The Nature of the Path: Reading a West African Road 1452952132, 9781452952130

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Tilte
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Notes on Orthography, Diacritics, and Language
Introduction: Crossing the Black Earth
1. The Roads into Igbó Ilú: The Making of an Ohori Identity
2. Roads to Subversion: Displaying Independence and Displacing Authority in the Early Colonial Era
3. Going to the Greens Seller: Ohori Communal Expansion in the 1920s and 1930s
4. "It Has Become a Joy to Go to Tollou": Reinterpreting the Tools of French Colonial Développement
5. Cementing Identities: Negotiating Independence in a Changing Landscape
Conclusion: Breathing with the Road
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

The Nature of the Path

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The Nature of the Path Reading a West African Road

Marcus Filippello

A Quadrant Book

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Quadrant, a joint initiative of the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, provides support for interdisciplinary scholarship within a new, more collaborative model of research and publication. http://quadrant.umn.edu

Sponsored by the Quadrant Environment, Culture, and Sustainability group (advisory board: Bruce Braun, Daniel Philippon, Christine Marran, and Stuart McLean), and by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. Quadrant is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

All photographs by the author. Maps by Philip Schwartzberg, Meridian Mapping, Minneapolis. Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 22 21 20 19 18 17

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Filippello, Marcus, author. Title: The nature of the path : reading a West African road / Marcus Filippello. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | “A Quadrant book.” Identifiers: LCCN 2016022209| ISBN 978-1-4529-5212-3 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-4529-5213-0 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Roads—Benin—History. | Roads—Social aspects—Benin. | Roads—Environmental aspects—Benin. | Benin—History—20th century. | Benin—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HE367.B452 F55 2017 | DDC 388.1096683—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022209

For Neha and Sai

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Contents Notes on Orthography, Diacritics, and Language Introduction: Crossing the Black Earth

ix 1

1. The Roads into Igbó Ilú: The Making of an Ọhọri Identity

29

2. Roads to Subversion: Displaying Independence and Displacing Authority in the Early Colonial Era

49

3. Going to the Greens Seller: Ọhọri Communal Expansion in the 1920s and 1930s

71

4. “It Has Become a Joy to Go to Tollou”: Reinterpreting the Tools of French Colonial Développement

91

5. Cementing Identities: Negotiating Independence in a Changing Landscape

111

Conclusion: Breathing with the Road

131

Acknowledgments

141

Notes

145

Bibliography

193

Index

211

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Notes on Orthography, Diacritics, and Language

Names of places and people in West Africa can be spelled in a variety of ways. I opted to more generally use names and places as one might find them in English or French, but there are occasions where I use proper names and places with tones or diacritical marks that do not appear in English or French. Yorùbá has three tones: high, middle, and low. In an effort to make the book accessible to students and nonspecialists not familiar with seeing the language in print, I generally omitted tones and diacritical marks. These include the low (i.e., ù) and high (i.e., á) as in Yorùbá, as well as Ọ, pronounced “aw,” and Ş, pronounced “sh.” Notable exceptions include some proper names, such as those of individuals who made known they would prefer a Yorùbá spelling; the words Ọhọri and Ọhọri-Ije, which are spelled Holli and Hollidjé in French; Kétu in lieu of Kétou, the French spelling of the town; and the spelling of the names of some Ọhọri kings, such as Otutubiodjo, who was often referred to as Otoutoubiodjo in French colonial correspondence. Throughout the book, I use the term “Ọhọri” in different ways. Ọhọri can be a reference to people who consider themselves members of an Ọhọri community. I also use Ọhọri to describe the geographical space where many Ọhọri people live. The Ọhọri space or homeland is a part of the lower southeastern segment of the Lama Valley, which stretches across the entirety of a southern area of the Republic of Benin. In Yorùbá, ije signifies a region’s capital. Ọhọri-Ije consists of eighteen villages that have historically made up the political center of the community.

ix

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Introduction

Crossing the Black Earth But don’t we all change from minute to minute? If we didn’t we wouldn’t hope to die. Well, same as the road. My favourite paths are those trickles among green fastnesses on which whole forests are broken up — between the falling dew and the evening mists the nature of those paths changes right beneath my feet. — Wole Soyinka, The Road

With a thunderous roar emanating from their engines, bulldozers driven by Africans working for the French engineering firm, Enterprise Razel, Frères emerged from an early morning mist in August 1982 near Itchagba, a village in the heart of the Lama Valley in southeastern Benin.1 As the heavy machinery rumbled to a halt at the southern base of a forest that lay in its path, many of Itchagba’s residents — members of the valley’s main Ọhọri community — gathered to examine the commotion. Eight months earlier, the government of Benin had awarded the company a contract to repair and rebuild the main road that crossed the valley and cut through the Ọhọri-Ije homeland.2 During a colonial era, French administrators referred to the deepest reaches of the basin as la terre noire, “the black earth,” because of its dark hue and unusually fertile soil.3 An earlier road constructed of laterite composite that carved through the valley, connecting the southern and northern plateau towns of Pobé and Kétu, had deteriorated following years of heavy rains.4 The government of Benin charged Razel with the task of completing an asphalt road, thereby improving access to the new Onigbolo cement factory built five kilometers north of Itchagba.5 Engineers working for the firm surmised that cutting a new path through the forest would improve the highway’s efficacy.6 Brandishing chain saws, laborers leapt off of their bulldozers and set forth cutting down a large kapok tree that lay at the grove’s foundation.7 For hours, the grinding hum of saws resonated beyond the village, reaching the ears of local farmers tending nearby maize and legume fields. By the day’s close, however, the company’s workers had done little more than leave marks where their saws had nibbled into wood. Returning the next morning, they again chiseled away at the tree. Exhaust from their gas-powered 

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Map . The Lama Valley in Dahomey/Benin and colonial rail lines.

equipment climbed through the dense morning air as they whittled chunks of timber from its base. But the revolving teeth of their chain saws kept splitting apart, forcing the workers to abandon the task. Finally, on a third day, as mid-afternoon clouds threatening an early season rain gathered on the horizon of the southern plateau, the whirring metallic drone of their saws gave way to a moment of silence as the laborers stopped to gauge their progress. Shortly after, one could hear the cracks of the tree’s sinewy trunk splitting apart. With a final muted groan, the kapok tilted

 . INTRODUCTION

Figure . An example of Kapok trees in Igbó Akpa taken by the author from the side of the Pobé–Kétu road, near the village of Itchagba.

slowly downward, gathering speed before reaching the surface with a dull, forceful thud that shook the landscape. One would be forgiven for thinking that the team of laborers would have celebrated the victory. Their three-day bout with the tree, however, had

INTRODUCTION . 

left them exhausted. Plus, the kapok was just one in a forest filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of similar trees entangled by tall vines and surrounded by dense stands of bamboo. Ọhọri refer to the grove as Igbó Akpa, or Kapok Forest. They consider its space powerful and sacred and claim that it is the last remaining vestige of the dense forest that filled the valley only two generations earlier. Local religious leaders conduct rituals and divinations within its space to assist them in making communal decisions. Only those initiated into the sect are allowed to enter its space. What purportedly happened after the tree fell constitutes a prominent element of the community’s collective narrative, which has taken shape over the course of its people’s long history in the valley. According to oral accounts, a lead engineer unwilling to extend the project’s schedule ordered one of the company’s laborers to go into the forest and estimate how many similar trees lay in their path. With the sun dipping toward the horizon, the driver maneuvered his bulldozer into the grove. Brush crackled under its rolling tracks as the operator crossed the boundary of the forest’s sacred space. Within minutes, the mechanized hum of the bulldozer and the noise of bamboo and vines crumbling under its weight succumbed to an eerie silence. The driver and the bulldozer vanished. They were never seen again, “consumed” by the forest. The following day, the project manager ordered his employees to construct the new Pobé–Kétu route around the grove.8 The stories of Igbó Akpa and the disappearance of a person not initiated into the local power structure are not exceptional. Scholars and filmmakers working throughout Africa have heard similar tales.9 For members of the Ọhọri community, however, the confrontation between the workers of the French firm hired by the government and the kapok tree that lay at the southern base of the sacred grove exemplified their tenuous engagement with the Beninese state. In a period considered by many Ọhọri as one of oppressive Marxist rule, where open opposition to the regime resulted in beatings, the road builders’ decision to bypass the powerful forest marked a form of resistance to the postcolonial state and validated their sense of political independence.10 Of the more than one hundred interviews I conducted with Ọhọri in 2006, 2007, and 2011, many informants recalled variants of the same story. The account was typical of numerous similar anecdotes told in our conversations. Like many scholars who work in Africa, I started this project by collecting life histories, in my case, from the elders of the Ọhọri community.11

Figure . A view of the Pobé–Kétu road near the southern edge of Igbó Akpa in , before repairs were made to the road the following year.

Figure . After the completion of a new road, . Igbó Akpa lies in the distance, and the sign warns drivers of the diversion where informants claim the previous road builders’ decided to have the highway circumvent the forest rather than go through it.

 . INTRODUCTION

My first interviews involved asking informants about their memories of childhood and what they recalled about their parents’ and grandparents’ stories. I found, however, that most people who agreed to speak with me hesitated when I opened with these types of questions. Colleagues in Benin had warned me that members of the community were known for their wariness of foreigners. At first, I interpreted my interlocutors’ reticence as evidence confirming this prevailing notion. Prior to my initial field research, I had examined colonial documents that revealed information about early road-building projects in the valley and how French colonial officials viewed the community. Among the information stored in archives were details of a failed attempt to build a road across the valley in the 1930s, which French administrators had hoped would bisect the Ọhọri heartland and assist them in pacifying a community they characterized as “fiercely individualist” and “passively dissident.”12 A road traversing the basin in all seasons would also connect the two important towns of Pobé and Kétu, thereby reducing illicit trading activities and precluding Africans from moving across the porous border with British colonial Nigeria.13 Beyond the handful of colonial road-building projects I had read about in archives, I had few other data and little knowledge of the community at my disposal when I first engaged in conversations with the aim of getting a better sense of the Ọhọri and regional past.14 Informants’ unwillingness to divulge their history as individuals or as a community forced me to reconsider my approach. I abandoned the notion of engaging people with more common life-history questions and asked informants about the only element of their history I had known about based on my earlier archival research — their recollections of the building of the road that crossed their valley of “black earth.” What I discovered was that doing so allowed members of the community to shape the dialogue based on their memories of the past. In speaking about the road, Ọhọri revealed much about their lives and the changes that had taken place in the valley. I also found that they regarded the paths that predated the road and the various stages of construction and repairs it had undergone as markers of time. Speaking about the several road repair projects that had taken place during the colonial and independence eras, as well as the importance of routes and pathways in the precolonial era, informants told how the road has impacted environmental, social, and political change. In addition to recalling how the company had built a new Pobé–Kétu route around Igbó Akpa, the theme of the road elicited other important

INTRODUCTION . 

communal narratives showing how people in the area construct and understand their history. Among other popular stories, informants recalled how their ancestors — refugees fleeing the social and political upheaval generated by the transatlantic slave trade — trekked along various paths to settle the region and engaged in processes of crafting a politically independent community that operated outside of the purview of much larger regional empires, such as Dahomey and Ọyọ, two of the more prominent regional polities, whose leaders enriched their states by capturing and trading slaves from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.15 They also described how, during an era of early colonial rule, later generations of Ọhọri blocked thoroughfares leading into Ọhọri spaces while battling French troops, thwarted road-building projects designed to “penetrate” the valley, and expanded their geographic scope, in spite of European attempts to gain economic and political control of the region.16 Local attitudes remained fluid, however, because informants also remembered how, later in the colonial era, people in the community welcomed a rebuilt road that allowed them to export surplus crops more efficiently to markets outside the valley. The rapid deterioration of that version of the road, though, and the unwillingness of colonial and later independent Dahomean states to address the highway’s decay became a source of discontent. Ọhọri likewise spoke openly about a tremendous loss of forest space that occurred after the Republic of Benin had the road repaired in the early 1980s, and they questioned the viability of a new road as it underwent another restoration in 2007 and 2008.

“Reading” a Road The British cultural historian Joe Moran refers to roads as palimpsests, highlighting how their histories often involve the building of successive layers one on top of another.17 Indeed, photographs and depictions people give of roads’ physical characteristics lend credence to this notion. Roads also act as arbiters of change and exchange. For members of the Ọhọri community, the Pobé–Kétu road represents much more. It not only serves as a mnemonic device but constitutes a material and metaphorical space on which Ọhọri allegorically “record” their memories and perceptions of changing relationships with the natural and material worlds. This extends beyond notions of historical change, however, because the road is also a vehicle by which members of the community animate natural and built

 . INTRODUCTION

physical sites. Idodèyi Assogba, an informant from Itchagba with whom I spoke on several occasions in 2007 and 2011, indicated the route had “been there since the time of our ancestors,” having shifted shape with torrential rains, disappeared under overgrown bushes and vines, and reemerged with successive rebuilding and construction efforts.18 This book examines the local history of the Ọhọri community through the story of the Pobé–Kétu road, which serves as a narrative device by which members of the community understand different periods of history in relation to their collective identities, their engagement with changing state authorities, their surrounding environment, and various projects of modernization that have, as Peter Bloom, Stephan Miescher, and Takyiwaa Manuh suggest, been “recast as ‘development’ ” in late colonial and postcolonial discourse.19 Adopting this method of analyzing the ways in which people construct history enables us to “read” the Pobé–Kétu road, and how Ọhọri make use of it, thus advancing the discourse on African and global thoroughfares. Considering how Ọhọri speak about their past also complicates our understanding of social and political change from a precolonial era to an age of independence from colonial rule, while allowing for an examination of how Africans interacted with local ecologies, in addition to neighboring communities and European colonial administrators and merchants. In recognizing how the road traversing la terre noire features prominently in Ọhọri renditions of the past, this book seeks to offer new insights into how small African communities have responded to and enacted change in social, political, and environmental landscapes. Across West Africa, roads function simultaneously as social, economic, political, and material spaces. Rarely do I journey in or around Benin without a friend or colleague asking me, “How was the road?” Road motifs likewise have entered colonial and postcolonial social imaginaries in the form of highly acclaimed drama, literature, popular fiction, and critiques of how Africans are treated in global history.20 As conduits of exchange, roads and trade routes have also yielded useful information about social and economic processes, ranging from discussions of how roads influenced indigenous state formation to how they integrated African economies as facets of wider-scale political economies.21 Some scholars have identified roads and pathways as gendered spaces with cultural significance, while others have examined roads as uniquely colonial and African technologies.22

INTRODUCTION . 

Whether busy or not, roads also have played unique roles in the making of world history. As instruments of mobility, they have enabled humans to connect with one another and engage in cross-cultural exchange.23 The first “routes” of antiquity more than likely stemmed from animal tracks or human footpaths. The origins of indigenous Australian walkabouts and the first trails that served as the basis for the long-distance trade networks of the “Silk Road” that connected Asians to trading partners in Europe may elude us, but that does not minimize the way roads have impacted human and environmental history. From the elaborate Roman highway system that allowed for the formation of empire and the “royal roads” that provided an entrée into the hinterlands of early Spanish colonial Mesoamerica, routes have constituted analytical and ethnographic mediums that help us better to understand historical change.24 The Pobé–Kétu route may seem insignificant when viewed on a map. It appears small relative to the historical thoroughfares of empires or the vast networks of interstate and transnational highways that cross the globe like the intricate strands of a spider’s web. In spite of its diminutive size, however, the road is a piece of a much broader global historical puzzle. Ọhọri and others entering the Lama Valley have alternately traversed and blocked the road and the paths that connect it to the network of villages the community’s ancestors whittled out of forest spaces. The stories and memories informants revealed to me when speaking about the road drive the accounts in this book. They also coalesce around the space of the route with archival data in a way that allows me to filter various categories of historical evidence to gauge how and why members of the community negotiated complex transitions in regional politics and maintained a fluid sense of independence from the time when the first people who would become the Ọhọri settled the valley, whether three to five hundred years ago or more recently. The theme of the road, including Ọhọri efforts to prevent access to their community by occasionally blocking it, constitutes a material and metaphorical reference to their desire to keep encroachments from several states at bay over their long history in the valley. An Ọhọri past, when revealed through the prism of the road, depicts various centers and margins that likewise illuminate their interconnected, yet diverse meanings of space, authority, notions of political independence, and identity over time. Scholars have recognized how natural environments and “nonplaces” such as roads, among other categories of material and symbolic goods,

 . INTRODUCTION

objects, and “things,” can take on a variety of meanings across diverse populations and landscapes.25 In the way they speak about the road, Ọhọri also compel us to reconsider how Africans convey a sense of the past. But what do narratives of the Pobé–Kétu road and their surrounding environments reveal about the complex social and political changes that have occurred during the community’s long history in the valley? How do we account for an Ọhọri enduring, yet fluid, sense of social and political independence? How did their ancestors negotiate intensive regional political instability during the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent periods of colonization and then independence from European colonial rule? Examining how Ọhọri generate a sense of the past by speaking about the Pobé–Kétu road, and examining perceptions of environmental change and modernization as descriptive frameworks, I argue that this group of people has forged various forms of collective identity and constructed new narratives that counter precolonial, colonial, and Beninese nationalist histories recounted in archival records and independence-era African newspapers. Ọhọri accounts also shift the historical trajectory of their community away from scholarship that situates it within the context of a widerranging Yorùbá political network. Scholars are unsure how to approach the Ọhọri relative to neighboring Yorùbá communities, who more often reside in Nigeria.26 Noting shared cultural–linguistic traits, authors of the region’s history often place Ọhọri haphazardly within Yorùbá historiography.27 Ọhọri identify as “Ọhọri” more often than they do as Yorùbá, or even as citizens of the Republic of Benin, and they do not always frame their history in ethnocentric terms or specifically as a Yorùbá political subgroup.28 On the contrary, oral traditions and data that highlight the importance of pathways and crossroads as elements of a shared past demonstrate how Ọhọri have maintained a sense of political independence and crafted different communal identities over time. On a broader regional scale, the study likewise adds depth to a historical discourse that tends to emphasize larger polities and communities, thereby better depicting the changes that have taken place in the social and political landscapes of West Africa and the former French empire.29 With a few exceptions, historians and members of other academic disciplines working in the Bight of Benin region — a geographical space, formerly referred to as the “Slave Coast,” that extends westward loosely from the Niger Delta in what is today Nigeria to Ghana—have neglected

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Map . A map of the Bight of Benin area. It shows the region where many Ọhọri settled relative to the coast, as well as where they have been situated historically on the interstices of larger regional powers such as Dahomey and Ọyọ.

 . INTRODUCTION

the smaller interstitial communities that have lived among yet operated on the margins of much larger regional indigenous empires, colonies, and independent African states.30 The history of the small Ọhọri community and the road and environment that have impacted its members’ daily activities adds to regional and imperial historiography by shifting attention to African communities that lived in the spaces between these various neighboring groups and states and valued their collective identity and independence. By etching, revisiting, and revising their fluid dialogue with their surrounding environment on the allegorical space of the route, Ọhọri have created a guide that reveals the history of a people and place rarely addressed in scholarship.31 Their unique and vivid construction of history from the perspective of the road likewise reveals the community’s complex, dynamic understandings of autonomy and engagement with power over time.32

Building the “Black Earth” For Ọhọri, the Pobé–Kétu road and the paths that predated it have constituted spaces where they can devise and reframe their historical identities and notions of political independence.33 An examination of communal narratives that mark time by emphasizing changes in the meandering yet material space of the Pobé–Kétu road has allowed members of the Ọhọri community to remold their history, while memorializing how their surrounding landscape has changed. The connections members of the Ọhọri community have made with their surroundings by remembering the Pobé– Kétu road shows how topography, geography, environment, and human interactions are all interconnected. The nature of the pathway’s origins is unclear. The first Ọhọri settlers may have followed animal paths that led the way to the deepest recesses of the valley. Later travelers carried machetes to slash away vines that consumed the path, lending the trail a form and shape that was no doubt remarkably fluid. Ọhọri oral traditions emphasize that dense forests covered the valley in a precolonial era, providing an ideal setting for early Ọhọri settlers to operate outside of the purview of much larger empires that often sought tribute from neighboring polities. The road acquired new significance in the eyes of valley residents, colonial officials, and independence-era leaders as a result of the increased politicization of thoroughfares and pathways from the early colonial period on. As members of the Ọhọri community settled in different areas

INTRODUCTION . 

over time, the road took on a more pronounced character. In speaking about their memories of various Pobé–Kétu road projects and subsequent changes in the environment, members of the community revealed how their ancestors later defied French colonial officials and expanded their communal social and political sphere in the valley. In an era of early French rule, Ọhọri linked forms of indigenous political power with control of pathways into and out of the valley. This perception was enhanced by road repair and resurfacing by the French colonial and subsequent Dahomean and Beninese governments. Even during the subsequent era of independence, valley residents have striven to maintain their autonomy, even though it differs from their forebears’ sense of political independence generations earlier. Today, the Pobé–Kétu route angles through an Ọhọri country that rests in the eastern section of the Lama Valley, connecting the Yorùbá towns from which it gets its name.34 Pobé lies approximately sixty kilometers north of the colonial and current nominal Beninese capital of Porto Novo.35 The plateau town marks one of the southern points of the valley and rests on the escarpment that overlooked what Ọhọri oral traditions, informants, and early colonial documents indicate was a heavily wooded, eight thousand–square kilometer area.36 From the deepest recesses of the valley near villages that serve as important Ọhọri political seats approximately fifteen kilometers north of Pobé, the terrain gradually slopes thirty kilometers to Kétu, a seat once prominent in a greater Yorùbá political framework. A linear rift created by geological fault-line activity several millennia ago, the Lama Valley stretches the forty-five kilometers from south to north and another hundred kilometers along a west-to-east axis, ranging from the far-eastern reaches of what is now Togo and traversing southern Benin to the southwestern edge of Nigeria.37 A black cotton soil, or vertisol, dominates a land rich in humus, meaning that carbon and important nutrients have drained into the basin from higher elevations.38 Thousands of years of carbon buildup lend the pliable clay soil of ỌhọriIje its dark color and provide an uncharacteristic amount of agricultural stability relative to the rest of region.39 Climate in the valley is marked by seasonal extremes. Dry seasons arrive in late December or early January when Harmattan winds from the north carry sands from the Sahara Desert through the Sahelian region and into subtropical West Africa. As a dusty haze settles upon the Lama Valley,

 . INTRODUCTION

the dry air soaks up the moisture of the previous season’s rains before giving way to two or three months of intense heat that can reach up to thirty-five degrees Celsius. Higher temperatures and limited rainfall cause the clay surface to crack as local farmers prepare their fields for the first of two growing seasons. Rainy seasons offer a marked contrast. The area often experiences two periods of rain during the course of a year, ranging from March to August and then October to November. It is not uncharacteristic, however, for showers to persist up to nine months, beginning in March and continuing through December. The region generally receives its heaviest rainfall from May to July, when a northerly shift in wind patterns causes the airstream to reroute, driving tropical moisture further into the hinterland.40 Unlike neighboring regions of West Africa lying roughly a hundred kilometers north of the Atlantic Coast, the part of the Lama Valley inhabited by Ọhọri rests in an area that experiences a unique “sub-Guinean” weather pattern that accounts for more rainfall than other areas along the interior of the Bight of Benin. The Ọhọri region receives an average of eleven to twelve hundred millimeters of rainfall per year, compared to seven to eight hundred millimeters in areas to its immediate east and west.41 The landscape takes on a dramatically different character during these months. The impermeable, loamy “black earth” captures water spilling into the basin from the plateau to the south and from higher elevations in the north, transforming the region’s patchwork of small villages and farms into a series of what French officials during the era of colonial rule referred to as “small islands.”42 Until recently, rainy season marshes constituted the only vital sources of water for the community. Because the eastern section of the valley boasts no rivers, lakes, or reservoirs, residents up to the latter half of the twentieth century established their homes around ponds or areas with larger depressions where rainwater could collect. A tributary from the Ouémé River had once trickled its way into the heart of the basin north of the Ọhọri country, but the stream dried up long before French colonial administrators arrived in the late nineteenth century.43 It is unclear when the rivulet faded, but based on oral traditions collected by French colonial researchers in the 1930s, the first Ọhọri and Adja-speaking settlers in the southern half of the valley never benefited directly from its flow.44 Gazing north at the eastern Lama Valley from the top of the escarpment fringing the French colonial town of Pobé on a hazy morning toward

INTRODUCTION . 

Figure . This path, inundated during the rainy season in  and covered by a grayish mud the locals refer to as pọtọ-pọtọ, connects the Pobé–Kétu road to a local farm.

the end of the rainy season at the dawn of the twentieth century, one would have seen the tops of large baobab and kapok trees piercing through an opaque fog. As sunlight spilled over the top of the valley’s eastern edge, burning condensation trapped in its lowest reaches, sizable pockets of dense

 . INTRODUCTION

Figure . Another example of pọtọ-pọtọ during the rainy season of . The photograph also shows a part of the valley that informants insisted had been heavily forested two or three generations earlier.

forest would have started taking shape, becoming visible to the naked eye. An assortment of large groves would have emerged from the mist, dotting the landscape that stretched to Kétu. Approximately twelve kilometers north of the observer’s outlook lay the southern edge of a forest Ọhọri called Igbó Ilú, which means “forest home” or “forest state.” One of the largest wooded areas dominating the backdrop, Igbó Ilú surrounded an archipelago of villages that Ọhọri had carved out of the landscape many generations earlier. Surrounding Igbó Ilú and the other numerous groves emerging from the humid morning air would have rested a lower level of impenetrable vegetation, consisting of bamboo and an assortment of different vines reaching three meters or more in height. The spectator looking out over the valley from the southern plateau would have neither seen the Ọhọri community’s villages hidden by Igbó Ilú nor the settlements of Adja speakers further west or the Nago-speaking communities to the east, on

INTRODUCTION . 

what today is the Benin-Nigeria border.45 To reach Kétu, the spectator would have descended along a dirt path that opened up out of thick vegetation on the northern outskirts of Pobé. Probably not much more than two or three meters in width, the trail constituted the primary artery that connected the two plateau towns. After reaching the bottom of the escarpment, the person making the trek to Kétu would have found it difficult to move ahead efficiently. Bamboo weighed down by the season’s wind and rain often sagged heavily across the path, making it particularly difficult for porters carrying trade goods and supplies on their heads to navigate their way through the basin. Rainy season bogs and deep inundations likewise impeded movement, as did a slick, dark gray sludge the locals call pọtọ-pọtọ. The journey to Kétu by foot could take up to two days or more.46 Those who left Pobé in the early morning would have been fortunate to reach the outskirts of Igbó Ilú by nightfall. Today, the dense forests described by informants and documentary sources have largely disappeared. Small farm plots have replaced the valley’s sea of forest. Twenty kilometers north of Pobé, the hulking Onigbolo cement factory, which opened in 1982, emerges from the horizon, billowing smoke from its stacks into the sky above.47 The newest version of the Pobé–Kétu road, repaired and resurfaced in 2007 and 2008, follows roughly the same course as the path that meandered through the valley over a century ago. The region’s malleable clay surface provided little more than a delicate foundation for the route reconstructed in the early 1980s to accommodate transportation from the factory to Lagos and ports in Cotonou. Its asphalt crumbled under the weight of lorries overloaded with bags of dry cement, exposing the slick composite surface of an even earlier road completed under the auspices of French colonial administrators in the 1950s. The “new” Pobé–Kétu thoroughfare serves as the final segment of Benin’s “National Route Three.” The highway winds its way north from the town of Sakété, before jogging around the outskirts of Pobé, probably not far from where the old path served as the main entrance into the valley. At the bottom of the escarpment, the road takes a sharp northward turn, angling its way through Ọhọri farmland and piercing the heart of a country once enclosed by Igbó Ilú. After the slight diversion around the sacred grove of Igbó Akpa, the road bypasses the Onigbolo factory before sloping gradually upward, skirting new villages settled by members of the Ọhọri community during the era of French colonial rule.

 . INTRODUCTION

Figure . A photograph of the Pobé–Kétu road at the end of a dry season in . The Onigbolo factory lies on the horizon on the left side of the image.

The route halts abruptly at the eastern edge of Kétu, where broad cement pylons and the intersection with Benin’s east-to-west “National Route Four” signal its end. By car, the journey from Pobé to Kétu takes less than hour.

Rethinking Identity and Environment in African History Prompted by questions about the Pobé–Kétu road, the Ọhọri weave their ancestors’ historical trajectories into the architecture of their memories. In doing so, they also stress that their ancestors never conceived of themselves as vassals of precolonial states or colonized by the French. On the contrary, they portray their community as a type of social and administrative body or bodies that some might consider a sovereign nation or state, insofar as its residents’ accounts suggest that a shared communal identity has developed over time. Understanding Ọhọri-Ije as a nation in these terms is nevertheless problematic.48 Their sense of collective identity does

INTRODUCTION . 

not correlate neatly with prevailing definitions of nationality, or what Benedict Anderson called a sense of “nation-ness.”49 In recent decades, scholars of Africa have further complicated prevailing understandings of identity formation and nationalism by evoking temporal, generational, spatial, and class-based gaps.50 Scholarship on the manufacturing of identities has advanced by breaking through the boundaries of periodization and examining conceptualizations of autonomy and geographical space.51 From a historical standpoint, however, it is hard to escape the discursive trap of treating nationhood, or the molding of national identity, as what Frederick Cooper refers to as a “colonial fiction of territorial particularity.”52 Studies of the Ọhọri and how members of the community recount their history allow for an extension of Cooper’s critiques of how we study an imperial era. Their very different understandings of autonomy and engagement with power over time likewise complicate further the ways in which scholars have sought to obfuscate the “ambiguous and changing” notions of a concept such as citizenship in imperial historical contexts.53 Cooper also notes that the concept of sovereignty remains “abstract.”54 Scholars often engage in a discourse on sovereignty by framing it in imperial and postcolonial contexts without examining how people conceive of it “on the ground” in communities who found themselves living within the manufactured borders of colonial states and the nations they became at independence.55 In conceiving of the Pobé–Kétu road and the paths that predated it as marking time and the changes that have taken place in their community, the Ọhọri depict various forms of historical identity and demonstrate how their progenitors remolded what some might refer to as collective communal or “autochthonous” personalities.56 In this way, my informants historicize what the anthropologist Dorothy Hodgson calls “positionings,” meaning that they make use of the thoroughfare to explain “relational” struggles and engagements they have had with other communities, while vying for control and influence as a means to project a sense of collective identity on larger regional and global political stages.57 Using the road as a primary element in constructing their past, the Ọhọri reveal how their ancestors altered forms of political organization and distinguished themselves in creating various senses of autonomy.58 That Ọhọri frame their narratives in the descriptive contexts of animated and changing natural and built environments also suggests how they connect landscape change to memory. In recent years, scholars have

 . INTRODUCTION

successfully promoted interdisciplinary methodologies as a means to complicate our understanding of environmental change as it pertains to awareness of landscape.59 The Ọhọri recall a specific environmental past that often involves how forested areas have vanished over time. Many of my informants advanced Malthusian arguments to explain the reduction in forest in the valley when talking about the Pobé–Kétu road, meaning that they believed that a growing Ọhọri population has over time cut down groves of trees to clear land for farm plots.60 They likewise suggest that illicit logging in more recent decades has hastened processes of deforestation and remark on how the landscape has also become industrialized during the postcolonial era.61 Anecdotal and photographic evidence suggests that vegetation loss has occurred over time.62 Yet without having paleoecological data at our disposal, it is difficult to corroborate these claims.63 What is important, however, is that a collective memory of a once densely forested valley home exists in the minds of informants.64 Environmental change figures prominently in Ọhọri narratives, showing how such beliefs influence the way they tell their history. More recent research coupling analyses of historical memory and landscape constitute a new paradigm in which to reexamine links between Africans’ perceptions of environmental change and how they construct history.65 The approach offers a useful framework for the study on the Ọhọri, because it allows for a better comprehension of how Africans have drawn on local historical knowledge to negotiate land usage and conservation efforts during the colonial era.66 It has also extended the discourse to include assessments of how African communities have gendered features of landscape and made unintended use of, and attached new meanings to, elements of the natural and built environments.67 Emphasizing the construction of social memory, Jan Bender Shetler’s “spatial analysis of oral tradition” among western Serengeti peoples in Tanzania shows how her informants “humanized” and viewed their surrounding environments historically.68 By investigating her informants’ memories alongside archaeological, linguistic, ecological, and documentary evidence, she developed a methodology that allowed for a “recontextualization” of landscape memory and offered a new way to corroborate people’s “historical claims about the pre-colonial past even where sources are scarce and problematic.”69 Her methodology constitutes a new foundation for scholars of Africa seeking techniques that take into account African perspectives in historical writing.

INTRODUCTION . 

Devoting attention to how Ọhọri animate their surroundings when speaking about material aspects of the Pobé–Kétu route opens up new lines of inquiry to discussions on landscape histories and environmental change. Foremost, it provides a new lens to understand how Africans include elements of built environments in their renditions of historical change. Envisioning the mnemonic capacity of the Pobé–Kétu road and understanding how Ọhọri have interacted within their surroundings and reconceptualized space over time allow us to better gauge how they negotiated important social and political transitions, as well as quotidian activities.

Memory and Method One of the greater challenges for historians of Africa is reconciling oral tradition and oral data with historical accuracy. For those writing precolonial histories, in particular, the dearth of tangible materials to crossreference oral sources presents limitations. Oral traditions and informants’ memories, after all, do not necessarily reveal objective truths about changes that have taken place over time.70 Numerous scholars have demonstrated how examining “memory” as a useful category of analysis should not be discarded.71 Yet debates about the veracity of oral traditions and oral data relative to an otherwise “undocumented” past remain.72 To bridge this conceptual impasse, Africanists have incorporated new approaches to better account for historical change.73 Where “poorly endowed” oral traditions limit our ability to piece together the precolonial past, historians have employed a “new set of levers for grasping historical transformations,” Neil Kodesh observes — specifically, oral histories recounted in socially important settings and with “culturally encoded clues.”74 To highlight how basic narratives of a precolonial past offer new vantage points to better understanding historical change, others have “mined” oral sources while also remaining skeptical about the “bare reliability” of oral data.75 Shetler’s emphasis on common spatial images reveals how elements of oral tradition such as references to place-names and descriptions of past landscapes and topographical features can serve as “encoded fragments” that provide a loose chronology of change occurring over the longue durée.76 We should also recognize that informants’ oral codes change. Keith Basso, an anthropologist studying Native Americans, suggested that the past constitutes a “well-worn path or trail.”77 Yet it is also a past that is perceived differently and written about in dramatically diverse ways. In this book, I

 . INTRODUCTION

am considering how people conceive of and propagate interpretations of history in the context of an ever-changing road that has facilitated crosscultural change and exchange and influenced people’s perceptions of environmental change and communal identity. With the exception of my recording of oral traditions, which local kings and their historians recounted in the more “formal” settings of kings’ residences, the majority of the more than a hundred conversations I had with members of the Ọhọri community occurred informally alongside the Pobé–Kétu road.78 Typically, I approached people where they gathered to sell surplus maize, rested from their agricultural work, or merely passed the time in leisurely activities. A few interviews took place near informants’ farms and villages, reachable via small paths from the Pobé–Kétu road on foot or by bicycle or motorcycle. For the majority of conversations, whether they took place with individuals or with a group, I arrived with no set questions or surveys. Rather, I opened a dialogue by posing open-ended inquiries about the road. I did not request information about specific construction projects, but merely asked informants to speak generally about their recollections of the route that traversed their valley of “black earth.” With the exception of two interviews I held in French with the local chief, or king, of Onigbolo, a village that lies five kilometers north of the cement factory that bears the same name, the majority of conversations were conducted and recorded in the Ọhọri dialect of Yorùbá with the assistance of Jean-Didier Akpona, an interpreter and ecologist whose mother grew up in the region. Jean-Didier led all the conversations recorded in 2007 and 2011.79 While I do not claim to be fluent in the dialect, I have studied “standardized” Yorùbá and heard it well enough to insert myself into conversations, which we subsequently translated into French and English.80 Clearly, employing multiple translations can cause problems. The shared narratives that many informants recounted, however, revealed a process by which Ọhọri speak about the past. Without being prompted to highlight specific events, the majority of informants told remarkably similar anecdotes about their communal history, which constitute narrative and temporal benchmarks for the way they frame the past. In the narratives in this book, conversations and oral traditions take precedence, with supplementary evidence from French colonial data in the national archives of France, Benin, and Senegal; independence-era Dahomean and Beninese newspapers; and photographs taken in the region by the French journalist Pierre Verger in the late 1940s or early

INTRODUCTION . 

1950s.81 These third-party testimonies provide a filter for examining Ọhọri recollections of the past at greater critical depth. Much of the colonial archival material presented in this book centers on an extended series of Ọhọri skirmishes with French troops from 1914 to 1916 known as la révolte des Hollis. I also relied on files from the Dahomean and French West African Divisions of Public Works in charge of road-building operations from the 1900s to the 1950s.82 While colonial officials most certainly did not recognize certain transitions in Ọhọri political and social organization following the establishment of colonial rule in Dahomey, a critical reading against the grain of their documents reveals significant changes that took place as the French attempted to exert political control in the region.83 Independence-era newspapers likewise represent source materials, however tenuous.84 Although the Beninese newspaper Ehuzu was the mouthpiece of the Marxist government that ruled the country throughout the 1970s and 1980s, for example, critical readings of its content reveal a great deal about that regime’s desire to mold its own version of an independent African industrial state free from the erstwhile colonial yoke. While it provided little concrete information about forms of Ọhọri social and political organization, Ehuzu — like other newspapers and earlier colonial documents — acted as a useful tool to crossreference events described by members of the community.

Chapter Outline Ọhọri narratives and accompanying documentary evidence reflect an identifiable sequence of path-cutting and road-building projects in the valley. I have organized the book in accordance with this chronology to demonstrate how Ọhọri have constructed their history as a politically independent community. The first chapter emphasizes Ọhọri oral traditions and assesses identity formation and political changes that occurred in Ọhọri-Ije from the initial settlement of the valley to the late nineteenth century. Shortly after establishing themselves in the deepest recesses of the basin, refugees who had settled there began drawing on their understandings of ecology, forest space, and mobility in shaping a collective communal identity that counters prevailing understandings of African “ethnicity” crafted through processes of “inventing traditions.” As the population of refugees fleeing slavers swelled, Ọhọri residing in Igbó Ilú laid the foundation for a complex political organization that transitioned from a rule by consensus to a more centralized monarchy.

 . INTRODUCTION

The second chapter outlines how early French colonial road-building projects in the valley challenged indigenous power structures. When an Ọhọri king who was sympathetic to the French died mysteriously in 1906, local religious leaders conspired to dismantle the centralized political structure and distribute decision-making powers among a select group of merchants, farmers, and balóguns, or war chiefs. They likewise heightened security, blocked all roads entering Ọhọri-Ije, and organized an armed revolt against colonial forces. When the French ordered the destruction of Igbó Ilú in retaliation, members of the community crafted new narratives about their relationship with the land, its productive capacity, and notions of political independence. The third chapter depicts how Ọhọri responded to the quelling of the rebellion by French troops and the imposition of a colonial military administration in the valley, which lasted until 1935. Military governance included the conscription of younger members of the community to serve as laborers and military porters. In response to the repression of their armed revolt and oppressive colonial labor and recruitment practices, younger Ọhọri men and women left their natal villages. After traveling by foot northward along the Pobé–Kétu road, many settled roughly fifteen kilometers away, where they carved new fields out of the forested landscape. The village of Oligbolo exemplifies this demographic shift. Founded by a young Ọhọri woman who sold surplus crops along the route, the village soon became a thriving new social and political center for the community. Although colonial forces destroyed much of the forest surrounding the original Ọhọri villages, residents developed a new form of communal identity based on the founder of Oligbolo’s role in reshaping social, political, and economic autonomy. The fourth chapter examines shifts in the Ọhọri’s perceptions of labor, mobility, and the valley’s agricultural capacity in the context of two colonial projects designed to rebuild a Pobé–Kétu road that would be “crossable in all seasons.”85 The first project, which took place from 1938 to 1940, offered a lesson in how not to build a road. The era was marked by the transition to a socialist government in France and a subsequent philosophical change in the way French leaders envisioned colonial rule. Administrators emphasized the role of economic and political développement as a means to manage colonial spheres in more efficient and sociable ways. To that end, the colony offered to pay members of the community for their assistance in rebuilding the road. The Ọhọri refused because they

INTRODUCTION . 

associated colonial labor schemes with enslavement. In their place, French administrators began construction with convicts from prisons throughout the colony. Repairing the route proved difficult. By late 1940, officials had abandoned construction after prisoners had completed only 20 percent of the project. The second road-building project in the 1950s prompted a shift in Ọhọri attitudes. Using mechanized equipment, a French engineering company cleared a path through the valley’s dense vegetation and completed a road surfaced with composite in less than a year. The new route and the change in technologies of development illuminated new relationships among the Ọhọri, their surrounding environment, and the tools employed in the building of infrastructure. Despite the fanfare that accompanied the completion of the new road, the thoroughfare fell into a state of disrepair within a few years. Heavy rains caused the road to deteriorate when its laterite surface, laid on top of the valley’s malleable clay soil, crumbled under the weight of motor vehicles. For the Ọhọri, the dilapidated Pobé–Kétu road symbolized how the government of independent Dahomey, plagued by political strife and economic malaise during its transition to independence, “forgot” about the valley. The fifth chapter depicts how Dahomey/Benin’s postindependence history raised a new series of questions about communal identity from the 1970s onward. Repairs to the Pobé–Kétu route made by the Marxist government of Benin and the industrialization of the landscape influenced Ọhọri perceptions of environmental change and local identity formation. In an era remembered by many Ọhọri as one of environmental degradation and deforestation in the valley, members of the community drew on the cosmological power of Igbó Akpa to substantiate their autonomy and support a transition to a more centralized social organization. The stories of how road builders ran the new road around the small sacred grove abound within Ọhọri collective narratives and demonstrate how many members of the community negotiated the transition to independence.

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

The Roads into Igbó Ilú The Making of an Ọhọri Identity

No one knows with certainty when the first Ọhọri settlers arrived in the valley. The early history of the community is as murky as the muddy pọtọpọtọ that covers much of Ọhọri-Ije during rainy seasons. Oral traditions place the appearance of the first settlers, a hunter named Ahoua and his wife Kouoka, at some point in the sixteenth century.1 Others have speculated the community’s first pioneers may have reached the valley either as early as the late fifteenth century, when eastern migrants fled raiders from Ọyọ, then building its empire, or as late as three hundred years ago.2 Regardless of when the first settlers reached the deepest recesses of the valley that became Ọhọri-Ije, the route connecting Pobé with Kétu and the trails descending into the basin from the surrounding plateaus figure prominently in the way members of the community describe how early generations colonized the space and crafted a sense of communal identity.3 The origins of Ahoua and Kouoka, whether imagined or not, are as obscure as the date of their arrival. Some members of the community claim the couple migrated from Ọyọ, a highly centralized empire based in what is today western Nigeria, whose expansion from the early seventeenth through eighteenth centuries made it one of the more influential powers in the region.4 Others insist that they came from Ilé-Ifè, the mythical cradle of all Yorùbá communities, which lies further to the east.5 Whether told by local historians, kings, or other informants, stories of the community’s founding almost always portray Ahoua and Kouoka as the first settlers, regardless of their origin. A. I. Asiwaju hypothesizes that Ọhọri may have derived from two different groups who integrated over time and developed into a community, whose members developed what he calls a “feeling” that they had “descended from common ancestors who had been deified . . . and glorified by the entire community.”6 His suggestion is plausible. Numerous elements of Ọhọri religious practices — including the worship of Şango, 

 . THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ

the Yorùbá god of thunder — indicate a connection with Ọyọ. The insistence by others that the community’s founders originated from Ilé-Ifè suggests, however, that fugitives belonging to various cultural–linguistic groups, many of them likely part of the wider Yorúbá-speaking world, escaped into the valley from slave raiders and their descendants later united as the people of Igbó Ilú. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the forest that surrounded Ọhọri villages, whose cosmological energy was alleged to have prevented slavers from entering the community’s space, offered protection to people displaced by the social and political upheaval in the region. That Igbó Ilú means “forest home” or “forest state” in Yorùbá suggests that refugees who settled in the deepest reaches of the Lama Valley east of the Ouémé River forged a deep connection with their surrounding environment and credited the basin’s dense forest with playing a role in their developing a sense of community. The grove surrounding what became Ọhọri-Ije constituted an organic space, but it was also one the Ọhọri produced materially and symbolically as representative of having operated politically outside of the purview of regional powers during an era when most interstitial polities in the area offered tribute in exchange for protection.7 Asiwaju likened Igbó Ilú to the defensive walls built by Ọyọ’s leaders.8 Local historians highlight how the dense forest and surrounding vegetation played roles in the restructuring of a collective communal identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as refugees fleeing slave raiding during the height of the transatlantic slave trade and the regional upheaval that occurred in the wake of Ọyọ’s demise sought protection. Before this time, the Ọhọri community was likely small. Informants suggest that the earliest generations consisted primarily of Ahoua and Kouoka’s descendants and others who had joined them in forming ỌhọriIje over the course of the previous two or three centuries. Based on the way people recall oral traditions, it also seems that this small community organized itself politically in what most scholars would call a decentralized manner.9 The violent nature of the slave trade, however, caused tremendous social and political flux in the region.10 Refugees fleeing slaving activities conducted by militia from regional kingdoms such as Dahomey to the east of the portion of the valley where Ọhọri settled and fragmented communities following Ọyọ’s unraveling from the early nineteenth century on descended into the valley and assimilated with Ọhọri. The swelling of the community with the influx of new arrivals that residents allowed

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

to pass through Igbó Ilú into Ọhọri space necessitated political centralization. Leaders responded to the demographic changes by developing a fluid type of centralized political structure. Most Yorùbá communities were governed by hereditary patriarchal kingships, but as the valley’s population continued to grow, four prominent villages in it, likely representing different refugee subsets, came to share a nonhereditary revolving kingship, ecologically symbolized by the forest, Igbó Ilú.

