August 5, 2015 • 23 mins
The kingdom of Dahomey may have had the world's first full-time, all-female combat fighting force. How did these women rise to become some of history's fiercest warriors, and what happened to them?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class stuff Works
dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy
Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've talked quite a
bit about women in combat in various ways on the
podcast before. We've told stories about individual women who disguised
(00:24):
themselves as men to go to war at a time
when women were not allowed to, like our Sarah Emma
Edmund's episode. We've also talked about efforts to recruit women
out of a specific and pretty dire need during wartime,
like one of my very favorite episodes of ours, which
is the one on the Night, which is We've also
talked about women who could be described as warrior queens,
(00:44):
like Budica or in the time of past host on
the podcast Queen and Zinga. But today's topic is a
little bit different. We are revisiting the Kingdom of home
A which is now in Benin, which we talked about
in our recent episode about its royal path Alice is.
For most of its history, Dahomy employed women warriors, first
(01:05):
as a palace guard and then as a combat fighting force.
In this later form, these were probably the earliest full
time professional female fighting units in history, especially considering the
fact that they really were a combat force and not
like a ceremonial one who sort of accompanied men to
the battlefield but didn't actually do any fighting. The idea
(01:26):
of an all female group of warriors who actually did
fight was rare enough that when Europeans encountered them for
the first time, they nicknamed them Amazons, after the figures
in Greek mythology. These women had a reputation for just
being beyond fierce. Some of them were known as reapers,
and they fought with these three ft long razor blades.
(01:48):
After mock battles and other military displays, ones who were
particularly brave would be awarded with belts that were made
of braided acacia branches, and these had these two inch
long thorns all over them, and they would just put
those on in front of their audience as though it
was nothing. Even after most of these women had been
killed in battle, European military leaders that they had been
(02:10):
fighting spoke of them with a whole lot of reverence
and respect. So let's who we're going to talk about today.
But before we get into it, I need to give
a note on the terms we're going to use. Unfortunately,
we do not have a clear Dahomyan word to describe
these women. At the time, they were called ajosi, which
meant king's wives, but that same word was used to
describe all of the women who were part of palace life,
(02:32):
regardless of whether they were fighters or not. The same
is true of the word mino, which meant our mothers,
which was had the same basic connotation these were women
who live in the palace. French speaking people in Benin
today still use the French word for amazon's to talk
about these women. And so even though this is basically
a European word that was added into the language, it's
(02:54):
the word we're going to go with because we just
don't really have a better alternative. Yeah, it kind of
sets the apart in a more distinctive way than any
of the the native labels that would be applied there.
There are many many historical accounts of dahom as women warriors,
but because the Kingdom of dahome A had no written
language before the arrival of Europeans, most of them are
(03:17):
written from a distinctly European perspective. These written records are
mostly also from the point of view of men. Many
of them active and enthusiastic participants in the Transatlantic slave trade,
which is what funded the kingdom and its army. So overall,
the documentation that we have doesn't have a lot of
insight into how these women came to be fighters, or
(03:38):
how they were viewed by the rest of Dahoman society,
and even how they viewed themselves. Even though the University
Nacional du Benin later undertook significant oral history projects to
document the nation's history, those projects all started after the
women who had been Amazons, and likely anyone else who
would have had firsthand contact with them, had eyed Consequently,
(04:02):
it's a little bit unclear exactly when Dahoman kings started
having female guards. However, the use of women as a
king's guard stemmed directly from one aspect of Dahoman culture,
so it's probably really early in the establishment of the kingdom. Basically,
other than the king, men were not allowed to be
in the palace walls when it was dark, so anybody
(04:24):
guarding the king overnight needed to be a woman. More
than likely the first women put to this task were
some of the king's wives. They were trusted, they were
connected directly to the king through social ties, and they
were women so they could be in the palace at night.
Dahoman kings had multiple wives, and a sort of third
tier wife was married to him but not considered attractive
(04:46):
enough to be physically intimate with him or bear his children,
and some of these women, in their celibate marriage to
the king were armed and then trained to guard him.
