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CHAPTER 4

The Conventional Model: The Dahomean War (1890–1894)

In this chapter, I deploy the conventional model as a theoretical framework to examine the Dahomean War. The central proposition of this chapter is that war against a stronger foreign power is an impossible task if the insurgent side adopts a conventional model. According to this model, insurgent forces engage in open-terrain violence with their counterpart until one side is defeated. The conventional model is characterized by the direct use of force where military power plays a central role in the outcome. As such, rebel forces in Dahomey, located in what is now Benin in West Africa, mounted a brave challenge to the French army before they were ultimately crushed. The Dahomeans fielded an organized army that was twice as large as that of the French but still lost the war through a series of ground battles in two major campaigns. Dahomeans’ initial advantage in manpower size allowed them to prolong the war by a couple of years and bring a draw to the first campaign, but their failure to evolve throughout the duration cost them the war. In this context, the Dahomean War serves as a good case study for this book. It illustrates some of the key problems associated with the conventional model, such as insurgent failure to adopt guerrilla strategy, build a state as a means of war, and increase military capability. This case study shows that the Dahomeans, relatively understudied in the field of international security, confronted a powerful French adversary, used modern weapons and strategy in orthodox combat, and were defeated. The case study proves my argument that war without adaptation is a suicidal endeavor even though the insurgent side has a numerical advantage in manpower.

This chapter proceeds in four sections. First, I trace the war from 1890 to 1894 to present a brief background. Next, I use the conventional model to explain the war outcome. In the third section, I connect Dahomean defeat to the lack of strategic evolution on the part of the insurgents, namely the absence of state-building efforts and guerrilla war. In the final section, I examine the existing theories of asymmetric war. While this case study alone does not fully refute these theories, it demonstrates why 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 could fight on the same level as the strong. Furthermore, the plain topography of Dahomey favored infantry and cavalry operations rather than jungle and urban wars suited for guerrilla missions. Thus in 1891 Dahomey purchased from the Germans and Portuguese a variety of modern weapons, including flintlock muskets, blunderbusses, and other weapons like crossbows, arrows, spears, and machetes. At least one German soldier was constantly in Dahomey to train Dahomeans in the use of the new weapons, siege tactics, and physical fitness. Indeed, the Dahomean army had been known for its military potency. Archibald Dalzel, British governor of Benin in the 1760s, wrote that Dahomey maintained a considerable standing army where the king could gather his forces quickly, with officers armed like regular troops.⁹ Dahomey was “the strongest indigenous military power on the west coast of Africa.”¹⁰ Béhanzin organized his forces according to the principle of “levee en masse” to recruit all combat-ready adults. He put a commander called Gau in charge of planning military strategy, logistics, deployment, and command and control.¹¹ Béhanzin’s campaigns thus became standardized. Between one and three campaigns normally took place in the dry season. Mobilization calls would come by drum, forcing all villages to respond or face collective punishment. Force sizes ranged between twenty and two hundred men; all the rest were reserves who were nevertheless well trained and armed with their own weapons.¹²

Conventional war generally leads to insurgent failure after a few battles, and Dahomey was no exception. When the war started, it quickly revealed five major flaws with the Dahomean army, starting with the shortage of resources. The first campaign broke out during the planting season in Dahomey, interfering with the normal production of crops because the military commandeered the needed laborers. The series of French attacks not only destroyed the soil but also prevented farmers from cultivating it. The war also instigated a revolt among the neighboring Yoruba slaves, making it difficult for the Dahomeans to collect food near their areas. Therefore Dahomey’s wartime harvest declined below the average and forced soldiers to prepare their own food and raid neighbors for slaves and capital. Soldiers seized provisions while leaving little behind for the farmers.¹³ The slave trade, while bringing in cash, took away laborers available for mobilization and undermined sources of recruitment for war. Furthermore, because previous wars had been shorter in duration, preparations for this war were more pervasive. Food importation from neighbors became difficult due to the wars, the slave trade, and Béhanzin’s hostility toward them. To bring more land into cultivation in the hope of increasing productivity necessitated more labor. Finally, harsh taxation and mobilization calls proved to be such heavy burdens that villagers gradually resisted calls to contribute to the kingdom. As a result, Dahomey had to turn to women soldiers and the slave trade that gave preference to and therefore reduced the number of ablebodied men.

The second problem was that French firepower effectively offset Dahomey’s numerical superiority. French weapons, such as the Maxim gun, which fired much faster and at longer range than Dahomey’s blunderbusses and muzzle-loading flintlocks, decimated repeated Dahomean charges before the warriors could get within musket range. The French mixed this technological advantage with their maneuvers to generate maximum combined effects, overcome the burden of carrying heavy weapons, and move quickly against Dahomean efforts to cut them off. There were reports of some successful Dahomean ground combat,¹⁴ but these instances were strategically isolated. In the Battle of Poguessa, French bayonets proved to be highly effective. French rifles with fixed bayonets outreached Dahomeans’ machetes.¹⁵ These technological advances allowed a smaller number of soldiers to transport a high volume of combat power during expeditions. All this enabled a small number of French troops to defeat a quantitatively larger army.¹⁶

The third problem with Dahomeans fighting conventionally rested with the fact that they viewed war generally as a social, rather than military, enterprise. In peacetime, they devoted themselves more to court ceremony than to military training. While Dahomey’s military organization kept the guise of a modern army, the division of labor served more ceremonial purposes. The army was divided into the right and left wings because on ceremonial occasions it formed two symmetrical sections placed to the right and left of the king. Such formation was justified to reflect one of the important dualities of the kingship. Since war had a major social value in itself, the army was made congruent with the organization of the kingdom. Thus while the French army was disciplined to fight, the Dahomean army was used for social purposes. This widespread social ideology had conceptualized war rather as a form of literal manhunt aimed more at capturing individuals than killing them and occupying territory. It also encouraged the Dahomeans to use prisoners of war for the slave trade and to buy guns to ensure a supply of human sacrifices. Not surprisingly, the Dahomean practice of surprise and night raids included surrounding a town in the darkness and forcing entry, not necessarily to kill but to capture as many people as possible. As a result, if their attacks did not succeed, or if they themselves were taken by surprise, the Dahomean army fell into confusion quickly.¹⁷