Abomey

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The pigment came out of the ground. To raise the panels that face the palace walls at Abomey, the modeler took earth from a termite mound — the fine clay the insects have already worked and bound — and kneaded it with palm oil until it would hold a shape; the colors were mineral and vegetable, ochre and charcoal and the reds and whites a dry country gives up to anyone who knows where to dig. Onto the wall went a leopard, a warship, a headless man, a buffalo, a key. A court that kept few written records could stand in front of its own history and read it at a glance, because the history had been pressed into the same red earth the palaces were built from. The Fon call these molded reliefs noundidè, and they are the oldest reason the plateau is remembered: a dynasty that wrote itself in clay.

The plateau and the two records

Abomey stands on a red-earth plateau in the Zou Department of present-day Benin, inland from the Bight of Benin, at roughly 7.19 degrees north and 1.99 degrees east. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Fon state that rose around 1600 and fell to France in 1894, and local tradition holds that the town was founded in the seventeenth century on the plateau above the older settlement of Kana. Its record reaches us along two currents that meet on that ground.

The first is the kingdom’s own telling, kept by the royal lineage and the court chroniclers of the Fon. In this tradition the founders were Aja migrants who traced their line back through Allada — itself remembered as a daughter-kingdom of Tado on the Mono River — and a prince, named in the oral history as Do-Aklin, or Dako, who pushed north onto the plateau to make a kingdom of his own. The dynastic name is itself a foundation-story. Danhomè — also written Danxomé, and Europeanized as Dahomey — is glossed in Fongbe as “in the belly of Dan,” after a local chief called Dan on whose ground, the tradition says, the first palace was raised; the parsing runs Dan (the chief), xo (belly), me (inside of). Whether the etymology is history or charter, scholars treat it as a traditional and debated gloss rather than a settled fact, and the story it tells — of a house that did not inherit its ground but took it — is the point the telling means to make. By the royal count, twelve kings succeeded one another at Abomey between about 1625 and 1900: after the founder- generation came Houegbadja, Akaba, Agaja, Tegbessou, Kpengla, Agonglo, the effaced Adandozan, Ghezo, Glele, and Behanzin, with Agoli-agbo installed at the end under French oversight.

The second current is documentary and comes from outside. European traders and envoys on the Slave Coast left eyewitness reports of the capital, its wall, and its ceremonies — William Snelgrave and Robert Norris in the eighteenth century, Richard Burton in the nineteenth — and these accounts have to be read against their grain, for the men who wrote them came to buy captives or to press a foreign policy, and their gaze was interested and often hostile. To this the twentieth century added the ethnography of Melville J. Herskovits, whose two-volume Dahomey (1938) remains a foundational study of Fon religion and society, and, on the palace art in particular, the work of the art historian Suzanne Preston Blier. And the fabric itself became a source: the earthen palaces and their reliefs, read by art historians and Benin’s own heritage service and inscribed by UNESCO in 1985, speak for a court that left little writing of its own.

A Dahomean bas-relief of a fish swallowing a European ship, in the emblematic idiom of the Abomey palace reliefs, photographed near the palace of Guézo in 1930. Frédéric Gadmer / Musée Albert-Kahn, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A city assembled king by king

What grew on the plateau was not a palace but a walled city of palaces. By Fon custom each king raised his own compound beside his predecessor’s, inside the same great earthen enclosure and in the same materials and manner — so that the site accreted, reign by reign, into a single body built up over nearly three centuries. King Akaba is remembered as the exception, set apart in a separate enclosure; his short reign was a troubled one, and the break in the pattern marks it. The rest were laid down in sequence, and by the end the complex held on the order of ten palaces across some forty-seven hectares, historically ringed by a cob wall whose circumference the World Heritage record estimates at about ten kilometers. Houegbadja, who reigned in the later seventeenth century, is remembered as the king who built the first palace here and fixed the two principles that governed everything after: that each successor would add his own enclosure to the line, and that the kingdom would honor its dead kings without end.