Written accounts of these armed female guards go all the
way back to the seventh teen twenties. We talk about
the annual customs in the in the Palaces of Albumy
(05:06):
episode and European descriptions of that festival also feature armed
women as part of processionals and royal guards. The size
of this guard was relatively small, about six hundred women total,
and it seems to have been at this point back
in the eighteenth century, largely related to guard duties and
ceremonial presence. In seventeen twenty nine, King Agaja reportedly armed
(05:31):
women and placed them at the rear of his fighting
formations to make his numbers appear larger. However, it seems
as though their role was not actually to fight, but
just to give the illusion of greater strength. So the
exact process by which the Amazon's morphed from a king's
guard made up of his least attractive wives into a
fighting force is a little bit muddled. There are several
(05:53):
possible explanations for exactly what happened and when, and one
of them is very simple. The Bajaman kingdom was small
compared to some of its neighbors, and so it's possible
that the Homemade just needed to recruit more soldiers to
continue to expand its kingdom and defend itself, and since
there weren't enough men to do this, they started also
recruiting women. Another theory follows the same lines as we
(06:14):
talked about in our recent episode about the Palaces of Aboumae.
Each king was expected to expand the kingdom during its reign,
and this meant that the Homemade was always at war.
The consequent loss of life would mean that the kingdom
really always needed more soldiers. Theory number three has to
do with a royal coup. A Dan da Zan, who
(06:34):
reigned from sevent to eighteen eighteen, was overthrown by his
brother Guizo, and in the process nearly all of a
Dan da Zan's female guards were killed. But they were
so fierce in the battle, and so devoted to protecting
the king that Guiso concluded they would be good as
a real ongoing fighting force, not just as a palace guard.
(06:56):
And of course, there is a story that's almost certainly
apocryph fold that's in the mix, and this is also
from the rain of Kinguizo to explain how this all started.
Women hunters in Dahoma were known as beeto. In the
mid nineteenth century, a French naval surgeon reported that a
group of about twenty gbeto had attacked a herd of
forty elephants, although several of them were killed or wounded.
(07:20):
Guizo praised their bravery in having attacked such a large
herd in the first place, and one of them replied
that they'd enjoy a man hunt better, and Guizo decided
to start recruiting women into his army. Regardless of exactly
what prompted it all, the palace guard definitely did transform
into a fighting force and got a lot bigger during
(07:40):
the reign of Kinguizo, so much though, that he took
credit for inventing the idea entirely, even though it seems
like he was more morphing an idea that already existed
into a permanent part of the standing Dahoman army, which
would go on until Dahoma as a kingdom ended. Under Guizo,
the Amazons grew from a force of about six hundred
(08:01):
women to about six thousand. Guiso also started a tradition
of wearing uniforms, which was a largely European convention that
didn't exist in the Dahoman military before this point. Beginning
in his reign, both men and women wore knee length
pants and tunics, whereas previously there hadn't been one standard
of dress and most of the women had fought bare chested.
(08:24):
Post Guizo, the Amazon's also had two sets of uniforms,
one that was fighting where and the other as a
sort of parade dress. We'll talk about how these women
were selected and trained once they were part of the
standing army. After a brief word from one of the
great sponsors who keep the show on the air, to
return to the women who fought in Dahoman's army. Many
(08:47):
of Dahomey's first Amazons were slaves from neighboring kingdoms who
had been taken as prisoners of war. It was believed
that they would have no ties to anyone into home
who might want to overthrow the king, and so they
were safer to have around as part of his his guards. Later,
Dahomie and women were recruited or conscripted as well, some
(09:09):
of them reportedly because they were of high enough status
to be favored by the king, but not beautiful enough
to actually be one of his wives. Regardless of how
they came to be part of the army, the women
were also expected to be celibate. They all effectively married
the king and took a how of chastity. Infidelity was
(09:30):
punishable by death, including for women who had been married
or had children before they were conscripted. There were two
reasons for this, first, so that the women's loyalty to
the king would not be divided, and seconds so military
service would not be interrupted by pregnancies and births. A
lot of European writing about these women and their relationships,
(09:50):
including whether they had physical relationships with each other or
whether they broke their vows of chastity, is really based
on conjecture, and they are also varying accounts of how
they and others viewed their own gender. Some accounts described
the amazon's being viewed as male after they had killed
someone in battle. Others described the Amazon's viewing themselves as
(10:12):
male once they had been recruited, but all of this
is kind of hazy. As part of the army, Amazons
were definitely given preferential treatment over the typical non royal
women of dahome A, whose lives revolved around growing crops,
tending to household tasks, and raising their children. The Amazons
were given slaves, possibly as many as fifty for each Amazon,
(10:35):
although that number is based on Sir Richard Richard Burton's account,
so there's just a maybe there. We don't know about
the veracity of that statement. When outside the palace, a
slave girl ringing a bell walked ahead of the Amazon's,
warning men in the area to both get out of
the way and to avert their eyes. As a fighting force,
the Amazons followed the same basic pattern as Dahomey's male army,
(10:58):
which was divided into left, center, and right wings with
a rear guard. The king commanded the center wing until
the king stopped personally taking the field in battle, and
then the left and right wings were commanded by two
of his highest ranking chiefs. In terms of the Amazon's
the center was the king's personal guard and the left
and right wings were fighting forces who fell under commands
(11:18):
of the other chiefs. When going into battle, the Amazon
units would fall in with their corresponding mail units. Amazons
were armed with muskets, short swords, knives, and clubs. Most
of the muskets were obtained through the slave trade, and
some of them were intentionally faulty. However, the people of
Dahoma became quite adept at repairing them, and those that
(11:41):
weren't reparable were still carried so that the army could
maintain this appearance of being incredibly well armed. Some also
fought with bows and poisoned arrows. We talk a lot
more about Dahomey's role in the Transatlantic slade trade and
the other episode that we keep mentioning or not going
to rehash it all here, but basically, uh, the Kingdom
(12:02):
of Dahoma was often paid for slaves with weapons, and
a lot of times the weapons that were used as
payment were deliberately broken, so they got very good at
fixing them. As the Amazons evolved from being a palace
guard to being a true fighting force, the women started
undergoing really extensive training. A lot of it was inherently
painful and dangerous and meant to desensitize them both the
(12:24):
physical pain and to being around a lot of death.
