Near Abomey’s city center is Place Goho, a small park where a statue of Akhosu (King) Behanzin (r. 1889–1894) stands behind a fountain and rectangular pool. This massive monument depicts a muscular figure, his hand outstretched as if to indicate “stop.” The site is particularly poignant, for it is where Behanzin and Alfred Amédée Dodds, the Senegalese general who led the French army’s final assault, met for the Dahomean surrender in 1894, as well as where Dodds made his encampment after his conquest of Abomey and Behanzin’s exile. Fencing encloses the formally designed park, punctuated by colored medallions featuring the emblems of former rulers, as if they are witnesses to the end of independence.

Behanzin’s idealized representation is made from copper alloy and stands over 19.5’ tall (6 meters). While its face bears a general likeness to the oft-photographed monarch, its musculature (as well as that of the body generally) is over-emphasized, a trait common to the socialist realism of its North Korean sculptors. A creation of the North Korean state-run art operation Mansudae Art Studios, it is one of the factory’s many African memorials to national heroes who fought European colonial ambitions. Although numerous sources mistakenly attribute it to the 21st century, the statue was erected in 1979. Benin was a declared socialist state from 1974–1989, when some of its defensive forces were trained by North Korea, the decade when the Mansudae Art Studio began to move beyond Pyongyang to international locations. Place Goho itself was the very site of the revolutionary government’s declaration of Marxist-Leninist policies. The company’s collective nature–it employs over 1000 artists–and North Korean origin make it difficult to track down any information on the specific artists who worked on this project, but the company’s policy has been to use its own artists, engineers, and installers.

Behanzin is shown in his typical royal attire. He wears a toga-like hand-woven garment that leaves one shoulder bare, a “dog-eared” cloth cap, and sandals. Sandals are the most significant of the garments, as they were explicitly reserved for the Akhosu. Clenched in his right fist is the royal makpo (reçade in French), the scepter used since the kingdom’s first “official” Akhosu, Houegbadja (r. 1645–1685). The plinth that supports the statue bears an inscribed plaque, which (loosely translated) states: “I cannot accept any treaties that do not keep the land of my ancestors independent.”

Akhosu Behanzin was the eleventh king of Dahomey. When he first came to the throne, European attempts to colonize the continent were underway. They occupied the coastal town of Cotonou, and Behanzin immediately attacked them. Their modern weaponry forced him to withdraw. Two years later, Behanzin campaigned against two other coastal towns formerly part of Dahomey’s territory but part of France’s sphere of interest; France declared war. Behanzin favored diplomacy over the death of his people in battle even as the French demanded the kingdom’s surrender to French rule. Behanzin wrote many letters to the French commander, General Dodds, explaining that Dahomey would never give up its land. He even attempted to contact the president of France to explain the situation.

When it became apparent that reason and even gifts of gold and slaves could not sway the French, Behanzin took a stand. The French slowly battled their way inland against the ferocious albeit ill-equipped Fon. Steadily, they pushed the Fon back from the coast and into the capital city of Abomey. While remaining steadfast in his defense of his homeland, Behanzin never abandoned the hope for a diplomatic solution. After General Dodds and his government dismissed Behanzin’s pleas, he began corresponding with the German chancellor asking him beseech the president of France on Dahomey’s behalf, swearing to protect German traders and citizens in Abomey. The French were not persuaded and continued their attacks.

Behanzin knew the army that was marching into the capitol could easily overwhelm his exhausted remaining forces. He decided to burn the royal palaces so the French could not claim them and then fled to the north with the intention of making a final assault against the French. Guerilla warfare and small attacks against the French in Abomey occupied the next year. Due to word from his brother and former officer, Goutchili (regnal name Agoli-Agbo), he attempted a final meeting with the French and was captured. After his difficult four-year reign, Behanzin was exiled, first to Martinique, then to Algeria, dying in Algiers in 1906. The French had installed Agoli-Agbo as king but stripped all power from his position. This was a pivotal moment in Dahomean history and it was undoubtedly the death of the nation’s independence. The Fon still regard Behanzin as not only a great king but a national hero for his resistance efforts. His body was repatriated in 1928.

Behanzin’s giant statue honors the monarch who spent his whole reign attempting to stop colonialization efforts. Its naturalism is in stark contrast to the life-size wooden sculpture created in his lifetime by local artist and royal family member Sosa Dede or to the Houeglo family of artists. It takes the unusual form of an anthropomorphized shark in an equally rare depiction of aggressive action. This work was a royal bocio, a power object activated and reinforced by mystical medicine. When such works were transported to the battlefield, they were believed to exert positive effects on the outcome. The shark was one of Behanzin’s emblems and referred to a “strong name” assigned to him by divination. His motto was “The angry shark will terrorize its enemies,” and he is remembered as saying, “Gbo ouele fandan agbedui brou,” or “the daring shark has troubled the sandbar,” referring to the French who had to cross a sandbar at Cotonou.

This wooden sculpture may soon join its larger “twin” in Benin Republic. Although it has been in Paris since Dodds’ success (presently at the Musée du Quai Branly), the 2018 panel assembled by French President Emmanuel Macron concluded it should be among the first African objects to be repatriated to its home country. In 2020, this became a bill passed into law, with 2021 the target year. Midway through the year, this had not yet occurred.

