In 1892, the soldiers of Abomey attacked villages near Grand Popo and Porto-Novo in an effort to reassert the older boundaries of Dahomey. This was seen as an act of war by the French, who claimed interests in both areas. Bayol, by now named Colonial Governor by the French, declared war on Behanzin. The French justified the action by characterizing the Dahomeans as savages in need of civilizing. Evidence of this savagery, they stated, was the practice of human sacrifice during the annual customs celebrations and at the time of a king’s death, and the continued practice of slavery.
The French were victorious in attaining the surrender of Behanzin in 1894, though they did not procur his signature of national surrender or treaty. He lived out the remainder of his life in exile in Martinique and Algeria. After his death, his remains were returned to Abomey.
His symbols are the shark, the egg, and a captive hanging from a flagpole (a reference to a boastful and rebellious Nago practitioner of harmful magic from Ketou whom the king hanged from a flagpole as punishment for his pride). But, his most famous symbol is the smoking pipe.
Behanzin was succeeded by Agoli-agbo, his distant relative and one-time Army Chief of Staff, the only potential ruler which the French were willing to instate.
Agoli-agbo
Agoli-agbo is considered to have been the twelfth, and last, King of Dahomey. He took the throne after the previous king, Behanzin, went into exile after a failed war with France. He was in power from 1894 to 1900.
The exile of Behanzin did not legalize the French colonization. The French general Alfred Dodds offered the throne to every one of the immediate royal family, in return for a signature on a treaty establishing a French protectorate over the Kingdom; all refused. Finally, Behanzin’s Army Chief of Staff (and distant relative), Prince Agoli-agbo was appointed to the throne, as a ‘traditional chief’ rather than head of state of a sovereign nation, by the French when he agreed to sign the instrument of surrender. He ‘reigned’ for only six years, assisted by a French Viceroy. The French prepared for direct administration, which they achieved on February 12, 1900. Agoli-agbo went into exile in Gabon, and the Save River. He returned to live in Abomey as a private citizen in 1918.
Agoli-agbo’s symbols are a leg kicking a rock, an archer’s bow (a symbol of the return to traditional weapons under the new rules established by the colonial administrators), and a broom.
Agbo. AGBOLI-AGBO DEDJLANI
King of Abomey
Benin
Dedjlani, a former policeman, waited six years to retire, and then proceeded with his secret coronation ceremonies.“Officially”, there is no longer a king in Benin. But on september 30, 1989, Dedjlani put on his royal shoes, and at the age of fifty four became King of Abomey.
Being monogamous, he was obliged to marry two more wives to take care of his royal household. When he goes out, tradition requires that he be sheltered under an umbrella with his emblem. One of wives must always be next to him, carrying the royal spitting bowl. The King also has to wear his scepter in permanence. Holding it in his hand or hanging on his shoulder, more than a symbol, the scepter is the King. The silver dust protector worn on the nose, dates from the nineteenth century, and was inherited from the King Gbehanzin. It protected the King’s nose from the dust, during the royal processions in Abomey.
Dahomey Amazons
The Dahomey Amazons were a Fon all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey. They were so named by Western observers and historians due to their similarity to the legendary Amazons described by the Ancient Greeks.
King Houegbadja, the third king, is said to have originally began the group which would become the Amazons as a corps of royal bodyguards after building a new palace at Abomey. Houegbadja’s son King Agadja developed these bodyguards into a militia and successfully used them in Dahomey’s defeat of the neighboring kingdom of Savi in 1727. European merchants recorded their presence, as well as similar female warriors amongst the Ashanti. For the next hundred years or so, they gained a reputation as fearless warriors. Though they fought rarely, they usually acquitted themselves well in battle.
From the time of King Ghezo, Dahomey became increasingly militaristic. Ghezo placed great importance on the army and increased its budget and formalized its structures. The Amazons were rigorously trained, given uniforms, and equipped with Danish guns obtained via the slave trade. By this time the Amazons consisted of between 4,000 and 6,000 women, about a third of the entire Dahomey army.
European encroachment into West Africa gained pace during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in 1890 the Dahomey King Behanzin began fighting French forces (mainly made up of Yoruba, who the Dahomeans had been fighting for centuries). It is said that many of the French soldiers fighting in Dahomey hesitated before shooting or bayoneting the Amazons. The resulting delay led to many of the French casualties. Ultimately, bolstered by the French Foreign Legion, and armed with superior weaponry including machine guns, the French inflicted casualties that were ten times worse on the Dahomey side. After several battles, the French prevailed. The Legionnaires later wrote about the “incredible courage and audacity” of the Amazons. The last surviving Amazon died in 1979.
Economy
Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Fon are farmers, fishermen, and market women. Nowadays they occupy all the positions and jobs to be found in government, civil service, business, and production. Staple crops are yams, maize, and manioc. (Millet was once important.) Beans, peas, peanuts, sorghum, sweet potatoes, onions, okra, peppers, gourds, papayas, bananas, plantains, mangoes, pineapples, oil palms, and some rice and cocoa are also grown. Animals raised include pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, chickens, guinea fowl, ducks, and pigeons. Fishing is of primary importance along the coast and in the Volta region. Cash crops include palm kernels, peanuts, copra, castor beans, kapok, and, by far the most important, coffee and cocoa.
Fon and Ewe market women—both wholesalers and retailers—have a near monopoly on the internal economy. Even in small villages, many women are traders and retailers, selling anything from homemade fermented corn porridge to Coca Cola, often specializing in a single item such as fresh or home-smoked fish, imported Dutch wax cloth, fresh fruits and vegetables, or trade beads.
Industrial Arts. Fon engage in pottery making, wood sculpting (mostly for religious use), and basketwork; in the past, every village had a blacksmith.
Fon people carrying pots at Abomey,Benin
Trade
Fon have traded with Yoruba and Hausa for as long as they have had their present identity. The slave trade and the salt trade brought other traders from the north of present Ewe and Fon regions, including as far north as Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and perhaps Mali and Niger. Portuguese traders reached the coast in the fifteenth century, even before the Ewe and Fon had migrated that far. By the seventeenth century, when the Volta region had become home to an Ewe polity and the Kingdom of Dahomey had regular relations with Ouidah, European commercial envoys were no longer a novelty on what was then called the Slave Coast. The Atlantic commerce in slaves was a significant aspect of Fon life for two centuries.