The Communal “Belly Swells”: The Founding of Igbó Ilú Like all oral traditions, those of the Ọhọri offer insights into the way they construct a sense of the past. Whether Ahoua and Kouoka were real people who trekked into the Lama Valley from Ọyọ, Ilé-Ifè, or some altogether different location in the region, or merely fictive characters who embody an Ọhọri communal foundation, their story begins with the routes and trails that descend into the basin from the plateaus above. Today, Africans steer their cars and trucks — the lifeblood of a West African economy — along the networks of roads and highways that cross the region and connect various nodal points marking social, political, and commercial spaces. To make one’s way into Ọhọri space, one need only follow the elaborate series of asphalt national roads of countries such as Benin, Togo, and Nigeria to make the connections. According to oral traditions, Ahoua and Kouoka followed the paths that preceded these roads into the valley to sow the seeds from which the Ọhọri community sprouted. When asked about the Pobé–Kétu route, informants aver that the winding path that is now the highway across their valley existed “before the time of our fathers.”11 No one knows the road’s origins, and it is unclear whether the valley’s first settlers took this path into what became the Ọhọri country. Nonetheless, the story of Ahoua and Kouoka’s journey came up often when I prompted members of the community to recall the road’s past. In many ways, the narrative of Ahoua and Kouoka establishing the Ọhọri community is similar to other settlement narratives scholars have collected throughout West Africa. Local historians describe Ahoua as a hunter who left his home in what is today Nigeria to “conquer new lands” with room to grow staple crops such as yams, legumes, and maize.12 The story of a lone hunter carving new fields out of a West African landscape constitutes a common way for many communities throughout West Africa to explain the transition from hunting to more sedentary political economies

 . THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ

supported by farming activities. The story of Ahoua and Kouoka is unique, however, in the way it sets up the foundation for the fluid sense of Ọhọri identity as a politically independent African community. It also depicts the formation of a distinctly decentralized or polycentric form of political organization — a framework that existed until intense demographic growth in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries triggered a shift to political centralization. According to local historians and informants, Ahoua was one of six children of a king who ruled a powerful Yorùbá-speaking polity. Ọhọri tradition tells of how Ahoua’s father, concerned that his children would plot against each other and make secret alliances to secure the throne upon his death, encouraged them to seek suitable land elsewhere should they face exile or threats. In his thorough description of the history of the Yorùbás, published in 1921, Samuel Johnson highlighted a similar type of succession dispute that occurred early on in the imperial formation of Ọyọ.13 Johnson’s depiction of the situation conveys an era of social and political upheaval that caught many members of the ruling family in its wake and forced a number of them to flee the city while a “junior brother” seized political control.14 Whether they are linked to the Ọyọ Empire or not, Ọhọri depictions of Ahoua and Kouoka indicate how the community’s early settlers lived during an era dominated by incredible social and political upheaval. In addition to being a hunter, Ahoua is alleged to have been a “brave prince” who heeded his father’s warning. Informants recounted how the young prince left his father’s palace alone and headed west from his birthplace on foot, with little more than a weapon used for hunting and a few provisions.15 Routes heading west allowed him to pass through other small regional settlements, called Imeko and Ika-Ori, where leaders and residents received him and provided him with accommodations during his journey. It was when he reached the northeastern edge of the Lama Valley in what is today Nigeria that he descended into the basin, informants say. For a short time, he settled in the village of Ibiyan, which lay on the eastern edge of the valley. Ibiyan’s leaders welcomed him.16 Informants claim, however, that Ahoua did not stay there long. They suggest that the town’s inhabitants were embroiled in their own political quarrels, and that the young prince felt it served his interests to move further west. Fearing for his safety, Ahoua navigated his way deeper into the heavily wooded

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Lama Valley, whose landscape was dominated by its understory of dense brush and vines. Whether humans had ever set foot on these trails prior to Ahoua is unknown. Nevertheless, he carved his way through the valley until, local historians indicate, he found an appealing space to settle. The region may have lacked a natural water source, but the impermeable clay soil allowed rain to collect in depressions. Barring significantly dry seasons, these pools would provide enough water for a small community. The location in the center of the forest, with its abundance of animals to hunt and fertile soil in which to grow crops, also appealed to him. Ahoua decided that the area would serve him well as a new settlement, far from the reach of his siblings should one of them win their father’s crown in a palace coup, the Ọhọri assert. At this point, the narrative built by Ọhọri to explain their communal history takes on a decidedly mythical tone. It also lays the groundwork for a historical framework that very clearly depicts how members of the community portray an engagement with their surrounding natural environment in crafting their past. Some informants recount, for example, how one day shortly after his arrival in the deepest recesses of the valley, Ahoua encountered a large snake near what is now the Aba market.17 Addressing the serpent that lay in his path, Ahoua claimed the valley as his new home. The snake apparently refuted this assertion, however, and indicated the land did not belong to Ahoua, but to him.18 Before slithering into the surrounding vegetation, the snake allegedly warned the hunter prince to remain wary of the forest’s power. It ordered Ahoua to walk through the valley with caution and suggested he return promptly to his father’s home. Informants indicated that Ahoua was greatly concerned about the snake’s stern warning, so he prepared fetishes to assist him in making a decision about whether to colonize the land. He found the surrounding landscape devoid of a human presence, abundant in animals, and unusually fertile. Simply walking away from so fine a site seemed questionable, and to discover whether the snake had a valid claim to the valley, Ahoua invoked his ancestral gods — whose spirits resided in forest spaces throughout western Africa — by gathering the new shoots of nearby trees called ekàn and rubbing them together.19 Local historians say that after kneading the trees’ roots together, he saw visions of the serpent wearing a crown. On top of the crown stood a parakeet, a symbol that denoted a “mother in transition” who occupied forest space. Ahoua interpreted this to mean that

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he should heed the snake’s demand. He left the valley immediately and returned home for three years before coming back to ask the snake’s permission to settle the land.20 It was common practice in West Africa for people settling empty land to ask local leaders, such as a chief or a ruling group of elders, for their permission to set up a homestead where they could hunt and farm. In the way they construct their history as a community, Ọhọri claim that the images Ahoua saw of the snake wearing a crown connect the natural environment in this instance to a ruling presence.21 Whether fictive or not, communal narratives indicate that Ahoua found the result of his divination disappointing. The story suggests, however, that he heeded the ancestral gods’ advice and returned home via the same paths that brought him to the valley. Back in his birthplace again, he married Kouoka. The two spent the subsequent three years making preparations to return to the Lama Valley should the violent succession dispute that Ahoua’s father predicted force them into exile. Ọhọri insisted that the fears of Ahoua’s father came to fruition, and that shortly after his death, Ahoua and Kouoka fled from their homeland in the cover of darkness and took the paths back to the lowest reaches of the basin where Ahoua had encountered the snake three years before.22 Oral traditions tell that the snake was waiting for the hunter prince. Ahoua again performed a divination, this time in the presence of the serpent. After he kneaded ekàn from nearby trees, the gods rewarded Ahoua’s patience and the respect he showed for the surrounding natural environment. The gods called on the serpent to acknowledge Ahoua’s claim to the land this time. The snake, informants told me, then led the hunter and his wife to the spot that eventually became the village of Edé, the first in the series of settlements that made up Ọhọri-Ije. Local legends suggested that by clearing a small plot out of the valley’s dense brush, striking their hoes firmly into the basin’s “black earth,” and planting new crops, Ahoua and Kouoka sowed the seeds from which the Ọhọri community eventually sprang. Ọhọri extended their reach in the valley from Edé, but apparently they did so slowly. Oral traditions hint that the community grew only gradually. The measured demographic growth over time is symbolized in the way informants reference the couple’s difficulty producing offspring. They indicated that Ahoua had reached an advanced age, well “into his forties,” before he and Kouoka bore children. The couple’s inability to bring offspring into their new world is alleged to have caused them a great deal of stress and concern. After a number of

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years in Edé, though, Ahoua apparently discovered what informants referred to as a Şọhọri tree while hunting in the forest surrounding the village.23 It was the first time Ahoua had seen the tree in the valley, but he knew of its leaves’ medicinal properties. After gathering a few handfuls, he returned home, removed dust that had collected on them, rubbed them together, and gave them to Kouoka to eat. Not long afterward, Kouoka’s “belly swelled” and she gave birth to the couple’s first child.24 More children followed. Legends indicate Kouoka bore sixteen children in all, eight boys and eight girls, each of whom left their natal village to settle elsewhere, thus symbolically laying the foundations for sixteen of Ọhọri-Ije’s villages.25 The foundation narrative and the suggestion that the community grew slowly constitute a way for Ọhọri to explain their early history as a small community, likely prior to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when demographic upheaval following Ọyọ’s collapse resulted in larger refugee populations looking to settle in the valley. The narrative also denotes how early members of the community eschewed political centralization. Ahoua’s disgruntlement with what transpired in his birthplace, causing him to flee to the relative safety of an isolated area of the Lama Valley, left him wary of kingship structures. Informants asserted that at some point, presumably before the empire’s demise, leaders in Ọyọ installed Ahoua’s third son, Alafèka, the founder of the village of Itchagba, as the first Ọhọri king.26 The community seems, however, to have been decidedly less centralized than the larger regional kingships and patriarchal citystates in the area. It is also unclear whether early inhabitants really considered Alafèka someone able to rule, because an element of later oral tradition I highlight later suggests that the next community member to be appointed king received his title only many generations later, after population growth necessitated the transition to political centralization.27 Rather, Ahoua and his sons were patriarchal figures. Patriarchy did not necessarily constitute a predominant form of Ọhọri organization, however, since oral tradition indicates that the eight daughters of Ahoua and Kouoka also founded and maintained their own villages. Moreover, accounts of early communal growth also suggest that political power and rights to adjudicate at the village level may not have rested solely with males. Village leaders apparently shared decision-making abilities with an emerging group of Adoko cult religious leaders who, with their emphasis on the intersection of cosmology and ecology, assumed

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prominent positions and helped unite the growing community of refugees who were assimilated along cultural, linguistic, and religious lines. In particular, Adoko members, whose religious beliefs centered on Ahoua and the snake he was said to have encountered in the valley prior to settlement, served as communal “ministers” who derived their political power from various sacred forest spaces that existed within and as part of Igbó Ilú, which surrounded the original Ọhọri villages. Entering sacred forest spaces and performing divinations, Adoko functionaries made important decisions that affected the growing community inhabiting what was becoming the produced space symbolized by the impenetrable forest that enclosed their villages.28 By producing fetishes, claimed to have prevented slavers from entering Ọhọri space, they also provided the sense of security the refugees sought. The polycentric, or decentralized, form of political organization that members of the community based on religious practice and a rule by consensus among local priests and patriarchal and matriarchal figures seems to have served the small community well during the earlier years of assimilation and community-forming processes. One of the more prominent narratives in oral tradition that depicts the first generations of the Ọhọri community involves a “mysterious man carrying a crown.” No one knew where he came from. He is known in local traditions only as Agbadéwolou Edi, or the “the man with the crown.” According to the narrative, he arrived on the fringes of Igbó Ilú one day and claimed a hereditary right to an Ọhọri kingship. Local leaders suggest that after performing divinations, Adoko members rejected Agbadéwolou Edi’s assertion and branded him a charlatan. After learning of the Adoko pronouncement, residents “shamed” him and obliged him to move on to a place immediately west of the Ọhọri heartland, where he founded the village of Houelli-Gaba.29 Narratives of the Ọhọri community’s first generations are punctuated with allusions to how early refugees gradually entered the valley and sought protection from their surrounding natural environment. They also indicate how members of the community shunned political centralization. For members of the community today, Ahoua and Kouoka constitute a communal mother and father whose assiduous journey along the roads and pathways west of the homeland and respect for the natural world allowed them to build the social and political architecture for a stable community in an era of disruption. Tales of the couple’s reproductive troubles provide a structure to explain how displaced “children” fleeing the troubles that

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

gripped the region on the cusp of a regional shift in transatlantic trading and slaving activities gained acceptance and laid the context for a gradual process of building a community and establishing an identity that was independent of some of the era’s much larger regional empires. The surrounding environment features prominently. The Şọhọri tree, for example, has considerable importance in accounts of the Ọhọri past. Not only does the community’s name reference this tree, but a potion derived from its leaves was possibly employed in making the powerful Adoko fetishes that, informants insisted, had prevented unwanted intruders from crossing the boundary of Igbó Ilú and entering the community’s space. The tree is thus a significant factor in Ọhọri cosmology, like the story of the snake that led Ahoua and Kouoka to their settlement.30 In the building of an Ọhọri society, refugees and their offspring traversed the paths of their “forest home,” Igbó Ilú. From the communal womb of Edé, the first refugees that transitioned into becoming the Ọhọri community, who are represented in local folklore by Ahoua and Kouoka’s children, expanded their network by carving new fields and villages out of the dense vegetation that covered the valley. In doing so, they identified with the forest and relied on its benevolence for healthy rains and productive growing seasons. With each successive generation, the community grew gradually. By the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, however, other individuals and families, likely fleeing the disruptions caused by the demise of Ọyọ and the subsequent slaving activities of Dahomeans in the region, sought refuge in the valley. By this time, people from neighboring communities had heard rumors of the powerful Adoko fetish. As raiding expanded with the increased demand for slaves in the Bight of Benin, the slow trickle of refugees became a steady stream.

From Consensus to King Although it is difficult to gauge the exact nature of demographic changes that resulted from transatlantic slaving activities and social and political upheaval in the area, it is likely that the traffic in refugees along the routes and paths entering the Lama Valley increased as the fabric of Ọyọ’s empire unraveled.31 A combination of political strife, its leaders’ failure to expand their political realm, and increased attacks by Dahomean soldiers on communities that had operated under Ọyọ’s purview all paved the way to heightened mobility in the region.32 In particular, the series of uprisings

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that followed in the wake of Ọyọ’s collapse — a four- or five-decade period once referred to by many scholars as the “Yorùbá Wars” — challenged outlying communities and caused massive spatial and demographic displacement.33 For many who lived in Yorùbá-speaking areas east of the Lama Valley, the thought of moving west into the advancing grip of Dahomean soldiers constituted an unattractive option. People seeking refuge more often fled to Ilé-Ifè. Prior to the onset of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ilé-Ifè maintained an economic presence in the region based on the production of glass. As a regional power, it paled in comparison to earlier, and much larger, savannah empires such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai — whose proximity to the Sahara Desert made for ideal nodal points to manage trade between Mediterranean entrepôts and West African gold fields south of the Niger River. Like many of its neighboring Yorùbáspeaking communities further east, the town operated as a small regional patriarchal kingship whose leaders achieved prosperity based on their ability to carve out an economic niche. As trading patterns shifted with the arrival of European ships along the littoral of West Africa, the smaller kingdoms and city-states that lay in between the savannah and coastal areas vied for control of the extremely profitable trade in slaves that developed with Europeans. Unlike larger regional empires that benefited directly from trading in slaves, such as Dahomey and Ọyọ, Ilé-Ifè owed its economic success to glass production. Glass rivaled gold in economic value and provided the kingdom with the means to operate socially and politically without entirely committing itself to the trade in humans. To say that its prominence as a glass producer insulated it completely from the slave trade would be inaccurate, because the disruptions caused by the rise in human trafficking did benefit the town financially. Not only did emerging communities and regional empires that enriched themselves via the slave trade value glass beads as ritual objects, but Ilé-Ifè’s reputation as a safe haven that did not owe its prosperity to slaving attracted refugees in the nineteenth century. As attractive as Ilé-Ifè may have seemed as a secure goal for some refugees, however, its geographic remoteness almost certainly prompted people living in communities further west to seek alternative refuges.34 Scholars have more often examined the trajectories of those who sought protection under the large rock outcroppings of what became Abeokuta in

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

what is now western Nigeria.35 It seems likely, based on oral traditions, that many of those fleeing social and political disruptions took routes and trails into Ọhọri-Ije as well. Ọhọri narratives indicate there had been significant population growth around what probably would have been that time. While many refugees found the access to Ọhọri country on paths that were oftentimes inundated during rainy seasons and covered by the sticky gray potọ-potọ difficult, they also learned the landscape buffered the valley from slave raids. Perhaps more important, Africans in search of protection may have heard rumors about Igbó Ilú’s unique protective capacity.36 Legends indicate that the placement of Adoko fetishes at locations along the outskirts of the forest safeguarded the refugees who had ties to Yorùbá communities to the east. The distinction constitutes a way for current residents to build a sense of shared lineage, although informants contend that if one did not come from a Yorùbá community, he or she would have perished or “disappeared” upon crossing into Ọhọri space. The narrative also serves as a way to explain how the Ọhọri community provided a safe haven for refugees, since the fetishes would have repelled “foreigners” such as Dahomean soldiers intent on capturing slaves to transport to coastal ports. Unlike in the earlier era when the Ọhọri ancestral spirits had rejected the “man with the crown,” the populations of the villages within the Igbó Ilú forest probably expanded at a rapid pace during the nineteenth century’s tremendous upheaval. Demographic growth prompted political centralization. Oral traditions explain the transition to a kingship organization through the tale of a later “fleeing king” who arrived at the Ọhọri border at some point in what may have been the early to mid-nineteenth century.37 The time frame fits traditions indicating that a king named Aromokoukomoulèkè, or “the war has captured everyone but him,” fled a prominent Yorùbá town after receiving threats from belligerent communities during the mayhem that resulted from Ọyọ’s dismantling as a regional empire. Like Ahoua before him, the king first arrived in the village of Ibiyan. Shortly after arriving there, however, residents forced him to flee again, driving him further into the valley toward the Ọhọri “border.”38 Oral traditions depict how Aromokoukomoulèkè astonished many Ọhọri by withstanding the powerful Adoko fetish designed to protect the community from foreigners. The mere fact that he was able to enter the space enclosed by Igbó Ilú legitimized him in the Ọhọri’s eyes. Aromokoukomoulèkè also sought to rule the valley community as a king, however, and Ọhọri leaders questioned this. Local historians recall how Adoko

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priests conducted divinations to assess his worthiness as a monarch. Legends indicate that they did so without gaining clarity, however, so they decided to wait until a more favorable time to perform another divination. In the interim, Aromokoukomoulèkè apparently sought out a chief of the nearby community of Adja-Oueré to see if he could settle within his domain. The Adja chief complied and offered Aromokoukomoulèkè land that bordered Ọhọri space, not far from the foundational spot where Ahoua encountered the serpent, near what is today the Aba market. The Adja community had established hunting rights in the area generations before, but its king apparently thought little of the land’s utility, because it lay in the deepest recesses of the valley and was surrounded by bogs and potọ-potọ.39 Ọhọri oral traditions indicate that despite the less than ideal living conditions, Aromokoukomoulèkè built a dwelling in front of an aba tree and waited for the Adoko priests to make a decision. He laid his claim on the territory by calling the space around the tree Ababa, a name signifying that those who wanted to move to the area would have to speak to “the fleeing king” to get his permission.40 Whether this would have constituted an affront to the Adja chief is unknown, but later generations referred to his settlement as Issaba, which means “the king who has fled.” The Ọhọri allowed Aromokoukomoulèkè to remain on the outskirts while they performed divination after divination over the course of many years. Over that time, the ancestral deities failed to yield a definitive answer. In the interim, Aromokoukomoulèkè remained in the area and engaged socially and economically with his Ọhọri neighbors. He organized the village as a patriarchy, and, like his Ọhọri compatriots, he welcomed other Africans who had fled from nearby areas, which fell increasingly under the nominal control of Dahomey or were threatened by slave raids.41 The population of Issaba grew rapidly during the era of upheaval, and informants suggest “the fleeing king” mastered the same powerful Adoko “chemistry” that protected Ọhọri people from invasions, slaving, and warfare — a process indicating that assimilation occurred between valley residents and others allowed to settle there.42 Over time, informants suggest, divinations eventually confirmed that Aromokoukomoulèkè should be inducted as the second Ọhọri king — the first since the era, generations earlier, when Ọyọ’s leaders were said to have enthroned Ahoua’s third son.43 The recognition explains two notable historical trends: foremost, it marked a shift

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

toward political centralization in the community. Second, it accounted for the merging of refugee communities who had assimilated and become part of the “forest home” surrounded by Igbó Ilú.44 Although Aromokoukomoulèkè ascended to what ostensibly amounted to a new Ọhọri chieftaincy or kingship, the exact nature of how residents structured the centralized form of political organization was apparently left unclear upon his enthronement. Informants depict the transition to a new political structure as challenging. The types of political machinations and internal family politics that are alleged to have driven Ahoua from his home many generations before threatened to unravel the underlying fabric of the growing community. Foremost was the lack of clarity about who would succeed Aromokoukomoulèkè. Traditions suggest he had become an old man by the time divinations revealed him to be a true Ọhọri king.45 His reign was therefore short.46 Narratives indicate that the king had three sons, Iloukan, Dochan, and Idohou, princes who vied for their father’s throne upon his death. By the time of Aromokoukomoulèkè’s passing, both Issaba and the Ọhọri country had grown considerably as refugees arrived in regular intervals from the plateau regions. Seeking political continuity, Adoko members entered sacred forest space to seek guidance in identifying whether one of the “fleeing king’s” offspring could provide political stability to their growing community. Divinations resulted in the choosing of Iloukan as his successor.47 Political rivalries, however, developed shortly after Iloukan assumed the kingship, likely donning a crown that replicated the one worn by the serpent Ahoua had seen in his dream during his initial divination after entering the valley.48 Iloukan’s younger brother, Idohou, had also wanted to be king. Upset with the results of divinations, he used the same strong Adoko “chemistry” his father had learned in assimilating with members of the Ọhọri community to undermine his brother’s authority. What that entailed is not explicit in the oral records, but Iloukan apparently survived Idohou’s scheming. Nonetheless, Adoko members, who were concerned about the restless nature of the transition, consulted with the ancestral spirits once again to assuage the situation and restored a sense of calm to the community by choosing Idohou’s son Otckékérédinan to take over leadership of Ọhọri-Ije.49 The appointment calmed his father, whom an informant referred to as “the powerful one who got angry.”50 The succession returned a sense of tranquility and political stability to the valley, but Adoko members

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also used the dispute to modify the sequence of nominating future kings. Following the reign of Idohou’s son, the community abandoned the hereditary model and started choosing leaders via a revolving kingship.51 Lineage no longer applied to political ascendancy. On the contrary, Adoko leaders developed a rotating kingship in which priests chose new kings in turn from four different villages, Aba, Issaba, Itchigan, and Iwọyé.52 Even though Ọhọri consider each of the four villages as “original,” in the sense they are believed to have been founded by Ahoua and Kouoka’s offspring, I interpret this decision as aimed at representing different refugee groups: Issaba derived from Aromokoukomoulèkè’s settlements, whereas the inhabitants of Aba, Itchigan, and Iwọyé were descended from earlier refugees who had settled in what became Igbó Ilú.

Questioning the Invention of African Cultural and Historiographical Tradition The symbolic merging of distinct refugee groups via a rotating kingship lends credence to Asiwaju’s earlier proposition that Ọhọri assimilated over time to learn a sense of shared community. The story of Adoko priests calming the “powerful one who got angry” also supports the creation of a type of centralized political organization that operated loosely until shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, when prominent members of the community altered the political structure by spreading political decision-making among Adoko leaders, local merchants, and war chiefs — a trend I examine in more depth in chapter 2. Although valid as regards the formation of an autonomous collective identity, narratives that promote the notion of conformity and assimilation over time by just two groups of refugees, from Ọyọ and Ilé-Ifè, respectively, almost certainly fail to capture the dynamic nature of demographic change in the region during an era of the transatlantic slave trade and the political ruptures that occurred as Ọyọ’s influence in the region waned. There is no way to know for certain the origins of all the refugees who “became” Ọhọri through assimilation.53 Likewise, how many people arrived together en masse in the latter stages of settling the valley in the precolonial era will likely forever remain a mystery. In many respects, the way members of the community explain their past by emphasizing that their ancestors came from either Ọyọ or Ilé-Ifè fits into a framework of inventing tradition, a process

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whereby a community constructs a common identity based on a sense of a shared past.54 Contrary to earlier studies of communities that have manufactured a sense of cultural linguistic commonality, however, Ọhọri narratives, while highlighting shared Yorùbá cultural–linguistic origins, are unique in that they draw on a dialogue with their surrounding environment to shift attention away from the wider-ranging Yorùbá political framework.55 Particularly when recalling stories about the road crossing their valley home, the Ọhọri highlight a sense of historical autonomy and frame their past as a community that fell outside of the purview of much larger regional polities, Yorùbá and non-Yorùbá alike. The difficulty explaining Ọhọri origins and depicting their precolonial past may account for why scholars have neglected to write a comprehensive history of the community and the role its members have played in varying historical settings. Nevertheless, the few scholars who have written about the Ọhọri past, in however limited a way, err in trying to place them within the larger Yorùbá communal and political framework.56 Although contemporary accounts speak of attributes shared with Yorùbá cultural–linguistic groups, Ọhọri oral tradition depicts a politically independent community established by refugees who more than likely arrived from numerous villages and towns throughout the region. Scholars who have written about Ọhọri-Ije cannot agree on the community’s origins or the type of political organization it adopted prior to formal colonial rule. Yet they still insist that the Ọhọri’s cultural and linguistic commonalities with Yorùbá communities mean that they also share political affiliations, even though oral tradition and current narratives of a communal past suggest otherwise. By inserting the Ọhọri community into a Yorùbá political structure, scholars have crafted what amounts to an invented historiographical tradition, which fails to capture the complex nature of how Ọhọri formed their identity as an independent, stable polity that operated on the margins of powerful, yet politically fragile, empires. That scholars cannot agree on the origins of the community or find a “neat” place for it within a greater Yorùbá history indicates the difficulties in piecing together an Ọhọri precolonial past. That Samuel Johnson does not even mention the community specifically in his History of the Yorubas constitutes a notable omission. More contemporary historians, however, have tried to explain Ọhọri history in brief by associating it with the broader Yorùbá past. Asiwaju, for example, offers a limited account of the

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Ọhọri in his history of Yorùbá communities who have lived in areas outside of what is now Nigeria, but since his study focuses primarily on the eras of colonial rule and independence, he does little more than suggest that the community may have shared ties with Ọyọ and Ilé-Ifè. He urges scholars to expand the scope of Yorùbá scholarship by writing a more comprehensive history of the community.57 In an earlier article on resistance, Asiwaju suggested that Ọhọri-Ije had been a “small but very vigorous Yorùbá kingdom” when formal colonial rule in the region commenced and noted that the Ọhọri villages were composed of people who had managed to build a “tradition of political independence that had not been seriously interfered with by any external powers.”58 Biodun Adediran challenged Asiwaju’s assessment and insisted that the Ọhọri community was a subsection of the larger Anago Yorùbá subgroup.59 Given the complex and fluid ways in which the Ọhọri have organized over time and disassociated themselves actively from the Yorùbá political framework in their oral tradition, this strikes me as a call to revise, not only their history, but the history of smaller interstitial communities in the region that, while no doubt impacted by the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade and associated social and political upheaval, responded to tensions by developing a sense of political independence, which they buttressed by their relationship with the natural environment. A more comprehensive history of the Ọhọri helps fill in part of the historiographical gap. Part of that entails disentangling it from the standard narrative of a shared Yorùbá past. An examination of an Ọhọri past before the arrival of French colonizers in the last decade of the nineteenth century also shifts attention away from a historiographical tradition on Africa and an Atlantic World that emphasizes how many Africans either were enslaved or engaged in the slave trade.60 Members of the community indeed speak a Yorùbá dialect and share many cultural commonalities with neighboring groups, but their understanding of their history and the roles they played as Africans who actively and successfully avoided enslavement while refusing to engage in the trade provides new types of narratives that scholars of Yorùbá and Atlantic World histories have yet to explore in depth.61 The historical narratives of Ahoua and Kouoka arriving in the valley and the various kings the community rejected and accepted challenge otherwise linear models of the past. Tales of the couple settling the valley, building their “family,” and constructing a politically independent “forest home” or “state,” with the eventual emergence of a rotating kingship structure, constitute how Ọhọri commu-

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

nity evolution involved gradual processes of assimilation, demographic growth, and modified political centralization in the precolonial era.

Regional Unrest in the Late Nineteenth Century Perceptions of the surrounding environment and an emphasis on the routes settlers and refugees took to enter the valley feature prominently in the way members of the community tell their history and lend insight into how they created the framework for a communal identity associated with a sense of social and political autonomy. Foundational sites such as the present-day Aba market, where Ahoua is said to have engaged with the serpent, and the memories of the protective Igbó Ilú forest surrounding the communal heartland are important components in the way the Ọhọri construct a sense of the past when speaking about the Pobé–Kétu road. In drawing on these sites of remembrance, members of the Ọhọri community sketch a new type of history that explains how they built a community that may have operated on the margins of larger polities during an era of tremendous social and political upheaval, but found a political and social center in the heart of the Lama Valley. In writing about Ọhọri resistance to French colonizing processes, Asiwaju noted that the valley’s terrain kept its residents “beyond the reach of Old Ọyọ cavalry power and outside the orbit of active Ọyọ imperial control.”62 That seems to have held true during the turbulent nineteenth century. While other towns and villages, such as Kétu, Pobé, and nearby Adja-Oueré, fell prey to Dahomean raiders at various times, the Ọhọri remained politically independent. Members of the Ọhọri community made little to no effort at expanding their geographic boundaries beyond the confines of Igbó Ilú following the arrival of Aromokoukomoulèkè. Nevertheless, Ọhọri-Ije’s population continued to grow in the latter half of the nineteenth century as refugees emigrated from neighboring Yorùbá areas to the north and east, as well as Adja domains to the south.63 In 1852, the newly centralized kingship, with the guidance of key Adoko figures, entered into a defensive alliance with the leaders of Adja-Oueré and Kétu to protect an exposed Kétu and the populations of the valley kingdoms of Ọhọri-Ije and Adja-Oueré from Dahomean raids. Later, French colonial military leaders referred to the coalition as the “confederation of Nagos.”64 The arrangement did not last long. Kétu’s leaders interpreted the pact as an agreement whereby Adja and Ọhọri communities operated under the

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purview of Kétu royalty, a position both of the valley kingdoms found unacceptable. Adja and Ọhọri shared cultural–linguistic connections with Kétu, but chafed at the notion that a military alliance equated to political submission. Likewise, members of the Ọhọri community became wary of a possible Adja engagement with Dahomey. The French general who led campaigns against the Dahomean kingdom forty years later, Alfred Dodds, indicated in a brief political sketch of nineteenth-century regional history that the Ọhọri king, most likely Atoyéshéshébi Omi, accused his Adja counterpart of allowing Dahomean troops to explore the “muck” of the valley on the outskirts of Igbó Ilú.65 For both of these reasons, Ọhọri leaders promptly “resumed their independence,” abandoning the confederation less than a year after its formation.66 The unraveling of the alliance did not serve Kétu well. Prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century, residents of the Lama Valley and those living on the plateaus used the road connecting Pobé and Kétu sparingly. While a number of the refugees who made up the Ọhọri community had hiked along its path to enter the valley throughout the previous two or three centuries, the dense vegetation and boggy conditions during rainy seasons discouraged people from traveling consistently along the route.67 That changed when soldiers from Dahomey laid siege to Kétu in 1886.68 When Dahomey’s warriors attacked and set fire to dwellings, a number of people fled the city. The father of Adèyinka Moutitaba, a merchant I interviewed in Pobé in 2007, was among those who braved the “difficult terrain” of the Lama Valley to escape to the relative calm of Pobé. Many, like Moutitaba’s father, a young merchant whose operations were disrupted by the violence, opted to take the Pobé–Kétu road south through the dense vegetation of Ọhọri-Ije protected by the surrounding Igbó Ilú forest. No records or oral traditions indicate that Dahomean soldiers followed displaced people from Kétu into the valley. When asked about recollections of the Pobé–Kétu road, Moutitaba noted how only those frightened enough by the Dahomean siege “were willing to make the journey.” When the “problems” made it necessary, however, they “did so in order to outrun Dahomean raiders.”69 It is difficult to gauge how many people escaped Kétu via the route south to Pobé during the Dahomean raids in 1886. Unlike in neighboring regions, there were no Christian missionaries in the Lama Valley to record how the events impacted local communities.70 Although it highlights certain noteworthy events, Alfred Dodds’s historical account sheds little light

THE ROADS INTO IGBÓ ILÚ . 

on how people in the Ọhọri community reacted to the upheaval generated at the end of the nineteenth century. Glimpses of what transpired after the Dahomean sacking of Kétu can be gleaned from Moutitaba’s testimony. Ọhọri memories of the era, however, are scant. The dearth of information about what transpired in the latter half of the nineteenth century prior to the penetration of French troops into the interior during the 1890s makes it difficult to assess how Ọhọri responded to the tremendous flux that gripped the region in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It seems likely, however, that the Ọhọri’s communal awareness and sense of autonomy began to change during the upheaval. Ọhọri recollections of the French arrival in the area from the 1890s onward, coupled with an increase in colonial correspondence at the turn of the century, indicate that members of the community found a new foundation for their political identity through their ability to control access into and out of Igbó Ilú via conduits such as the Pobé–Kétu road. With the French attempting to impose colonial control, while the Ọhọri struggled to preserve their political independence, the routes into the valley became battlegrounds.

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

Roads to Subversion Displaying Independence and Displacing Authority in the Early Colonial Era

Although the Ọhọri recall hearing little about the decades that preceded the upheaval in Kétu in 1886, some informants indicated that the roads bisecting the valley during that time were little more than footpaths. 1 These trails had offered refugees their entrée into Ọhọri-Ije in previous centuries. Beyond that, few had traveled the routes such as the one connecting Pobé with Kétu on a regular basis. Those who had assimilated with the Ọhọri community during the preceding century or two preferred to stay within the confines of the forest boundary that protected their homeland. Many residents chose to remain in the valley because they felt protected, believing that Igbó Ilú and the surrounding ecosystem constituted an impermeable force or energy that repelled foreign intrusions during the height of slaving activities from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Ọhọri kings were forbidden to leave its space.2 Human activity along the paths leading into the valley and Ọhọri notions of identity and political independence started to change, however, as fighting on the northern escarpment between Dahomean soldiers and Kétu’s inhabitants heightened in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Members of the community allowed people like Moutitaba’s father to cross the valley along the Pobé–Kétu route following the sacking of the plateau town, but the increase in traffic prompted the Ọhọri to guard the roads and paths that entered their homeland more closely. The Dahomean raid on Kétu triggered a new type of traffic and human mobility in the valley. People displaced by the fighting made their way south to Pobé. Around the same time, new French arrivals had heightened their administrative and military presence on the plateaus that shrouded the valley by the early 1890s. French troops pushed into the interior on the pretext that they were stabilizing the region following decades of unrest. 

 . ROADS TO SUBVERSION

Beginning in 1892, soldiers under General Dodds’s command engaged in a series of battles with Dahomean soldiers. The overthrow of the Dahomean king Behanzin two years later brought a sense of calm and stability to the valley and the surrounding plateaus for the first time in generations. Communities in the area breathed collective sighs of relief and no longer felt driven to flee Dahomean excursions. The French victory, however, also established a new ruling power in the region. Early French designs for colonial rule entailed the imposition of a centralized system of administration throughout France’s colonies on the continent. The notion of “direct rule” centered on the idea that French administrators on the ground in Africa would be in charge of all aspects of administration. During the early years of colonial rule, believing that Africans could learn from French forms of government, French officials envisioned training African functionaries to support French commandants and regional administrators. More specifically, early French colonial planners aimed at replacing indigenous cultures with their own, in the belief that Africans could learn to become French, or at least assimilate certain French cultural attributes. In practice, the model of direct rule throughout French Africa proved challenging. The obstacles were exacerbated in places like Ọhọri-Ije. To begin with, the French colonial government had no formal presence in the valley. Officials governing the area that included Ọhọri-Ije administered it from a post in Zagnanado, approximately forty kilometers to the northwest. Furthermore, French officials found it difficult to travel to Ọhọri country. The derelict paths that provided access through the swampy terrain and dense vegetation of the valley complicated matters for officials hoping to collect taxes and impart their notions of civility to the local population.

Guarding Landscapes of Mobility Prior to the dawn of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the limited contact between them, members of the Ọhọri community and French officials developed a fragile relationship based on mutual respect.3 Early French military commanders praised the Ọhọri for their notable hunting skills and brave, or decent demeanor, while members of the community appreciated the calming influence the French presence had in surrounding areas following the generations’ long upheaval that had stemmed from the transatlantic slave trade.4 Ọhọri remained dubious, however, about French plans. The distance between Ọhọri-Ije and Zagnanado provided

ROADS TO SUBVERSION . 

a geographic cushion, but the French presence caused concern among members of the local population who feared that the colonial power might threaten their independence.5 Ọhọri leaders therefore encouraged their people to monitor traffic into the valley more actively. The French found direct rule unsatisfactory in many colonizing situations in Africa: it was costly and ineffective to place French officials in inhospitable areas in the interior of the continent. Noting the complications, they quickly abandoned the model in numerous administrative regions, opting instead to focus on a more indirect form of rule, based on the recruitment of indigenous political figures to act as tax collectors, military and labor recruiters, and local adjudicators.6 Indirect rule varied within different areas. In Ọhọri country, French officials found a willing advocate to take on these roles in the king, Awélédé. Although custom forbade him from traveling outside of Igbó Ilú, Awélédé “sent notables to greet” French officials “from time to time, and assured” them of Ọhọri “dedication.”7 Delegations of Ọhọri leaders signaling compliance with colonial rule did not, however, mean that all members of the community agreed to serve as colonial subjects. The stabilizing influence the French generated following decades of unrest might have prompted Awélédé’s eagerness to cater to French demands. It is also possible, however, that he faced challenges from those within the Ọhọri political framework who remained wary of French intentions, and he may have sought protection by aligning himself with the French colonial army, which had defeated the regional powerhouse of Dahomey only a few years before. We can only speculate about Awélédé’s reasons for collaborating with the French. What is certain, however, is that his relationship with many Ọhọri had frayed by the dawn of the twentieth century. Leaders from the Adoko religious group, in particular, were cautious of the king’s welcoming stance vis-à-vis the French and encouraged members of the community to resist his overtures when he showed up on farms and at homesteads to help colonial soldiers collect taxes and recruit laborers for new French roadbuilding projects that were designed to “penetrate” Ọhọri-Ije politically and economically. Many Ọhọri grew to detest Awélédé as a result of his collaboration with the French, and residents often refused to comply with his demands or “fled into the surrounding bush” when they saw him approach.8 Colonial officials noted with frustration that Awélédé’s “docile obedience to our orders” did little to ingratiate him to the Ọhọri. By 1906, administrators complained about members of the community who “fiercely” guarded their

 . ROADS TO SUBVERSION

land and independence against “the law of the whites” and cautioned those who entered the valley about Ọhọri who habitually “ventured from their dwellings with weapons such as rifles or sabers.”9 Awélédé’s alliance with colonial officials did not last. At the onset of the rainy season in March 1906, members of the community found the king and his onsa, or confidant, dead.10 Ọhọri residents claimed that Awélédé and the onsa, shamed by their alliance with French officials, had committed suicide “in the face of general public protestation.”11 Colonial inspectors offered a different narrative. They had heard “public rumors” that a group of disenchanted Ọhọri had poisoned the leaders.12 Regardless of the nature of their deaths, the void opened up space for Adoko members to start a process of decentralizing the community’s political structure and displacing decision-making powers among a cadre of militant farmers and religious figures. It took them nearly six years to complete the process, but the relative isolation of the valley in the rainy months that followed Awélédé’s death and the distance between Ọhọri-Ije and Zagnanado allowed them to start reframing their form of governance and conceptualize their sense of political independence in new ways. In addition to encouraging members of the community to guard access to the valley, Adoko leaders persuaded local farmers to plant surplus cotton and use the proceeds from its sale to build up a stronger cache of firearms.13 Before 1906, high-ranking colonial administrators made excursions into the valley only on rare occasions. Rather than endure the difficult traveling conditions, they typically ordered soldiers to travel to ỌhọriIje to assist Awélédé in fulfilling his colonial duties. The rainy season had already begun at the time of the king’s mysterious death, but French officials decided that the political vacuum resulting from his passing necessitated a visit by a person with more administrative control. Within a month of Awélédé’s passing, Georges Hummel, an administrator from Zagnanado became the first French official to trudge through the valley’s thick pọtọ-pọtọ since General Dodds had made the excursion more than ten years before.14 Recognizing that even a marginal colonial presence would disappear with Awélédé’s death, Hummel sought an audience with Adoko leaders who he knew would be in charge of choosing a new king. In particular, Hummel wanted to convince them of the benefits of choosing a leader sooner rather than later, in the hope that the new king would align himself with colonial officials and collect taxes more effectively.

ROADS TO SUBVERSION . 

