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| Map of West Africa by Hermann Moll (George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida) |
In September of 2022, the Woman King came to theatres. The movie was surrounded by controversy. The marketing glorified Dahomey’s all-female warrior unit, the Agojie, as black freedom fighters battling white domination. Naturally those who saw the trailer looked into the background of the Agojie and were shocked to learn that they served a kingdom that much of its wealth from selling other Africans to Europeans, not to mention using slave labor to run its internal economy. The movie is not quite as bad as suspected, but still rewrites parts of history to enable a good guys (or in this case good girls) versus bad guys narrative.
My own curiosity piqued, I’ve read several books and many articles on the Kingdom of Dahomey. I do not specialize in African history, but I hope this will be a good short history of a West African kingdom. I do not have access to all the primary source accounts of Dahomey, but secondary sources reference and quote them at length. I.A. Akinjogbin’ Dahomey and it’s Neighbours is a detailed summary of the Tegbesu Dynasty, which ruled from 1708 to 1818. I will thus be using it frequently in my first two parts. Robin Law’s Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ covers the primary port and point of contact with Europeans. Ouidah saw a million slaves pass from Africa over the Atlantic to American colonies and Law does a great job covering every aspect of the slave trade and relations with Europeans. Melville Herskovits' Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom is not a narrative history but a summary of Dahomean social, cultural, and religious practices. Basil Davidson’s The African Past and Dov Ronen’s Dahomey: Between Tradition and Modernity offer more simplified summaries of Dahomey history. Finally there is Stanley Alpern’s Amazons of Black Sparta, the only full-length study of the all-female Agojie warriors. It goes into further detail on women in Precolonial Dahomey and various military operations.
Chapter I: Origins
The Founding
Dahomey occupied what is now the southern third of Benin (on the West Coast of Africa south of Nigeria). It was made up of the Fon People and centered on the Abomey Plateau. They originated the Aja, a subset of a greater Yoruba culture that dominated the armpit of Africa. They became Fon when they mingled with the other residents of late Medieval Benin. In the 17th Century, the peoples that lived in what is now southern Benin mostly resided within city-state kingdoms. At its inception Dahomey existed alongside Allada, Jakin, Ouidah, and Popo (all of which would one day be absorbed into Dahomey via conquest). Each of these kingdoms had a main town where the king resided, and a few or more other major towns alongside various villages. Each king had under him a group of chiefs, who like him practiced hereditary succession. Familial and biological bonds were considered the most important building blocks of Aja culture and the basis for citizenship. The emphasis on kinship groups meant that the kings had no actual centralized government or army. It was the kinship groups that guided the course of these little kingdoms.
Even
after the king became a powerful tyrant, kinship and familial groups remained
deeply important to Dahomean life. In fact, the people had a sense that the
dead, relations of blood, were still with them. This resulted in much ancestor
worship, and Dahomeans looked forward to being deified upon death. Unfortunately many West Africans believed that human sacrifice was a
way for the living to show their allegiance to the dead. War captives were sacrificed to
ancestors in large ceremonies. This practice was carried out in Dahomey at least as early as the 1720s.
The
actual origin of Dahomey is unclear, obscured by various legends and folk
traditions. One of the more accepted narratives is that the ruler of Allada,
Agassu, gave his son Dakodonu Abomey, 90 miles from the Atlantic coast. One
of Abomey’s local chiefs, Dan, did not like this intrusion and asked Dakodonu,
“Should I open up my belly and build you a house in it?” Dakodonu took his
advice, killing Dan and building Dahomey on the spot of the deed. Around the
time of this legend, 1600, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was going into full
swing.
