A Brief History of Modern Benin

I recently returned from another youth camp in the hilly central region of the Collines. This is the furthest north in Benin I have ever gone, and a week of conducting trainings on food conservation, business acumen, and reproductive health was capped with two excursions onto nearby rocky hills. The breathtaking views of the city of Dassa and the rolling countryside beyond proved a beautiful and stark contrast to my work site’s red soils, sand, and lakeshore.

The real excitement these days, however, comes with the arrival of August 1, Beninese Independence Day. Parties and parades abound throughout the country as the people celebrate their shared history. In the spirit of Peace Corps’ Goal 3, I thought it a swell and hopefully-not-too-boring idea to write for my blog audience a brief history of modern Benin. While certainly abridged and far from definitive, I hope the following information will grant you a better understanding of both Benin’s place in history and the historical origins of its current state.

We can trace modern Benin back to the rise of the Kingdom of Dahomey. In the 17^th century the Fon-speaking and Vodoun population of Dahomey developed out of large communities on the southcentral plateau. The Kingdom organized a standing army and government ministries more advanced than any of its neighbors, leading to successful conquests of most of what is central and southern modern-day Benin by 1730. A key component of the Dahomean army was the Ahosi, an elite female soldier corps later called the Amazons by Europeans. With control over key coastal cities like Ouidah, Dahomey became a major player in the Atlantic Slave Trade, contributing around a quarter of all slaves bound for the New World. It supplied slaves from raiding weaker kingdoms in the region and aligning with Portuguese traders.

The Ahosi (Amazons)

Meanwhile, Christianity was introduced to the southern region by European missionaries, and Islam spread north of Dahomey in the kingdoms of Borgou and Dendi. Vodoun remained strong as the state religion of Dahomey, reinforced by temples and ceremonies from Ouidah to the capital of Abomey. Trade with Europeans supplied Dahomey with guns, precious metals, and New World crops like maize and cassava, which are now at the center of southern Beninese agriculture. The slave trade dissipated in the 19^th century with abolition in Britain and the United States, weakening the Kingdom of Dahomey.

With the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, France laid claim to a sliver of land between the British protectorates of Ghana (the Gold Coast) and Nigeria. At first glance, this choice of Christian and Vodoun communities in the south and Muslims in the north looks like clumsy nation-building. The reality, however, is that the French sanctioned a colony for conquering, not a nation for building. In coastal West Africa, cultural similarities run east-west. The Fon people shared culture (and sometimes language) with their Yoruba neighbors to the east and their Ife and Akan neighbors to the west. They shared nothing with their Dendi and Bariba neighbors to the north who were Muslim and from a different language family. The French claimed a territory of disunified, disparate, and easily-conquerable peoples. The English did the same in Ghana and Nigeria. Thus, a sinister game of divide and conquer was afoot throughout Africa.

The Kingdom of Dahomey would not go down without a fight. King Béhanzin rejected French offers of protectorate status and waged war against the invaders, employing imported guns, an isolation strategy, and the Ahosi with strong effect. The French fought back with superior weaponry, burning down sacred forests, and improved finances after a successful propaganda campaign in France described the Dahomeans and Ahosi as savages. Béhanzin surrendered in 1894 without signing any treaties. This act of self-sacrifice had two grave consequences. First, the French kept him in legal custody until his death, never allowing him to travel to France to negotiate colonization. Second, the French were thus free to choose his successor as a pawn for their colonial government.

Béhanzin surrenders

The French marveled at the administrative complexity of Dahomey. They soon adopted it for their new colony of the same name (to the chagrin of non-Dahomean northerners) and replicated it throughout West Africa. Doing so was an intentional move to administer colonies of millions of people with minimal presence of actual French colonizers. Africanist historians like Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen and Subject call this indirect rule. Far from granting conquered communities autonomy, indirect rule subjugated natives to oppressive labor systems, political apartheid, and a corrupt judicial system. The new judiciary was administered by local chiefs, making it look traditional. In reality, the chiefs were agents of French colonial power, installed even where there never were traditional chiefs, and tasked not with justice but with population control and manipulation. Sustained by French money and power, these chiefs facilitated the French oppression of the population.

At the same time, the French conscripted northern farmers into cotton production solely for export to metropolitan France. France had already done this successfully with peanuts in Senegal, cotton in Burkina Faso and Mali, and cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire. The result was an agricultural system developed only for subsistence agriculture in the south and cotton in the north. This scheme led to infrastructure and technology adapted exclusively for cotton, making the economy dependent on the crop to purchase foreign goods. Such dependency is disastrous for the economy when prices plummet (as they recently have) and with the harsh soil effects of continual cotton production.

The French contributed incrementally to the infrastructure of Dahomey until its independence alongside many other African countries in 1960. Chiefs became locally elected leaders instead of agents of the state. The Republic of Dahomey was formed and governed by a series of many presidents over its first dozen years, forced in and out by coups and power sharing schemes. In 1972, Lt. Col. Mathieu Kérékou stabilized the government with a coup in the name of Marxist-Leninism. He renamed the country the People’s Republic of Benin to avoid the ethnic tensions of the name of Dahomey, and aligned his government with China, North Korea, and Libya. Nationalized industries and brain drain characterized much of the Kérékou government until protests and reforms introduced a new, French-style constitution for the Republic of Benin in 1990. The economy embraced freer markets, political parties multiplied, and elections by 2006 were hailed as fair by international watchdogs. The current president and businessman Patrice Talon was elected in 2016.

I hope this brief history of modern Benin provides context to my readers when they consider the origins of global poverty. Centuries of the slave trade, divide-and-conquer national boundaries, oppressive indirect rule, and cotton dependency never gave Benin foundation for nationwide development until recently. Without historical context we forget the human dimension of today’s issues and yesterday’s transgressions. It then becomes easy to label poor countries a host of derogatory names and call it truth, so let’s not forget shared responsibility. Fortunately, Benin is not bound by its history. No country is. As growth rates climb and efforts for food security and public health advance, Benin has a lot to celebrate today in addition to its rich history and culture. Happy Independence Day, Benin! You’ve earned it.