The Gbe languages are spoken along the coast and immediate interior of Ghana, Togo, Benin and southwestern Nigeria, and the peoples who speak them include the Ewe, the Fon, the Aja, the Gen and the Phla-Pehri. The name is a linguists' coinage, taken from gbe, the word for language or voice shared across the group, and the peoples covered identify by their own names rather than by it. The area was among the most politically dense in West Africa: the kingdom of Allada, the kingdom of Whydah on the coast and above all Dahomey, which conquered both in the 1720s and became one of the major powers of the region, were all Gbe-speaking states.
Dahomey's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, through the port at Ouidah, is the reason this comparatively small linguistic cluster has an influence on the religious map of the Americas out of all proportion to its size. The atlas groups these peoples here rather than under a wider West African label because the linguistic cluster is the unit that actually tracks what moved. The neighbouring Yoruba to the east are a separate people speaking a separate branch of Niger-Congo, and the two traditions were in constant contact and are constantly confused from outside. Keeping the Gbe cluster distinct is the first step in telling their contributions apart.