Slavery
had long existed in this part, in fact most parts, of Africa. Still, it took
time for it to become a booming business for Dahomey and its neighbors. The
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was started by the Portuguese and Dutch in the 16th
Century. These men violently seized people on the coast and took them to the
West Indies and Latina America. Rival European powers who established trade
settlements on the coast increased political animosity between the groups by
hiring African men as soldiers to fight each other. The Aja somehow escaped
these historical developments until the end of the 16th Century when
the Dutch arrived hoping to get a monopoly on slaves in the area. The slave
trade, which incentivized militarism and produced economic changes, would
completely transform the social workings of the region. The two Aja powers to
rise throughout the 18th were Allada and Whydah (later spelled Ouidah. I will the
latter spelling for consistency’s sake).
Dakodonu’s
successor was Wegbaja, considered by many as the true founder of Dahomey’s
Kingdom. He was the one to lay down how the kingdom would be governed. Wegbaja
ruled from the 1640s up to 1685. He undertook a period of expansionism,
allowing Dahomey to also attain the title of empire (though the rulers were
never referred to as king). Oral tradition credits with having made pre-dawn
attacks the main tactic of Dahomey’s military. This tactic would be useful in
procuring slaves for the Europeans. Some also say that he, not his predecessor,
also established the palace at Abomey and thus the royal capital. From there he
worked to cement the power of the king. He alone could punish criminals and
deal out death penalties, and had oversight over military campaigns. Despite Wegbaja’s
bid for more power, Dahomey was in a subordinate position to Allada.
For
those interested in the Agojie, they will not find them in Dahomey’s early
history. However there was a precursor. Dahomean kings had thousands of
“wives.” Some were true wives that they would sleep with, but others were in
fact royal servants or bodyguards. One unique wing of the bodyguard was the
gbeto. The gbeto were a collection of women who hunted elephants for the king.
They would give him ivory to keep or sell to Europeans, as well as elephant
meat for feasts. Even after they were absorbed into the Agojie, they continued
to hunt the pachyderms. One French observer claimed that they wore their hair
in a horn-like fashion, so that when they crawled through the tall grass their
prey mistook them for harmless antelopes.
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| Female hunters still hunted elephants for the king in the 19th Century, as shown in this drawing. This particular hunt appears to have gone awry, with the elephants goring the gbeto on their tusks. |
Dahomey Becomes a
Power
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| Map of the kingdoms in 1724 (https://thinkafrica.net/dahomey-the-real-dora-milaje/) |
Back
in Dahomey, Akaba succeeded Wegbaja as king. According to tradition, Akaba had
a twin sister, Ahangbe. In Dahomean culture, twins were believed to have a
special guardian, and were afforded equal treatment. They were considered divine
reflections of each other. Thus Ahangbe was named co-regent. When Akaba died in
1708, she became ruling regent until her brother’s son could come of age. Her
reign is estimated to have lasted from about three months to about three years.
She proved unpopular, not because of her sex, but because she adopted an
outwardly hedonistic lifestyle unbefitting a regent. To force her removal,
assassins murdered her nephew. Now having to resign, she publicly stripped
naked, washed herself, and predicted catastrophe for Dahomey. This event would
be recalled in the 1890s when France conquered the kingdom. After this display her brother Dosu took the
throne, where he assumed the new name Agaja. The story of Ahangbe’s short reign
is interesting, but could be a concoction of propaganda on behalf of Agaja.
It’s just as likely Agaja ordered the assassination of his nephew himself so
that he could assume power.
Dahomeans
at this time undertook a revolution of politics, in which obedience to a
central king overruled the former emphasis on family groups. Force would also
take precedence over blood (though the kingdom would be ruled by two hereditary
dynasties). With his people constantly hit by slaving raids from powerful neighbors,
Agaja sought to increase Dahomey’s military potential and take part of the
Atlantic Coast. By doing so he would not only defend his people, but also take
over a good cut of the slaving business. With the coast he could trade slaves
for firearms. Agaja first tried negotiation, sending ambassadors to the
European trading posts at sites like Ouidah. The port officials refused to
grant him access to the ocean, so he felt justified in beginning a military
campaign against Allada, Ouidah, and various other neighbors.
