Abomey

The kings of Dahomey each built a palace of their own inside a single walled enclosure at Abomey, so that the site grew over two centuries into a compound of successive reigns. Each king also raised a house for his predecessor, a small shrine holding earth mixed with the blood of offerings, which made the dead king a continuing presence with a residence, attendants and a share of what the kingdom produced. Painted clay reliefs set into the walls recorded the deeds and emblems of each reign, so that the buildings were also the archive.

The annual customs were the public form of this. Tribute was brought in, the court assembled, gifts were distributed to the population, and offerings were made to the royal ancestors so that they would continue to support the kingdom. Those offerings included the killing of war captives, described by European visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose accounts served their own purposes but whose substance is corroborated by the kingdom's own traditions. The atlas records it as documented, neither dwelling on it nor pretending it away.

Ordinary Fon families memorialised their dead differently, with the asen, an iron staff carrying a small platform of figures, planted in a family shrine and used as the point of address to a particular ancestor. The royal enclosure has been on the World Heritage list since 1985, and parts of it were damaged by a tornado in 1984 and by earlier fires.

Vodun is not a single deity but a class of them, each with its own priesthood, drums, songs, food prohibitions and initiates. The creator pair Mawu and Lisa stand at a distance; the powers people deal with are those of the earth and smallpox, of thunder and lightning, of the serpent and the rainbow, and Legba, who stands at every threshold and crossroads and must be addressed first because he carries messages between worlds. Initiation takes place in enclosures for periods of seclusion and instruction, and the initiate emerges with a new name and a lifelong obligation. Decisions are referred to a divination system of sixteen signs read from palm nuts or a chain, shared with the Yoruba Ifa tradition.

The port of Ouidah on the coast below Abomey was one of the principal points of embarkation of the Atlantic slave trade, and the religion travelled with the people taken from it. Haitian Vodou's Rada rite carries Dahomean names and rhythms, and its Legba stands at the same threshold; Brazilian Candomble and Cuban Santeria draw more heavily on Yoruba sources but belong to the same Atlantic family. Families of Brazilian returnees settled at Ouidah in the nineteenth century and brought elements back the other way.

Benin recognised vodun as a national religion in 1996 and made 10 January a public holiday for it, after decades in which the revolutionary government had suppressed it as backwardness.