Settling Ọhọri: Reassessing Rebellion, Gender, and Foundation “Myths” in Colonial Dahomey

Abstract

Abstract This article offers critical examinations of archival and oral data and tradition to show how members of a small community in southeastern colonial Dahomey responded to early French policies that featured arrest and banishment as mechanisms of coercion in their experiments with early modalities of indirect rule. In highlighting historical change through the prism of local politics, the article adds to historical discourses on colonial and gendered West African pasts in three notable and interconnected ways. First, it demonstrates how younger generations of Africans disaggregated from a colonial apparatus and local elders aligned with French administrators by resettling and operating outside of the purview of colonial rule. An emphasis on the role that women played in reshaping a collective anticolonial identity also offers new gendered and temporal dimensions to West African foundation traditions. Finally, the inability of colonial troops to restrict mobility reveals how some Africans considered imperial boundaries as insignificant and voluntary.