Abomey

Abomey lies on a plateau in the Fon country inland from the Bight of Benin, some 221 metres above the lowland corridor toward the Atlantic. In Fon it is called Agbome, and the city grew from the older village of Kana to become the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the seventeenth century. The plateau offered defensible ground, while the surrounding farming country and the routes toward the coast supported a capital that increasingly projected power beyond its own fields.

Dahomey developed among the Fon people around 1600 as an offshoot of the royal line of Allada. Houegbadja, who ruled from about 1645 to 1685, is credited with building the royal palaces of Abomey and extending raids beyond the plateau. The palaces formed a walled royal quarter of courtyards, audience halls, shrines, and houses associated with successive rulers. Their earthen architecture and bas-reliefs recorded victories, royal symbols, and religious ideas.

King Agaja transformed Dahomey into a regional power. In 1724 he conquered Allada, the ancestral kingdom of the dynasty, and in 1727 he took Whydah on the coast. Access to that port tied Abomey directly to Atlantic commerce. Dahomey became a major supplier of enslaved people, exchanging captives taken in wars and raids for firearms, powder, cloth, cowries, tobacco, pipes, and alcohol. The trade financed an army of roughly ten thousand and a highly militarized state. The expansion brought repeated conflict with the Oyo Empire, which forced Dahomey into tributary status for much of the eighteenth century. King Ghezo recovered independence from Oyo in 1823, and Dahomey remained famous for its female military corps, commonly called the Amazons.