They climbed acacia walls, which were covered in huge thorns,
usually doing this with bare hands and feet. They underwent
extensive survival training, including field testing, in which they were
sent into the wilderness without a whole lot in the
way of either food or protection. In terms of desensitizing
(12:45):
these Amazons to death, they participated in ceremonies in which
they were made to kill prisoners of war, or to
witness executions, or to perform these executions themselves. The women
most often put through this were normally the youngest recruits,
who had little exposure to violence or death. Yet all
these aspects of the Amazon's training, combined with exhibitions that
(13:08):
were put on for visiting African and European leaders, to
give the Amazons an extremely fierce reputation. Even before they
took to the field of battle. These women were widely
viewed as brave and determined to the point of being ruthless.
This element of fear was as much a part of
their reason for being as their actual existence as a
fighting force. As the words spread that Dahomey had this
(13:31):
fighting force of women who climbed walls of thorns in
their bare feet or swung giant razor blades in combat.
They bring tribes and kingdoms became a little more wary
of them, like you would, you know, a rumor of
a bunch of women swinging giant razor blades would be
enough to keep me away, frankly, and this was the
(13:52):
case as well for European visitors and later colonists and
conquerors in Africa as well, although virtually every European fighting
force was better armed than the Amazons, meaning that Europeans
who did meet them in battle, generally one European accounts
have a generally admiring tone about this whole fighting force.
Explorer John Duncan, who visited the area in the mid
(14:14):
nineteenth century, wrote of them, saying, quote, their appearance is
more martial than the generality of men, and if undertaking
a campaign, I would prefer the females to the male
soldiers of this country. Commoner Wilmot described them in his
dispatches as quote far superior to the men in everything,
in appearance and dress and figure, and activity, and their
(14:35):
performance as soldiers and in bravery Richard Burton wrote of
there being better shots who fired from the shoulder rather
than the hip as the men did, and faster to
reload than their male counterparts. But like the Dahoman Kingdom,
the fighting force of Amazons did not last forever, and
we will talk about that more after another brief word
(14:56):
from sponsor. The Dahoman Kingdom started to lose some of
its power in the mid to late eighteen hundreds with
the decline and eventual abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade
and some attempted conquests of neighboring territory that went in
their enemies favor. Many Dahoman fighters, both male and female,
were also killed in two different sailed attempts to overthrow
(15:18):
the Eggba capital capital of a Bayo Kuta, the first
in eighteen fifty one and the second in eighteen sixty four.
One attack was probably the peak of the Amazon's military
strength and their reputation in battle. Baya Kuta was large,
About fifty thou people lived there and it was surrounded
by a wall that made it easy to defend reports
(15:40):
about exact numbers conflict, but there were as many as
five thousand Amazons fighting for Dahoma at the time, and
roughly a fifth of them were killed in this battle. Then,
during the rule of King Behanzan, France started trying to
annex the land that was occupied by Dahomy Zahoma, apparently
trying to drive the French out, tacked a village that
(16:01):
had come under French control in eighteen eighty nine, when
the chief of the village said that the French flag
would protect them, presumably because the French had promised protection
when taking control of the village, The general who was
attacking the village said, so you like this flag and
be it. It will serve you. Then one of the
Amazon's beheaded. The chief wrapped his head in the flag
(16:22):
and carried it back to behind en all out war
with France immediately followed. France's weapons were superior to the
Dahoman army, so during fighting that went on from eight
casualties on the Dahoman side were very high. Of the
roughly one thousand, five hundred women still serving in the
(16:43):
Dahoman army, fewer than fifty were both alive and physically
able to continue fighting. By the time France officially took control.