Hummel made his first attempt to trek into Ọhọri country in late March 1906. He made the trip in vain, however, since residents blocked access to their political heartland.15 An Adoko leader named Alatché had anticipated the arrival of a French delegation and sent guards to monitor the main roads that connected Ọhọri-Ije to Pobé, Kétu, Adja–Oueré, and Massè. The sentries patrolling the route to Massè that Hummel had traveled on from Zagnanado had arrived well before the French administrator and his party reached Igbó Ilú. Hummel did not portray his encounter with the guards as tense, but they warned him that Adoko leaders had ordered the border closed for a month. They claimed they needed the time to consult with oracles to find a replacement for the king. In an additional display of their political independence, members of the community had also placed protective fetishes on the routes to “prohibit whites from passing.”16 Whether he feared the power of Ọhọri fetishes and the armed soldiers guarding access to Ọhọri-Ije or merely opted to honor the Adoko’s requests for extra time to conduct divinations in their search for a new leader, a frustrated Hummel returned to his post in Zagnanado. He arrived again a month later, but Adoko leaders continued to elude him. This time, members of the community had taken away the fetishes from the roads and allowed him entrée.17 After entering the wooded confines of the Ọhọri heartland and “quietly installing” himself in the village of Aba, however, Hummel found he could only get an audience with minor political figures. The chief of Aba, Issokia, and Alla Joussou, the chief of the nearby village of Itchèdè, welcomed him shortly after his arrival.18 Hummel assured them of his good intentions, and the two chiefs arranged a meeting with other minor notables. Those who could make it to the palaver arrived within the hour. Before the meeting opened, women and children emerged from the surrounding bamboo and brush to witness what for many had likely been their first glimpse of a European. Hummel used the encounter as an attempt to quell Ọhọri concerns about taxation policies in the wake of Awélédé’s death. He also explained to the junior political leaders that French officials taxed all African populations as a means to support administrative rule. The rationalization did not sit well with the audience. The chiefs responded politely throughout the discourse, but they expressed little more than what Hummel referred to as a “limited confidence” in French administrative rule.19 The Ọhọri he spoke with assured him that even if they had believed in the benefits of colonialism, they had no authority to make decisions about making tax payments. In the wake of Awélédé’s demise, all political decisions

 . ROADS TO SUBVERSION

affecting the community as a whole were the domain of Adoko leaders. They thanked Hummel for his visit but encouraged him to leave ỌhọriIje promptly, suggesting that he return the following month, when, they promised, they would act as intermediaries with Adoko leaders if they could not arrange an audience for him.20 At the very least, they told him, they would raise his concerns and keep him apprised of the progress Adoko leaders were making in finding a new king.21 It is unclear whether Hummel returned that year. Heavy rains may have precluded him from gaining access to Ọhọri-Ije via the route from Massè. After his initial meeting with Ọhọri chiefs, though, he returned to Zagnanado and recommended that colonial leaders of Dahomey grant him approval to repair and build new roadways into the heart of the valley. He rationalized that road networks would facilitate what he called the “social and political taming” of the Ọhọri and argued that better access to the valley would encourage people living there to be willing participants in the emerging colonial economy.22 Like many of his administrative colleagues in this early era of formal colonial rule in Africa, Hummel advocated public works projects and building roads, in particular, as a primary means of “reaching” Africans in the interior. In many ways, his opinions mimicked those who had justified colonialism as a type of “civilizing mission” that could uplift people whom many Europeans in the Victorian era considered “primitive.” In writing about building and repairing roads connecting Ọhọri-Ije to colonial administrative posts, Hummel maintained that more efficient contact with members of the community would demonstrate to them that the colony had heard their “eternal song of the uncivilized.” He emphasized in his correspondence that the lack of natural water sources in the basin forced residents to travel fifteen kilometers or more to ponds for water in dry seasons. Better roads, he suggested, would make their journeys much easier.23 Good though his intentions may appear to have been on paper, in reality, Hummel advocated rapid penetration via road building so that the French could subjugate the “fiercely independent” Ọhọri community more easily. The Ọhọri had different ideas. They viewed control of mobility as an important element in upholding their political independence, and the roads entering Ọhọri-Ije soon became important sites of contestation. The colonial administration responded to Hummel’s call and quickly made plans to repair the road connecting Ọhọri-Ije to Massè. The rainy season and the closely guarded entry points along the routes going into the valley,

ROADS TO SUBVERSION . 

however, forced the French to abandon the initial project.24 Political and economic “penetration” of the valley remained a top colonial priority, and French administrators started planning a series of new road-building projects designed to provide access. Given the difficult circumstances involved in building and repairing routes through a swampy area inhabited by a community skeptical of French intentions, colonial officials preached tolerance among their peers. One noted that the “spirit of the [Ọhọri] population could be better, but with great patience, gentleness, and firmness they will get better acquainted with our customs.”25 Most Ọhọri viewed the “gentle” approach of the French either skeptically or angrily. Collective Ọhọri anticolonial displays took shape in active and passive forms around routes and new roadbuilding projects in the valley, exemplifying how members of the community defied the French presence. People such as Adjmajou Aladji, an Ọhọri farmer and trader whom colonial officials described as “well respected and very much listened to” by the local population, “compelled a number of his Holli compatriots to openly resist whites and take up arms against colonial guards” who made excursions into the valley.26 The taking up of arms by Ọhọri farmers was a frequent response to  road-building projects. People rarely fired shots in the early stages, choosing instead to conserve bullets and gunpowder for a wider-scale revolt, which was to take shape less than a decade later. Ọhọri anticolonial displays nonetheless challenged colonial road-building efforts. Inclement weather and budgetary problems also caused delays. The repairs that Hummel recommended for the road connecting Massè with Ọhọri-Ije were postponed for two years because rainy seasons made construction difficult and administrators did not have the money to get the project under way. Zagnanado officials finally approved the project in February 1908, when a more liberal budget allowed them to do so. Twenty Fonspeaking laborers recruited from Massè and led by a Conductor Grave from Dahomey’s Division of Public Works began cutting back trees and brush with machetes, starting in Massè and proceeding southwest toward the Ọhọri heartland.27 When the workers reached Ọhọri country in March, members of the community quickly showed their hostility. Ọhọri stopped the laborers as they approached Igbó Ilú and intimidated them by pointing rifles in their direction. This reception prompted the colonial administration to back up the workforce, and seventy workers showed up later that month, this time accompanied by armed colonial guards. In the

 . ROADS TO SUBVERSION

interim, colonial officials tried to recruit more laborers from nearby communities, hoping that building up the team to 150 men by April would help speed up the pace and boost security.28 The Ọhọri responded with more subversive actions. Part of the roadbuilding process involved tracing the route after laborers had cut back trees and brush. To mark out the path, workers inserted wooden pegs into the soil to act as a guide for where they needed to dig the embankments that provided the foundation for the road. While not a painstaking process, engineers such as Grave required precision in tracing routes. The first day after his workers placed the stakes into the soil, though, Grave returned to the site from his quarters in Massè to find that Ọhọri had removed them from their original positions during the previous night and placed them haphazardly over the cleared spaces. Grave had workers retrace the road over the course of the following week, but each morning, he returned to find the pegs scattered. Grave also complained about how groups of Ọhọri men would emerge from nearby brush to attack laborers and colonial guards as they cleared trees. Although the attackers were not always armed with weapons, they lobbed clumps of the valley’s hard dark clay soil at the heads of workers — no doubt conserving gunpowder in the process — before scurrying off into the dense forest that surrounded the path. Officials reported no serious injuries, but the attacks sparked fear among the laborers who refused to sleep on the work site and insisted on returning home to Massè each evening.29 The Ọhọri championed their independence in the face of road-building efforts in numerous other ways, as well. Farmers often stormed in from their fields in large groups to steal packets of food and clothing from workers and Public Works officials before darting quickly back into the surrounding forest.30 Acts like these frustrated colonial officials and caused significant delays in the building of the road. It took laborers the remainder of the year to reach Aba, even though it was only twenty kilometers from Massè. Even after workers finished clearing a path to Aba, the road ended up being unviable because vines and bamboo quickly grew over it, making it impossible for colonial officials to navigate their way into Ọhọri-Ije. Frustrated, French administrators in Zagnanado responded by recruiting another ninety-eight workers from Massè to cut back the brush. By the time they reached Igbó Ilú, however, the Adoko had already placed new fetishes on the route to ward off the intruders. The new team of workers, fearing the power of the fetishes and potential Ọhọri retribu-

ROADS TO SUBVERSION . 

tion, refused to conduct the maintenance work beyond Igbó Ilú.31 Anticolonial demonstrations like this persisted for the next five years. Workers recruited from outside of the valley often became scared that Ọhọri would curse or poison them, and by 1911, most people from neighboring communities rebuffed colonial recruiters when asked to clear additional paths into the valley.32

Building an Arsenal and Displacing Authority Although they had weapons at their disposal, Ọhọri often refrained from using their guns against colonial laborers and guards, opting instead to try to scare colonial officials and the laborers they conscripted to work on building roads in the valley. Putting fetishes on roads and throwing chunks of clay at those who crossed Igbó Ilú served Ọhọri purposes well. It also allowed the Ọhọri to amass firearms and gunpowder with the proceeds they received from selling the highly valued and durable strain of cotton grown in the deepest recesses of the valley.33 Given the Ọhọri predilection for keeping foreigners out of their space, they preferred to sell their crops in markets outside of Ọhọri-Ije. That did not preclude some European merchants, however, from taking the calculated risk of entering the valley in search of the product. Colonial documents tell, for example, how members of the Ọhọri community harassed and scared away a representative of the German company Noltenius & Paul GmbH who had sought to negotiate with farmers directly in early 1908. The Ọhọri not only refused to sell him their surplus cotton crops but denied him lodging and forced him to trudge out of the valley in the middle of the night.34 It was more than just cotton, however, that members of the community sold for cash to purchase weapons. Administrators in Zagnanado noted with admiration how Ọhọri farmers “regularly brought surplus palm kernels and yams to market in exchange for French currency and silver coins.”35 As early as 1907, officials were also aware of some members of the community — referred to as “vagabonds” in colonial correspondence — who streamed back and forth along the Dahomey–Nigeria border and dealt in illicit firearms and gunpowder.36 Amazingly, the French seem never to have realized that the Ọhọri took the proceeds from the sales of cash crops to purchase the weapons they would later use in an uprising against them from 1914 to 1916. In the interim, colonial officials were also unaware that a group of Adoko religious figures and commercial leaders worked to decentralize

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the community’s political structure in the wake of Awélédé’s death without French knowledge. Adoko members had appointed a successor in the months following the former king’s passing, but the appointee “refused” to take on the role, which prompted “people of the country to send him into exile.”37 Nothing else is known about the individual who chose exile over the kingship. The appointment of this new king may have been a ruse Adoko priests came up with to fool French administrators into thinking members of the community were invested in finding a new leader. Either way, Adoko figures took the opportunity to launch a new form of political organization. The nature of the transition was evident in colonial correspondence, even if the authors of reports discussing the political situation in Ọhọri-Ije did not recognize what had been taking place within the community. Administrators heard from people working on the various projects to build roads into the valley how members of the community “barely even recognized household leaders, even though they live similar lives. They fear foreigners, as well, and it is only the fetishes and the priests who have some sporadic influence on the population.”38 What seemed like political instability to French commanders in Zagnanado was in reality a deft political transition that took nearly six years to complete. In the interim, members of the community methodically built up their cache of arms in preparation for premeditated attacks. French officials did not fully recognize the transition in power because Adoko priests claimed their divinations following the mysterious successor chosen in 1906 yielded no viable candidates to assume the kingship.39 The framework of a reorganized Ọhọri political structure became more apparent by 1909. In particular, French officials started seeking audiences with elders whom they heard had been gaining power. One French administrator described in March of that year how he traveled into the valley to meet with an Ọhọri elder named Imokia. The official hoped Imokia could provide information on missing tax revenues from the previous year and described an encounter with young Ọhọri residents while trying to locate the elder. “Upon my arrival,” he wrote, “I asked for Imokia, one of the Hollis who I thought might be able to help me. But people prevented this from happening. As I approached inhabitants, they all fled into the bush. In the afternoon, I toured through the rest of the villages looking for him. Everyone fled despite my offers of friendship, as told through my interpreter. The presence of one of their own, though, did not reassure these savages, who consider Imokia one of their high masters.”40 Men like Alatché,

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Imokia, and Aladji had made up a new cadre of leaders, but the lack of a central authority figure in the form of a king frustrated French administrators, who were intent on raising taxes and recruiting laborers for the colonial road-building projects in the valley. In spite of their attempts to gain influence with the enigmatic new leaders, colonial officials rarely gained audiences with them, which left the French increasingly frustrated. When administrators did get the rare chance to meet any of the new leaders, they achieved little other than promises. Alatché, for example, flaunted his defiance to colonial rule by assuring French officials in 1907 of his “allegiance.” He also “pledged to appoint a new king shortly,” but this did not happen until five years later.41 French administrators characterized the six-year interlude between Awélédé’s death and the appointment of a successor in 1912 as a “period of anarchy that had heightened from year to year.”42 In reality, Adoko elders and prominent farmers used the time to solidify a new type of political organization that involved a redistribution of power away from a king toward a select group of religious leaders, prominent farmers, and an emerging set of younger war chiefs known as balóguns, who ruled by consensus. Numerous factions had likely developed even before Awélédé succumbed to his fate, but the new leaders appeared to find enough common ground among the general populace to forge ahead with their political reorganization. Although some Ọhọri no doubt supported colonial endeavors, the majority of the community opposed French labor recruitment and taxation policies. The strong anticolonial sentiment among the population and the unwillingness of many to accept subjugation in particular must have emboldened the new leaders, who encouraged other Ọhọri farmers to sell surplus cotton to fund the communal buildup in weapons and dispersed the leadership among a larger group of individuals.43 Choosing a new ọba, or king, was one of the Adoko leaders’ responsibilities, and they decided to continue to do this, even while decentralizing Ọhọri political organization. They were seeking to maintain the façade of monarchy in order to divert their would-be colonizers’ attention away from the Ọhọri who were acquiring arms in anticipation of rebellion. A king of their choosing, they believed, could serve diplomatically to keep the French at bay. It often took the leaders several months of divining to select a new ọba, but following Awélédé’s death, it atypically took them nearly six years. When, finally, they picked a man named Anegbé, they

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broke the cycle of kingships rotating among the villages of Issaba, Aba, Iwọyé, and Itchigan.44 Awélédé had hailed from Itchigan, and custom dictated that Adoko leaders choose a successor to him from Issaba.45 Of the three main candidates oracles had identified by 1912, however, only one, Issokia, came from Issaba.46 The others, Esija and Anegbé, came from Itchigan and Iwọyé, respectively. In choosing Anegbé in November of that year, Adoko leaders ruptured the succession process. They also engendered rivalries among the three main candidates that impacted Ọhọri history in the near term. Issokia was a relative of Awélédé’s and hoped the instability following the former king’s death would compel diviners to grant him hereditary rights to the position by reason of birth and place of origin.47 Issokia maintained an advisory role with Anegbé, but later used the position to conspire against him with French administrators and troops. The nature of Esija’s discord with the new king is not entirely clear, but colonial documents portray their relationship as frayed.48 In spite of the fractious political environment the choice created, Anegbé was an ideal candidate for the Adoko leaders engaged in realigning the Ọhọri political structure. French officials knew very little about Anegbé. A combination of oral data and correspondence compiled by French administrators shortly after his ascent reveal glimpses into his earlier life and offer insights into why the Adoko might have considered him for the post. Anegbé was the son of a midlevel notable who likely would have had some familiarity with local politics. As a “young man” relative to his predecessors, he may have also had the ability to appeal to a group of younger Ọhọri men and women who detested colonial labor recruitment policies.49 Shortly after his ascent, Anegbé renamed himself Otutubiodjo, “Cool Like the Rain.” Neither the meaning of the name nor the political role he played immediately after his appointment is entirely clear, although it is possible he chose it to give the impression that he could be calm under pressure. Regardless of the name’s meaning, it seems likely that Otutubiodjo acted more as a diplomat than a central political figure charged with making important communal decisions. Informants recall learning how he remained a prominent figurehead during the initial phase of his reign.50 Political power and military decisions, however, lay in the hands of leading Adoko figures and the community’s chief military adviser, Mohilo. In retelling their history, members of the community remember Otutubiodjo as a heroic figure, but his role seems to have been mostly ambassadorial.

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Others wielded real political power from behind the scenes as members of the community continued to raise cash from the sale of surplus crops to purchase firearms and gunpowder. In the interim, the new king adhered to diplomatic expectations. In the annals of Ọhọri minds and later colonial documents, Otutubiodjo is remembered as a king who resisted the French. Before he transitioned into a rebel, however, he tried to placate French colonizers by saying the right things and acting in ways that stalled anxious colonial officials who hoped to cash in finally on tax revenues and take advantage of the valley’s agricultural capacity. Ọhọri law precluded Otutubiodjo from traveling outside of Igbó Ilú, but he maintained contact with the French by sending Issokia to meet with colonial officials on his behalf.51 The king also orchestrated an elaborate flag-raising ceremony to appease French administrators after his appointment. Claiming that this was meant to “cleanse” relations after the period of social unrest and tension following Awélédé’s ambiguous death, Otutubiodjo invited French officials to Ọhọri-Ije and raised the French flag outside of his dwelling.52 The ritual may have put colonial administrators at ease, but the symbolic act of raising the flag meant little to the Ọhọri community, whose members still refused to consider themselves a colonized people. Nevertheless, with overtures like this, Otutubiodjo led the French to believe that a state of laissez-faire, if not camaraderie, existed between himself and the colonial rulers in Zagnanado. In addition to raising the French flag upon his inauguration, he persuaded a number of Ọhọri to pay French colonial taxes. The number of people paying taxes from Aba and Issaba, for example, rose from 170 to 206 and from 130 to 162, respectively. The percentage increase may have seemed modest, but the commander of the Holli–Kétou administrative region thought it a “satisfactory” result compared to the previous six years.53 The assistant administrator of a colonial military post in Pobé, Chassin, also described Otutubiodjo as “genuine” after conducting a palaver with him and other notables in Ọhọri-Ije in early 1913. He made this assessment based on the notables’ willingness to help him persuade members of the community to work on a variety of “essential projects” such as building roads and digging wells in Issaba. He tempered his optimism, however, by noting that the new king had also made excuses for over six hundred people who had failed to pay taxes due at the end of 1912, saying that they had been too busy to make the payments because they had remained on their farms during that season’s harvest.54

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Chassin’s guarded observations presaged the nature of future relations. After their initial meeting, the Pobé chief of post could never seem to gain an audience with Otutubiodjo. Tax revenues plummeted the following year, and the Ọhọri never agreed to work on colonial projects. Chassin also demonstrated his frustration when the king took more than a month to arrest three Ọhọri who had beaten another to death during a market altercation. By the beginning of 1914, tensions between Ọhọri, the French, and neighboring communities had reached a turning point.55 French leaders in Zagnanado and the colonial capital of Porto Novo started to question Otutubiodjo’s intentions. His promises to collect taxes never came to fruition, and military advisors began to believe that he “secretly encouraged malcontents” and had “ignored the arms buildup” in the weeks leading up to the wide-scale Ọhọri revolt that broke out in January 1914.56 The first attack by Ọhọri warriors led by Mohilo occurred at a ceremony marking the completion of a railway line that connected Pobé with the colonial capital of Porto Novo. At the time, officials surmised that Otutubiodjo “energetically” supported the Ọhọri assault on the train station.57 Other attacks on French African infantry (tirailleurs) and members of neighboring African communities who tried to enter Ọhọri space as colonial laborers followed in later January and early February. Allegedly on Otutubiodjo’s orders, Ọhọri also blocked routes into their homeland by felling large kapok trees, which measured as much as ten feet wide at the base, and armed members of the community who supported the new faction of leaders manned all trails and roads.58 Non-Ọhọri who attempted to enter Ọhọri space were met with force. Shortly after the attack at the train station in Pobé, Ivorian tirailleurs based in the town trekked into the valley with orders to inquire about the Ọhọri refusals to pay taxes. As the colonial troops reached the edge of Igbó Ilú, Ọhọri fighters emerged from the dense brush near the road to fire upon the regiment.59 Ọhọri did not restrict attacks to just colonial officials and soldiers along the roads entering the valley. Three men from the northern part of Dahomey had contacted a resident from Kétu named Bitokoun to escort them north from Pobé through the core of Ọhọri country on January 31, 1914. The tensions sparked by the previous weeks’ confrontations between the valley’s inhabitants and French officials had reached a fever pitch. It was not uncommon for merchants and travelers to hire guides to help navigate the dense vegetation and web of trails that intersected the Ọhọri heartland and connected the community’s citizens to the southern

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and northern plateaus. Given the heightened anxiety along the Aba to Adja-Oueré road, Bitokoun likely descended with his patrons into the Ọhọri segment of the valley from the southern escarpment town of Pobé with trepidation. The early morning passed without incident as the guide directed his party around the Ọhọri villages of Aba and Issaba before embarking on the route that linked the heart of the country to Massè. Once the group reached the outskirts of the Ọhọri village of Itchèdè, however, Bitokoun found the road barred. Villagers had blocked the path with fallen trees. Within seconds of their arrival at this barrier, a gang of Ọhọri farmers armed with machetes emerged from brush that enveloped the path and attacked Bitokoun and his clients without warning. The guide and two of his travelers escaped into the surrounding vegetation and fled in different directions, but the Ọhọri captured the fourth man and, according to colonial correspondence, “hacked his body to pieces.”60 Even though they shared cultural–linguistic ties with people such as Bitokoun, members of the Ọhọri community perceived him and his small party as foreigners and potential enemies. By ignoring barriers, penetrating Igbó Ilú, and setting foot on what the Ọhọri community considered autonomous ground, Bitokoun’s quartet — like the tirailleurs the week before — challenged the local people, who denied access to their heartland to preserve their political independence. Fierce fighting raged over the course of the next three months, with Ọhọri farmers and warriors led by Mohilo engaging in regular skirmishes with colonial troops at various entry points into Ọhọri-Ije.61 Ọhọri guerrilla activities subsided as the rains picked up in April, and French military leaders responded by having troops and conscripted laborers from nearby communities fell trees in Igbó Ilú.62 Colonial administrators thought that felling large trees in Igbó Ilú and cutting back brush would keep Ọhọri guerrillas in the sights of colonial militia and allow French African tirailleurs to bypass the barricades of vegetation and dead trees with which the Ọhọri had blocked all routes.63 The Ọhọri considered the felling of trees by colonial officials an act of hostility. Through Issokia, who met with the French battalion commander Maroix in Pobé in early April, Otutubiodjo made known his aversion to the colonial policy.64 Ọhọri religious and political leaders commonly spent time in the forest upon their inauguration, and they considered an energy generated by its trees as the source of Ọhọri power. Local rulers took “their strength from the forest,” and Otutubiodjo and the religious leaders who had gained political control were enraged at colonial

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soldiers cutting down trees.65 The destruction of the forest space that surrounded Ọhọri-Ije and protected its inhabitants added more fuel to the fire of Ọhọri rebellion. Otutubiodjo maintained his role as a diplomat who expressed Ọhọri concerns to French officials, but battles between residents and French colonial soldiers persisted. Armed Ọhọri farmers regularly attacked French African tirailleurs and laborers conscripted to destroy the forest throughout the first months of 1914. Even though local religious leaders had effectively limited the role of the Ọhọri king during the long process of choosing a new figurehead, French administrators did not recognize the complex changes to their political organization. Political power rested primarily in the hands of new leaders such as Mohilo, and his fellow balóguns, Okolo and Lakoulou.66 Nonetheless, French officials such as Maroix assumed Otutubiodjo acted as the community’s central political figure, and in spite of their concerns that the king’s earlier pretense of collaboration may have been a ruse, they believed him when told he wanted to help stabilize the situation. Through his envoy, Issokia, Otutubiodjo articulated his concern about the number of Ọhọri who had died during the initial attacks, and he suggested that he and other “important notables and principal elders” wanted to negotiate a submission.67 He also asked colonial officials in early February to “allow him the month” to calm the population, a request French officials heeded, though one later admitted to the governor of Dahomey that the king had “fooled us into waiting” while Mohilo planned more attacks.68 By the end of February, Issokia — who by this time had been acting clandestinely as an informant to French military advisors — referred to Otutubiodjo as a “man with two mouths” and claimed the king had been at the forefront of inspiring Ọhọri youth to revolt.69 When writing to the governor of Dahomey about how to proceed with the Ọhọri leadership, Captain Vian, the military commander in Pobé during the first attacks, summed up his position equivocally: “The truth is difficult to know.”70 French leaders’ vague stance regarding the king persisted despite continued Ọhọri vigilance in keeping their “border” closed to all outside influences. In the interim, colonial officials gathered intelligence from Issokia. Through their interpreter Jérôme de Souza, the French had led Issokia to believe that they would support his installment as the new Ọhọri king following the arrest of Otutubiodjo. It was a promise made in vain, though, because officials decided not to arrest the king during this time. By the end of April 1914, thanks in part to the information

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provided to them by Issokia, colonial troops had put considerable military pressure on the main Ọhọri villages. The week before, tirailleurs from an artillery brigade had set fire to a number of Ọhọri homes in the villages of Aba and Issaba. The razing of dwellings followed a particularly fierce battle in the Aba market, where the brigade had encountered and defeated many of Mohilo’s fighters, who had been preparing there for a new attack. The French assault stymied Ọhọri plans and forced their leaders to negotiate submission. In a report that described military operations in the valley during 1914, Maroix, the commander of French troops called in from Senegal to quell the violence, outlined the details of the negotiations he and other officials held with Otutubiodjo that followed from May 7 to May 10 in Issaba. After their initial meeting, the king said that he had to “submit the fate” of the Ọhọri “to the fetishes.”71 He asked Adoko members to conduct a divination and left it to the oracles to decide whether they should surrender to the French forces. Unlike in the previous choice of a new king, it did not take Adoko leaders long to reach a conclusion. Within hours, the leaders conducted a divination and made their announcement in a forum that included French officials, the king, and his family, as well as numerous members of the community who were interested in the outcome. It was in this environment that Otutubiodjo learned of the Adoko proclamation. One of the French officials described the pronouncement as a tense affair: “Surrounded by homes that had been engulfed by flames, the scared king and his confidants who had instigated the revolt and eagerly sent young people to war realized their predicament.” Adoko leaders encouraged Otutubiodjo to acquiesce to the colonial forces. The king, apparently displeased with the decision, “expressed apprehensions about the way in which the priests had handled the divination.” Some of the younger members of the community “cried treason after hearing the results and accused the elders of betraying them and selling them out to the whites”; meanwhile, Otutubiodjo walked back to his home in Iwọyé “without making any promises.”72 Three days later, the king emerged from his home, proclaiming that he “opposed warfare.” He “instructed Issokia to negotiate” the timetable for Ọhọri submission, an outcome French leaders — believing his decision marked an end to Ọhọri rebellion — welcomed with “great satisfaction.”73 In making his pronouncement, Otutubiodjo likewise promised officials that they could “occupy” Ọhọri country and establish a military post there, and he offered to encourage Ọhọri to turn in their weapons. Otutubiodjo

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avoided arrest over the near term primarily because French officials hoped his promises of stabilizing the situation would yield results. They also hoped his overtures of alliance and the backing of troops could help him collect taxes from the population. In the interim, Mohilo and other balóguns fled with an estimated two hundred warriors to Ọhọri farms along the border with colonial British Nigeria. From there, they conducted sporadic attacks on colonial troops and laborers co-opted from neighboring communities by the French to build roads and fell trees.74 Tirailleurs captured Mohilo later that year and exiled him to the French penal colony in Port-Étienne, Mauritania, for ten years after his conviction for “participating in insurrection against French authority.” The French likewise arrested, convicted, and banished Otutubiodjo’s rival Esija and the Adoko leaders Akoagu and Eitcha for “compromising public security.” Each was sentenced to five years’ exile.75 In spite of the arrests, problems between the Ọhọri and those they considered “foreigners” persisted well into the next year. Well aware that France from early 1915 on was devoting more financial resources and troops to European theaters of war, Ọhọri “exploited” the weakened colonial position by heightening attacks.76 Because of Otutubiodjo’s “previous show of respect” and the sincere hope that he could assist them during leaner economic times, the French at first maintained an ambiguous stance regarding the king’s role in the Ọhọri’s subversive activities.77 Otutubiodjo finally met his demise in August 1915, however, following an Ọhọri assault on the commander of the new Aba post, Lieutenant Balain, and twenty-six tirailleurs. The soldiers had been escorting a prisoner to the colonial post in Massè when the detainee’s father and a group of armed men confronted them on the route leaving Ọhọri country. A female Ọhọri informant who had been a “companion” of one of the tirailleurs complained to French investigators that Otutubiodjo had concealed “clandestine” Ọhọri purchases of guns and powder in Nigeria. Soldiers arrested the king at his residence shortly after he “admonished” the informant in public for revealing his role in the new wave of onslaughts.78 In a public spectacle, the tirailleurs escorted Otutubiodjo out of Ọhọri country to a Zagnanado prison.79 From there, officials transferred the king to a  colonial court in Abomey, where he was condemned to exile for ten years in the same French penal colony in Mauritania as his countrymen. Deported in 1916, he died later that year.80

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Shortly after soldiers escorted Otutubiodjo out of Ọhọri country, troops and corvée laborers from nearby communities cleaned up the barriers the Ọhọri had placed on pathways leading into the valley. They also more systematically set about destroying Igbó Ilú and confiscated as many firearms from its inhabitants as they could.81 Upon the king’s arrest, some Ọhọri elders also promised French officials that they would provide the colony with laborers to carve out a “passable road” connecting the new administrative circle headquarters in Pobé to Aba. In addition to promising laborers to build a road connecting the two towns, elders agreed to provide workers to clear the surrounding forest and vegetation.82 French officials had hoped that the arrest and deportation of Otutubiodjo would help restore calm to the Ọhọri country. They failed to realize, however, that his title of ọba did not equate to absolute political authority within the community. Furthermore, promises made by Ọhọri elders to supply laborers for colonial road-building projects either proved a ruse or failed to come to be fulfilled. In spite of the arrests of many of its leaders, some Ọhọri continued to display their anticolonial sentiments by vying with militia for control over roads and pathways. Although the French had banned locals from carrying weapons in April 1914, Ọhọri kept rifles and often flaunted them while patrolling routes that entered Ọhọri space.83 The military commander in French West Africa, General Pinaud, noted an Ọhọri “vanity to possess firearms” and ventured that every member of the community owned three or four rifles with ranges of up to fifty or sixty meters.84 True or not, tirailleurs risked attack if they trekked through the valley.

Protecting an Environmental Identity From their settlement of the valley to the early twentieth century, the Ọhọri had shaped their communal identity based on their awareness of the surrounding ecosystem, while heavily guarding access to their social and political heartland. The name Igbó Ilú, or “forest state,” ascribed to their forest enclave exemplifies their understanding of community. In his 1974 article on Ọhọri anti-French resistance in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Asiwaju attributes the Ọhọri sense of political independence in large part to the surrounding physical environment.85 The dense brush and boggy rainy season gave Ọhọri a sense of security.

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The forest that encircled their homeland also surrounded their townships and farms.86 In many respects, Ọhọri foundation myths provided the basis for current communal narratives that express a sense of autonomy. Even though the Ọhọri never considered themselves colonized, their understanding of political independence changed with the onset of formal colonial rule in neighboring areas. In particular, French attempts to gain political and economic access to the Ọhọri heartland by collecting taxes and recruiting labor inspired new Ọhọri leaders to alter the community’s political organization following the death of Awélédé. Ọhọri notions of identity were also firmly rooted in their ability to control access into and out of Igbó Ilú. When colonial officials opened a series of road-building projects designed to penetrate the Ọhọri forest during this era of political transition, members of the new leadership perceived these attempts as challenges to Ọhọri independence, necessitating a shift in political organization. Nominally, the community may have remained a “kingship,” as Asiwaju suggests. Members of the Adoko cult did, after all, eventually choose Otutubiodjo as Awélédé’s successor. The new king’s appointment, however, followed a six-year period in which Ọhọri religious and military leaders dispersed political power and redistributed it among various individuals who represented important religious, military, and commercial segments of the community. The shifting Ọhọri historical narrative and the refashioning of roads and pathways in the valley help explain the political changes that took place in the Ọhọri community following the establishment of formal colonial rule in the region, shedding new light, too, on the struggles faced by early French colonial administrators in attempting to build a state. In particular, an analysis of documents concerning colonial officials’ inability to penetrate the valley from administrative posts in Pobé and Zagnanado highlights the environmental challenges the French encountered in laying the groundwork for their rule in West Africa. It also demonstrates the fragile underpinnings of the formal political European presence on the continent. More importantly, establishing control over the same paths their refugee ancestors had taken in founding Ọhọri-Ije buttressed the community’s sense of independence. Ọhọri identified their control of the roads in their homeland with the success of their long-standing struggle for security and protection from regional strife from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The cosmic power of their forest and the barriers it provided had, they believed, enabled them to remain independent of

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much larger regional polities in the precolonial era. Thus, when French soldiers encroached on their space in the early twentieth century, hawkish Ọhọri leaders were emboldened to encourage their people to increase cotton yields, sell the surplus at the new colonial market established in Massè, and use the proceeds to buy firearms, which were used in what European officials referred to as la révolte des Hollis from 1914 to 1916. After two years of occasionally gruesome fighting, colonial soldiers suppressed the rebellion and the French set up a military administration in the valley, hoping that would help them colonize Ọhọri-Ije. The constant presence of colonial troops and the use of oppressive tactics in coopting Ọhọri to work did little to alter the community’s distrust of the French and the “instinctive repulsion” that made them reluctant to recognize these foreigners as their rulers.87 Rather than view the valley’s populations in terms of its community’s combined spiritual, communal, and economic independence, French administrators merely saw the agricultural productive potential of the valley’s “black earth,” which promised to be a source of important cash crops, such as cotton. Likewise, they viewed the able-bodied Ọhọri male population, estimated at from one to two thousand, as a potential labor force.88 Ọhọri responded to French attempts to colonize the valley in different ways. With colonial planners designing new roads to penetrate the valley, many Ọhọri emigrated from an Igbó Ilú they had once believed to be impenetrable by other routes, like the Pobé–Kétu road.

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Going to the Greens Seller Ọhọri Communal Expansion in the s and s

With little more than hoes slung across their backs, a machete in one hand, and a sack of grain and seeds to plant new fields in the other, a young Ọhọri woman named Tollou and her husband Fadikpé left their natal village of Itchagba soon after French troops installed themselves in Ọhọri-Ije following the arrests of leaders such as Mohilo and Otutubiodjo. Like a number of Ọhọri men and women of their generation, the couple branched out from the community’s main villages in search of plots of land away from the soldiers who had occupied the new military post on the outskirts of Aba by the beginning of 1915.1 Traveling north along a Pobé–Kétu road colonial officials considered impassable during the rainy season, Tollou and Fadikpé marched roughly ten kilometers away from the Ọhọri social and political center that colonial soldiers had left in ruins following la révolte.2 They settled on a parcel of land near a grove of trees that Fadikpé had found a few weeks before. The areas north of Ọhọri-Ije were sparsely populated at the time, and Fadikpé had chosen an isolated spot before carving out a small plot from a landscape dominated by a few large trees, dense vines, and clusters of tall bamboo.3 Like a number of younger members of the Ọhọri community who trekked beyond Igbó Ilú from the 1910s to the 1930s, Tollou and Fadikpé established their home adjacent to their new fields. French troops suppressed wide-scale Ọhọri rebellion by 1916. It is unclear how many of the younger generation left the Ọhọri heartland during the following two decades, but the establishment of a military administration in the valley by colonial leaders compelled many to leave their homes.4 From the mid-1910s onward, a stream of younger Ọhọri families migrated from the communal center, marking a notable demographic shift in the valley. Most members of the community found their way to their new plots by setting out on foot along the seldom-used Pobé–Kétu road. The era 

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predated any formal colonial road-rebuilding projects in the area immediately north of Ọhọri-Ije, and the families settled on small farms that lay beyond the reach of colonial troops, who were wary of traveling through the marshy depths of a part of the valley that had become populated by people they considered hostile. By the mid-1930s, though, a number of families had settled the region and had formed a new series of Ọhọri villages that expanded the social, economic, and later, the political realm of their community. The village of Oligbolo, likely established at some time in the mid1910s to early 1920s around a new market that sprang up alongside the Pobé–Kétu route, exemplified Ọhọri expansion and has served as a symbol of what current residents consider a historical social and economic space where members of the community operated unsupervised by French administrators. In particular, the pioneers who established Oligbolo sought refuge from the disparate group of colonial soldiers who lived in the Aba barracks and a local strongman named Ọkpé, whom colonial administrators appointed canton chief not long after establishing a military administration in a region they renamed the Holli-Kétou subdivision.5 Informants credit Tollou with the founding of Oligbolo. She laid the foundation for the market by selling a type of vegetable similar to spinach called gbolo at a stall she set up alongside the road. Tollou’s market, and the village that cropped up around it, received its name from neighbors who recognized its promise as a trading hub and potential as a new Ọhọri social center. Members of the community who had migrated to the area often passed through the fields of their neighbors while en route to the market. Custom dictated that those working their land should ask where the passersby were going. When asked about their intended destination, those trekking toward the Pobé–Kétu road responded, “A lọ oligbolo,” “We are going to the greens seller.”6 Over the course of the 1920s, residents recognized the benefits of Tollou’s locale and joined her in selling their wares alongside the road. The popularity of the location grew rapidly and soon an active market grew up around the space where she sold her greens. Residents traded excess crops, fish from markets acquired on the coasts, and trinkets and clothing bought from merchants in Pobé, Porto Novo, Cotonou, the British colony of Nigeria, and Togo. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, farmers no longer needed to inquire about their passing neighbors’ destination. Rather than explain, “We are going to the greens seller,” those strolling along the series of local

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trails that had cropped up between newly established fields and the Pobé– Kétu road simply replied with an elided “oligbolo” to queries about their destination. At this juncture, Oligbolo served as both the name of the market and the village inhabitants had built up around it. The way current members of the community frame it in their accounts of the Ọhọri past, the space of Tollou’s market, the village Ọhọri had created, and the broader network of younger members of the community who chose to trek along the Pobé–Kétu route to settle the region took on greater meaning. Stories of Tollou and the founding of Oligbolo were among the most prominent told by Ọhọri interlocutors when asked about their memories of the Pobé–Kétu road. Accounts of the village have become intertwined with the route’s history; an element of the communal narrative process that demonstrates Ọhọri expansion in terms of social, and later political, ties as a response to colonial French organizers’ attempts to refashion the community. French administrators had hoped to include local residents as a functioning part of a colonial apparatus. Their establishment of a military administration following the suppression of la révolte des Hollis, the creation of the military post, and an attempted relocation of Fon-speaking families intended to “dilute” the local population in the late 1910s were all constitutive of colonial state-building policies that Ọhọri residents refused to recognize.7 In talking about the Pobé–Kétu road, informants refer to Oligbolo as “an important place for all” Ọhọri, but their image of the village as a thriving new Ọhọri social center that grew out of the landscape north of an Ọhọri-Ije that remained in flux throughout the 1910s and 1920s differs dramatically from colonial accounts and earlier histories published about the community.8 French officials had recognized Oligbolo’s existence by the 1930s, but they portrayed the village as little more than a marginal settlement. The author of a report on the Holli-Kétou area published in 1938 alluded to its market as one in a chain that served a “grimy area of a Holli space lying at the side of a trail.”9 Scholars such as Asiwaju have identified how a number of people fled from Ọhọri-Ije during and after the rebellion of the 1910s, but there remains an assumption that the French suppression of the battles “completely destroyed” the community and compelled most Ọhọri to migrate to Nigeria, where they resolved to “no longer build or live in any corporate town . . . for strategic reasons.”10 While it seems likely that numerous members of the community did abandon their homes and sought refuge across the colonial border with kin groups, others such as

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Tollou and Fadikpé remained within colonial Dahomey and preserved a sense of cohesive communal identity and Ọhọri independence. The village may not have resembled a “corporate town,” insofar as it did not operate initially as a politically centralized settlement. Nevertheless, it became a nodal point for Ọhọri to regroup after their armed revolt against the French ended.11 Narratives of the village and the market founded by Tollou as a vibrant new social center where Ọhọri refugees reestablished their autonomy in the wake of Igbó Ilú’s dismantling by colonial laborers counters notions of the “complete destruction of Ọhọri-Ije” and of their community as displaced and disorganized.12 The partial destruction of Igbó Ilú, thought previously by members of the community to be impenetrable and a source of political strength, challenged Ọhọri conceptualizations of the natural world’s role in substantiating their autonomy.13 The cutting down of Igbó Ilú’s trees by colonial soldiers marked an era when the power generated by and the protection offered by Adoko “disappeared,” meaning that the religious faction dissipated after the fighting concluded.14 Furthermore, the “occupation” of Ọhọri-Ije by colonial troops from the 1910s to the mid-1930s tested the community’s control over the valley’s roads and pathways, another hallmark of its independence from much larger neighboring kingdoms and polities.15 The fecundity of the land north of Ọhọri-Ije, however, and the blossoming of Oligbolo along a vitalized and animated Pobé– Kétu road offered new outlets for Ọhọri to operate socially, economically, and politically on their own terms. The accounts of its founding and its importance in a uniquely Ọhọri construction of history shed new light on how Africans responded and adapted to European attempts to build a colonial apparatus on the backs of coerced subject labor, insofar as people highlight the roles the route and the land played in reviving the community through the telling of Tollou’s story.

“We Will Kill Those Who Take Us from Our Homes” The arrests of leaders such as Mohilo and Otutubiodjo, among others, and the “vanishing” of Adoko powers left a political void in Ọhọri-Ije. The era also coincided with the beginning of what became a prolonged colonial military presence, which lasted in the valley until 1935.16 In the initial stages of what French officials referred to as both a “military administration” and “occupation,” leaders charged a lieutenant named Le Floch with a number of tasks. Among other things, Le Floch took command of mili-

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tary operations following the deportation of Otutubiodjo. In addition to overseeing construction of the barracks near the Aba market, occupied by up to twenty tirailleurs at any given time, he led a campaign to confiscate weapons from Ọhọri and was given the task of arresting as many as possible of the estimated seven to eight hundred who had fought the French over the course of the previous two years. The lieutenant also spearheaded a project designed to repair the road connecting Aba to Pobé and oversaw the destruction of Igbó Ilú along the southern edges of Ọhọri-Ije.17 Colonial plans and the military presence in the valley aggravated Ọhọri, who responded by increasing their attacks on the French for over a year.18 Officially, these skirmishes ended in early 1916, when Ọhọri elders agreed in principle to lay down their arms, but isolated attacks and passive displays of resistance persisted.19 In spite of their continued resistance, the nearly two years of battles from 1914 to 1916 had ruptured the underlying economic and social fabric of the Ọhọri community. Many of Ọhọri-Ije’s population, which colonial officials estimated might have been between five and ten thousand, were displaced, arrested, or killed during la révolte.20 The community’s male population was reduced significantly. At least eighty men died in battles from 1914 to 1915.21 The French also arrested over 150 for suspicious activities.22 Those considered by French officials to be more dangerous likely remained in the prison in Porto Novo, but fifty were relocated, along with another hundred males who had been “recruited” following the end of fighting, to serve colonial forces as porters for military expeditions in the German colony of Cameroon.23 As highlighted in chapter 2, the series of armed revolts coincided with the onset of World War I, and French troops engaged in large-scale operations in the German colonies of Togoland in 1914 and Cameroon in 1915 with the support of co-opted laborers and volunteers from nearby subject populations. By the end of 1915, the colonial administration and its militia had forcibly removed or killed approximately 330 able-bodied Ọhọri men. Others who had farms on the outskirts of Ọhọri-Ije abandoned their homes, hoping the distance would keep them out of the reach of colonial soldiers. The numbers may seem insignificant, but the effects reverberated throughout the valley. To say that the Ọhọri community relied solely on its young men to provide the pulse of its agricultural economic livelihood would be inaccurate. With the exception of clearing large trees to make fields, a task performed solely by men, Ọhọri women did the same work in tilling,

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planting, and harvesting crops.24 Such a dramatic reduction in the laboring population no doubt placed stress on the productive capacity of the community. One French military officer referred to the years immediately following la révolte as a time of economic malaise.25 Moreover, the fighting shook the social and political foundations of Ọhọri-Ije. By 1916, the Aba market, an important social center that had teemed with members of the community on market days before the incursions, lay in ruins. Brush and vines consumed nearby fields that had produced surplus cotton, legumes, manioc, groundnuts, and yams only two years before.26 Burned-out hollows where Ọhọri homes had once stood pockmarked every village, and unattended goats, sheep, and chickens ran “amuck throughout the bush,” while desperate Ọhọri pillaged the grain stores and livestock pens of people living in the adjacent villages of Adja-Oueré, Igana, and Pobé.27 The arrest of important Adoko leaders, political figures, and balóguns during la révolte also compromised political stability; it likely accounted for the religious faction going underground. For the first time in three generations, Adoko elders either chose not to consult with oracles to appoint a new ọba or were simply no longer around to do so. The Ọhọri’s unwillingness or inability to choose a new leader frustrated French leaders, who needed a local resident on the ground to administer justice, govern, and collect taxes on behalf of the colony.28 To fill the political void, the French appointed a former convict named Ọkpé as chef de canton in 1916.29 Ọkpé had spent time in the prisons of colonial Dahomey, but French administrators found him to be a “courageous” leader who moved deftly between the colonial military post in Aba and other Ọhọri villages in an attempt to collect taxes; co-opt young men to work as prestataires, or conscripted laborers, on road-building projects in the valley; and recruit people for military tasks.30 Asiwaju referred to Ọkpé as a “strong man” who had allied himself with the French while serving time in the Kuti prison, approximately thirty kilometers south of Pobé.31 Memories of Ọkpé in the early twentyfirst-century Ọhọri imaginary portray him more as a “child” who was unable to achieve a sense of political authority.32 The reference to the exconvict as a child indicates he almost certainly had not been initiated into Adoko or had undergone other religious rites of passage before the onset of fighting in the years preceding his appointment. He would therefore not have been considered a man, much less a legitimate political leader. Regardless, he lived in the Aba barracks with the predominantly Fon-

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speaking soldiers from the Eleventh Company of tirailleurs, who had been recruited from nearby regions of colonial Dahomey during the era of military administration.33 Ọkpé is best remembered today for joining the soldiers in stealing chickens from Ọhọri villagers.34 That the French system of governance in Ọhọri-Ije was inept is without doubt. The framers of French colonial policy in Africa had not yet determined how to develop their colonies.35 Rather, they embarked on vain attempts to subjugate African populations like the Ọhọri. Adoko leaders may not have been around to choose a new ọba, leaving the community in a political flux, but this was not a complete political vacuum, devoid of organization. The Ọhọri merely responded in ways not immediately apparent to colonial administrators. Among the colonial policies a younger Ọhọri generation detested the most was the colony’s demand that men serve as military porters in World War I. While some elders “pledged their sincere and steadfast submission by handing over guns, paying head taxes, and promising to reorganize the Holli country and recruit porters to go to Cameroon,” others refused forcefully. Young men routinely scattered when French military personnel approached villages on recruitment excursions. Tirailleurs found themselves surrounded by bands of armed Ọhọri men who screamed that they “would kill them all if they tried to take them from their homes.”36 Ọhọri also voiced their “displeasure” with the “slow pace of reconstruction” following la révolte by harassing the soldiers living in the barracks near Aba. The troops were “few enough in number,” Ogoulerou Obalegbé recalled hearing, and “the Ọhọri population was able to keep its eye on them. Sometimes the soldiers would steal from the market, but our people outnumbered them. The soldiers drew their guns when confronted, but we still had guns as well.”37 French officials were wary of the tense standoffs. From their new subdivision office in Pobé, they responded by developing a plan to “dilute” the Ọhọri population. The strategy involved relocating the families of Fon-speaking soldiers to live with them in the barracks.38 A man named Bertheux, who worked for the Holli-Kétou subdivision devised the policy, suggesting that bringing in the families of the tirailleurs who had replaced the Ivoirian soldiers that fought during la révolte would elevate the morale of those stationed in the valley. He also believed that other Fon-speakers from neighboring regions might follow, thinking they would find the fertile land of the valley an appealing spot to relocate.39 The idea was

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to  reduce Ọhọri homogeneity. Not all French officials supported the plan. Commandant Malnous of the same administrative center disliked Bertheux’s idea. He argued that a greater Fon presence might allow for work on roads and other infrastructure projects to progress, but cautioned against the political ramifications of introducing “foreign” populations into Ọhọri-Ije, suggesting that it would not have “beneficial results” so soon after the formal establishment of a military presence in the valley.40 In spite of Malnous’s concerns, the colony relocated families by the end of 1916. The new residents interacted with the Ọhọri sparingly and never made a home out of their new environs. Fearful of retribution, the soldiers and their families tended to remain within the confines of the military post.41 Tirailleurs joined Ọkpé as he visited villages to recruit colonial militia and collect taxes, but otherwise the people living at the barracks almost never mingled with local residents or took part in market activities. They ventured from the small plots they had near the tightly packed residences of the military post only when ordered to do so or to buy provisions.42 It is not clear how many of the transplanted families stayed in the valley for the duration of French military administration in Ọhọri-Ije. Ọhọri elders recall hearing that as soon as colonial officials suspended military administration in favor of civilian administrative rule in 1935, the families “left for their natal villages and never returned.”43

Leaving Igbó Ilú and Rebuilding Community Tensions in Ọhọri-Ije remained high in the years following the suppression of la révolte. Residents may have considered Ọkpé a “child” unworthy of leadership, but despite their cache of firearms, younger Ọhọri were still wary of his military backing. Although he “operated with very little authority,” the tirailleurs challenged Ọhọri autonomy.44 The two years of battles had also reduced the stores of gunpowder Ọhọri fighters had built up before launching attacks, and the displacement of many members of the community and the economic malaise brought on by the battles limited farmers’ ability to feed their families, much less trade for additional firepower. At the same time, the elders who had agreed to end fighting and provide the French with labor were disdained by many of the younger generation of Ọhọri. Informants have suggested that Adoko influence waned considerably in the immediate aftermath of the revolt. Many Adoko practitioners died

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in battle, and the colonial administration’s arrest and banishment of Mohilo and others resulted in a political abyss that others found difficult to fill. The French military presence made it difficult to reorganize politically. Finally, the felling of many of Igbó Ilú’s trees altered Ọhọri conceptions of political independence. The forest that surrounded their land had not only offered protection, but had also been perceived as the primary source of the community’s power. It was this tenuous social, political, and economic environment that young Ọhọri like Tollou and Fadikpé faced in the middle to late 1910s. Chaos had transformed Ọhọri-Ije, and they must have felt that their communal infrastructure had unraveled. French officials estimated that the Ọhọri population declined by almost 60 percent from 1916 to 1918.45 While many of Tollou and Fadikpé’s kin absconded across the colonial border into Nigeria, others like them viewed the Pobé–Kétu road as a gateway to new settlements where they could carve out fields to feed their families and reorganize their community. Although the road had existed since “a time before [their] ancestors arrived,” Ọhọri had hitherto used it only sparingly, and few had traveled it regularly since the flight of Kétu’s citizens from Dahomean attacks in the late nineteenth century. 46 If Ọhọri did travel along the route in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, it was to reach a large communal burial ground that lay at the northern edge of Ọhọri-Ije on the upper fringe of Igbó Ilú. Beyond that, vegetation covered the remaining twenty kilometers of road. The lack of consistent traffic for the better part of the previous thirty or forty years had allowed dense brush and bamboo to devour the route, making it inconspicuous in spots and difficult to negotiate. Although it thus offered only poor access to the northern plateau and Kétu, it nonetheless constituted a route away from the archipelago of Ọhọri villages.47 From the burial ground, the terrain sloped upward gradually toward the plateau. Like Ọhọri-Ije, the land remained extremely fertile. The limited elevation gains within ten kilometers or so of the northern edge of Igbó Ilú ensured that new farmland would benefit from the same rich soil generated by rainy season spill-off from the adjacent plateaus.48 The slick, clay soil and pọtọ-pọtọ also made it “difficult for the colons to travel there,” giving an added sense of security.49 Most, if not all, young Ọhọri couples moving north took the route some distance before stealing into the relative obscurity of the surrounding forest.50 After arriving at areas they felt were out of reach of colonial soldiers, they cleared the thick brush and tall trees for fields, whittling

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farms out of an otherwise inhospitable landscape. Whether Tollou and Fadikpé and the others who joined them intended to colonize this new territory, regroup, and forge a new sense of communal identity following the military occupation of Ọhọri-Ije is unclear. What is certain, however, is that many younger Ọhọri took the road north to get away from colonial soldiers and French officials eager to sign up military recruits and co-opt laborers for Public Works projects. No one remembers the exact year of Tollou and Fadikpé’s departure, but given the way the couple are remembered in Ọhọri history, it seems likely they were among the first to set up homesteads in the dense vegetation and forests north of Ọhọri-Ije.51 Others carried babies on their backs, while encouraging their older children to walk faster. The earliest memory of one informant, Salako Igue Olougbessa, is of trekking along the road with his parents in the 1920s.52 Oké Ogouninhou and Idji Kpedé, who had barely begun their teenage years, decided to leave their village of Itchakpo together in the late 1910s or early 1920s.53 After finding a locale easy to till, they settled down in one of several small satellite communities that emerged around Oligbolo. Striking their hoes effortlessly into a looser topsoil than that in the deeper recesses of the valley, they found underneath it the same “black earth” that had offered sustenance to earlier Ọhọri generations. The land’s fertility made what became Oligbolo an attractive location, and its founders also reminisced about how “whites almost never” came to the region.54 At that time, Ọhọri left a “thick brush” covering much of the Pobé– Kétu route on the northern outskirts of Ọhọri-Ije.55 Since colonial officials hated traveling along a road covered with vines and brush, this deterred them from taking the path on a regular basis. When colonial officials and soldiers needed to go to the north to Zagnanado or Kétu, or to search for people to pay taxes, they often chose to take the more roundabout route that connected Ọhọri-Ije to Massè. Decades of neglect may have made it more difficult for Ọhọri to navigate the road at first, but they found it led them to a fertile land devoid of a colonial presence. Men who had not married prior to migrating north often sought spouses among communities across the Nigerian border, but others maintained communal ties by returning to their natal villages to marry, a process that ensured that Ọhọri “brothers and children would always come back home from time to time.” 56 No doubt wary of incursions by African soldiers and colonial administrators, Tollou and Fadikpé carried all of the provisions they could to the

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new settlement and planted their field about two kilometers west of the Pobé–Kétu route. The vegetation and tall trees surrounding their plot offered security.57 Shortly after settling in, it became clear to Tollou that colonial officials did not often ply the main route. Surmising they would not pose a significant threat to commercial and social activities, she chose a spot along the road equidistant from Pobé and Kétu to set up a stall where she could sell surplus gbolo she had grown on her new farm. In doing so, she breathed new economic and social life into the previously marginal and seldom-used Pobé–Kétu road and founded what would soon become a vibrant new social center for Ọhọri during the 1920s and 1930s. The growing market revived the thoroughfare, and a complex network of smaller foot trails created by the area’s new inhabitants soon snaked throughout the region, providing access to it from homesteads like those built by Fadikpé and Tollou. Initially, Tollou sold her gbolo to newcomers who wanted to supplement the surplus food grains they had brought to get them through to their first harvest. Soon, though, “her little market came to life.”58 Other women who had settled in the area joined her to sell their crops. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of passersby from Kétu and people from nearby communities like Pobé came there to trade without worrying about the watchful eyes of colonial officials. Over time, the market emerged as a prime location for those wishing to exchange highly esteemed goods such as fish and tobacco for surplus manioc, yams, and maize that Ọhọri grew on the new farms that had cropped up around Oligbolo.59 In many ways, Kétu’s residents had been in disarray since the sacking of their town by Dahomean raiders in 1886. Yet the city’s merchants, long maligned and marginalized by early French colonial rule, found the road’s reemergence offered a viable, if not always easily passable conduit to coastal markets, where they could procure seafood and other highly sought after goods.60 A woman selling dried shrimp in the Kétu market in 2006 recalled hiking along the road to Pobé as a young girl in the early 1930s with her grandmother.61 After reaching the southern escarpment, they took the train to Cotonou where they purchased smoked shellfish to sell to patrons in Oligbolo and residents on the northern plateau. She remembered they usually left before sunrise. Barring weather-related complications, they typically reached the Pobé train station by nightfall. On the return, they would sell some of their wares at Oligbolo before going home. She does not recall seeing automobile traffic prior to the construction of a

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laterite Pobé–Kétu road in the late 1950s.62 Despite the limited automobile traffic on the road in the 1920s and 1930s, the new settlers, people from Pobé, and traders from Kétu used the route on a regular basis to move products into and out of the valley and enhance sociability in the new settlement. They did so without intrusions from colonial officials and soldiers, who remained wary of following its path deeper into the valley.

