Deadvalley001:
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Ole! History revisionist!
stop lying to some uniformed people here.
Yaorubas have always been known as cowards,
Afonja animal pls read your history here.
They slaughtered your coward forefathers like cows.
Dahomey’s Women Warriors For the better part of 200
years, thousands of female
soldiers fought and died to
expand the borders of their
West African kingdom. Even
their conquerors, the French, acknowledged their
“prodigious bravery.” 1.9K 316 224 102 9 10.5K One of Dahomeys' women
warriors, with a musket,
club, dagger—and her
enemy's severed head. From
Forbes, Dahomy and the
Dahomans (1851). It is noon on a humid Saturday in the
fall of 1861, and a missionary by the
name of Francesco Borghero has been
summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated
on one side of a huge, open square
right in the center of the town–
Dahomey is renowned as a “Black
Sparta,” a fiercely militaristic society
bent on conquest, whose soldiers strike fear into their enemies all along what
is still known as the Slave Coast. The
maneuvers begin in the face of a
looming downpour, but King Glele is
eager to show off the finest unit in his
army to his European guest. As Father Borghero fans himself, 3,000
heavily armed soldiers march into the
square and begin a mock assault on a
series of defenses designed to
represent an enemy capital. The
Dahomean troops are a fearsome sight, barefoot and bristling with clubs and
knives. A few, known as Reapers, are
armed with gleaming three-foot-long
straight razors, each wielded two-
handed and capable, the priest is told,
of slicing a man clean in two. ADVERTISEMENT The soldiers advance in silence,
reconnoitering. Their first obstacle is a
wall—huge piles of acacia branches
bristling with needle-sharp thorns,
forming a barricade that stretches
nearly 440 yards. The troops rush it furiously, ignoring the wounds that the
two-inch-long thorns inflict. After
scrambling to the top, they mime hand-
to-hand combat with imaginary
defenders, fall back, scale the thorn
wall a second time, then storm a group of huts and drag a group of cringing
“prisoners” to where Glele stands,
assessing their performance. The
bravest are presented with belts made
from acacia thorns. Proud to show
themselves impervious to pain, the warriors strap their trophies around
their waists. The general who led the assault
appears and gives a lengthy speech,
comparing the valor of Dahomey’s
warrior elite to that of European troops
and suggesting that such equally brave
peoples should never be enemies. Borghero listens, but his mind is
wandering. He finds the general
captivating: “slender but shapely, proud
of bearing, but without affectation.”
Not too tall, perhaps, nor excessively
muscular. But then, of course, the general is a woman, as are all 3,000 of
her troops. Father Borghero has been
watching the King of Dahomey’s famed
corps of “amazons,” as contemporary
writers termed them—the only female
soldiers in the world who then routinely served as combat troops. Dahomey–
renamed Benin
in 1975–
showing its
location in
West Africa. Map: CIA World
Factbook. When, or indeed why, Dahomey
recruited its first female soldiers is not
certain. Stanley Alpern, author of the
only full-length Engish-language study
of them, suggests it may have been in
the 17th century, not long after the kingdom was founded by Dako, a
leader of the Fon tribe, around 1625.
One theory traces their origins to teams
of female hunters known as gbeto, and
certainly Dahomey was noted for its
women hunters; a French naval surgeon named Repin reported in the 1850s
that a group of 20 gbeto had attacked a
herd of 40 elephants, killing three at
the cost of several hunters gored and
trampled. A Dahomean tradition
relates that when King Gezo (1818-58) praised their courage, the gbeto cockily
replied that “a nice manhunt would suit
them even better,” so he drafted them
drafted into his army. But Alpern
cautions that there is no proof that
such an incident occurred, and he prefers an alternate theory that
suggests the women warriors came
into existence as a palace guard in the
1720s. Women had the advantage of being
permitted in the palace precincts after
dark (Dahomean men were not), and a
bodyguard may have been formed,
Alpern says, from among the king’s
“third class” wives–those considered insufficiently beautiful to share his bed
and who had not borne children.
