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Description

This one was a suggestion from Sport16ing way back in September of last year and I'm only just now getting around to it.

---

It's extremely rare to find a single event in history that you can point to and say "This is where it all changed". Even if you can, it more often than not needs to be couched in the various social forces and political environment which that event was contemporaneous with, and for Dahomey this event is placed at the Annual Customs of 1818. King Adandozan's reign had been troubled from the moment of his accession, facing pressure from the British to abolish the slave trade and circling European vultures that eyed his kingdom enviously, this on top of his state sitting under the yoke of the Oyo Empire. His efforts at reform were unable to achieve positive results, the Oyo were breathing down his neck, and on top of that Brazil still demanded fresh slaves imported from the ports that Dahomey controlled. It was in this environment that one of his younger brothers, Madogungun, conspired with the slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa to overthrow him, for the sake of Dahomey's economic well-being.

What exactly happened in the palace that day may never be known. Some things are obvious: Madogungun was defeated and imprisoned, de Sousa was killed, and Adandozan remained King. In the years that followed, Madogungun was effectively erased from his own life; still alive, but subjected to Damnato Memoriae. Any achievements he had before his attempted coup were attributed to his brother, while de Sousa was endlessly vilified and used as a poster child for Adandozan's campaign against the Portuguese and Brazilians, culminating in his attack on Porto-Novo and expelling the slave traders from the country. The resulting economic shocks were harsh for Dahomey, but with Portugal spiraling out of control and the goodwill of Britain for Dahomey now toeing the line on the slave trade, Adandozan was able to invite trade and economic investment which helped spur his new efforts to restructure the economy of his country. This in turn led to his gaining access to British weapons, which he then turned on the Oyo and ended Dahomey's vassalage to the Oyo. As a symbol of this new era of ascension for his kingdom Adandozan declared the founding of a new capital city at what is now Kutonou, and a grand new palace to accompany it.

Much of this is muddled by the history of Dahomey was very much controlled from the top-down. For instance Adandozan is credited with founding Kutonou, but others have long suggested the idea was originally Madogungun's and his older brother appropriated it. Others have said that Kutonou's founding was less to create a grand new capital for the burgeoning state and more to do with removing himself from the traditional capital of Abomey, where bureaucrats were loyal but disgruntled and had become increasingly obstinate in their opposing the King's reform efforts. Indeed, Adandozan never relinquished Abomey's status as a capital and instead referred to both Abomey and Kutonou as officially co-equal capitals, though from 1831 onwards he rarely spent any time in Abomey and instead lavished his attention on Kutonou while his son and heir Dakpo handled affairs in the old capital. Madogungun was also given far more credit for the malcontent in Dahomey than had previously been known, blamed for everything from economic malaise to the encroaching Portuguese-Brazilian influences, when there is little evidence that he held any significant influence in government prior to (and especially after) the attempted coup.

All interpretations aside, the new path which Dahomey had been set upon was one that saw the nation undergo a rapid ascension in the region. The Oyo Empire, already in decline, faced the vigorous new state expanding against it. Dahomey in turn began to expand against other groups of the region. These conquests were as much driven by the desire of a king for growth as it was for economics' sake. With the slave trade now fully abolished almost overnight, Dahomey needed new economic drivers, and the embrace of a war economy filled this role. Plunder from the newly conquered territories were used to fill the treasury, and access to new resources enabled the country to further expand its development. Such is the cyclical nature of Adandozan's reign: war brought plunder and new access to resources that were used to fund the next war, and so on and so on. By the time that Adandozan died, Dahomey had nearly quintupled in territory and conquered the coasts between the Volta and Ogun Rivers.

The ascension of Dakpo as King Adandozan II marked another pivot for the nation. Dahomey was now well-placed to consolidate itself without significant threats within the region, but it was also increasingly obvious that European powers were still eyeing the nation greedily. To this extent, Adandozan II positioned himself as a staunch Europhile and convert of Christianity, taking the baptismal name George Charles Aladaxonou and traveling to Paris and London to meet with Napoleon III and Victoria themselves. Kutonou was designed in the model of a European capital, even going so far as to invite Haussman himself to oversee the plans. Of course, the actual merit of this is doubted then as now, with many wondering aloud if Adandozan II was actually attempting to reform his country or give the appearance of it to dissuade Europe from simply dismissing its achievements and invading anyways. After all, Adandozan II was never seen actually practicing the Christian faith after his conversion, and regularly carried out the old animist traditions of the kingdom. It had the desired effect, though.

