The Kingdom of Dahomey, located in present-day Benin, offers the clearest example of an African state that built itself specifically around the slave trade. Dahomey’s participation was not peripheral or incidental. It was central to the kingdom’s identity, its economy, and its military strategy.
Dahomey conducted what it called annual customs, large-scale military raids on neighbouring peoples specifically designed to capture enslaved individuals for sale to European traders. These raids were so regular and so central to the kingdom’s operation that they were essentially an industry. The port of Ouidah, controlled by Dahomey, became one of the busiest slave-trading ports in West Africa, processing hundreds of thousands of enslaved people over the course of the eighteenth century.
Dahomey’s kings were not reluctant or coerced participants in the trade. King Agaja, who ruled in the early eighteenth century, actually attempted to cut out African middlemen and deal directly with European traders to maximise Dahomey’s profits. His successors maintained and expanded the trade. The slave trade generated the revenue that funded Dahomey’s military, its court, and its considerable political ambitions in the region.
When Britain began to pressure African rulers to end the slave trade in the nineteenth century, Dahomey’s kings resisted strenuously, arguing that the trade was essential to their economy and their power. This resistance continued for decades, and Dahomey remained an active slave-trading state well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Republic of Benin, successor state to Dahomey, formally apologised in 1999 for its ancestors’ role in the slave trade. This stands as a rare and significant acknowledgement. It does not resolve the moral questions, but it demonstrates that honest reckoning with this history is possible.