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| King Agaja's Emblem, a ship. |
Though smaller than Allada and Ouidah, Dahomey was much more efficiently organized for inter-kingdom warfare thanks to the centralized regal power. The two city-states, by contrast, suffered from internal strife. For the first years of Agaja’s reign Dahomey conquered several of its smaller neighbors. In 1724 King Agaja began a three-year conquest and consolidation of the larger Aja kingdoms into the Kingdom of Dahomey. He first took over the Kingdom of Allada. Allada’s throne was in dispute between two possible rulers. The loser in this contest appealed to Agaja for help. Agaja obliged, but in truth sought Allada for himself. He conquered Allada after quickly. The battle was followed by the killings or imprisonment of the king and the major chiefs. In the same year Agaja also the important port city of Jakin.
In
March 1727 Agaja invaded Ouidah. Agaja had held off on his designs for Ouidah
because though it was weakened by internal divisions (one contemporary British
history claims that the king there was a “tool of a train of
designing ministers”), it had good relations with the Europeans and thus access to their weapons. Now he felt confident
enough to attempt it. At first the Dahomeans found their way blocked by the river that marked their border. The Hueda (the dominant ethnic group of Ouidah), believed that the invasion was over before it began. Agaja's men simply looked for and found another crossing further away. On March 9 the Dahomeans took and destroyed the capital
of Savi, even razing the European factories there. Ouidah's internal divisions helps explain the
invaders’ rapid conquests in this war. One European chronicle writes, “Those slain and made
prisoners were innumerable; and thousands, who sheltered themselves up and down
the country among the bushes afterwards perished by sword and famine.” Shortly
the army reached the prized port of Ouidah itself.
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| King Huffon sports a European wig. His date of death is 1727, indicating that the Dahomeans got and executed him. |
King Huffon offered his subservience. Agaja replied, however, that he must hand himself and some of his prominent men over to secure Dahomean control. Instead of complying, they sought refuge at the European forts. Agaja was outraged that these foreigners would give his enemies succor and directed his soldiers against them. They captured and razed the Portuguese fort and laid siege to the English and French posts. Agaja soon broke off the sieges, since the Europeans were prospective business partners. He withdrew the army, along with captured Portuguese cannons, when the Hueda were able to enlist an ally to march against him. King Huffon's date of death is 1727, indicating that Agaja was able to execute him.
Agaja
was not done with wars. At one point he had to reconquer the trading city of Jakin
when its merchant class rebelled against what they saw as Dahomeans’ “unfit for
commerce.” Agaja’s reprisal was brutal. Thousands of people of Jakin were
killed or taken prisoner. The Dahomeans also seized the Europeans there, but
Agaja treated them graciously, seeing that they were well fed before their
release. Agaja also warred with the Mahi to the north, and continued to
confront the Hueda in his bid to cement control over Ouidah.
Ouidah
was one of the primary slaving ports of West Africa for two centuries, sending
at least a million slaves to the Americas. This became moreso when Jakin,
Dahomey’s other favored port, was destroyed in 1732. Dahomey control of Ouidah
was not firmly established for several years, as the Hueda, Little Popo, and
even Europeans made attempts to take the port for themselves. Eventually
Dahomey cemented control. The town was technically not a port as it sat a few
miles inland by a lagoon. Ships could not even go to the coast proper, as
sandbars prevented large vessels from getting their cargo. The Dahomeans sent
men out on canoes to the waiting Europeans to make business arrangements. Trade
at Ouidah was primarily conducted by its former rulers, who were now middlemen
between Dahomey and the Europeans. King Agaja set up this arrangement to ease
relations with the Hueda and prevent further uprisings by them. Ouidah remained
somewhat separate from Dahomey proper all throughout the 18th
Century. One European observer saw it as an “entity which could not be wholly
controlled” by its master.