Contrary to 19th century gossip that
portrayed the female soldiers as
sexually voracious, Dahomey’s female
soldiers were formally married to the king—and since he never actually had
relations with any of them, marriage
rendered them celibate. Dahomey's female hunters, the
gbeto, attack a herd of elephants. At least one bit of evidence hints that
Alpern is right to date the formation of
the female corps to the early 18th
century: a French slaver named Jean-
Pierre Thibault, who called at the
Dahomean port of Ouidah in 1725, described seeing groups of third-rank
wives armed with long poles and acting
as police. And when, four years later,
Dahomey’s women warriors made their
first appearance in written history, they
were helping to recapture the same port after it fell to a surprise attack by
the Yoruba–a much more numerous tribe from the east who would
henceforth be the Dahomeans’ chief
enemies. Dahomey’s female troops were not the
only martial women of their time.
There were at least a few
contemporary examples of successful
warrior queens, the best-known of
whom was probablyNzinga of Matamba, one of the most important figures in 17th-century Angola—a ruler
who fought the Portuguese, quaffed
the blood of sacrificial victims, and kept
a harem of 60 male concubines, whom
she dressed in women’s clothes. Nor
were female guards unknown; in the mid-19th century, King Mongkut of
Siam (the same monarch memorably
portrayed in quite a different light by Yul Brynner in The King and I) employed a bodyguard of 400 women. But Mongkut’s guards performed a
ceremonial function, and the king could
never bear to send them off to war.
What made Dahomey’s women
warriors unique was that they fought,
and frequently died, for king and country. Even the most conservative
estimates suggest that, in the course of
just four major campaigns in the latter
half of the 19th century, they lost at
least 6,000 dead, and perhaps as many
as 15,000. In their very last battles, against French troops equipped with
vastly superior weaponry, about 1,500
women took the field, and only about
50 remained fit for active duty by the
end. King Gezo, who
expanded the female
corps from around 600
women to as many as
6,000. Picture:
Wikicommons. None of this, of course, explains why
this female corps arose only in
Dahomey. Historian Robin Law, of the
University of Stirling, who has made a
study of the subject, dismisses the idea
that the Fon viewed men and women as equals in any meaningful sense;
women fully trained as warriors, he
points out, were thought to “become”
men, usually at the moment they
disemboweled their first enemy.
Perhaps the most persuasive possibility is that the Fon were so badly
outnumbered by the enemies who
encircled them that Dahomey’s kings
were forced to conscript women. The
Yoruba alone were about ten times as
numerous as the Fon. Backing for this hypothesis can be
found in the writings of Commodore
Arthur Eardley Wilmot, a British naval
officer who called at Dahomey in 1862
and observed that women heavily
outnumbered men in its towns—a phenomenon that he attributed to a
combination of military losses and the
effects of the slave trade. Around the
same time Western visitors to Abomey
noticed a sharp jump in the number of
female soldiers. Records suggest that there were about 600 women in the
Dahomean army from the 1760s until
the 1840s—at which point King Gezo
expanded the corps to as many as
6,000. No Dahomean records survive to
explain Gezo’s expansion, but it was
probably connected to a defeat he
suffered at the hands of the Yoruba in
1844. Oral traditions suggest that,
angered by Dahomean raids on their villages, an army from a tribal grouping
known as the Egba mounted a surprise
attack that that came close to
capturing Gezo and did seize much of
his royal regalia, including the king’s
valuable umbrella and his sacred stool. “It has been said that only two amazon
‘companies’ existed before Gezo and
that he created six new ones,” Alpern
notes. “If so, it probably happened at
this time.” Women warriors parade outside
the gates of a Dahomean town,
with the severed heads of their
defeated foes adorning the walls. Recruiting women into the Dahomean
army was not especially difficult,
despite the requirement to climb thorn
hedges and risk life and limb in battle.