Dahomey by 1880 had come to be the largest state in West Africa and had positioned itself to become one of the few surviving native African states that hadn't been subsumed by a European colonial power, both before and after the Berlin Conference. It was after the death of Adandozan II and the rise of King Kefa I that matters with Europe began to reach a fever pitch. Although the kingdom had been able to circumvent most of the grabs by Britain and France at its territory, the kingdom's main enemy had become Germany. Under Wilhelm II, German colonial policy was growing ever-more aggressive, and it was the desire of the German colonial office to gain an inroad into Western Africa. Gustav Nachtigal, a German commissioner, began the process by negotiating with several Ewe chiefs in the region of Alomé to create a German protectorate, something which did not go unnoticed by Kutonou. The Germans had expected a conflict, and still riding high on their victory over France in 1871 boldly went forth to war.

It was a disaster. The Germans were ill-prepared for the logistics of movement through the region, and even the Ewe chiefs were divided in their loyalties, further undermining the German war effort. On top of this the Dahomean government had creative extensive networks of information and espionage despite the relatively undeveloped hinterlands of the country. This enabled swift responses to German movements, and even if the German guns were superior to the Dahomeans their ability to leverage terrain, politics, and logistics to their advantage gave them the capacity to drive the Germans back out of their country. Under threat of French intervention, Germany was forced to withdraw with wounded their pride unassuaged. Much as with the Italo-Ethiopian War that would come a mere six months later, Dahomey had achieved what had seemed impossible: the defeat of a European power by an African power, later garnished by the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. At the turn of the 20th Century, when Europe stood astride the world like a colossus, Dahomey was one of an exclusive club of those not wholly underfoot.

Even if independent, it could not remain totally avoidant of European affairs, not least for the fact that Dahomey may have largely controlled its internal markets but trade and diplomacy still had to be carried out through a European lens. Dahomey's efforts to expand its navy had to be done carefully to avoid provoking Britain and France, both of whom surrounded it with their colonial domains and still held on to the idea that Dahomey might be brought into their grasp. All the same, they carried out border negotiations with the African power to resolve border conflicts, not that it meant much to prevent a long-standing dispute between Dahomey and Nigeria over the so-called "Okuta Triangle". Inevitably, the European powers would then be drawn into the chaos of World War I, which saw Germany defeated and wholly evicted from her colonial empire. Dahomey was neutral in the conflict, and unlike Ethiopia was positioned to again avoid World War II even if it would eventually join the latter conflict in 1944 two weeks after Liberia.

Most of the trouble had to do with the social forces that were emerging in the later decades of the Age of Empires. Throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Dahomey stood as a model of African resistance to European encroachment, and had become an icon for African independence movements, though always with some level of deference to Ethiopia as the "senior" to Dahomey's "junior". Dahomey happily hosted many pro-independence activists and was an advocate for decolonization, but its ability to serve as a "leader" in this field was constantly hobbled by internal struggles over policy and issues of government which had as much to do with struggles within the palace as the more "commonplace" struggles of African nations with regard to ethnic, linguistic, and religious conflict. The Dahomean efforts at maintaining a strong, authoritarian monarchy and centralized government was increasingly at odds with the fact that Dahomey was no longer a small Fon-dominated state, and was in practice as much of an "Empire" as Ethiopia was with all the struggles that came with it.

Much like Ethiopia, the Dahomean monarchy would not last long into the late 20th Century. As early as 1950, as decolonization was going into full swing, the idea of a "republic" had gone from a rarity to the norm, and many who were disaffected by Fon domination of society and politics began to rally to the cause of republicanism. In this regard the republicans found support from the Soviet Union, as the monarchy had become increasingly reliant on aid from the United States and United Kingdom as a "bulwark against communism" under the containment doctrine. Of course, this could only go so far and not long after Kwame Nkrumah was elected President of Ghana in 1960, the House of Aladaxonou was subjected to a palace coup, the "Red Morning", when royal guards locked down the palace and massacred the royal family. What was expected to be a coup d'etat instead turned into a gargantuan civil war which tore across Dahomey for the next eight years.

