About La Voix du Dahomey

La Voix du Dahomey

La Voix du Dahomey was a French-language newspaper published at Porto-Novo, in what was then the French colony of Dahomey and is now Benin, in the Ouémé region of the country's south-east. It was one of the first newspapers to appear in Dahomey, and historians of the colonial press have treated it as the leading title — the "chef de file" — of the Dahomean press of its generation. Published fortnightly, it gave Dahomey's educated elite, the évolués, a printed forum at a time when very few Dahomeans were legally able to run a newspaper at all. Its importance was never measured by its print run. With an initial circulation of only about 2,000 copies, it reached a readership and exercised an influence far beyond its numbers, because copies were read aloud, passed from hand to hand and discussed in villages. A colonial administrator's report, quoted in studies of Benin's intellectual movement, observed that every sheet was read in the villages and every article was deeply diffused and commented on in people's homes. The newspaper functioned, in the phrase used by Africultures' history of the intellectual movement in Benin, as a veritable "arbre à palabre" — a palaver tree, the traditional gathering place for public discussion — through which an intellectual could reach a far wider public.

Origins in the Dahomean press of the 1920s

La Voix du Dahomey emerged from a small but determined tradition of Dahomean journalism that had developed under severe legal constraint. Under the French press law of 29 July 1881 as applied in the colonies, only French citizens could legally manage a press enterprise, and before the First World War Dahomeans in general had no authorisation to publish newspapers; the merchants of the colony were the exception. Dahomean campaigners worked around those limits in stages. In 1917, French-subject Dahomeans launched a clandestine handwritten sheet, the Récardère de Béhanzin, directed by the schoolteacher Louis Hounkanrin (also spelled Hunkanrin), which ran to as many as six manuscript issues. Its promoters, mostly officials, then sought to legalise their activity by creating a paper in metropolitan France, the Messager dahoméen, published in Paris in 1920 under a Guadeloupean lawyer of the Paris Court of Appeal, though publication from Paris imposed delays on the news. Dorothée Lima, a veteran of the First World War who had obtained French citizenship, founded Le Guide du Dahomey in 1921; after Le Guide was banned in 1923, the field was open for a successor. Patrick Manning's history of Dahomey records that La Voix was established by political activists in 1927, while French reference listings date the foundation to 1928 and give its final year as 1957; a 2024 academic study treats its lifespan as 1927–1958. The small differences reflect the difficulty of dating a colonial-era title precisely, but all accounts agree that by the late 1920s La Voix had taken over, in the words of one thesis history, "the relay of the demands of the Dahomean intellectuals."

Porto-Novo and the évolué milieu

The newspaper's city of publication, Porto-Novo, was the administrative capital of the colony and one of its three electoral centres, alongside Abomey and Ouidah. Its milieu was that of the évolués: the educated Dahomeans — teachers, clerks, traders and officials — who, in the analysis of historians of colonial Dahomey, positioned themselves as spokespeople for the defence of indigenous people against colonial arbitrariness. They demanded, in varying combinations, equality of conditions and status or recognition of a particular status for the évolués themselves. The legal press was their chosen instrument after the First World War, in which many Africans had served and from which veterans returned expecting that relations between coloniser and colonised could not simply remain as they had been. Louis Hounkanrin belonged to this milieu, and his notoriety as a journalist was established, as the Africultures history puts it, through the trial of La Voix du Dahomey. Around the newspaper gathered much of the colony's elite; it was frequently described as anti-French, even revolutionary, although — in a striking contrast noted by historians of political communication in Benin — its stated programme clearly declared that it defended the "mother country," France.

Editorial line: criticism hidden beneath loyalty

The defining technique of La Voix du Dahomey was indirection. W. Joseph Campbell's study of the emergent independent press in Benin and Côte d'Ivoire, quoted in reference works, explains that criticism of France was hidden beneath effusive protestations of loyalty to Paris. French Wikipedia summarises the same method as criticism of French colonial power delivered "through ironic praise": attacks on the abuses of colonial administrators were concealed under overflowing professions of loyalty to France. That double register was a survival strategy as much as a literary one. A newspaper that could be read, on its surface, as loyal to the mother country was harder to suppress outright, yet Dahomean readers understood the irony, and the paper's denunciations of abusive administrative practices were the core of its appeal. At its beginnings, according to the historian Laurent Manière cited in academic work on colonial justice, La Voix criticised the colonial order virulently before settling into the coded style that became its signature. The strategy carried the paper through three decades in which more direct titles were repeatedly banned or prosecuted.

The 1928 elections and political influence

The clearest demonstration of the newspaper's power came almost immediately. Elections to Dahomey's Administrative Council had been introduced in 1925, with three elected seats — for Abomey, Ouidah and Porto-Novo — but an extremely restricted franchise: only 470 people had been registered to vote for the first elections in 1925. In 1928, the candidates supported by La Voix won in all three constituencies. Pierre Johnson was re-elected in Ouidah, Augustinho Olympio won in Abomey, and Casimir d'Almeida won in Porto-Novo, while the pro-French candidates were defeated in the other two seats, as Manning's account records. For a newspaper barely a year or two old, with a circulation of about 2,000, to sweep every elected seat in the colony was a remarkable result, and it confirmed the paper as a political machine as well as a journal. La Voix continued to intervene in the council elections that followed. In 1930 it supported Casimir d'Almeida in Porto-Novo against Augustin Nicoué, who was backed by the rival Le Phare du Dahomey, and d'Almeida was re-elected; in 1932 d'Almeida was again re-elected despite Nicoué's campaign. The paper's dominance was not permanent, however, and the elections of 1934 showed both its limits and the divisions within the Dahomean elite.