Market activities are central in all Fon regions. Women almost always have something to sell on market days, including foodstuffs they make themselves. They often buy their husband's or brothers' catch of fish fresh from the sea or river and take it straight to various markets. Or they smoke the fish and take them to markets farther inland. Today European, U.S., and Chinese goods are available even in small Fon village markets more than 150 kilometers from the coast, often taken there by local women who buy the goods in coastal cities.
Abomey-Calavi
Division of Labor
. Apart from the special status of kings in the Kingdom of Dahomey who did not perform manual labor, the main division of labor is along gender lines. Men do heavy agricultural labor such as clearing the land and staking yam vines; they fish, hunt, and build houses. Women participate in the above activities also, such as preparing the palm-frond walling or fencing necessary to hut building, taking charge of butchered animals and fish, and carrying out almost all agricultural tasks except the very heaviest.
Dance of warrior women,Abomey.
Women also carry headloads as heavy as any load men can carry. Although it is often said that only women headload, this is patently untrue. Women are in charge of most market activities, although they may hire men to help them. One of the few items usually sold by men in the market is beef, often brought by Hausa or other Muslim traders. Most other kinds of work, including cooking, may be done by women and men, and even the above-mentioned divisions of labor are not absolute. Women and children may join with men in pulling in the enormous and heavy fishing nets from the surf after a catch. Gender-specific cash savings and work collectives abound, enabling members to have their own banking as well as support in house building, clearing land, harvesting, fishing, marketing, and all other labors. Especially notable are the Fon dokpwe , or cooperative, or tontine (French). Both women and men engage in child care, although women are considered to have greater responsibility in this regard. Groups of men and groups of women may take care of any and all village children in their vicinity at any given time.
Fon woman,Sessimé’s, a Beninese Afropoprock musician
Land Tenure
Anyone from a particular region can farm on land that is not occupied by anyone else. Inside a settlement, a person wishing to employ land must ask permission of the village chief or the elders of the lineage owning the land. Formerly, rights have extended only to use of land; there was no absolute right to the land itself. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, land was by definition the property of the king. In most Ewe regions, land is inherited and administrated by elders of each patriline; any lineage member may build or farm on lineage land as long as she or he respects the rights of others nearby who are already established on the land. Widows of patriline members or other persons not members of the lineage may stay on the land and farm it, but it cannot pass definitively into another lineage.
Only in the last few generations has land come to be alienable from lineage tenure by being mortgaged or sold. Land not already belonging to a lineage (of which there is scarcely any now) may be acquired personally through simply clearing the land, or buying it non-Fon owners; the owner may dispose of such land without consulting lineage elders. Both women and men have rights to lineage land, often now called "inheritance of land," but, in areas where land is scarce, women have difficulty claiming such rights.
Kinship
Kin Groups and Descent. Descent is primarily patrilineal. Fon have exogamous patrisibs composed of lineages, but in the Kingdom of Dahomey the royal sib had exceptional rules. Princesses married commoners and their children belonged to the royal sib, as did the offspring of royal princes. Cross-cousin marriage is preferred among most Fon groups, particularly with mother's brother's daughter.
Holywood Actor djimon Hounsou is a Fon from Benin
Marriage and Family
Marriage. Most Fon marriages are patrilocal, although neolocal residence has become popular in the late twentieth century. Polygyny is the rule if a man has means to marry more than one wife. It is often said that an abuse of polygyny leads wives to leave their husbands for other men, often younger and as yet unmarried, so that women also tend to have more than one husband in their lifetimes. Fon marriages are of two general types, one more prestigious than the other. Prestigious marriage includes payments by the groom to the bride's father or premarital farm labor performed by a man for his future father-in-law. Such bride-wealth or work gives a man control over his children. When this is not performed, the mother and her family have all rights over the children; thus, this sort of marriage is less desirable or prestigious for a husband. Herskovits (1938) outlines thirteen different variations of these two major marriage categories. A man must never refuse a wife offered him, and divorce may be initiated only by the wife's family. In many Ewe groups, marriage is less marked by bride-wealth or bride-service, and even if a man offers only the required drinks and cloths to his bride and her family, he may claim the children as members of his own patriline. In case of separation, a father may keep his children with him, although in many cases wives are allowed to raise the children. Pregnancy makes a marriage complete. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, virginity was demanded of brides in prestigious marriages. Christian Fon proceed according to the arrangements prescribed in their churches.
Domestic Unit. Patrilineal three- or four-generational extended family compounds, as well as agnatic extended family compounds, are common. Another model is a nuclear-family household (often with children from previous marriages) that eventually is joined by other relatives, such as the couple's younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and foster children.
Fon Kid from Benin
If the husband has not vowed monogamy, in time, other wives and their children may come to expand the compound (each wife with her own hut or little house). In many cases, other wives and their children form separate households. Adolescent boys may have collective sleeping quarters separate from their mothers and sisters.
Fon kids at Ouidah,benin
Inheritance. Most Fon property, including land, is inherited patrilineally, although some lineage land remains. Cloth wealth and jewelry sometimes become lineage property too, along with ancestral stools. Individual property, which may include rights to land and fields, may be inherited patrilineally. In some areas the eldest son inherits land rights, but livestock and other individual property go to a man's sister's son. In Lome inheritance is mixed.
Socialization. Virtually everyone, but especially older siblings, takes care of the children. Grandparents, both female and male, also spend considerable time with children. Fishermen in from the sea often sit around in groups during the afternoon, playing boardgames and watching over young children at the same time.
Angelique Kidjo is a fon
Toddlers are passed from person to person, including adolescent boys, who appear to enjoy taking their turns. Mothers and all female relatives carry babies on their backs for much of the day; sometimes doting fathers or other male relatives also wrap babies and toddlers on their backs. Fon adolescents experiment with sexuality early in their teen years, and nowadays pregnancy at a young age, even if the mother is unmarried, is not especially discouraged in many communities. Thus virginity is not as highly valued as it once was.