After spending so long removed from European control, Dahomey rapidly fell into becoming a battleground for surrounding African states to play kingmaker, at times literally, with the Soviet Union and United States backing their chosen victors. Ghana for its part marched across the Volta to create a "security cordon" which was openly an effort to create safe havens for pro-Ghanean militias, while Nigeria likewise moved to occupy its own border regions before its own internal tensions fell apart and the country experienced its own north-south split. At this time with factions divided along ethnic, political, and religious lines, an actual "Dahomean Goverment" was more of a legal fiction than anything else, and even under the doctrine of the "legitimate" government being whichever controlled the capital in Kutonou the "government" rarely controlled territory outside of the city's immediate environs, often not even entirely around Lake Nokoue, and the war only ended with a political accord that ended with no one faction fully gaining control.

The only lasting legacy was the deposition of the Dahomean monarchy, and even then the House of Aladaxonoustill persisted by the sheer dumb luck of Prince Béhanzin escaping the palace massacre. Despite that, the monarchy was now relegated to a purely ceremonial role as a fragile republic took its place, desperately maintaining control over the core territories even as the hinterlands, particularly towards the north, remained restless. And yet despite the ongoing instability and most of the 1970s and 80s meeting the description of "low-level conflict", by and large Dahomey was able to carry on a period of "business as usual" in spite of the conflict that was ostensibly tearing the country apart. Really, as things went for post-colonial Africa Dahomey was "fine" by most standards", as even if the officially-recognized government was a military dictatorship lacking any ideology other than maintaining its own power, most people were not fully subjected to its abuses by simple lack of capacity to exert its power.

Fortunes began to improve in the 90s and early 2000s, though rather than by the action of any one political group it was simple entropy. With the death of Houédogni Sagbadjou in 1991, the original actors behind the civil war had all died or been ousted by successors, and the succeeding generation of warlords and politicians was simply tired of fighting an endless war even if it meant ruling their own petty domains. The Second Lokossa Accord, signed in 1995 after a brief eight month flare-up in the conflict, formally ended the civil war after the first de facto ending 27 years prior. In the aftermath, with the Soviet Union now defunct and the United States no longer focused on directly interfering in Africa, Dahomey was able to reintegrate itself and steadily recover under the strongman leadership of Efosa Béhanzin (unrelated to the monarchy), who received no end of criticism for a lack of respect for due process and democratic rule but was equally lauded for restoring internal peace to Dahomey after spending most of three decades wrought with conflict.

This has been the dominant status quo in Dahomey since then, as even in 2024 Dahomey is still one of the most stable African nations by virtue of being a practical autocracy. President Béhanzin himself has even openly stated that his rule is one of "benevolent autocracy" even if gestures towards democracy are made. Even in this circumstance, though, he does have his supporters, as does the Dahomean regime as a whole. Even those who oppose the Béhanzin regime will at times support a return of the monarchy, which ceremonially continues under Adandozan IV, something which has little support even in a nation like Ethiopia where the monarchy is far, far older. One thing that most people do agree on despite it all is that the solution should come from within Dahomey itself, as repeatedly throughout the civil war even governments which controlled Kutonou refused offers at intervention by foreign states both African and global, if only to avoid having them sink their teeth into the country for their own benefit.

The end result is that the modern Dahomey is a nation with a muddled past and a muddled future, where only the present can be fully known and understood. Most don't bother, but for those enterprising individuals who can the entire past and future of the country can be manually written in, a kind of political "fill in the blanks" where the winner is the one who comes out on top. The Béhanzin regime has done this for almost 30 years, the old Dahomean monarchy did it, and of course most every nation will do it to themselves at some point. The only real difference is that in the modern day such fuzziness is self-inflicted, diverging from the historical trends of having such uncertainty imposed on it. Dahomey is, uniquely, one of the only African nations to have never suffered the indignity of foreign conquest and rule, and it has not done the country any favors. The only thing it does give it is the sense of pride that is so rare for an African nation, to say that it has not suffered as much of the pain that Europe and later the United States has forced on the continent. And even if the past and future are indeterminate, there is still the present, and whoever can control that will control both of the others.

