Benin
Birthplace of Vodun and heir to the Kingdom of Dahomey
Benin is a narrow, north-south sliver of West Africa running from a short Atlantic coastline up to the Niger River, a country whose modest size belies a rich and influential history. It was the seat of the powerful Kingdom of Dahomey, famed for its royal palaces and its all-female military regiment, and it is the spiritual homeland of Vodun, the religion carried by enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas. Today its roughly 15 million people make a living from farming, trade through the busy port of Cotonou, and a long, layered cultural heritage.
The coast is a low, sandy belt of lagoons and palm groves, behind which the land rises gently through fertile plateaus to the Atakora Mountains in the northwest, where Mont Sokbaro marks the high point at about 658 meters. The far north slopes toward the Niger River and the Sahel, with savanna and the wildlife-rich Pendjari National Park. Agriculture dominates the economy, with cotton the leading export, alongside cashews, palm oil, and a vast informal re-export trade with neighboring Nigeria that funnels goods through Cotonou.
The Kingdom of Dahomey rose in the seventeenth century, growing wealthy and notorious through its role in the Atlantic slave trade from the port of Ouidah, still a center of Vodun pilgrimage. France conquered the kingdom in the 1890s and ruled it as part of French West Africa until independence in 1960. After years of instability and a Marxist-Leninist phase under Mathieu Kérékou, the country was renamed Benin and in 1991 staged one of Africa's first peaceful democratic transitions. Its arts, from bronze and brass casting to drumming and dance, remain widely celebrated.