Fon people

The Fon people, also called Dahomeans, Fon nu, Agadja and historically called Jeji (Djedji) by the Yoruba in the South American diaspora and in colonial French literature are a Gbe ethnic group. They are the largest ethnic group in Benin, found particularly in its south region; they are also found in southwest Nigeria and Togo. Their total population is estimated to be about 3,500,000 people, and they speak the Fon language, a member of the Gbe languages.

The history of the Fon people is linked to the Dahomey kingdom, a well-organized kingdom by the 17th century but one that shared more ancient roots with the Aja people. The Fon people traditionally were a culture of an oral tradition and had a well-developed polytheistic religious system. They were noted by early 19th-century European traders for their N'Nonmiton practice, or Dahomey Amazons – which empowered their women to serve in the military, who decades later fought the French colonial forces in 1890.

Cities built by the Fon include Abomey, the historical capital city of Dahomey on what was historically referred to by Europeans as the Slave Coast. These cities became major commercial centres for the slave trade. A significant portion of the sugar plantations in the French West Indies, particularly Haiti, Suriname and Trinidad, were populated with slaves that came from the Ewe and Fon ethnic groups, who were captured along the Slave Coast.

The Fon people, like neighboring ethnic groups in West Africa, remained an oral tradition society through the late medieval era, without ancient historical records. According to these oral histories and legends, the Fon people originated in present-day Tado, a small Aja town now situated near the Togo–Benin border. Their earliest rulers were originally a part of the ruling class in the Aja kingdom of Allada (also called the Ardra kingdom).

The Aja people had a major dispute; one group broke off and these people came to be the Fon people, who migrated to Allada with king Agasu. The sons of king Agasu disputed who should succeed him after his death, and the group split again. This time the Fon people migrated with Agasu's son Dogbari northwards to Abomey, where they founded the kingdom of Dahomey sometime about 1620 CE, The Fon people have been settled there since, while the kingdom of Dahomey expanded in southeast Benin by conquering neighboring kingdoms.

The oral history of the Fon further attributes the origins of the Fon people to the intermarrying between this migrating Allada-nu Aja group from the south with the Oyo-nu inhabitants in the (Yoruba) Kingdoms of the plateau. These Yorubas were known as the Igede, which the Ajas called the Gedevi. The fusion of the immigrant Aja conquerors and the original Indigenous Yorubas of the Abomey plateau thus created a new culture, that of the Fon.

Although these oral traditional origins have been passed down through the generations, they are not without controversy. The claim to any origin from within Allada is not recorded in contemporary sources before the late eighteenth century, and is very likely an attempt by the ruling dynasty in the Dahomean kingdom's capital of Agbome to legitimize its conquest of the independent coastal kingdom of Allada in the 1720s. These claims can also be interpreted as a metaphorical expressions of cultural and political influences between kingdoms rather than actual kinship.

While references and documented history about the Fon people are scant before the 17th century, there are abundant documents on them from the 17th century, particularly written by European travelers and traders to West African coasts. These memoirs mention such cities as Ouidah and Abomey. Among the most circulated texts are those of Archibald Dalzel, a slave trader who in 1793 wrote the legends, history and slave trading practices of the Fon people in a book titled the History of Dahomey. Modern era scholars have questioned the objectivity and accuracy of Dalzel, and to what extent his pioneering book on Fon people was a polemic or dispassionate scholarship.