Benin

The successor to one of the most powerful and most misunderstood West African kingdoms, and the first African country to vote a Marxist government out of office. The Kingdom of Dahomey, founded in the seventeenth century, built a centralised state on the Atlantic slave trade, selling captives from its wars through Ouidah in enormous numbers, and maintained a corps of women soldiers Europeans called the Amazons - several thousand strong and the kingdom's elite troops. France conquered it in the 1890s. Independence came in 1960 as Dahomey, and the country had six coups in twelve years before Mathieu Kerekou took power in 1972 and declared a Marxist-Leninist state, renaming it Benin in 1975 after a different and much older kingdom that was actually in Nigeria. Economic collapse forced a national conference in 1990 that peacefully ended one-party rule - a template copied across francophone Africa - and Kerekou lost the 1991 election, accepted the result, and won again in 1996. Vodun originated here and is an officially recognised religion with a national holiday. Porto-Novo is the capital and Cotonou the largest city. Cotton is the main export. The country has about fourteen million people and is long and narrow. The royal palaces of Abomey are a World Heritage site. France returned twenty-six looted royal treasures in 2021 after long negotiation. Ganvie is a large village built on stilts in a lagoon. The Dahomey Amazons have been the subject of recent films and scholarship, and the last surviving veteran of the corps died in the 1970s.

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