Description

This one was a suggestion from Sport16ing way back in September of last year and I'm only just now getting around to it.

---

It's extremely rare to find a single event in history that you can point to and say "This is where it all changed". Even if you can, it more often than not needs to be couched in the various social forces and political environment which that event was contemporaneous with, and for Dahomey this event is placed at the Annual Customs of 1818. King Adandozan's reign had been troubled from the moment of his accession, facing pressure from the British to abolish the slave trade and circling European vultures that eyed his kingdom enviously, this on top of his state sitting under the yoke of the Oyo Empire. His efforts at reform were unable to achieve positive results, the Oyo were breathing down his neck, and on top of that Brazil still demanded fresh slaves imported from the ports that Dahomey controlled. It was in this environment that one of his younger brothers, Madogungun, conspired with the slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa to overthrow him, for the sake of Dahomey's economic well-being.

What exactly happened in the palace that day may never be known. Some things are obvious: Madogungun was defeated and imprisoned, de Sousa was killed, and Adandozan remained King. In the years that followed, Madogungun was effectively erased from his own life; still alive, but subjected to Damnato Memoriae. Any achievements he had before his attempted coup were attributed to his brother, while de Sousa was endlessly vilified and used as a poster child for Adandozan's campaign against the Portuguese and Brazilians, culminating in his attack on Porto-Novo and expelling the slave traders from the country. The resulting economic shocks were harsh for Dahomey, but with Portugal spiraling out of control and the goodwill of Britain for Dahomey now toeing the line on the slave trade, Adandozan was able to invite trade and economic investment which helped spur his new efforts to restructure the economy of his country. This in turn led to his gaining access to British weapons, which he then turned on the Oyo and ended Dahomey's vassalage to the Oyo. As a symbol of this new era of ascension for his kingdom Adandozan declared the founding of a new capital city at what is now Kutonou, and a grand new palace to accompany it.

Much of this is muddled by the history of Dahomey was very much controlled from the top-down. For instance Adandozan is credited with founding Kutonou, but others have long suggested the idea was originally Madogungun's and his older brother appropriated it. Others have said that Kutonou's founding was less to create a grand new capital for the burgeoning state and more to do with removing himself from the traditional capital of Abomey, where bureaucrats were loyal but disgruntled and had become increasingly obstinate in their opposing the King's reform efforts. Indeed, Adandozan never relinquished Abomey's status as a capital and instead referred to both Abomey and Kutonou as officially co-equal capitals, though from 1831 onwards he rarely spent any time in Abomey and instead lavished his attention on Kutonou while his son and heir Dakpo handled affairs in the old capital. Madogungun was also given far more credit for the malcontent in Dahomey than had previously been known, blamed for everything from economic malaise to the encroaching Portuguese-Brazilian influences, when there is little evidence that he held any significant influence in government prior to (and especially after) the attempted coup.

All interpretations aside, the new path which Dahomey had been set upon was one that saw the nation undergo a rapid ascension in the region. The Oyo Empire, already in decline, faced the vigorous new state expanding against it. Dahomey in turn began to expand against other groups of the region. These conquests were as much driven by the desire of a king for growth as it was for economics' sake. With the slave trade now fully abolished almost overnight, Dahomey needed new economic drivers, and the embrace of a war economy filled this role. Plunder from the newly conquered territories were used to fill the treasury, and access to new resources enabled the country to further expand its development. Such is the cyclical nature of Adandozan's reign: war brought plunder and new access to resources that were used to fund the next war, and so on and so on. By the time that Adandozan died, Dahomey had nearly quintupled in territory and conquered the coasts between the Volta and Ogun Rivers.

The ascension of Dakpo as King Adandozan II marked another pivot for the nation. Dahomey was now well-placed to consolidate itself without significant threats within the region, but it was also increasingly obvious that European powers were still eyeing the nation greedily. To this extent, Adandozan II positioned himself as a staunch Europhile and convert of Christianity, taking the baptismal name George Charles Aladaxonou and traveling to Paris and London to meet with Napoleon III and Victoria themselves. Kutonou was designed in the model of a European capital, even going so far as to invite Haussman himself to oversee the plans. Of course, the actual merit of this is doubted then as now, with many wondering aloud if Adandozan II was actually attempting to reform his country or give the appearance of it to dissuade Europe from simply dismissing its achievements and invading anyways. After all, Adandozan II was never seen actually practicing the Christian faith after his conversion, and regularly carried out the old animist traditions of the kingdom. It had the desired effect, though.

