Abomey

Abomey was founded on the plateau by a branch of the royal line of Allada, and Fon tradition names Houegbadja, in the second half of the 17th century, as the king who established the capital and the custom that shaped it: each ruler built his own palace beside those of his predecessors, so that the royal enclosure grew outwards into a walled city within the town. The dynasty traced itself to Agasu, a leopard in the founding story, and the leopard remained a royal symbol.

Dahomey became a highly organised military state. It fought almost continuously, raiding the Mahi to the north and the Yoruba to the east, and sold large numbers of captives to European traders at Ouidah, which King Agaja seized in 1727 to reach the coast directly. The annual royal ceremonies at Abomey included human sacrifice, recorded by European visitors, and the army included a corps of women soldiers, the Agojie, whom Europeans called Amazons. Ghezo, in the 19th century, and his son Glele were the strongest of the later kings.

When France invaded in 1892, King Behanzin resisted and burned much of Abomey before it fell; he surrendered in 1894 and was exiled to Martinique, and French troops carried off thrones, statues and carved doors. Under colonial rule Bohicon grew around the railway while Abomey became a quiet provincial town. The palaces were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and placed at once on the list of World Heritage in Danger, a tornado having damaged them in 1984; they were taken off that list in July 2007. In 2021 France returned 26 statues looted in 1892, shown in Cotonou from the following year and celebrated across Benin.

Abomey lives with its royal past as a present institution. The royal family still names a king of Abomey, whose authority today is traditional and ceremonial, and the lineages of former kings maintain temples where rites for the ancestors are performed. Vodun is strong here, as it is on the coast, and the town has many convents where initiates are trained; Vodun, Catholicism and Islam coexist, often in the same families.

The court's crafts are the town's best-known art. Appliqué cloths, cut and stitched in bright colours, carry the emblem by which each king is remembered, and are made by families who once worked for the palace alone. Brass casters use the lost-wax method to make small figures of daily life and royal history, and the bas-reliefs on the palace walls, painted clay panels of battles, animals and proverbs, functioned as the kingdom's record.

The Agojie, the women soldiers of the kingdom, have become a strong element of Beninese national memory, and the town is part of a wider national conversation about how a state that grew rich on the slave trade should be remembered. Visitors are expected to treat the palace, temples and ceremonies with the seriousness given to a royal site, and guides mediate access to most of them.

About 97,000 people live in the commune of Abomey, against some 149,000 in neighbouring Bohicon at the 2012 count, which long ago overtook the old capital as the region's commercial centre. The contrast shapes daily life: Bohicon has the highway, the buses, the wholesale trade and the banks, while Abomey has the palaces, the schools and administrative offices of the Zou department, and a much slower pace.

Most households farm. Maize, cassava, yams, groundnuts and beans are grown on the plateau, oil palms supply palm oil and palm wine, and produce moves down to Cotonou through Bohicon's market. Craft work, teaching, small trade and the visitors who come for the palaces provide most of the rest of the town's income, and many young people leave for Cotonou or abroad, sending money home.

The week follows the rotating markets that move between the plateau towns on a fixed cycle, and the day follows the heat: early mornings in the fields and the market, a quiet middle of the day, and the evening at the maquis, at church or mosque, or around a television. Water supply in the dry season, the state of the earthen palace walls and the pull of the larger towns are steady local concerns.

The plateau eats from the farm, and yam is the prestige food. Pounded yam, igname pilée, is beaten to a smooth, elastic dough and eaten by hand with a peanut sauce, a leafy-green sauce or a tomato and palm-oil sauce, often with chicken, smoked fish or bush meat. Dried yam ground to flour makes télibo, a dark, stiff paste that is one of Benin's staple dishes and distinctly a food of the interior.

Maize is the everyday base: akassa, fermented maize dough wrapped in leaves, and amiwo, the red dough cooked in a tomato and palm-oil stock, usually with chicken. Sauces lean on groundnut, okra, baobab leaf and the fermented néré seed. Wagasi, the soft Fulani cow's-milk cheese brought down from the north, is fried in slices and sold at the market or cooked in sauce, and grilled agouti, the grasscutter rodent, is a valued bush meat along the roads.

Snacks are roasted groundnuts, kuli-kuli — fried sticks of pressed peanut paste — grilled maize cobs in season and fried plantain. Palm wine is tapped fresh in the morning and distilled into sodabi, the clear spirit poured at ceremonies, and the market sells bissap made from hibiscus and, in the season, cheap pineapple and mangoes.