Reframing Ọhọri Independence Oligbolo enhanced the region’s economy by allowing for the entrée of specialized and highly coveted luxury goods.63 Like virtually all marketplaces in West Africa, it provided a space, not only to conduct business, but to exchange news and gossip. The rapid rise of the village as an important communal site also compelled people in Ọhọri-Ije who were trying to reestablish political organization to recognize a minor kingship there.64 The primary function of a new political leader in Oligbolo was to serve as adjudicator and religious functionary, and the village’s inclusion in the reemerging Ọhọri political framework further south helped cement its importance as a new social and economic center in the valley. The appointment also offered a sense of political stability and constituted a process of political recentralization as a response to the French military administration in the valley. The combination allowed the village to become a locus for a renewed sense of Ọhọri independence. By the early 1920s, French colonial administrators complained about the “contraband that streamed in from Nigeria.”65 Officials also remarked on the “ease with which Ọhọri acquired gunpowder at the market in Illara, English territory only 100 meters from the border.”66 The proximity of the Oligbolo market to the border facilitated trading for weapons there—which from an Ọhọri perspective was not illicit—and, thus armed, the community reunited and launched new guerrilla attacks on the colonial forces in Ọhọri-Ije throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Many of the attacks centered on the Aba post and French lines of communications, but some of the skirmishes also took place in the newly settled areas north of the Ọhọri political center. As in Ọhọri-Ije before the exodus, the Ọhọri sought to consolidate their political autonomy by controlling the roads and pathways. Soldiers and colonial officials who risked taking the Pobé–Kétu route north of Ọhọri-Ije faced attacks. On October 8, 1924, for example, Ọhọri men

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named Adénon and Faloyé accosted two tirailleurs along the Pobé–Kétu route. The soldiers were returning to the Aba post after attending a meeting at the military base in Kétu, and they hoped to travel more quickly by way of the more direct road south to Aba, rather than the circuitous trek from Kétu to Massè, and then Massè to Aba. Having witnessed the two soldiers cross into the uncharted area, Adénon and Faloyé attacked. The two soldiers “raised their rifles” as the Ọhọri farmers approached, “but before long others emerged from nearby fields and joined in threatening” them by “raising guns and sticks. One of the soldiers took flight and escaped, while the other was brutally hit before making it out with light head wounds.”67 French political monthly and quarterly reports from the 1920s depicted incidents such as Adénon and Faloyé’s attack on the two tirailleurs as isolated and unplanned. French officials claimed that incidents like these were more often than not the work of Ọhọri “fueled by a drunken rage.”68 But Ọhọri accounts prompted by memories of the Pobé–Kétu road and the role it and the surrounding environment played in maintaining their sense of political independence paint a dramatically different picture. By 1924, French administrators lamented that Ọhọri habitually demonstrated their “hatred for all things European.” Officials blamed the lack of access to other reaches of the valley for eight months during rainy seasons for their inability to penetrate the community.69 In the interim, Ọhọri farmers and warriors attacked. Immediately after la révolte, some members of the community had sought recourse in colonial courts because the local legal structure had frayed along with the Ọhọri political organization.70 The demographic shift toward Oligbolo and the installation of a new king in the village, however, marked the end of any political or legal “discourse” members of the community had with French officials.71 The growth in Tollou’s market also allowed Ọhọri traders and farmers to bypass French-regulated markets such as those in Pobé.72 Unwillingness to seek justice in French courts or do business in colonial markets suggests that members of the community did not value or recognize these structures as ones of authority. Throughout the later years of the 1920s, frustrated French officials clung to the hope that their military administration in Pobé and Aba might eventually yield results beneficial to the colony. Recognizing that Ọkpé’s thuggish tactics and military rule in general were increasingly futile, they encouraged lower-ranking village chiefs in Ọhọri-Ije to choose a new ọba, believing that a leader chosen by the Ọhọri would improve relations.73 The “old memory” of “severe repression” at the hands

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of colonial soldiers following Otutubiodjo’s ouster remained fresh in the minds of many in the community, however, and virtually “the entire population,” even if “isolated,” vented their frustrations by acting in a hostile manner to colonial officials and troops.74 Some tried to placate the director of the Holli-Kétou administration. In late 1927, a feticheur in the Ọhọri village of Edé claimed that oracles had named a seven-year-old boy to a prominent religious position, leading officials to believe that a resolution had been forthcoming.75 It seems possible the child was Adjonibi Inan, an Ọhọri king who reigned until the end of the twentieth century. Regardless, French leaders must have found it difficult to recognize a child. Colonial officials responded by appointing yet another chef de canton, Adhiafa, in early 1931. Little is known about Adhiafa’s childhood or his role in the community prior to French administrators appointing him as the new canton chief, a position he held until 1953.76 Adhiafa appears to have had a reasonable amount of contact with the general population. He also acted as a figurehead, attending colonial meetings and giving French administrators the impression that the Ọhọri were willing to work with the colony. In truth, he cared little for either colonial policy or the concerns of neighboring communities. French officials learned soon thereafter they could not rely on him as an advocate. Subdivision officials found him “incapable . . . of stopping culprits” who attacked tirailleurs and grumbled about how he disregarded their authority.77 Even African chiefs and notables from neighboring towns and villages vented their frustration at Adhiafa during palavers arranged by colonial officials. At an annual meeting of regional leaders in his first year as canton chief, his neighbors from surrounding African communities charged him with “refusing to provide laborers on road building projects” as their communities had done and urged him to make “Hollis people obedient.”78 The appointment of Adhiafa occurred in an era when the Ọhọri reasserted their control over the region’s roads and pathways. Although it went unrecognized by colonial officials, the community had by this time expanded beyond the original villages that made up Ọhọri-Ije. Added to the polity once surrounded by Igbó Ilú were Oligbolo and the other satellite villages that had sprung up around its market, and the Ọhọri reframed their sense of independence against the backdrop of the Pobé–Kétu road, traversing the entirety of the expanded region. Equating political control with control over access to roads traveling into and out of the region was

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exemplified by a brawl that occurred among a courier—a soldier from the Aba military post named Malopa—and three Ọhọri residents, brothers named Tanghan and Akan and an unidentified woman. When the fight took place, the soldier was patrolling the route north of the Aba post near the village of Itchagba. The account of this scuffle in the records of the HolliKétou subdivision, which includes interviews with the brothers, offers a rare glimpse of how members of the community envisioned their political situation relative to the French military administration in the valley. The brothers had been walking along the thoroughfare, carrying a cask of distilled palm wine and fetishes designed to protect their space, when, they claimed, Malopa started a fracas by attempting to knock the fetishes from their hands and spilling liquor from the container. According to Tanghan’s testimony, the brothers then started “insulting” Malopa because of his show of disrespect. The courier responded by striking Tanghan’s ribs with the “butt of his rifle,” at which point Tanghan and Akan “jumped on him, threw him to the ground, and took his gun by cutting the holster” with a machete. “Dizzied by a blow he took to the head,” Malopa broke free, dropped “his equipment . . . and fled in the direction of Aba.”79 Soldiers went to Itchagba later that morning, but rather than arrest Tanghan and Akan, they implored Itchagba’s chief to persuade the brothers to come to Pobé to give their version of what had happened. The brothers had an audience with the director of the Holli-Kétou subdivision two days later. Their defiance and comical portrayal of Malopa as an ill-advised intruder prompted the director to refrain from charging them with rebellion. On the contrary, he blamed the situation on the courier, remarking he should have known the “risks” entailed in “encountering Hollis on the road.”80

A Living History That officials asked Tanghan and Akan to give their account speaks to the relative ease with which Ọhọri had resumed operating as a politically independent community, and their reaction to Malopa’s intrusion indicates how people had regrouped in the years following the suppression of la révolte. Current residents portray how Oligbolo’s founding provided Ọhọri with the means to reunite a community whose autonomy had been challenged during the fighting. The way they frame it in their telling of an Ọhọri past, Tollou’s market, the village that cropped up around it, and the broader network of younger Ọhọri citizens who trekked along

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the Pobè–Kétu road to settle the region took on greater meaning. In particular, the founding of Oligbolo and the renewed political framework have become part of a past the Ọhọri draw on to construct their narratives of social and political expansion during the 1910s, and through the 1930s, despite colonial organizers’ attempts to refashion the community as French subjects. The establishment of a military administration following the suppression of Ọhọri “rebellion,” the creation of the military post near Aba, and the relocation of Fon-speaking families intended to “dilute” the local population were all representative of colonial policies that the Ọhọri refused to recognize. Oligbolo may not, cosmologically speaking, have the sacred status for today’s Ọhọri that Igbó Ilú had for the generations before 1914, but the village founded by Tollou is one of the more prominent and identifiable places people cite when speaking about their past in the context of the Pobé–Kétu road. The narrative of the village’s founding has become part of a living Ọhọri history that archival data alone cannot measure. The stories about how Tollou and her generation settled the land north of the Ọhọri political center received little mention in the surfeit of reports and correspondence written and filed by French colonial officials during the period. In spite of the military administration, the colonial imprint in the valley rarely extended north of the “original” Ọhọri villages. The tirailleurs and the strong-arm tactics of Ọkpé filled a tenuous colonial political void in Ọhọri-Ije, but only briefly and without success, while the new Ọhọri social center in Oligbolo blossomed. Also worth noting is how informants, when speaking about the Pobé–Kétu road, insisted that “people always returned home” to their natal villages. Doing so allowed for the rebuilding of a sense of cohesive collective identity and political independence.81 Scholars have recognized that colonial policies resulted in demographic movements in African societies.82 Acknowledging that an indigenous political community could expand in the colonial era, however, signifies a departure from an emphasis on the marginalization of indigenous political entities during colonial times. Listening to stories about mobility and hearing about how local residents contextualize Oligbolo’s place in Ọhọri history lends new insight into the fluid social and political nature of African communities after the onset of formal colonial rule in Africa. The reemergence of the Pobé–Kétu road in the stories of the village’s founding epitomizes this historical process of communal expansion, because it

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was not only the physical means by which Ọhọri left their villages but also the catalyst of this fact of their history. During the era of military administration, French administrators struggled to enforce colonial rule throughout the Ọhọri region. Simultaneously, however, the new sense of autonomy stressed in the narratives of the founding of Oligbolo by Tollou was developing there. Most residents paint a picture of the village materializing quickly around the newly established northern portion of what grew to be the Ọhọri community’s most important market during this era.83 The village teemed with the region’s new settlers, who found the market and its proximity to the Pobé–Kétu road an ideal locale to gossip and discuss political or business matters with neighboring farmers. By the mid-1930s, leaders in various French colonial ranks, ranging from officials in Dahomey to ministers in the Front populaire (Popular Front) government in France, a left-wing political alliance headed by the socialist Léon Blum, which came to power in June 1936, recognized the failure of the military administration in the valley. Many began calling for an administrative reorganization and a return to civil rule.84 The transition to administrative rule in the valley took place officially in 1935. The French protectorate of Dahomey abandoned its military post in Aba and set up the new Pobé civil administrative subdivision.85 The families that had been relocated to the Aba military post packed up their belongings, “left for their own villages, and never returned.”86 Although they no longer had a consistent physical presence in Ọhọri-Ije, the French hoped that relocating the new administrative center to Pobé would offer easier access to the community. Rather than adopting the indirect route into Ọhọri-Ije from Zagnanado, officials started to discuss the possibility of rebuilding the Pobé–Kétu road to create more efficient access to the valley and allow for regular incursions into the area. The idea marked a change in colonial attitudes reminiscent of the interwar era and demonstrated that officials were considering alternative means to gain political access to the Ọhọri community.87 Before starting to build a new road, however, officials sought to develop stronger ties with the valley’s population and hoped to win the trust of members of the Ọhọri community through a more frequent diplomatic presence in Ọhọri-Ije. To that end, the new administrative region’s commander ordered the Pobé subdivision chief, Captain Bourgeois, and his second-in-command, Brêt, to increase their visits to the basin.88 It was

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thought that frequent contact with Ọhọri would allow the French to “politically tame” the region “little by little.” In the early months of 1936, Brêt devoted two tours to documenting the region’s topography. Aside from holding a few brief meetings with Adhiafa, however, he made little contact with residents.89 Brêt embarked on a third incursion on November 27, 1936. Accompanied by two European officers and sixteen tirailleurs, he entered the region to hold a meeting with local chiefs and notables in Edé. The arrest of a man named Kougbougi for reportedly committing a murder in a market near Aba, and Ọhọri residents’ subsequent “lack of respect” for colonial law, served as the rationale for the meeting.90 Adhiafa had arrested Kougbougi on October 29, and he was incarcerated in Pobé on November 7. However, the French were unable to proceed with a criminal trial because the victim’s parents refused to attend, saying that they did not accept “white law.” Brêt was therefore sent to Ọhọri-Ije to find witnesses, which he thought should be easy, given that the crime had taken place in a busy marketplace, but no one there was willing to speak about it. Ọhọri either said that they could not recollect the confrontation or simply refused to provide information.91 Another incident occurred just before the arrival of Brêt’s party that late November afternoon when an unidentified group of Africans destroyed a telephone line that stretched from the abandoned military post to Pobé. Dahomey’s lieutenant governor, Maurice-Léon Bourgine, viewed this as a serious act of hostility and surmised that the perpetrators were well aware that troops were en route to the region and aimed at blocking communication. Brêt summoned nearby chiefs and notables to meet with him in Edé, but few came, aside from fifteen young men who accompanied the leader of the village; these Brêt described as “particularly incorrect and suspect.”92 Writing to the newly appointed governor-general of French West Africa, Marcel de Coppet, on December 15, Bourgine concluded that further measures were needed to “pacify” the region’s inhabitants and urged him to consider taking measures to improve relations with them.93 Encouraged by the reformist zeal of the Blum government, de Coppet — who had served previously as a governor of Dahomey and knew the Ọhọri situation well—recommended the construction of an all-weather road from Pobé to Kétu. This would not only promote trade but also enable the colony to reestablish a military post in the basin.94 He suggested, too, that inviting paid local volunteers to build such a road would help improve relations.

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To rebuild the Pobé–Kétu road, however, the colony needed the support of the Ọhọri community. Colonial soldiers and co-opted laborers from nearby communities had destroyed much of Igbó Ilú’s southern fringe much earlier in the era of military administration, thereby compromising what the Ọhọri had seen as a source of political power. The Ọhọri responded to these challenges by engaging in a process of political recentralization. They had also rebuilt a sense of political independence based on the economic success of Oligbolo. As the events depicted herein suggest, members of the community did not see themselves as colonial subjects. Colonial officials recognized this and spent much of their efforts after Brêt’s palaver in Edé trying to persuade the Ọhọri that rebuilding infrastructure in the interior of the valley was representative of a new philanthropic form of colonial rule that could benefit all parties. Members of the community, however, remained skeptical of French intentions and guarded their independence by avoiding officials and refusing to adhere to colonial law.

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

“It Has Become a Joy to Go to Tollou” Reinterpreting the Tools of French Colonial Développement

Every November or early December, weather patterns change the varied landscapes of West Africa. Winds in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (also known as the doldrums) alter direction, and tropical rains delivered by a northerly breeze from the Atlantic Ocean dissipate. The new airstream driving south ushers in the dry season, bringing with it sand from the Sahara Desert that covers places such as the Lama Valley and the littoral with a dense, dusty fog that limits visibility and blocks the warmth of the sun for weeks on end. The haze brought on by these Harmattan winds had already descended on the wharf in Cotonou in December 1938 when Adhiafa visited the commercial hub with the new lieutenant governor of Dahomey, Armand Annet. For someone who had never been to the coast, the accompanying chill and the fog that enclosed the docks and hovered atop the ocean must have seemed surreal to the Ọhọri canton chief. He no doubt also found the commotion of laborers, coughing from the dust they inhaled into their lungs loading palm oil and cotton onto French merchant ships docked in the harbor a jarring display. Compared to the slower pace of rural life he had been accustomed to at home, the relative bustle of the wharf, even during an era of global depression, would have offered a new vision of what colonial rule entailed. Annet had invited Adhiafa to Cotonou to “admire the orderly nature of the roads, the grandiose buildings, and the commercial activity of the wharf,” hoping that he would be impressed and convince his community that colonial development projects could yield the same “illustrious results” in Ọhọri-Ije.1 To that end, Annet also wanted Adhiafa to encourage Ọhọri to assist the colony in rebuilding the Pobé–Kétu road. Heeding Governor de Coppet’s call to repair the route so that one “could cross the valley by automobile in all seasons,” colonial officials had authorized the project two years before.2 The administrators found the prospect of a new 

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road appealing for a variety of reasons. Rainy seasons turned sections of the valley into a swamp, making it impossible for officials and soldiers to use at times. Officials also lamented that the colony did not benefit from lucrative Ọhọri cash crops such as cotton and palm oil. The “rapport” residents had developed with their African neighbors living outside of the valley allowed them to “sell their products . . . in the Yorùbá markets” of Kétu and across the border in Nigeria, and officials in Dahomey felt that their tax coffers had suffered as a result.3 Administrators also hoped that repairing the route would extend their reach to Kétu and beyond, where other African populations in the northern areas of the colony oftentimes operated outside the purview of French rule.4 Moreover, the framers of colonial policy rationalized that a new thoroughfare crossing the valley of “black earth” could act as a symbol for the directives handed down by the new socialist government that had taken the reins in France following elections in 1936. Although people like de Coppet had hoped to reestablish a military presence in the region, the regime led by the noted moderate leftist Blum advocated a more philanthropic form of colonial rule, and the French viewed an improved Pobé–Kétu road as a perfect olive branch with which to pacify the “fiercely individualist” Ọhọri after nearly four decades of active resistance to the French and much “passive dissidence.”5 In that sense, the new route fell under the rubric of développement: a word that had entered into the local colonial lexicon by the mid-1930s.6 Fierce debates raged in administrative circles about what développement actually entailed, but French administrators hoped to ingratiate themselves with locals by means of projects such as a new and improved Pobé–Kétu road.7

The Slow Road to Kétu Talk of rebuilding the road had actually begun much earlier during the French colonial project. In the 1920s, officials had discussed the possibility of extending the rail line linking Cotonou and its port to Pobé into the Lama Valley. They soon realized, however, that the malleable clay terrain would not provide adequate support for trains.8 Administrators did not start developing plans for a new road in earnest until 1936. At that time, part of the project prompted by one of de Coppet’s earlier suggestions included asking Ọhọri to help repair the road as paid laborers.9 Officials neglected, however, to meet Ọhọri leaders during the planning phases to

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gauge the community’s interest. When colonial leaders did finally raise the possibility with Ọhọri notables in early 1937, no one accepted the offer.10 Members of the community, they told colonial officials, would rather “till their fields” than receive wages to build a new route. Administrators tried to appeal to residents by promising them access to clean water. They also assured Ọhọri that the colony would set up a “rural hygiene program” that would include weekly visits from a European doctor, who could distribute medicines and tend to Ọhọri health concerns.11 In spite of these assurances, people living in the valley still declined to help. In the wake of the refusals, the colony instead scrambled to assemble penal laborers to work on the project. Taken from various jails around Dahomey, the prisoners arrived in Pobé in early 1938. After building their own jail, a crew of one hundred inmates started construction on the road that February.12 It was the slow pace of the work that prompted Annet’s overture to Adhiafa at the wharf in Cotonou ten months later. Ọhọri refusals to work on the route had put construction behind schedule. To make matters worse for colonial officials, the prisoners forced to toil on the road were inadequately fed, which delayed progress.13 Officials from the Division of Public Works in charge of the project fed the laborers a diet based on a penal food regime designed by Dahomey’s Division of Prisons in 1935, without realizing that the “regular diet of an average Dahomean” prisoner provided a notably deficient amount of protein and calories for laborers forced to clear forest, dig embankments along the route’s path, and lay track.14 Construction lagged from the moment the first axe was swung to clear trees for the new route in early 1938. By that July, the hundred-strong army of detainees, undernourished and lacking energy, had managed to clear and terrace an average of only seventy-five meters of road per week. As the rainy season came to a close in early November, prisoners had worked ten months to complete less than two kilometers of a forty-five-kilometer route that officials had wanted finished by the end of 1940.15 Annet toured the site on November 8, 1938, and, dismayed at the slow pace of the work, decided soon afterward to make his appeal to Adhiafa in Cotonou.16 It is difficult to know whether the Ọhọri canton chief found his experiences in the bustling port city compelling enough to encourage members of his community to help rebuild the route. Even if he had, his political influence among the Ọhọri was limited. New local leaders, notably a new king named Okalèbiodjo, had emerged in the years preceding the return to the colonial civil administration in the valley and had succeeded in

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reconstituting a type of centralized indigenous polity. As a result, Adhiafa had little power. His role as canton chief meant he engaged with French officials on a regular basis, however, and the new French leaders hoped that, notwithstanding his past unwillingness to cater to colonial demands, they could influence him with displays like those at the Cotonou wharf. Regardless of Adhiafa’s status or his thoughts about what he saw in Cotonou, people in Ọhọri-Ije were nonplussed by colonial overtures. Not one person from the community accepted a new offer to work on the project after Adhiafa returned from his trip. They again said that it was their preference to work their farms. Ọhọri were also wary of the colony’s proposal, however, because they equated development projects like the Pobé–Kétu road with slavery, memories of which remained fresh in the minds of many Ọhọri in the early decades of the twentieth century. Soldiers often press-ganged Ọhọri to clear brush for paths and roads without offering to pay them in the early decades of colonial rule. One elder I spoke with referred to the era of military administration from the 1910s to 1930s as a time when colonial soldiers would “enslave” people for merely walking down the road.17 The colonial administration also conscripted young Ọhọri men as porters during World War I, and many never returned home. In addition to compelling families to move north to Oligbolo, the loss of young men had also sparked memories of the type of slaving activities that had compromised regional stability in preceding centuries. Ọhọri reservations about rebuilding the Pobé–Kétu road make sense in this context. Although the colony was “offering financial rewards” for African labor by the 1930s, many members of the community, noting it “had not been [their] choice to work in the past,” either attacked colonial officials or soldiers who approached their homes and villages or fled into the surrounding forest.18 This may have been the case when officials entered Ọhọri-Ije to inquire about members of the community’s willingness to work on the new route in the late 1930s. People who remembered the “atrocities during the time of slavery” were “scared of being taken away like their ancestors.”19 When viewed in this light, Ọhọri claims that they avoided the “experience of slavery for a second time” during the decades of French colonial rule seem not unreasonable.20 It also explains why members of the community “became suspicious and occasionally nasty” as the penal labor crew working on the Pobé–Kétu road advanced closer to the Ọhọri heartland toward the beginning of 1940.21

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Although tirailleurs and conscripted laborers had destroyed much of Igbó Ilú’s southern section during the years of military administration, members of the community believed they had regained control of ỌhọriIje when the colonial troops left the Aba barracks for good in 1935. They had also resumed regulating access to the valley by guarding the Pobé– Kétu route. A brawl between Ọhọri and convict laborers at the road work site on January 17, 1940, exemplifies the community’s revived sense of political independence.22 The incident occurred about four kilometers south of Aba when a man named Lequet, the chief surveyor from the Division of Public Works who was in charge of the road rebuilding project, ordered prison laborers to clear palm trees to widen the road. An Ọhọri farmer, characterized by colonial officials as a “drunk man looking for a fight,” emerged from his fields waving his machete and making “menacing gestures.”23 Others working their fields nearby noticed the commotion. Within minutes, an Ọhọri “mob” had surrounded Lequet, the prisoners, and the guards who accompanied their work party.24 As tensions heightened, a French surveyor who had been working with a different group of convicts embanking the route further south noticed the crowd gathering and jumped into his truck to assess the situation. He pulled up to the mêlée as the farmer lacerated one of the prisoners with his machete, causing minor wounds. The injured worker and others clambered into the back of the truck before the crowd could attack en masse, and the driver sped them to safety. This incident shows the disdain with which members of the community viewed the continued attempts by the French to maintain a presence in the valley. By the end of 1940, convict laborers had toiled nearly three years to rebuild the Pobé–Kétu road, with limited success. They were undernourished, battled inclement weather, and worked in less than ideal conditions during rainy seasons. They slashed and hacked their way through the dense vegetation of the valley with machetes to the outskirts of Ọhọri-Ije, only to face additional challenges when members of the community halted their progress. The project continued for a short while after Ọhọri farmers ran off Lequet and the prisoners, but the colonial administration abandoned the project later that year, citing the onset of World War II and the diminishing colonial budget as the primary reasons.25 In total, the crew completed only eight kilometers of the road and had cleared trees and brush just south of Aba. Perhaps more than anything else, French administrators demonstrated how not to build a road. In the end, their attempts

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to “peacefully reduce” what they referred to as the “Holli blemish” on the colony proved futile, and their plan to uplift an Ọhọri population they saw as “primitive” and “wild” by building a new route came to nothing.26

Navigating Access and Agricultural Production Ọhọri memories of the efforts to rebuild the Pobé–Kétu road in the late 1930s are indistinct. A handful of elder informants recalled hearing about prisoners cutting a wider path south of Ọhọri-Ije.27 With the community’s commercial activities focused on Oligbolo and across the Nigerian border, however, few actually witnessed their labors. The colony’s failure to penetrate the Ọhọri heartland must have helped substantiate Ọhọri claims to political independence. Yet in the wake of the project’s demise, the administration maintained its policy of trying to subjugate the community. In doing so, colonial leaders often debated reviving construction of the Pobé–Kétu road throughout the 1940s. Leading officials emphasized the need to increase cotton and maize production in support of the war effort.28 At first, it was their demands for cotton that filtered down the chain of colonial command. Calls for increased production passed from ministers in France to leading officials at French West African headquarters in Dakar before permeating down to the ranks of administrative circle heads in various cotton-producing regions under French administrative rule. On May 17, 1941, a new governor of Dahomey, Léon Truitard, sent a memo to administrative circle heads in Dahomey, urging them to focus on increasing cotton production and to develop stronger ties with representatives of metropolitan industry.29 Well aware of the valley’s agricultural potential, Germain Mouleres, the Porto Novo administrative circle commandant, responded the following month and mentioned that the soil in “Hollidjé was particularly favorable” for cotton production.30 The area of the Lama Valley inhabited by Ọhọri had, in principle if not in practice, fallen under Porto Novo’s governance. Mouleres stressed that while Ọhọri had long grown cotton so as to “make their own clothes,” they had not to his knowledge produced a surplus that they sold in local markets.31 Noting the fertility of the soil in the area, he encouraged those in the upper echelon of Dahomean ministries to consider making new investments in rebuilding the Pobé–Kétu road to augment the extraction of cotton from the region. From Mouleres’s perspective, the decision to end the project to rebuild the road six months earlier had been too

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hasty. While he cautioned that the long history of “insubordination” to colonial influence among the local population would challenge the “task at hand,” he also adhered to the notion that rebuilding the road “might allow for the establishment of closer contact with the Holli population while leading to the normalization of an administrative rapport” needed to ensure a more efficient trade network.32 Although cotton maintained its importance as a cash crop throughout the era, the wartime need to produce grain to feed growing urban populations in French West Africa soon made exploiting Ọhọri-Ije’s agricultural potential seem even more attractive to colonial leaders in Dakar. Global warfare impacted both subject populations and colonial administration. To support the war effort, many colonies invested in large-scale projects to build and improve African harbors and airports, among other Public Works endeavors. As a result, African cities experienced demographic challenges.33 People streamed into urban areas from the interior in search of work. With subjects flooding into cities, administrators and Africans alike began to question how to feed growing proletarian populations. A severe drought in the French Sudan in 1941 made the situation even more precarious and sent shockwaves throughout the wider region of French West Africa. In early 1942, a colonial inspector named Le Gregam predicted that food stores would rapidly be depleted. He described the imminent crisis as a “delicate” situation and urged officials to consider the more fertile areas of Togo and Dahomey as potential suppliers of grain to other areas of French West Africa.34 Of all of the administrative circles in Dahomey, Le Gregam identified those near Porto Novo, among which Ọhọri-Ije was the most abundant region, as the most productive potential exporters. Administrators found the prospect of growing surplus maize in the Ọhọri country a particularly attractive option. The soil there made it easy to grow the crop and could yield two harvests per season in ideal weather conditions. Ọhọri farmers had grown maize for generations as part of their diverse repertoire of crops, which included legumes, yams, manioc, cotton, and palm kernels, but it had not been a dominant product. Farmers would keep surplus stores of the grain to exchange for millet with traders from the north. Otherwise, they preferred to sell cotton to merchants from Nigeria, who valued the variety grown in the valley and used it to make a sturdy type of clothing locals referred to as gbogui. Accounts from informants suggest that the cash generated from the sale of cotton allowed Ọhọri to buy the tobacco and fish they craved, as well as calabashes

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harvested on the southern escarpment, which they “appreciated” and “prized” because of their uses for storage and transportation.35 Colonial officials such as Mouleres were aware of the nature of the cross-border trade. That did not, however, stop the French authors of the Pobé subdivision’s Ten Year Plan in 1941 from fantasizing about the possibility of increasing maize production and exporting fourteen thousand tons of the grain and two thousand tons of cotton from the valley every year to feed urban populations and support the war effort.36 Even if colonial officials could have persuaded members of the community to emphasize maize production, significant difficulties in transporting it out of the valley would have remained, because of the inefficient network of roads and pathways connecting the area to markets in Pobé. Trucks and cars could barely make the journey to Aba without getting stuck in the mud during the rainy seasons, and drivers would face delays navigating the large cracks that opened up along the road during the dry season. The twelve-kilometer journey between the Aba market and the railway station in Pobé that connected the town to Cotonou could take up to half a day, if not longer.37 Access to the market in Oligbolo constituted an even greater challenge. Alatoindji, a trader from Kétu who traveled the Pobé–Kétu route regularly as a young man during the 1940s remembered the era well. “Cars could get to Aba from Pobé, but they could not pass through all of the valley,” he recalled. “It could take up to three days to get to Pobé from Kétu by foot. Sometimes we slept in Odo-Meta [a village north or Oligbolo], especially when we were transporting merchandise back and forth. The road was so bad, we had to carry our shoes during rainy seasons.”38 That the lack of a viable road connecting Pobé to Kétu through the heart of the valley challenged the exchange of goods is evident. The authors of the Pobé subdivision’s Ten Year Plan suggested that it was in the “general interest to continue the project that had been abandoned the previous December.” They were alarmed, in particular, by calculations indicating that exporting the amount of goods they forecast would require men to transport “an average of thirty kilograms of goods on their heads!”39 Pleas from French officials on the ground to relaunch construction did not fall on deaf ears. People in certain factions within the colonial government advocated mechanizing road-building work sites. They lobbied leading officials in Dahomey and French West African headquarters to reopen construction of the Pobé–Kétu route with the use of bulldozers, tractors, and motorized graders to clear, terrace, and smooth the track.40 Their calls

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did little to yield any progress on connecting Pobé to Kétu in the first half of the decade. As World War II raged in various theaters around the world, colonies prioritized the building of coastal infrastructure and ironically left little in their budgets for improving networks to transport the raw materials and resources needed to support war efforts from the interior more efficiently.41 In the interim, members of the Ọhọri community continued to project their independence by maintaining control of the roads entering the valley. The new Ọhọri political regime persuaded people to refrain from making tax payments to colonial officials as a show of independence. When, as their appointed canton chief, Adhiafa sought to placate the French authorities by asking residents to meet their tax quotas, Okalèbiodjo performed divinations, supported by what informants called a “strong power” that the colons could not suppress, and claimed that oracles would not allow this.42 Frustrated by Adhiafa’s inability to raise revenue and Okalèbiodjo’s refusal to assist them, French civil and military officials started to enter the valley on their own to “visit isolated farms and demand tax payments” by the mid-1940s.43 They did so sporadically, however, and only during dry seasons, when weather conditions made it easier to travel along the Pobé–Kétu route and the series of paths leading to villages. The Ọhọri resented the incursions and banded together to scare off French officials and the tirailleurs who accompanied them. On March 29, 1945, a group of fifteen Ọhọri, fueled by whatever they had “imbibed the night before,” but acting in what one French official referred to as “cold blood,” accosted Subdivision Chief M. Dunglas and a group of African police as they made their way along a remote path connecting Ọhọri farms to the villages of Aba and Issaba and drove them off, wielding rifles, machetes, and daggers.44 A detachment of guards returned to the scene on the night of April 3 to exact retribution by setting fire to twenty small thatched dwellings in the Aba market. The Ọhọri thumbed their noses at colonial authority by quickly rebuilding the market, staunchly refusing to pay taxes, and intimidating all non-Ọhọri who entered their space.45

The “Road Controls All” These types of skirmishes between Ọhọri and colonial troops persisted throughout the 1940s. Most played out on the Pobé–Kétu road and the paths that linked it to the population centers of Ọhọri-Ije. The idea of

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mechanizing road building remained fresh in the minds of colonial administrators, however, and the prospect of engaging in new projects gained steam shortly after the war ended. Fueled by the long-standing justification of colonial rule predicated on the paradoxical notion that “human populations could evolve and progress” while also being subjugated, colonizers throughout the imperial world promoted “development” and the emerging theoretical concept of “development economics” in the immediate postwar context to provide what Frederick Cooper calls “an effective language with which African governments and nongovernmental organizations could appeal to rich nations and international organizations for aid in the form of grants and low-interest loans.”46 The period saw a notable transition in the underlying philosophy of colonial rule to one couched in a language of progress that anticipated social, agricultural, and industrial development. This rarely turned out as planned.47 Financing the construction and repair of roads throughout the empire presented significant challenges over the near term. Once authorities identified ways to invest in new equipment, however, road-rebuilding efforts in Dahomey and other colonies picked up pace. The completion of new routes impacted African communities in different ways.48 A second project to rebuild the Pobé–Kétu road by the French engineering firm Société Coloniale d’Entreprises (SOCOLE) in the 1950s prompted members of the Ọhọri community to reinterpret their collective economic and environmental identity. Many Ọhọri informants either witnessed or heard about SOCOLE’s progress, and their recollections of the company’s use of novel technologies of development such as mechanized equipment compelled them to think differently about their relationships with both the environment and the French colonial government. The completion of what residents refer to as the “SOCOLE road” also prompted members of the community to reconceptualize their notions of labor and land management. Before the SOCOLE road became a reality, however, French officials had to negotiate the fragile economic underpinnings of colonial rule in a post–World War II context. Sara Berry calls the long-standing legacy of colonial rule a form of “hegemony” operating on a “shoestring” budget, given colonial administrators’ “continual struggle to make ends meet,” and this was true of postwar Ọhọri-Ije.49 Yet soon after fighting came to a close, colonial leaders restarted discussions about using mechanized equipment in public works projects that had either been tabled or delayed during the early part of the decade. Two important agencies created by the

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French government, the Fonds d’Investissements pour le Développement Économique et Social (FIDES) and the Fonds d’Equipement Rural et de Développement Économique et Social (FERDES), created in 1946 and 1949, respectively, constituted two of the primary outlets that distributed funds to colonies seeking money to invest in infrastructure. A wideranging telegram sent by the minister of Overseas France to high commissioners, governors-general, governors, and territorial administrators of French colonies shortly before Allied forces achieved victory in Europe renewed the discourse. The minister impressed upon his colleagues the “measures that must be taken to substitute, in the greatest measure possible and without delay, mechanical tools for human labor in the construction and maintenance of roads and paths.”50 As much as they appreciated and supported the minister’s sentiments, French officials working on the ground in colonial circles raised questions about who would provide the investments and machines needed to build up colonial road networks. Public Works departments in French African colonies had neither the funding nor the mechanical wherewithal to put the minister’s program into place. The Division of Public Works in Dahomey had a long list of road-building projects on its docket, but only a limited amount of funds or mechanized equipment at its disposal to engage in any meaningful construction. Its engineers found themselves having to pick and choose projects to develop in the years immediately following the war, and more often than not, the political leaders holding colonial purse strings opted to work on intercolonial coastal roads rather than those offering access to the interior.51 In lieu of repairing and building new roads, administrators hoped the colony’s limited rail network would allow for the transport of goods produced in noncoastal areas. With rail already deemed ineffective in the Ọhọri region of the Lama Valley, colonial officials continued to grapple with ways to gain access to the community and the productive capacity of its land. The development of a new series of roads took on greater significance, however, in the building up of a colonial state apparatus during the late 1940s when strikes by African laborers on the wharf in Cotonou and in the colonial rail system impeded the transfer of goods flowing to the port from the interior. Writing to the minister of Overseas France while on a mission in Togo and Dahomey in June 1948, the same colonial inspector Le Gregam who had championed the Lama Valley as a potential breadbasket for burgeoning urban areas pointed to the “stagnation” caused by strikes and “various

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contingencies” of the postwar environment as necessitating the establishment of a new type of road system in the colony.52 Speaking about his “passion for the overseas territories, and especially economic considerations,” the French secretary of state seconded the colonial inspector’s call when he wrote about the strategic importance of roadways in France’s overseas territories in December 1948: “I can say  .  .  . all must be done without delay. There is only one way to answer the economic question at hand. . . . The road controls all.”53 In writing this note, the secretary of state urged his financial counterpart to draw on the recently created FIDES to ask for subsidies to build stronger road networks across French West and Equatorial Africa.54 By the late 1940s, FIDES’s growing budget provided a portion of the funds required to get road-building networks and long-awaited road repairs under way throughout French colonial Africa.55 Its money flowed into the coffers of colonial governments. Finding the means to construct and maintain roads, however, remained an obstacle because of the lack of available equipment. Le Gregam urged colonial officials to subcontract work to private companies.56 Only a few firms capable of taking on such projects existed in French African colonies. A 1949 report on the politique routière of the French African colonies noted that big road-building companies were very rare in French West Africa.57 The same report indicated that in Dahomey, the Togo–Nigeria and Parakou–Malanville routes were the most important ways to connect the colony’s markets and commercial opportunities to other French West African territories. The road from Porto Novo to Kétu through Pobé, bisecting Ọhọri territory, was expected to feed into the Togo–Nigeria coastal road. The task of finding companies that could provide the necessary services for building or rebuilding these routes fell upon the local Division of Public Works. Engineers with the division identified two firms, Hersent and SOCOLE, as the “only practical candidates” to conduct work of that scope in Dahomey.58 Hersent, the more financially stable of the two, won the contracts for both the Togo–Nigeria and Parakou–Malanville routes and subcontracted out the Porto Novo to Kétu section to SOCOLE. Representatives of SOCOLE arrived in Dahomey in October 1949 after surveyors from another company, Graux Enterprises, completed the initial surveying and planning stages.59 Later that month, a SOCOLE delegate named P. Mann submitted the company’s proposal to the Dahomean government.60 The colonial government approved the operation on October 21, 1949, but the

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French secretary of state retained final approval and veto authority over colonial Public Works projects. He balked at releasing the hundred million francs SOCOLE had requested to do the work.61 Colonial planners had budgeted only half of that sum to rebuild the Porto Novo–Kétu road. The marked difference in figures stalled the project over the near term. By July of the following year, the desire to tap into the Ọhọri area’s agricultural capacity to feed expanding urban populations prompted colonial officials in Dahomey to renegotiate terms. SOCOLE representatives presented the Division of Public Works with a new proposal the following year, and the two parties signed a memorandum of understanding on July 3, 1950. For unknown reasons, getting the relevant officials in France to sign off on it still proved “difficult.”62 After the Afrigue-Occidentale française (AOF) Public Works Department made “slight modifications” and recommended its approval, colonial administrators finally accepted the plan on October 5, 1950.63

“Growing” with the SOCOLE Road With negotiations complete, the administration in Dahomey thought it had “all of the materials” to set the project in motion.64 SOCOLE started work in the village of Sakété, midway between Porto Novo and Pobé, in December 1950. By April, the company had finished clearing the route’s path of trees and vegetation between the two cities, had smoothed its track, and began laying asphalt.65 As SOCOLE’s teams applied the new surface to the road connecting Porto Novo to Pobé, surveyors began quietly laying out the segment that was to cross the Ọhọri “black earth” and recommended that plans to pave the segment of the road through the valley with asphalt be abandoned, since the clay surface was unsuitable for this, given its pliable nature.66 Some of the Ọhọri informants who recalled the early stages of SOCOLE’s efforts indicated it seemed like a “small project” at first.67 The Ọhọri at that time still had strong “reservations” about foreign incursions into their space, and many prepared to “attack or kill” Europeans if they entered Ọhọri-Ije.68 Despite the Ọhọri’s misgivings, the company brought its equipment to the southernmost point of the valley in either late 1951 or early 1952 and started widening an area for the new road and laying a foundation in areas immediately south of Pobé.69 Before SOCOLE reached Ọhọri villages, leaders in Dakar again halted construction in April 1952. With France’s budget stretched thin, all French West African colonies

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ceased construction on roads deemed “secondary” in terms of strategic importance.70 The Pobé–Kétu road fell into this category. With the project on hold, officials in Dahomey again complained that “products” from the valley were “escaping to Nigeria.”71 Administrators in Porto Novo and the subdivision of Pobé nonetheless still wished to make economic contact with the “isolated” members of the Ọhọri community. In their eyes, restarting the SOCOLE Pobé–Kétu road project offered the only means of doing so. For the better part of three months, Dahomey’s administrators tried to convince officials in French West African headquarters of the road’s necessity. In the interim, SOCOLE submitted a third proposal in January 1953.72 Officials from Dahomey’s Division of Public Works also made the case that French West Africa had already set aside forty-three million francs from FIDES in its Four-Year Plan for 1953 to 1957 to fund SOCOLE’s work, noting that roads were extremely important for the economic development of the territory.73 A deliberation from the Territorial Assembly of Dahomey — a group of well-educated African functionaries who met to discuss the classification of roads in the colony — forced French administrators’ hands, and on April 28, 1953, they declared the road connecting Sakété to Kétu a “federal route.”74 The distinction elevated the road’s status from secondary to primary, prompting officials in Dakar to release funds. With the promise of payment on the horizon, SOCOLE’s workers returned to the valley with their equipment to restart construction on the Pobé–Kétu road later that year.75 On a hot, steamy morning at the end of the rainy season in 1953, bulldozers and tractors driven by Africans working for SOCOLE, led by a European foreman, crossed into Ọhọri-Ije and began to clear the trees, brush, and bamboo that had covered much of the old track laid down with convict labor more than a decade before.76 When they reached the end of the road carved out by the prisoners just south of the Aba market, they forged on all the way to Kétu. Convict laborers had toiled nearly three years on the first Pobé–Kétu road-repair project and cleared only twelve kilometers of unfinished eight-to-ten-meter-wide track. SOCOLE’s machines worked more efficiently, clearing the forty-five kilometers to Kétu in weeks.77 Moreover, they navigated the cracks in the Ọhọri terrain with relative ease, leaving a fifteen-meter-wide path with fallen trees and brush strewn alongside it in their wake.78 Ọhọri memories of the colony’s attempt to remake the Pobé–Kétu road in the late 1930s may have been blurred, but they vividly recall the

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construction of the SOCOLE road.79 Many of the generation born in the decades following the migration to Oligbolo by many members of the community and the subsequent transition away from colonial military rule in the 1930s and 1940s said that they had “grown up” with the SOCOLE road; their memories of early childhood were attached to it.80 They most vividly remember the equipment SOCOLE used to carve the road through the dense vegetation and trees of the valley.81 Residents remember hearing the sputtering coughs and low bellows of bulldozers and tractors from their village homes and fields. Hitherto, the “noises of the few cars and motorcycles” passing through the valley had put Ọhọri on the defensive, but they soon started to appreciate the ease with which SOCOLE widened the track.82 Even before SOCOLE finished surfacing the road with laterite, members of the community found the wider track made it easier to travel through the valley and transport their agricultural goods to local markets.83 Before SOCOLE blazed a new trail through Ọhọri-Ije, the maintenance of the road had required intense manual labor. Members of the community, whose control and regulation of the route had previously been a byproduct of their political independence, had used machetes to cut back the brush that grew over the track every rainy season. Seeing SOCOLE’s machinery carve a wider trail through the valley made them realize how much easier colonial enterprise could make the job. SOCOLE had employed “a few Africans” from nearby towns like Pobé, Kétu, and Cové to work on the project, but members of the Ọhọri community noted that people working for the company did not perform strenuous manual labor.84 Although the initial phase of clearing trees and vegetation required some manual labor—twenty African employees would follow SOCOLE’s bulldozers and move the fallen trees and brush left in their wake to the side—the other workers drove bulldozers and tractors.85 Bulldozers followed those who cleared brush to the side to embank the road.86 A third team, consisting of another tractor, equipped with a “rooter” for terracing the road and a motorized grader to smooth the track, followed, and a mechanized “scraper” then prepared the road for the final stage of surfacing with laterite. The Ọhọri were impressed by the fact that SOCOLE employed only thirty or so men to do the job, whose labor seemed far less intensive than the clearing and smoothing of track by prisoners, corvée laborers, or prestataires in years gone by. Noting how much easier travel had become, they asked the colony to build another short road to connect villages

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to the Pobé–Kétu route before the company had even finished that project.87 The road they proposed, only three kilometers in length, ran from where the Pobé–Kétu thoroughfare passed the market near Aba to Issaba, then veered north to Itchagba, where it rejoined the main route. A report submitted in December 1953 by the commandant of the Porto Novo administrative circle to FERDES asserted that 450 Ọhọri had volunteered to help build it.88 The Ọhọri’s willingness to work on a road like this without pay was a dramatic shift away from their fierce resistance to all French road-building projects in the past. Members of the community recall thinking that the new road they had asked for would make it easier to market their crops to urban merchants.89 The French subdivision chief in Pobé concurred, reporting to his superiors: “This route is of vital interest to the population of the two villages of Issaba and Itchagba and must permit the transport of products from Hollidjé to the Aba and Pobé markets. These are the largest Ọhọri villages, consisting of around 6,000 inhabitants, who will depend on navigable roads, especially those connecting to Kétu and Porto Novo.”90 It is unclear exactly when the work on the small tributary road occurred, but informants corroborated the community’s willingness to engage in the project and indicated that Ọhọri provided the labor to finish it. One might think that the willingness of the Ọhọri to work with the colonial government, their acceptance of FERDES funds for the project, and allowing SOCOLE and its employees to enter their space without resistance might have constituted an admission that they were indeed colonial subjects. On the contrary, members of the community say that building the small road from Aba to Issaba and Itchagba buttressed their sense of independence. Aside from the felling of trees by bulldozers, much of the work on it was done manually. Members of the community recall how they built the road and were “proud” to have completed it. Even today, Ọhọri use the small route to travel between the villages and call it àfọwọdá, which means “what we did with the strength of our own hands.”91 Members of the community finished the àfọwọdá side road before the colony opened the main SOCOLE road officially in early 1955. When SOCOLE completed the project, many French officials commented that the new road “filled in gaps” and had been needed in Dahomey ever since the onset of colonial rule.92 Many Ọhọri took advantage of the new road by growing additional maize for sale to traders from outside of the valley, who now found access much easier. Although colonial officials had advo-

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cated an increase in maize production much earlier, members of the community had refrained from growing significant surpluses of the grain until the SOCOLE road allowed them to do so on their own terms. One informant recalled how the Ọhọri population “was so happy” with the situation that they sang praise songs to SOCOLE’s employees “to thank them for building the road.”93 Men and women gathered around SOCOLE’s engineers when the colony opened the road officially in 1955. Rather than threatening the road builders with guns and machetes, as they had in the past, Ọhọri now danced to the sound of drums, singing: It has become a joy if we want to go to Tollou. It is the laterite that allows for us to pass through. It has become a joy if we want to go to Tollou.94 In singing about Tollou, of course, Ọhọri were referring to Oligbolo’s founder and highlighted the “joy” they took in shipping their surplus grains more efficiently from deep in the heart of Ọhọri-Ije to the market that attracted traders from Kétu and Nigeria.

