Word: dahomey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ugly bands of 200 and 300, the black mob surged through the streets of Abidjan (pop. 128,000), capital city of the Ivory Coast, shouting against the black "invaders" from Dahomey and Togoland. Armed with knives, clubs and broken bottles, rioters smashed down any Dahomeyans or Togolanders they met. Houses were looted and set afire and as women fled into the streets, they were dragged off and raped. Native Ivory Coast policemen stood by and watched. Only the Frenchmen in the police force tried to restore order...
...said French West Africa Deputy Hammadoun Dicko, "must recognize our independence and not only our right to independence." After hearing a nationalist pep talk by Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah ("Make first for independence, and you will get the rest!"), a meeting of African party leaders in Dahomey called upon France to help her territories form a "United States of Africa." De Gaulle apparently would have the West African territories separate states affiliated with France. For all their protests, Africans were careful not to ask for too much too soon, lest France cut off its vital economic...
...disemboweled bodies into the river to make sure of a good year's fishing. Until this year, Mauritania, whose Berber people call themselves "whites" (Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after an ancient king who ate his victims, the fiercest warriors were once the Amazons. And among the Tuareg tribes of the Niger, it is the men, not the women, who wear veils...
...people or more, is a vast desert whose rich deposits of iron and copper ore are still to be exploited. The Upper Volta has as many livestock as people, and its workers must migrate from the territory each year to find jobs. Niger, the largest territory, and Dahomey, the smallest, barely manage to survive...
Togoland is a hot, humid and tiny country, 75 miles wide and 330 miles long, named by the Germans, given to the French under a U.N. trusteeship, and stuck like an afterthought on the map of Africa, between Ghana and the even tinier French territory of Dahomey. Of all French African territories, it is closest to independence. At the same time, it has seemed closest to France. Since 1956 the government has been safely in the hands of Premier Nicolas Grunitzky, a naturalized French citizen and member of the French National Assembly. The boss of the ruling political party...