Most West African women lived lives of
forced drudgery. Gezo’s female troops lived in his compound and were kept
well supplied with tobacco, alcohol and
slaves–as many as 50 to each warrior,
according to the noted traveler Sir Richard Burton, who visited Dahomey in the 1860s. And “when amazons walked
out of the palace,” notes Alpern, “they
were preceded by a slave girl carrying a
bell. The sound told every male to get
out of their path, retire a certain
distance, and look the other way.” To even touch these women meant death. "Insensitivity training": female
recruits look on as Dahomean
troops hurl bound prisoners of war
to a mob below. While Gezo plotted his revenge against
the Egba, his new female recruits were
put through extensive training. The
scaling of vicious thorn hedges was
intended to foster the stoical
acceptance of pain, and the women also wrestled one another and
undertook survival training, being sent
into the forest for up to nine days with
minimal rations. The aspect of Dahomean military
custom that attracted most attention
from European visitors, however, was
“insensitivity training”—exposing
unblooded troops to death. At one
annual ceremony, new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a
platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets
containing bound and gagged prisoners
of war, and hurl them over the parapet
to a baying mob below. There are also
accounts of female soldiers being ordered to carry out executions. Jean
Bayol, a French naval officer who visited
Abomey in December 1889, watched as
a teenage recruit, a girl named Nanisca
“who had not yet killed anyone,” was
tested. Brought before a young prisoner who sat bound in a basket, she: walked jauntily up to
, swung her sword
three times with both
hands, then calmly
cut the last flesh that
attached the head to the trunk… She then
squeezed the blood
off her weapon and
swallowed it. It was this fierceness that most
unnerved Western observers, and
indeed Dahomey’s African enemies.
Not everyone agreed on the quality of
the Dahomeans’ military preparedness
—European observers were disdainful of the way in which the women
handled their ancient flintlock muskets,
most firing from the hip rather than
aiming from the shoulder, but even the
French agreed that they “excelled at
hand-to-hand combat” and “handled admirably.” For the most part, too, the enlarged
female corps enjoyed considerable
success in Gezo’s endless wars,
specializing in pre-dawn attacks on
unsuspecting enemy villages. It was
only when they were thrown against the Egba capital, Abeokuta, that they tasted defeat. Two furious assaults on
the town, in 1851 and 1864, failed
dismally, partially because of
Dahomean overconfidence, but mostly
because Abeokuta was a formidable
target—a huge town ringed with mud- brick walls and harboring a population
of 50,000. Béhanzin, the last king
of an independent
Dahomey. By the late 1870s Dahomey had begun
to temper its military ambitions. Most
foreign observers suggest that the
women’s corps was reduced to 1,500
soldiers at about this time, but attacks
on the Yoruba continued. And the corps still existed 20 years later, when the
kingdom at last found itself caught up
in the “scramble for Africa,” which saw
various European powers competing to
absorb slices of the continent into their
empires. Dahomey fell within the French sphere of influence, and there
was already a small French colony at
Porto-Novo when, in about 1889,
female troops were involved in an
incident that resulted in a full-scale
war. According to local oral histories, the spark came when the Dahomeans
attacked a village under French
suzerainty whose chief tried to avert
panic by assuring the inhabitants that
the tricolor would protect them. “So you
like this flag?” the Dahomean general asked when the settlement had been
overrun. “Eh bien, it will serve you.” At
the general’s signal, one of the women
warriors beheaded the chief with one
blow of her cutlass and carried his head
back to her new king, Béhanzin, wrapped in the French standard. The First Franco-Dahomean War, which
ensued in 1890, resulted in two major
battles, one of which took place in
heavy rain at dawn outside Cotonou, on
the Bight of Benin. Béhanzin’s army,
which included female units, assaulted a French stockade but was driven back
in hand-to-hand fighting. No quarter
was given on either side, and Jean
Bayol saw his chief gunner decapitated
by a fighter he recognized as Nanisca,
the young woman he had met three months earlier in Abomey as she
executed a prisoner. Only the sheer
firepower of their modern rifles won
the day for the French, and in the
battle’s aftermath Bayol found Nanisca
lying dead. “The cleaver, with its curved blade, engraved with fetish symbols,
was attached to her left wrist by a
small cord,” he wrote, “and her right
hand was clenched around the barrel of
her carbine covered with cowries.” In the uneasy peace that followed,
Béhanzin did his best to equip his army
with more modern weapons, but the
Dahomeans were still no match for the
large French force that was assembled
to complete the conquest two years later. That seven-week war was fought
even more fiercely than the first. There
were 23 separate battles, and once
again female troops were in the
vanguard of Béhanzin’s forces. The
women were the last to surrender, and even then—at least according to a
rumor common in the French army of
occupation—the survivors took their
revenge on the French by covertly
substituting themselves for Dahomean
women who were taken into the enemy stockade. Each allowed herself
to be seduced by French officer, waited
for him to fall asleep, and then cut his
throat with his own bayonet. A group of women warriors in
traditional dress. Picture:
Wikicommons. Their last enemies were full of praise
for their courage. A French Foreign
Legionnaire named Bern lauded them
as “warrioresses… fight with extreme
valor, always ahead of the other troops.