“We Sell What We Sow” Better access to Oligbolo was one of the benefits of the SOCOLE road informants recalled. Others likened the company to a “savior” who came to the valley “to give us the first road that introduced us to development.”95 Sentiments like these provide some insights into how members of the community received the road’s completion and how SOCOLE’s equipment played a role in altering their conceptions of labor and what Arijit Sen and Jennifer Johung call “landscapes of mobility.”96 Rather than align with the colony as productive “subjects,” though, Ọhọri displayed and merged new senses of economic independence as they navigated the new cultural and material spaces that cropped up around the SOCOLE road. Perhaps most important in terms of communal identity and historical communal “positionings” relative to their colonial rulers, the route offered local farmers new ways to distribute increasing amounts of surplus maize to markets outside of the valley. Even though they had grown maize regularly prior to the 1950s, oral data suggest the crop had never been a primary export for Ọhọri farmers. Photos taken by the French journalist Pierre Verger of Ọhọri trading palm kernels along the Pobé–Kétu road

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during a dry season in the late 1940s or early 1950s also indicates palm kernels constituted a primary export product.97 Shortly after SOCOLE completed the new road, there was a shift toward maize production, and a new collective communal identity arose that emphasized the economic benefits of maize as a cash crop. One informant portrayed the new relationship the community forged with the material aspects of the new road matter-of-factly when describing the connection between the soil’s productivity and what constituted economic well-being in many Ọhọri farmers’ minds. “We sell what we sow,” he remarked when talking about the impact of the SOCOLE road on Ọhọri people. “It’s the only business we know. Woman and men both sell maize. That’s the way it came about.”98 Clearly, the Ọhọri recall a past where the community embraced the SOCOLE road with enthusiasm, marking a noteworthy change in attitudes toward colonial infrastructure projects in the valley. Ọhọri political circles also adopted the modified attitude toward roads in general. Unlike in preceding years when Ọhọri political leaders had perceived colonial road-building schemes as challenges to their authority and encouraged members of the community to block the routes entering their domain to contest French attempts at formal rule, Ọhori welcomed the SOCOLE project. They did not conceive of it as a threat to local power structures. On the contrary, the efficacy of SOCOLE’s operations, coupled with the enhanced mobility the new route provided accounted for this change in political mind-set.99 Moreover, local people no longer had to provide upkeep for the roads. “After the SOCOLE project,” Barthlemi Odjoubé recalled, “the road belonged to the colony, and later the state, even though the villages maintained the paths that connected fields to the main route.”100 Firmin Ogounonté confirmed, suggesting how “once SOCOLE finished the project, the Division of Public Works maintained the road. . . . The Ọhori people were still a country of their own, but they did not have to provide the labor or equipment required for maintaining the road.”101 Nothing in the archival record or informant data suggest that relinquishing maintenance of the Pobé–Kétu route constituted a political concession to the colonial administration on the part of Ọhori political leaders. Rather, Ọhori residents negotiated the road’s completion on their own terms, concluding that the road facilitated their ability to sell products and acquire goods they desired, even though traveling during rainy seasons continued to be problematic since downpours caused slippery conditions on the laterite surface.102 Valley residents may have hesitated to

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welcome SOCOLE’s workers as they drove their bulldozers and tractors into Ọhọri space in late 1953. Their sense of defiance waned quickly, however, as construction took shape over the little more than a year it took for SOCOLE to complete the project. Despite the fanfare that accompanied the completion of the SOCOLE road, inclement weather and more consistent traffic compromised its foundation quickly. The land between Pobé and Oligbolo offered a fragile basis for the road. The malleable clay soil may have provided the valley with its productive agricultural capacity, but it granted little support for the increased truck and automobile traffic along the thin laterite road that stretched into Ọhọri country. The new route fell into a state of disrepair within a few years. By the late 1950s, the tires of cars and trucks, often weighted down with heavy sacks of maize, had gouged ruts and potholes deep into the clay that lay beneath the surface of the SOCOLE road. When rainwater filled these, as it did for much of the year, it was once again difficult to traverse the valley.

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

Cementing Identities Negotiating Independence in a Changing Landscape

The carving of the SOCOLE road through Ọhọri country in the mid-1950s altered local perceptions of labor and conceptualizations of development. Informants also pointed, however, to the sudden decrease in traffic caused by the route’s rapid deterioration and the subsequent economic downturn as evidence that the appeals of local people went unheard by colonial officials and, later, the leaders of independent Dahomey and Benin.1 By 1958, the annual rains often made the road impassable. On June 16, 1958, the last colonial territorial adviser in Pobé, Bernadin Abikanlou, emphasized the road’s rapid deterioration in a letter to Dahomey’s minister of Public Works. “The road at this moment finds itself in a state where driving has become difficult for all vehicles, lighter cars included,” he wrote. “The last rains have made traveling along the portion to Holli country nearly impossible.  .  .  . The ruts have become more substantial. Clay has reappeared in numerous places, and I can but think that in three months’ time, Pobé will be completely cut off from Kétu if a bold solution is not found immediately.”2 The government’s failure to address these concerns would result in a “stoppage of all commercial activities” in the region, Abikanlou continued, and the fifty-five million francs invested in the SOCOLE project would thus be “a complete loss.” The Ọhọri who had become accustomed to the economic benefits of the road might not take kindly to the lack of interest in repairing it, Abikanlou indicated. “The peasants speak little, but observe much,” he wrote. “They will react according to their own will.” Repairing the road would be a “noble task” on the part of the colonial government and serve as an olive branch to an Ọhọri community that had been hostile to outsiders in the past.3 Abikanlou’s plea fell on deaf ears. France was reeling politically and economically from what was by then the fourth year of the bloody and expensive Algerian War of Independence. In 1954, too, French forces 

 . CEMENTING IDENTITIES

had suffered an overwhelming defeat by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. The challenges of maintaining France’s empire were becoming greater, and leaders in the metropole had little time or resources to devote to France’s other overseas colonies.4 Abikanlou’s letter preceded by only a few months French President Charles de Gaulle’s notorious referendum in September 1958 that allowed African subjects in French West and Equatorial Africa to maintain their ties with the metropole by becoming members of the Communauté Française. Known popularly as the “oui or non vote,” the referendum allowed Africans to either achieve immediate independence from France if they voted “no” or to preserve the existing economic ties while attaining a wider degree of political autonomy by voting “yes.” With the exception of French Guinea, all of France’s African colonies opted to become part of the communauté. However, this left the new self-governing “protectorates” largely to their own devices. People in the assembly in the new Republic of Dahomey, created in December 1958, realized that formal independence was not far off. Rather than focus on small projects in places such as Ọhọri-Ije, legislators thus prepared instead for complete political autonomy. Not unreasonably, the Ọhọri connected this with the failure of the government to hear their complaints about the disintegrating SOCOLE road. The path to African independence following the “oui or non vote” was swift. Within two years, Dahomey achieved self-rule. The new leaders who took the reins of governing a truly independent Republic of Dahomey made it clear that they did not intend to ignore the Ọhọri community. Nonetheless, the first years after the transition proved turbulent on social and political levels across the country and within the Ọhọri region in particular. The Ọhọri soon realized that they had to negotiate the regional transition from French colonial rule and reframe their social and political independence on their own terms. Although Dahomey’s leaders pledged to address the concerns of many of its diverse communities, the Ọhọri no doubt felt ignored by the new government on numerous occasions. This rang particularly true after fires raged through the Aba market on March 16, 1961. In what had been a thriving commercial space just three years before, the blaze annihilated all semblance of economic activity, which had already been waning as a result of the rapid deterioration of the SOCOLE Pobé–Kétu road. The new independent Dahomean state-sponsored weekly newspaper, L’Aube Nouvelle, declared the fire a disaster and described how it had “preyed upon nearby

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houses, boutiques, and market displays,” while also destroying an adjacent police post.5 In the historical mapping of their community, Ọhọri residents envision the Aba market as the symbolic birthplace of the community; a space where the first Ọhọri settler, Ahoua, encountered the mythical serpent who eventually allowed him to sow his communal seeds in the valley. That the new government did nothing to help the community rebuild the market after the fire drew the ire of many of the valley’s residents and led to increasing mistrust of the new regime. Less than a month later, another correspondent from L’Aube Nouvelle described how what he called a “rain of ice” descended upon the city of Pobé and the adjacent valley.6 A rarity in this part of subtropical West Africa, the hail descended upon a rural region whose inhabitants were considering how to best negotiate the transition with new African leaders. Ọhọri residents, many of whom were devotees of Şango, the Yorùbá god associated with thunder, considered the storm significant. Members of the community viewed the downpour as a symbol of their political autonomy from the newly established government of Dahomey, and the “rain of ice” instilled into the community the confidence that it could maintain a sense of political autonomy in the face of a new independent government, whose leaders would soon start to view the valley’s productive agricultural, and later mineral, capacity as illustrative of their own manufacture of a national identity in the postcolonial era.7 Like the colonial government that had preceded it, the Republic of Dahomey sent tax collectors into the valley to demand financial support for the new country. A skirmish between Ọhọri residents and a Dahomean tax collector from the new “southeastern” department named Jean Akinrila exemplified the rift that had developed between members of the community and the new government. The fight occurred shortly after Akinrila and an armed guard named Houmenou Koudokpo Cachako made their way to a market in the village of Kpedekpo on December 2, 1961. Like the Aba and Oligbolo markets in years past, Kpedekpo provided a location where Ọhọri mingled and conducted business with neighboring communities from the northern plateau and northwestern edges of the valley. The arrival of Akinrila and his accomplice in the market in the midafternoon sparked a commotion. No sooner had Akinrila called on market traders to do their duty as Dahomean citizens and pay taxes than they were attacked by approximately twenty Ọhọri, catching them off guard. Wresting away Cachako’s gun, the assailants obliged the pair to flee.8

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The next morning, after hearing about the melee, police from the subprefecture of Pobé descended into the valley in a truck. Setting out northward on the dilapidated SOCOLE road, the driver navigated the cracks in the laterite surface, which had widened in the dry season.9 Imposing ruts, puddles, and debris from the previous rainy season had also pockmarked the road along the twelve-kilometer stretch into Ọhọri country, making the journey even more of a challenge. When the police finally arrived in Aba hours later, they started interrogating members of the community. Feigning ignorance, the Ọhọri offered little information about the names or whereabouts of the assailants. Officials found what they thought might be Cachako’s gun in some vegetation near Aba, but they returned to Pobé without any other information and never came back to follow up on the incident.10 Violent though the reaction to attempts at tax collection may have been, perhaps the most active display of Ọhọri discontent with the new government during the early years of independence occurred when a team of doctors and technicians working under the auspices of the independent state of Dahomey opened a smallpox vaccination campaign in the valley two years later.11 According to informants, the medical team had descended into the valley along the still derelict Pobé–Kétu road without warning to set up their clinic in the Aba market. Having remembered an earlier vaccination campaign that took place during an era of late colonial rule, a group of Ọhọri recognized the purpose of the medics’ visit and quickly attacked and killed an orderly before a guard retaliated by shooting dead one of the assailants, a man named Ogoudéyi.12 During the previous inoculation campaign, Ọhọri recalled how “many people got sick” soon afterward. “When government officials and white doctors came into the valley again to give another round of shots without telling us,” Ogoulerou Obalegbé recalled, “many people got upset and fought them . . . until they ran away.”13 Only a handful of informants recalled narratives of the campaign and the violent upheaval by residents when talking about the road that crosses their valley home, but others corroborated it when asked specifically about the event.14 Many residents thought the Dahomean government designed the inoculation campaign as a means to “exterminate their race” because people in the valley refused to comply with or recognize Dahomey’s legitimacy.15 In Ọhọri accounts, the inoculation project equated to an invasion of Ọhọri geographical and bodily space. By “driving the foreigners out,” members of the community asserted their independence.16

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The new state’s attachment to what members of the community perceived as an invasion is exemplified further by what was alleged to have followed. Informants described how the government sent in a larger detachment of troops to quell the violence that erupted during the vaccination campaign.17 While there is no “official” verification of soldiers entering the valley, memories of a heavily armed squad repressing the uprising by beating detractors with the butts of their rifles are imprinted vividly on the Ọhọri collective consciousness.18 Regardless of the veracity of the story, the fact that it persists in Ọhọri historical memory suggests how tumultuous negotiating independence and Dahomean state-building often was and shows that many informants saw the Republic of Dahomey as yet another in a long line of oppressive polities that had penetrated Ọhọri space illegitimately via the road to exert state power.

Industrializing Landscapes and Manufacturing New State Identities In the way Ọhọri portray their history during this era of early postcolonial Africa, the Pobé–Kétu road acts as a primary site where residents negotiated independence, in part because tense confrontations between locals and Dahomean officials often occurred alongside the thoroughfare. That the road had deteriorated rapidly within years of SOCOLE making such an impression on Ọhọri likewise caused concern. The new Dahomean government’s unwillingness to address local anxieties about the disintegrating road and the subsequent economic malaise may have played a role in making members of the community ignore calls by government officials to pay taxes levied on them. Promises in the government mouthpiece L’Aube Nouvelle that the revenues generated would “ensure” that “work toward progress” would ensue never seemed to materialize.19 The ever-shifting road and the way it crumbled on its malleable clay foundation constituted a symbolic merging of land and landscape. Part of the government’s inability to address concerns about the deteriorating space of the route may have resulted contrarily from the nonpayment of taxes, but political problems at a national level also played a role in the administration’s incapacity. Economic problems and habitual political stalemates on the Dahomean national stage paved the way to a turbulent era that lasted for many decades. Dahomean government officials’ attempts to promote their conceptualizations of independent nationhood in the first ten years of independence, in particular, proved a daunting task at the local level.

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Constructing what leaders hoped would be a “new Dahomey” constituted an even more challenging objective than the country’s first leaders had anticipated.20 On October 28, 1963, General Christophe Soglo ousted the country’s first postcolonial president, Hubert Maga, and encouraged political leaders to form a coalition that could acquiesce to the demands of a dismayed and increasingly volatile trade union movement.21 By early February 1964, L’Aube Nouvelle championed the “birth of the second republic” when Soglo announced that Maga’s former premier, Sourou Migan Apithy, was to become the new president. Apithy cautioned Dahomeans that “creating a true atmosphere of work and development” in their country would be difficult. “The road,” he told reporters, “will be long and hard.”22 With that sentiment, the new administration embarked on a campaign to industrialize the country and launch it on a path to what Apithy suggested constituted “development.” Economic problems persisted, however, and accomplishing the administration’s goals of “ensuring progress” proved ineffective.23 By the end of 1966, contemplating the difficulties plaguing the country, writers in the national paper suggested that problems stemmed from the fact that neither the administration nor the military had managed to unify the country. On the morning of September 25, 1966, L’Aube Nouvelle’s readers found the headline “Our Problem Today: The Realization of a Nation” on the paper’s front page.24 For Dahomean leaders, embarking on industrialization throughout the various regions of the country was the way to “realize” a new national identity.25 Prior to that, one might have been forgiven for thinking that forced changes in government were the basis for building a national Dahomean character. Soglo’s ouster of Maga in 1963 was among the first coups d’état in postcolonial West Africa.26 Feuding by political leaders prompted Soglo to oust Apithy in late 1965, the second of the five coups in the country during its first decade of independence.27 The army replaced leaders once again at the end of 1969. Yet when it installed a new government on December 10 that year, the same cast of characters commanded the political stage. Included in a tripartite presidential council the army installed after it annulled presidential elections in 1970 was Maga, alongside political stalwarts Apithy and Justin Ahomadegbé Tomêtin, a prime minister and president of the National Assembly.28 The triumvirate maintained the rhetoric of building the nation by advocating industrialization, a strikingly similar manifesto to French colonial leaders’ earlier desire to développer their colonies a generation earlier. In a new national paper, Daho-Express,

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the leaders focused their public relations efforts on the Lama Valley, and, in particular, the long “forgotten” Ọhọri people.29 Limestone, an important ingredient in the manufacturing of cement, lay deep under the surface of Ọhọri-Ije and the building of a cement factory not far from the old northern boundary of Igbó Ilú gave the new regime a centerpiece for its plans and propaganda. A French geologist working for the colony named Henri Bésaire had identified a “significant” deposit of limestone in the valley three decades earlier. He had made this assessment after conducting soil analyses throughout the region during a French West African–sponsored survey in 1943.30 Later, colonial geologists estimated that there were nearly 380 million tons of what Bésaire had referred to as “exceptionally strong” limestone there.31 He likewise identified large quantities of phosphates in his analysis, which likely has accounted for some of the soil’s ongoing fertility. At the time, he had implored the colonial government to explore the region’s mineral capacity in more detail, but colonial officials, no doubt restrained by limited budgets during World War II and wary of potential Ọhọri reactions, did little to promote further exploration of the region.32 By the time SOCOLE completed the new Pobé–Kétu road in the 1950s, the French colonial government, already embroiled in the first years of warfare in Algeria and on the verge of defeat in Indochina, chose not to invest the significant funds it would take to build a cement factory. Ten years after independence, however, the presidential council led by Maga revisited the possibility of extracting the limestone reserves, hoping that a productive new cement factory would symbolically and fiscally prop up Dahomey’s fragile economy, while also allowing the regime to promote a new sense of independent African identity. On the afternoon of August 27, 1970, the council held a ceremony in the heart of Ọhọri country to mark the breaking of ground at the future site of what they called the Onigbolo cement factory, a “bastardization” of the name of nearby Oligbolo.33 One informant explained the name change simply by remarking, that was what the “whites hired to construct the plant” wanted it thus named.34 Flanked by his vice presidents and other members of their ministerial staff, Maga stood proudly over the first limestone deposit engineers had mined from deep under the surface of the valley’s terrain at a location that had once been an Ọhọri communal burial ground at the northern edge of Igbó Ilú.35 The Ọhọri had not used the site for burials for many years, because it became increasingly inundated after

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torrential rains over time, and many informants claimed that building the factory there did not materially challenge their autonomy.36 Hoping that the venture would provide new job opportunities for their growing population, locals chose not to contest the plan. Many cautiously witnessed the ceremonial start of construction after the state appropriated the site, some of whom would have no doubt been present when Maga stood next to the first mass of limestone extracted and flashed a proud smile as a photographer from Daho-Express snapped a picture for the next day’s front page.37 The administration hoped that the celebration, replete with fanfare and performances by “traditional” Dahomean dancers, would provide a psychological boost for a nation that had struggled with political upheaval and economic malaise since making the transition to independence. Its leaders also designed the event to serve as a precursor for celebrations of Dahomey’s tenth anniversary as an independent nation. As the inaugural ceremony came to a close, Joseph Kéké, minister of Economic Planning, speaking to reporters, linked cement production to the development and revitalization of Dahomey’s economy. Drawing comparisons to discoveries of oil along the coast of West Africa, Kéké remarked, “Our oil will not be the kind that is refined.”38 The minister was referring to the discovery of oil reserves along coastal regions of Nigeria in the mid-1950s. By referencing the subsequent economic boom the government of Nigeria had experienced following the discovery of oil in the country, he pointed to cement production as a potential symbol of new economic growth and independence in the Dahomean postcolonial framework.39 The pace of factory construction following the ceremony is unclear, but it appears that work languished soon thereafter. Builders made only limited progress, and construction stopped completely when Major Mathieu Kérékou, commander of a paratroop unit in the Dahomean army, led a military coup and took over the government on October 26, 1972. Informants recalled sporadic work on the project during the initial years of the Kérékou era.40 Beyond that, the site remained largely vacant until four years later, when his Marxist–Leninist regime, by that time governing a country leaders had renamed the People’s Republic of Benin, revitalized the undertaking, envisioning it as a multinational project that encompassed their postcolonial vision of state formation.41 Much like the tripartite administration that preceded it, Kérékou’s government fantasized about how high-quality cement produced from the large deposits of lime-

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stone deep beneath the Lama Valley could provide the main ingredient, literally and figuratively, in building an independent African state. The respective governments, however, had differing goals in mind. Whereas the presidential council of 1970 had hoped that the Onigbolo plant would constitute a new node of development in independent Dahomey, Kérékou and his ministers saw it as an achievement of the new African Marxist state that would play a key role in an economically unified West Africa finally free of European domination.42 To that end, Kérékou’s administration entered into a new joint venture with the oil-rich government of Nigeria and a Danish engineering company, FLSmidth & Co., to finish the factory with the intention of supplying high-quality cement that could be used to build homes and infrastructure across West Africa.43 According to an article in the new Marxist government–sponsored newspaper, Ehuzu, the arrangement the parties agreed to in the previous year allotted a 41 percent stake in the new Société des Ciments d’Onigbolo to Nigeria in exchange for promised labor and cash investments pulled from the country’s swelling oil industry coffers. The People’s Republic of Benin owned 49 percent, while FLSmidth & Co. received the remaining 10 percent of ownership, in exchange for technical and marketing expertise, after winning the contract to build the factory.44 A delegation of Beninese and Nigerian functionaries met at the revitalized site on August 30, 1976, to announce what they referred to as “the final phase” of construction. The meeting highlighted the dual nature of the Beninese administration’s vision for the factory. Ehuzu boasted that the Onigbolo factory symbolized Benin’s “revolutionary struggle for national liberation.”45 Furthermore, the operation would allow West African nations to break free from their economic and political connections with old colonial powers by producing a uniquely African product, mined and produced by an African majority–owned venture.46 During the ceremony, Benin’s new minister of Industry addressed Edwin Ihama, the Nigerian ambassador to Benin, as “brother” and reassured the audience that “the cement leaving this factory will find a strong market, not only in Nigeria and Benin, but throughout all of our sub-region.”47 Turning the Onigbolo factory into a symbol of national and multinational West African unity was not without problems. Although the functionaries insisted that the “final phases” had already begun in 1976, budget and planning issues delayed construction until August 20, 1979. In

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the two years it took to finish the factory from that point, bickering among African and European workers, as well as internecine struggles between Beninese representing different “ethnicities,” likewise interrupted progress. The nature of discord is not entirely clear, but Kérékou alluded to problems in a speech he delivered at the factory’s opening on August 30, 1981. Addressing an audience that included the 1,406 laborers who had arrived from “all areas” of Benin to work on the project, he chastised them for fostering “an insalubrious social climate, and a work environment characterized by suspicion, pettiness, tensions, clan-building hatred, laziness, absenteeism, anarchy, indiscipline, detours, and sabotage of all types.”48 His polemic indicated that the process of construction had nearly undermined his regime’s intended aim of building a new, unified, and Marxist Beninese national identity. Local memories of construction are limited because few if any of the valley’s residents worked on the project in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Falilou Wabi, a personnel manager who worked for Onigbolo recalled how workers “came from everywhere,” but the construction led many locals to question where they fit in the new framework of the country, because, as he said, “not many Ọhori worked on the project.”49 Regardless of the problems builders faced during construction, and despite his scolding of workers on the eve of the Onigbolo factory’s opening, Kérékou and his ministers envisioned it as a poster for the revolutionary political and social reawakening they hoped would invigorate their formerly colonized people. After speaking about the challenges associated with completing the factory, the president outlined what he called the “fundamental political, economic, and sociocultural objectives” the “party and the revolutionary state” would achieve with its opening.50 Foremost, he called upon all Beninese to view the plant’s potential as the “total and definitive liquidation of the old policies, structures, and ideologies” promoted by colonial officials and the African leaders such as Maga and Apithy who had replaced them at the onset of independence. He continued by saying how cement production at Onigbolo meant the “effective control of the state in all vital sectors of the national economy.” 51 While the project did not afford many Ọhọri wage opportunities, he did not leave them out of his address, saying that the building of industry out of their agricultural landscape was a way to “develop” their community and bring them into the new national fold. Jérôme Bibilary, the correspondent

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from Ehuzu who covered the speech, reiterated the president’s proclamation by suggesting how the opening of the factory would “transform” the Ọhọri region by finally uniting its citizenry with the “broad masses” of Benin.52

Negotiating Narratives of Independence: Cosmology and Ọhọri Perceptions of Land and Landscape For Benin’s Marxist leaders, the building of the Onigbolo factory marked a new chapter in their refashioning of Benin. Physically reaching the Ọhọri community and transporting loads of manufactured cement from the valley to ports along the West African coast still remained a problem when the plant started mining limestone and manufacturing cement. The ruts and potholes in the old SOCOLE road had become deeper by the early 1980s, making it nearly impossible to transport heavy bags of product out of the center of the valley to coastal and interior markets.53 The government of Benin responded by putting out a call for proposals to rebuild the Pobé–Kétu road not long after the factory opened.54 The bidding process, to the extent that one occurred, must have happened quickly. The government published the call in Ehuzu in December 1981 and awarded the contract to Razel by early the next year.55 Using an armada of bulldozers and mechanized rollers, the company’s employees started the process of widening and surfacing the highway with asphalt shortly thereafter and soon encountered the sacred forest of Igbó Akpa, where it took workers three days to fell a lone kapok tree before lead engineers decided to reroute the new road around the grove.56 Ọhọri mistrust of Benin’s government was widespread by this time. Hopes that the factory construction would lead to employment opportunities were never met. The transition in rule following the coup in 1972 was likewise marred by tension at local levels in the valley. Informants recall how opposing the regime often led to having one’s “skull cracked” by the military or police.57 As a result, “nobody was really able to talk during the revolutionary period,” which explains why “there was no active resistance at the time of the new Pobé-Kétu road construction.”58 In talking about the various forms the Pobé–Kétu road has taken over time, Ọhọri interlocutors and others from neighboring communities interviewed also point to the era as one of rapid environmental transformation in the valley. Ọhọri residents recalled how a combination of demographic growth,

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which compelled farmers to carve new fields out of the dense vegetation of the valley, and an illicit logging trade from the 1970s on commenced a process of deforestation.59 Numerous scholars have highlighted the problems of drawing on Malthusian arguments to rationalize or explain environmental change.60 While anecdotal evidence suggests the valley has experienced some loss in forest space, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which this has occurred.61 Nonetheless, the Ọhọri reinforce their narratives of deforestation by pointing to population growth among their community.62 “The Ọhọri have grown,” said Kossoko Ilo. “Our population is made up of farmers, so it is natural that we have exploited the land to create new fields.”63 The trader Moutitaba, whose father fled Kétu in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and who likewise plied the road connecting the town to Pobé as a merchant throughout the second half of the twentieth century concurred. “There used to be a lot of trees and dense bush in the valley,” he recalled. “There are not as many trees today. The forest around Itchagba [Igbó Akpa] used to be a lot bigger. But farmers destroyed a lot of it, and what remains is what you see.”64 Carpenters throughout the area agreed with these assessments when asked about their impressions and memories of the road. For them, talking about the road was a way to air complaints about how the loss of forest in the valley has impacted their business. Gone were the days of “reasonable prices and a good quality of timber coming from the valley” when I conducted some of my first interviews. “All of the trees had been cut, for a variety of reasons,” and that forced carpenters “to seek more expensive products from further away.”65 Given that Ọhọri religious and political leaders had historically derived their power from a cosmological “energy” emitted by the surrounding forests, narratives of deforestation act as a way for members of the community to explain how a regime many considered oppressive challenged their political independence so soon after the transition from colonial rule. The stories portray a sense of communal vulnerability rarely seen in narratives of resistance, but they give a sense of how Ọhọri distanced themselves from Benin’s rule. The accounts of demographic growth also allowed them to buttress their sense of being a politically independent community as a counter to the government’s use of the factory and the rebuilding of an asphalt Pobé–Kétu road as new metaphorical texts in which to inscribe its leaders’ vision of national and regional identity. Ọhọri responded, however, by identifying the remaining notable forest in their country, the sacred

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grove of Igbó Akpa, as a new locus of power. In the past, Ọhọri leaders had met in the forest of kapok trees that lay adjacent to the village of Itchagba to make communal decisions. As it dwindled over time, however, its status as a powerful sacred grove took on greater prominence, in part because it constituted the only forest space left where religious leaders could meet to conduct divinations and initiate male disciples.66 In speaking about their memories of the Pobé–Kétu road, Ọhọri demonstrate how the forest became a symbol of communal strength during its reconstruction in the early 1980s. Narratives of Benin’s statist propaganda and Ọhọri communal notions of a new brand of independent political identity met at the confluence of the new road and Igbó Akpa. Members of the Ọhọri community recall fondly how the newly paved Pobé–Kétu route made it easier to move agricultural exports, but the rebuilding of the dilapidated SOCOLE road did not occur without problems. Among the more widespread stories Ọhọri told when prompted by questions about the road was how the company’s workers and engineers encountered delays shortly after reaching the southern base of the grove. Igbó Akpa lay in the path laid out for the new thoroughfare. When laborers came to the point where the company hoped to cut a new and straighter path through the forest, they encountered difficulties trying to cut down a large kapok tree that lay at its southern edge. The tree finally fell after workers spent three days gnawing at the tree’s base with gas-powered chainsaws, and the company decided to run the route around the forest after a worker driving a bulldozer into the grove allegedly disappeared, or was “consumed.”67 With the exception of a brief Ehuzu leader that refers enigmatically to technical “delays” that occurred during the route’s construction, the tale of the company’s problems at the base of Igbó Akpa have been left out of an official record.68 The story remains very much alive in Ọhọri collective memory, and the event is indicative of how members of the community negotiated independence and substantiated their autonomy as a response to ideological shifts in national government and the industrialization of their landscape. In particular, accounts of laborers’ inability to cut a new route through Igbó Akpa act as a reminder of Ọhọri defiance to the regime and a reaffirmation of the community’s steadfast adherence to its political independence in spite of Beninese rule. “It happened right in front of me,” Itchagba resident Idodèyi Assogba remembered: “[The company] worked on that tree with everything it had for three days before it fell. It was

 . CEMENTING IDENTITIES

unbelievable. The forest is natural, sacred, and venerated by the Ọhọri people. Not everyone is able to penetrate it. It accommodates powerful divinities. You cannot enter it simply because you want to.”69 Others alluded to the forest’s power by adding that the company’s engineers “did not realize the forest was impenetrable. One should never even try to cut a small plant inside of it. [The French company] tried, but had bad luck. They sent a man in, and he was never found.”70 The production of the sacred grove as an increasingly powerful space that repelled the company employed by the state of Benin in its attempt to imprint a new form of national identity on the landscape is connected to local perceptions of environmental change. Local practitioners share commonalities with Yorùbá religions. Among them are notions of how trees act as conduits for the type of “energy” that locals ascribe as a source of power.71 The year before I engaged in collecting oral data in the valley, an Ifa priest in Nigeria explained to me how forests are places where forces “from the sky above and from the ground below” find what he referred to as their “connection.”72 The force generated by this bond is similar to the one in the forest that once lent Adoko and political leaders their power during the early era of colonial rule. When trees are cut down, he said, “energies are displaced that then look for new trees to forge connections with.”73 In the prevailing Ọhọri memory, therefore, the association between power and the only sizable remaining forest in their heartland makes sense.74 It also explains why groves such as Igbó Akpa “reveal,” what one informant described as an “incredible power.”75 Ọhọri perceptions of Igbó Akpa’s strength and its importance to the community grew as the state industrialized the surrounding landscape and rebuilt the Pobé–Kétu road to facilitate the transport of cement out of the valley, while stories of deforestation permeated their communal narrative processes. Speaking of the forest’s enhanced importance for members of the Ọhọri community, informants comment on how “over the years, the grove has become a restricted zone for the community. It seems we revere the sacred forest even more as the years pass.”76 In cosmological terms, the displaced energy from trees that inhabitants’ claim were cut throughout the valley over time would have assembled within Igbó Akpa and generated enough power to frighten people working for the state to reroute the road around its space. Other accounts exemplify the forest’s position as a site representative of Ọhọri political independence in the postcolonial era. One informant summed up Igbó Akpa’s importance to the community by stating:

CEMENTING IDENTITIES . 

There are numerous advantages we have because of the sacred forest. It is not that it merely keeps foreigners out. It allows us to eat, and prevents either drought or too much rain. I could say there was not a tree in the path that had not been cut down by road builders before and after [the early 1980s]. This includes numerous other sacred forests that once existed in the valley. Igbó Akpa is the most powerful of all of these and conserves the energy of others. That is what made it possible to demonstrate its power when a worker tried to go in. And that is what makes it possible for the trees to remain in the forest today.77 Although scholars have begun to examine periods of independence from colonial rule in historical terms in Africa, they have neglected to frame it in a context of resistance, which implies that the diverse communities of Africa welcomed the transition without negotiating the processes on their own terms.78 That members of the Ọhọri community associate political and religious power with their small sacred forest of Igbó Akpa demonstrates how African perceptions of environmental change can become a component in the construction of the past and offers a new type of postcolonial history that is informed by how people alter social organization and engage actively with natural and material worlds to alter their sense of communal identity.79 The narratives may show how members of the community resisted Dahomean and later Beninese governance passively, but it also serves as a new way for the Ọhọri to display their history as an independent polity. Despite the diversion at the edge of the forest, the company cleared vegetation that had spilled over the long-dilapidated SOCOLE road and paved the new highway to Kétu with asphalt in less than a year.80 Trucks carrying the first shipments of cement from the factory plied the new road near the end of the rainy season in 1982.81 A short time later in December, Benin opened the road to the public. Like the SOCOLE road before it, the new goudron, or asphalt road, was a new marker for Ọhọri in the framing of their past. The perception of demographic and landscape changes continued to feature prominently in local narratives. Informants insisted that the process of road building in the early 1980s and subsequent improvements in mobility into and out of the valley played a role in continuing to alter the valley landscape. Residents recalled, for example, how some “trees became obstacles” for workers as they widened the road, and many had to

 . CEMENTING IDENTITIES

be destroyed.82 According to Théodore Olouossa, many people took the fallen trees to make charcoal and build houses. After that, he recalled, loggers began to “exploit the forest” more vigorously and shipped “the best wood” out of the valley with ease along the road’s improved track.83 In addition to continued population growth and the rise in illicit log trading, the newfound access provided by the rebuilt road from the early 1980s on compelled Ọhọri farmers to clear even more space for new fields, because it allowed them to export maize more efficiently from the valley to markets outside of the region. Alongside the ecological vulnerability portrayed in narratives of the era, stories of relative prosperity and new income opportunities sprang up that further bolstered the Ọhọri sense of economic independence. Members of the community had exported agricultural products to larger markets for the better part of their history in the region. Noting their improved means of transporting goods in the 1980s, many farmers claimed to have sought access to larger tracts of land to augment their yields for export. The enhanced mobility provided by the asphalt road also brought new merchants to the valley to buy surplus crops and improved economic prospects of many farmers as a result. Many residents took the opportunity to increase their landholdings either by purchasing or renting land to clear for new fields. “Business,” as one informant relayed to me, “was going really well at that time,” and it made sense for members of the community to “put a lot of sweat and energy” into their endeavors and “invest in tools and new fields.”84 Others responded to the new route by developing new microindustries to supplement farming and family incomes. Peripheral businesses, such as selling cheap petrol trafficked into the valley from nearby Nigeria, where subsidies kept prices artificially low, and tire repair and auto mechanic stalls cropped up at various points along the new road.85 Others invested in motorbikes to ferry residents of Ọhọri-Ije and Pobé to and from the valley and the plateau on market days, or they set up small stalls at the side of road to sell snacks and soft drinks to the influx of market patrons and truckers who traveled along its paths with more regularity.86

From Subject to Citizen? Drawing on Ọhọri residents’ perceptions of environmental change and memories of factory and road construction demonstrates a new way to view how Africans negotiated the transition from colonial rule. The way

CEMENTING IDENTITIES . 

Ọhọri refashioned their sacred grove of Igbó Akpa complicates our understanding of how new independent governments of Africa engaged in postcolonial statecraft. African independence from European colonial rule did not mean that communities living within the boundaries of the new states simply made a seamless transition from being presumed colonial subjects to becoming citizens of newly sovereign entities. Detailed examinations of transitions made by local polities in the framework of independence have yet to be explored in depth.87 Improvements and repairs to the Pobé–Kétu road to facilitate the movement of trucks delivering cement from the Onigbolo factory played a role in altering perceptions of Ọhọri communal identity. It likewise paved the way for members of the community to enhance Igbó Akpa’s status as a symbol of their political independence during an era remembered as one of oppressive Beninese Marxist nationalist rule.88 In Ọhọri collective memory, the industrialization of the valley’s landscape, the rebuilding of the Pobé–Kétu road, and local assessments of demographic growth that led to a reduction of forest space spurred changes in how residents understood a sense of community and their roles in this new type of political space. That the tale of the company altering the route’s path around the sacred forest takes on such a prominent role in how informants tell Ọhọri history suggests how local residents, who considered themselves to have been members of a politically independent community during both the precolonial and colonial eras, also negotiated the transition to national independence as an autonomous polity. An examination of the building of the cement factory, coupled with an investigation of communal narratives about the Pobé–Kétu road-building project in the early 1980s and the subsequent impact it had on local perceptions of environmental change, reveals compelling differences in Dahomean/Beninese and Ọhọri visions of identity formation. The leaders of the independent countries of Dahomey and later Benin targeted the capacity of the valley to produce high-quality cement to promote their respective visions of an economically viable state. The factory and the newer paved version of the Pobé–Kétu route constituted metaphorical texts on which the new African countries wrote and reinscribed their images of independent statehood.89 Contrarily, members of the Ọhọri community refashioned their own communal identity during this period by drawing on the power generated by the perceived inviolability of Igbó Akpa. The small sacred grove represented the last vestige of what members of the Ọhọri community remember was once a densely

 . CEMENTING IDENTITIES

forested valley, and the story of the forest repelling the company hired by the government constitutes a new chapter in the telling of an Ọhọri history generated by memories of the road. Negotiating the transition from colonial rule to independent Dahomean and later Beninese governance, however, was a process that lasted well into and beyond the early 1980s, when the Marxist regime under Kérékou completed the construction of the Onigbolo cement factory in the heart of the Ọhọri basin. To a certain extent, inhabitants continued to negotiate their political standing as Benin transitioned from Marxist to democratic rule in the 1990s. The long process of cement factory construction and the subsequent repair of the Pobé–Kétu road bisecting their social and political heartland in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate how members of the Ọhọri community drew on perceptions of environmental change as a way to distance themselves from the competing state-building and identity-formation processes sponsored by the Beninese state. On top of the layers of an economically developing Benin and the perceived development of a regional Nigerian–Beninese power grew a new sense of a centralized Ọhọri social identity around Igbó Akpa. Improvements and repairs to the Pobé–Kétu road to facilitate the movement of trucks delivering cement from the Onigbolo factory played a role in changing conceptualizations of independence and communal identity.90 Scholarly research on processes of decolonization and independence from colonial rule has emphasized the transition of governments, the crafting of new national identities, and how the “spectacle” of modernity and development has impacted and complicated our understandings of how people have formed identities in the near-term historical landscape of the past fifty or sixty years.91 The overarching emphasis has, however, been on the much geographically larger “sovereign” African nations that achieved independence from colonial rule.92 As a result, research has often emphasized how Africans negotiated independence in a postcolonial framework without addressing how smaller communities residing within the borders of newly independent states perceived the nature of accompanying political and social change. The narrative of the sacred grove resisting the mechanical onslaught of road builders and the larger independent state apparatus shows how the Ọhọri understood the transition. After operating politically and socially outside of the purview of French colonial rulers for the better part of the twentieth century, members of the com-

CEMENTING IDENTITIES . 

munity maintained their sense of autonomy even after new African leaders assumed positions as heads of the independent Republic of Dahomey in 1960. In the early years following independence, many residents resisted attempts by government functionaries to collect taxes on sales made in local markets. They likewise reacted violently to a government-led inoculation campaign that many members of the community believed threatened the lives of Ọhọri children. Aggressive displays of their independence appeared to have dwindled following the transition in government following the coup of 1972, but identifying Igbó Akpa as a locus of local power that challenged Beninese statecraft constituted a type of passive resistance not yet explored in African history and substantiated local autonomy. Noting their memories of decreasing forest space in the telling of their communal history, Ọhọri residents likewise draw on their perceptions of the sacred grove in the wake of the failure to blaze a trail through the grove as a means to reaffirm their political autonomy in the postindependence era. Members of the community used their understanding of Igbó Akpa’s cosmological power, in particular, in reaffirming their own brand of political independence. The rapid deterioration of the road prior to the building of the Onigbolo factory and the perceived strength of the Ọhọri sacred forest during road rehabilitation serve as symbols of how members of this small rural community viewed national identity. The route cuts through the Ọhọri basin and has served as an arbiter of change and exchange. The cement factory, whose existence can be attributed to the deposits of limestone lying deep under the land’s surface, has likewise affected mobility, politics, economics, and environment in the region. Distinguishing between built and natural environments in local renditions of history is problematic, though, because they each have a bearing on human and animal behavior. Nevertheless, the sacred forest that rests on the other side of the Pobé–Kétu highway from the Ọhọri village of Itchagba also links the natural and built environments by reason of its geographical location in the Ọhọri heartland and proximity to the Onigbolo cement factory. The forest is a natural site, but in recent decades, the Ọhọri community has drawn on memories of the security it historically provided them with to recreate it as a communal landmark. The Ọhọri link narratives and memories of deforestation to the cement factory’s emergence from the forest in an industrializing landscape and to population growth, which in turn

 . CEMENTING IDENTITIES

serves as the historical backdrop of an enduring local Ọhọri autonomy. Igbó Akpa thus constitutes a new form of text through which to examine African history in a wider context. Tales about it sprang up as the new Dahomean, and later Beninese, leaders struggled to create their own vision of postcolonial identity.