France conquered Dahoman, there was a trend at this point
in history for a quote ethnographic showcase races to be
part of world's fairs and other large public exhibitions. These
(17:05):
showcases would include recreations of of places from around the world,
populated with people purported to be front of these places. Generally,
the world's largest colonial powers were the ones hosting these
world's fairs and exhibitions, and the people on exhibit were
from territory they had conquered a colonize. Several of these
exhibits between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties included
(17:27):
women who were described as Amazons, although whether they genuinely
were women fighters from Dahomy is pretty suspect. The first
of these displays was at a showcase at the Gaudin
Daclamttion in Paris, not long after the war between France
and Dahomey ended. As another example, in nineteen o nine,
a quote village from Dahomey was recreated as part of
(17:50):
the Imperial International Exhibition, a world's fair that took place
in London. The Amazons that were displayed there toured in
other exhibitions throughout Europe, where, in addition to being show pieces,
they would participate in simulated fights, and in these exhibitions,
Dahomey's women fighters were depicted as vicious and barbaric, and
as a good example of what one might find if
(18:12):
they visited the so called quote Dark Continent. A woman
named Nawi, who was reported to be the last living
Amazon of Dahomy, died in November of ninety nine, twenty
one years after Benin had finally become independent from France.
She claims to have fought against the French and eight
two and that's the Amazons of Dahomy. It is a
(18:35):
really fascinating story. There are so few historical accounts of
full women's forces, but the ones that uh, we do
talk about and that exists in the historic record never
ceased to just completely capture my attention. UH. In the meantime,
do you have a bit of listener mail for us
to enjoy? So the mail I have us from Christine
who talks about how she's recently been catching up on
(18:57):
episodes like our Child Migrant Program episode and the what
about the King's Daughter ers. She says, these topics remind
me a lot of early American context, and it's been
so delightful and informative to hear about France, Canada, Britten, Australia,
et cetera as well. What these podcasts are calling to
my mind is the genesis of American colonial history. I
teach an undergrad race and American Politics class, and my
(19:19):
students this term got super interested in how the problem
of quote population in England in part prompted the colonization
of the quote New World. As historians like Edmund Morgan
and others tell it, England was in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries suffering a population boom without an economic
(19:39):
growth to match. This resulted in several efforts by Parliament
to contain what was suddenly a rather problematic population of
destitute labors without work. They built workhouses and hospitals to
house many, stowed away others in prisons, and sent still
more to the gallows. But unlike these efforts, colonization allowed
England to achieve two things at once. First, that helped
(20:01):
curtail the population problem by sending their conflicts, their poor,
and their riff raff away to the New World as
settlers and laborers. Second, and just as importantly, and fulfilled
dreams of empire that we're starting to take root in
British thought. In the American colonial context, the arrival of
masses of indentured servants from England predated the arrival of
masses of slaves from Africa for the simple reason that
(20:24):
this helped solve some serious pro poverty problems for Parliament
while enriching the British Empire. It was only later that
colonies like Virginia turns to chattel slavery as the primary
source of unpaid labor. After it turns out insurgencies like
Bacon's Rebellion outlined for the colonists the dangers of indentured
servants outliving their servitude and roaming the frontier again, poor, restless,
(20:47):
relatively young, without work and armed. Apologies for the long note.
Never apologize for your long notes, folks. Uh. It has
been so interesting to hear about programs like the Child
Migrant Program because it reminds us the issues of population,
settlement and sometimes full scale colonization are all wrapped up
in each other and they can have incredible ripple effects
(21:09):
throughout history on race, gender, youth, etcetera. Thanks for your
interesting podcasts of late best Cursed Thin. I wanted to
read this for a couple of reasons. One is that
we we talked about, um, a lot of the population
boom in in Britain and what it was leading to
in our episode on The Lady Juliana, so that, like,
(21:29):
that's not totally new territory for the podcast. But we've
never really talked about the fact that a lot of
the first people who were sent to uh, the American
colonies from Britain were indentured servants and that that was
the primary form of unpaid labor until the slave trade
really reached North America. It was already reaching South America
(21:52):
long before it made its way into North America. UM.
