The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey

Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940

Jessica Catherine Reuther

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780253071453
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers.

Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Jessica Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls' lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing these girls and their social mothers at the center of history brings to light their core contributions to local and global political economies, even as the Dahomean monarchy, global trade, and colonial courts reshaped girlhood norms and fostering practices.

Reuther reveals that the social, economic, and political changes wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century; the shift to "legitimate" trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth century; and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered—and were altered by—the intimate practice of entrusting female children between households. Dahomeans also valorized this process as a crucial component of being "well-raised"—a sentiment that continues into the present, despite widespread Beninese opposition to modern-day forms of child labor.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Portrait of a Girl and a Fabric Seller
• Chapter 1. The Value of Girls to the Royal Household of Dahomey, 1720s–1870s
• Chapter 2. Dashing and Entrusting Girls: The Atlanticization of Child Transfers during the Reigns of Kings Gezo and Glèlè, 1818–1889
• Chapter 3. Agbessipé and Her Mother: Female Wealth, Girl Pawns, and Enslaved Labor in Ouidah during the Era of “Legitimate” Trade, 1840s–1880s
• Chapter 4. A Runaway Girl amid the Turmoil of Conquest: Household Economies and Colonial Transformations in the Kingdoms of Hogbonou and Dahomey, 1880s–1890s
• Chapter 5. Entrusted or Enslaved?: Colonial Legal Debates about Girls’ Statuses, 1900s–1930s
• Chapter 6. “Why Did You Not Cry Out . . .?”: Sexual Assaults of Entrusted Girls in Colonial Dahomey, 1917–1941
• Chapter 7. The Télé Affair (1936–1938): Anxieties about Transformations in Girlhood in Colonial Abomey
• Conclusion: Obscured Histories of Girlhood
• Glossary of Foreign Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author