Fact vs. Fiction : The So-Called Amazon Women Warriors of Dahomey
Table of Contents
[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.
Who were the fake women warriors of Dahomey?
UK historian Jeffrey P. Green writes:
It is known that a small group of Africans from Sierra Leone worked as ‘Dahomey Warriors’ in Brighton [England] in 1908, and that Joseph Lee, an African American from [Baltimore] Maryland, worked for years as Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn Lobagola and published books in the 1920s. Images were everything it seems.
(emphasis added)
Poster announcing the London premiere of “In Dahomey” at the Shafesbury Theatre, 1903
The poster features the famous cake walk with Bert Williams, acclaimed comedian, at the top of the cake.
(Credit: Wikipedia user Weimar03)
The Joseph Lee (1887-1947) who Green is referring to took parts of his stage name from diasporic and continental African performers he encountered on a visit to England in the early 1900s. His greatest inspiration was the director of a popular comedy called “In Dahomey.”
Lee himself pretended to be a fire-eater who was born in Dahomey and made a fortune from this persona.
When pressed by anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania about his knowledge of Dahomey, Lee, who had only travelled twice to West Africa and stayed for less than a year each time, discovered that ‘there is as much difference between a Dahomeyan and one of my people as there is between a flea and an elephant.’
But he didn’t skip a beat.
I simply said anything that came to me.
(emphasis added)
Countless artists posed as continental Africans before Joseph Lee. And Lee was not the last of his kind.
So given the lure of “primitive” African exhibits – even for Black opportunists – we must be careful about taking romanticized representations of African people at face value, whether the characters they portray are real or imaginary. We must consider that these images have always been and will always be tethered in some way to their original colonial context.
Group portrait of the so-called ‘Amazons from Dahomey’ taken during their stay in Paris, France, January-February 1891
The girl seated front and center was named Titi. She was 8 or 9 years old.
Gumma, the “leader” of the troupe, is seated behind her.
(Source: Tropenmuseum)
The Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands, captions this image in their collection as follows:
In February 1891, the British entrepreneur John Wood brought a dance group from Dahomey (now Benin) to Paris. They were housed in the exhibition hall of the Jardin d'Acclimatation [the official name for the Paris Zoo] at Bois de Boulogne [an urban park similar to Central Park in New York City]. Among them were twenty-four so-called 'Amazons...'
However, it is almost certain that no 'real' Amazons were among the dance group members.
A French journalist discovered that ten women were Egba (Yoruba)and the rest came from Dahomey but did not belong to the armed forces.
[UCLA professor Robert B. Edgerton (1931- )] shows that it was not unusual for an Egba to become an Amazon as a girl captured in 1851 during the siege of the Egbacity of Abeokuta was raised as an Amazon in Dahomey.
[Still], it seems unlikely that King Behanzin, during the war with France in the homeland, when he needed them most, sent part of his elite corps to Paris to dance for the amusement of the European spectator.
[French historian Hélène d'Almeida-Topor (1932-2020)] goes even further by stating that these women were impostors and were forced by the French as Amazons to give the impression that Dahomey was in favor of French colonialism. But also the clothing consisting of jewelry and tops trimmed with cowrie shells and bells was not a customary costume for the Amazons and purely intended for decoration.
(emphasis added)
For many of these performances, random people, who could have been captured from pretty much anywhere, were decked out in the “costumes” of a people they did not know. Then, they were paraded before another set of foreigners who were no less curious about the authenticity of their appearance as they were about the circumstances that brought them there.
We are about half as curious.
As they learned of these exhibits, some, like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, challenged their imperial overtones.
How many today are able to recognize the problem, much less to question it?
Those who crowded these venues were too concerned about the complexities of an imagined culture to care for the actual predicament of the creatures before them. Few intervened as those hapless Africans were captured once more for flyers and for postcards.
The subjects of these snapshots had been urged to act out assigned roles on stages in Europe, in Africa, and in the United States. These acts were now staged on more permanent platforms. In this way, 19th and 20th century advertisers could re-introduce them to a wider and equally unwitting audience in our time.
Those guns and machetes? Just a bunch of props they were given to make their act more convincing.
(But – hey, it worked right? Still works today.)
One show featured the official band of the West India Regiment – part of a segregated unit within the British colonial army of the Caribbean. Recruits would have been pulled from Barbados and Jamaica. (Ironically, this unit was employed in combat against African people and was known for helping the British conquer the Ashanti Empire in modern-day Ghana.)
