Fon Erotic

The Fon are the people of the old Kingdom of Dahomey, the centralized state that ran the southern third of present-day Benin from the early seventeenth century until the French dismantled it in 1894. Their heartland is the plateau around Abomey, sloping down through Allada and Ouidah to the Atlantic coast — a stretch of palm groves, lagoons, and red-earth farmland rather than the dramatic geography people associate with West Africa. The Fon are the demographic core of Benin, and their language, also called Fon, belongs to the Gbe cluster of Kwa within Niger–Congo. Gbe is best understood as a chain of closely related tongues that shade into one another across the Benin–Togo–Nigeria border: Ewe to the west, Aja inland, Gen near the coast, with Fon as the eastern anchor. Speakers can usually follow neighboring varieties with effort, and the related Egun (Gun) of the Porto-Novo area are sometimes counted as a Fon sub-group, sometimes as kin rather than kin proper.

Dahomey is the historical fact that shapes everything about how the Fon present themselves. It was a militarized monarchy with a court bureaucracy, a standing army that famously included the women's regiment Europeans called the Amazons, and a deep, uncomfortable entanglement with the Atlantic slave trade through the port at Ouidah. That history is not a wound the Fon hide; the royal palaces at Abomey are a UNESCO site, the appliqué cloths of the court are a recognized art form, and the annual Vodun festival each January draws practitioners from across the Black Atlantic.

Catholicism took hold under French rule and remains the dominant institutional religion, but Fon religious life is rarely just one thing. Vodun — the indigenous system from which Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo descend — was never displaced, and most Fon households move between the two without much theological anxiety. A baptized Catholic may also keep a shrine to a family vodun, consult a bokonon diviner using the Fa system of sixteen signs, and observe obligations to ancestors at named festivals. The cuisine runs to maize and cassava porridges, palm-oil stews, and the fermented condiment afitin; agbo, the cloth-strip drumming and dance forms, and the praise-name traditions of the Abomey court all remain in active use rather than preserved as folklore.