Young Fon worshippers of a mermaid deity prepare for the Voodoo Festival, in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Young girls help their mothers, often caring for smaller children or carrying loads to market, boys as young as 10 may go to sea with the men and go over the side of the pirogue to drive a school of fish into the nets. Inland, young boys and girls help perform agricultural tasks and care for animals. Children are present at all important social and religious events and may, at a very early age, become "spouses" of important spirits or gods, thus inheriting sizable responsibilities and the special, often prestigious, identity, that goes with them. Children as young as 10 may go into trance during Vodu (Fon) possession ceremonies. They also enjoy such events as recreation and take advantage of opportunities for drumming, singing, and dancing performances; teenagers and young adults may court during and after such religious rituals.
Fon girl braiding her sisters hair at Ouidah,Benin
Political Organization.
Although the Fon kingdom had a centralized state with a powerful ahosu (King), since its collapse that structure is no longer available. Fon villages had village autonomy before they were consolidated into a kingdom in the seventeenth century, and thus each village chief was a "king" (toxosu ) to whom the heads of each compound answered. The Kingdom of Dahomey forced these chiefs to swear loyalty to the ruler or be sacrificed (some were sold into slavery). Sibs in Fon villages have considerable political influence, but the chief is hardly all-powerful.
His Majesty Agboli Agbo Dedjani, Last King of the Dan-Home Dynasty, Abomey, Benin (Dahomey), Africa
Social Control. Although during the colonial period chiefs had considerable control (and still do as far as administrative decisions are concerned), authority is widely distributed in villages and regions. Whereas Fon are nominally under the jurisdiction of French-inspired legal systems, the laws of the ancestors and the moral frameworks of Vodu worship tend to have just as much, if not more, authority than official law in many communities. Even in colonial and precolonial periods, the office of chief and the ranks of the elders were usually filled with men (and some women) who were linked to religious orders.
Fon women at Ouidah
Individual behavior for many is constantly interpreted and adjusted through the lenses of Afa (or Fa) divination, which includes the "laws of destiny," or the "law-deity who brought me here" (esesidomeda ). Thus, supernatural sanctions are more powerful than state legal systems for numerous Fon. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, kings were tyrannical according to numerous sources; village chiefs, in keeping with earlier practices, were not. Decisions of village chiefs had to be reported to the king, however, so that final control was in his hands. The king's tribunal of chiefs was expected to judge harshly so that the king himself could demonstrate clemency by lightening the sentence. During the colonial period, there was great tension between certain Ewe Vodu orders and colonial administrators who claimed the Vodu "courts" were presuming to take the place of official courts. Numerous shrines were thus destroyed by German and French authorities. Vodu worshipers often did not consider the powers of the colonial governments to be legitimate,
Fon people.
Conflict
Conflict in villages is typically brought to a group of "judges," including the chief, Vodu priests, and both male and female elders. The entire village has the right to attend, and whoever wishes to speak may do so. Often divorce cases, theft, assault, and instances of injury through witchcraft do not go before official courts of law. Even cases that do go before official courts of law, including murder, may be rejudged by Vodu priests and communities because the conflict at the source of the crime is not thought to be merely personal. All conflict is a reflection of the social body in its relationship to the rest of the cosmos.
Fon
Religion and Expressive Culture
Religious Beliefs. Various Vodu (Fon) orders are at the foundation of Fon religion. A High God exists, according to numerous informants. Among Fon, Mawu and Lisa are a couple, twins, or a female (Mawu) and male (Lisa) hermaphrodite divinity. Fon may say the world was created by Nana-Buluku, who gave birth to Mawu and Lisa. For others, Nana-Buluku, Mawu, and Lisa are all Vodus, and there is no all-powerful separate creator.
Gu or Egu, the warrior and hunter god of iron, is central among all Fon groups. There are a number of other Vodu orders, including Gorovodu, which is popular across Fon populations in Benin. Mama Tchamba, a related order, involves the worship of the spirits of slaves from the north that Ewe once owned and married. The selfhood of each individual is involved with these major deities and spirit personalities. They are also protectors, healers, judges, and consummate performers.
Vodoun practitioners at Ouidah voodoo festival in Benin
All Vodu orders work hand in hand with Afa (or Fa) divination, a complex interpretive framework within which each person has a life sign (kpoli ), of which there are a total of 256. Each sign is connected to a set of plants and animals, stories and songs, dietary taboos, Vodus, and dangers and strengths, all associated with each other, as though clan-related. Events, projects, activities, and relationships also have their own Afa signs. Everything in the universe is related to Afa texts and themes, as though nature itself were divided into exogamous clans.
Some Fon have become Christians; given their proximity to the coast, these ethnic groups were among the first to accept Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Certain Christian groups originating in West Africa, such as Aladura and Celeste, have a considerable following on the coast.
Fon christian Celestial believers
Religious Practitioners. Vodu priests are usually men, but postmenopausal women may become priestesses. The great majority of spirit hosts or "wives" of the Vodus are women. Priests, priestesses, and "wives" of the Yehve deities (Sosi, Avlesi, Dasi, etc.) do not usually practice trance. Afa diviners are almost always men, although it is said that a woman can become a diviner if she wishes.
vodoun devotees
Ceremonies. Vodu ceremonies are compelling performances for both insiders and outsiders. Worshipers who begin dancing to the drum music may go into trance. Spirits who possess their "wives" may have messages for the community, may take part in judging certain cases of conflict, and may heal the sick. Above all, they are dancing gods, and there are aesthetic conventions that have long traditions.
Fon people of benin performing their Vodoun rituals
In Vodu orders where possession is not usual, ceremonies are all the more dazzling because of the perfection of their collective execution. Rows of dancers, all clothed in ceremonial attire, move across a ritual space as one person, performing specific movements. Drums always provide a sort of text or context for movement, including narrative associations and instruction. Ceremonies are events during which symbolic associations are reinforced, individual and collective identity is stated, certain aspects of identity and power are recalled and redistributed, healing and admonishment take place, and, above all, collective exhilaration, ecstasy, and awe are produced. Ceremonies are always gifts to the gods.