So yeah, I thought that was a good a good
time to be able to note that. So thank you
so much Christine for sending us this note. If you
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(22:12):
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Is it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class stuff Works
dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy
Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've talked quite a
bit about women in combat in various ways on the
podcast before. We've told stories about individual women who disguised
(00:24):
themselves as men to go to war at a time
when women were not allowed to, like our Sarah Emma
Edmund's episode. We've also talked about efforts to recruit women
out of a specific and pretty dire need during wartime,
like one of my very favorite episodes of ours, which
is the one on the Night, which is We've also
talked about women who could be described as warrior queens,
(00:44):
like Budica or in the time of past host on
the podcast Queen and Zinga. But today's topic is a
little bit different. We are revisiting the Kingdom of home
A which is now in Benin, which we talked about
in our recent episode about its royal path Alice is.
For most of its history, Dahomy employed women warriors, first
(01:05):
as a palace guard and then as a combat fighting force.
In this later form, these were probably the earliest full
time professional female fighting units in history, especially considering the
fact that they really were a combat force and not
like a ceremonial one who sort of accompanied men to
the battlefield but didn't actually do any fighting. The idea
(01:26):
of an all female group of warriors who actually did
fight was rare enough that when Europeans encountered them for
the first time, they nicknamed them Amazons, after the figures
in Greek mythology. These women had a reputation for just
being beyond fierce. Some of them were known as reapers,
and they fought with these three ft long razor blades.
(01:48):
After mock battles and other military displays, ones who were
particularly brave would be awarded with belts that were made
of braided acacia branches, and these had these two inch
long thorns all over them, and they would just put
those on in front of their audience as though it
was nothing. Even after most of these women had been
killed in battle, European military leaders that they had been
(02:10):
fighting spoke of them with a whole lot of reverence
and respect. So let's who we're going to talk about today.
But before we get into it, I need to give
a note on the terms we're going to use. Unfortunately,
we do not have a clear Dahomyan word to describe
these women. At the time, they were called ajosi, which
meant king's wives, but that same word was used to
describe all of the women who were part of palace life,
(02:32):
regardless of whether they were fighters or not. The same
is true of the word mino, which meant our mothers,
which was had the same basic connotation these were women
who live in the palace. French speaking people in Benin
today still use the French word for amazon's to talk
about these women. And so even though this is basically
a European word that was added into the language, it's
(02:54):
the word we're going to go with because we just
don't really have a better alternative. Yeah, it kind of
sets the apart in a more distinctive way than any
of the the native labels that would be applied there.
There are many many historical accounts of dahom as women warriors,
but because the Kingdom of dahome A had no written
language before the arrival of Europeans, most of them are
(03:17):
written from a distinctly European perspective. These written records are
mostly also from the point of view of men. Many
of them active and enthusiastic participants in the Transatlantic slave trade,
which is what funded the kingdom and its army. So overall,
the documentation that we have doesn't have a lot of
insight into how these women came to be fighters, or
(03:38):
how they were viewed by the rest of Dahoman society,
and even how they viewed themselves. Even though the University
Nacional du Benin later undertook significant oral history projects to
document the nation's history, those projects all started after the
women who had been Amazons, and likely anyone else who
would have had firsthand contact with them, had eyed Consequently,
(04:02):
it's a little bit unclear exactly when Dahoman kings started
having female guards. However, the use of women as a
king's guard stemmed directly from one aspect of Dahoman culture,
so it's probably really early in the establishment of the kingdom. Basically,
other than the king, men were not allowed to be
in the palace walls when it was dark, so anybody
(04:24):
guarding the king overnight needed to be a woman. More
than likely the first women put to this task were
some of the king's wives. They were trusted, they were
connected directly to the king through social ties, and they
were women so they could be in the palace at night.
Dahoman kings had multiple wives, and a sort of third
tier wife was married to him but not considered attractive
(04:46):
enough to be physically intimate with him or bear his children,
and some of these women, in their celibate marriage to
the king were armed and then trained to guard him.
Written accounts of these armed female guards go all the
way back to the seventh teen twenties. We talk about
the annual customs in the in the Palaces of Albumy
(05:06):
episode and European descriptions of that festival also feature armed
women as part of processionals and royal guards. The size
of this guard was relatively small, about six hundred women total,
and it seems to have been at this point back
in the eighteenth century, largely related to guard duties and
ceremonial presence. In seventeen twenty nine, King Agaja reportedly armed
(05:31):
women and placed them at the rear of his fighting
formations to make his numbers appear larger. However, it seems
as though their role was not actually to fight, but
just to give the illusion of greater strength. So the
exact process by which the Amazon's morphed from a king's
guard made up of his least attractive wives into a
fighting force is a little bit muddled. There are several
(05:53):
possible explanations for exactly what happened and when, and one
of them is very simple. The Bajaman kingdom was small
compared to some of its neighbors, and so it's possible
that the Homemade just needed to recruit more soldiers to
continue to expand its kingdom and defend itself, and since
there weren't enough men to do this, they started also
recruiting women. Another theory follows the same lines as we
(06:14):
talked about in our recent episode about the Palaces of Aboumae.
