The Gun

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After dark in the lanes of Porto-Novo the drums come up low, and a shape moves down the street that is taller than a man and made of nothing a man wears — a towering cone of raffia and straw, dyed in bands of color, spinning and dipping and sweeping the dust. The Gun say there is no one inside it. The thing patrols the quarter, halts at a compound gate, sways, and moves on, and the people who keep their lamps low behind their shutters know its name: a Zangbeto, from zan, the night, and gbeto, the watcher. The night-watchmen of the town are older than any constabulary the French would bring, and they answer to no hand. Pull back from the one street to the whole map and the town itself carries three names at once, one for each of the peoples who have shared its ground: the Gun call it Xɔ̀gbónù — Hogbonu, “by the great tree,” after a landmark fig; the Yoruba to the east call it Àjàṣẹ́, Ajashe; and the Portuguese, coming to trade in 1730, called it Porto-Novo, the new port, for its likeness to Porto at home. To be a Gun is to live where those three names overlap and to keep, without strain, the heavens of both one’s neighbors.

The people of the great tree

The Gun — the spelling is Goun in French usage, and the same people are known as Ogu, Egun, and Gun-Alada — are a Gbe-speaking people of the southeastern corner of Benin, gathered chiefly in the Ouémé Department around Porto-Novo, and of the adjoining Nigerian coast just over the border, at Badagry and Ipokia in Ogun State and in the Makoko waterside of Lagos. The Ogu (Gun) people number on the order of 811,000 across the two countries; they are roughly six percent of Benin’s population and about fifteen percent of the indigenous population of Lagos State. Most live by the lagoon and the sea — fishing, coconut and palm processing, the working of salt — in a low green country of creeks and sandbars where the freshwater of the Ouémé meets the tide.

Their tongue, Gungbe, sits in the Gbe language family, in its eastern cluster, close kin to Fon on one side and, further off, to Ewe. It is the speech of a people who reached the lagoon from the interior. The country they came into is a low, amphibious one — a fringe of sandbar and creek where the Ouémé River fans out to meet the sea, where a town can stand on stilts over the water, as the Gun quarter of Makoko does in the Lagos lagoon, and where the year turns on the tide and the fish and the salt-pans rather than on the plow. It is a hinge of a country, neither wholly of the interior kingdoms nor wholly of the open coast, and the people who settled it took the shape of the ground. By their own telling, and in the reading the historians have given the Beninese record, the Gun are a western branch of the Aja-Fon world — the world whose ancestral people, the Aja, carried the Gbe tongue and the vodun out of the interior — who came down out of Allada, the old kingdom the Europeans called Great Ardra, in a wave of migration that pressed toward the coast across the seventeenth century. Some outside accounts compress this and call the Gun simply an offshoot of the Fon; the Gun’s own memory is more exact, tracing the line not to Abomey but to Allada, the elder house from which Abomey itself went out. The cradle-kingdom of Allada is where the shared origin-story of this whole region begins: the tradition holds that around the turn of the seventeenth century a broken royal inheritance was divided among three kinsmen. Kokpon held Great Ardra itself. Do-Aklin’s line went north to the plateau and founded Abomey, the seat of the Kingdom of Dahomey. And Te-Agbanlin — Tê-Agbanlin — led his people east and south to the edge of the great lagoon, to the ground under the fig tree that gave Hogbonu its name. The three-brothers account is tradition-internal, a story the Gun and their Fon and Aja cousins recite about their own beginnings rather than a date the sources can fix; what the documented record carries is the migration itself, the movement out of Allada into the Ajashe country in the 1600s, and a dynastic king-list at Hogbonu that runs from Te-Agbanlin through Messe, Ayikpe, and Meyi down to Toffa I. The rulers held the title ahosu, king, and belonged to the Agasuvi line, understood as a branch of the Allada royal house carried east.

So the Gun reach the record doubly rooted. By descent they are a people of Allada, sharing a founder-generation with the kings of Abomey. By place they are a people of a borderland — for Hogbonu was built not in the heart of the Aja-Fon world but on its eastern rim, where that world runs up against the Yoruba country. The Yoruba were on the ground first; Ajashe is a Yoruba name. And for a long stretch of its early history the little kingdom on the lagoon lived as a tributary of the Yoruba Oyo Empire inland, whose overlordship was a kind of shield: Oyo’s protection kept the expanding Fon kingdom of Dahomey, pressing down from the northwest, off the port’s neck. A people can be defined by the seam it sits on, and the Gun are. Their name-list of kings is recited on both sides of it.

