"Royal Palaces of Abomey" a Abomey Travel Page by niamey00

In January 2003 I, along with our good friend and colleague Bio Gado, took the entire middle school of ASN on a six day journey through the history of Benin, particularly the slave trade history. Our first stop was Abomey, where the last independent king, Gbehanzin, held back the French until 1894, when he was deported to Martinique. Thanks to our incredible guide, Amadże, we learned a lot of the history of Abomey, and were able to take pictures, which is usually forbidden

In this room of the museum, they kept the thrones of the kings along with the "assins." The assins are portable shrines dedicated to the ancestors of the deceased kings and their spirits. They have sculpted animals and other representations of the kings.

Abomey di not have a writing system, so their recorded his takes two forms; appliquż, seen here, and bas relief sculptures. In this appliquż you can see warriors fighting the French. The warriors are women. According to local lore, the Amazon warriors are from Abomey. How they came to be called Amazons is anyone's guess. The kings had armies of women, who fought to the death and were much feared by neighboring kingdoms. The present king still has Amazons in his retinue, but they are only symbolic and do not fight to the death today!

According to legend, the person in charge of shading the King with the parasol had to keep rotating it in a clockwise manner. If he stopped, or rotated it in the wrong way, he was killed.

This throne is built upon the skulls of enemies killed in battle.

What we call today voodoo (voudon in local dialect) was very important in Abomey life, and still is across much of Southern Benin. Fetish such as this are common at entrances to villages or family compounds.

These walls really were built with blood anyway. The blood of enemies killed in battle were mixed with mud or clay to build the walls of this structure.