Béhanzin: The Last Independent King of Dahomey

Béhanzin, born Kondo in Abomey around 1844, became the twelfth king of Dahomey in 1889 after the death of his father, Glele, and ruled the West African kingdom, in what is now Benin, until French conquest ended its independence in 1894. He remains, along with Yaa Asantewaa of Asante, one of the figures most closely associated with armed African resistance to European colonization in the late nineteenth century.

By the time Béhanzin took the throne, France had already established a foothold on Dahomey’s coast. An 1868 treaty signed by Glele placed the port of Cotonou under French administration, and in 1882 France declared a protectorate over Porto-Novo, a state Dahomey considered its vassal, without consulting Abomey. Béhanzin, known by the honorific “King Shark,” rejected the erosion of Dahomean sovereignty that these arrangements represented. He built up an army reported at around 15,000 soldiers, including several thousand of the kingdom’s famed women warriors, the Mino, and moved to reassert control over disputed territory: attacking French positions at Cotonou and taking hostages among French residents at Ouidah.

An uneasy truce followed, but hostilities resumed decisively in 1892 in what is known as the Second Franco-Dahomean War. Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds led a French expeditionary force equipped with far superior weaponry, including rapid-fire artillery, against Dahomean troops still fighting largely with older rifles. Béhanzin’s forces fought hard at engagements including Dogba, Poguessa, and along the Ouémé Valley, and inflicted real losses on the French, but the campaign at Adégon in October 1892 proved catastrophic for the Dahomean side, and by November French troops had taken the capital, Abomey. Béhanzin burned parts of his own palace rather than let it fall intact and continued a guerrilla resistance for several more months before submitting to Dodds in January 1894, reportedly unwilling to keep sacrificing his soldiers, including the Mino, in a war he could no longer win.

France deposed Béhanzin, installed his brother Agoli-agbo as a subordinate ruler stripped of real authority, and absorbed the kingdom into French colonial territory. Béhanzin himself was deported first to the Caribbean island of Martinique, where he lived for over a decade, and later moved to Blida, Algeria, where he died on December 10, 1906, without ever returning home. He is remembered in Benin today as a national symbol of resistance; a monument in Abomey preserves his own defiant words, that he would never sign away his ancestors’ independence, and he remains among the few African rulers of the colonial era to appear on national postage stamps in more than one country.