A man slaughters a goat at the Temple of Pythons during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Afa divination involves numerous complicated rituals based on a binary system of questions and responses, and permutations of the 256 life signs associated with collections of oral texts.
vodounsi
Arts.
Fon artists are widely known for their appliqué hangings with legendary motifs from the Kingdom of Dahomey and Vodu culture. Elaborate engraving or carving of calabashes is another Fon art. Brass casting (using the cireperdue, or lost-wax method) has been practiced by the Fon since early times. Brass workers belonged to special guilds in the Kingdom of Dahomey; they created some of the more striking objects constituting the king's wealth. Silverwork was also mastered. Fon still carve wooden bocio figures for spiritual practices, as well as Legba statues (guardian deities) and other Vodu god-objects. Earthen Legbas are also common. Some god-objects, entirely abstract in form, are confected as a collage-sculpture, with numerous ingredients including cowry shells, goat horns, cows' tails, birds' claws, iron bells, and tree roots, all united with red clay and glazed with the blood of sacrificial animals. Drums of many different kinds are produced for specific ceremonies. Vodu costumes for spirit possession may be richly adorned with cowries sewn on in patterns. All of the objects necessary for Fa (Fon) divination are also created with great care and elaboration; thus they are sometimes bought by Europeans as objects of art. Stools are important to Fon lineages. They are often carved with narrative detail so that their symbolic significance is inscribed for future generations to see.
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Festivals
GeledeTraditional Festival of the Fon people in South Benin
Gelede is a cult dedicated to Mother Earth. It is celebrated by the whole community to promote fertility of both the people and the soil. Each mask is sculpted and represents a different character but only the initiates know the true nature and secrets of those symbolic characters.
The masks are brightly painted and move like puppets linking myths and moral stories through mime. It is both educational and quite hilarious. The delighted crowd laugh and clap their hands as they watch in appreciation. It is a fascinating mix of street theatre and magical theatre.
Gelede Mask festival
Egun, traditional Celebration
Egun masks represent the spirits of the deceased and according to the locals; they "are" the deceased.
The men wearing the masks representing Egun are initiates of the cult. Dressed in brightly multicolored clothing, they emerge from the forest and form a procession through the streets of the village, leaping towards any foolish spectator who dares to get too close.
Egun gun traditional masked dancers at Egun festival at Abomey,Benin
You don’t want the Egun to touch you because if he does; there is a danger of death, so watch out! Some people touched by the Egun immediately collapse but fortunately they recover instantly. When they arrive, the masks perform a kind of bull fight which is designed to scare the crowd but instead is greeted with bursts of laughter!
Zangbeto, traditional Celebration of the Fon in South Benin
Zongbeto festival at Ouidah,Benin
The Zangbeto mask is very tall and covered with colored straw. It represents wild non human spirits (the forces of nature and of the night that inhabited the Earth before human beings). The mask wearers belong to a secret society and keep their identity hidden as the non-initiated cannot know who they are.
When Zangbeto comes out, it is a big important event for the village. Its performance guarantees protection against bad spirits and malicious people. The spinning movement of the mask symbolizes the spiritual cleaning of the village and Zangbeto also performs miracles to prove its powers.
Zongbeto and his minder at a Zongbeto festival in Ouidah,Benin
Voodoo Festival at Ouidah (Benin), Jan 10 2013
Dances, libations, masks (some official speech) feature the morning. The first part of the festival ends at about 15h00 and then it continues in the city.
Fon Vodoun practitioners at a festival in Ouidah,Benin
Peoples are never tired to exalting their voodoos. All of them reach a large square where the Eguns masks come together. Masks come for dancing, chasing away the bad spirits , and playing with people like a kind of "corrida".
In the evening Ouidah is exhausted but not yet fully satisfied. The festival goes on in the depths of the courtyards, waiting to meet again the next year so renewing the faith in Voodoo.
Gandaxi Ceremony – Nov. 2012 – Mar. 2013
This is the most important ceremony performed by the King of the Dahomey. Each King has to organize a Gandaxi Ceremony at least once during his reign with the aim to show his people the extent of his wealth as well as the greatness of his mystic power.
The power of the king is based on two dimensions: a temporal dimension and a spiritual one represented by the voodoo religion.
Left: Jean Zossoujbo, a guide at the Temple of Pythons, shows a python to a visitor to the temple in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. Right: A Voodoo worshiper dances during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Sunday Alamba
The next Gandaxi will take place – after the last one was held 30 years ago – from November 2012 to March 2013 and will be divided into two periods lasting 4 ½ months altogether. The first month will be entirely devoted to organization and closed to the public. Then, great surprises will be waiting for us!!!
Medicine. Today many Fon seek medical assistance in modern clinics and hospitals and go to Westerntrained doctors. They may also frequent local healers and Vodu priests who employ plants and carbonized ingredients, as well as rituals to address illness and conflicts playing themselves out in a person's body and soul.
Vodu medicine is not hostile to modern biomedicine. Upon asking Afa, though divination, what to do about illness, a sufferer may be told by Fa to go to a doctor in town. Vodu medicine is particularly effective in cases of madness. Ingestion of roots and plants, as well as "speaking pain and desire" to the Vodus make it possible for the alienated to mourn losses and go on with life once again.
Fon mystic healer/voodoun practitioner and a guide,Jean Zossounjbo, a guide, shows a python at the Temple of Pythons in Ouidah, Benin, on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Death and Afterlife
Upon death, certain aspects of the person are lost forever in their individuated form, whereas other aspects, for example, the djoto, or reincarnation soul, will come back in the next child born to the lineage. The luvo, or death soul, may linger for some time after death, looking just like the person in life and frightening loved ones with demands for attention and its cravings to be still with the living. According to some informants, the person as constituted in life does not survive death, but parts of the personality may indeed continue and even join with Vodus, as part of the conglomerate energy and personality of a deity. Others say that the spirit realm mirrors human life in every aspect, so that after death individuals go on in much the same way as before. Funerals are the single most important event in a person's history, more lavish and expensive than any other celebration or feast. Groups of drummers are hired, and mourners may dance throughout the night for several nights in succession. Attending funerals and contributing to them financially and with food and drink are among the most binding obligations for lineage members, neighbors, friends, chiefs, and Vodu worshipers (above all, for those who belong to the same order as the deceased).