Conclusion

Breathing with the Road Well, it is not true that my history is only in my heart; it is indeed there, but it is also in that dusty road in my town, and in every villager, living and dead, who has ever walked on it. It is in my country too; in my continent and, yes, in the world. That dusty little road is my link to all other destinations. — Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

While writing earlier drafts of this book, I discussed thematic trajectories with non-Africanist colleagues and acquaintances. Many found Ọhọri narratives intriguing, but a few among them also mentioned how the materials and stories I gathered might lend themselves to writing a novel rather than the history of an African community. I recognize fully how some of the stories recounted in the preceding chapters may seem enigmatic to outside observers. Many Ọhọri accounts seem unorthodox. The community’s founder engaging in conversations with a snake and a forest consuming a laborer and a bulldozer are perhaps the most noteworthy. That does not mean, however, they do not constitute legitimate methods by which residents tell and envision their history. On the contrary, they do. I would like to think most scholars who work in Africa would agree. Nonetheless, the critiques and comments of my colleagues who questioned the veracity of my informants’ narratives also substantiated my belief that Ọhọri recollections of the Pobé–Kétu road at the very least offered accessible narratives for Africanists and non-Africanists alike. Transforming Ọhọri constructions of the past into fiction might, however, banalize the way they position themselves relative to neighboring communities and the historical role they have played. In his treatise On Africa, Wole Soyinka reprimanded scholars and development pundits for engaging in what he called the “fictioning” of the continent.1 By “fictioning,” he refers to a long-standing imperial legacy of people either refusing to interpret or invalidating exceptional tales as myth rather than examining them as forms of knowledge.2 As a result, erroneous prevailing notions of Africa as a simultaneously “exotic” and pristine, 

 . CONCLUSION

yet contrarily war-torn, disease-ridden, environmentally challenged, and impoverished continent populated by starving children remain imprinted on the collective conscious of many who live outside of Africa. I do not deny that Africans face numerous challenges, but to envision their lives solely as depicted above belies historical and current realities.3 Noting the abundance of prevailing narratives that negate Africa’s role on a global scale, Soyinka called on those who conduct research on and write about the continent to refrain from reducing historical processes to bland generalities. According to him, allowing for the “discovery” of Africa by “the indigenes themselves” offers the key to reversing this problematic trend.4 Soyinka’s appeal is not new. In fact, it is one that mirrors what many scholars of Africa have been saying for years. The anthropologist Andrew Apter preceded the renowned Nigerian playwright’s entreaty by encouraging us to break from conceptualizing the past in terms of what he called a “colonial library.”5 The novelist Chinua Achebe likewise long mused about the misconceptions about the continent of people from outside of Africa. The assessments of such important and influential authors, scholars, and commentators on the human condition in Africa and the world in general may seem curious to what likely constitutes their primary audience — namely, people who live and conduct research on the continent and in diaspora communities. Yet Africans and Africa remain among the most misunderstood people and regions of the world. In spite of the contributions our colleagues have made for the better part of the past sixty or seventy years, I think what Soyinka, Apter, and Achebe are saying is that we can do better. As Africanists, we hear and read engaging narrative accounts of charismatic and resilient individuals and communities who, like the Ọhọri, situate themselves in a broader historical landscape in dramatically different ways, and I wonder oftentimes if it behooves us to seek a broader audience, both inside and outside of academe to clarify localized histories to explain our contemporary world.6 I am not saying, incidentally, that my rendition of the ways Ọhọri speak about their past succeeds completely in doing this, but their narratives are accessible to an audience who may not understand the complex historical processes Africans have engaged in their making of the contemporary world, and they lend new insights into how Africans construct a sense of their history as a means to support their claims of political independence.

CONCLUSION . 

A Brief Epilogue Like its predecessor, the new and improved asphalt Pobé–Kétu road rebuilt in the early 1980s did not last. Over time, the malleable clay that lay under the goudron did not provide a stable foundation. When the Kérékou regime’s Marxist rule ended in 1991 and governance transitioned to a multiparty democracy, new cracks had already appeared along the road. Heavy trucks burdened with bags of cement were among the primary culprits, but torrential rains had also taken their toll on the highway. Annual downpours washed out large areas of the route, making travel often difficult and dangerous. By the time I traveled to the valley for the first time in 2006 to collect oral histories, the stretch of road between Pobé and the Onigbolo cement factory looked nothing like it must have when the government reopened it to the general public in 1982 (see Figure 7). Much of the surface had disintegrated, exposing the laterite surface of the previous SOCOLE road. Travelers had to be cautious of the treacherous conditions resulting from the downpours that occurred every rainy season. Traffic

Figure . A  photograph depicts how the road looked in the rainy season before repairs were made the following year.

 . CONCLUSION

had diminished considerably, but people driving automobiles, motorbikes, and even pedaling bicycles found they had to navigate slowly around the potholes, which had grown deeper all along the road. They also had to be wary of slippery spots, which seemed to grow with each new year, causing drivers and bicyclists to lose control and veer off into the farmland that bordered the road. In dry seasons, dust thrown up by vehicles covered roadside vegetation, and local medical practitioners were kept busy with patients who worked near the road and complained of relentless coughing (see Figure 8).7 At that time, the dilapidated road, a subsequent decline in economic activity, and promises by a new government elected earlier that year to modernize agriculture and fuel commercial growth prompted many Ọhọri to reexamine their past. As I engaged them in our first conversations, plans to rebuild the route were also getting under way. Almost a century after the first colonial attempt to build a road traversing Ọhọri country, and twenty-five years removed from the completion of the first asphalt “all season” highway in the early 1980s, the Republic of Benin received the equivalent of eight million dollars from the Danish International Development Agency and the African Development Bank to renovate the Pobé– Kétu road.8 The language used by officials of Benin’s Ministry of Public Works resembled that of the French colonial officials who had discussed building the road during the interwar years. Both rationalized their respective ventures as vital to boosting economic activity in this fertile, yet swampy and isolated subtropical region. Judging from the similarity in language, one might think that little had changed. Work on the rebuilt road had begun when I returned in 2007. Informants were hopeful that the new road would allow them to achieve the social and economic gains that had eluded them over the previous twentyfive years as the asphalt highway built during the Marxist period deteriorated. “The road is in a bad state,” Barthlemi Odjoubé told me, “and for our well-being, we hope it is repaired. A good road brings enormous advantages for our economy and our community because it opens the connections between us and Benin and Nigeria.”9 Other informants, however, were more cautious about whether a repaired road would provide sustained economic growth. Many indicated that over the short term, a new road would enhance their ability to ship surplus crops to market. They also questioned how long the new road would last, however, given the valley’s loamy geology and the traffic that roars back and forth from the cement factory to

Figure . With Igbó Akpa in the background, this  photograph shows how vehicles caused dusty conditions before repairs to the road were completed the following year.

 . CONCLUSION

markets outside of the region at all hours of the night and day. Okpéogou Olatodji countered optimism by offering, “I can say that the road in its current state does not benefit us. Traveling along it, especially by motorbike, is tiring because of all of the bumps. Before, when the road had been newly constructed, the trucks didn’t pass so much. Over time, though, heavy vehicles began taking [over] the road. That quickly caused much of the damage you see today. You see, when trucks pass, the road quakes. When they repair the road, it will be lucky for everyone. But I ask myself, how long will the ground underneath it hold up?”10 In many ways, his trepidation exemplifies the reservations many Ọhọri have about the road’s long-term viability. Furthermore, it complicates their attitudes about capitalist modernity and development, while also placing their sense of political independence metaphorically on an equally fragile footing. A “good road” may indeed “bring development,” as Alatoindji told me one afternoon while observing machine operators shift dirt with a bulldozer during the road-rebuilding project in 2007.11 It also brings to light, however, numerous contradictions Africans associate with infrastructure building projects, notions of improved governance, and conceptualizations of identity in postcolonial Africa.12 At various times, Ọhọri have drawn on the road crossing their valley of “black earth” as a narrative device or trope to demonstrate how they and their ancestors displayed anticolonial sentiments and protected their political independence. They relate the theme of blocking access to their space with labor conscription and preserving their sacred forest of Igbó Akpa. The ways in which Ọhọri speak about the road in constructing their past as a politically independent community also underscores how Africans conceive of historical agency.13 In observing that the road “quaked” when trucks rolled along its surface, and noting that the ground beneath it played a role in its ability to hold up, Olatodji perhaps framed it best. Another informant echoed his sentiments, remarking on how “the asphalt road crumbles and breaks quickly” under the passing trucks.14 In demonstrating how the Ọhọri view their history through the prism of the road and frame an environmental past, they and others breathed life into the route’s shifting spaces and animated the surrounding landscape, thereby lending each a sense of agency in the crafting of an Ọhọri history. Since the late 1950s, Africanists have created a solid scholarly foundation devoted to ascribing agency to Africans who have otherwise been left out of “official” records. Yet in doing this, they have generally not con-

CONCLUSION . 

sidered what African perspectives of historical agency might entail. The Ọhọri generate new insights into this in animating their natural and built environments—the forest, the road, and the cement factory—and including them as active participants in their narratives of historical change.

Connecting the Ọhọri Past with Global History Ọhọri narratives and their conceptions of historical change and historical agency allow us to place an emphasis on Africans’ perceptions of roads and pathways as arbiters of social, political, environmental, and economic change. In this way, the road stretching from Pobé to Kétu constitutes an ideal localized sub-Saharan Africa text, as well as a material and metaphorical space from which to gauge the impact of trade and infrastructure projects on African communities.15 Information that can be extrapolated to numerous other historical debates is likewise provided by analyses of precolonial narratives, or “traditions,” that highlight the routes and paths the people who created the Ọhọri community took to gain access to the valley; of how French colonial administrators conceived of, but later abandoned, Pobé–Kétu road projects; and of how an all-season route was finally completed during the Marxist era under Kérékou in the early 1980s. Viewing the road as simultaneously a physical space, a palimpsest, and a metaphor enhances our understanding of competing Ọhọri perceptions of identity and political independence in a fluid historical landscape. It also offers new depth to the ways in which scholars have methodologically periodized African history, examined its source materials, explored memory and consumption as lines of historical analysis, understood enslavement in the transatlantic context, and explored environmental change in the broader framework of communal identity. I address many of these themes in this book, but to frame Ọhọri history as strictly local would fail to capture how members of the community have interpreted their dynamic relationships with people from around the world. The emergence of the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth century on clearly impacted their community. Valley residents also engaged economically with the wider world long before they even tacitly accepted outside political authority or the improvement of their access to neighboring communities, states, and ports. My examination of the Ọhọri community and how its members perceived changes in their land offers insight into how Africans negotiated

 . CONCLUSION

Figure . The new Pobé–Kétu road, completed in .

complex transitions in regional and global politics. It also complicates our understanding of how Africans interpret communal identity and notions of political independence across time and space. This combination offers a new lens from which to assess how, as active members of an autonomous political entity, rural Africans conceived of themselves within the wider framework of various types of African political organization, ranging from decentralized communities to centralized states. In drawing on the Pobé–Ketu road as a mnemonic device, the Ọhọri provide us with a distinctive localized case study that allows us a rare glimpse into how people envision their place on the global political stage. Scholars of Africa, in particular, have long questioned the utility of the term “globalization” and encouraged their peers to seek distinctive case studies.16 Frederick Cooper, for example, has argued that explaining rapid and pervasive historical changes by focusing on themes such as globalization, capitalism, and development as descriptive frameworks, scholars “analytically risk being trapped in the very discursive structures they wish to analyze,” namely, transnational movements of capital, people, and culture.17 If we recognize that a community’s understanding of identity is “lumpy” or “abstract,”

CONCLUSION . 

terms Cooper uses to describe capitalist processes and notions of sovereignty, respectively, it is possible to see how what some people might view as a small or “marginalized” communal window may allow us to garner a better understanding of changes taking place over time and space.18 The Ọhọri do not see themselves as marginalized, however. Neither am I giving them a voice in this book: they and their ancestors have had a collective voice for many centuries now, and they are merely allowing me to tell their history. Their understanding of the various incarnations of the road connecting Pobé and Kétu as markers of time gives us a new way of grasping a segment of global historical change.

Breathing with the Road By the time I conducted the last phases of research for this project in 2011, workers had completed the new Pobé–Ketu route (see Figure 9). With it came enhanced mobility and an injection of economic livelihood. We need to be careful, however, to not assume that new roads will simply cure the ills of prevailing and erroneous attitudes that exist about Africa. Doing so risks reducing the social, economic, and environmental history of the region to unrealistic generalities. Inasmuch as they animate its space and accord it agency in historical change, members of the Ọhọri community have “grown” with their road, and even “breathe” with it, they say. Moreover, they draw on it in recounting their history on their own terms—a history that even though perhaps omitted from official records, nonetheless thrives and changes as new spaces take on new meanings around the road.

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Acknowledgments

At its core, this book is about people and how they remember their past. However, a road traversing a valley of seasonal wetlands that connects two towns in Benin, West Africa, features prominently as an organizing component. I suppose there is some truth to the adage that every road has an end, but there were moments in the process of conducting research and writing where I wondered whether that held true about this book. One does not finish a project like this without the help of numerous friends, colleagues, and family members. I wish I could thank them all individually. Foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to the Ọhọri people, whom this book is about. Their openness, humor, strength, and willingness to tell me their stories and memories of the road that bisects their homeland is ultimately what made this project possible. My adviser and friend, Benjamin Lawrance, has been with me every step of the way on this long journey, from our first meeting in the now defunct Café Roma in Davis, California, to seeing this book come to fruition more than ten years later. When we met in that loud little coffee house on a rainy December morning in 2003, I had no idea that would lead us to this moment. Benjamin has trained me as a historian of Africa, read and commented on numerous versions of this project, and supported me throughout the process of conducting research and turning this from a dissertation to a manuscript. I am not sure I will ever be able to thank him enough. I also thank the editors at the University of Minnesota Press. Pieter Martin, in particular, demonstrated faith in this project from the onset. Kristian Tvedten and Anne Carter offered support throughout the process. Reports from Celia Nyamweru and an anonymous reader provided constructive advice that shaped the final outcome of this book. Colleagues and friends from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the University of California, Davis, and the Africanist community played



 . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

essential roles in helping me define the trajectory of this book. Nate Carpenter and David DiValerio read full drafts and offered insightful comments that I hope will make the narratives appealing to Africanists and non-Africanists alike. Jennifer Jordan, Ben Johnson, Rob Smith, Bruce Fetter, Merry Weisner-Hanks, Philip Minehan, Jasmine Alinder, Aims McGuinness, Neal Pease, Margo Anderson, Amanda Seligman, Carolyn Eichner, and Lorelle Semley, among others, read segments of the book or offered support in helping me navigate the world of publishing. A fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Center for Twenty-First Century Studies in 2013–14 not only provided me with precious time to write but also allowed me to workshop draft chapters. Special thanks go to Richard Grusin for seeing enough merit in the project to offer me the opportunity. I also thank the fellows from that year’s cohort for providing comments and lending support: Arijit Sen, Jennifer Johung, Elena Gorfinkel, Dehlia Hannah, Tracey Heatherington, Jenny Kehl, Annie McClanahan, and Michael Oldani. My kind regards go to colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well: Tom Spear for letting me know about the wonderful Africa at Noon series hosted by the African Studies program; Jim Delehanty for allowing me to invite myself to present a draft chapter of this book; and Jim Sweet and Neil Kodesh for their helpful comments. Although our days of getting together to talk shop in the cafes and bars of Davis are in the past, I am thankful that I still get a chance to discuss our work and life in general with Nate, Jo Tague, Aliou Ly, Baba Jallow, and Kris Inman. While studying at the University of California, Davis, I had the fortune to share my ideas and receive helpful advice from wonderful scholars. There are many to thank, but Cynthia Brantley, Omnia El Shakry, Cathy Kudlick, and Stylianos Spyridakis all contributed to my development as a scholar and teacher. I also had the chance to take a graduate seminar with Arnie Bauer. It was my first year as a graduate student and the last seminar he taught before his retirement. He may have never known this, but he influenced me in profound ways. I wish I could have sent him a copy of this book. In addition to those listed here, numerous institutions, programs, and people helped fund and support research and writing. While in graduate school, a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad program gave me the opportunity to study Yorùbá in Nigeria. A generous grant from the Univer-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . 

sity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Graduate School funded important trips to collect archival and oral data necessary to complete research for the project. Finally, my appointment as a Quadrant Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2011 played an integral role in the development of the book. In addition to allowing me the rare chance to meet face-to-face with editors at the University of Minnesota Press, I benefited greatly from the interactions I had with scholars from various disciplines. In particular, I thank Adia Benton, Christine Marran, Amy Kaminsky, Ann Waltner, Stuart McLean, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Yuichiro Onishi, Jill Doerfler, and Brett Walker for commenting on drafts or presentations and putting me in contact with other scholars in the University of Minnesota community who impacted the scope of the project in a number of ways. Special thanks go, as well, to Susannah Smith and Karen Kinoshita. My cubicle mate, Brian Horrigan, and his partner, Amy Levine, became dear friends whom I am very happy to have in my life. In Africa, I also had the good fortune of making friendships that will no doubt last a lifetime. In Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria, the Dipo-Salami family housed and fed me while I studied Yorùbá language at Obafemi Awolowo University. More important, they took me into their home. In Benin, the Akpona and Djagoun families provided me with homes away from home. In particular, I thank Jean-Didier Akpona for his friendship and unflinching assistance in conducting field research and collecting oral histories. We traveled together on his small motorbike up and down the Pobé–Ketu road that plays a central role in this book more times than I can count. Sylvestre Djagoun has always been there for me in times of need, and his brother, Florent, in turn, helped me in the early stages of this project. Mr. Bocar Ly was gracious in opening his home to me while I conducted archival research in Dakar, Senegal. I very much appreciate the assistance of archivists and staff at the National Archives in Benin and Senegal, as well as the Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence, France. In Benin, I thank specifically Sonia Mahamé, Jérôme Chazaody, Félicité Gnaho, Laurette Abèbigni, and Alphonsine Aguégué for their patience, understanding, and friendship. Alex Baradel at the Fundação Pierre Verger in Salvador, Brazil, granted me access to see the Ọhọri through the lens of the gifted journalist and photographer for whom the foundation is named. I was not able to publish his photographs in this book, but Verger offered a unique view of the road and surrounding

 . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

landscape at a crucial time in Ọhọri and French imperial history. Philip Schwartzberg and Peter Dreyer likewise played helpful roles in seeing this book come to fruition. Lastly, I would have never summoned the energy to complete a project like this without the love and support of my family. My mother and father, Abigail and Nick, instilled in me a love of travel and have always supported my endeavors. My brother, Russ, taught me there is nothing wrong with being a little adventurous. He, his wife, Tania, and their son, Leo, have been hearing about this book for what seems a lifetime. For Leo, it indeed has been a lifetime. They will be pleased it made it into print. I wish my grandmother, Lois, could have been able to see this finished product. I take comfort in knowing that I was able to share many of the stories depicted in this book with her while she was still with us. When my lovely wife, Neha, and I married in 2014, I gained a few hundred new extended family members. All have shared an interest in my work and supported me in numerous ways, but I would like to thank Raoji and Panna Patel; Lopa, Amit, Tarak, and Tiya Shah; and Hiren and Natasha Patel specifically. Finally, to sweet Ne and our wonderful Sai: this book is for you. Your smiles mean the world to me, and words cannot express how much I love you and how thankful I am to have you in my life.

Notes

Introduction 1. “The Minister of Public Works Inspects the Pobé-Kétou Route,” Ehuzu, August 9, 1982, 1, 6. 2. French colonial documents and postindependence journals and newspapers typically refer to the area and its population as Hollidjé and Holli, respectively. Local residents, however, use the Yorùbá terms, Ọhọri-Ije and Ọhọri. I use Yorùbá names in the text unless they are quoted directly from the source. 3. Numerous political affairs and French colonial Division of Public Works (Travaux Publics) documents in the Archives nationales du Benin (ANB), the Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), and the Archives national du Sénégal (ANS) refer to the valley’s soil as “black earth.” 4. Laterite is a durable reddish soil or rock material rich in iron oxide and aluminum ore that was often used as a surface in tropical road-building projects. 5. Map 1 shows important towns, villages, and the location of the cement factory. The dotted outlined areas in Map 2 show where the Lama Valley is situated in Benin. The area marked Ọhọri depicts the specific site under study. The map also shows colonial rail lines built in the region during the early twentieth century. 6. The majority of informants who remembered the story recalled that Razel did the majority of the work on the project. The national newspaper likewise named the company as having engaged in the road’s construction, but it did so only in one very brief article, “The Minister of Public Works Inspects the Pobé-Kétou Route,” Ehuzu, August 9, 1982, 1, 6. I attempted to contact the company on numerous occasions to corroborate informants’ claims, but never received a response. Gaining access to corporate archives of firms that have worked in Africa can be difficult, although a few Africanists have succeeded in doing so. See, for example, Hecht, Being Nuclear, and Miescher, “Nkrumah’s Baby.” 7. Kapoks are also known as cottonwood trees. Figure 1 shows a number of kapoks in the forest. The trees can reach up to 150 feet in height, with a base up to 15 feet in width when fully grown. 8. Numerous interviewees mentioned this story. Unless stated otherwise in the notes, the author conducted the interviews. The most vivid portrayals were in the 

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

following interviews: Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007, Issakou; Tedédé Kougbaki, October 5, 2007, Issakou; Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007 and November 7, 2007, Itchagba; King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007, Issaba; Bamidel, October 18, 2007, Ita Olagban; Adéyinka Moutitaba, Assané Ashamou, and Odjo Toini, October 18, 2007, at the bottom of the Pobé escarpment; Firmin Ogounonté, October 31, 2007, Odo-Meta; and Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007, Issaba. Figures 2 and 3 depict where the road diverts around the forest. The road’s surface is different in the photos. The author took the photo in Figure 3 after the completion of road repairs in 2007 and 2008. 9. Sabine Jell-Bahlsen’s documentary film Mammy Water, for example, includes a story of a European bridge engineer who died after completing a bridge over a river in Nigeria that locals claimed housed a water spirit. Others have examined the cultural and supernatural significance forests hold for communities in detail. For studies in Africa, see Parkin, The Sacred Void; Sheridan and Nyamweru, eds., African Sacred Groves; Fairhead and Leach, “False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis”; Carney and Elias, “Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree”; and Berry, “A Forest for My Kingdom?” 10. Interviews with Thèophile Tella, July 2, 2006, Pobé, and a group interview at the Aba market, July 3, 2006. 11. Scholars of Africa have long collected life histories to get a better sense of the past. For scholarship devoted specifically to the gathering of life histories, see Vaughn, “Which Family?”; Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women; Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine; and Fair, Pastimes and Politics. 12. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to French West Africa (AOF) GovernorGeneral de Coppet on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 13. Governor-General de Coppet, telegram to Lieutenant Governor Bourgine, January 13, 1937, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 14. I later found comprehensive materials on subsequent Pobé–Kétu roadbuilding projects, as well as a series of armed Ọhọri revolts from 1914 to 1916 that French administrators referred to as la révolte des Hollis. Correspondence among administrators, military officers, and Public Works officials who designed and worked on projects in the valley disclosed only fragments of how members of the community organized themselves socially and politically. French struggles to maintain a consistent presence in the valley and their eagerness to subjugate the Ọhọri economically and politically throughout the first half of the twentieth century informed their opinions, which offered little insight into Ọhọri social and political lives. 15. Defining region can be challenging. In this sense, I view region in a way similar to that proposed in Howard and Shain, The Spatial Factor in African History, 21, who argue that “a regional approach draws attention to the places and

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION . 

zones of interaction where people carried out social practices and generated perceptions.” 16. Numerous letters and meeting minutes archived in ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30 reveal how French administrators often used verbs such as pénétrer and s’infiltrer in their correspondence regarding their plans for the Ọhọri community. 17. Moran, On Roads, 1. 18. Assogba, November 7, 2007. 19. Bloom et al., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, 3. On narratives of progress and modernity in postcolonial African historical contexts, see also Apter, The Pan-African Nation, and Ivaska, Cultured States. Apter, in particular, altered the discourse by redefining Guy Debord’s “spectacle of culture” in his analysis of the Nigerian government’s sponsorship in 1977 of the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, commonly known as FESTAC, a world’s fair that celebrated black culture. 20. Notable works include Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard; Soyinka, The Road; Okri, The Famished Road; and Achebe, Home and Exile, among others. The road motif has also penetrated the realm of popular fiction in Okpi, On the Road. 21. Although roads do not feature specifically as categories of analysis, the following books explore how roads and networks have impacted social and economic change in West Africa: Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa; Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century; Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves; Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest; McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton; and Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails. 22. Bastian, “Dancing Women and Colonial Men” and Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast, shows how roads have constituted gendered spaces. For an examination of how Africans view roads as spaces of technology, see Freed, “Conduits of Culture and Control.” 23. There is a vast literature on social movement in African history. See, for example, Iliffe, Africans. Recent scholarship linking identity formation with mobility include Howard and Shain, eds., The Spatial Factor in African History; Byerley, Becoming Jinja; Lawrance, Locality, Mobility, and “Nation”; De Bruijn and Van Dijk, eds., The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa; and Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous. 24. Scholars have featured roads, rivers, and trade networks prominently in historical and ethnographic writing. For a discussion of ancient roads, see Staccioli, The Roads of the Romans, and Snead et al., Landscapes and Movement. For a longer history of roads around the globe that explore themes of mobility, labor, and networks, see Akurang-Parry, “Colonial Forced Labor Policies for Road-Building in Southern Ghana”; Castleman, Building the King’s Highway; and Hansen, The Silk Road. Moran, On Roads, discusses the concept of automobility. For an emphasis on how road ethnographers have emphasized roads as elements of space, time,

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

and (im)mobility, see Dalakoglou and Harvey, “Roads and Anthropology,” and the associated articles they compiled on the topic in the journal Mobilities. Specific articles on Africa in the volume include Nielsen, “Roadside Inventions” and Klaeger, “Rush and Relax.” Others, such as contributors to a volume of Africa, highlight the ambivalence of Africans and Africanists relative to roads. See, in particular, Klaeger, “Introduction.” For an investigation of what routes — when recognized as public infrastructure — reveal about state formation, social relations, and political economies, see Harvey and Knox, Roads. 25. The recognition by Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, that people attach meanings to things based on how they are used and circulated around the globe sparked a new type of discourse in postcolonial studies that has expanded upon and explored the relationships people have developed with a multitude of objects. In particular, Augé, Non-Places, helped reshape the discourse by adding how people have encountered and altered their senses and uses of space. 26. People continue to speak dialects of Yorùbá throughout the Atlantic World. For an examination of these connections, see Falola and Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. For broader examinations of how Yorùbá-speaking communities have become connected in West Africa through processes of what constitutes a manufacturing of collective cultural–linguistic identity, see Law, The Oyo Empire, and Peel, Religious Encounters and the Making of the Yoruba. 27. Although they note shared cultural–linguistic traits, scholars studying Yorùbá communities often place Ọhọri uncomfortably within a larger Yorùbá political framework. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” refers to the Ọhọri community as an autonomous kingdom in the early colonial era, but he also hints that the community maintained political ties to Yorùbá entities further east. See also Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule; Eades, The Yoruba Today; Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba; and Adediran, The Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, for debates about how the Ọhọri fit into the broader framework of Yorùbá-speaking peoples in West Africa. 28. There are occasional exceptions where informants have indicated a desire to frame themselves within a broader Yorùbá or world community. Most of Asiwaju’s informants in the 1960s claimed descent from Ọyọ, but others indicated that members of the community settled the region after leaving Ilé-Ifè. My informants nearly forty years later claimed descent from Ilé-Ifè and that their ancestors forged political connections with Ọyọ in precolonial times. I discuss the inconsistencies in oral traditions in more detail in chapter 1, but there are occasions when Ọhọri connect themselves to other Yorùbá communities. 29. Scholars have devoted much more time and effort to investigations of much larger precolonial empires that operated throughout West Africa. For a few early examples of anthropological and historical research conducted on what historians once referred to as “forest states” that operated in the interior and often engaged in

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION . 

slaving activities throughout Africa, see Evans-Pritchard, The Azande; Lloyd, “Conflict Theory and Yoruba Kingdoms”; Egharevba, A Short History of Benin; Bradbury, Benin Studies; Feierman, The Shambaa Kindgom; Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast; and Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century. Other notable publications that stemmed from this discourse include, Law, The Oyo Empire; Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast; Connah, African Civilizations; Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast; Bay, Wives of the Leopard; Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest; Law, Ouidah; and Vansina, Being Colonized. 30. A “bight” is a geographical term that often refers to a bend or a curve along a coastal region; see Map 3. Alagoa, The Small Brave City-State, was one of the first studies to depict the history of a smaller African community in the region. More recent studies that gauge the impact smaller communities have had on African history include Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa; Lentz, “Of Hunters, Goats, and Earth Shrines”; Klieman, The Pygmies Were Our Compass; Giblin, A History of the Excluded; Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa; and Carpenter, “Sovereignty along a West African Frontier.” Only a few scholars have addressed smaller communities in neighboring regions. See, for example, Parrinder, The Story of Ketu, and Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass, for histories of Kétu. See also Law, Ouidah, for a study on how the former slaving port town operated outside of the purview of the much larger Dahomean state and Sweet, Domingos Àlvares, for a discussion of how people in what many call the Mahi confederation navigated tenuous relationships with Dahomey. 31. The historical scholarship on the Ọhọri is either extremely out of date or limited to studies that assess their history in the context of a series of armed rebellions against French colonial forces. An imperialist history includes Tereau and Huttel, “Monographie du Hollidge.” Cornevin, Histoire du Dahomey, likewise offers some sections on the Ọhọri past. Studies of Ọhọri resistance include Garcia, “Les mouvements de résistances au Dahomey”; Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije”; and d’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation.” 32. In this sense, Ọhọri narratives can also be placed within the wider context of resistance and collaboration in African history. Scholars have long engaged in historical debates using resistance as a category of analysis to generate a better understanding of how Africans negotiated and adapted to colonial rule. The following includes a partial list of key texts: Shepperson and Price, Independent African; Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia and “Connexions Between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism”; Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni”; Cobbing, “The Absent Priesthood”; Isaacman and Isaacman, “Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa”; Vail and White, “Forms of Resistance”; Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa; Glassman,

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Feasts and Riot; Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine; Robinson, Paths of Accommodation; Mbembé, On the Postcolony; Lawrance, et al., Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks; Newell, The Power to Name; and Lawrence, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism. 33. Only a handful of scholars have moved beyond thinking of resistance outside of the framework of colonial rule. Miescher, “Building the City of the Future,” hints that Africans in postcolonial Ghana resisted policies instituted by the government when it constructed the Akosombo Dam. I am not aware of scholars who have discussed resistance and collaboration in the context of precolonial African societies, although Law, Ouidah, recognized how citizens were marginalized by precolonial Dahomey. 34. In francophone Africa, roads are often named for the towns or villages they connect. 35. Porto Novo was the capital of colonial Dahomey. It remains the nominal capital of the Republic of Benin, but virtually all government and commercial business is conducted in the much larger port city of Cotonou. 36. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 37. See Figure 1. 38. For a more nuanced description of local ecology, see Nagel et al., “Conservation of Biodiversity in a Relic Forest in Benin.” 39. Iliffe, Africans, offers a detailed discussion of how soil in much of Africa lacks important nutrients that challenge agricultural production. 40. For a detailed discussion on varying weather patterns in Africa, see McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land. 41. Pobé Commune Development Plan, 9. While rainfall in the region has varied over time, data collected by colonial officials in Zagnanado and later Pobé administrative circles during the colonial era demonstrate that average rainfall has generally remained consistent over the past century. 42. “Proces-verbal, May 5, 1937 on the political situation in the Holli region,” ANS, AOF Fonds materielles 8G/30. Figures 4 and 5 show how rainy seasons transform the landscape of the Ọhọri region. 43. Colonial administrator Georges Hummel to the lieutenant governor of Dahomey, March 26, 1906, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. Interview with Ogounonté, October 31, 2007. In Yorùbá, Odo-Meta means “three rivers.” The village of Odo-Meta lies in the valley alongside today’s Pobé–Kétu route north of what would be considered the original Ọhọri country. The informant indicated that the village received its name based on how people in the area used the river. “The place is called Three Rivers because a while back there was a river

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION . 

that people divided into three parts,” he said. “One part was for washing clothes. The second was for drinking. And the third was for bathing.” 44. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region, 1936,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. I discuss the settlements of Ọhọri and Adja peoples in more detail in chapter 1. 45. Nago, or Nagot, is a cultural–linguistic term loosely interchangeable with Yorùbá. The imposition of European colonial boundaries in the late nineteenth century accounts for the discussion. For a discussion of historical linguistics and Yorùbá regional dialects, see Eades, The Yoruba Today. For research on how the drawing of arbitrary colonial boundaries impacted local communities in the immediate region, see Asiwaju, “The Alaketu of Ketu and the Onimeko of Meko.” 46. Interview with Moutitaba, Ashamou, and Toini, October 18, 2007. 47. See Figure 6. 48. Raising questions about how to investigate identity formation in postcolonial historical contexts, Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” argues that the construction of former colonial nation-states in European forms reduces indigenous political organization to bland generalities that defy historical reality, because such national identities could not have existed prior to European colonization. 49. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 50. For an exploration of how scholars have examined and complicated themes of nationalism and identity formation, see Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa; Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine; Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier; Apter, The Pan-African Nation; Moore, Suffering for the Territory; Lawrance, Locality, Mobility, and “Nation”; and Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones. 51. Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil, for example, examines how slave communities identified as members of cultural–linguistic “nations” upon arrival in the New World. 52. Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 168. Scholars studying Native America have used the concept of “indigeneity” to push boundaries beyond the normative Eurocentric nation-state. See, for example, Smith, “American Studies without America.” 53. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 4. Scholars studying imperialism, in particular, have struggled to assess how people conceive of citizenship. Examples include Mamdami, Citizen and Subject; Gorman, Imperial Citizenship; Thompson, Colonial Citizens; Dorman et al., Making Nations, Creating Strangers; Lonsdale, “Soil, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya”; Kobo, “ ‘We Are Citizens, Too’ ”; Saada, Empire’s Children; and Smith, Making Citizens in Africa. 54. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation. Scholars have long grappled with the question of how to address the concept of sovereignty in their

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

research. See, for example, Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty?”; Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty”; Sheehan, “ The Problem of Sovereignty in European History”; Howland and White, The State of Sovereignty; Carpenter, “Sovereignty along a West African Frontier”; Lewis, Divided Rule; and White, Unpopular Sovereignty. 55. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, encourage scholars to shift the trajectory of social theory and ask us to devote more attention to how theory may be applied, or received “on the ground,” as it were, in the global south. 56. Emphasis on “the indigenous” tends to associate identity formation with “traditional” communities in marginal regions, employing the term “autochthonous” (“from the soil”) and tracing African communal identities back to “determined colonial and postcolonial interventions,” which in the early twenty-first century were “facilely cited as the cause for a discouraging[ly] wide range of phenomena” (Geschiere, Perils of Belonging, 20–21). 57. Dorothy L. Hodgson elaborates on the concept of “positioning” posited by Li, “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia.” Positioning refers to how indigenous groups negotiate with their nation-states to gain recognition. Li suggested that people draw upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning and argued that identity emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle. Hodgson notes how Maasai communities have positioned themselves relative to highly mobile social and political networks in Tanzania and that recognition of this highlights “multiple, at times possibly contradictory, and always dynamic and shifting possibilities and locations [of identity formation]” (Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, 8). 58. I approach this framework consciously to complicate how scholars view identity in an African historical framework. In an immediate postcolonial environment of the 1960s, scholars often viewed national identities in terms of territoriality and comprehended collective or communal identities as multiethnic in scope. The earlier studies of resistance noted herein emphasized the role of widescale organized revolts as a component of nationalist historical consciousness. Positing a multiethnic approach to comprehending national identities based on artificial colonial boundaries constituted a legacy many found unsettling, prompting Ranger, “Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism,” and Denoon and Kuper, “Nationalist Historians in Search of a Nation,” among others, to reexamine “ethnicity” and communities’ similarities in language, indigenous religious practices, and forms of social organization in terms of a social history “from below” to better reflect how ordinary Africans acted as agents of historical change. However, “ethnic” strife from the late 1960s on made national identities seem like socially and politically destructive concepts. Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” offered respite for those struggling to grant formerly colonized peoples a sense of agency in building up collective social and political identities, but his emphasis on identity formation was based on Euro-

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION . 

pean elite and modular forms that left a majority of former subjects on the margins of history. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, responded by emphasizing thematic fragments, parastatism, and ambiguities, which in turn, sparked a new trajectory for thinking about identity formation in global postcolonial studies. 59. The use of paleoecological data by Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome; “multiple levels” of interdisciplinary analysis by Sheridan and Nyamweru, eds., African Sacred Groves; aerial photography by Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway; and examinations of “eco-critical” perspectives by Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, eds., Environment at the Margins, has forced us to rethink thematic connections between ecology and social organization in African historical contexts. 60. The role of human actors in causing environmental degradation was a popular explanation for the widespread famines in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, when climate scientists closed what James McCann calls “the neo-Malthusian circle” by blaming population growth and poor land management by African farmers for desertification and famine throughout the continent (McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land, 56). In shifting responsibility away from Africans, McCann and other scholars created a new paradigm that credited Africans with adapting to colonial policies and managing their environments efficiently (see, for example, Showers, “Soil Erosion in the Kingdom of Lesotho”; Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya; Webb, Desert Frontier; Leach and Mearns, Lie of the Land; Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape; Ranger, Voices from the Rocks). The recognition spearheaded a twofold shift in determining how Africans perceived landscape and the fact that ecological changes had not always been directly tied to human action or policy decisions. 61. In chapter 5, I explore in more depth how Ọhọri interpretations of their industrialized landscape in the postcolonial era offer new insights into critiques of modernity by Africans and other formerly colonized peoples. Apter, Politics of Modernization, opened the discourse in the mid-1960s by positing a theoretical framework for studying “modernizing” former spaces of empire. For more recent scholarship on the subject, see Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Mitchell, Questions of Modernity and Rule of Experts; Cooper, Colonialism in Question; Geschiere et al., Readings in Modernity in Africa; Thomas, “Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts”; Isaacman and Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development; Bloom et al., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa; Apter, “Modernization Theory and the Figure of Blindness”; Hecht, “Radioactive Excess”; Miescher, “ ‘No One Should Be Worse Off ’ ”; and Tischler, “Negotiating Modernization.” 62. The Pobé Commune Development Plan, identified how aerial photos taken of southern Dahomey in 1953 corroborate the narrative. While I located documentation in France’s Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer that indicated colonial

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

administrators indeed took aerial photos, I could not locate any of these in archives in France, Benin, or Senegal. 63. Paleoecological evidence used by Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, dispelled prevailing notions that deforestation and desertification exist on the scale that government leaders and development pundits would have us believe. The approach offered new evidence to support the paradigm discussed herein that credited Africans with managing their ecological surroundings more efficiently than colonial officials suggested. 64. In many ways, it is difficult to divorce critiques of modernity as noted herein from environmental change and notions of development. A partial list of the relevant scholarship would include Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine; Moore and Vaughn, Cutting Down Trees; Escobar, Encountering Development; Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines of Development; Cooper and Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences; Scott, Seeing like a State; Brantley, Feeding Families; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; Peet and Hartwick, Theories of Development; Cooper, “Writing the History of Development”; Bourbonniere, “Ripple Effects”; and Osborne, “Controlling Development.” 65. Cronon, “A Place for Stories” was among the first to connect the themes. See also Hofmeyr, We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told. In African studies, Gengenbach, “Naming the Past in a ‘Scattered’ Land”; Gilles-Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past; Gengenbach, Binding Memories; Shetler, Imagining Serengeti; McGregor, Crossing the Zambezi; and Sunseri, Wielding the Ax, have taken similar approaches to promote how understandings of memory are intricately intertwined with examining environmental change. 66. For studies of environmental change relative to an era of colonial rule, see also Berry, No Condition Is Permanent; Beinart and McGregor, eds., Social History and African Environments; Conte, Highland Sanctuary; Showers, Imperial Gullies; Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change; and Beinart and Hughes, eds., Environment and Empire. 67. Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway. 68. Shetler, Imagining Serengeti, 1. 69. Ibid., 24. 70. Gathering oral data to gauge historical change constitutes one of the more contested debates in African historiography. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, sparked debates concerning the veracity and utility of oral traditions and oral data. See also White et al., African Words, African Voices. 71. With “Doing Social History from Pim’s Doorway,” David Cohen triggered a shift through his work on Luo pims in Kenya by arguing that analyses of stories passed down by “pims” — female elders from outside of the kinship network taken in by families to help rear children — revealed an “interior architecture” that scholars could use to gauge changes in family and political structures. History “from

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION . 

below” based on historical memory is also depicted by Klein, “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget”; Roberts, “Reversible Social Processes, Historical Memory, and the Production of History”; Amin, Event, Memory, and Metaphor; Malkki, Purity and Exile; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton; and White, Speaking with Vampires. Akyeampong, Between the Sea and Lagoon; Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter; and Sheridan and Nyamweru, eds., African Sacred Groves, have demonstrated how informants’ memorialization or forgetting of certain natural sites lend insights into changes that occurred during the colonial encounter. 72. Jansen, Griot’s Craft, is particularly skeptical of the use of oral tradition, arguing that contemporary biases impact the dissemination of tradition. 73. See, for example, Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, whose informants in Guinea-Bissau used what he called “culturally encoded” words to identify animals, crops, and songs, among other things, which for him served as “starting points for framing meaningful questions during oral interviews with local people.” 74. New “levers” revealed by hearing about traditions in Buganda healing shrines that became new spaces from which traditions were told are reported by Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze, 25–26. 75. Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here, 15–16. 76. Shetler, Imagining Serengeti, 20. 77. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 31. 78. Oral historians are responsible throughout West Africa for disseminating local histories. Positions are often hereditary, and they often tell histories through performance of song, epic poetry, and storytelling. 79. Another assistant, Florent Djagoun, worked with me during initial field research during the summer of 2006. 80. Jean Didier likewise conducted four supplemental interviews on my behalf in 2014 and 2015. 81. The exact year in which Verger took the photos is not known, although the Pierre Verger Foundation believes that he visited the area at some point between 1949 and 1953. 82. Most of the archival material I analyze in this study is colonial documentation. European missionaries operated on the plateaus, however, and historians often use missionary documents in piecing together the precolonial African past. Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass, for example, supplements oral data with mission records. There is no evidence, however, that European missionaries worked in the Ọhọri region. King Massa of Onigbolo indicated Christian missionaries did not actively set up missions in the valley because of the difficulty in gaining access to it during both the colonial and independence eras. 83. In reading colonial documents, I follow the methodological approach taken by the “subaltern studies school,” which recognized that “in a historical narrative . . .

 . NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

it is a process of ‘distension and expansion’ of its syntagm which helps paradigmatic elements infiltrate and reconstitute its discrete segments into a meaningful whole” (Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Guha and Spivak, 57). 84. Beyond newspapers and journals, archival material from the era of independence remains scarce. At the time I conducted research for the project, documents from the Kérékou era had yet to be “declassified.” I likewise attempted many times to contact European companies that had worked on road-building projects and cement factory construction to inquire about materials they might have archived, but I received no response. 85. Telegram, January 13, 1937, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30.

