Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[6] [7] Instead, Oyo directed more effort towards trading and acted as middlemen for both the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trades. [6] Europeans bringing salt arrived in Oyo during the reign of King Obalokun. [8] Thanks to its domination of the coast, Oyo merchants were able to trade with Europeans at Porto Novo and Whydah. [9]
The Oyo Empire was a Yoruba empire in West Africa. It was located in present-day southern Benin and western Nigeria (including the South West zone and the western half of the North Central zone). The empire grew to become the largest Yoruba -speaking state through the organizational and administrative efforts of the Yoruba people, trade, as ...
The Dahomey were soon met with victory when they brought down the Oyo Empire and its yoke at Paonignan in 1827. While Brazil's demand for slaves increased in 1830, the British started a campaign to abolish the slave trade in Africa. The British government began putting significant pressure on King Ghezo in the 1840s to end the slave trade in ...
At the same time, the empire continued slave raids throughout the region and became a major supplier to the Atlantic slave trade. In the late 18th century, Oyo put pressure onto Dahomey to reduce its participation in the slave trade (largely to protect its own slave trade) and Dahomey complied by limiting some of the slave trade. [7]
This led to Dahomey being one of the leading states in the slave trade with the Oyo Empire, which used slaves for commodity exchange in West Africa until the slave trade in the region ended. The lack of men likely led the kings of Dahomey to recruit women into the army.
Ghezo ended Dahomey's tributary status to the Oyo Empire. Afterwards, he dealt with significant domestic dissent, as well as pressure from the British Empire, to end the slave trade. He promised to end the slave trade in 1852, but resumed slave efforts in 1857. Ghezo was assassinated in 1858, and his son Glele became the new king.
He is also remembered as the Aláàfin under which Oyo first entered the Atlantic Slave Trade and contact with European powers. One of his nicknames was "Aágànná Erin" which translates to the plundering elephant, alluding to his expansionist policy. [1] He was first in an era of successive despotic and short-lived kings of Oyo.
Basil Davidson contended that Dahomey was drawn into the slave trade only as a means of self-defense against slave raiding by the Oyo Empire and the kingdoms of Allada and Whydah. He argued that Agaja took over the coastal cities to secure access to European firearms to protect the Fon from slave raiding.