Tribal marks
source:http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3458001484.html
Amazons: inside the King of Dahomey’s all-woman army
Posted: 23 September 2011 in Africa, C18th, C19th, France, War
One of Dahomeys' amazons, with a musket, club, dagger—and her enemy's severed head. From Forbes, Dahomy and the Dahomans (1851).
It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center of the town–Dahomey is renowned as a “Black Sparta,” a fiercely militaristic society bent on conquest, whose soldiers strike fear into their enemies all along what is still known as the Slave Coast. The maneuvers begin in the face of a looming downpour, but King Glele is eager to show off the finest unit in his army to his European guest.
As Father Borghero fans himself, 3,000 heavily armed soldiers march into the square and begin a mock assault on a series of defenses designed to represent an enemy capital. The Dahomean troops are a fearsome sight, barefoot and bristling with clubs and knives. A few, known as Reapers, are armed with gleaming three-foot-long straight razors, each wielded two-handed and capable, the priest is told, of slicing a man clean in two.
The soldiers advance in silence, reconnoitering. Their first obstacle is a wall—huge piles of acacia branches bristling with needle-sharp thorns, forming a barricade that stretches nearly 440 yards. The troops rush it furiously, ignoring the wounds that the two-inch-long thorns inflict. After scrambling to the top, they mime hand-to-hand combat with imaginary defenders, fall back, scale the thorn wall a second time, then storm a group of huts and drag a group of cringing “prisoners” to where Glele stands, assessing their performance. The bravest are presented with belts made from acacia thorns. Proud to show themselves impervious to pain, the warriors strap their trophies around their waists.
Dahomey–renamed Benin in 1975–showing its location in West Africa.
The general who led the assault appears and gives a lengthy speech, comparing the valor of Dahomey’s warrior elite to that of European troops and suggesting that such equally brave peoples should never be enemies. Borghero listens, but his mind is wandering. He finds the general captivating: “slender but shapely, proud of bearing, but without affectation.” Not too tall, perhaps, nor excessively muscular. But then, of course, the general is a woman, as are all 3,000 of her troops. Father Borghero has been watching the King of Dahomey’s famed corps of “amazons,” as contemporary writers termed them—the only female soldiers in the world who then routinely served as combat troops.
When, or indeed why, Dahomey recruited its first female soldiers is not certain. Stanley Alpern, author of the only full-length Engish-language study of them, suggests it may have been in the 17th century, not long after the kingdom was founded by Dako, a leader of the Fon tribe, around 1625. One theory traces their origins to teams of female hunters known as gbeto, and certainly Dahomey was noted for its women hunters; a French naval surgeon named Repin reported in the 1850s that a group of 20 gbeto had attacked a herd of 40 elephants, killing three at the cost of several hunters gored and trampled. A Dahomean tradition relates that when King Gezo (1818-58) praised their courage, the gbeto cockily replied that “a nice manhunt would suit them even better,” so he drafted them drafted into his army. But Alpern cautions that there is no proof that such an incident occurred, and he prefers an alternate theory that suggests the women warriors came into existence as a palace guard in the 1720s.
Women had the advantage of being permitted in the palace precincts after dark (Dahomean men were not), and a bodyguard may have been formed, Alpern says, from among the king’s “third class” wives–those considered insufficiently beautiful to share his bed and who had not borne children. Contrary to 19th century gossip that portrayed the female soldiers as sexually voracious, Dahomey’s female soldiers were formally married to the king—and since he never actually had relations with any of them, marriage rendered them celibate.
Dahomey's female hunters, the gbeto, attack a herd of elephants.
At least one bit of evidence hints that Alpern is right to date the formation of the female corps to the early 18th century: a French slaver named Jean-Pierre Thibault, who called at the Dahomean port of Ouidah in 1725, described seeing groups of third-rank wives armed with long poles and acting as police. And when, four years later, Dahomey’s women warriors made their first appearance in written history, they were helping to recapture the same port after it fell to a surprise attack by theYoruba–a much more numerous tribe from the east who would henceforth be the Dahomeans’ chief enemies.
Dahomey’s female troops were not the only martial women of their time. There were at least a few contemporary examples of successful warrior queens, the best-known of whom was probably Nzinga of Matamba, one of the most important figures in 17th-century Angola—a ruler who fought the Portuguese, quaffed the blood of sacrificial victims, and kept a harem of 60 male concubines, whom she dressed in women’s clothes. Nor were female guards unknown; in the mid-19th century, King Mongkut of Siam (the same monarch memorably portrayed in quite a different light by Yul Brynner in The King and I) employed a bodyguard of 400 women. But Mongkut’s guards performed a ceremonial function, and the king could never bear to send them off to war. What made Dahomey’s women warriors unique was that they fought, and frequently died, for king and country. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that, in the course of just four major campaigns in the latter half of the 19th century, they lost at least 6,000 dead, and perhaps as many as 15,000. In their very last battles, against French troops equipped with vastly superior weaponry, about 1,500 women took the field, and only about 50 remained fit for active duty by the end.
King Gezo, who expanded the female corps from around 600 women to as many as 6,000.
None of this, of course, explains why this female corps arose only in Dahomey. Historian Robin Law, of the University of Stirling, who has made a study of the subject, dismisses the idea that the Fon viewed men and women as equals in any meaningful sense; women fully trained as warriors, he points out, were thought to “become” men, usually at the moment they disemboweled their first enemy. Perhaps the most persuasive possibility is that the Fon were so badly outnumbered by the enemies who encircled them that Dahomey’s kings were forced to conscript women. The Yoruba alone were about ten times as numerous as the Fon.
Backing for this hypothesis can be found in the writings of Commodore Arthur Eardley Wilmot, a British naval officer who called at Dahomey in 1862 and observed that women heavily outnumbered men in its towns—a phenomenon that he attributed partly to military losses. Around the same time Western visitors to Abomey noticed a sharp jump in the number of female soldiers. Records suggest that there were about 600 women in the Dahomean army from the 1760s until the 1840s—at which point King Gezo expanded the corps to as many as 6,000.