The noundidè are the reliefs that panel the walls and pillars of these compounds, and they are the kingdom’s history written in earth. Modeled from anthill soil kneaded with palm oil and colored with vegetable and mineral pigments, they carry the emblems and the deeds of the kings: a dynastic device for each ruler, the memory of a battle, a captured enemy, a proverb turned into a picture. The fish that swallows a European ship, the buffalo, the ship, the woman soldier over a fallen foe — each is a sentence in a public chronicle that a largely oral court could read at a glance, a way of fixing the dynasty’s account of itself on the outside of the buildings where the dynasty lived. Blier’s study reads the palace art as a deliberate visual language, not decoration; the reliefs are how the kingdom kept its own record where everyone could see it.

The compounds were built to a plan the eye can still trace. Each palace opened through a great public court, the singboji, where the king appeared before the assembly; set within it stood the ajalala, the reception hall whose facade carried the densest run of reliefs, and behind it the private quarters closed to all but the household. Rooms were raised in banco, the sun-dried earth of the plateau, roofed in thatch and later in sheet metal, and thickened at the base against the rains; the whole was low, red, and massive, an architecture that drew its strength from the ground it stood on. The palaces of Ghezo and Glele, the two nineteenth-century kings whose compounds the museum now occupies, are the best preserved, and it is on their walls that the reliefs survive in the greatest number. Woven through the buildings were the tombs and the djexo, so that the living court and the dead kings shared a single precinct — the geography of the place enforced the theology.

Behind the throne stood the religious architecture of the Fon, and it is what makes Abomey more than a seat of government. Over the whole world stands Mawu-Lisa, the moon-and-sun creator pair who made things and set the vodun over the world’s domains — Legba at the crossroads and the threshold, Gu of the iron and the war-edge that armed the kingdom, Dan the rainbow-serpent, Sakpata the earth-king. But the vodun who most define Abomey are the royal dead. The Fon hold that a king does not cease at death; he passes into the company of the deified ancestors, and from the land of the dead he keeps his power over the living. Beside the kings stand the kpojito, the queen mothers paired with each reign, honored as ancestral powers in their own right. Within the palace precinct the djexo, the spirit-houses, and the ancestral shrines make the compound a working sanctuary of the royal cult, tended by the vodunon, the priesthood, and ordered by Fa divination and the honoring of the dead. The living king ruled by the consent of the dead ones, whose approval was sought before the kingdom undertook anything of weight.

An interior courtyard of the Royal Palaces of Abomey, the earthen precinct raised king by king within a single enclosure. Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The yearly business of the dead

That relationship between the living king and the deified kings was renewed once a year in the ceremony the Fon called the Annual Customs — xwetanu or huetanu, a name that carries the literal sense of “yearly head business.” Held at Abomey and elaborated from the reign of Agaja onward, the Customs were the central rite of the Dahomean year: weeks of parade and praise-singing in which the deeds of the royal line were recited, the throne redistributed cowries and cloth from the palace down to the population, and the kingdom’s power was renewed by being displayed. Above all the Customs served the ancestors. The dead kings, it was held, required attendants and wealth in the other world, and the ceremony supplied them; the living king demonstrated his command over life, death, and treasure at once, and honored the powers on whose consent his own authority rested.

Here the record has to be exact and sober. The Customs as reported by outside eyewitnesses included, among their offerings, the ritual killing of war captives — messages and tribute sent, in the Fon understanding, to the royal dead. This dimension is named in the documentary sources and is not to be sensationalized or explained away. It also comes to us almost entirely through interested outsiders — slave-traders, naval officers pressing abolition, colonial writers building a case — and the numbers they reported are unreliable, some of them wildly inflated for effect; the figures in the period narratives run from the tens to fantastical claims of thousands. What the sources establish, when read critically, is that the Customs were the kingdom’s supreme act of ancestral devotion, that they bound the nobility into the rhythm of the court, and that they had a sacrificial dimension that the modern museum and Benin’s own memory address directly rather than evade. No operative account of the rite belongs in a public record, and none is given here; the meaning is what survives — a state that governed the living by keeping faith with its dead.

