The Fon people, also called Fon nû, and historically called the Dahomean people in colonial French literature, are the largest ethnic group Fon people, Encyclopædia Britannica, undated, 1.7 million population, Retrieved June 29, 2019 in Benin, accounting for approximately 33.2% of the total population, more than 4,800,000 million people (39.2% if including the Gouns/Eguns, an offshoot ethnic group).
In addition to the main branch, mainly established in major cities like Cotonou, Abomey, Ouidah, Allada, Bohicon, Calavi, Lokossa, etc., there are several sub-groups, including the Kotafons and the Aïzos (Ayizos), across the southern part of Benin Republic. They are also established in southwest Togo, in the Atakpamé region. They speak Fongbe, one of the Gbe languages found in the Bight of Benin, which covers the coastal areas of Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.
Although their geographic range is smaller compared to that of the Ewes, Akans, Fulanis, Yorubas, Igbos and other major ethnic groups in West Africa, the Fons people have an important cultural and sociological impact in the Bight of Benin. This is mainly due to the ancient Dahomey kingdom which they founded by the 17th century, and which were for several decades one of the main economic hubs, as well as a key military power in the coastal region, only second the Oyo Empire.
The Fons, who trace their roots back to the Aja people, have mainly a culture of oral tradition. They were noted by early 19th-century European traders for their Dahomey Amazons – women serving in the army, who took part to the wars against the french colonial forces decades later in 1890.Robin Law (1993), The 'Amazons' of Dahomey, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, Bd. 39 (1993), pp. 245–260
Notable Fons figures include the five time Grammy Awards winner singer and choreographer Angélique Kidjo, the film actor Djimon Hounsou, the former head of state Patrice Talon, and the economist Lionel Zinsou.
Origin
The Fon people, like neighboring ethnic groups in West Africa, remained an oral tradition society through the late medieval era, without ancient historical records. According to these oral histories and legends, the Fon people originated in present-day Tado, an Aja kingdom now situated near the Togo–Benin border. Their earliest ancestors, called Agassouvis, were originally a part of the ruling class in Tado.
The Aja people had a major dispute; one group broke off and these people came to be the Fon people, who migrated to Allada with king Lande Ajahouto. The sons of king Ajahouto disputed who should succeed him after his death, and the group split again. This time, a Fon group migrated with Ajahouto's middle son Do-Aklin northwards to the Abomey's plateau, where they founded the kingdom of Dahomey sometime about 1620 CE, The Fon people have been settled there since, while the kingdom of Dahomey expanded in southeast Benin by conquering neighboring kingdoms.
Some sources further attributes the origins of the Fon people to the intermarrying between this migrating Allada-nu Aja group from the south with the Gedevi, a subgroup of the Ayo-nu inhabitants in the (Yoruba) Kingdoms of the plateau. These Yorubas were known as the Igede, which the Ajas called the Gede-vi.
But these sources are highly controversed. The claim to any origin from within Allada is not recorded in contemporary sources before the late eighteenth century, and is very likely an attempt by the ruling dynasty in the Dahomean kingdom's capital of Agbome to legitimize its conquest of the independent coastal kingdom of Allada in the 1720s. These claims can also be interpreted as a metaphorical expressions of cultural and political influences between kingdoms rather than actual kinship.
History
While references and documented history about the Fon people are scant before the 17th century, there are abundant documents on them from the 17th century, particularly written by European travelers and traders to West African coasts. These memoirs mention such cities as Ouidah and Abomey. Among the most circulated texts are those of Archibald Dalzel, a slave trader who in 1793 wrote the legends, history and slave trading practices of the Fon people in a book titled the History of Dahomey.I. A. Akinjogbin (1966), Archibald Dalzel: Slave Trader and Historian of Dahomey, The Journal of African History, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1966), pages 67-78 Modern era scholars have questioned the objectivity and accuracy of Dalzel, and to what extent his pioneering book on Fon people was a polemic or dispassionate scholarship.
In the 19th century and early 20th century, as the French presence increased and then the colonial period began in the Benin and nearby regions, more history and novels with references to the Fon people appeared, such as those by Édouard Foà,Le Dahomey, Édouard Foà (1895), BnF: National Library of France (in French) N. Savariau,L'agriculture au Dahomey N. Savariau (1906), A. Challamel, Marseille, France, Exposition nationale (in French) Le Herisse and M.J. Herskovits' anthropological study on Fon people published in 1938.
