The languages of the tradition in the Benim: power and religion

Abstract

This article concerns the origins of Benim, traditional kingdom of Africa, lived by the people Edo, in the west of Niger, which takes as a principal characteristic the appropriation of the religiosity and of his mythology, of his traditional religion, which substantiated the construction and the social and political development of the kingdom was located. The kingdom of Benim is tied the Ifé by his founding and legendary Oranyan, son of Oduduwa who futuramente would be the king of Oyó. The tradition talks also about a first dynasty where twelve kings were sovereign in the century XII. In the First half of the century XIII it is Eweka what there sets up the electoral college of seven members and Ewedo his successor, who consolidates the kingdom of Benim through the inheritance of the crown of Oranyan, in other words, of the dynasty of the foreign kings, as guarantees the footstool of the ogiso, which was symbolizing all the authority entrusted to a guardian of the ancestralidade and of the traditional worships that were giving sustentabilidade, to a real dignatário, in the driving of the power. This power of a segmental shade woven and sewed by the religiosity. The constitution of this imaginary space, it guarantees the perpetuation of the past, in the conceptions of the present and they inaugurate the future, establishing the power and the resistance of a people, having the sphere of the consecrated one like norteador and organizer of the sphere of the storm, protecting to the begun kings, the maintenance of his hierarchies and traditions.