No Dahomean records survive to explain Gezo’s expansion, but it was probably connected to a defeat he suffered at the hands of the Yoruba in 1844. Oral traditions suggest that, angered by Dahomean raids on their villages, an army from a tribal grouping known as the Egba mounted a surprise attack that that came close to capturing Gezo and did seize much of his royal regalia, including the king’s valuable umbrella and his sacred stool. “It has been said that only two amazon ‘companies’ existed before Gezo and that he created six new ones,” Alpern notes. “If so, it probably happened at this time.”
Women warriors parade outside the gates of a Dahomean town, with the severed heads of their defeated foes adorning the walls.
Recruiting women into the Dahomean army was not especially difficult, despite the requirement to climb thorn hedges and risk life and limb in battle. Most West African women lived lives of forced drudgery. Gezo’s female troops lived in his compound and were kept well supplied with tobacco, alcohol and slaves–as many as 50 to each warrior, according to the noted traveler Sir Richard Burton, who visited Dahomey in the 1860s. And “when amazons walked out of the palace,” notes Alpern, “they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell. The sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.” To even touch these women meant death.
While Gezo plotted his revenge against the Egba, his new female recruits were put through extensive training. The scaling of vicious thorn hedges was intended to foster the stoical acceptance of pain, and the women also wrestled one another and undertook survival training, being sent into the forest for up to nine days with minimal rations.
"Insensitivity training": female recruits look on as Dahomean troops hurl bound prisoners of war to a mob below.
The aspect of Dahomean military custom that attracted most attention from European visitors, however, was “insensitivity training”—exposing unblooded troops to death. At one annual ceremony, new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets containing bound and gagged prisoners of war, and hurl them over the parapet to a baying mob below. There are also accounts of female soldiers being ordered to carry out executions. Jean Bayol, a French naval officer who visited Abomey in December 1889, watched as a teenage recruit, a girl named Nanisca “who had not yet killed anyone,” was tested. Brought before a young prisoner who sat bound in a basket, she:
walked jauntily up to [him], swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk… She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.
It was this fierceness that most unnerved Western observers, and indeed Dahomey’s African enemies. Not everyone agreed on the quality of the Dahomeans’ military preparedness—European observers were disdainful of the way in which the women handled their ancient flintlock muskets, most firing from the hip rather than aiming from the shoulder, but even the French agreed that they “excelled at hand-to-hand combat” and “handled [knives] admirably.”
For the most part, too, the enlarged female corps enjoyed considerable success in Gezo’s endless wars, specializing in pre-dawn attacks on unsuspecting enemy villages. It was only when they were thrown against the Egba capital,Abeokuta, that they tasted defeat. Two furious assaults on the town, in 1851 and 1864, failed dismally, partially because of Dahomean overconfidence, but mostly because Abeokuta was a formidable target—a huge town ringed with mud-brick walls and harboring a population of 50,000.
Béhanzin, the last king of an independent Dahomey, in 1895.
By the late 1870s Dahomey had begun to temper its military ambitions. Most foreign observers suggest that the women’s corps was reduced to 1,500 soldiers at about this time, but attacks on the Yoruba continued. And the corps still existed 20 years later, when the kingdom at last found itself caught up in the “scramble for Africa,” which saw various European powers competing to absorb slices of the continent into their empires. Dahomey fell within the French sphere of influence, and there was already a small French colony at Porto-Novo when, in about 1889, female troops were involved in an incident that resulted in a full-scale war. According to local oral histories, the spark came when the Dahomeans attacked a village under French suzerainty whose chief tried to avert panic by assuring the inhabitants that the tricolor would protect them. “So you like this flag?” the Dahomean general asked when the settlement had been overrun. “Eh bien, it will serve you.” At the general’s signal, one of the women warriors beheaded the chief with one blow of her cutlass and carried his head back to her new king, Béhanzin, wrapped in the French standard.
The First Franco-Dahomean War, which ensued in 1890, resulted in two major battles, one of which took place in heavy rain at dawn outside Cotonou, on the Bight of Benin. Béhanzin’s army, which included female units, assaulted a French stockade but was driven back in hand-to-hand fighting. No quarter was given on either side, and Jean Bayol saw his chief gunner decapitated by a fighter he recognized as Nanisca, the young woman he had met three months earlier in Abomey as she executed a prisoner. Only the sheer firepower of their modern rifles won the day for the French, and in the battle’s aftermath Bayol found Nanisca lying dead. “The cleaver, with its curved blade, engraved with fetish symbols, was attached to her left wrist by a small cord,” he wrote, “and her right hand was clenched around the barrel of her carbine covered with cowries.”
A group of women warriors in traditional dress.
In the uneasy peace that followed, Béhanzin did his best to equip his army with more modern weapons, but the Dahomeans were still no match for the large French force that was assembled to complete the conquest two years later. That seven-week war was fought even more fiercely than the first. There were 23 separate battles, and once again female troops were in the vanguard of Béhanzin’s forces. The women were the last to surrender, and even then—at least according to a rumor common in the French army of occupation—the survivors took their revenge on the French by covertly substituting themselves for Dahomean women who were taken into the enemy stockade. Each allowed herself to be seduced by French officer, waited for him to fall asleep, and then cut his throat with his own bayonet.
Their last enemies were full of praise for their courage. A French Foreign Legionnaire named Bern lauded them as “warrioresses… [who] fight with extreme valor, always ahead of the other troops. They are outstandingly brave … well trained for combat and very disciplined.” A French Marine, Henri Morienval, thought them “remarkable for their courage and their ferocity… [they] flung themselves on our bayonets with prodigious bravery.”
Most sources suggest that the last of Dahomey’s women warriors died in the 1940s, but Stanley Alpern disputes this. Pointing out that “a woman who had fought the French in her teens would have been no older than 69 in 1943,” he suggests, more pleasingly, that it is likely one or more survived long enough to see her country regain its independence in 1960. As late as 1978, a Beninese historian encountered an extremely old woman in the village of Kinta who convincingly claimed to have fought against the French in 1892. Her name was Nawi, and she died, aged well over 100, in November 1979. Probably she was the last.