. The Roads into Igbó Ilú 1. Interview with King Massa, August 4, 2011, Onigbolo. 2. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 15–17. 3. “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. The report, republished in Memoire du Benin, no. 2, details oral traditions that a French officer of the Eighth Battalion of Senegalese tirailleurs, based in Ouidah, Dahomey, collected in Ọhọri-Ije from 1936 to 1938. Much of what the offi cer recorded was corroborated in interviews with King Massa, August 4, 2011; King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011, Issaba; as well as the historians of their respective villages. The author of the report refers to Akura (pronounced Ahoua by my informants) as Adoko and his wife, Kuoka, as Akura. This constitutes a notable conflict, but I err with local historians’ accounts. 4. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 16. 5. The majority of Asiwaju’s informants in the 1960s claimed the original settlers arrived from Ọyọ, although some also suggested that the couple might have emigrated from Ilé-Ifè. My informants approximately forty years later indicated Ahoua and Kouoka emigrated from Ilé-Ifè. 6. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 17. 7. I use the word “interstitial” to convey a sense of how Ọhọri-Ije lay geographically and culturally outside of the space of larger polities that historians generally devote more time to studying. For discussion of space and spatial dynamics in African history, see Howard and Shain, Spatial Factor in African History; and Lawrance, Locality, Mobility, and “Nation.” 8. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 259. 9. Much of the historiography on statecraft and political organization among African communities emphasizes centrally organized communities. That roughly one-third to one-half of African communities organized themselves politically and socially in a decentralized manner prior to colonial rule makes the discourse on what scholars have in the past referred to as “acephalous,” “stateless,” and “seg-

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

mentary” groups an important addition to the discourse. It is also worth noting, however, that decentralization includes extraordinarily complex forms of organization. African societies align themselves in vastly different ways, and there are few, if any, uniform rules that connect decentralized groups on the continent. The historiography on decentralized forms of organization in Africa is small relative to scholarship devoted to more centralized societies. Nonetheless, there are important contributions that highlight the varied nature of decentralized rule. For examples, see Alagoa, Small Brave City-State; Horton, “Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa”; Afigbo, “Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies”; McIntosh, “Pulse Model”; Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade; Klein, “Slave Trade and Decentralized Societies”; and Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves. 10. Scholars have devoted a considerable amount of attention to examining domestic slavery in Africa and the impact the transatlantic slave trade had on subSaharan communities. To get a sense of the trajectory of debates, see Rodney, “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression”; Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery; Manning, Slavery and African Life; Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World; Klein, Breaking the Chains; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women; Falola and Lovejoy, Pawnship in Africa; Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade; Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves; Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar; and Stilwell, Slaving and Slavery in African History. 11. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, November 7, 2007, Itchagba. I have replaced Mr. Assogba’s reference to “our fathers” in the translation of the interview with “their fathers” for the sake of clarity. In referring to “our fathers,” he meant the earliest settlers of the Ọhọri country. 12. Interview with King Massa, August 4, 2011, Onigbolo. 13. Johnson, History of the Yorubas. 14. Adediran, Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, 32. 15. The vague time line of his journey makes it difficult to know exactly what sort of weapon Ahoua would have carried on his journey. Africans had certainly acquired muskets and gunpowder through trading activities with Europeans during this era, and blacksmiths often manufactured similar weapons. The nature of trade suggests that many Yorùbá-speaking communities further in the hinterland—particularly those from ruling families—would have gained access to firearms. For a thorough discussion of what he referred to as the “gun-slave cycle” and “horse-slave cycle” and how the trade in weapons played a significant role in the development of the transatlantic slave trade, see Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of an Atlantic World, 66–67. 16. Interview with Okpetcha Adeyi and Achebe Ougouni, July 4, 2006, Issaba. 17. Interview with King Massa, August 4, 2011. There are varying stories of the role the snake played in the foundation myth. Other informants, for example,

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

indicated Ahoua followed the serpent all the way from his place of origin. Informants told Asiwaju that the snake joined Ahoua from Ọyọ (Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 16). Other informants I spoke with told a similar tale. The only difference was the snake accompanied him from Ilé-Ifè. See also Oyekan, Histoire sur l’Origine des Hollis, 5–6. 18. Those who say Ahoua followed the snake from his place of origin also suggest that the snake “disappeared” at some point during their journey in the valley. All informants seem to agree that the snake at some point claimed the land. 19. Interview with King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011. He called the leaves ekàn, which refers to the new shoots of a mature tree. 20. Interview with King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011. 21. In many respects, the tradition also serves as a way for Ọhọri to claim that their community’s founders were the original settlers in the valley. Since at least the early colonial era, Ọhọri have engaged in debates with Adja-speaking peoples in the valley about which community settled in the valley first. Their debates appear to have become more congenial in recent years, but shortly after the French established an administrative presence in the area, disputes occurred as administrators attempted to understand political structures in the valley. Conflict never reached a scale where violence ensued, but tensions peaked when political power in later colonial administrative eras was at stake. See “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2, for French colonial administrators’ perspectives on the issue. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhori-Ije,” 259, suggests that members of the Ọhọri community fiercely disputed Adja settler myths in the precolonial era. 22. “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. The use of the term “refugee” in this report could mean many things. It could simply mean a foreigner, or perhaps someone forced to leave after a violent dispute. However, the ambiguity might make sense, particularly if he was forced to leave his natal home. 23. Interview with King Massa, August 4, 2011. 24. Interview with King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011. 25. Oyekan, Histoire Sur L’Origine des Hollis, 7. 26. Interview with King Massa, conducted by Jean Didier Akpona, August 15, 2014, Onigbolo. 27. King Massa referred to the community as a royaume, or “kingdom” when highlighting the nature of Alafèka’s role, even though in this instance it appears that the community had yet to recognize a centralized political hierarchy. Members of the community may have numerous reasons to claim a king existed in the area before processes of political centralization actually occurred. It may, for example, reflect a contemporary desire to promote a long-standing tradition of centralized rule.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

28. Interview with King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011. 29. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007, Issaba. 30. A new discourse on arbitrary imperial boundaries has shed light on the permeability and uncertainty of frontier zones, and historians writing about these spaces have encouraged scholars to view borders critically. See, for example, Etherington, Great Treks and Mapping Colonial Conquest; and Levine, Living Man from Africa. 31. For a concise discussion on the demographic impact the transatlantic slave trade had on African societies, see Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. 32. For an extensive history of Ọyọ and regional strife, see Law, Oyo Empire; and Akinjogbin, War and Peace in Yorubaland. 33. For scholarly discussions, see Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbors; Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba; Akintoyé, Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland; Law, Oyo Empire; Falola, Military in Nineteenth Century Yoruba Politics; and Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. 34. There is an emerging discourse on asylum in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. See, for example, Berger et al., African Asylum at a Crossroads. The word “asylum” may not often get placed in an earlier historical context, but I use it consciously to demonstrate how people in West Africa fleeing slaving were in many ways political refugees. 35. See Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba, 34. 36. For the role rumor and innuendo have played in constructing African history, see White, Speaking with Vampires. 37. The exact dates of his arrival in the valley are, of course, unknown, but from what we know about the historical context and his place on an Ọhọri king list, it seems likely that he settled there around the mid-nineteenth century. 38. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 39. “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. French administrators’ informants from Kétu believed that the Adja and Ọhọri communities fell under the purview of the Alafin of Kétu. Members of the Ọhọri community contest this notion on the grounds that they voluntarily abdicated prominent princely status many generations earlier. Adja tradition indicates that their people fled the area around the Mono River after experiencing political problems with the Abomey Kingdom. The nature of the problems they encountered is unclear. Nevertheless, the original Adja settlers first traveled to the eastern side of the Ouémé River, where they formed a small, independent kingdom in what is now Ouignan. It was from here that the first Adja king, Ahossoundjé, wrested control of what is now the Ọhọri heartland from people living in Ibiyan, whose hunting ground it was. Adja tradition suggests that he took control of this region by force, and even though their ancestors sought approval from the Adja

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

king to settle their region of the valley, members of the Ọhọri community draw on their roots in Ibiyan to suggest that they had established legitimate political control of the region. Members of the Ọhọri community substantiate their claims based on the understanding that Ibiyan had at one point controlled the area, giving them original settler status in the region, even though some of their ancestors, notably Aromokoukomoulèkè, received permission from the Adja king. 40. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 41. It is important to make clear the distinction between the African empire of Dahomey and the French colony and independent African republic of that name. Established around the mid-seventeenth century, the kingdom of Dahomey was a regional economic power during the precolonial era. The abolishment of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century challenged Dahomey’s economic standing. France conquered the kingdom in 1894 after a struggle that lasted two and a half years and subsequently incorporated Dahomey into French West Africa. 42. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 43. Interview conducted by Jean Didier Akpona with King Massa, August 15, 2014. 44. This appears to be the source for Asiwaju’s assumption that communities from Ọyọ and Ilé-Ifè merged. 45. Interviews with King Massa, August 4, 2011, and King Awélédé II, August 5, 2011. 46. Interview conducted by Jean Didier Akpona with King Massa, August 15, 2014. 47. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 48. A version of this crown worn by King Awélédé II existed when I conducted interviews in 2007. 49. Interview conducted by Jean Didier Akpona with King Massa, August 15, 2014. 50. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 51. Interviews with Okpetcha Adeyi and Achebe Ougouni, July 4, 2006. See also “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 52. King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 53. For the discourse in forming African identity, see Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba; and Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous. 54. The seminal work on the topic, Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, sparked debates. Although Ranger applied the concept largely to colonial situations, it should be noted that African communities likewise engaged in similar processes. 55. Numerous scholars of African history and beyond have drawn on Hobsbwam and Ranger for inspiration. For critiques and notable advancements in the discourse on invented tradition, however, see in particular, Spear, “Neo-

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention”; Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival; and Newell, Power to Name. Spear highlighted the “limits” of invented tradition in the context of British colonial rule. Peterson advanced the discourse by describing how members of evangelical movements in midtwentieth-century East Africa “unsettled” the inventions of tradition by engaging actively in new processes of self-narration and political identity formation, whereas Newell examined African-owned newspapers to demonstrate how contributors often concealed their identities to develop new forms of subjectivity and create a new type of political discourse. 56. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, and Adediran, Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, offer the most comprehensive accounts of the precolonial past, but both devote only a few pages to the history of Yorùbá communities living west of Nigeria’s border. 57. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 17. 58. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 258. 59. Adediran, Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, 22. 60. In discussing the emergence of an Atlantic World, scholars previously focused primarily on slave experiences along the Middle Passage and in the “new world,” or emphasized Africans who were either enslaved or actively participated in the trade. For a partial list, see Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, and A Cultural History of the Atlantic World; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Carney, Black Rice; Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar; Sweet, Recreating Africa and Domingos Álvares; Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil; and Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans. More recently, Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, and Candido, African Slaving Port, have redirected the discourse on an Atlantic World back to Africa by depicting the histories of the important slaving towns of Annamboe in what is now Ghana and Benguela in Angola, respectively. Ọhọri narratives indicating a conscious rejection of slavery in an Atlantic context raises new questions about how Africans responded and adapted to slaving. 61. James Sweet’s discussion of Mahi resistance to Dahomey in the early chapters of Domingos Àlvares constitute an exception to this trend and offers scholars a useful model from which to explore in more depth how African communities living on the interstices of regional empires in West Africa responded and reacted to slaving activities. 62. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 259. 63. During an armed uprising against French forces in April 1914, the French military commandant in Dahomey, Chef de bataillon Maroix, estimated the Ọhọri population to be around six thousand (Maroix to lieutenant governor of Dahomey, Porto Novo, May 12, 1914, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 4). Maroix would likely have based this figure in part on tax rolls taken the previous

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

year. He had installed himself in Aba during this period, which may lend his estimates some legitimacy. Either way, it is difficult to assess for certain the accuracy of this figure, because numerous residents fled their homes every time a colonial official entered their villages. The point to be made, however, is that whatever the population, it seems likely to have been augmented considerably during the latter half of the nineteenth century, since Ọhọri-Ije welcomed refugees fleeing the upheaval in Yorùbá communities to the east following the unraveling of Ọyọ and forceful Dahomean expansion from the west. 64. “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 65. Neither General Dodds nor the author of the “Study” cited in the preceding note, who stresses Dodds’ impressions, mentions the name of the king, but based on the king list presented to Jean-Didier Akpona in his interview with King Massa, August, 15, 2014, it seems likely it would have been during Atoyéshéshébi Omi’s reign. 66. “Study” cited in note 64. “Adjas and Hollis remained politically independent. They recognized the leader of Kétu as a religious figure, but beyond that it was little more than a defensive alliance,” Dodds notes. 67. Interviews with Barthlemi Odjoubé, October 4, 2007, Pobé and Ogoubei, October 7, 2007, Pobé. 68. For a discussion of Kétu’s history, including broader discussions of the Dahomean sacking of the town, see Parrinder, Story of Ketu; Asiwaju, “Alaketu of Ketu and the Onimeko of Meko”; and Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass. 69. Interview with Adèyinka Moutitaba, Assane Ashamou, and Odjo Toini, October 18, 2007, Pobé. 70. European missionaries operated on the plateaus during precolonial and early colonial eras. Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass, supplements her oral data with mission records. As noted above, however, King Massa indicated that Christian missionaries never established missions in the valley during a precolonial era.

. Roads to Subversion 1. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, November 7, 2007, Itchagba. 2. “Report on the Political Situation for the Agony-Ouéré-Kétou Protectorate, September 1895,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 1. 3. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 260. According to the author of “Study of the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2, the region’s inhabitants viewed Dodds as having “liberated” them from Dahomean oppression. 4. “Proces-verbal from a meeting between French officials and inhabitants in the village of Dequi Fyo on April 29, 1914,” ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2, dos-

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

sier 1. Asiwaju also notes, however, that minor skirmishes and tense encounters occurred in 1895 when French officials attempted to recruit soldiers and laborers in Ọhọri-Ije. 5. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 260. 6. For a discussion on the frail economic realities of colonial rule, see Berry, No Condition Is Permanent. The belief that Africans living or working out of the purview of a colonial state exerted power that influenced colonial agendas is implicit in her analysis, which thus challenges the overly simplistic binary terms in which scholars had previously viewed European colonizers and African subjects. Berry’s conclusions inspired scholars to question presumed notions of colonial hegemony. Using her research as a launching pad, scholars sought different ways to uncover and validate the tenuous realities of colonial rule in Africa. For a better understanding of the banalities of colonial rule, also see Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton; Isaacman and Roberts (eds.), Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa; and Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention.” 7. Report on the political situation in Sagon during October, 1895, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 1. Sagon was an administrative region in early French colonial Dahomey. Ọhọri-Ije nominally fell under its jurisdiction. 8. Interview with Tedédé Kougbaki, October 5, 2007, Issakou. 9. Letter from the administrator of the Zagnanado Circle to the governor of Dahomey concerning his excursion into Holli country, March 10, 1909, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 10. The exact date of Awélédé’s death is in dispute. Based on oral data he collected in 1969, Asiwaju put it in 1905. Colonial documents indicate, however, that it occurred in 1906. 11. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 261. 12. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” by Inspector Monguillot, May 14, 1916, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 13. D’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation,” argued that members of the community grew more cotton in the early years of the twentieth century to fund a build-up in weaponry. For discussion of early colonial economic policies and cotton production, see Isaacman and Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton. 14. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 15. Letter from Colonial Administrator Georges Hummel to the LieutenantGovernor of Dahomey, March 26, 1906, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 16. Ibid. Hummel did not specify what type of fetishes members of the community placed on the road.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

17. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 18. Letter, March 26, 1906, ANB Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. In addition to serving as a lower level Ọhọri chief, Issokia was related to Awélédé, possibly his son. It does not seem, however, that Issokia took the meeting as a means to seek French support in seeking revenge for the king’s death. Hummel does not mention anything of that sort in his meeting notes and portrays Issokia primarily as someone who could act as an intermediary between French administrators and Adoko leaders. 19. Ibid. 20. Although it is not evident from Hummel’s correspondence, it seems possible that religious leaders either chose not to meet with foreigners or were prohibited from doing so by “custom.” That certainly is the case today. When engaging with religious figures in the field, Jean-Didier Akpona was allowed an audience with prominent religious figures because his mother was from the Ọhọri region. 21. Among the Ọhọri community’s prominent religious figures, including priestesses, many also served as figureheads in prevalent Șango cults. Worship of the Yorùbá god of thunder and lightning factored into rituals, and in particular into prayers for rain. Șango worship remains an important element of indigenous religious practice today. Interview with Albertine Olougbeka, Monlèkan Ogouyémi, and Talabi Salako, October 17, 2007, Iletchi. Olougbeka suggested that priests and priestesses in earlier times would have likely performed rituals to encourage strong rains as a means to discourage foreigners from entering the valley. 22. Letter, March 26, 1906, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 23. Ibid. 24. Zagnanado monthly report, February 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 2, dossier 4. 25. Zagnanado monthly report, April 1907, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 1. 26. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. Cited from a Zagnanado monthly report found in Monguillot’s compilation of political reports. Although most Ọhọri probably held indigenous religious beliefs, many were Muslim, and based on his name, Aladji was likely one of these. Those who practiced Islam were probably traders whose families had converted while trading in important Islamic centers such as Kétu. Interview with Tedédé Kougbaki, October 5, 2007. The informant mentioned how members of the Ọhọri community “had for a long time had practiced a little bit of everything: Islam, animism, fetishism; whatever they wanted.” In many respects, his statement highlights the ambiguous nature of religious practice in many African societies. Furthermore, it demonstrates how Ọhọri view communal identity, outside of strictly religious beliefs. On conversion in Africa, see especially Balandier, “Messianism and Nationalism in Black Africa”; Horton, “African Conversion”; Fisher,

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

“Conversion Reconsidered”; Horton, “On the Rationality of Conversion”; Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women; and Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. 27. Zagnanado monthly report, February, 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. 28. Holli Opposition to the Construction of the Route Connecting Massè to Adja-Oueré, March 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. 29. Subversive actions by Hollis during the construction of the route connecting Massè to Adja-Oueré, April, 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. 30. Holli Opposition to the Construction of the Route Connecting Massè to Adja-Oueré, March 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. 31. Letter from the Administrator of the Zagnanado Circle to the Governor of Dahomey concerning his excursion into Holli country, March 10, 1909, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 32. Zagnanado monthly report, August 1911, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. According to reports on Ọhọri opposition to the project, people from nearby villages of Massè, Agony, and Sagon begrudgingly sent laborers to the valley. In addition to fearing for their safety, recruited laborers complained that they were doing work that members of the Ọhọri community were obligated to perform. 33. See d’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation.” 34. Holli Opposition to the Construction of the Route Connecting Massè to Adja-Oueré, March 1908, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 2. 35. Letter from the Administrator of Zagnanado to the Governor of Dahomey concerning his excursion into Holli country on March 10, 1909, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 36. Zagnanado monthly report, January 1907, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 1. 37. Letter from the Administrator of Zagnanado to the Governor of Dahomey concerning his excursion into Holli country on March 10, 1909, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2. 38. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 39. Colonial officials may have not recognized transitions in Ọhọri political organization following the establishment of formal colonial rule in Dahomey, but contemporary documents indicate the significant changes, in response to colonial attempts to penetrate Igbó Ilú, that took place following the death of King Awélédé. 40. Letter from the Administrator of Zagnanado to the Governor of Dahomey concerning his excursion into Holli country on March 10, 1909, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 2.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

41. Zagnanado monthly report, October 1907, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E20, box 4, dossier 1. 42. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 43. It should be noted that the new leaders did not necessarily represent three different “classes” per se. Most members of the community, including religious figures, traders, and balóguns, would have been farmers. It seems likely that individuals could have also filled multiple roles. Some Adoko leaders certainly would have been traders and possibly also war chiefs. 44. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 45. Interviews with Okpetcha Adèyi and Achebe Ougouni, July 4, 2006, Issaba. See also, “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 46. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 47. Letter from Holli-Kétou administrator to the Lieutenant-Governor of Dahomey, November 23, 1912, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 5. 48. Pobé monthly report, July 1914, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E15, box 1, dossier 1. 49. Interviews conducted by Jean-Didier Akpona with King Massa, February 13, 2015, Onigbolo, and King Awélédé II, February 27, 2015, Issaba. 50. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007, Issaba. 51. Questionnaire on the Holli affair, answered by Captain Angelini, May 1914, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 4G, box 16. 52. Letter from Holli-Kétou administrator to the Lieutenant-Governor of Dahomey, November 23, 1912, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 5. 53. Ibid. 54. Response by Assistant Administrator Chassin on the political situation in Hollidjé, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 55. Nearby communities who engaged with French administrators often resented the Ọhọri for not providing workers on colonial projects. Many, like members of the Adja community who also lived in the valley, also lived nearer to water sources and were suspicious of the Ọhọri. 56. Reports on the political situation dated August 31 and November 7, 1915, in ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G, 21, summarize the previous year’s attacks. 57. Response by Assistant Administrator Chassin on the political situation in Hollidjé, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 58. Confidential letter from Pobé Circle Administrator, Ali Hauet, to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 59. Report on the Holli rebellion by M. Monguillot, colonial inspector second class, to the Governor of Dahomey on May 1, 1914, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 4G, box 16.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

60. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 61. Questionnaire on the Holli affair, answered by Captain Angelini, May 1914, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 4G, box 16, and Holli-Kétou political report from the first trimester, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, dossier 1. 62. Chef de bataillon Maroix to lieutenant governor of Dahomey, May 12, 1914, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 4. On April 10, 1914, a Lieutenant Le Floch brought twenty-three African guards to start felling trees in Igbó Ilú. Eight heavily armed tirailleurs surrounded them as they worked. See political reports and messages telephoniques in ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21, “Troubles in Holli country, Political Situation.” Asiwaju says that colonial forces cleared the trees so that they could see guerrillas, whose weaponry had a limited range. His informants, interviewed in the 1960s, indicated that the French commander Maroix had “ordered the felling of trees and general clearing of both sides of the military routes to the width of one hundred meters on either side. Igbó Ilú . . . was destroyed in this process” (Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in ỌhọriIje,” 258). Shortly after suppressing the first stages of rebellion in Ọhọri country, Maroix conducted operations in Togoland and was appointed military commander of the “district lying between the provisional Franco-English boundary and the existing provinces of Dahomey and Upper Senegal” (W. A. Crabtree, “The Conquest of Togoland” [1915], 391). 63. D’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation,” 82, suggests that inhabitants used dead trees to block roads and pathways leading into the Ọhọri heartland. The Monguillot and Maroix reports submitted in 1914 and 1915, respectively, support this. 64. Chef de bataillon Maroix, report on political, administrative, and military operations, Pobé, February 15 to December 31, 1914, filed January 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 65. Interview with Kossoko Ilo, November 13, 2007, Issaba. 66. Extract from a Pobé Circle monthly report, October 1915, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 67. Letter from Brigade Captain Angelini to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 68. Lieutenant governor of Dahomey to Chef de bataillon Maroix, February 14, 1914, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 69. Letter from Pobé Circle Administrator, Ali Hauet, to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, February 18, 1914, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 70. Report on la révolte des Hollis by Captain Vian, Pobé Circle Commandant, August 31, 1915, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 71. Pobé monthly report, July 1914, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E15, box 1, dossier 1.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

72. Ibid. 73. The Pobé commandant who wrote the July 1914 monthly report speculated that the rift that had developed between Otutubiodjo and Esija by this time also included the influential Adoko healer Issa Saïcho. 74. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 75. Letter from the AOF Governor General to the French Minister of Colonies on the internment of Esija, Akoagu, and Eitcha, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 575, dossier 3. 76. It is worth noting that colonial administrators also devoted funds to building roads and infrastructure in African colonies to support the transport of soldiers and commodities. Hew Strachen suggests that “in general the war in Africa has been neglected by scholars” (The First World War in Africa, 185). Nonetheless, some scholars have devoted efforts to understanding the social and economic impacts of the war in African colonies. For examples of the effects of war policies in francophone Africa, see Clayton, France, Soldiers, and Africa, and Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts. 77. Letter from Captain Vian to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, September 7, 1915, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 78. Confidential letter from the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey to the Governor General of French West Africa, September 3, 1915, ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21. 79. Letter from the AOF Governor General to the French Minister of Colonies on the internment of Ọhọri chief, Otutubiodjo, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 575, dossier 3. 80. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007. He recalled learning from village elders that French authorities first deported Otutubiodjo to a prison in Zagnanado, before sending him to Abomey, from where officials sent him to Mauritania, where he “remained in spirit.” 81. General Pineau, AOF military commander in chief to governor-general, June 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 82. Pobé monthly report, July 1914, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E15, box 1, dossier 1. 83. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 259. 84. General Pineau, AOF military commander in chief to governor-general, June 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 85. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 258. 86. Ibid., 259. 87. “Troubles in Holli Country: Political Situations, 1914–1916,” ANS, Affaires politiques, ser. 8G 21.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

88. General Pineau, AOF military commander in chief, report to governorgeneral, June 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5, and Chef de bataillon Maroix, report on political, administrative, and military operations, Pobé, February 15 to December 31, 1914, filed January 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. Both reports estimated Ọhọri demographics, probably based on tax rolls. It is difficult to gauge the exact number of younger males who might have served as laborers, but colonial reports give a sense of administrators’ assumptions about potential African labor in the valley. Maroix’s report also describes the battles that took place during the year, as well as colonial reconnaissance missions.

. Going to the Greens Seller 1. Group interview with Oké Ogouninhou, Idji Kpedé, Ogou Odjougbele, Salako Souley, Adjoyo Idokou, German Ọkpé, and Bolayi Ogouniyi, July 17, 2006, near Odo Meta. Their village is roughly ten kilometers north of Onigbolo. They told a settlement story that was similar to that of Tollou and Fadikpé in that the founders of their village also moved north from the Ọhọri heartland because “there were no whites” in the region. The dates of settlement are unclear, but the group of elders interviewed were among those from a first generation born in the village, which would correspond with a probable movement in the late 1910s to the 1930s. 2. Numerous informants told me the story of the founding of the village of Oligbolo. Among the more animated were interviews with Tollou and Fadikpé’s daughter, Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007, Onigbolo; Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007, Itchagba; and Ilo Etou, October 31, 2007, Onigbolo. 3. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. In describing the “Ọhọri basin,” the report’s author wrote, “in the deepest recesses of the valley there are numerous and very large clusters of bamboo,” surrounded by “a few very large trees, kapoks being among the largest.” 4. Ibid. Roughly two years before, on December 3, 1912, the French colonial administration in Dahomey created the Holli-Kétou administrative circle and transferred civil administrative rule of the valley from the Zagnanado administrative circle. In principle, the military administration extended throughout the entire valley, from Pobé to Kétu, from 1914 to 1935. In reality, however, the French administration had a limited military presence north of the Ọhọri political and social center. 5. Ibid. The colony set up three posts in the region: one in Ọhọri-Ije near Aba on January 23, 1915; a second in the neighboring village of Iga, a few kilometers northeast of Pobé near the Nigerian border on the same day; and a third in Kétu on October 19, 1916. At their peak, each post housed approximately twenty tirailleurs at a time, leaving significant swathes of the valley north of Aba unpatrolled.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

6. Interviews with Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007; Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007; and Ilo Etou, October 31, 2007. 7. “First Trimester Political Report,” May 16, 1916, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, dossier 2. 8. For historical scholarship on the period, see Tereau and Huttel, “Monographie du Hollidge”; Cornevin, Histoire du Dahomey; Garcia, “Les mouvements de résistances au Dahomey”; Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in ỌhọriIje”; and d’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation.” 9. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. The report, which included a list of Ọhọri markets, was the only reference I found to Oligbolo in colonial records. 10. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 144. 11. For a discussion on the importance of nodal points in understanding the functionality of spaces, see Howard and Shain, eds., Spatial Factor in African History, and Lawrance, Locality, Mobility, and “Nation.” 12. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 268. 13. Interview with Kossoko Ilo, November 13, 2007, Odjou Olokpé. 14. Interview with King Massa, conducted by Jean-Dider Akpona, February 12, 2015, Onigbolo. The king said that Adoko’s protection is still felt “from time to time,” but only rarely. 15. “First Trimester Political Report,” May 16, 1916, ANOM, Affaires Politiques, box 574, dossier 2. The French administration officially categorized the colonial presence in Ọhọri-Ije as a “military administration,” but this report speaks of “occupation” by the tirailleurs. 16. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E, box 48, dossier 2. 17. General Pineau, AOF military commander in chief, to governor-general, June 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 18. For detailed discussions of la révolte in the context of resistance to colonial rule, see Garcia, “Les mouvements de résistances au Dahomey”; Asiwaju, “AntiFrench Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije”; and d’Almeida-Topor, “Une société paysanne devant la colonisation.” 19. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E, box 48, dossier 2. 20. General Pineau, AOF military commander in chief, to governor-general, June 15, 1915, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5.The figures are based on colonial estimates. In his report to the AOF governor-general, General Pinaud speculated that the prerevolt population had been around five thousand. Chef de bataillon Maroix, reporting on the fighting that occurred during 1915, placed the figure at closer to six thousand. Observations from the Inspector of Colonies, HolliKétou Circle, 1918, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 2, estimates the

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

Ọhọri population in 1916 as 10,294. Gauging the veracity of these estimates is difficult. Colonial officials often based population figures on poll tax rolls, but the refusal by many Ọhọri to pay taxes would have made that problematic. 21. General Order no. 86, police operations in Hollidjé, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 22. The total includes 104 men arrested from 1911 to 1914 and 50 arrested during la révolte des Hollis. Captain Vian, Pobé subdivision, monthly report for December 1915, listing the names of prisoners, dates of incarceration, and sentences, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8; Pineau report to governor-general, June 15, 1915. 23. General Order no. 86, police operations in Hollidjé, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2,801, dossier 5. 24. Unlike in neighboring communities in West Africa, where men engaged in cash crop production while women produced subsistence crops, there was not a significant gendering of agricultural labor among Ọhọri. Informant testimonies bear this out. Interviews with Albertine Olougbeka, Monlèkan Ogouyémi, and Talabi Salako, October 17, 2007, Iletchi; Deborah Olatan, November 7, 2007, Igbo Odo; Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007; Ikpo Ola, November 13, 2007, Odjou Olokpé; Salako Igue Olougbessa, November 13, 2007, Onigbolo; and Babi, November 14, 2007, Igboisso. 25. Pobé subdivision, monthly report for December 1915, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8. 26. Report on the Holli-Kétou Circle, March 17, 1919, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 7. 27. Pobé subdivision, monthly report for December 1915, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8. 28. Observations of the Assistant Inspector of Holli-Kétou, 1918, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 2. The report gives a brief political history of the region. 29. “Holli-Kétou Circle Second Trimester Report, 1925,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 4. Cantons were the equivalent of townships or small administrative subdivisions. 30. Dahomey, fourth trimester 1916 political report, March 5, 1917, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, dossier 3. The word prestataires derives from prestation, “provision of service.” The period of corvée labor done by prestataires in French colonies varied. In the valley in these years, it was often as much as six weeks annually. The colonial administration forcefully recruited prestataires, and numerous informants recalled that elders who lived during that period equated such work with slave labor. Many even suggested that the communal distrust of outsiders that persisted until recently resulted from it. Interviews with Abiala Omonlekan, October 8, 2007, Itchoko, and Firmin Ogounonté, October 31, 2007, Odo-Meta.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

31. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 91. Archival records do not indicate why he was incarcerated. 32. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007. He did not recall his name, but the elder’s portrayal of a person he thought might have been the young son of Otutubiodjo matches well with archival records of Ọkpé. Some Ọhọri also refer to him as Kaga. 33. Installation of Dahomean groups in Hollidjé, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, dossier 5. 34. Nothing in the archival record confirms that soldiers stole chickens from residents, but documentation throughout the period of military administration of the valley depicts an antagonistic relationship between soldiers stationed at the Aba post and locals. Lines of communication, including roads and pathways into the valley were often cut, particularly during rainy seasons. That the post lacked adequate provisions for prolonged periods is likely and might account for why soldiers would plunder local farm stocks. 35. For a thorough explanation of how the term développement entered the French colonial lexicon during the interwar period, see Freed, “Conduits of Culture and Control.” 36. “First Trimester Political Report,” May 16, 1916, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, Dossier 2. 37. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007. 38. “First Trimester Political Report,” May 16, 1916, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, Dossier 2. 39. Extract from the Holli-Kétou Subdivision monthly report, December 1916, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 1, dossier 5. 40. Malnous was wary of inciting more political unrest in the region. He felt that an influx of Fon-speakers might cause another uprising by an already “guarded” Ọhọri population. With numerous colonial forces devoted to World War I operations, Malnous and his supporters were concerned about dedicating more troops to quell internal instability. 41. Group interview at the Aba market, July 3, 2006, and interview with Lawani Lassissi, November 14, 2007, Issaba. 42. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007. His claims are verified by colonial documents that indicate that for fear of Ọhọri retaliation, soldiers stationed at the Aba post rarely, if ever, strayed far from their station. They received supplies and provisions from colonial administrators, who seldom made excursions into the valley because of difficult environmental conditions and fears of being attacked. 43. At the time of my research, there were numerous Fon-speakers living in the valley. Many had emigrated from their birthplaces around Cové (Zagnanado) in the latter part of the colonial era. For example, Firmin Ogounonté, interviewed October

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

31, 2007, had remained in the valley after working for the French firm contracted to build the new Pobé–Kétu road in the mid-1950s, discussed in chapter 4. 44. Holli-Kétou, no. 6, Pobé, April 11, 1923, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, dossier 3. 45. Observations from the Inspector of Colonies, Holli-Kétou Circle, 1918, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 2. The author of the report suggests the Ọhọri population dropped from 10,294 in 1916 to 4,240 two years later. While many likely fled to Nigeria, a significant number also moved north to what became Oligbolo and were unaccounted for by officials who had yet to realize that the new settlement existed. 46. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007. 47. Interview with Salako Igue Olougbessa, November 13, 2007. 48. Extract from a report of Mr. Henri Bésaire, Chief Colonial Geologist, March 31, 1943, Hollidjé, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, dossier 2. Besaire made a thorough geological study of soils in the valley. In particular, he identified high levels of phosphates, which “added a valuable fertilizing element” to the soil. 49. Interview with Salako Igue Olougbessa, November 13, 2007. 50. According to informants such as Marie Fadikpé and Salako Igue Olougbessa, most people settled north of the Ọhọri burial ground at the site of the present Onigbolo cement factory. 51. Interview with Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007. 52. Interview with Salako Igue Olougbessa, November 13, 2007. The informant lived a few kilometers north of Onigbolo, adjacent to the Pobé–Kétu road. He said he had moved north from Itchagba as a child, “long before the construction of the SOCOLE road” in the mid-1950s, and that at the time the road was built, he was a father and probably in his late twenties. 53. Group interview with Oké Ogouninhou, Idji Kpedé, Ogou Odjougbele, Salako Souley, Adjoyo Idokou, German Ọkpé, and Bolayi Ogouniyi, July 17, 2006, near Odo Meta. 54. The exact dates of settlement are unclear, but many in the group of elders interviewed belonged to the first generation born in the immediate area, which would generally correspond with a movement in the late 1910s to the 1930s. 55. Interview with Salako Igue Olougbessa, November 13, 2007. 56. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007. He said that, unlike today, Ọhọri men then sought to marry women from their natal villages, and that Ọhọri families maintained social and political connections within Ọhọri-Ije. The trend ran contrary to colonial suspicions about the relationship between the Ọhọri younger generation and its parents. In the Holli-Kétou administrative circle monthly report, October 1924, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 3, the Holli-Kétou administrator depicted younger Ọhọri residents as “individualists to a fault, who have little respect for their parents.”

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

57. At present, many farms lie adjacent to the Pobé–Kétu road. Interviews with Okpeogou Olatodji, October 10, 2007, Ouignan, and Akidélé Mouinan, October 16, 2007, Iwọyé, indicated that farmers with fields close to the road benefited during the harvest. Many of the original farms north of Itchagba and past the cement factory, however, lay some kilometers from the road. When Marie Fadikpé’s son took me to the farm his grandfather and grandmother had carved out of a forested landscape, we traveled a few kilometers by motorbike on a small path connected to the Pobé–Kétu road. Those, like Firmin Ogounonté, who have fields and homes closer to the road settled the area after the completion of the laterite road built by SOCOLE in the mid-1950s. 58. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007. 59. Interview with Dinan and Alashe Oga, October 17, 2007, Aba. Mr. and Mrs. Oga pointed to the rise of the market as a time when residents reduced their cotton production and sought imported cloth to make clothes. They also mentioned the introduction of bicycles into the region around this time, but suggested that regular purchases of bikes by valley residents did not occur until the completion of the laterite road in the mid-1950s. 60. For a description of how Dahomean colonial officials marginalized the political structure of Kétu within the larger Yorùbá polity, see Asiwaju “The Alaketu of Ketu and the Onimeko of Meko.” 61. Interview conducted in the Kétu market, July 20, 2006. The informant declined to give her name. She indicated that she was around eighty years old, meaning she would have been a small girl, aged eight to twelve, in the late 1920s or early 1930s. 62. Ibid. The informant also indicated that automobile taxi traffic did not cross the valley regularly until the 1970s and 1980s, when engineers from a French company built an asphalt road. 63. Interview with Dinan and Alashe Oga, October 17, 2007. 64. Interview with King Massa, October 16, 2007, Onigbolo. 65. Dahomey political report no. 1,730, November 22, 1920, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, dossier 6. 66. Holli-Kétou official telegram No. 456 from the commander of the HolliKétou administrative circle to the Lieutenant-Governor of Dahomey, October 15, 1922, ANB, Affaires politiques, serie 1E11, box 1, dossier 7. The colony had set up customs posts in Iga and Kétu, but the network of paths connecting the region to Nigeria made for a highly porous border. Residents traversed the boundary with relative ease. 67. “Holli-Kétou Monthly Report,” October 1924, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 3. 68. “Second Trimester Political Report of Dahomey,” October 12, 1920, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 574, dossier 6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

69. “Holli-Kétou Third Quarter Report, 1924,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 3. 70. For a discussion of how Africans used colonial court systems to their advantage, see Roberts, Litigants and Households. 71. “Holli-Kétou Third Trimester, Political and Administrative Situation, Hollidjé Canton, 1924,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 3. 72. Ibid. 73. A. P., no. 608, Pobé, November 21, 1927, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, box 4. 74. “Holli-Kétou Circular no. 28,” Pobé from the Adjunct Commander of HolliKétou to the Governor of Dahomey, Porto-Novo, May 21, 1931, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8. 75. A. P., no. 608, Pobé, November 21, 1927, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, box 4. 76. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 268. Asiwaju had access to a local archive in Pobé that no longer exists. Documents he viewed seemed to show that French officials relieved Adhiafa of his duties as canton chief. 77. “Holli-Kétou Circular no. 35,” Subject: incident with a courier from Kétu, April 13, 1931, from the Deputy Commander of Holli-Kétou to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, Porto Novo, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8. Documents Asiwaju viewed suggested that Adhiafa lost his post because of his “laxity and drunkenness.” 78. Meeting minutes: council of notables, November 12, 1931, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 10. 79. “Holli-Kétou Circular no. 35,” Subject: incident with a courier from Kétu, April 13, 1931, from the Deputy Commander of Holli-Kétou to the Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, Porto-Novo, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 2, dossier 8. 80. Ibid. 81. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007. 82. There are numerous examples. For regional case studies, see Asiwaju, “Protest Migrations,” and Lawrance, Locality, Mobility, and “Nation.” For discussions of mobility across the continent, see Iliffe, Africans, and Curtin, Why People Move. 83. Interviews with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007; Ilo Etou, October 31, 2007; and Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007. 84. Proces-verbal from a commission that met on May 5, 1937, to discuss the political situation in the Ọhọri region, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 85. “Study on the Holli-Kétou Region,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E, box 48, dossier 2. 86. Interview with Lawani Lassissi, November 14, 2007.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

87. For varying impacts and discussions of interwar colonial development aims, see Brantley, Feeding Families; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; and Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory. 88. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet, on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 89. In spite of Bourgine’s directive that Brêt engage in friendly dialogue with locals, many inhabitants avoided him and his accompanying band of African colonial soldiers. Correspondence in the archival record does not indicate that French administrators or officials ever discussed alternative ways of contacting the public. 90. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet, on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 91. Ibid. 92. It is unclear why Brêt chose to hold his palaver in Edé. Perhaps Adhiafa chose the location. Although it plays a significant role in oral tradition as the community’s first village, by this time it was only of minor political importance and lay on the fringe of the Ọhọri heartland, away from the political centers of Issaba and Aba. 93. A desire to improve relations with subjects was a significant interwar trend in many French colonial situations. 94. AOF Governor General de Coppet, telegram to Lieutenant-Governor Bourgine, January 13, 1937, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30.

. “It Has Become a Joy to Go to Tollou” 1. Dahomey Lieutenant Governor Annet to AOF governor-general on the political situation in Hollidjé, December 12, 1938, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 2. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet, on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 3. First trimester 1938 report on the Holli region, June 30, 1938, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 4. Report from Captain Bourgeois, Subdivision Chief of Pobé, on political activities in the Holli country and the results obtained, February 26, 1936, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 5. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet, on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles 8G/30.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

6. French colonial officials used the term développement in numerous official telegrams and letters during the period under analysis. See ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/22. For discussions of how the concept of “development” came to feature prominently in colonial situations in Africa, see Brantley, Feeding Families; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Freed, “Conduits of Culture and Control”; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; and Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory. 7. Lieutenant Governor Bourgine to AOF Governor-General de Coppet, on the political situation in the Ọhọri region, letter no. 1,220, December 15, 1936, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 8. Holli-Kétou administrative circle no. 328, Commander Depuis, chief of the circle to the Governor of Dahomey, July 8, 1925, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, dossier 5. Depuis advocated the building of a rail line, or what he called a tramway, that would cross the valley in lieu of a road. Officials soon realized, however, that the clay soil in the valley would not provide a viable foundation for a railroad. 9. Proces-verbal from a commission that met on May 5, 1937, to discuss the political situation in the Holli region, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 10. This sentiment corresponds with what was said by informants who recalled how members of the Ọhọri community often refused colonial demands to provide labor on colonial Public Works projects. Interview with Tedédé Kougbaki, October 5, 2007, Issakou. Kougbaki was one of many who mentioned that residents would “flee into surrounding bush” when approached by colonial administrators or tirailleurs. He also stated Ọhọri often simply refused to accommodate colonial officials’ requests. 11. Proces-verbal, May 5, 1937, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 12. Report by AOF Inspector First Class Bargues on the Pobé Penal Camp, May 22, 1939, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 633, dossier 3. Little has been written about prison regimes in colonial Africa. For a more thorough discussion, see Bernault (ed.), A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, and Alexander and Kynoch, “Introduction.” Illustrating the incompetence of French colonial rule in the region, the prison built by convicts in Pobé had only three solid walls; the fourth “wall” consisted of tree stumps, which did little to prevent prisoners from escaping. 13. I wrote about this situation more extensively in my doctoral thesis. See Filippello, “The Slow Road to Ketu.” 14. Report by AOF Inspector First Class Bargues, May 22, 1939, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 633, dossier 3. 15. “Second Trimester Economic Report, Porto Novo Circle, Pobé Subdivision, 1940,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E15, box 6, dossier 1. The report contains rainfall data from 1937 to 1940; 1938 appears to have been an unseasonably wet year,

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

after years of drought-like conditions, which also likely accounted for the slow pace of construction. Often, rain abates in the generally drier months of August and September in the region, but heavy rain continued through August 1938, when rainfall nearly doubled from the previous year. 16. “Governor Annet’s Visit to Hollidjé in Dahomey,” ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 3, dossier 3. Bargues also mentions this in his May 22, 1939, report (cited in note 14). 17. Interview with Kougbaki, October 5, 2007. 18. Interview with Omonlèkan and Aguégué Ogourombi, October 8, 2007, Itchakpo and Ogoubei Ogouwelé, October 18, 2007, Ilètchi. They were not sure whether this could apply to the road construction project from 1938 to 1940, but conceded that it might be a possibility. 19. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007, Issaba. 20. Interview with Aguégué Ogourombi, October 8, 2007. 21. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 22. “Official Telegram Letter (Confidential), Object: Holli Country, PortoNovo” from Circle Commandant to the Governor of Dahomey, Porto-Novo, January 27, 1940, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 23. French officials writing about the tenuous nature of the political situation in the Ọhọri heartland during this period often blamed social and political uprisings on alcohol abuse by members of the community. 24. “Official Telegram Letter (Confidential), Object: Holli Country, Porto Novo” from Circle Commandant to the Governor of Dahomey, Porto Novo, January 27, 1940, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E48, box 2. 25. Excerpt from a political report filed by the commander of the Porto Novo Administrative Region in 1943, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 26. Governor-General de Coppet, telegram to Lieutenant Governor Bourgine, January 13, 1937, ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 8G/30. 27. Interviews with Aguégué Ogourombi, October 8, 2007, and Ogouwelé, October 18, 2007. 28. Numerous communications from the late 1930s to the early 1940s outline the French demand for cotton. See ANB, ser. R, Service des Eaux, Forêts et Chasses, box 10, in particular, Proces-verbal notes concerning cotton production regulation from May 30, 1939, which documents historical production in the region and the demand at the time. 29. “Official Telegram Letter No. 2,856” from Germain Mouleres, Porto Novo Circle Commandant to the Governor of Dahomey, June 23, 1941, ANB, ser. R, Service des Eaux, Forêts et Chasses, box 17, dossier 2, and Circular no. 036, from Porto Novo Administrative Circle Commandant, Germain Mouleres, to the Governor of Dahomey, May 17, 1941, ANB, Affaires économiques, ser. E.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

30. “Official Telegram Letter No. 2856,” June 23, 1941, ANB, ser. R, Service des Eaux, Forêts et Chasses, box 17, dossier 2. 31. . Observations of Colonial Inspector Cazaux, Holli-Kétou administrative circle, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E11, box 4, dossier 2. According to Cazaux, the valley’s farmers produced only two hundred tons of cotton in the 1938 to 1939 growing season. This constituted less than half of the production recognized by colonial administrators in postrevolt Ọhọri country per observations made by a colonial inspector in March 1919. The “official” tally of likely production paled in comparison to the real production, which Ọhọri farmers exchanged informally with traders from all over the region, most notably those across the border in Nigeria. 32. “Official Telegram Letter No. 2856,” June 23, 1941, ANB, ser. R, Service des Eaux, Forets et Chasses, box 17, dossier 2. 33. For a detailed discussion of wartime trends in urbanization, see Cooper, Africa since 1940. 34. Report by Mr. Le Gregam, Colonial Inspector General, concerning supplying Senegal with corn from Togo and Dahomey, February 26, 1942, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 633, dossier 2. 35. Interview with Alatoindji, November 6, 2007, Kétu. 36. Porto Novo Circle, Pobé Subdivision, Proposal for the Ten Year Plan, July 29, 1941, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 1, dossier 1. 37. Duration tables for major routes in Middle and Lower Dahomey, 1943, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 22, dossier 16. The report also estimated that travel by automobile from Pobé to Kétu required an overnight stay in the valley. Most informants recall seeing little to no traffic before the completion of the SOCOLE road in 1955. According to Omonlèkan, October 8, 2007, “Cars did not really pass here until after SOCOLE came. And even then, it was only in dry seasons.” Dinan Oga, interviewed October 17, 2007, Aba, recalled how travel by automobile in the valley prior to the building of the later SOCOLE road in the 1950s was virtually impossible because trees and vegetation often covered the path. 38. Interview with Alatoindji, November 6, 2007. 39. “Proposal for the Ten Year Plan, July 29, 1941.” The authors used the exclamation point in the report, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 1, dossier 1. 40. Official telegram from the Division of Public Works to the Governor in Porto Novo on mechanizing road-building work sites, October 18, 1941, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 10, dossier 7. 41. To support the war effort, many colonies had invested in large-scale projects to build up African harbors and to construct airports, leaving limited finances to repair or build secondary roads. Information about Ọhọri-Ije during the Vichy years is scarce, and it is unclear how Vichy’s imperial designs may have affected the region. For a thorough discussion, see Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