Conquered by the
Oyo
With
his centralization of power and successful conquests, Agaja founded the Tegbesu
Dynasty. Ironically in light of future history, Agaja was actually an enemy of
the slave trade. In fact the Dahomey had halted Allada slave raiding on several
occasions. Agaja was not opposed to slavery itself, having hundreds of bondsmen
working his fields. He was opposed to the slave trade itself as the root cause
of Aja instability. He hoped to replace slaves with other forms of goods. As
the Dahomeans conquered their Aja brethren, the supply of slaves dried up, much
to the frustration of European traders who suddenly could not fill their slave
ships. Agaja also assailed their coastal forts and burned down their factories,
forcing them to trade gifts in exchange for their lives.
In
1738 the Oyo, a Yoruba empire based in what is now southern Nigeria and
northern Benin, invaded the emergent kingdom. One contemporary British writer
called them “the scourge and terror of all their neighbours.” Their horses gave
them a large advantage over the Aja People. In Dahomean territory the tsetse
fly killed the animals and prevented their use. In Dahomey the Oyo “laid the
country waste with fired and sword to the gates of Abomey” (some sources say
that the Dahomeans actually burned their own crops to deny them food). Agaja
gathered every warrior he could find to defend the capital, but was still
outnumbered.
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| A Yoruba horseman waits for his servants to feed and tend to his mount. The Oyo had slaves devoted to taking care of their steeds. These horses gave them a military advantage over their southern neighbors. |
The defenders had the advantage of a defensive moat. The Oyo attacked them in the morning, only to be repulsed twice. Despite their setbacks, the Oyo had a seemingly endless line of supplies and gradually wore down the Dahomey. Agaja ordered an evacuated of himself, the wounded, and the women and children to Zassa, 25 miles away. Later the king and his entourage moved even further away, while Agaow, his general, continued to fight a delaying action at Abomey. Once the king was safely removed Agaow withdrew. Agaja ended his opposition to the slave trade. He felt he needed it to maintain his remaining power after his defeat. He died in 1740, having almost accomplished what he set out to do, only for the Oyo to have ruined his long-terms plans. The Oyo would invade for years afterward.
Agaja’s
son Tegbesu assumed the throne after a struggle with his older brother Zingah.
He had Zingah wrapped in a hammock and drowned in the sea while his accomplices
were executed or sold into slavery. He did the same to any perceived internal
threats. The Oyo continued their annual invasions. The Dahomey were so cowed by
their powerful northern neighbor that their response was to abandon the towns,
split up, and hide out in fortresses and hills. Tegbesu struggled to arrange a
treaty to save his kingdom. In 1747 the two kingdoms finally arranged one.
Dahomey would pay a heavy tribute every year (in November). The deal was not
entirely one-sided, as the Oyo would send its military to repel any invaders of
Dahomey.
Tegbesu
would continue Dahomey’s involvement in the slave trade, with all the ills and
economic vulnerabilities that would entail.
Sources
"African Eighteenth Century Warfare I." https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2015/08/23/african-eighteenth-century-warfare-i/
Akinjogbin,
I.A. Dahomey and it’s Neighbours:
1708-1818. Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Alagoa, E.H.
“Fon and Yoruba: the Niger Delta and the Cameroon” in General History of Africa Vol. V: Africa from the Sixteenth tot eh
Eighteenth Century. UNESCO, 1992: 434-452.
Alpern, Stanley
BB. Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women
Warriors of Dahomey. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Bay, Edna G. “Belief, Legitimacy and the Kpojito: An Institutional History of the ‘Queen Mother’ in Precolonial Dahomey.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1995): 1-27.
Dalzel,
Archibald. The History of Dahomy, an
Inland Kingdom of Africa. London: T. Spilbury and Son, 1793.
Davidson, Basil
(ed.). The African Past: Chronicles from
Antiquity to Modern Times. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964.
Herskovits,
Melville J. Dahomey: An Ancient West
African Kingdom. New York: J.J. Augustin, 1938.
“Kingdom of
Dahomey,” https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Kingdom_of_Dahomey
Law, Robin. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African
Slaving ‘Port,’ 1727-1892. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.
Ronen, Dov. Dahomey: Between Tradition and Modernity.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
“Twins.” https://www.culturesofwestafrica.com/twins/
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