What were they like, these scattered survivors of a storied regiment? Some proud but impoverished, it seems; others married; a few tough and argumentative, well capable, Alpern says, of “beating up men who dared to affront them.” And at least one of them still traumatized by her service, a reminder that some military experiences are universal. A Dahomean who grew up in Cotonou in the 1930s recalled that he regularly tormented an elderly woman he and his friends saw shuffling along the road, bent double by tiredness and age. He confided to the French writer Hélène Almeida-Topor that
one day, one of us throws a stone that hits another stone. The noise resounds, a spark flies. We suddenly see the old woman straighten up. Her face is transfigured. She begins to march proudly… Reaching a wall, she lies down on her belly and crawls on her elbows to get round it. She thinks she is holding a rifle because abruptly she shoulders and fires, then reloads her imaginary arm and fires again, imitating the sound of a salvo. Then she leaps, pounces on an imaginary enemy, rolls on the ground in furious hand-t0-hand combat, flattens the foe. With one hand she seems to pin him to the ground, and with the other stabs him repeatedly. Her cries betray her effort. She makes the gesture of cutting to the quick and stands up brandishing her trophy….She intones a song of victory and dances:
Female officers pictured in 1851, wearing symbolic horns of office on their heads.The blood flows,You are dead.The blood flows,We have won.The blood flows, it flows, it flows.The blood flows,The enemy is no more.But suddenly she stops, dazed. Her body bends, hunches, How old she seems, older than before! She walks away with a hesitant step.She is a former warrior, an adult explains…. The battles ended years ago, but she continues the war in her head.
Sources
Hélène Almeida-Topor. Les Amazones: Une Armée de Femmes dans l’Afrique Précoloniale. Paris: Editions Rochevignes, 1984; Stanley Alpern. Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011; Richard Burton. A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. London: RKP, 1966; Robin Law. ‘The ‘Amazons’ of Dahomey.’Paideuma 39 (1993); J.A. Skertchley. Dahomey As It Is: Being a Narrative of Eight Months’ Residence in that Country, with a Full Account of the Notorious Annual Customs… London: Chapman & Hall, 1874. source:http://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/
by: jeffreygreen
Exhibiting captives as trophies was both widespread and ancient, but as European awareness of Africa developed in the 19th century entrepreneurs took advantage of railways and presented Africans around Europe, on stage, and in exhibition centres. Zulus were exhibited in England from 1850, for example. The men, women and children who were presented are part of European popular culture and were seen by hundreds daily. Linking groups of Africans to recent conquests and battles in Africa seemed to attract crowds, and the legendary women soldiers of Dahomey (modern Benin) provided an additional attraction. Dahomey Warriors or Amazon Warriors were exhibited in France soon after their lands were taken by the French in 1890. In 1893 over fifty Africans were exhibited at London’s premier entertainment centre, the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill.
Dahomey Amazon warriors practicing their military skills and posing for the camera. Circa 1893
The group first appeared in May 1893. The Daily Telegraph said ‘Nothing so original has been seen in England for many a long day’ and the Daily Chronicle noted ‘A strong attraction, both for its novelty and the alacrity with which it displays the drill of a savage army’ whilst the London Standard said it was ‘the sight of the season’ and the Africans were the ‘finest of the races of Africa’. They made four appearances daily and numbered 58 people. On 17 June 1893 the showbusiness weekly the Era noted that they ‘go through their war dance and perform athletic feats with marvellous agility’. A group of East Anglian brewery workers on an annual outing visited and the Africans were noted by the Essex County Standard of Colchester (16 September). The brewery staff would have spread the news in Colchester, Eye, Ipswich, Cambridge and Halesworth.
advertisement of Exhibition of Amazon warriors from Dahomey
By October the Warriors were indoors, at London’s Oxford Music Hall. The Era of 7 October noted the senior woman was named Gumma. The Standard advertisement of 17 October said they were ‘grand specimens of Muscular Womanhood’. It was the semi-naked women who attracted crowds to the extent that a shop keeper took the matter to court, for they were accommodated at the Canterbury Music Hall and left every day for the Oxford Music Hall ‘which had the effect of collecting together large crowds nightly’ (Pall Mall Gazette 19 October). Extra police were on duty, the Africans had adopted all the suggestions from the police, and were ‘well wrapped up’. The judge said that if people were ‘foolish enough and curious enough to collect in order to see them, notwithstanding their want of sufficient overcoats – (laughter) – the Court, he thought, should not be asked to prevent them so collecting’. The plaintiff claimed his wholesale clock and watch business was suffering. Many newspapers reported this court case (Standard 19 October; Morning Post 21 October and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 22 October).
Amazon warriors from Dahomey at Crystal Palace for exhibition. Circa 1893
On 18 December they started their show at the Waverley Market, Edinburgh’s Christmas and New Year Carnival (Glasgow Herald 19 and 26 December 1893) and from 8 January 1894 they were at the Olympia in Newcastle. The Newcastle Weekly Courant of 30 December 1893 noted the ‘inhabitants’ numbered fifty, and that, as at the Crystal Palace, Lockhart’s elephants were on show too.
Thousands had seen them but we have no idea what impressions were made or if there were any long-lasting memories. Ethnic exhibitions or human zoos were common for decades but identifying the individuals and learning what they thought of the white public remains guesswork. It is known that a small group of Africans from Sierra Leone worked as ‘Dahomey Warriors’ in Brighton in 1908, and that Joseph Lee, an African American from Maryland, worked for years as Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn Lobagola and published books in the 1920s. Images were everything it seems.
Amazons of Dahomey in Battle. Illustration from Illustrated Travels edited by H W Bates (Cassell, c 1880).
The logistics of travel, accommodation, food and daily care remain to be investigated, although it is known that groups such as the West India Regiment’s band which played at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924 were accommodated in army barracks. Human rights groups often protested, and governments put pressure on colonial authorities, but it was not until the television age that such exhibitions fell from favour.
