Dahomey renamed itself Benin after a Marxist turn in 1975
Benin, called Dahomey until 1975, stretches north from the Bight of Benin between Togo and Nigeria across 112,622 square kilometres. Porto-Novo is the capital but government sits in Cotonou, and the land was home to the Kingdom of Dahomey, whose female soldier corps helped earn it the nickname Black Sparta.
Before 1600 the area held coastal city-states, mostly of Aja people, and inland groups such as the Bariba and Mahi, all raided by the Oyo Empire to the east. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey rose to dominance, apprenticing young people to veteran soldiers and fielding an elite women's corps called the Mino, our mothers. Its kings sold war captives to European slavers, earning an estimated £250,000 a year by about 1750, and the shore became known as the Slave Coast.
France took the territory in the 1890s and folded it into French West Africa as French Dahomey, treating it as a reserve in case valuable resources turned up. Autonomy came in 1958 and full independence on 1 August 1960 under Hubert Maga. Coups followed, and the rivals Maga, Sourou Migan Apithy and Justin Ahomadégbé, each representing a different region and ethnic group, formed a rotating Presidential Council after violent elections in 1970.
On 26 October 1972 Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu Kérékou seized power, declared the state Marxist in 1974, and on 30 November 1975 renamed it the People's Republic of Benin, after the bight rather than the Fon-linked name Dahomey; the bight itself is named for the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria. Sweeping state control drove off investment, and by 1989 the regime could not pay its army. Kérékou dropped Marxism, and in 1991 he lost to Nicéphore Soglo, the first mainland African president voted out of office.
Kérékou won back the presidency in 1996, and in 1999 he apologised for Africans' role in the Atlantic slave trade. Businessman Patrice Talon took office in 2016. In February 2022 the country suffered its deadliest terrorist attack, in W National Park, and France returned 26 pieces of sacred art looted 129 years before. French is official alongside Fon, Bariba, Yoruba and Dendi, and a 2025 law formally recognised 16 traditional kingdoms.
Source: Benin