Fire, conquest, and what the palaces became

Abomey’s afterlife is bound up with two catastrophes and one recognition. The first catastrophe was the Atlantic slave trade. Dahomey’s wars fed captives down the road to the coast, where they were sold at Ouidah into the Atlantic traffic, and the kingdom’s wealth and its Customs were entangled with that commerce — a history that Abomey’s museum and Benin’s public memory now confront directly instead of avoiding. Agaja had opened the kingdom to the sea in the 1720s, conquering Allada in 1724 and the coastal port of Whydah in 1727; for a century and a half after, the trade in human beings financed the state whose reliefs and Customs were the trade’s monument.

The second catastrophe was conquest. Under Behanzin, who took the throne in 1889, Dahomey collided with France, established on the coast at Cotonou and Porto-Novo. Two wars followed, and in the second, rather than yield the capital intact as the French advanced, Behanzin set fire to Abomey and its palaces in 1892 and withdrew to the north. The French entered the burning city that November, and much of the earthen fabric was lost; only a fraction of the palaces came through the fire. Behanzin fought on for more than a year before surrendering, and was deported — to Martinique, and later Algeria, where he died in 1906. France installed his brother as the client king Agoli-agbo, who held a hollow throne from 1894 until the French dissolved it around 1900. The administrative center of the new colonial order was built a few kilometers off at Bohicon, on the railway, and the royal city subsided into a provincial town, its walls half-ruined and its kings in the ground beneath them.

Yet enough of the palaces survived to be recognized. In 1985 the Royal Palaces of Abomey were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List under cultural criteria (iii) and (iv), and in the same year placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger — a tornado in March 1984 had torn through the fragile earthen structures, and the reliefs and walls needed rescue. The site remained on the Danger list until 2007, when it was removed after the corrective work was done. Within the precinct the Historical Museum of Abomey, established in 1943 in the palaces of the kings Ghezo and Glele, holds on the order of a thousand objects of the kingdom — thrones and scepters, weapons and appliqué banners, the regalia of the dynasty — and reads its history explicitly through the kingdom’s resistance to colonial conquest, so that the place tells its own story rather than the one the conquerors wrote.

And the deepest layer of that story is not in the museum but in the ground and in the living. The Fon are a present people, and the vodun honored at Abomey is not a relic: it is a recognized religion of the Republic of Benin, given official standing in the 1990s and marked each year by a national festival on 10 January, whose most visible celebrations gather on the coast at Ouidah. The same powers, carried across the Middle Passage from ports like Ouidah, endure in Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Lucumí — carried, not corrupted. It should be said plainly what this religion is not. The lurid “voodoo” of the Hollywood and colonial imagination — and the sensational tales of Dahomean human sacrifice that fed it — have nothing to do with the ordered royal-and-ancestral religion of Abomey — a supreme creator, the vodun set over the world’s domains, a trained priesthood, the reading of destiny by Fa, and a cosmology of consent between the living and the dead. The caricature is a thing said about the religion, from outside and for profit; it is named here only to be set aside.

The reliefs need tending. Earth returns to earth if no one renews it, and after the tornado the panels were among the first things the conservators steadied, hand-pressed again into the same clay from the same mounds. That is the condition the royal city lives in — a history that has to be remade in order to last, the leopard and the ship and the woman with her fallen enemy kept legible on the wall by people who still know what each one means. The twelve kings lie under the palaces they built, one enclosure apiece; their descendants pour for them, repair their walls, and go on reading the earth.

→ Related: Mawu Lisa · Legba · Gu · Dan · Sakpata · Ouidah · Allada · Dankoli · The Ewe · The Aja · The Gun