42. Interview conducted by Jean-Didier Akpona with King Massa of Onigbolo, August 8, 2014. 43. Confidential letter from Governor M. A. de Pompignan of Dahomey to the AOF Governor General, April 23, 1945, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles, 8G/22. 44. Paths in the valley were often shrouded by hedgerows demarcating individual farm plots. 45. Confidential letter from Governor M. A. de Pompignan of Dahomey to the AOF Governor General, April 23, 1945, ANS, AOF Fonds matérielles, 8G/22. 46. Cooper, Africa since 1940, 90–91. 47. On how Africans responded to “development” in post–World War II Africa, see White, The Comforts of Home; Berry, No Condition Is Permanent; Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon; Hodgson, “Taking Stock”; Hodge, “British Colonial Expertise”; and Osborne, “Controlling Development.” 48. For a discussion of how Africans often interpreted colonial roadways, see Freed, “Conduits of Culture and Control.” 49. Berry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring,” 329. 50. Letter from the Minister of Overseas France to High Commissioners, Governors-General, Governors and Territorial Administrators, April 15, 1945, ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, 2nd ser., box 295. 51. Letter from Inspector General Le Gregam to the Minister of Overseas France, June 25, 1948, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2139, dossier 3. 52. Ibid. Based on other correspondence in the same dossier, it appears administrators in Dakar sent Le Gregam to Togo and Dahomey to investigate the status of Public Works and Division of Health projects. 53. Note on the necessary credits for the realization of road networks in the territories of West Africa, November 23, 1948, ANOM, FIDES, ser. 1, box 31, dossier 234. 54. The secretary of state was speaking here of building a road network as a means to export cotton from Chad, but the short letter outlines his belief that roads needed to be built in all regions to facilitate the trading of cash crops and food products from colony to colony, as well as from colonies to the metropole. 55. Note, November 23, 1948, ANOM, FIDES, ser. 1, box 31, dossier 234. 56. Le Gregam letter, June 25, 1948, ANOM, Affaires politiques, box 2139, dossier 3. 57. “Road Network Program,” June 16, 1949, ANOM Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 2, box 295. 58. Note on how the local Public Works division responded to the question of contracting with the Hersent and SOCOLE companies in 1950 (n.d.), ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 53, dossier 1,487. See also Thompson and Adloff, French West Africa, 409, for discussion of the situation. The authors claimed that the French government had brought the two firms to

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

Dahomey to adhere to the “Plan’s big building program.” The plan they referred to was the French West African Four-Year Plan published in 1947. 59. Note from Agence Fonds d’Outre-Mer (FOM) Inspector General Berthaux to the Minister of Overseas France on the antecedents and consequences of SOCOLE’s bankruptcy, June 28, 1957, ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 83, dossier 1,487. Berthaux wrote this note after SOCOLE completed the route. Much of the information depicts what ended up being the tenuous opening stages of building the SOCOLE road that preceded SOCOLE’s bankruptcy in 1957. 60. “SOCOLE Work Study No. 22, Route Togo–Nigeria, Porto Novo–Kétu,” October 11, 1949, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles 24, ser. 2, box 863. 61. Note, June 28, 1957, ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 83, dossier 1,487. The secretary of state’s decision appears somewhat ironic, given his earlier suggestion that “the road controls all.” 62. Note from the Director of Public Works, June 19, 1956, ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 83, dossier 1,487. 63. “Work Study No. 80 for the construction of the Porto Novo–Nigeria route in Dahomey” and “Note, June 28, 1957” (indicating that colonial officials accepted “Work Study Number 80” as a replacement for “Work Study Number 22”), both in ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 83, dossier 1,487. 64. “Dahomey Annual Report 1950,” ANS, AOF, Fonds matérielles 2G/50.31, 102 and 104. By year’s end, Hersent and SOCOLE had established work sites for their respective sections of the project. 65. Report from French Overseas Inspector Zoccolat, April 16, 1951, ANOM, Affaires économiques, box 82, chapters 11–111. 66. A surveyor named Peigne had conducted a study between Pobé and Kétu in December 1950. 67. Interviews with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007, and Bamidel, October 18, 2007, Ita Olagban. 68. Interviews with Firmin Ogounonté, October 31, 2007, and King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. Ogounonté moved to the valley as a young man from the village of Cové after being employed by SOCOLE as a night watchman. 69. Account of the first programs funded by FIDES in Dahomey to January 1, 1957, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles 24, ser. 2, box 369. Laying the foundation included clearing trees and vegetation fifteen meters across and embanking the road with bulldozers and tractors. 70. Work commission, March 17, 1952, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles 24, ser. 2, box 863. 71. 1953–57 quadriennal plan, November 6, 1952, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles, 24, ser. 2, box 370. 72. “Work Study No. 6,” 1953, ANS, Travaux Publics, ser. 5P, box 650.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

73. 1953–57 quadriennal plan, November 6, 1952, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles, 24, ser. 2, box 370, 20. 74. Letter from the Governor of Overseas France to the Governor of Dahomey and Hubert Maga, the President of the Territorial Assembly of Dahomey, September 15, 1954, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 23, dossier 7. In doing so, the Territorial Assembly renamed the road R.I.G. 8. 75. FIDES account, January 1, 1957, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles 24, ser. 2, box 369. 76. Report from French Overseas Inspector Zoccolat, April 16, 1951, ANOM, Affaires économiques, box 82, chapters 11–111. 77. FIDES account, January 1, 1957, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles 24, ser. 2, box 369. 78. Principal Engineer Rousselin’s report on upcoming work for April 7 to April 10, 1949, ANS, ser. 5P, Travaux Publics, box 295, gives details of the mechanized and manual labor required. The engineers felt that the “plastic-like clay soil . . . necessitated” a wider embankment according to the 1953–57 quadriennal plan, November 6, 1952, ANOM, FIDES, Fonds matérielles, 24, ser. 2, box 370. 79. Interviews with Omonlèkan and Ogourombi, October 8, 2007; King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007; Dinan and Alashé Oga, October 17, 2007; Ilo Etou, October 31, 2007, Onigbolo; Ogounonté, October 31, 2007; Alatoindji, November 6, 2007; Aya Bachirou, November 8, 2007, Onigbolo; Adè, November 13, Agbodé; and Konetché, November 14, Onigbolo. 80. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 7, 2007. 81. Interview with Omonlola, October 10, 2007, Ilekpa. 82. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007. 83. Interview with Dina and Alashé Oga, October 17, 2007. The elderly couple recalled that SOCOLE had “removed a lot of trees.” 84. Interview with Adè, November 13, Agbodé. 85. Interview with Alatoindji, November 6, 2007. 86. “Work Study No. 6, 1953,” ANS, Travaux Publics, ser. 5P, box 650. 87. “Official Telegram No. 972” from the Subdivision Chief of Pobé to the Chief Commandant of the Porto Novo administrative circle, December 15, 1953, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 22, dossier 16. 88. “FERDES Work Project: Route Aba-Issaba-Itchagba-Kétu,” ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 22, dossier 16. There is no date on the letter, but it accompanies official telegram letter no. 972, leading me to believe that it would have been written around the same time. 89. Interview with Okpé, October 5, 2007, Idjakou. 90. “Official Telegram No. 972” from the Subdivision Chief of Pobé to the Chief Commandant of the Porto Novo administrative circle, December 15, 1953, ANB, Travaux Publics, ser. K, box 22, dossier 16.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

91. Interview with Adè, November 13. See Map 1. 92. Note, June 19, 1956, ANOM, Travaux Publics, Fonds matérielles 26, ser. 3, box 83, dossier 1,487. 93. Interview with Ilo Etou, October 31, 2007, Onigbolo. 94. Ibid. 95. Interview with Konetché, November 14, Onigbolo. Recalling the time prior to the SOCOLE project, he also mentioned how members of the Ọhọri community had difficulties traveling in the valley and exporting products. 96. Sen and Johung, Landscapes of Mobility. 97. The exact date of Verger’s trip to Ọhori is not known, although it is believed to have occurred at some point during a dry season between 1949 and 1953. In some of the photos he took, what is likely the Pobé–Kétu road appears to be narrower than the depictions of the SOCOLE road. Given the suggested time frame, it seems probable that he visited the valley before the company repaired the road. 98. Interview with Dinan and Alashé Oga, October 17, 2007. 99. In many ways, these memories offer a historical counterweight to studies emphasizing Africans’ more contemporary ambivalence about the threat posed by roads, for example, Klaeger, “Introduction,” and accompanying articles in Africa 83 (2013). 100. Interview with Barthlemi Odjoubé, October 4, 2007, Pobé. By referencing the “state,” Odjoubé meant the postcolonial, independent Republics of Dahomey and later Benin. 101. Interview with Firmin Ogounonté, October 31, 2007. 102. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007.

. Cementing Identities 1. Group interview with Albertine Olougbeka, Monlèkan Ogouyémi, and Talabi Salako, October 17, 2007, Ilètchi. 2. Letter from I. Bernadin Abikanlou, Territorial Adviser from Pobé to the Minister of Public Works, June 16, 1958, ANB, Travaux Public, ser. K, box 22, dossier 16. His reference to clay suggests that rains had washed away parts of the SOCOLE road’s laterite surface. 3. Ibid. 4. For scholarly discussions on the challenges the French government faced with the Algerian and Indochina wars, see Cooper, Tensions of Empire and Africa since 1940; and Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. 5. G.  S. Medessoukou, “Echoes from Our Departments: The Aba Market Destroyed,” L’Aube Nouvelle, April 1, 1961, 7. 6. Beauclair Gnonlonfoun, “Echoes from Our Departments: A Rain of Ice,” L’Aube Nouvelle, April 29, 1961, 4.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

7. Bascom, Shango in the New World, has indicated that certain rituals associated with Șango might be linked to notions of political autonomy. It is feasible to think that refugees in the Ọhọri region would have guardedly held onto their political autonomy, and although Șango worship in the valley has no doubt changed over time, informants corroborated a link between Șango and a sense of autonomy. Albertine Olougbeka told me that Șango allows her and other members of the Ọhọri community to “have success in the fields.” Their success, she indicated, has allowed them to distance themselves from the centralized state, which, she explained, had “caused a great deal of suffering” in the past. 8. Blaise Adegbite, “An Unfortunate Incident,” L’Aube Nouvelle, December 16, 1961, 4. 9. For a more detailed discussion of Ọhọri affective responses that took place at the market that day, see Filippello, “Roads of Joy, Pathways of Anger.” 10. Adegbite, “Unfortunate Incident,” 4. 11. People say that the inoculations were against smallpox. Interviews with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007, Issaba; Falilou Wabi, October 8, 2007, Onigbolo; Bamidel, October 18, 2007, Ita Olagban; and King Awélédé II, July 4, 2011, Issaba. This was among the stories informants mentioned less often, but it nonetheless illustrates how memories of the road evoke narratives of Ọhọri independence. Asiwaju, “Anti-French Resistance Movement in Ọhọri-Ije,” 268–69, and Elwert, “Socio-Anthropological Interpretation of Violence,” either mention the incident or describe it in brief. The exact year is not known, but various sources place it between 1961 and 1966, and there were World Health Organization campaigns to eradicate smallpox during this time. However, a search of World Health Organization archives turned up no specific mention of this in documents related to campaigns in Dahomey. 12. Interview with Ogoulerou Obalegbé, November 7, 2007, Issaba. Th ere are no references to the disturbance in L’Aube Nouvelle, perhaps because of the new administration’s desire to portray peaceful postindependence relations between the new state and its diverse populations. 13. Ibid. 14. Interviews with Wabi, October 8, 2007, and King Awélédé II, July 4, 2011. 15. Interview with Wabi, October 8, 2007. Wabi was not Ọhọri, but he had worked as personnel representative for the Onigbolo cement factory since its opening in the early 1980s and recalled hearing about the incident from local residents on numerous occasions. 16. Interview with Bamidel, October 18, 2007. 17. Interview with King Awélédé II, July 4, 2011. 18. Gaining access to postcolonial government archival records in Benin is difficult. Most either do not exist or have yet to be declassified. This holds particularly true for records from the revolutionary era. The only way to check on these is

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

through the scholarly data of Asiwaju and Elwert, but their research is likewise based on oral evidence. Regardless, the narrative substantiates Ọhọri claims of independence in the postcolonial era. 19. Alexis Gnonlonfoun, “Echoes from Our Departments: News from the Subprefecture,” L’Aube Nouvelle, July 18, 1963, 4. 20. “Construction of a New Dahomey,” L’Aube Nouvelle, February 20, 1965, 4. The government often tried to use the newspaper as a forum to promote its aims and rally citizens behind a unified national identity. New research on identity formation in colonial Africa has demonstrated how Africans’ participation in publishing newspapers constituted a new form of enacting agency and manufacturing anticolonial identities. See, in particular, Barber, “Translation, Publics, and the Vernacular Press in 1920s Lagos,” and Newell, The Power to Name. 21. For information about changes in Dahomean government in the earlier years of independence, see Skurkin, “Dahomey: The End of a Military Regime.” 22. “The Second Republic Is Born,” L’Aube Nouvelle, February 1, 1964, 1. 23. Ibid. 24. “Our Problem Today: The Realization of a Nation,” L’Aube Nouvelle, September 25, 1966, 1. 25. Many independent African governments saw industrialization as the way to build a “modern” nation. For historical research that examines development and modernity in the context of independent African rule, see Apter, The PanAfrican Nation; Ivaska, Cultured States; and Bloom et al., eds., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa. 26. The change in government by military force followed a coup in Togo that took place earlier that year. 27. On coups d’état in Dahomey, see Decalo, Coups and Army Rule in Africa, and “Regionalism, Politics, and the Military in Dahomey.” 28. Maga assumed the first of three two-year revolving presidencies. Ahomadegbé Tomêtin assumed the second term in 1972, shortly before Major Mathieu Kérékou seized political power in a coup on October 26, 1972. 29. “The Dahomean Cement Factory Becomes a Reality,” Daho-Express, August 28, 1970, 1 and 4. 30. Extract from a report of Mr. Henri Bésaire, Chief Colonial Geologist, March 31, 1943, Hollidjé, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, dossier 2. 31. Hubert Akponikpe, “The Onigbolo Cement Project Will Soon Enter Its Final Phase,” Ehuzu, December 13, 1976. According to this article, geologists estimated 380 million tons in 1958. This was revised to five hundred million tons in the 1980s. Ehuzu was the mouthpiece of the Marxist government that took over in the 1972 coup. 32. Extract from a report of Mr. Henri Bésaire, Chief Colonial Geologist, March 31, 1943, Hollidjé, ANB, Affaires politiques, ser. 1E47, dossier 2.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

33. “The Dahomean Cement Factory Becomes a Reality.” 34. Interview with Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007, Itchagba. The village of Oligbolo, which even locals now call Onigbolo, lies approximately five kilometers north of the factory. In discussing the name change, Assogba added that the planners “preferred the name Onigbolo. And that is the name everyone has adopted.” It is uncertain, based on limited evidence, what company won the initial contract to build the factory. A military coup caused delays, and in the mid-1970s, the new government awarded a new contract to build the factory to the Danish firm FLSmidth & Co. 35. “The Dahomean Cement Factory Becomes a Reality.” The article does not mention that the site was a burial ground, but informants said so. Interview with King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007, Issaba. 36. Interviews with Sourou Okpé, October 5, 2007, Itchagoun, and Idodèyi Assogba, October 8, 2007. 37. “The Dahomean Cement Factory Becomes a Reality,” 1. Interview with Falilou Wabi, October 8, 2007. The former personnel manager for the factory indicated that while many Ọhọri may have wanted to work at the plant, very few had actually been employed there in the past. 38. “The Dahomean Cement Factory Becomes a Reality,” 4. 39. For more on the impact oil production has had on Nigerian socioeconomic and political organization, see Berry, “Oil and the Disappearing Peasantry,” and Fathers Work for Their Sons; Apter, The Pan-African Nation. 40. Interview with Adèyinka Moutitaba, Assane Ashamou, and Odjo Toini, October 18, 2007, near Pobé. Informants recalled the ceremony and the excavation of the first stone in 1970, but noted that until the revolutionary era following Kérékou’s coup, little work had been done on the project. 41. The government renamed the country officially on November 30, 1975. The name is a reference to the precolonial kingdom and city of Benin in what is now Nigeria. 42. References to “economic” and “socialist” development feature prominently in Ehuzu articles published throughout the 1970s and 1980s. 43. Akponikpe, “The Onigbolo Cement Project Will Soon Enter Its Final Phase,” 6. 44. The ownership percentages were reported in Ehuzu in 1976. According to literature published in April 2007 by the factory’s current owner, SCB-Lafarge, however, those figures were altered by 1979: the Beninese state had negotiated a majority 51 percent stake, with Nigeria receiving 43 percent and FLSmidth & Co. lowering its stake to 6 percent. 45. Akponikpe, “The Onigbolo Cement Project Will Soon Enter Its Final Phase,” 6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

46. As a Danish firm, FLSmidth & Co. was not materially associated with formal colonial rule in the region, although Danes had certainly played significant roles in the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, the minimal stake the company received did not jeopardize the regime’s vision of an economically unified West Africa. 47. Akponikpe, “The Onigbolo Cement Project Will Soon Enter Its Final Phase,” 1. 48. “The Onigbolo Cement Complex Is One of the Finest Examples of Dynamic and Effective Cooperation between Benin and Nigeria: Address of the Head of State at Onigbolo,” Ehuzu, August 31, 1981, 7–8. 49. Interview with Wabi, October 8, 2007. 50. “The Onigbolo Cement Complex . . . Address.” 51. In total, Kérékou named eight objectives. In addition to those listed, he cited “the consolidation of public finances through sound management and democratic affairs of our revolutionary state; the restoration of state authority in all areas and at all levels; the liberation of all the productive forces in the countryside by genuine agrarian reform; the organization of effective control of the state in all vital sectors of national economy; the judicious distribution of production units all over the country; the judicious use of natural vocation of each region of our country; and the building of a popular democracy” as other goals that he sought to foster with the completion of the factory. 52. Jerome Bibilary, “Onigbolo: A Concrete Model of Economic Cooperation,” Ehuzu, August 31, 1981. 53. Interviews with Barthlemi Odjoubé, October 4, 2007, Pobé and Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007, Issakou. 54. “Call for Proposal,” Ehuzu, December 17, 1981, 8. 55. “The Minister of Public Works Inspects the Pobé-Kétou Route,” Ehuzu, August 9, 1982, 1. 56. Interviews with Maurice Dawi, October 4, 2007, Pobé; Odjoubé, October 4, 2007; Tedédé Kougbaki, October 5, 2007, Issakou; Ilo, October 5, 2007; Wabi, October 8, 2007; King Awélédé II, October 10, 2007; Bamidel, October 18, 2007; Adéyinka Moutitaba, Assané Ashamou, and Odjo Toini, October 18, 2007; Firmin Ogounonté, October 31, 2007, Odo-Meta; Assogba, November 7, 2007; Obalegbé, November 7, 2007; and Marie Fadikpé, November 8, 2007, Onigbolo. 57. Informants from an informal group interview, July 3, 2006, Aba market. 58. Interview with Thèophile Tella, October 4, 2007, Pobé. 59. Interviews with Dawi October 4, 2007; Odjoubé, October 4, 2007; Tella, October 4, 2007; Ilo, October 5, 2007; Okpé, October 5, 2007; Saliou Oloukoti; October 5, 2007, Aba; Ogbékè Douissi, October 5, 2007, Aba; Kougbaki, October 7, 2007; Assogba, October 8, 2007; Omonlekan and Aguegue Ogourombi, October 8,

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

2007, Itchoko; Elisabeth Edeogou, October 9, 2007, Itchougoun; King Awélédé II, October 10; Okpeogou Olatodji, October 10, 2007, Ouingnan; Omonlola, October 10, 2007, Ilekpa.; King Massa, October 16, 2007, Onigbolo; Dinan Oga and Alashe Oga, October 17, 2007, Aba; Moutitaba, October 18, 2007; Ogoubei Ogouwelé, October 18, 2007; Aya Bachirou, November 8, 2007, Onigbolo; Fadikpé, November 8, 2007; Olougbessa Salako Igué, November 13, 2007, Onigbolo; Adè, November 13, Agbodé; Kossoko Ilo, November 13, Issaba; Konetché, November 13, 2007, Onigbolo; Jean Baptisse, November 14, 2007, Pobé; Moussourou Segbé, November 14, 2007, Igboisso; and Fadina, November 14, 2007, Itchakpo. 60. See Showers, “Soil Erosion in the Kingdom of Lesotho”; McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land; Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya; Webb, Desert Frontier; Leach and Mearns, Lie of the Land; Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape; Ranger, Voices from the Rocks; Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome; and Davis and Burke, eds., Environmental Imaginaries in the Middle East and North Africa. 61. Pobé Commune Development Plan, 10. 62. Interviews with Dawi October 4, 2007; Odjoubé, October 4, 2007; Tella October 4, 2007; Ilo, October 5, 2007; Okpé, October 5, 2007; Oloukoti; October 5, 2007; Douissi, October 5, 2007; Kougbaki, October 7, 2007; Assogba, October 8, 2007; Pierre Kossolou, October 9, 2007, Pobé; Olatodji, October 10, 2007, Ouingnan; Omonlola, October 10, 2007; Moutitaba, Ashamou, and Toini, October 18, 2007; Ogouwelé, October 18, 2007; Etou Ilo, October 31, 2007, Onigbolo; Igué, November 13, 2007, Onigbolo; Deborah Olatan, November 7, 2007, Igbo Odo; Bachirou, November 8, 2007; and Kossoko Ilo, November 13. 63. Interview with Kossoko Ilo, November 13, 2007. 64. Interview with Moutitaba, Ashamou and Toini, October 18, 2007. 65. Interview with Kossolou, October 9, 2007. 66. Women and uninitiated men are prohibited from entering the forest. 67. Interviews with Odjoubé, October 4, 2007; Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007; Okpé October 5, 2007; Oloukoti; October 5, 2007; Assogba, October 8, 2007; Edeogou, October 9, 2007; King Massa, October 16, 2007; Oga and Oga, October 17, 2007; Ogounonté, October 31, 2007; Obalegbé, November 7, 2007; Fadikpé, November 8, 2007; Kossoko Ilo, November 13, 2007; Konetché, November 13, 2007; Igué, November 13, 2007; Lawani Lasissi, November 14, 2007; Segbé, November 14, 2007; and Fadina, November 14, 2007. 68. “The Minister of Public Works Inspects the Pobé–Kétou Route,” Ehuzu, August 9, 1982, 6. The technical issues were actually one of the “problems” highlighted in the article. Other issues that the minister of Public Works, Gado Girigissou, addressed during his inspection were problems caused by the onset of the second rainy season, which also delayed progress. 69. Interview with Assogba, November 7, 2007.

NOTES TO CHAPTER  . 

70. Interview with Kougbaki, October 5, 2007. 71. Interviews with Okpé, October 5, 2007, and Konetché, November 13, 2007. 72. Interview with Dr. Abiodun Agboola, August 8, 2005, Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria. 73. Ibid. 74. For broader discussions of how memory, rumor, and innuendo coincide in collecting oral data, see Klein, “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget”; Roberts, “Reversible Social Processes, Historical Memory, and the Production of History”; Malkki, Purity and Exile; White, Speaking with Vampires; Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement; and Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter. 75. Interview with Igué, November 13, 2007. 76. Ibid. 77. Interview with Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007. 78. One notable exception includes Miescher, “Building the City of the Future.” 79. This adds to the emerging discourse on forest spaces in Africa. See, in particular, Sheridan and Nyamweru, eds., African Sacred Groves; Fairhead and Leach, “False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis”; Carney and Elias, “Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree”; and Berry, “A Forest for My Kingdom?” 80. Interviews with Oga and Oga, October 17, 2007; Etou Ilo, October 31, 2007; and El Hadj Arekpatadjou, November 6, 2007, Kétu. 81. Léon Brathier, “Discovering the Rural District of Pobé,” Ehuzu, September 17, 1984, 3. 82. Interview with Odjoubé, October 4, 2007. 83. Interview Thèodore Olouossa, July 5, 2006, Issaba. 84. Group interview with Albertine Olougbeka, Monlekan Ogouyemi, and Talabi Salako, October 17, 2007, Ilètchi. 85. Interview with Kougbaki, October 5, 2007 and Olatodji, October 10, 2007. 86. Interview with Oloukoti, October 5, 2007 and Douissi, October 5, 2007. 87. To get a better understanding of how scholars have approached studying how states and governments negotiated independence, see Cooper, Decolonization and African Society and Africa since 1940; Birmingham, The Decolonization of Africa; and Falola, ed., Africa, vol. 4: The End of Colonial Rule. 88. Interview with Thèophile Tella, July 2, 2006. 89. From a metaphorical standpoint, this is where the allusion by Moran, On Roads, to roads as palimpsests seems most appropriate from a cultural historical standpoint. 90. Interviews with Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007; Kougbaki, October 5, 2007; Assogba, October 8, 2007; King Awélédé II, October 10; Bamidel, October 18, 2007; Moutitaba, Ashamou, and Toini, October 18, 2007; Ogounonté, October 31, 2007; and Obalegbé, November 7, 2007.

 . NOTES TO CHAPTER 

91. Recent noteworthy scholarly literature includes Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Mitchell, Questions of Modernity and Rule of Experts; Cooper, Colonialism in Question; Geschiere et al., eds., Readings in Modernity in Africa; Thomas, “Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts”; Isaacman and Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development; Bloom et al., eds., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa; Apter, “Modernization Theory and the Figure of Blindness”; Hecht, “Radioactive Excess”; Miescher, “ ‘No One Should Be Worse Off ’ ”; and Tischler, “Negotiating Modernization.” 92. Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty?”; Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty”; Sheehan, “ Problem of Sovereignty in European History”; Howland and White, eds., State of Sovereignty; Carpenter, “Sovereignty along a West African Frontier”; Lewis, Divided Rule; White, Unpopular Sovereignty; and Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.

Conclusion 1. Soyinka, Of Africa, 29. 2. On colonial developmental “expertise,” see Berry, No Condition Is Permanent; Brantley, Feeding Families; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; McCann, Maize and Grace; Ferguson, Global Shadows; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert and “British Colonial Expertise”; and Osborne, “Controlling Development.” 3. For an example of a scholarly work positing a more hopeful view of contemporary Africa, see Ellis, Season of Rains. 4. Soyinka, Of Africa, 27. 5. Apter, Beyond Words. 6. Scholars of Africans and Native Americans are starting to recognize, as an example, that much can be learned from one another in terms of approach and methodology. See Gordon and Krech, eds., Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America. 7. Interview with Salako Ilo, October 5, 2007, Issakou. 8. For designs and repair plans, see the Danish Agency for International Development, “Programme d’appui au sector routier, phase 2, description de la composante route principale: Projét de réhabilitation de l’axe Pobé-Kétou,” July 2005, http://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Project-and-Operations. 9. Interview with Barthlemi Odjoubé, October 4, 2007, Pobé. 10. Interview with Okpéogou Olatodji, October 10, 2007, Ouignian. 11. Interview with Alatoindji, November 6, 2007, Kétu. 12. Although no informants mentioned specifically how corruption enters into the highly politicized discourse on road and infrastructure building in Africa, one also wonders whether past experiences with fraudulent politicians weighed on their minds and fueled skepticism.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION . 

13. On the role in historical change of nonhuman actors, such as mosquitoes, see also Mitchell, Rule of Experts; and McCann, Maize and Grace. 14. Interview with Bamidel, November 13, 2007, Ita Olagban. 15. Some scholars have conceived of natural spaces like rivers and towns as metaphorical texts in their research. See, in particular, White, The Organic Machine, and Law, Ouidah. In his study of the Columbia River, which snakes through the high desert plains and vast gorges of North America’s Pacific Northwest, White examines the organic nature of the river to gauge environmental and social change in the region. By investigating the river as an “energy system” that preserves an “unmade” quality in spite of human modifications, he concludes that human and natural history are intertwined. Law’s account of Ouidah draws on the town itself as an important primary source. Noting the town’s economic and political marginalization after colonization, Law points out that its layout and the rich documentation stemming from its days as an important entrepôt during the Atlantic slave trade make Ouidah an important textual context. He looks at the settlement as a focus of trade, rather than a periphery of the dominant Dahomean kingdom. In doing so, he shows that in both the historical and contemporary contexts, West African states constitute distinct organic social and political entities, the changes in which we can accurately assess if we recognize their textual aspects. 16. See Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For?”; Mitchell, Questions of Modernity. 17. Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For?,” 190–91. 18. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 4.

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Index Aba (French military post): attacks on, 66, 82; closure of, 87, 95; creation, 72, 75, 86; occupants, 76–77, 83, 85, 87 Aba (market): battles near, 65; fires, 99, 112; market activities, 76; murder in, 88; in oral tradition, 33, 40, 45, 113; roads connecting to, 106 Aba (village): colonial encounters with residents of, 53, 61, 65, 95, 114; after independence, 114; roads connecting to, 56, 63, 67, 75, 83, 98–99, 104; rotating kingships, 42, 60 Abeokuta, 38 Abikanlou, Bernadin, 111–12 Abomey, 66 Achebe, Chinua, 131–32 Adediran, Biodun, 44 Adhiafa, 84, 88, 91, 93–94, 99 Adja-Oueré, 40, 45, 53, 63, 76 Adjas, 16, 18, 40, 45–46, 158n21, 159–60n39 Adoko: beliefs, 36; demise of, 74, 78, 170n14; leaders, 35–36, 42, 45, 51, 53, 66, 76; rituals and practice, 37, 39–41, 56, 65, 76–77, 124; role in decentralizing Ọhọri political organization, 52–54, 57–60, 68 àfọwọdá, 106 African Development Bank, 134 Afrique-Occidentale française (AOF), 103. See also French West Africa Agbadéwolou Edi, 36 Ahomadegbé Tomêtin, Justin, 116

Ahoua, 29–37, 39–42, 44–45, 113 Akinrila, Jean, 113 Akpona, Jean-Didier, 24 Aladji, Adjmajou, 55, 59 Alafèka, 35, 158n27 Alatché, 53, 58–59 Alatoindji, 98, 136 Algerian War of Independence, 111, 117 Anderson, Benedict, 21 Anegbé, 59–60. See also Otutubiodjo Annet, Armand, 91, 93 Apithy, Sourou Migan, 116, 120 Apter, Andrew, 132 Aromokoukomoulèkè, 39–42, 45 Asiwaju, A.I.: on environment, 30, 67; on mobility, 73; on Ọhọri origins and political organization, 29, 42–44, 67–68, 76; on Ọhọri resistance to colonial rule, 44–45 Assogba, Idodèyi, 10, 123 Atlantic World: historiography, 44, 137, 161n60; slavery, 9, 12, 30, 37–38, 42, 44, 50 Atoyéshéshébi Omi, 46 autochthonous, 21, 152n56 Awélédé: collaboration with French colonial administrators, 51–52; death, 52–52, 58–61; succession, 68 balóguns, 26, 59, 64, 66, 76 Bascom, William, 184n7 Basso, Keith, 23 Behanzin, 50 

 . INDEX

Benin (Republic of): archives, 24, 156n84; border with Nigeria, 19; after democratization, 8–10, 128, 134; industrialization, 27, 118–19 (see also Onigbolo); nationalism, 12, 119–21, 130; newspapers, 25 (see also Ehuzu); Ọhọri relationship with governments of, 5, 12, 111, 121–25, 127–29; roads in, 1, 9, 15, 20, 31. See also Kérékou, Mathieu Berry, Sara, 100, 163n6 Bésaire, Henri, 117 Bibilary, Jérôme, 120 Bight of Benin, 12–13, 16, 37. See also “Slave Coast” Bloom, Peter, 10 Blum, Léon, 87–88, 92 Bourgine, Maurice-Léon, 88 Cachako, Houmenou Koudokpo, 113–14 Cameroon, 75, 77 cement: factory, 1–2, 19, 24, 118–20, 127–29, 134, 137; production and use of, 117–19, 121, 127, 185n31; transport of, 19, 121, 124–25, 127. See also Onigbolo (cement factory) Chad, 180n54 civilizing missions of French colonialism, 50, 54 climate and weather: impact on agriculture, 79, 97; impact on health, 134; impact on mobility in Ọhọri-Ije, 17–19, 39, 52, 54, 71, 81, 98–99, 109, 114, 133; impact on road-building projects, 55, 95; Ọhọri politics, 60, 63, 67 (see also Otutubiodjo); rain as source of drinking water, 16; weather patterns, 15–16, 91 (see also Inter

Tropical Convergence Zone). See also Harmattan Communauté Française, 112 Confederation of Nagos, 45 Cooper, Frederick, 21, 100, 138–39 Cotonou, 19, 72, 81, 91–94, 98, 101 cotton: colonial demands for, 69, 91–92, 96–98; Ọhọri production of, 52, 57, 59, 76, 163n13, 179n31 Cové, 105 Daho-Express, 116, 118 Dahomey (French colony): agricultural production during World War II, 97–98; border with Nigeria, 57; Division of Public Works, 25, 55, 104; early modalities of colonial rule in, 50–51; interwar administration of, 87–88, 91–93; military administration of Ọhọri-Ije, 76–77, 87–88; mobility within, 62; naming of, 160n41; rail lines in, 3; responses to Ọhọri rebellion, 64–65; road-building and repair, 9, 15, 54, 96–104, 106; Territorial Assembly of, 104, 112; use of prison labor in, 93 Dahomey (independent nation): coup under Kérékou, 118–19; independence, 112–16, 118, 128–30; industrialization, 116; Ministry of Economic Planning, 118; Ministry of Public Works, 111; naming of, 160n41; nationality, 27, 116, 118, 127; newspapers, 24 (see also DahoExpress); rail lines in, 3; roadbuilding and repair in, 9, 15, 27, 111. See also Benin (Republic of) Dahomey (kingdom): attack on Kétu, 46–47, 49, 79, 81; French defeat of,

INDEX • 

50–51; imperial rule and expansion, 13, 37, 45, 162n63, 191n15; possible political engagement with Adjas, 46; slaving activities, 9, 30, 37–40 Dakar, 96–97, 103–4 Danish International Development Agency, 134 decentralization, 32, 36, 52, 57, 59, 138, 156–57n9 de Coppet, Marcel, 88, 91–92 de Gaulle, Charles, 112 Dien Bien Phu (Battle of), 112 Dodds, Alfred, 46, 50, 52 Dunglas, M., 99 Edé, 34–35, 37, 84, 88–89 Ehuzu, 25, 119, 121, 123 Entreprise Razel Frères, 1, 121, 124, 145n6 environment and landscape: historiography, 10, 20–23, 132, 139, 153n60; impact on colonial mobility, 68; in relation to Ọhọri identity formation, 10, 30, 33–37, 43–44, 67, 83, 100; Ọhọri memories of deforestation and environmental change, 8, 12, 14–16, 21–22, 26–27, 121–29; roads, 11–12, 14, 27, 45, 137 Esija, 60, 66 Fadikpé, 71, 74, 79–81 FLSmidth & Co., 119, 186n44 Fonds d’Equipement Rural et de Développement Économique et Social (FERDES), 101, 106 Fonds d’Investissements pour le Développement Économique et Social (FIDES), 101, 102, 104 Fon-speakers: laborers during the colonial era, 55; relocation of, 73, 77–78, 86; soldiers, 76–77

France: colonial infrastructure, 26–27, 91–92, 95, 97–102; difficulties in maintaining empire after World War II, 103, 111–12; military organization and administration in Ọhọri-Ije, 25–26, 62–66, 71, 74–80, 82; oui or non vote, 112; socialist government of Léon Blum, 26, 87, 92; transition from direct to indirect rule in early colonies, 50–51; use of exile as a political tool, 66–67; World War I, 66. See also French West Africa French Equatorial Africa, 102, 112 French West Africa: administration of, 88, 96–98, 117; Division of Public Works, 25; “Four Year Plan,” 180n58; military command of, 67; politique routière, 102; roadbuilding, 102–4 frontiers, 159n30 Front Populaire (Popular Front), 87 Graux Enterprises, 102 Guinea (French), 112 Harmattan, 15, 91 Hersent, 102 History of the Yorubas, 43 Hodgson, Dorothy, 21 Holli: colonial encounters with, 58, 85, 97, 145n2; French impressions of, 96; rebellion, 25, 55, 69, 73, 77, 84; region, 111 Hollidjé, 96, 106, 145n2. See also Ọhọri-Ije Holli-Kétou, 61, 72–73, 77, 84–85, 169n4 Houelli-Gaba, 36 Hummel, Georges, 52–55

 . INDEX

Ibiyan, 32, 39 Idohou, 41–42 Ifa, 124. See also religion Igbó Akpa (Kapok Forest), 2, 4–8, 19, 27, 121–30, 135–36. See also sacred forests Igbó Ilú: creation of, 29–31, 37; as de-facto border, 25, 36, 42, 45–47, 84, 117; destruction of, 26, 63, 67, 74–75, 79, 89, 95, 167n62; meaning of, 18, 30, 41, 67; migration from, 71, 79; Ọhọri control of, 19, 29, 31, 39, 51, 53, 55–57, 61–63, 68; sacred spaces within, 36, 39, 45–46, 49, 86 Ihama, Edwin, 119 Ika-Ori, 32 Ilé-Ifè, 29–31, 38, 42, 44 Illara, 82 Ilo, Kossoko, 122 Iloukan, 41 Imeko, 32 Imokia, 58–59 Indochina, 112, 117 industrialization: in French colonial Dahomey, 96, 100; Ọhọri memories of, 22, 27, 123–24, 127, 129; in post-independent Dahomey/Benin, 25, 115–21 interstitial West African communities, 13–14, 30, 44, 156n7 Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, 91 inventing tradition, 25, 42–45, 160n54 Issaba: colonial encounters with residents of, 61, 65, 99; origins of, 40–42; roads connecting to, 63, 106; rotating kingships, 42, 60 Issokia, 53, 60–61, 63–65, 164n18 Itchagba: founding of, 35; proximity to Igbó Akpa, 1, 4, 122–23; in relation to the Pobé-Kétu road, 106, 129;

residents of, 10, 71, 123; skirmishes near, 85 Itchèdè, 53, 63 Itchigan, 42, 60 Iwọyé, 42, 60, 65 Johnson, Samuel, 32, 43 Johung, Jennifer, 107 Kéké, Joseph, 118 Kérékou, Mathieu, 118–20, 128, 133, 137, 187n51 Kétu: access to, 8, 19–20, 29, 46, 53, 80, 88, 98–99, 102, 104, 111, 125; colonial administration of, 83; Dahomean attacks on, 46–47, 49, 79–81; location, 1, 15, 18; Ọhọri alliances with, 45–46 (see also Confederation of Nagos); residents of, 62, 82, 98, 105, 107, 122; trading activities, 81–82, 92 Kodesh, Neil, 23 Kouoka, 29–32, 34–37, 42, 44 Kpedekpo, 113 labor: changing Ọhọri perceptions of, 26–27, 59–60, 62, 100–101, 106–8, 111; colonial conscription and recruitment practices or prestatataires, 26–27, 51, 68–69, 76, 105, 171n30; on colonial roadbuilding projects, 55–57, 66–67, 105; corvée, 67; destruction of Igbó Ilú, 63–64, 66, 74; gendering of, 171n24; Ọhọri resistance to labor co-option, 67, 136; in a postcolonial era, 1, 3–5, 119–20, 123, 131; slave, 171n30; strike at Cotonou wharf, 101; use of porters during World War, 1, 75; use of prison and convict labor, 93–95, 104

INDEX • 

Lama Valley: access to, 11, 15, 92, 101; climate, 15–16, 91; location, 1, 3; mineral deposits, 119; residents, 45–46, 96; settlement of, 30–38 la révolte des Hollis: conclusion of, 71, 73; French portrayal of in archival data, 25, 69, 146n14; impact on the Ọhọri population, 75–77, 83, 85 L’Aube Nouvelle, 112–13, 115–16 Law, Robin, 149n30, 191n15 Le Gregam (colonial inspector), 97, 101–2 Maga, Hubert, 116–18, 120 maize: distribution of, 81, 126; French colonial desire for, 96–98; Ọhọri production of, 1, 24, 31, 106–9 Manuh, Takyiwaa, 10 Maroix (chef de battaillon), 63–65, 161–62n63 Massè, 53–56, 63, 66, 69, 80, 83 Mauritania (Port-Étienne), 66 Miescher, Stephan, 10 modernity, 12, 128, 134, 136 Mohilo, 60, 62–66, 71, 74, 79 Moran, Joe, 9 Mouleres, Germain, 96, 98 Moutitaba, Adèyinka, 46–47, 49, 122 Nago, 18, 45, 151n45 Nigeria: Beninese collaboration with, 119; British colonial, 8, 66, 72, 92; cross-border trade, 57, 66, 82, 96–97, 104, 107, 126, 134; intercolonial routes, 102; Ọhọri migration to, 73, 79–80; oil production, 118–19, 126; present day, 15, 19, 29, 31–32, 39, 44, 124; Yorùbá communities within, 12 Noltenius & Paul GmbH, 57

Obalegbé, Ogoulerou, 77, 114 ọbas, 59, 67, 76–77, 83 Odjoubé, Barthlemi, 108, 134 Odo-Meta, 98, 150–51n43 Ogounonté, Firmin, 108 Ọhọri-Ije: access to, 26, 39, 49, 52–56, 91, 94–100; agriculture and geography, 15, 29, 46, 107; colonial administration of, 50–54, 58, 64, 69, 87–88; colonial military occupation of, 71–80, 82, 86, 169n5; demography, 46, 170n20, 173n45; founding of, 69; in historiography, 43–44; during independence, 112, 126; location, 1; mineral capacity of, 117; Ọhọri defense of, 103; Ọhọri political organization of, 20, 25, 29–30, 34–35, 41, 61, 83–84; Ọhọri use of term, 145n2; SOCOLE road, 105. See also Hollidjé Okalèbiodjo, 93, 99 Ọkpé, 72, 76–78, 83, 86 Olatodji, Okpégou, 136 Oligbolo: founding of, 72–74, 85–87, 107 (see also Tollou); market, 81–82, 84, 89, 96, 98, 107, 113; naming of, 73, 117; Ọhọri migration to, 26, 80, 82, 94, 105; topography, 109. See also Onigbolo (village) Olougbessa, Salako Igue, 80 Olouossa, Théodore, 126 Onigbolo (cement factory): cement distribution, 127; construction of, 119, 128–29; naming of, 117, 186n34; notions of development, 119, 121 Ọhọri impressions of, 120 (see also Société des Ciments d’Onigbolo). See also cement Onigbolo (village), 24. See also Oligbolo

 . INDEX

oral data, traditions, and memory: challenges for scholars, 23–24, 137; connections to environment in scholarship, 21–22; foundation myths, 25, 29–31, 34–36, 39–41, 43–44; methodology, 8–9, 11–12, 20, 73; Ọhọri memories of colonial era, 45–47, 76, 80, 83, 94; Ọhọri memories of colonial road-building, 96, 104–5; Ọhọri memories of environment and landscape, 14–15, 21–22, 122–23, 124, 127; Ọhọri memories of Igbó Akpa and road construction, 5, 120; Ọhọri memories of independent era, 115, 123–24, 126–29; traditions collected by French colonial administrators, 16, 60 Otckékérédinan, 41 Otutubiodjo, 60–68, 71, 74–75, 84. See also Anegbé Ouémé River, 16, 30 Overseas France, 101 Ọyọ empire: demise of, 37–39, 42, 162n63; imperial growth, 29, 32, 45; location of, 9, 13; Ọhọri connections to in oral tradition, 29–32, 35, 40, 42, 44, 148n28 paleoecology, 22, 153n59, 154n63 palm and palm oil, 57, 85, 91–92, 95, 97, 107–8 Pobé: access to, 19–20, 29, 46, 53, 75, 92, 98–99, 102–5, 111, 114; colonial administration of, 61–64, 67–68, 77, 83, 85, 87–88, 98; Dahomean attacks on, 45; following independence, 113, 126, 133; location, 1, 8, 15–16, 81, 109; migrations to, 49, 93; residents of,

46, 76; trading activities, 72, 82, 106; train station, 81, 98 Porto Novo: capital of Benin, 15, 150n35; capital of colonial Dahomey, 62, 96, 106; Ọhọri trade with merchants from, 72, 97; prison of, 75; SOCOLE, 102–4 pọtọ-pọtọ, 17–19, 29, 39, 40, 52 Prisons (Dahomey’s Division of), 93, 177n12. See also Dahomey (French colony) Public Works: archival materials, 25; colonial administration of, 54, 101–4, 111; projects, 55–56, 80, 93, 95, 97, 100; road maintenance, 108. See also Dahomey (French colony) rail, 3, 62, 92, 98, 101, 177n8 Ranger, Terence R., 152n58, 160n54 refugees: assimilation of in Ọhọri-Ije, 31, 36, 41–43; mobility, 45–46, 68; reasons for displacement, 9, 30, 35, 37–39; in scholarly discourse, 158n22, 159n34; settlements of in a precolonial era, 25, 30, 36–38, 49, 74 religion: identity formation, 36, 82; missionary activities, 46, 155n82; Ọhọri beliefs and rituals, 5, 29, 63, 76, 122–25, 164n20, 164n26; in relation to Ọhọri politics, 26, 35, 51–52, 57, 59, 64, 68; See also Adoko; Ifa; Şango resistance: to colonial rule, 51, 55, 61, 67, 75, 92, 106; historiography, 44–45, 125; in post-colonial contexts, 5, 121–22, 125, 128–29, 150n33 sacred forests: functions in religious and political ceremonies, 5, 36, 41, 86, 136; locations, 2; Ọhọri

INDEX • 

memories of, 5, 19, 27, 121–29. See also Igbó Akpa (Kapok Forest) Sakété, 19, 103, 104 Şango, 29, 113, 164n21, 184n7 SCB-Lafarge, 186n44 Sen, Arijit, 107 Shetler, Jan Bender, 22–23 “Slave Coast,” 12. See also Bight of Benin slavery: historiography, 137; impact of on Ọhọri social and political organization, 9, 12, 25, 30, 36–40, 49–50, 137; Ọhọri memories of in relation to colonial rule, 27, 94; West African imperial growth, 9, 42, 44, 191n15 Société Coloniale d’Entreprises (SOCOLE), 100, 102–9, 111–17, 121–25, 133 Société des Ciments d’Onigbolo, 119. See also Onigbolo (cement factory) Soglo, Christophe, 116 sovereignty, 20–21, 127–28, 139 Soyinka, Wole, 1, 131–32 subaltern studies, 155–56n83

Togo, 15, 31, 72, 75, 97, 101, 102. See also Togoland Togoland, 75. See also Togo Tollou, 71–74, 79–87, 91, 107. See also Oligbolo Truitard, Léon, 96

tirailleurs, 62–67, 75, 77–78, 83–88, 95, 99

Zagnanado, 50, 52–58, 61–62, 66, 68, 80, 87

urbanization, 97–98, 101, 103, 106 vaccinations, 114–15, 184n11 Verger, Pierre, 24, 107, 155n81, 183n97 Viet Minh, 112 Wabi, Falilou, 120 World Health Organization, 184n11 World War I, 75, 77, 94, 168n76 World War II, 95, 99–100, 117, 179n41 Yorùbá: communities and politics, 12, 15, 29–31, 38–39, 43, 45; historiography, 12, 38, 43–44; language, 24, 30, 44; markets, 92; Ọhọri connections with, 43, 124, 162n63; religion, 30, 113, 164n21

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MARCUS FILIPPELLO is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.