Fact vs. Fiction : The So-Called Amazon Women Warriors of Dahomey
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[Warning: Readers may find this content to be disturbing.
This article includes vivid descriptions of human suffering.]
You may have seen images of African women in memes claiming “these are the Amazons of Dahomey…”
You may have seen them and thought…”Wow! What a powerful representation of the strength of Black women everywhere. What a resilient people we are.”
But what if I told you that the photos you are looking at are fakes? And that each one is a distortion of the truth?
The truth is: those are not the great women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey pictured there – the women who fought two wars against the army of France (in 1890 and again from 1892 to 1894). The men and the children we see in these pictures are not the pride of Dahomey either.
Some of those people were originally from outside the region now referred to as the nation of Benin, where historical Dahomey stood for generations. Some of them had never even seen the African continent.
Yet they styled themselves, willingly or unwillingly, as “Dahomean” entertainers.