Adandozan was a King of Dahomey (now Benin), technically the ninth, though he is not counted as one of the twelve kings. His name has largely been erased from the history of Abomey (the capital of Dahomey), and to this day is generally not spoken out loud in the city. He became king when, in 1797, the previous King of Dahomey, Agonglo, died, leaving the throne to his eldest son. Dahomey was a kingdom in Africa, situated in what is now the nation of Benin. ... Abomey is a town in Benin, formerly the capital of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey. ... 1797 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Agonglo was the eighth King of Dahomey. ...

Adandozan's symbols were a baboon with a swollen stomach, full mouth, and ear of corn in hand (an unflattering reference to his enemy, the King of Oyo), and a large parasol ('the king overshadows his enemies'). These symbols are not included in Abomey appliques, for the same reasons that Adandozan is not included in Abomey's history. Type species Simia hamadryas Linnaeus, 1758 Species Papio hamadryas Papio papio Papio anubis Papio cynocephalus Papio ursinus The baboons are some of the largest non-hominid members of the primate order; only the Mandrill and the Drill are larger. ... Binomial name Zea mays L. Maize (Zea mays ssp. ... Oyo (Ọyọ in Yoruba orthography, pronounced ) is the name for a Yoruba city in modern-day Nigeria and also the loose empire which that city controlled in the 17th and 18th centuries. ...

The traditional stories about Adandozan's rule (which are retold, with some changing of names, in Bruce Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah) portray him as extremely cruel: he is said to have raised hyenas to which he would throw live subjects for amusement; he is pictured slitting a pregnant woman's abdomen open on a bet to see whether he could predict the sex of the fetus. Bruce Charles Chatwin (May 13, 1940 - January 18, 1989) was a British novelist and travel writer. ... Genera Crocuta Hyaena Parahyaena Proteles Hyenas (or Hyænas) are moderately large terrestrial carnivores native to Africa and Asia. ...

Adandozan is portrayed as an incompetent warrior and general, and as a betrayer of the royal family: he is said to have sold his brother's, Gakpe, mother into slavery. Gakpe, who had previously feigned idiocy to avoid attracting his brother's attention, fled into exile near Kana. Adandozan is portrayed as hopelessly mad, struggling foolishly with the European powers. He refused to pay Francisco de Souza, a Brazilian merchant and trader who had become a major middle-man in the Ouidah slave market, for services rendered, imprisoned and tortured de Souza, and then attempted to have his own ministers sell the slaves directly. King Ghezo (right), with his son the future King Glele in 1863 Ghezo was the ninth King of Dahomey (now Benin), considered one of the greatest of the twelve historical kings. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 For other meanings of Kana, see Kana (disambiguation). ... Ouidah is a city on the Atlantic coast of Benin. ...

In the traditional story, Gakpe, secretly coming back from exile, helped de Souza escape. In return, de Souza helped Gakpe marshall a military force and take the throne with the assistance of the terrified council of ministers. Gakpe then put Adandozan in prison.

This traditional portrayal may be wrong: like Richard II of England in the Wars of the Roses, Adandozan may have been the object of a propagandistic rewriting of history after he lost the throne, turned into a monster by his successor as a means of excusing the coup d'état and legitimizing the new regime. All stories agree that Adandozan tried to force more favorable terms of trade with the Europeans involved in the export of slaves, and seriously undermined the power of the extended royal family and Vodun cult practitioners at court through administrative reforms. Richard II (January 6, 1367 – February 14, 1400) was the son of Edward the Black Prince, Prince of Wales, and Joan The Fair Maid of Kent. He was born at Bordeaux and became his fathers heir when his elder brother died in infancy. ... The Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) is the name generally given to the intermittent civil war fought over the throne of England between adherents of the House of Lancaster and the House of York. ... A coup détat (pronounced ), or simply a coup, is the sudden overthrow of a government against the volonté générale formed by the majority of the citizen, usually done by a smaller supposedly weaker body that just replaces the top power figures. ... The term Voodoo (Vodun in Benin; also Vodou or other phonetically equivalent spellings in Haiti; Vudu in the Dominican Republic) is applied to the branches of a West African ancestor-based religious tradition with primary roots among the Fon-Ewe peoples of West Africa, in the country now known as...

It may be that these policies themselves provoked Adandozan's powerful opponents to support a coup against him. In order to justify the coup, Gakpe may then have been obliged to have his griots (oral historians) tell of the monstrous and mad Adandozan. . A griot (pronounced gree-oh) is a West African poet, praise singer, and wandering musician, considered a repository of oral tradition. ...