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The regal estate that fronts Devil’s Peak next to Table Mountain was home to British colonialist, politician and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), whose belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy led him to enact voting and property laws that helped steer South Africa towards apartheid. The Groote Schuur, Dutch for “Big Barn,” was first constructed as a Dutch East India Company granary in 1657, and passed into private hands in the 18th century. Rhodes then leased it, purchasing and renovating it in 1893, along with 1500 acres of surrounding mountains and land. Ever since, the Cape Dutch structure has been an exclusively governmental estate, used to house political officials during their years in office.  When Rhodes acquired the Groote Schuur, it was in a dilapidated state. Rhodes had amassed a fortune consolidating diamond concessions through the establishment of De Beers. He decided to rejuvenate the property and hired Sit Herbert Baker, an English architect who made many notable government structures in South Africa. The Groote Schuur underwent massive renovation and expansion to revamp its original Cape Dutch appearance while preserving its character. Baker invented a new vernacular, exaggerating some of the curving gables and marrying them to certain English features, such as barley sugar chimneys with their twisted appearance. Although a fire destroyed much of it in 1886, Baker rebuilt it to his first plan, abjuring thatched roofing for tiles. Its enlargement included an entirely new front façade and a large terraced back porch, as well as a new wing that contained a leisure room for billiards, a master bedroom with a great bay window, and a grand hall with a huge fireplace. Its interior also incorporated indigenous yellowwood and stinkwood. The home’s architectural elements are comprised of decorative gables, collonaded verandas, whitewashed walls, and teak woodwork, giving the structure the air of a country estate. A bronze relief by Scottish sculptor John Tweed stands over the front door, framed by Ionic columns. Although it represents Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival and the founding of his colony, it has also been read as Rhodes’s constructed foreshadowing of his own further development as an empire builder, van Riebeeck like John the Baptist to Rhode’s Christ. Rhodes also commissioned Baker to furnish the estate, and he filled the house with furniture, books, glassware, and other decorations from the Cape in a shift away from popular London-imported furnishings. Baker’s skill and interest in the Cape Dutch style inspired Rhodes to collect colonial furnishings and keep African elements a part of his interior decorating.  Furnishings include an expertly-crafted Egyptian writing table, an old Cape Town armoire with hidden drawers, an elephant-shaped drinking cup, and an enormous bathtub carved from a single formation of Paarl Mountain granite. The Groote Schuur’s interior remains almost entirely as it was in Rhodes’s day, which means that heads of state through much of the 20^th century lived in old-fashioned surroundings that underlined the enshrined past. The narrative was that of a kind of manifest destiny: that what Rhodes considered the “higher races” were fated to rule their inferiors. One of Rhodes' favorite symbols derived from Great Zimbabwe in what was then Rhodesia. Rhodes subscribed to the false narrative of the time—that its mortarless-stone structures had been built by non-Africans who had subjugated much of southern Africa in the distant past. He would have found the concept that the Shona had created the structure, since established by archaeologists, inconceivable. Rhodes had originally wanted to be buried at Great Zimbabwe, but settled for bringing part of it back to Groote Schuur. His bedroom, whose window looked out at the house’s Devil’s Mountain backdrop, still includes a glass front case filled with milk jugs, headrests, soapstone bowls, and other African objects. A stone bird sits at its top; this is one of the eight soapstone birds that stood at Great Zimbabwe, and was snatched by the hunter Willie Posselt, who had separated the bird (about 13 inches high) from its column, which was just under five feet tall. He sold it to Rhodes. A number of similar sculptures were taken from the site, but all have been returned to Zimbabwe except for the Groote Schuur example. The wooden staircase Baker built at the house features comer posts carved in its likeness, and Baker used its form for doorplates and several waterspouts still visibly protruding from the wall under parts of the building’s roofline. Rhodes also had it reproduced and aggrandized for the dome finials at Oxford University's Rhodes House, which Baker also designed, and its replicas stand on the staircase there as well. It acted as his personal emblem and remains incorporated in the Rhodes Trust logo. During Rhode’s occupation of the estate, he used it as much as a home as a political headquarters. He frequently opened his gates to the public and allowed them to play and picnic amid the flowers and foliage of the garden and grounds, where he demanded masses of colors. He kept a menagerie closer to the slopes near Devil’s Peak, where visitors were also welcome. In 1930, decades after Rhodes's death, the Groote Schuur Zoo was constructed, full of antelopes, zebra, wildebeest, and ostriches. It has been vacant since 1975.   In choosing the Cape Dutch style and even reverting to the property’s Dutch name, Rhodes gave a nod to the Afrikaaners who had lived in Cape Town before their Great Trek to Natal. Coetzer suggests that Rhodes’ promotion of Cape Dutch style—at first derided by the English who had taken possession of Cape Town—was the cornerstone of the creation of a fictional common white South African identity, devoid of the very real conflicts that took place between the English and the Boers before their 1910 union. A partner in Baker’s architectural firm wrote an 8-part series on Cape Dutch architecture in 1909, and the would-be architectural joint heritage took on symbolic significance. Cape Dutch Revival became popular in the Cape Town for several decades; first associated with the elite, then the middle class. Rhodes left his estate to the nation. From 1911 to 1994, the Groote Schuur was the official Cape residence to eleven members of the Prime Ministers of South Africa and then functioned as a presidential residence. P. W. Botha, Nelson Mandela, and subsequent heads of state declined to live there. It is now a museum, known as Rhodes Memorial, but is only open to the public by appointment, unless public charity events are scheduled. 

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