Dahomey by 1880 had come to be the largest state in West Africa and had positioned itself to become one of the few surviving native African states that hadn't been subsumed by a European colonial power, both before and after the Berlin Conference. It was after the death of Adandozan II and the rise of King Kefa I that matters with Europe began to reach a fever pitch. Although the kingdom had been able to circumvent most of the grabs by Britain and France at its territory, the kingdom's main enemy had become Germany. Under Wilhelm II, German colonial policy was growing ever-more aggressive, and it was the desire of the German colonial office to gain an inroad into Western Africa. Gustav Nachtigal, a German commissioner, began the process by negotiating with several Ewe chiefs in the region of Alomé to create a German protectorate, something which did not go unnoticed by Kutonou. The Germans had expected a conflict, and still riding high on their victory over France in 1871 boldly went forth to war.

It was a disaster. The Germans were ill-prepared for the logistics of movement through the region, and even the Ewe chiefs were divided in their loyalties, further undermining the German war effort. On top of this the Dahomean government had creative extensive networks of information and espionage despite the relatively undeveloped hinterlands of the country. This enabled swift responses to German movements, and even if the German guns were superior to the Dahomeans their ability to leverage terrain, politics, and logistics to their advantage gave them the capacity to drive the Germans back out of their country. Under threat of French intervention, Germany was forced to withdraw with wounded their pride unassuaged. Much as with the Italo-Ethiopian War that would come a mere six months later, Dahomey had achieved what had seemed impossible: the defeat of a European power by an African power, later garnished by the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. At the turn of the 20th Century, when Europe stood astride the world like a colossus, Dahomey was one of an exclusive club of those not wholly underfoot.

Even if independent, it could not remain totally avoidant of European affairs, not least for the fact that Dahomey may have largely controlled its internal markets but trade and diplomacy still had to be carried out through a European lens. Dahomey's efforts to expand its navy had to be done carefully to avoid provoking Britain and France, both of whom surrounded it with their colonial domains and still held on to the idea that Dahomey might be brought into their grasp. All the same, they carried out border negotiations with the African power to resolve border conflicts, not that it meant much to prevent a long-standing dispute between Dahomey and Nigeria over the so-called "Okuta Triangle". Inevitably, the European powers would then be drawn into the chaos of World War I, which saw Germany defeated and wholly evicted from her colonial empire. Dahomey was neutral in the conflict, and unlike Ethiopia was positioned to again avoid World War II even if it would eventually join the latter conflict in 1944 two weeks after Liberia.

Most of the trouble had to do with the social forces that were emerging in the later decades of the Age of Empires. Throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Dahomey stood as a model of African resistance to European encroachment, and had become an icon for African independence movements, though always with some level of deference to Ethiopia as the "senior" to Dahomey's "junior". Dahomey happily hosted many pro-independence activists and was an advocate for decolonization, but its ability to serve as a "leader" in this field was constantly hobbled by internal struggles over policy and issues of government which had as much to do with struggles within the palace as the more "commonplace" struggles of African nations with regard to ethnic, linguistic, and religious conflict. The Dahomean efforts at maintaining a strong, authoritarian monarchy and centralized government was increasingly at odds with the fact that Dahomey was no longer a small Fon-dominated state, and was in practice as much of an "Empire" as Ethiopia was with all the struggles that came with it.

Much like Ethiopia, the Dahomean monarchy would not last long into the late 20th Century. As early as 1950, as decolonization was going into full swing, the idea of a "republic" had gone from a rarity to the norm, and many who were disaffected by Fon domination of society and politics began to rally to the cause of republicanism. In this regard the republicans found support from the Soviet Union, as the monarchy had become increasingly reliant on aid from the United States and United Kingdom as a "bulwark against communism" under the containment doctrine. Of course, this could only go so far and not long after Kwame Nkrumah was elected President of Ghana in 1960, the House of Aladaxonou was subjected to a palace coup, the "Red Morning", when royal guards locked down the palace and massacred the royal family. What was expected to be a coup d'etat instead turned into a gargantuan civil war which tore across Dahomey for the next eight years.

