Benin
Benin, officially the Republic of Benin, formerly known as Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. Benin is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north-west, and Niger to the north-east. The majority of its population lives on the southern coastline of the Bight of Benin, part of the Gulf of Guinea in the northernmost tropical portion of the Atlantic Ocean. The capital is Porto-Novo, and the seat of government is in Cotonou, the most populous city and economic capital. Benin covers an area of, and its population in was estimated to be approximately million. It is a tropical country with an economy heavily dependent on agriculture and the exports of palm oil and cotton.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, political entities in the area included the Kingdom of Dahomey, the city-state of Porto Novo, and other states to the north. France took over the territory in 1894, incorporating it into French West Africa as French Dahomey. In 1960, Dahomey gained full independence from France. As a sovereign state, Benin has had democratic governments, military coups, and military governments. A self-described Marxist–Leninist state called the People's Republic of Benin existed between 1975 and 1990. In 1991, it was replaced by the multi-party Republic of Benin.
The official language of Benin is French, with indigenous languages such as Fon, Bariba, Yoruba and Dendi also spoken. The largest religious group in Benin, as projected for 2020 by Pew Research Group based on 2010 statistics, is Christianity, followed by Islam and African traditional religions. Benin is a member of the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone, Francophonie, the Community of Sahel–Saharan States, the African Petroleum Producers Association and the Niger Basin Authority.
Etymology
During French colonial rule and after independence on 1 August 1960, the country was named Dahomey, after the Kingdom of Dahomey. On 30 November 1975, following a Marxist–Leninist military coup, the country was renamed Benin, after the Bight of Benin, which borders the country, since the name Dahomey is exclusively associated with the Fon who inhabited the southern half of the country. The bight takes its name from the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.History
Pre-colonial
Prior to 1600, present-day Benin comprised a variety of areas with different political systems and ethnicities. These included city-states along the coast and tribal regions inland. The Oyo Empire, located primarily to the east of Benin, was a military force in the region, conducting raids and exacting tribute from the coastal kingdoms and tribal regions. The situation changed in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Kingdom of Dahomey, consisting mostly of Fon people, was founded on the Abomey plateau and began taking over areas along the coast. By 1727, King Agaja of the Kingdom of Dahomey had conquered the coastal cities of Allada and Whydah. Dahomey had become a tributary of the Oyo Empire, and rivaled but did not directly attack the Oyo-allied city-state of Porto-Novo. The rise of Dahomey, its rivalry with Porto-Novo, and tribal politics in the northern region persisted into the colonial and post-colonial periods.In the Dahomey, some younger people were apprenticed to older soldiers and taught the kingdom's military customs until they were old enough to join the army. Dahomey instituted an elite female soldier corps variously called Ahosi, Mino or the "Dahomean Amazons". This emphasis on military preparation and achievement earned Dahomey the nickname of "Black Sparta", from European observers and 19th-century explorers such as Sir Richard Burton.
File:São João Baptista de Ajudá 1886.jpg|thumb|left|The Portuguese Empire was the longest European presence in Benin, beginning in 1680 and ending in 1961 when the last forces left Ajudá.
The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery or killed them ritually in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. By about 1750, the King of Dahomey was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling African captives to European slave-traders. The area was named the "Slave Coast" because of a flourishing slave trade. Court protocols which demanded that a portion of war captives from the kingdom's battles be decapitated, decreased the number of enslaved people exported from the area. The number went from 102,000 people per decade in the 1780s to 24,000 per decade by the 1860s. The decline was partly due to the Slave Trade Act 1807 banning the trans-Atlantic slave trade by Britain in 1808, followed by other countries. This decline continued until 1885 when the last slave ship departed the modern Benin Republic for Brazil, which had yet to abolish slavery. The capital Porto-Novo was originally developed as a port for the slave trade.
Among the goods the Portuguese sought were carved items of ivory made by Benin's artisans in the form of carved saltcellars, spoons, and hunting horns – pieces of African art produced for sale abroad as exotic objects. Another major good sought by European settlers was palm oil. In 1856 approximately 2,500 tons of palm oil was exported by British companies which was valued at £112,500.
Colonial
By the middle of the 19th century, Dahomey had "begun to weaken and lose its status as the regional power". The French took over the area in 1892. In 1899, the French included the land called French Dahomey within the larger French West Africa colonial region.France sought to benefit from Dahomey and the region "appeared to lack the necessary agricultural or mineral resources for large-scale capitalist development". As a result, France treated Dahomey as a sort of preserve in case future discoveries revealed resources worth developing.
The French government outlawed the capture and sale of slaves. Previous slaveowners sought to redefine their control over slaves as control over land, tenants, and lineage members. This provoked a struggle among Dahomeans, "concentrated in the period from 1895 to 1920, for the redistribution of control over land and labor. Villages sought to redefine boundaries of lands and fishing preserves. Religious disputes scarcely veiled the factional struggles over control of land and commerce which underlay them. Factions struggled for the leadership of great families".
