Benin - History
Just below the Gold Coast lay the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Oral history and findings in archeological excavation attest that Yoruba people have been the dominate group on the west bank of the Niger River as far as their historical memory extends and even further into the past. The twelfth century found the Yoruba people beginning to coalesce into a number of territorial city-states of which Ife, Oyo, and Benin dominated.
Old loyalties to the clan or lineage were subordinated to allegiance to a king or oni. The Oni was chosen on a rotating basis by the clans. Below him, was an elected state hierarchy that depended on broad support from the community. The people were subsistence farmers, artisans, and long distance traders in cloth, kola nuts, palm oil, and copper. Trade and the acquisition of horses were factors in the emergence of Oyo as the dominant political power among the Yoruba states by late 14th and early 15th century.
Dahomey, or Benin, created by the Fon ruling dynasty, came to dominance in the 17th century and was a contemporary of the Asante Empire. As early as the 17th century the Oyo kingdom had an unwritten constitution with a system of political checks and balances. Dahomey, located in Southern Nigeria, east of Yorubaland and west of the Niger River also claimed to have obtained kingship from the Yoruba city of Ife. Oyo and Ife not only shared a common cultural history but also shared many other cultural characteristics, such as religious pantheons, patrilineal descent groups, urbanized settlement patterns, and a high level of artistic achievement by artisans, particularly in ivory, wood, brass and bronze sculpture.
Relatively few Yoruba and Fon people, the two principal ethnic groups in the Oyo kingdoms, were enslaved in North America. Most were carried to Santa Domingo (Haiti) and Brazil. During and after the Haitian Revolution, some of the Fon people who were enslaved in Haiti immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily to New Orleans.
Proclaimed a Republic on December 4, 1958, Benin acceded to international sovereignty on August 1, 1960, under the name Dahomey. The country is known for the "exemplary" nature of its democratic process, begun in February 1990, following the National Conference of the National Forces of the Nation. Since then, several presidential, legislative and local elections have sanctioned the devolution of political power. In fifteen years, political liberalism has generated three alternations at the height of the state.
Benin really experienced two waves of democratization, crowned with elections from which the rulers came. The first one dated back to the dawn of independence with the general elections of December 1960. This period was marked by the incompleteness of the mandate of the President of the Republic, swept away by a military coup in 1963. In addition, Political life suffered from monolithism, because very quickly the new president inspired the merger of the political parties into a single official: the Dahomean Party of Unity (PDU). The second wave of democratization has been underway since February 1990. Its specificity is that it is a long-term and stable democratic institution.
More generally, the contemporary political history of the country can be sequenced in three major stages: the time of political instability, the militaro-marxist time and the time of the democratic Renewal.
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