After spending so long removed from European control, Dahomey rapidly fell into becoming a battleground for surrounding African states to play kingmaker, at times literally, with the Soviet Union and United States backing their chosen victors. Ghana for its part marched across the Volta to create a "security cordon" which was openly an effort to create safe havens for pro-Ghanean militias, while Nigeria likewise moved to occupy its own border regions before its own internal tensions fell apart and the country experienced its own north-south split. At this time with factions divided along ethnic, political, and religious lines, an actual "Dahomean Goverment" was more of a legal fiction than anything else, and even under the doctrine of the "legitimate" government being whichever controlled the capital in Kutonou the "government" rarely controlled territory outside of the city's immediate environs, often not even entirely around Lake Nokoue, and the war only ended with a political accord that ended with no one faction fully gaining control.

The only lasting legacy was the deposition of the Dahomean monarchy, and even then the House of Aladaxonoustill persisted by the sheer dumb luck of Prince Béhanzin escaping the palace massacre. Despite that, the monarchy was now relegated to a purely ceremonial role as a fragile republic took its place, desperately maintaining control over the core territories even as the hinterlands, particularly towards the north, remained restless. And yet despite the ongoing instability and most of the 1970s and 80s meeting the description of "low-level conflict", by and large Dahomey was able to carry on a period of "business as usual" in spite of the conflict that was ostensibly tearing the country apart. Really, as things went for post-colonial Africa Dahomey was "fine" by most standards", as even if the officially-recognized government was a military dictatorship lacking any ideology other than maintaining its own power, most people were not fully subjected to its abuses by simple lack of capacity to exert its power.

Fortunes began to improve in the 90s and early 2000s, though rather than by the action of any one political group it was simple entropy. With the death of Houédogni Sagbadjou in 1991, the original actors behind the civil war had all died or been ousted by successors, and the succeeding generation of warlords and politicians was simply tired of fighting an endless war even if it meant ruling their own petty domains. The Second Lokossa Accord, signed in 1995 after a brief eight month flare-up in the conflict, formally ended the civil war after the first de facto ending 27 years prior. In the aftermath, with the Soviet Union now defunct and the United States no longer focused on directly interfering in Africa, Dahomey was able to reintegrate itself and steadily recover under the strongman leadership of Efosa Béhanzin (unrelated to the monarchy), who received no end of criticism for a lack of respect for due process and democratic rule but was equally lauded for restoring internal peace to Dahomey after spending most of three decades wrought with conflict.

This has been the dominant status quo in Dahomey since then, as even in 2024 Dahomey is still one of the most stable African nations by virtue of being a practical autocracy. President Béhanzin himself has even openly stated that his rule is one of "benevolent autocracy" even if gestures towards democracy are made. Even in this circumstance, though, he does have his supporters, as does the Dahomean regime as a whole. Even those who oppose the Béhanzin regime will at times support a return of the monarchy, which ceremonially continues under Adandozan IV, something which has little support even in a nation like Ethiopia where the monarchy is far, far older. One thing that most people do agree on despite it all is that the solution should come from within Dahomey itself, as repeatedly throughout the civil war even governments which controlled Kutonou refused offers at intervention by foreign states both African and global, if only to avoid having them sink their teeth into the country for their own benefit.

The end result is that the modern Dahomey is a nation with a muddled past and a muddled future, where only the present can be fully known and understood. Most don't bother, but for those enterprising individuals who can the entire past and future of the country can be manually written in, a kind of political "fill in the blanks" where the winner is the one who comes out on top. The Béhanzin regime has done this for almost 30 years, the old Dahomean monarchy did it, and of course most every nation will do it to themselves at some point. The only real difference is that in the modern day such fuzziness is self-inflicted, diverging from the historical trends of having such uncertainty imposed on it. Dahomey is, uniquely, one of the only African nations to have never suffered the indignity of foreign conquest and rule, and it has not done the country any favors. The only thing it does give it is the sense of pride that is so rare for an African nation, to say that it has not suffered as much of the pain that Europe and later the United States has forced on the continent. And even if the past and future are indeterminate, there is still the present, and whoever can control that will control both of the others.