HOUÉNOU, KOJO TOVALOU (born Marc Tovalou Quénum, 25 April 1887– 13 July 1936), Dahomean prince, member of the royal family of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey (located within present-day Benin), prominent African Francophone intellectual, political leader, and critic of the French colonial empire in Africa. Houénou worked on critical issues of Black participation during the First World War, the Pan-African Congress of 1919, and racism and discrimination in Europe and the US, in which Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois were both central figures in the 1910s and 1920s.
Born in Porto-Novo, a state city that fell to the French in the early 1880s, Houénou was the nephew of the late King of Dahomey, who was deported to Martinique when his kingdom was forcibly taken by France. Houénou spent the majority of his life in Paris fighting for African independence, as well as unity between Black people globally and throughout the African diaspora. Such concepts were allied with the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). On August 31, 1924, Houénou delivered a speech at the Convention of the UNIA at Carnegie Hall in New York. In his address, he endorsed Garvey’s “back to Africa” initiative for settling Liberia and further plans to extend his influence across the continent. Houénou’s words were among the most robust validation that Garvey received from a highly educated Black intellectual during his lifetime.
Houénou was considered a subversive and an agitator by the French government, and his commercial endeavors were largely suppressed, leading to bankruptcies that ultimately forced him to leave the country. French authorities continued their harassment and surveillance of Houénou even into the later years of his life, which were spent in exile in Dakar, Senegal, far from both his homeland, Dahomey, and from France. He continued to be politically active in Senegal and was arrested on charges of contempt in July 1936. He died of typhoid fever while in prison in Dakar.