Kingdom of Dahomey

Dahomey's kings ruled from Abomey over a state whose central institution was a cult. Each king built his own palace within the royal enclosure and, on his death, joined the line of royal ancestors who were served with offerings and consulted on the affairs of the kingdom; the annual ceremonies known as the customs gathered the court, the provincial chiefs and the tribute, redistributed wealth, and honoured those ancestors, so that the fiscal, political and religious year were one thing. Some of these ceremonies included the killing of captives, which European visitors reported in detail and often in inflated numbers, and which modern historians read as a state ritual of ancestral service rather than the mass spectacle of the travel literature.

Above and beside the royal ancestors stood the vodun: Mawu and Lisa as the paired creator principle, Legba at the threshold, Dan the serpent, Sakpata and Hevioso and the rest, each with its own priesthood, initiates, songs and shrines. Melville Herskovits' fieldwork in the 1930s produced the first systematic account of the system, and Edna Bay's later work showed how far the palace itself, with its thousands of resident women and the office of the kpojito who reigned alongside each king, was organised through these religious relationships.

The palace bas-reliefs at Abomey, which carry the emblems of each reign, are the kingdom's own record of that order, and the site is now protected as a world heritage property.

In 1727 Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdom of Hueda and took its port at Ouidah, and for the next century and a half the state's revenue rested heavily on selling captives to European traders there. The coast this stretch belonged to was called the Slave Coast, and the people carried from it, Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and others, went in very large numbers to Saint-Domingue, to Bahia and to Cuba.

What went with them was not only labour. The religious vocabulary of this region is the clearest single ancestor of the African American traditions of the Caribbean and Brazil: the word vodun itself, the figure of Legba at the crossroads, the serpent Dan who becomes Damballa, and the structure of initiation into the service of a particular spirit. Haitian Vodou, Cuban traditions and Brazilian Candomble each drew on it and on Yoruba practice, and each became a religion in its own right rather than a survival.

Dahomey resisted the French until 1894, when the last king was deposed and the kingdom annexed. The vodun did not end with it: Benin recognised Vodun as a national religion and instituted an annual national day for it in the 1990s, Ouidah holds the largest of its gatherings, and the port's memorial route to the shore is now a place of return for descendants of those who left from it. This is a living tradition with its own authorities, and it is described here rather than explained.