Each king was expected to expand the kingdom during its reign,
and this meant that the Homemade was always at war.
The consequent loss of life would mean that the kingdom
really always needed more soldiers. Theory number three has to
do with a royal coup. A Dan da Zan, who
(06:34):
reigned from sevent to eighteen eighteen, was overthrown by his
brother Guizo, and in the process nearly all of a
Dan da Zan's female guards were killed. But they were
so fierce in the battle, and so devoted to protecting
the king that Guiso concluded they would be good as
a real ongoing fighting force, not just as a palace guard.
(06:56):
And of course, there is a story that's almost certainly
apocryph fold that's in the mix, and this is also
from the rain of Kinguizo to explain how this all started.
Women hunters in Dahoma were known as beeto. In the
mid nineteenth century, a French naval surgeon reported that a
group of about twenty gbeto had attacked a herd of
forty elephants, although several of them were killed or wounded.
(07:20):
Guizo praised their bravery in having attacked such a large
herd in the first place, and one of them replied
that they'd enjoy a man hunt better, and Guizo decided
to start recruiting women into his army. Regardless of exactly
what prompted it all, the palace guard definitely did transform
into a fighting force and got a lot bigger during
(07:40):
the reign of Kinguizo, so much though, that he took
credit for inventing the idea entirely, even though it seems
like he was more morphing an idea that already existed
into a permanent part of the standing Dahoman army, which
would go on until Dahoma as a kingdom ended. Under Guizo,
the Amazons grew from a force of about six hundred
(08:01):
women to about six thousand. Guiso also started a tradition
of wearing uniforms, which was a largely European convention that
didn't exist in the Dahoman military before this point. Beginning
in his reign, both men and women wore knee length
pants and tunics, whereas previously there hadn't been one standard
of dress and most of the women had fought bare chested.
(08:24):
Post Guizo, the Amazon's also had two sets of uniforms,
one that was fighting where and the other as a
sort of parade dress. We'll talk about how these women
were selected and trained once they were part of the
standing army. After a brief word from one of the
great sponsors who keep the show on the air, to
return to the women who fought in Dahoman's army. Many
(08:47):
of Dahomey's first Amazons were slaves from neighboring kingdoms who
had been taken as prisoners of war. It was believed
that they would have no ties to anyone into home
who might want to overthrow the king, and so they
were safer to have around as part of his his guards. Later,
Dahomie and women were recruited or conscripted as well, some
(09:09):
of them reportedly because they were of high enough status
to be favored by the king, but not beautiful enough
to actually be one of his wives. Regardless of how
they came to be part of the army, the women
were also expected to be celibate. They all effectively married
the king and took a how of chastity. Infidelity was
(09:30):
punishable by death, including for women who had been married
or had children before they were conscripted. There were two
reasons for this, first, so that the women's loyalty to
the king would not be divided, and seconds so military
service would not be interrupted by pregnancies and births. A
lot of European writing about these women and their relationships,
(09:50):
including whether they had physical relationships with each other or
whether they broke their vows of chastity, is really based
on conjecture, and they are also varying accounts of how
they and others viewed their own gender. Some accounts described
the amazon's being viewed as male after they had killed
someone in battle. Others described the Amazon's viewing themselves as
(10:12):
male once they had been recruited, but all of this
is kind of hazy. As part of the army, Amazons
were definitely given preferential treatment over the typical non royal
women of dahome A, whose lives revolved around growing crops,
tending to household tasks, and raising their children. The Amazons
were given slaves, possibly as many as fifty for each Amazon,
(10:35):
although that number is based on Sir Richard Richard Burton's account,
so there's just a maybe there. We don't know about
the veracity of that statement. When outside the palace, a
slave girl ringing a bell walked ahead of the Amazon's,
warning men in the area to both get out of
the way and to avert their eyes. As a fighting force,
the Amazons followed the same basic pattern as Dahomey's male army,
(10:58):
which was divided into left, center, and right wings with
a rear guard. The king commanded the center wing until
the king stopped personally taking the field in battle, and
then the left and right wings were commanded by two
of his highest ranking chiefs. In terms of the Amazon's
the center was the king's personal guard and the left
and right wings were fighting forces who fell under commands
(11:18):
of the other chiefs. When going into battle, the Amazon
units would fall in with their corresponding mail units. Amazons
were armed with muskets, short swords, knives, and clubs. Most
of the muskets were obtained through the slave trade, and
some of them were intentionally faulty. However, the people of
Dahoma became quite adept at repairing them, and those that
(11:41):
weren't reparable were still carried so that the army could
maintain this appearance of being incredibly well armed. Some also
fought with bows and poisoned arrows. We talk a lot
more about Dahomey's role in the Transatlantic slade trade and
the other episode that we keep mentioning or not going
to rehash it all here, but basically, uh, the Kingdom
(12:02):
of Dahoma was often paid for slaves with weapons, and
a lot of times the weapons that were used as
payment were deliberately broken, so they got very good at
fixing them. As the Amazons evolved from being a palace
guard to being a true fighting force, the women started
undergoing really extensive training. A lot of it was inherently
painful and dangerous and meant to desensitize them both the
(12:24):
physical pain and to being around a lot of death.
