Annual Customs of Dahomey

The Annual Customs of Dahomey (xwetanu or huetanu in Fon) were the main yearly celebration in the Kingdom of Dahomey. These ceremonies were largely started under King Agaja around 1730 and involved significant collection and distribution of gifts and tribute, human sacrifice, military parades, and discussions by dignitaries about the future for the kingdom.

Read more about Annual Customs Of Dahomey:  Origins, Practice

Famous quotes containing the words annual and/or customs:

    No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.
    —W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)