Adandozan was a king of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, from 1797 until 1818. His rule ended with a coup by his brother Ghezo who then erased Adandozan from the official history resulting in high uncertainty about many aspects of his life. Adandozan took over from his father Agonglo in 1797 but was quite young at the time and so there was a regent in charge of the kingdom until 1804. Dealing with the economic depression that had defined the administrations of his father Agonglo and grandfather Kpengla, Adandozan tried to reduce slavery to decrease European trade, and when these failed reform the economy to focus on agriculture. Unfortunately, these efforts did not end domestic dissent and in 1818 at the Annual Customs of Dahomey, Ghezo and Francisco Félix de Sousa, a powerful Brazilian slave trader, organized a coup d'état and replaced Adandozan. He was left alive and lived until the 1860s hidden in the palaces while he was largely erased from official royal history.
Rise to power
Agonglo's (1789-1797) reign had been very contentious ending in his assassination by a brother, Dogan. The slave trade had been largely disrupted for two decades by the Oyo empire, the lack of military success by Dahomey, and European traders changing their focus (the French abolished slavery in 1794 and the British and Portuguese had stopped relying on Dahomey's ports). The result was that when Agonglo died there was a large scale upheaval led by various factions, but this ended on May 5, 1797 with the appointment of Adandozan, the second oldest son of Agonglo as the new king. However, because Adandozan was young at the time, the first seven years of his rule were held by a regency of various elder statesmen. In 1804, he became old enough to formally rule with his own authority but the regency members retained importance.
In general, it is contended that during the Annual Customs of Dahomey in 1818, Ghezo replaced Adandozan with the help of Adandozan's Migan and Mehu (prime ministers). He lived much of his later life confined to the palaces, while his descendants changed their name to avoid association, and when he died he was buried quickly but with full royal honors. Historian Edna Bay writes that after the coup "Adandozan suffered a bizarre punishment that was perhaps worse than assassination--to watch history be reworked as though he had never lived." The traditional stories about Adandozan's rule (which are retold, with some changing of names, in Bruce Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah) portray him as extremely cruel: he is said to have raised hyenas to which he would throw live subjects for amusement; he is pictured slitting a pregnant woman's abdomen open on a bet to see whether he could predict the sex of the fetus.
Many historians question the negative portrayal of Adandozan in the official history and common stories about the king and believe that it is the attempt to remove his claim to history. A similar process may have occurred earlier with Queen Hangbe who may have ruled for a brief period in the 1700s.
Although tradition has not been kind to Adandozan, the letters he wrote to various outsiders, especially the kings and other officials of Portugal (who fled to Brazil following the conquest of Portugal by Napoleon) have shown a different picture of his rule. In these letters, Adandozan outlines substantial military campaigns, which he presents as victories, as well as detailing his negotiations with Europeans. Some of these letters were published in work by Pierre Verger in the 1960s. A large cache, found in the Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro and Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, and several of the letters in this collection were examined in an article published by historian Ana Lucia Araujo in the British journal Slavery and Abolition. The full text of Adandozan's letters, both from the Institute cache and other repositories, as well as a few from his predecessor Agongolo and his successor Gezo were published in (the original) Portuguese in 2013.
Bibliography
La vie, le règne et l'œuvre de Dàdà Adàndozàn : Vingt-et-un ans effectifs de règne (1797-1818), deux cents ans d'ostracisme (1818-2018) : Actes du colloque tenu à l'Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Campus d'Abomey-Calavi, les 27, 28 et 29 mars 2014, pref. Brice A. Sinsin. Cotonou : Christon Editions, 2021, 9789998291577.