I'm reading Piers Brendon's "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" and he makes some claims about human sacrifice in West African kingdom that made me sceptical:
Terrible stories were told of fierce tribes who practised cannibalism and human sacrifice, piling up human heads outside their village gates like pyramids of shot in an arsenal. Doubtless because they were once grist to the racist mill, these propitiatory practices have now been obscured by a “conspiracy of silence.” Recent historians have also argued that they were relatively benign, limited in scale, expressive of religious zeal or filial piety, often voluntary and, where incontestably barbaric, a result of European contact. In fact, “enormous” and increasing numbers of Africans were ritually sacrificed in places such as Benin and Dahomey. Each subject was “brought up in the idea that his head belongs to the king.” Nevertheless the tales from Africa did become hugely exaggerated in the telling—at a time when punishments such as disembowelling and burning alive were still on the British statute book, and a human sacrifice was the cynosure of the established Church.
Unfortunately the PDF I'm reading doesn't include page numbers but this quote comes about 15 pages into the first chapter. Brendon's sources are this article and this article. They mostly back up his claims although they're written with a great deal more nuance. Law seems sceptical, for instance, that the number of people being sacrificed increased and suggests this was probably just due to changing European views of Africans. Both of these articles are pretty old though and I'm curious what more modern scholarship has to say about human sacrifice in West Africa.
As a smaller sub-question I'm wondering if Piers Brendon's book is still considered good by historians?
Piers Brendon is editorializing a bit with his statements in that quote. Fundamentally, it is true that there was ritual human sacrifice in Dahomey kingdom and in Benin kingdom.
But Brendon editorializes, saying:
Doubtless because they were once grist to the racist mill, these propitiatory practices have now been obscured by a “conspiracy of silence.” Recent historians have also argued that they were relatively benign, limited in scale, expressive of religious zeal or filial piety, often voluntary and, where incontestably barbaric, a result of European contact.
His use of the present-tense there ("have now been obscured") and ascribing it to a 'conspiracy of silence' were untrue statements when Brendon wrote them in the mid 2000s (his book is copyright 2007, but probably took several years to write)
Here is an extended excerpt from page 1 and 2 of Wives of the Leopard; Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey which is copyright 1998.
Dahomey epitomized everything negative that the Euro-American imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted to believe about Africa. Dahomey was said to be a state grown rich through the slave trade. Over more than 250 years, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were despatched from its beaches across shark-infested waters and into the infamous middle passage. But slavery in the Western Hemisphere was a blessing compared with life in the kingdom, at least as EuroAmerican observers described it. Slaves were captured by an army of women, amazons who severed their right breasts to be better able to fire arrows at their enemies. Foes not brutally decapitated on the battlefield by machete-wielding amazons, or not sold overseas after capture, were destined to die as sacrifices in horrifying fetish ceremonies. One visitor claimed that the king would sail in a boat on a sea of the blood drained from the severed necks of sacrifice victims. Others told of half-naked men eagerly waiting to eat the flesh of the dead. These rituals were said to have sprung from the evil beliefs that in North America were known as voodoo, and included the worship of snakes and trees. The absolute monarch who presided over this butchery lived in the capital, Abomey, in a palace surrounded by twelve-foot-high mud walls topped with rows of human skulls. He would sit on a throne supported by the heads of princely enemies or recline on a silk-cushioned sofa, where he would be served in oriental opulence by thousands of women. The royal harem in turn was guarded by eunuchs who indulged in intrigues with the wives of the king. As for the remainder of the populace, they were all slaves of the king.
Tales of Dahomey were told by many. and prior to the twentieth century, the storyteUers were all outsiders: slave traders. abolitionists, missionaries, diplomats, and officials of European governments. It has of late become fashionable to analyze the texts of such writers and travelers, to explore the ways in which their apparent observations were molded by the cultures of their birth and their life experiences. Like Joseph Conrad's Marlowe, we have relearned in such analyses the truism that the horrors we perceive tend to be the reflections of our own inner darknesses, and that human beings can rarely transcend culture or history. But having said that, we are left with the knotty question of Dahomean realities. W hat was this place called Dahomey like? Did the dozens of visitors make up these stories? Were their accounts simply creations of the racist imagination of Europe? If not, what did people see when they visited Dahomey? Can Dahomean culture be understood in other ways? And whose words can we trust? Having seen the errors of our predecessors' eyes, how can we be certain of the clarity of our own vision? How can we begin to understand meanings in other cultures, in other times?
