100 GREATEST AFRICANS OF ALL TIME - THE AMAZON WARRIORS OF DAHOMEY

This is the story of the legendary female royal guard of Dahomey kingdom who later metamorphose into the most ferocious war machine

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Throughout documented world history, some epochal events stand as incredible to the point some will argue that they are fiction out of seasoned Hollywood blockbuster. Such is the story of the women wariorrs of Dahomey Kingdom which may be hard to believe that such women actually existed in African past. Many western Historians, out of bewilderment have given them different names. For example, Stanley Alpern calls them “Amazons of Black Sparta” and Ednar Gay calls them “Wives of the Leopard. They were the women warriors of Dahomey, an eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. They were courageous, ruthless, blood thirsty and tactical with Spartanlike intense militarism and sense of collectivism.

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They operated with an unusual adroitness that they send shivers down the spines of many nations, Yoruba in particular. Their incursion into Yoruba nation resulted in the silencing of Ketu, a Yoruba kingdom as well as pillaging of many Yoruba villages and towns around Egba and Egbado.

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Although, they were originally palace guards, the Amazons of Dahomey evolved into ruthless women military force by the 1760s armed mainly with muskets, machetes and clubs. Their evolution came as a result of two factors; the incessant raid by the Oyo slavers and the truce reached with Oyo empire which mandated Dahomey kingdom to send 40 able bodied men. This was to tactically reduce the size of the Dahomean Army.

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By the 1840s their numbers had grown to 6,000 because King Ghezo fortified them by ordering every family to send him their most strong and fitting daughters to serve him as soldiers. They outsmart men and fought tenaciously to defend the Dahomey kingdom until the Kingdom was defeated by France in 1892.

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Refrences:

Herskovits, Melville J. (1967). Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (Volume I ed.). Northwestern University Press.
Stanley B. Alpern. 2011. Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey.
Ednar B. Gay. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. ISBN-13: 978-0813917924