Benin

Benin runs inland as a narrow wedge from the Bight of Benin to the banks of the Niger. Its short coast is a sandbar backed by lagoons, and on Lake Nokoué the village of Ganvié stands on stilts. Inland come clay plateaus and the marshy Lama depression, then savanna rising to the Atacora range in the north-west. The Pendjari and W parks in the far north shelter some of West Africa’s last lions. The south has two rainy seasons, the north one.

Coastal kingdoms such as Allada traded with Europeans from the seventeenth century until Dahomey, the Fon kingdom ruling from the palaces of Abomey, conquered Allada and Ouidah in the 1720s. Its kings sold captives through that port, a major slave market, and fielded a regiment of women soldiers. France defeated King Béhanzin in 1894. Dahomey became independent in 1960 and was renamed Benin in 1975 under a Marxist government; a national conference in 1990 opened the way to multiparty rule.

Vodun took shape in this region, and each January its followers gather at Ouidah, near a temple where royal pythons are kept as sacred. Families descended from freed slaves who returned from Brazil built the colourful mansions of old Porto-Novo, and Angélique Kidjo took the country’s rhythms abroad. Cotton from the north leads the exports, followed by cashew nuts and shea butter, and the port of Cotonou serves landlocked states inland and a busy trade with Nigeria.