A Zangbeto — the towering raffia-and-straw night-watcher of the Gun — dancing at a public gathering. Held to move by no human hand, the Zangbeto is the traditional guardian and night police of Hogbonu. Atej2, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Two heavens over one town

To live at Hogbonu is to keep two heavens at once. The Gun sacred world holds the Fon vodun — the ordered powers set over the domains of the world beneath the creator-pair Mawu-Lisa, the moon-and-sun who made it. Sakpata is the earth-king, owner of the ground and of the sickness that comes out of it. Sogbo-Hevioso is the thunder in the sky. Gu, the iron, is the edge of war and craft — and here a caution the Gun themselves keep, for Gu the vodun and Gun the people are two words a stranger easily blurs, the one the smith-power of iron, the other the name of a nation. Dan is the serpent who coils around the world and holds it together. And Legba stands at every threshold and crossroads, the opener who must be greeted first, the interpreter through whom a message reaches the other powers. These are the vodun of the Fon, and the Gun keep them as their own.

But at Hogbonu they are not kept alone. Brought over the eastern seam and worshiped in the same town are the Yoruba orisha, and for several of the great powers the Gun hold two names for one force. Shango of the thunderbolt stands beside Sogbo- Hevioso; Ogun of the iron beside Gu; Shopona, lord of the earth and the pox, beside Sakpata. The Fa divination — the reading of destiny from the palm-nuts and the marks that fall, which the Yoruba call Ifa — is spoken at Porto-Novo in both the Fon and the Yoruba idiom, its signs named in either tongue. The vodunon, the priests who serve the altars, tend shrines where the two names of a single power may stand together, and a household may honor the vodun of its Fon descent and the orisha of its Yoruba neighbors without any sense of choosing between them. This is not syncretism forced on the Gun by conquest; it is the ordinary condition of a people who were always of the border. What is a difficulty in the ethnographers’ debates — which came first, the vodun or the orisha, and who borrowed the thunder-god from whom — is at Hogbonu simply the shape of the town’s devotion. That the two pantheons touch here so closely is one reason the question of their relationship is so hard for scholarship to settle, and honest accounts leave it open.

The devotion is lived less in grand temples than in the small offices of a life. A birth, an illness, a journey, a quarrel that will not settle — these are the occasions on which a Gun household turns to the Fa, whose signs are cast and read by a diviner who has learned the long corpus of verses that hang from each mark, and on which a family carries a request to the vodunon who tends the shrine of the power that owns the matter. Behind the vodun and the orisha alike stand the dead: the ancestors are kept and fed, and the compound with its shrines is as much a place of the family’s own line as of the great powers. What a stranger might take for two rival religions crowded into one town is, from the inside, a single household economy of the sacred — a set of doors, each opened by the right greeting, through which the living reach the forces that hold their world.

Over all of it the Gun set the night. The Zangbeto are the town’s own guardian institution, and they belong to the Gun in a way the shared vodun do not — a covenant of the night that is the community’s oldest law-and-order office, its watch and its purification in one. In the accepted understanding a Zangbeto is not a masked man but a spirit of the night made present under the great conical mass of dyed raffia and straw. It patrols the lanes against thieves and against the harmful and the unquiet; it drives off what should not be abroad after dark; it cleanses the quarter. The guardians of the society are held to move by no hand — to spin empty when overturned, to swallow glass and take no hurt — and the plainest article of the whole institution is that there is no person inside the raffia, only the night itself. To claim otherwise, or to lift the covering, was a grave transgression, historically answered with death. The society that keeps the Zangbeto is closed, entered only by the initiated and the vodúnsɛntó, and what passes within it is not for the street; it can be described from the public record of a festival day, where the cones dance in the square, but its inner keeping is theirs. The teaching the Zangbeto carries into daylight is a plain one all the same: that the order of a town is not merely enforced but sanctified, that the watch of the night is a vodun office and not a municipal one, and that a people who hold the powers of both their neighbors have lost nothing of what is theirs alone.

