The Aja

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Each August, when the rains have greened the lowlands and the Mono runs high, men and women come along the red roads to a town on the west bank of the river and gather where the ancestors are said to lie. They come from Benin and from Togo, from the coast and from the plateau, some of them from farther still. They come to pray to the spirits of the ones who went before, and to stand for a while on the ground those spirits are said to have started from. The town is Tado. It is a modest place now — a village of the Togo side, close to the Benin border, a day’s country between the surf and the old kingdoms of the interior. But to the people who walk to it in August it is not a village. It is the beginning, and they are the ones who kept the memory of the beginning, and their name for themselves is the Aja.

The mouth of the Mono river at Avloh, near Grand-Popo, Benin, where the river of the Aja homeland meets the sea. Heikki Kastemaa (Kulttuurinavigaattori), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The town on the west bank

The Aja — the spelling Adja is as common, and older French maps prefer it — are a Gbe-speaking people native to southwestern Benin and southeastern Togo, farmers of the lowlands the Mono waters as it comes down toward the Bight of Benin. The linguists file their tongue as Aja-Gbe, a language of the Gbe cluster that also holds Fon and Ewe and Gun; the Aja themselves file it closer to the ground, and call it, and by it themselves, Aja-Tado — the speech of Tado, the tongue and the town named in a single breath. Its dialects carry the divided homeland in their names: Tàgóbé spoken on the Togo side, Dògóbè on the Benin side, and Hwègbè spoken across the line. Few of the roughly one and a quarter million who speak it read it; it lives in the mouth, in the market and the shrine and the naming of children, and where a written language is wanted the Aja reach for French, or for Fongbe, the lingua franca of the southern country.

The genealogy the Aja keep of themselves does not start with a scatter of villages. It starts with a single door. By the account the oral tradition holds — and it is the tradition’s account, set down here as the people give it, not as a chronicle a surveyor could sign — the Aja came into the country south and east of Tado in the twelfth or thirteenth century, moving out from the river town onto the plains and the plateau and the lagoon coast. Other Gbe-speaking peoples tell versions of the same story and reach the same town: the Aja are commonly named the mother-tribe of the Gbe world, the stock from which Fon and Ewe are branches, and the migration routes of the neighboring peoples are traced back, in their own telling and in the Aja’s, through Tado on the Mono. To be able to say a lineage came out of Tado is to grant it a founding dignity. Tado is the wellspring; the Aja are the people of the wellspring; and the water runs downhill from there in every direction the tradition looks.

The charter that carries the name into the wider record is a parting between brothers. Around the year 1600, so the oral history holds, three brothers — Kokpon, Do-Aklin, and Te-Agbanlin — divided the rule of the Aja country between them. Kokpon, the eldest, held the old capital that the European traders called Great Ardra, the seat of the kingdom of Allada. Do-Aklin went north onto the plateau and founded Abomey, the seed from which the kingdom of Dahomey would grow. Te-Agbanlin went south toward the lagoons and founded Little Ardra — Ajatche — the town the Portuguese would later rename Porto-Novo, and which is today the administrative capital of Benin. Three brothers, three kingdoms; and in the frame’s own reckoning the great southern powers are not neighbors who happened to share a border but siblings who happened to divide a house. That the ruling houses of Allada, Dahomey, and Porto-Novo all claimed a common descent out of Tado is the settled reading of the historians. The exact dates, the exact names, the tidy sorting of one brother to each throne — those the historians hold more loosely, as the kind of thing a foundation story arranges after the fact, ranking the kingdoms and knitting rival dynasties into one blood.

Outsiders enter the record early, and their entry is marked as what it is. European ships knew a kingdom of Ardra on this coast by the middle of the sixteenth century, when its capital at Great Ardra is reckoned to have held something on the order of thirty thousand people — a figure that reaches us through the ledgers and letters of coastal European commerce, not through the Aja’s own count. From the mid-1600s the trade papers thicken: factors, parades, treaties, the spellings of the kingdom’s name multiplying with every scribe. Later the ethnographers came, and read the trade record and the oral traditions against each other — Melville J. Herskovits, whose two-volume study of Dahomey appeared in 1938, and after him the historian Robin Law, whose work on the Slave Coast and on the kingdom of Allada reconstructed the Aja states from the European factory records and the remembered charters together. The Aja thus reach the modern page through two hands at once: their own, which keeps the origin, and the outsider’s, which kept the invoices.

The wellspring

Inside the vodun world the Aja are the cradle-people. They are the Gbe-speaking farmers and vodun-keepers of the Mono country from whom the Fon and the Ewe descend, and to name Tado is to name the shared root behind two of the great peoples of the region. The tradition sends the branches out along two roads. One went south and east, onto the Abomey plateau, where Aja settlers came among the Gedevi already working the land and, over generations, mingled with and absorbed them; out of that meeting came the Fon, and out of the Fon the kingdom of Dahomey. The other went west, to Notsé in south-central Togo, and became the Ewe — the western kin who keep their own long memory of a flight from a walled town and a tyrant king, but who trace the road behind that town back through Tado all the same. A third fork stayed near the coast and the lagoons, and out of it, at the Fon-Yoruba meeting-ground of Porto-Novo, came the Gun. The Aja stand behind all of them, in the frame’s own accounting, as the ancestor held in common.

What the branches carry from the cradle is the vodun. The powers set over the domains of the world by the creator pair — Mawu-Lisa, the moon and the sun who made the world and behind whom stands the primordial Nana Buluku; Legba of the crossroads, who must be greeted first and who carries speech between the powers and the living; Dan, the rainbow-serpent coiled around the earth to hold it whole; Gu, the iron that clears the path and arms the kingdom; Sakpata, the earth-king who owns the pox — these are the powers that peoples who name Tado as home carried out with them and set down where they settled. The Aja did not keep a separate pantheon. They kept the source of the one the Fon and the Ewe elaborate, so that to trace the vodun to its river is to trace it to the Aja country, and the priesthood of the whole southern world, the vodunon who tend the powers, keep a memory that runs upstream to the Mono.

