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The African kingdom of Dahomey was a major player in the slave trade.

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By that we mean it was a Walmart-sized superstore for slaves. [People outside Walmart]

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It was a great example of the kind of state the slave trade encouraged.

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Turns out, in a dog-eat-dog world, you have to become a person-capturing-person state. [Dogs at a park and man catches another man in a net]

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Some might ask…

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How could Africans do that to other Africans?

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Well, for one thing, during the Age of Exploration, there was no such thing as a pan-African identity. [Ship travels through age of exploration]

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Meaning that people didn’t necessarily think of themselves as African.

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There was a ginormous number of people living in Africa, with many different races, ethnicities,

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and huge cultural differences.

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Europeans might’ve seen people from Africa as one big lump of mashed potatoes. [European man looking at African man]

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But people from the continent saw themselves as part of a complex casserole made of lots

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of different ingredients.

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Anyway, this is one of the reasons some kings in Africa didn't see anything too ethically

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wrong with attacking different ethnic groups and nations and selling their people into [King Dahomey appears on pier]

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slavery.

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Totally different people.

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So NBD, they thought.

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That’s definitely how the rulers of the kingdom of Dahomey felt.

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See, Dahomey had a… rough childhood. [Abomey kid appears]

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It started as a small and weak city-state called Abomey.

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The nearby Oyo Empire had beat up on it for a while. [Oyo empire hand hits abomey]

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So Abomey absolutely hated Oyo and the whole Yoruba ethnic group to which the Oyo rulers

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belonged.

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But Oyo was powerful, and Abomey couldn’t do much about the abuse, except maybe write

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mean things in its diary… [Abomey writing in his diary]

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In the mid-17th century, however, a brutal absolute monarchy rose to power in Abomey.

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The kingdom got organized with a rigid hierarchy of bureaucrats and an ever-expanding army. [Soldiers of Dahomey appear on cliff]

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And by 1722, Abomey started to get even by conquering nearby Yoruba cities.

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Gotta hand it them: they had a solid plan.

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Capture towns with European slave-trading posts…

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…then use those posts to export the Yoruba people to the Europeans for superior weapons… [Man hands over slaves]

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…and finally, use those weapons to capture more Yoruba towns to get more weapons.

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It worked like a charm.

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Still, we don’t think the King of Dahomey would’ve been invited to do a Ted Talk… [King Dahomey on stage and security guard appears]

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Next thing anybody knew, Abomey was renamed the Kingdom of Dahomey.

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Over the next century, it became a bigger and bigger player in the human-selling game.

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They could only keep control of their empire through superior weapons. [Dahomey with stockpile of weapons]

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They could only get superior weapons by expanding their empire.

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It was a vicious cycle that caused them to ship thousands of people out of their slave

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ports.

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One might almost feel bad for Dahomey. [Slave trade on a ship]

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In a way, it was a… slave to its own slaving racket….

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