They climbed acacia walls, which were covered in huge thorns,
usually doing this with bare hands and feet. They underwent
extensive survival training, including field testing, in which they were
sent into the wilderness without a whole lot in the
way of either food or protection. In terms of desensitizing
(12:45):
these Amazons to death, they participated in ceremonies in which
they were made to kill prisoners of war, or to
witness executions, or to perform these executions themselves. The women
most often put through this were normally the youngest recruits,
who had little exposure to violence or death. Yet all
these aspects of the Amazon's training, combined with exhibitions that
(13:08):
were put on for visiting African and European leaders, to
give the Amazons an extremely fierce reputation. Even before they
took to the field of battle. These women were widely
viewed as brave and determined to the point of being ruthless.
This element of fear was as much a part of
their reason for being as their actual existence as a
fighting force. As the words spread that Dahomey had this
(13:31):
fighting force of women who climbed walls of thorns in
their bare feet or swung giant razor blades in combat.
They bring tribes and kingdoms became a little more wary
of them, like you would, you know, a rumor of
a bunch of women swinging giant razor blades would be
enough to keep me away, frankly, and this was the
(13:52):
case as well for European visitors and later colonists and
conquerors in Africa as well, although virtually every European fighting
force was better armed than the Amazons, meaning that Europeans
who did meet them in battle, generally one European accounts
have a generally admiring tone about this whole fighting force.
Explorer John Duncan, who visited the area in the mid
(14:14):
nineteenth century, wrote of them, saying, quote, their appearance is
more martial than the generality of men, and if undertaking
a campaign, I would prefer the females to the male
soldiers of this country. Commoner Wilmot described them in his
dispatches as quote far superior to the men in everything,
in appearance and dress and figure, and activity, and their
(14:35):
performance as soldiers and in bravery Richard Burton wrote of
there being better shots who fired from the shoulder rather
than the hip as the men did, and faster to
reload than their male counterparts. But like the Dahoman Kingdom,
the fighting force of Amazons did not last forever, and
we will talk about that more after another brief word
(14:56):
from sponsor. The Dahoman Kingdom started to lose some of
its power in the mid to late eighteen hundreds with
the decline and eventual abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade
and some attempted conquests of neighboring territory that went in
their enemies favor. Many Dahoman fighters, both male and female,
were also killed in two different sailed attempts to overthrow
(15:18):
the Eggba capital capital of a Bayo Kuta, the first
in eighteen fifty one and the second in eighteen sixty four.
One attack was probably the peak of the Amazon's military
strength and their reputation in battle. Baya Kuta was large,
About fifty thou people lived there and it was surrounded
by a wall that made it easy to defend reports
(15:40):
about exact numbers conflict, but there were as many as
five thousand Amazons fighting for Dahoma at the time, and
roughly a fifth of them were killed in this battle. Then,
during the rule of King Behanzan, France started trying to
annex the land that was occupied by Dahomy Zahoma, apparently
trying to drive the French out, tacked a village that
(16:01):
had come under French control in eighteen eighty nine, when
the chief of the village said that the French flag
would protect them, presumably because the French had promised protection
when taking control of the village, The general who was
attacking the village said, so you like this flag and
be it. It will serve you. Then one of the
Amazon's beheaded. The chief wrapped his head in the flag
(16:22):
and carried it back to behind en all out war
with France immediately followed. France's weapons were superior to the
Dahoman army, so during fighting that went on from eight
casualties on the Dahoman side were very high. Of the
roughly one thousand, five hundred women still serving in the
(16:43):
Dahoman army, fewer than fifty were both alive and physically
able to continue fighting. By the time France officially took control.