In 1958, France granted autonomy to the Republic of Dahomey, and full independence on 1 August 1960 which is celebrated each year as Independence Day, a national holiday. The president who led the country to independence was Hubert Maga.
Post-colonial
After 1960, there were coups and regime changes, with the figures of Hubert Maga, Sourou Migan Apithy, Justin Ahomadégbé, and Émile Derlin Zinsou dominating; the first three each represented a different area and ethnicity of the country. These three agreed to form a Presidential Council after violence marred the 1970 elections.On 7 May 1972, Maga ceded power to Ahomadégbé. On 26 October 1972, Lt. Col. Mathieu Kérékou overthrew the ruling triumvirate, becoming president and stating that the country would not "burden itself by copying foreign ideology, and wants neither Capitalism, Communism, nor Socialism". On 30 November 1974, he announced that the country was officially Marxist, under control of the Military Council of the Revolution, which nationalized the petroleum industry and banks. On 30 November 1975, he renamed the country the People's Republic of Benin. The regime of the People's Republic of Benin underwent changes over the course of its existence: a nationalist period ; a socialist phase ; and a phase involving an opening to Western countries and economic liberalism.
In 1974, the government embarked on a program to nationalize strategic sectors of the economy, reform the education system, establish agricultural cooperatives and new local government structures, and a campaign to eradicate "feudal forces" including tribalism. The regime banned opposition activities. Mathieu Kérékou was elected president by the National Revolutionary Assembly in 1980, re-elected in 1984. Establishing relations with China, North Korea, and Libya, he put "nearly all" businesses and economic activities under state control, causing foreign investment in Benin to dry up. Kérékou attempted to reorganize education, pushing his own aphorisms such as "Poverty is not a fatality". The regime financed itself by contracting to take nuclear waste, first from the Soviet Union and later from France.
In the 1980s, Benin experienced higher economic growth rates, until the closure of the Nigerian border with Benin led to a drop in customs and tax revenues. The government was no longer able to pay civil servants' salaries. In 1989, riots broke out when the regime did not have enough money to pay its army. The banking system collapsed. Eventually, Kérékou renounced Marxism, and a convention forced Kérékou to release political prisoners and arrange elections. Marxism–Leninism was abolished as the country's form of government.
The country's name was officially changed to the Republic of Benin on 1 March 1990, after the newly formed government's constitution was completed. Kérékou lost to Nicéphore Soglo in a 1991 election and became the first president on the African mainland to lose power through an election. Kérékou returned to power after winning the 1996 vote. In 2001, an election resulted in Kérékou winning another term, after which his opponents claimed election irregularities. In 1999, Kérékou issued a national apology for the substantial role that Africans had played in the Atlantic slave trade.
21st century
Kérékou and former president Soglo did not run in the 2006 elections, as both were barred by the constitution's restrictions on age and total terms of candidates. The Beninese presidential election, 2006 resulted in a runoff between Thomas Boni Yayi and Adrien Houngbédji. The runoff election was held on 19 March and was won by Boni, who assumed office on 6 April. Boni was reelected in 2011, taking 53.18% of the vote in the first round—enough to avoid a runoff election. He was the first president to win an election without a runoff since the restoration of democracy in 1991.In the March 2016 presidential elections in which Boni Yayi was barred by the constitution from running for a third term, businessman Patrice Talon won the second round with 65.37% of the vote, defeating investment banker and former Prime Minister Lionel Zinsou. Talon was sworn in on 6 April 2016. Speaking on the same day that the Constitutional Court confirmed the results, Talon said that he would "first and foremost tackle constitutional reform", discussing his plan to limit presidents to a single term of 5 years to combat "complacency". He said that he planned to slash the size of the government from 28 to 16 members. In April 2021, President Patrice Talon was re-elected, with more than 86.3% of the votes cast in the 2021 Beninese presidential election. The change in election laws resulted in total control of parliament by president Talon's supporters.
On 11 December 2020, Benin ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, making the use of nuclear weapons in the country illegal. It officially entered into force for Benin on 22 January 2021.
In February 2022, Benin saw its largest terrorist attack in history, the W National Park massacre. On 20 February 2022, President Talon inaugurated an exhibition with 26 pieces of sacred art returned to Benin by France, 129 years after they were looted by colonial forces.
In March 2025, the government of Benin adopted a law, recognizing 16 kingdoms, 80 senior chiefs and 10 traditional chiefs through a new law. The pre-colonial period starting in 1894 for the south and 1897 for the north served as a historical reference for the bill, identifying traditional territories and rules to institutionalize chieftaincy.
In July 2025, the My Afro Origins law went into effect, granting the right of provisional Beninese citizenship to members of the African diaspora whose ancestry was impacted by the transatlantic slave trade.
On 7 December 2025, a coup attempt occurred in which a faction of the army led by Pascal Tigri claimed to have overthrown President Talon and suspended the government and all political parties. However, the government later announced it had suppressed the coup and regained full control of all institutions, although Talon's whereabouts were unknown.