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Wiktionary
dahomey

n. (context historical English) A former country in Africa, located in present-day Benin.

Wikipedia
Dahomey

Dahomey was an African kingdom (located in the area of the present-day country of Benin) that existed from about 1600 until 1894, when the last king, Behanzin, was defeated by the French, and the country was annexed into the French colonial empire. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by conquering key cities on the Atlantic coast.

For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey was a key regional state, eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo Empire. The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor, significant international trade with European powers, a centralized administration, taxation systems, and an organized military. Notable in the kingdom were significant artwork, an all-female military unit known as the Dahomey Amazons, and the elaborate religious practices of Vodun with the large festival of the Annual Customs of Dahomey.

Usage examples of "dahomey".

Dahomey, the Mandinka, the Yoruba, of tribes yet unborn in the tides of time.

Sanchez, who was an astonishing good plucked 'un, for a Dago, actually went up to talk to Gezo a day later, to see that all was well, and found the black rascal full of alarm in case Spring was going to wash his hands of the Dahomey trade.

It was only later, after the economic facts of life had forced several ex-colonial countries to federate into groups sharing a common European language - such as Mali, Dahomey and Upper Volta into Dahomalia, and Ghana and Nigeria into RUNG - that they became aware of a curious phenomenon.

I can't say it's none of my biznai, because it was once: in my time, I've raided blacks from the Dahomey Coast, shipped 'em across the Middle Passage, driven them on a plantation - and run them to freedom on the Underground Railroad and across the Ohio ice-floes with a bullet in my rump, to say nothing of abetting J.