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This article analyses the recent evolution of marriage relations between descendants of free and enslaved persons in Benin. It shows that slave ancestry is connected to tenure insecurity. This insecurity arises because land occupied by the descendants of slaves can be claimed by the descendants of the people who owned their ancestors. At the same time, such claims are blunted by intermarriage between these groups, which weakens the position of the descendants of slave-owners. As the memory of the exact arrangements that characterized past marriages between enslaved and freeborn fades away, marriage and kinship ties with descendants of former dependants put pressure on elite landowners to accept a degree of land redistribution in favour of relatives whom they perceive as ranking below themselves. In order to understand land conflicts in the present, it is essential to analyse the mixed-status marriages of the past.

‘The Land is Asking for History’. Marriages, Land, and Post-Slavery in Southern Benin