Béhanzin, King of Dahomey, one of the last African Resistant to French Colonization
Béhanzin (Gbêhanzin) Hossu Bowelle or the ‘King Shark‘ was one the most powerful kings in West Africa at the turn of the 19th century. He was the eleventh king of Dahomey, and the last independent ruler of Abomey before French colonization. Who was really Béhanzin?
Born in 1844 in Abomey, Béhanzin was the eleventh king of Dahomey from 1889 to 1894. His name, Kondo, was changed to Béhanzin after he succeeded to his father Glèlè. His personal symbols were the shark, the egg, and two coconut palm trees, while those of his father were the lion and the ritual knife of Gu. His name actually meant ‘the egg of the world or the son of the shark‘. His great love for the freedom of his country, culture, and people led him to courageously and fiercely defend the land of his ancestors. He led the resistance and fight for the Dahomey’s freedom.
Dahomey was one of most powerful kingdoms of West Africa, deriving its power from trade and its superior army. Dahomey’s army was one of the strongest and best-organized armies in West Africa and was comprised of both men and women, including the Amazons, a superior and dreaded fighting force of female warriors. At the time, Béhanzin masterfully led an army of 15000 men and 5000 amazon women. One of the Amazon leaders was Seh-Dong Hong-Beh (which means “God speaks true“) who led an army of 6000 amazons against the Egba fortress in Abeokuta in 1851.
In 1882, France declared a protectorate over Porto Novo, a vassal state of Abomey, without consulting with the indigenous people, as was (and still is) the practice with Europeans colons. By 1885, the French occupied the entire coastal strip West of Porto Novo. In 1889, King Glèlè and his son Béhanzin, who considered these coastal areas to be part of the kingdom of Dahomey, declared that the Fon people could no longer tolerate France’s actions.
In February 1890, the French occupied Cotonou; Béhanzin, now king after Glèlè’s sudden death, prepared for war. Béhanzin’s army, with rifles supplied by the Germans, were getting too strong for neighboring French colonies. Béhanzin’s forces attacked the French simultaneously on two fronts—militarily at Cotonou and economically by destroying the palm plantations at Porto Novo. The latter precipitated an early end to the hostilities. A treaty was signed, with the French continuing to occupy Cotonou, for which Béhanzin exacted an annuity; he made France pay for the use of Cotonou port. The peace lasted for two years. However, France was determined to annex Dahomey before the British or Germans did. Béhanzin, knowing that he would have to defend his sovereignty, continued upgrading his army in preparation for renewed war.
Combat de Dogba au Dahomey, 19 September 1892
He declared a treaty made with France by his father, Glèlè, in 1868 null and void, from this war began. In 1894, Béhanzin was defeated by Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a Senegalese mulatto, who was sent to fight against him with powerful French armed forces. Béhanzin, not wanting his people to be massacred, surrendered his person to Dodds, without signing any instrument of national surrender or treaty. Béhanzin thought that he will get a chance to talk to the French president and find a way or sign a conciliation agreement for his country, unfortunately, the French tricked him and instead of going to France, Behanzin was exiled to Martinique. With Béhanzin and his immediate family adamantly refusing to sign a treaty making Dahomey a French protectorate, the French installed their choice, Agoli-Agbo, as king; Agoli Agbo, the puppet, did not last more than 6 years (when he asked for more freedom to rule, he was deported to Gabon). Dahomey was then placed under France’s protection and it eventually became a French colony. Béhanzin died in 1906 in Algeria. In 1928, his son, Ouanilo (who was also France’s first African attorney in 1920) had his body moved to Dahomey. Ouanilo’s remains will be restituted to Benin almost 80 years after his death.
Béhanzin once said: «Vous pouvez arracher l’homme de son pays, mais vous ne pouvez arracher son pays du cÅ“ur de l’homme, ni arracher un grand homme de l’histoire.» [You can remove a man from his country, but you can never remove his country from a man's heart, or erase a great man from history]. Béhanzin truly loved his people, and when he saw that his army was being massacred by the French, he cried for his beautiful and strong amazons, and pronounced the most beautiful ode to them
King Behanzin in exile in Algeria
[Où sont maintenant les ardentes amazones qu’enflammait une sainte colère? ... Qui chantera leurs splendides sacrifices? Qui dira leur générosité? ... comment accepterais-je sans eux une quelconque abdication? Comment oserais-je me présenter devant vous, braves guerriers, si je signais le papier du Général? ... pour la survie de mon peuple, [j'accepte] de rencontrer dans son pays, selon sa promesse, le président des Français. –
Where are now the ardent amazons who were inflamed by a mighty anger? … Who will praise their splendid sacrifices? … Who will tell about their generosity? … How could I accept any sort of abdication without them? How could I dare presenting myself to you, brave warriors, if I signed the general’s paper?… for the survival of my people, [I agree] to meet in his country, according to his promise, the president of the French].
Please watch this great documentary about the life of Béhanzin, the last king of the Dahomey (part 1 – 4), and one of the last resistant to French colonization. Why was he defeated? He said himself: «malgré la justesse de notre cause, notre vaillance et notre détermination, ils n’ont pu l’emporter et s’accaparer de la terre de nos aïeux que par la force de leur science» [despite the legitimacy of our cause, our courage, and determination, they could only win and take the land of our forefathers because of the force of their science]. Check out the website djime.com entirely dedicated to Béhanzin and his heritage. To learn more about Dahomey’s Amazons, check out the Smithsonian blog. This facebook page provides details about the organization of the amazons in the army. Don’t forget to offer your support to the Agongointo Musée du passé vivant dedicated to the kingdom of Dahomey.
Source:
FACES OF FON PEOPLE
Sessimé’s, a Beninese Afropoprock musician,
Egungun festival Ouidah,benin
Temple of voodoo in Ouidah,Benin
Djimon Hounsou and family
Voodoo priestess Djbassi Manonwomin leads fellow worshippers of a mermaid deity to a Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Voodoo dolls are seen wrapped into a woman's dress, during the Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Jon Gambrell
Voodoo worshippers make sacrifice at the beach during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. AP / Sunday Alamba
Voodoo chiefs walk past The Point of No Return monument, which commemorates the slave trade during the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, Benin, on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013.AP / Sunday Alamba
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