Benin
POPULATION 6,787,625
VODUN 57 percent
ROMAN CATHOLIC 21 percent
MUSLIM 15 percent
PROTESTANT 4 percent
INDEPENDENT 3 percent
Country Overview
Introduction
Set in western Africa along the Gulf of Guinea, the Republic of Benin is a small, narrow country between Togo to the west and Nigeria to the east. To the north is Burkina Faso and Niger. Until 1975 Benin was called Dahomey, a name derived from the former kingdom of Dahomey, which dominated the slave trade between the interior and the Atlantic coast from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Among the largest ethnic groups represented in Benin are the Fon, Aja, and Gun. The population also contains groups of Yoruba- and Ewe-speaking peoples.
Traditionally Dahomeans have practiced Vodun, a religion involving the worship of hundreds of deities (vodun) who play an intermediary role between the Supreme Being (Mawu) and humans. Beginning in the sixteenth century slaves transported from Dahomey took the religion with them to the New World, where a derogatory and sensationalized form, voodoo, captured the Western imagination. Vodun remains the dominant religion of contemporary Benin.
Islam had trickled into the northern part of what became Benin well before the colonial period. Traders and clerics brought Islam with them and lived under the auspices of non-Islamic leaders who hoped to profit from the wider Islamic trade network.
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