Some Concrete, Practical Implications

This chapter presents the religious beliefs, and more generally the world outlook, of the local inhabitants in a comparative African context. It explores these “sacred societies”, and the way in which rulers of Dahomey tried to get around the inbuilt constraints that impeded the establishment of a genuinely centralized polity ruled by an all powerful monarch/sacred king. Among those constraints was that of “contrapuntal paramountcy” which implies that the right of conquest did not apply; incoming conquerors had to reach a modus vivendi with the indigenous population, and had to rule with the consent and collaboration of that population, the “owners of the land”, who exercised ritual control over the land, a divinely sanctioned inalienable right. But the rulers of Dahomey, who refused to abide by the rules of the game, were not really successful in establishing an alternative source of legitimacy, and were, therefore, faced with a severe problem of legitimacy – one which never went away. It forced the rulers to resort to terror.