These histories suggest that Fon people's kingdom of Dahomey expanded in early 18th century, particularly during King Agaja's rule through the 1740s, reaching the Atlantic coast from their inland capital of Abomey. During this period, 200 years after Portugal had already settled in the Kongo people lands on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa in the 16th century, there were numerous plantations in the Caribbean and Atlantic coastline of South America, which had already created a booming demand for slaves from the European traders. The expanded territory of the Dahomey kingdom was well positioned to supply this transatlantic trade and the 18th and 19th century history of the Fon people is generally presented within this context.
Slavery, Bight of Benin The Fon people did not invent slavery in Africa, nor did they have a monopoly on slavery nor exclusive slave trading activity. The institution of slavery long predates the origins of the Fon people in the Aja kingdom and the formation of the kingdom of Dahomey. The sub-Saharan and the Red Sea region, states Herbert Klein – a professor of history, was already trading between 5,000 and 10,000 African slaves per year between 800 and 1600 CE, with a majority of these slaves being women and children. According to John Donnelly Fage – a professor of history specializing in Africa, a "slave economy was generally established in the Western and Central Sudan by about the fourteenth century at least, and had certainly spread to the coasts around the Senegal and in Lower Guinea by the fifteenth century".
Slave shipment between 1501 and 1867, by regionDavid Eltis and David Richardson (2015), Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2nd Edition, Yale University Press, ; Archive: Slave Route Maps, see Map 9; The transatlantic slave trade volume over the 350+ years involved an estimated 12.5 million Africans, almost every country that bordered the Atlantic Ocean, as well as Mozambique and the Swahili coast. Region Total embarked Total disembarked West Central Africa 5.69 million Bight of Benin 2.00 million Bight of Biafra 1.6 million Gold Coast 1.21 million Windward Coast 0.34 million Sierra Leone 0.39 million Senegambia 0.76 million Mozambique 0.54 million Brazil (South America) 4.7 million Rest of South America 0.9 million Caribbean 4.1 million North America 0.4 million Europe 0.01 million
By the 15th century, Songhay Empire rulers to the immediate north of the Fon people, in the Niger River valley, were already using thousands of captured slaves for agriculture. The demand for slave labor to produce sugarcane, cotton, palm oil, tobacco and other goods in the plantations of European colonies around the globe had sharply grown between 1650 and 1850. The Bight of Benin was already shipping slaves in the late 17th century, before the Fon people expanded their kingdom to gain control of the coast line. The Fon rulers and merchants, whose powers were established on the Atlantic coast between 1700 and 1740, entered this market. The Fon people were divided on how to respond to the slave demand. Some scholars suggest that Fon people and Dahomey rulers expressed intentions to curtail or end slave trading, states Elizabeth Heath, but historical evidence affirms that the Benin coastline including the ports of the Dahomey rulers and the Fon people became one of the largest exporter of slaves.
The kingdom of Dahomey, along with its neighbours' kingdoms of Benin and the Oyo Empire, engaged in slave raiding and trading into transatlantic slavery. The competition for captives, slaves and government revenues, amongst the African kingdoms, escalated the mutual justification and pressure. The captives were sold as slaves to the Europeans from the Bight of Benin (also called the Slave Coast), from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.
During the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Fon people were both victims and victimisers of other ethnic groups. Under vassalship to the Oyo Empire, Dahomey had to provide Oyo with slaves as annual tribute. Many of these slaves were Fon men, which altered the gender demographics of the Dahomeans, and resulted in their reliance on an all-female military unit, called the Agoji or Mino. Many of the Fon people, annually, enslaved by Oyo, were sold into the Atlantic Slave Trade. Criminals of Dahomey could also be exported to the New World, even if they were of the Fon people.
The foreign slaves sold by Dahomey came from wars between the Oyo Empire, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Allada Kingdom. However, other enslaved people came from systematic kidnapping within the kingdom or at the frontiers, as well as the caravans of slaves brought in by merchants from the West African interior. The Fon kingdom of Dahomey controlled the port of Ouidah, from where numerous European slave ships disembarked. However, this was not the only port of the region, and it competed with the ports controlled by other nearby kingdoms on the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra. The enslaved people sold by Dahomey, belonged to ethnic groups such as the: Ewe, Aja, Whydah, Mina, and Yoruba.
The Fon people, along with the neighbouring ethnic groups such as the Ewe people, disembarked in French colonies to work as slaves in the plantations of the Caribbean and South American coast. They were initially called Whydah, which probably meant "people sold by Alladah". The word Whydah phonetically evolved into Rada, the name of the West African community that embarked in slave ships from the Bight of Benin, and is now found in Haiti, Saint Lucia, Trinidad, French Antilles and other nearby islands with French influence. In some Caribbean colonial documents, alternate spellings such as Rara are also found.