Benin - Hijacked!

Did you like Romania? The morning was a little questionable, but they played some great old stuff in the afternoon, huh?

Hey! You busy? Just blowing up that balloon and letting it fart around the room while your dog gives you the stink eye for interrupting her nap? us, too. 

Wanna get out of here and head to Benin?

and away we go!

From what we're gathering, around the 17th century, a tribe consolidated power and created a state called the Dahomey Kingdom. It sounds like these guys were some real assholes. They were WAAAAAY into human sacrifice and would sacrifice people for just about any reason they could think up. Sometimes they'd sacrifice thousands of people at once and it would take daaaays to cut all their heads off. Most of the sacrificees were prisoners of war, but kings' wives didn't have it much better. They were ceremonially buried alive. 

These kings owned all the land and taxed all the crops, but an even bigger portion of their income came from slave trading. When the Europeans rolled around with slaving ships, they had a field day buying up the war captives. They remained a pretty powerful state for a couple of hundred years until the slave trade dried up in the mid-19th century and their economic power declined. 

The French took over and did their colony thang for awhile, as they were apt to do back then, and in 1960 Benin gained their independence. They went through a series of coups and in the 1970's a fella named Mathieu Kérékou took power stating he'd build a Marxist economy, not a capitalist, communist, or socialist one. 

Who knew the Grinch was Marxist?

Kérékou allied himself with the pariah states, scared off all the intellectual class, and financed his regime by taking France's nuclear waste. His government ended up running out of money in the late 1980's and since they couldn't pay the army, riots broke out, the banking system collapsed, and folks banded together and called for elections. 

Since then, it seems like they've done pretty well with democratic elections, and though they've got tons of problems, it appears that things are looking up for Benin. 

Let's tune in and see what they're up to today. (Yes, we acknowledge that this station is NOT based out of Benin. However, there isn't a station broadcasting out of Benin that has a reliable internet presence. Enjoy it, anyway; it's a good one!) We really didn't expect to hear all the Rastafarian chatter...

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