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smcinco snatches it!
It is indeed Benin, the country just to the west of Nigeria - and if you think any Western country has a screwed up relationship with slavery, it's nothing compared to Benin. The first picture is Place Chacha or Place des enchères (Auctions Square) in Ouidah, where foreign traders would buy slaves captured by warriors of
Ghezo, king of Dahomey (now the southern, coastal part of Benin) in attacks on neighbouring tribes. The statue depicts one such warrior, which is kinda weird if you think about it.
It gets weirder as Chacha is the nickname of
Francisco Félix de Sousa (1754–1849) , the most important slave trader who helped Ghezo take the throne in a coup against the previous king. His descendants still live in a palace on one side of the square, and still retain much of the power and influence of their ancestor -
one descendant briefly headed a military junta in the country, his great-granddaughter was First Lady of Benin until 2016.
Weirder still they still use Chacha as a sort of hereditary title conferred by Ghezo's descendants, the current one is Chacha VIII. He's used his influence to try and rehabilitate his ancestor and make out he was one of the good guys - claiming he was saving the lives of captives who would otherwise be killed, he would even let families buy back their loved ones(!)
@schmurf probably saw something about Ouidah 92 which was a festival organised by UNESCO to promote local culture as a way to heal the sores of the past. One part of that was creating a slightly haphazard set of statues (including the one above) on the route from Place Chacha to the Door of No Return, a monument on the beach to the ~1 million slaves that left Ouidah, mostly for Brazil.
The festival wasn't without controversy, some saw it as a bit of a celebration of de Souza - but just keeping the name Place Chacha is kinda screwed, let alone having his descendants keep their palace next to the old slave market and have a statue celebrating the warriors who made slaves of what would now be fellow Beninese.