France conquered Dahoman, there was a trend at this point
in history for a quote ethnographic showcase races to be
part of world's fairs and other large public exhibitions. These
(17:05):
showcases would include recreations of of places from around the world,
populated with people purported to be front of these places. Generally,
the world's largest colonial powers were the ones hosting these
world's fairs and exhibitions, and the people on exhibit were
from territory they had conquered a colonize. Several of these
exhibits between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties included
(17:27):
women who were described as Amazons, although whether they genuinely
were women fighters from Dahomy is pretty suspect. The first
of these displays was at a showcase at the Gaudin
Daclamttion in Paris, not long after the war between France
and Dahomey ended. As another example, in nineteen o nine,
a quote village from Dahomey was recreated as part of
(17:50):
the Imperial International Exhibition, a world's fair that took place
in London. The Amazons that were displayed there toured in
other exhibitions throughout Europe, where, in addition to being show pieces,
they would participate in simulated fights, and in these exhibitions,
Dahomey's women fighters were depicted as vicious and barbaric, and
as a good example of what one might find if
(18:12):
they visited the so called quote Dark Continent. A woman
named Nawi, who was reported to be the last living
Amazon of Dahomy, died in November of ninety nine, twenty
one years after Benin had finally become independent from France.
She claims to have fought against the French and eight
two and that's the Amazons of Dahomy. It is a
(18:35):
really fascinating story. There are so few historical accounts of
full women's forces, but the ones that uh, we do
talk about and that exists in the historic record never
ceased to just completely capture my attention. UH. In the meantime,
do you have a bit of listener mail for us
to enjoy? So the mail I have us from Christine
who talks about how she's recently been catching up on
(18:57):
episodes like our Child Migrant Program episode and the what
about the King's Daughter ers. She says, these topics remind
me a lot of early American context, and it's been
so delightful and informative to hear about France, Canada, Britten, Australia,
et cetera as well. What these podcasts are calling to
my mind is the genesis of American colonial history. I
teach an undergrad race and American Politics class, and my
(19:19):
students this term got super interested in how the problem
of quote population in England in part prompted the colonization
of the quote New World. As historians like Edmund Morgan
and others tell it, England was in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries suffering a population boom without an economic
(19:39):
growth to match. This resulted in several efforts by Parliament
to contain what was suddenly a rather problematic population of
destitute labors without work. They built workhouses and hospitals to
house many, stowed away others in prisons, and sent still
more to the gallows. But unlike these efforts, colonization allowed
England to achieve two things at once. First, that helped
(20:01):
curtail the population problem by sending their conflicts, their poor,
and their riff raff away to the New World as
settlers and laborers. Second, and just as importantly, and fulfilled
dreams of empire that we're starting to take root in
British thought. In the American colonial context, the arrival of
masses of indentured servants from England predated the arrival of
masses of slaves from Africa for the simple reason that
(20:24):
this helped solve some serious pro poverty problems for Parliament
while enriching the British Empire. It was only later that
colonies like Virginia turns to chattel slavery as the primary
source of unpaid labor. After it turns out insurgencies like
Bacon's Rebellion outlined for the colonists the dangers of indentured
servants outliving their servitude and roaming the frontier again, poor, restless,
(20:47):
relatively young, without work and armed. Apologies for the long note.
Never apologize for your long notes, folks. Uh. It has
been so interesting to hear about programs like the Child
Migrant Program because it reminds us the issues of population,
settlement and sometimes full scale colonization are all wrapped up
in each other and they can have incredible ripple effects
(21:09):
throughout history on race, gender, youth, etcetera. Thanks for your
interesting podcasts of late best Cursed Thin. I wanted to
read this for a couple of reasons. One is that
we we talked about, um, a lot of the population
boom in in Britain and what it was leading to
in our episode on The Lady Juliana, so that, like,
(21:29):
that's not totally new territory for the podcast. But we've
never really talked about the fact that a lot of
the first people who were sent to uh, the American
colonies from Britain were indentured servants and that that was
the primary form of unpaid labor until the slave trade
really reached North America. It was already reaching South America
(21:52):
long before it made its way into North America. UM.
So yeah, I thought that was a good a good
time to be able to note that. So thank you
so much Christine for sending us this note. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, we're at History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com
(22:12):
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has all kinds of information about all kinds of stuff.
You can also come to our website, which is missed
(22:34):
in History dot com to find an ar guy that
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(22:56):
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