International records / OpenAlex research

A Yoruba woman remembers servitude in a palace of Dahomey, in the reigns of Kings Glele and Behanzin

Abstract A Yoruba woman in the Ketu-Yoruba town of Meko, in western Nigeria, gave an interview in January 1951 to the anthropologists William R. Bascom and Paul Mercier, in which she talked of her time in Dahomey as a servant in Simboji palace, some sixty years earlier. The conversation was written down by the author of this article and is offered to mark the centenary of the destruction of Abomey in 1992. She had served two mistresses, both of the same high rank. The first had committed suicide on the death of Glele, and the other she had served throughout the reign of Behanzin, during the de…