Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
none of them adequately explains the cause of Dahomean defeat.
Background
The Dahomey war originated in the broad historical context of Western imperialism across nineteenth-century Africa. In the 1880s, rivalry between European powers grew at a time commonly known as the Scramble for Africa. Africa as a whole generated an image of abundant resources to be exploited, and the kingdom of Dahomey became an attractive site of its own for the lucrative slave business and palm oil trade, inducing Britain, France, and Germany to seek to conquer the territory. More important, it stood as an extension of French economic and strategic interest in colonizing West Africa. Among these imperial powers, France was particularly motivated to conquer Dahomey for both financial and strategic reasons. Famine in the 1880s had hurt French agriculture and generated a mercantilist movement known as the pacte colonial, which asserted that colonies would provide markets and raw materials and could become part of a greater French civilization.1 France was strategically motivated, too, because resources that Dahomey offered could be used for war, because colonies provided bases of operation, and because they enhanced national reputation.2 Penetration of the Dahomey hinterland would also allow France to alter the strategic landscape in West Africa in its favor. Dahomey would present a takeoff point for a move into the Niger Bend and an opportunity to navigate portions of the Niger River. Possession of Dahomey was also key to France’s success in imperial competition, while loss of it would mean a relative decline of French power. The strategic benefit of colonialism, coupled with prestige and pride, was therefore an important part of French national interest. The operational drive centered on the so-called Chad Plan, which centered the idea of unifying all forces under French “assimilation” all the way from the Mediterranean to Chad.3 France’s adventure was led by the premiership of Jules Ferry, who argued that “for the time being, forget revenge and concentrate on the expansion of the empire.”4 As France began to prepare for invasion, agreements with Britain in the 1880s gave it a virtual free hand over Dahomey. French invasion was vehemently opposed by Dahomean King Gléglé, who asserted the right to collect customs at Cotonou, a naval kingdom neighboring Dahomey, threatened a massive retaliation, and preemptively raided Porto Novo.
Gléglé’s death in 1890 led to the outbreak of the Dahomean War. Unlike most other wars, in this war it was the weaker Dahomean side that had numerical advantage in manpower. The Dahomean army in 1890 had around 8,000 troops, before the number doubled in two years, against the initial French contingency of 3,450 men,5 composed mostly of Africans led by French officers. Dahomey had about 2,500 female soldiers who had physiques superior to those of men, fought ferociously, and therefore were well cherished. Dahomey’s numerical advantage continued until the end of the war, but their overall military deficit led to their defeat. As this chapter demonstrates, much combat took place in the form of battles in two major campaigns between Dahomean and French armies rather than in small-scale guerrilla operations because the war was more conventional than unconventional. The possession of an army did not mean that Dahomey was a state. In fact, it would never develop a mature state structure beyond a loosely controlled kingdom and instead functioned more like a group of nonstate warriors confronting the powerful intervention of French troops invading their territory. Therefore, the Dahomean kingdom was never recognized as a member of the international system.
Conventional Model and the Dahomean War
The war began in 1890 when negotiations for peaceful resolution to French demands for territorial control over Dahomey broke down and several thousand Dahomeans charged into Cotonou to confront French forces in a firefight. With the French launching the so-called first campaign, the Battle of Cotonou left several hundred Dahomeans dead and forced survivors to withdraw, while the French sustained few casualties. Soon Dahomey regrouped and sent a detachment south for a rematch at Atchoupa. After receiving reinforcements from Porto Novo, the French ordered four hundred men to march north and intercept the Dahomeans. At the Battle of Atchoupa, the Dahomeans destroyed five hundred warriors, but French troops held their ground and formed a defensive position there. They launched more charges and pushed the French all the way back to Porto Novo before breaking off the attack and retreating without taking the city. Refraining from launching further attacks, Béhanzin signed a treaty recognizing Porto Novo as a French protectorate and ceded Cotonou in exchange for a large indemnity. Béhanzin kept his kingdom intact, managed to avoid colonization, and prepared for another campaign, believing that the treaty would not last long. The year of 1891 was peaceful, as Dahomey used the brief recess to revive the slave trade in an effort to buy weapons as part of its rearmament program. The temporary “draw” left the French forces so embarrassed, however, that they changed command and assigned a higher-ranking officer, General Alfred-Amedee Dodds, to the area, although they never resolved their numerical disadvantage. When the second campaign started in 1892, Dodds arrived with a force of over 2,000 legionnaires, marines, engineers, and Senegalese soldiers, while Porto Novo added some 2,600 porters. The Dahomean army was still a few times larger, totaling around 12,000 men and armed with modern carbines. Despite French reinforcements, therefore, it was the Dahomeans who kept the numerical advantage and had perhaps grown confident because they had forced a draw with a more powerful enemy.
Yet the Dahomeans proved to be no enemy of France. Their inferiority in military power forced them to break off quickly at Dogba. After the defeat at Dogba, Béhanzin himself took up arms and attacked French forces moving upriver to Poguessa, although the Dahomean charges were fruitless in the face of French bayonets. French victory of Poguessa was followed by another French victory at Adégon. At this point Dodds decided that his troops must make a decisive march on Abomey, the capital, to end the war.6 Not surprisingly, the French overran the Dahomeans, now numbering just fifteen hundred men, and marched on to force Béhanzin to burn the capital and flee. Upon capturing Béhanzin in 1894, Dodds proclaimed victory. In less than seven weeks of fighting in the second campaign, the Dahomean army had lost between two and four thousand dead and between three and eight thousand wounded. French casualties were far fewer, with a few dozen dead and wounded.
The conventional model best captures the Dahomean War, which assumes that both sides’ strategies converged in fighting face-to-face, open-terrain combat in a period of consistently conventional conflict. But the two sides had different motives to fight that way. On the one hand, the French settled on conventional war because it allowed them to use their power advantage. Doctrine, training, operations, and weapons procurement all suited a conventional strategy and were deeply embedded in the French military. Having inherited the Napoleonic tradition that relied on artillery, square formation, and rigid doctrine, national leaders resisted changes and only slowly integrated new battle methods. Instructors had taught this approach at military schools for decades, and this ideological conservatism lasted through the 1890s. Anywhere France fought, it embraced a high expectation for a decisive victory on the battlefield. Thus the French military institutions kept up a conventional doctrine, which built on movements inland from coastal areas and small maneuvers by mostly indigenous infantrymen and levies. The pattern was followed by the destruction of African polities by these columns often assisted by people who had been abused by those polities. Furthermore, Dodds emulated the strategy of British General Garnet Wolseley, who twenty years earlier had led a successful expedition into nearby Ashantiland. In British strategy, a small force with plenty of firepower would move quickly to destroy enemy forces and dictate terms of control and avoid the impact of weather, disease, and ambushes. To that end, Dodds concluded, the infantry must travel light and fast.7
On the Dahomean side it was a different story because the notion of fighting the more powerful French forces face-to-face was suicidal. As an underdog the Dahomeans had every reason to avoid direct confrontation and use the “weapon of the weak” by fighting like guerrillas. Fortune-tellers had advised Béhanzin against waging pitched battles in favor of stealthy ambushes and night raids.8 The Dahomeans, however, remained committed to conventional battle because it had been institutionalized through their history of conflict with neighboring kingdoms and because of the general appeal of military modernization. Conventional doctrine and armies provided symbolic meaning as a mature polity and reasonable justification for the existence of Dahomey as an aspiring modern nation that could challenge an equivalent. By way of modernity, conventional war offered an illusion that Dahomey