The Fon kingdom of Dahomey rose inland at Abomey in the seventeenth century and grew into one of West Africa's most formidable states, famous for its royal ancestor cult, its Annual Customs at which the kings honored their predecessors, and its corps of women soldiers Europeans called amazons. Dahomey conquered the coast in the 1720s and took over Ouidah, the port whose slave trade Robin Law has chronicled: through its beach passed hundreds of thousands of captives, many of them Fon, Ewe and Yoruba speakers, bound for the Caribbean and Brazil.
They carried their gods. In Haiti the vodun became the lwa of Haitian Vodou, its largest rite still called Rada after the Dahomean port of Allada; Legba still opens the gates, and Damballah the serpent still arches over creation, as Leslie Desmangles' study of Vodou's marriage with Catholicism shows. Related traditions took root in Cuba and Brazil, and Fon religious vocabulary survives across the Atlantic world.
France conquered Dahomey in 1894, and the colonial and later Marxist governments of Benin suppressed or disdained Vodun for most of a century. The republic reversed course in the 1990s: Vodun was recognized, and January tenth is now a national Vodun holiday centered on Ouidah, where festival crowds gather at the Gate of No Return to honor the spirits and the ancestors the trade carried away. Most Beninese today are Christian or Muslim, and many keep Vodun obligations alongside.