Dahomey and the Atlantic Slave Trade

"We the King of Dahomey... have always been at war with our neighbors, and we take many prisoners in our wars, which we sell to the whites." — King Adandozan of Dahomey, letter to the Governor of Bahia, c. 1804

There is no honest account of the Kingdom of Dahomey that does not pass through this door.

The Atlantic slave trade was not something that happened to Dahomey. For approximately two centuries — from the early 18th century to the abolition of the trade in the mid-19th century — the Kingdom of Dahomey was among its most active and sophisticated African participants. The kings of Abomey organized military raids specifically to capture people. They built infrastructure to hold them. They negotiated prices with European traders. They used the proceeds to finance their army, their palaces, and their royal ceremonies.

To visit Abomey is to visit a place of extraordinary cultural achievement — and a place whose wealth was built, in significant part, on human trafficking. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other.

The Scale

Historians estimate that between 1 and 1.2 million people were enslaved and exported through the port of Ouidah alone between the late 17th and mid-19th centuries. Ouidah was the principal Atlantic port of the Dahomey kingdom — the place where captives taken in the interior were marched to the coast, held in barracoons, and loaded onto ships.

The stretch of coastline controlled by Dahomey became known, in the grimly descriptive language of the slave trade era, as the Slave Coast — a designation that encompassed present-day Benin, Togo, and parts of Nigeria and Ghana.

According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — the most comprehensive scholarly database on the subject, compiled by historians David Eltis and David Richardson — Ouidah was the third largest slave port in Africa, after Luanda (Angola) and Bonny (Nigeria). At the peak of the trade in the early 18th century, estimates suggest 15,000 to 20,000 people per year were exported through Ouidah.

How It Worked

The Raids

The primary mechanism of enslavement was the organized military raid. Dahomey's army — including, from the 18th century onward, the female Mino warriors — conducted systematic raids against neighboring kingdoms and peoples: the Mahi, the Nago (Yoruba), the Popo, and others.

These were not spontaneous conflicts. They were planned operations, conducted on a roughly annual cycle, designed specifically to produce captives for sale. The military capacity of Dahomey — its discipline, its weapons, its scale — was built in significant part because of the slave trade. The trade financed the army. The army fed the trade.

Historian Robin Law, in The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750 (1991), notes: "Dahomey's wars were primarily motivated not by territorial ambition but by the need to secure captives for export." This was not peripheral to the kingdom's functioning. It was central to it.

The Chain

Captives were marched from the interior to Ouidah — a distance of roughly 100 kilometers — in coffles (chained lines). In Ouidah, they were held in large barracoons (holding pens) near the shore, maintained by both Dahomean officials and European trading companies.

The Route des Esclaves — the Slave Route — ran from the northern end of Ouidah to the beach, ending at what became known as the Gate of No Return: a symbolic arch facing the Atlantic, through which captives passed to be loaded onto ships. This route still exists. It can still be walked. The weight of that walk is specific.

→ Ouidah Origins — the complete guide to Ouidah, the Route des Esclaves, and the Gate of No Return.

The Relationship with European Traders

European trading companies — Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Brazilian — maintained permanent trading posts (feitorias) in Ouidah. The relationship between Dahomey's kings and these companies was commercial and diplomatic. Prices were negotiated. Treaties were signed. The kings received, in exchange for captives: firearms, textiles, alcohol, metalware, and cowrie shells (used as currency in the inland trade).

The relationship was not one of European domination. The kings of Dahomey controlled access to the port and set the terms of trade. King Agadja, who conquered Ouidah in 1727, did not destroy the European trading posts — he incorporated them into his kingdom's revenue system.

The Brazilian Connection

Among the most significant and least-known chapters of this history is the Afro-Brazilian trade network that developed from the 18th century onward. Brazilian traders — many of them formerly enslaved Africans who had returned to West Africa after gaining freedom — operated as intermediaries between Dahomey and the Brazilian slave markets.

Ouidah had a substantial Brazilian commercial community by the 19th century. Families like the Da Silva and De Souza built fortunes in the trade. Their architecture still marks Ouidah's streetscape today — Baroque-influenced houses in colonial pastel colors, standing incongruous against the red earth.

The most notorious figure was Francisco Félix de Souza (known as Chacha), a Brazilian-born trader who became the principal slave broker for King Ghezo in the early 19th century. De Souza and Ghezo built what historians have called "the most organized slave-trading operation in West Africa" — a vertically integrated enterprise that moved tens of thousands of people to Brazil, Cuba, and elsewhere.

The Moral Ledger

Any honest reckoning must hold several facts simultaneously:

Dahomey was not unique. The trade in enslaved people was practiced across West and Central Africa, often facilitated by African kingdoms selling war captives. Dahomey was exceptionally organized in this practice, but it was not alone.

European demand created the market. Without the ships, the plantations, and the appetites of European colonial economies, there would have been no Atlantic slave trade. African participation was essential; European demand was the engine.

The victims were overwhelmingly non-Fon. The Dahomey kingdom primarily enslaved other peoples — the Mahi, Nago, Popo, and others. Fon people themselves could be enslaved for crimes, but the great majority of the enslaved were captured in foreign raids. This does not mitigate the crime, but it complicates any simple narrative of pan-African solidarity.

The legacy lives. The descendants of people enslaved by Dahomey's kings are present today in Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and throughout the African diaspora. The Vodoun they practice in Port-au-Prince and Salvador da Bahia is Fon Vodoun. The ancestors they honor are Fon ancestors. The civilization that trafficked them also gave them their deepest spiritual inheritance.

Acknowledgment and Memory

In recent decades, the Republic of Benin has moved toward more explicit national acknowledgment of its role in the slave trade. In 1999, Benin's President Mathieu Kérékou issued a formal apology at a diaspora summit in Baltimore — one of the first such apologies from an African head of state.

The Route des Esclaves in Ouidah was created in 1992 as a UNESCO-supported memorial route, tracing the path of enslaved people from the interior to the Gate of No Return. It is one of the most significant heritage sites related to the slave trade anywhere in the world.

In Abomey itself, the historical complexity is present but not always foregrounded. The museum focuses, necessarily, on the kingdom's achievements. A guide who engages seriously with the slave trade question is worth their weight in gold — and they exist.

Coming to Terms

For visitors — particularly those from the African diaspora — Abomey presents a specific emotional challenge. This is the place where many of their ancestors were taken. It is also a place of extraordinary beauty, cultural richness, and historical depth.

The Beninese philosopher and writer Paulin Hountondji has written: "We must be capable of looking at our history without flinching — not to condemn, not to excuse, but to understand. Understanding is the precondition of dignity."

That seems right. The slave trade was not the whole of Dahomey. But it was inseparable from Dahomey. Visiting Abomey with that knowledge — holding the palace and the barracoon in the same historical frame — is the only honest way to come.

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Explore further: Abomey — Capital of the Kingdom · Ouidah Origins · The Fon People · The Pillaged Treasures · King Ghezo · King Agadja · Visit Ganvie