They are outstandingly brave … well trained for combat and very
disciplined.” A French Marine, Henri
Morienval, thought them “remarkable
for their courage and their ferocity…
flung themselves on our bayonets with
prodigious bravery.” Most sources suggest that the last of
Dahomey’s women warriors died in the
1940s, but Stanley Alpern disputes this.
Pointing out that “a woman who had
fought the French in her teens would
have been no older than 69 in 1943,” he suggests, more pleasingly, that it is
likely one or more survived long enough
to see her country regain its
independence in 1960. As late as 1978,
a Beninese historian encountered an
extremely old woman in the village of Kinta who convincingly claimed to have
fought against the French in 1892. Her
name was Nawi, and she died, aged
well over 100, in November 1979.
Probably she was the last. What were they like, these scattered
survivors of a storied regiment? Some
proud but impoverished, it seems;
others married; a few tough and
argumentative, well capable, Alpern
says, of “beating up men who dared to affront them.” And at least one of them
still traumatized by her service, a
reminder that some military
experiences are universal. A Dahomean
who grew up in Cotonou in the 1930s
recalled that he regularly tormented an elderly woman he and his friends saw
shuffling along the road, bent double
by tiredness and age. He confided to
the French writer Hélène Almeida-
Topor that one day, one of us
throws a stone that
hits another stone.
The noise resounds, a
spark flies. We
suddenly see the old woman straighten
up. Her face is
transfigured. She
begins to march
proudly… Reaching a
wall, she lies down on her belly and crawls
on her elbows to get
round it. She thinks
she is holding a rifle
because abruptly she
shoulders and fires, then reloads her
imaginary arm and
fires again, imitating
the sound of a salvo.
Then she leaps,
pounces on an imaginary enemy,
rolls on the ground in
furious hand-t0-hand
combat, flattens the
foe. With one hand
she seems to pin him to the ground, and
with the other stabs
him repeatedly. Her
cries betray her
effort. She makes the
gesture of cutting to the quick and stands
up brandishing her
trophy…. Female
officers
pictured in
1851, wearing
symbolic
horns of office on their
heads. She intones a song of
victory and dances: The blood flows, You are dead. The blood flows, We have won. The blood flows, it
flows, it flows. The blood flows, The enemy is no
more. But suddenly she
stops, dazed. Her
body bends, hunches,
How old she seems,
older than before!
She walks away with a hesitant step. She is a former
warrior, an adult
explains…. The
battles ended years
ago, but she
continues the war in her head. Sources Hélène Almeida-Topor. Les Amazones:
Une Armée de Femmes dans l’Afrique
Précoloniale. Paris: Editions
Rochevignes, 1984; Stanley Alpern.
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women
Warriors of Dahomey. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011; Richard Burton. A Mission
to Gelele, King of Dahome. London: RKP,
1966; Robin Law. ‘The ‘Amazons’ of
Dahomey.’ Paideuma 39 (1993); J.A.
Skertchley. Dahomey As It Is: Being a
Narrative of Eight Months’ Residence in that Country, with a Full Account of the
Notorious Annual Customs… London:
Chapman & Hall, 1874. Ordinary copy and paste...... Fool 10 Likes |
I bet you didn't even bother to read what you posted. Smh. #Lost Cause.