Since the turn of the twentieth century, many scholars and writers, both Dahomeans and outsiders, have tried to counteract the negative stereotypes of the kingdom -explaining its customs, praising its governmental organization, admiring its military, describing its religious practices, and lauding its rulers. Yet no one today disputes the essential veracity upon which the stereotypes of savagery were based. Dahomey was a central player in the overseas slave trade from West Africa. In addition to a standing army of men, there were women soldiers in the kingdom's armed forces, at least in the nineteenth century. Despite the perpetuation of a myth of Greek antiquity by many, the women soldiers did not cut off either breast. Some captives of war were sold overseas, others were kept as domestic slaves within the kingdom, and yet others were sacrificed at ceremonies honoring the ancestors of the royal family. However, there were no lakes of blood, and cannibalism was never more than a rumor. Religion in Dahomey was focused on gods who were taken by slaves to the New World; there, the religion was called voodoo, a corruption of vodun, the Dahomean word for deity. The palace of the king was surrounded by a massive wall, which at one period in history was decorated with human skulls, as was the throne of one of the kings. And the kings did have many wives who, along with a much smaller number of eunuchs, inhabited a city like palace. But what visitors saw as intrigue tended to be the actions of women and eunuchs as they performed their roles as officials in the governments of the kings. And the mass of Dahomeans were not slaves but citizens in a hierarchic structure of family and state relations and obligations.
Bay is very careful to at least give a nod to different historiographical schools, acknowledging that the Nationalist school of the immediate post-independence era was invested in a program that emphasized glory and positive aspects of pre-colonial state formation, ritual, and individual leadership. But later generations of scholars, like Robin Law in the 1980s and Bay in the 1990s, have been forced to reckon with more disturbing aspects of the history. Crucially, though, Law and Bay are seeking to explain Dahomeyan custom of human sacrifice on Dahomeyan terms. That is, trying to explain how Dahomeyan soldiers, royals, and ritual specialists understood human sacrifice, how they believed blood served to nourish the "guardian spirit" that protected the king and by extension the state.
Which is why Brendon's comment that "Recent historians have also argued that they were relatively benign, limited in scale, expressive of religious zeal or filial piety, often voluntary ..." reads as a strawman. Brendon is implying that Politically Correct historians are making excuses for Dahomey. No, Law and Bay each acknowledge it, and try to explain the Dahomeyan religious and moral system that surrounded and contextualized human sacrifice.
In fact, “enormous” and increasing numbers of Africans were ritually sacrificed in places such as Benin and Dahomey. Each subject was “brought up in the idea that his head belongs to the king.
Here we get to the crux of your question. Unhappily, after a quick search of the literature, I don't see anything more recent than Robin Law's two articles that attempts to get at numbers or say if the practice intensified.
Wives of the Leopard repeatedly mentions the palace walls being decorated with the skulls of defeated war captives, and on page 134 mentions that those skulls numbered in the "thousands" by the mid 18th century. (But, we can't know if those skulls were produced over 10 years or over 100 years). Bay also mentions accounts saying that the death of a king was accompanied with the entombing of 24 women servants (enslaved?) to serve him the afterlife. However, these accounts are sometimes contradictory.
I have much less to say about Benin city and sacrifice. Archaeological digs at Benin city in the 1950s by AJH Goodwin, and in the 1960s by Graham Connah did turn up pits or cisterns containing mass burials, interpreted as mass human sacrifice. Connah describes this briefly in pp 160-161 in African Civilizations; an Archaeological Perspective second edition.
A brief search didn't turn up anything else helpful, though I will keep looking.
My rather lame summary would be: there is evidence human sacrifice happened, with testimony from European travelers that it may have continued up to 1897. But I can't comment on scope.