Along the coast the kingdom held

The afterlife of the Gun is written along the coast their kingdom commanded. Hogbonu grew into a port on the strength of a hard fact: as Dahomey pressed south toward the sea across the eighteenth century, Porto-Novo became an alternative outlet for the Atlantic trade, a slaving harbor whose wealth and whose wounds were bound to the same commerce that made Ouidah down the coast the region’s great embarkation port. The full weight of that trade — the barracoons, the Middle Passage, the door through which the captives were carried out and did not return — belongs to the telling of Ouidah; here it is enough to say that Porto-Novo was one of its harbors, and that the Gun carried into slavery went into the same dispersion as the Fon vodun and the Yoruba orisha they had kept side by side at home. In the New World those powers were carried, not corrupted: into Haitian Vodou, into Brazilian Candomblé — where the Jeje-Fon vodun and the Ketu-Nagô orisha are still kept as distinct “nations” under one roof — and into Cuban Lucumí. The doubled world the Gun had always lived, Fon power beside Yoruba power at a single set of altars, is one of the templates from which the religions of the African Atlantic were built.

In the nineteenth century a current ran the other way. From the 1830s the Aguda — Afro-Brazilian families and freed captives returning across the ocean from Brazil — settled at Porto-Novo and along the coast at Lagos and Badagry, and they brought a Catholic-Brazilian layer with them: a cuisine, a set of names, and above all a way of building. The Afro-Brazilian architecture of Porto-Novo, stuccoed and pedimented, is the visible mark of that return, and its most striking monument is the Great Mosque, raised in the Brazilian church-style in the early twentieth century by returnees who had learned the manner as enslaved builders across the Atlantic and turned it, at home, to Islam. The Gun town wears its diaspora on its streets.

The Great Mosque of Porto-Novo, built in the Afro-Brazilian manner by Aguda returnees from Brazil — a Catholic-Brazilian church-form turned to Islam on the Gun coast. Babylas, 2009, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The kingdom’s last independent chapter turned on the same pressure that had shaped its beginnings: Dahomey to the west. King Toffa I, who reigned from 16 September 1874 to 7 February 1908, held Hogbonu against the Dahomean kings Glele and Behanzin not by Oyo’s old shield, long since gone, but by a new one. To keep his kingdom out of Dahomean hands he placed it under French protection, re-establishing by treaty in 1882 an arrangement an earlier ahosu had briefly accepted in 1863; the small kingdom passed, over the following years, into the French colony of Dahomey, and Toffa’s alliance with the French set him against Behanzin on the eve of the Franco-Dahomean wars of 1892–94 that ended the Kingdom of Dahomey itself. After the annexation the rulers of Hogbonu held the colonial title Chef supérieur rather than ahosu; the last of them, Alohinto Gbeffa, died on 16 July 1976. Porto-Novo, meanwhile, had become the capital — of French Dahomey, and then, after the country’s independence in 1960, the official capital of the Republic of Benin, though the seat of government and the working weight of the state sit down the coast at Cotonou. The Gun town holds the legislature and the title; its larger neighbor holds the offices.

There remains the caricature to name and set aside. The pin-stuck doll, the zombie, the “black magic” of the colonial imagination and the Hollywood screen have nothing to do with the vodun the Gun keep, and less than nothing to do with the Zangbeto, which is a night-watch and a court of order rather than any theater of the sinister. That image is a distortion assembled elsewhere — in the missionary’s report, the travel-writer’s chapter, the film studio’s back-lot — and laid over a religion that never held it. The record runs the other way: vodun is a recognized religion of Benin, honored since 1996 with a national holiday on 10 January, and the Zangbeto endures as a living Gun institution, its masked processions a fixture of the Porto-Novo calendar and of the festivals at Ajido near Lagos, not a curiosity for outsiders to shudder at. The Gun are a present-tense people on both sides of the Benin–Nigeria border — fishermen and salt-workers and traders, Vodun-keepers and Christians and Muslims, many of them all at once in the ordinary way of the coast. The town under the great tree still keeps its three names, and after dark it still keeps its watch.

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