Defeat in 1934 and conflict within the elite

In the 1934 Administrative Council elections, the councillors supported by La Voix faced an alliance of candidates created by Louis Hunkanrin after his return from exile in Mauritania. The Hunkanrin group drew support from civil servants, farmers and workers, allied itself with Augustin Nicoué, and accused the La Voix group during the campaign of being capitalists rather than socialists. Augustinho Olympio stood down in Abomey rather than seek re-election, and the La Voix candidates were beaten in all three constituencies: Richard Johnson, brother of the defeated Pierre Johnson, was elected in Abomey; Ambroise Dossou-Yovo defeated Pierre Johnson in Ouidah; and Augustin Nicoué defeated Casimir d'Almeida in Porto-Novo. The aftermath was litigious. D'Almeida attempted unsuccessfully to sue his opponents for defamation, while the administration successfully prosecuted Pierre Johnson and the Hunkanrin associate Blaise Kuassi for the same offence, resulting in a prison sentence. Soon afterwards, two of the victorious councillors moved to a position supportive of the administration, leaving Richard Johnson as the only councillor who remained critical of the establishment. The episode illustrates how central newspapers had become to Dahomean politics: the colony's tiny electorate was contested through rival papers, rival personalities and rival claims to speak for the colonised population.

The 1936 prosecution

In 1936 the colonial authorities brought the editors and directors of La Voix du Dahomey before a court. Campbell's history, cited in both the English and French reference entries on the newspaper, records the prosecution as a landmark in the paper's history, and the Africultures account notes that the trial of La Voix was the case through which Louis Hounkanrin's reputation in journalism was established. The prosecution demonstrated the limits of the paper's protective irony: professions of loyalty could delay, but not forever prevent, a legal assault by an administration that understood perfectly well what the newspaper was doing. Yet the paper survived the prosecution and continued publishing for roughly another two decades, outlasting most of the fifty or so mostly ephemeral titles that were created in Dahomey between 1946 and 1960, after France granted political and expressive freedoms to the inhabitants of its colonies following the Second World War and the 1944 Brazzaville Conference.

People associated with the newspaper

French Wikipedia names José Firmino Santos as the newspaper's editor-in-chief (rédacteur en chef), and academic histories likewise describe it as directed by José Firmino do Santos. Other accounts preserve different names for different periods and roles: an English-language summary records the editor as Jean Adjovi, replaced later by Dorothée Lima — the same Lima who had founded Le Guide du Dahomey in 1921. French Wikipedia also records that Paulin Adjovi was associated with the newspaper and contributed to its management and direction, helping to establish La Voix du Dahomey as a major platform for political and social discussion, and that together the contributions of Jean and Paulin Adjovi made the paper a powerful tool of social and political change. The variation in names across sources is typical of the colonial Dahomean press, where titles were collective enterprises of a small elite whose members moved between newspapers, electoral committees and associations, and where formal roles were recorded inconsistently.

Place in Dahomey's press history

La Voix du Dahomey stood near the head of a crowded colonial press landscape. A 1973 inventory by Marie-Antoinette Adissoda counted thirty-seven titles published in Dahomey between 1890 and 1939. The list of newspapers in Benin places La Voix (1927–1950s) among the colonial-era titles alongside L'Echo du Dahomey (1905), the Récardère de Béhanzin (1915), Le Guide du Dahomey (1920–22), Le Messager Dahoméan (1920), Le Phare du Dahomey (1929), La Presse Porto-Novienne (1931) and L'Etoile du Dahomey (1932). What distinguished La Voix was longevity and political effect: it appeared fortnightly for some three decades, from the late 1920s into the 1950s — French listings give 1957 as its last year, and the 2024 study by P. J. Adjivessode in the Journal de la Recherche Scientifique de l'Université de Lomé treats the period 1927–1958 — spanning the final phase of colonial rule before Dahomey became an autonomous republic in 1958 and independent in 1960.

Legacy as a resistance newspaper

Historians have credited La Voix du Dahomey with a decisive role in the emergence of the Dahomean nationalist movement that led to independence on 1 August 1960. Adjivessode's 2024 study describes it explicitly as "a resistance newspaper in colonial Dahomey" and as the spearhead of the struggle for the cause of the colonised Dahomean and, more broadly, of French West Africa (the "aofien" cause). Its method — denunciation wrapped in loyalty, argument conducted as if in the open air under the palaver tree — educated a political class. The press committees of the interwar years fed directly into the electoral committees and then into Dahomey's first political parties after 1945, when, as historians of political communication in Benin note, the press became openly politicised. Read in that light, La Voix du Dahomey was not simply a chronicle of colonial Dahomey; it was one of the institutions through which Dahomeans learned to organise, campaign and win — beginning with the three seats it swept in 1928.

Sources and documentation

The newspaper is documented in Patrick Manning's Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), in The Cambridge History of Africa, volume 7, in W. Joseph Campbell's The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Côte d'Ivoire (Praeger, 1998), in the French and English Wikipedia entries on the newspaper, in Africultures' history of the intellectual movement in Benin, and in Adjivessode's 2024 article in the Journal de la Recherche Scientifique de l'Université de Lomé. Because it was a pre-independence print title, La Voix du Dahomey had no official website, and none is recorded for it.