An Adja-Fon portable altar in iron, the ason, from the Grand-Popo country, made about 1890. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The legend that seals the teaching is the story of Agasu. In the Fon telling, Agasu — Agassou — is the tohwiyo, the founding ancestor of the Dahomean royal line, and his origin is at Tado. His mother was the princess Aligbonu, a daughter of the king of Tado; and Aligbonu, the tradition says, was joined with a leopard, and bore Agasu of that union, so that the fierceness and the sovereignty of the leopard passed into the line at its root. From Agasu came the clan called the Agasuvi, the children of Agasu, and from the Agasuvi came the kings; and in Dahomey Agasu was honored as tohwiyo along with his mother, his shield and his spear kept among the relics of the kingdom. The kings of Abomey therefore held their sacred charter from the Mono. Their claim to rule ran back, through the leopard’s son, to a princess of the Aja town. It is the deepest form the teaching takes: not merely that the Aja are the elder people, but that the very blood of the plateau’s kings is Tado blood, carried north out of the cradle in the veins of a tohwiyo.

The historians handle Agasu at the distance the record asks. Most of them read the leopard-born ancestor and the tidy migration less as chronicle than as charter, much of it elaborated in the eighteenth century to gild the legitimacy of a dynasty then at the height of its power — the historicity of the individual foundation-legends, the three brothers among them, is exactly the kind of thing that is genuinely contested and is said so here. But the contest is over the documentary standing of the story, not over its standing within the tradition, where Agasu is not a hypothesis. He is the ancestor, and Tado is the ancestor’s ground, and that is why the town is a place of return. Each August the Aja and other Gbe people come home to it as pilgrims, to pray to the ancestral spirits and to keep the tie between the living peoples and the cradle open and warm. The pilgrimage is described here from the public distance, and its meaning taken from within: it is the scattered branches coming back, once a year, to touch the root they all name.

The living people and the far water

The Aja are not a people of the past tense. Something on the order of one and a quarter million Aja live today across the Mono country — by the survey estimates, about 1.09 million in Benin and about 190,000 in Togo, roughly 1.28 million in all — still, in the main, farmers of the river lowlands, working the same country the tradition says their forebears came into eight centuries ago. They keep the vodun alongside Christianity, the two held together in the ordinary way of the region, the shrine and the church in the same compound and often in the same life. Aja on the Togo side speak Ewe as readily as their own dialect; Aja on the Benin side reach for Fongbe; the language and the people spill across a border drawn long after the migrations, and the August road to Tado runs over that border as if it were not there.

The afterlife of the Aja world is written in salt water as well as in the living villages, and the record keeps that history soberly. The coast the three brothers’ heirs came to hold — Allada, Ouidah, Ajatche — became, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heart of the stretch that the trade papers called the Slave Coast, and Ouidah one of its major ports of embarkation. Through those ports an enormous traffic in human beings passed toward the ships, and among the captives were Aja and Fon and their neighbors, carried across the Middle Passage to the plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil. The vodun they carried in their heads could not be taken from them at the ship’s rail, and so the powers the Aja had set down at the river crossed the water too: into Haitian Vodou, into Brazilian Candomblé, into Cuban Santería and Lucumí, mingling with the orisha of their Yoruba neighbors to the east, so that deities born, in the tradition, on the Mono are prayed to now a hemisphere away. The kingdom of Allada that stands at the head of the Aja charter was itself broken by the trade’s logic: in 1724 the northern brother’s kingdom, Dahomey, grown into a disciplined military state, conquered Allada and sold thousands of its people, most of them Aja, into the New World. The elder line was carried down the road it had helped to open — the family quarrel of the three-brothers story turned final and bloody. The whole weight of the slaving history, the ports and the Route des Esclaves and the diaspora, belongs to the coast at Ouidah; it is enough here to mark that the Aja country fed it, and that Aja were among the carried.

Dahomey held the plateau and the coast for another century and a half, until the French broke it in turn in the war of 1892 to 1894 and folded the whole country into a colony. The name “Aja” reaches the modern record partly through the hands of the conquerors and their forerunners — the coastal traders first, then the colonial administrators and the missionaries, whose testimony is marked as the outsider testimony it is — and partly through the scholars who read the oral charters critically alongside the paper: Herskovits on Dahomey in 1938, Robin Law on the Slave Coast and on Ouidah, and the Beninese scholarship that has since worked the same ground from within. Between the two hands the shape of the Aja past can be made out: a cradle people remembered in oral tradition, a set of kingdoms documented in the trade record, a religion carried out across an ocean and kept.

That religion is no relic, and the caricature that clings to its diaspora name is not its own. Vodun is a recognized national religion of Benin, honored since 1996 with a public holiday on the tenth of January, the shrines tended and the priesthood at their work. The lurid images the word “voodoo” summons on a cinema screen were assembled far from the Mono, out of colonial fright and box-office appetite; they are a thing said about the religion in other countries and other centuries, and they answer to nothing in the ordered world the Aja carried from Tado — a creator pair, the powers set over the domains of the world, a trained priesthood, the reading of a life’s destiny, a cosmology of balance and delegation. The distortion is named here only to be set aside. What stands in its place is the town itself, still there on the west bank of the Mono, and the road to it that fills every August with the descendants of the ones who left. The Aja are the people who stayed close to the beginning and kept the way back marked. Their kin scattered to two nations and their powers to a hemisphere, and once a year the scattering reverses, briefly, at the one place they all still call home.

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