The “Dahomean” casts that appeared in Cologne (Germany) were actually composed of African women from Togo.
Last page of the French newspaper Le Petit Journal
February 28, 1891
Jardin d’Acclimatation, Paris, France
(Source: National Library of France)
After the French obliterated Dahomey and exiled their king for defying their absolute colonial authority, they captured people from the surrounding villages and paraded them around Europe as the “Dahomey Amazons.” “Dahomey Amazons” were billed as prisoners of war just as the Zulus were after their historic war against the British in 1879. However, it was often said that the real warriors of Dahomey would rather take their own lives than be captured and humiliated by their enemies.
Both the image above and the photo before it are depictions of the “Dahomean” exhibit in Paris, the year after their first performances in the Netherlands.
Here is part of an article accompanying the image above:
The Dahomeans are brave and vigorous, the women are equal to the men, the proof is that the king has for an honor guard a battalion of Amazons whose energy and ferocity do not cede in any way to those of men.
As the relations became less tense, the King of Dahomey authorized Mr. John Hood to take some of his subjects to Paris, and we now have amongst us four subjects of His Majesty Behanzin, six men and fourteen women from Yoruba, two witches, and a cook.
It is the Jardin d'Acclimatation, very well installed for this kind of exhibition, which has collected them; they can be seen there every day for the most strangest and most interesting exercises.
Let the Amazons do the exercise more regularly than [the] male warriors, witches, half priests, [and] half wizards practice their curious practices, and everyone...is very willing to receive the coins we want to give them.
(emphasis added)
Despite this admission in the French press, false stories concerning the origins of the Dahomean dancers persisted across Europe.
Three years into their tour, they were being billed in Britain as ‘a regiment of women warriors, captured in Dahomey by the French army under the command of General Dodds and afterwards released.’
Against this background, the people who we see in these pictures were mostly innocent bystanders being passed off as trophies to the colonial powers. For the people of Europe, each show was a rare opportunity to scoff at the wild brutes who thought they ever stood a chance against the march of civilization.
These poor souls were forced into public exhibits at circuses, at museums, and at human zoos as far as Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, and the Czech Republic, where at least one spectator petitioned the police on their behalf:
“I’ve been visiting the exhibition of Dahomeans at the Střelecký island these days to find out that the poor people aren’t allowed to wear any clothes. They were bare-footed, they trembled with cold and it was indeed a terrible look at the poor Negroes exploited by their merciless impresario.
Although they are accustomed to a warm climate, he does not give them any clothes even after their show when they are all swept. Such treatment is a blunt slavery, because these people are defenseless against their impresarios.
Poor people, nobody hears their complaints. Only when they see a compassionate face in the audience they stare into it, and their sad expression turns one automatically to cry.
…
If they continue to be treated like this, they will soon all become victims of human greed and coarseness.
A Dahomey Exhibit
1892
Hungary
(Credit: Clemens Radauer/Human Zoos, Jamaican scholar Kwasi Konadu’s blog)
They would go where they were ordered to go.
They would eat when their “bosses” said they were hungry.
They were coaxed to perform drills, dances, and sword-fights. Wrestling matches could be observed between children in a makeshift stage set labeled as a “Dahomean village.”
Now the kindred of that once-great empire were nothing but petting animals – their entire culture and livelihood reduced to a window for the White gaze.
A clip from a French documentary on Human Zoos
Those who were tasked with accommodating these distinguished visitors did less than the very minimum to ensure their safety and comfort.
This did not go unnoticed in England where Sunderland officials charged the host of the venue, Edward Martin, and his agent under the Public Health Act for crowding a five-room house with 46 “Dahomeans” in total.
The Shields Daily News published the details of their findings:
The house, which was unfurnished, contained five rooms, closet, and wash-house [a bathroom], and in these rooms the troupe—male and female—slept and lived. They slept on mattresses on the floor, but no bedclothes [sheets and blankets] were to be seen.
—Dr. Wood, medical officer of health, said that everything was in a disgraceful state. The people, when he visited the house, were almost naked, and were huddled together in the rooms.
—Herr Gunez, the manager the troupe, said they had been allowed to live in Oxford Street, London, and in Blackett Street, Newcastle, without interference. The people washed their robes every morning, and they kept together to keep themselves warm. He provided them with the best beef, rice, and sugar.
—The Bench made order for the abatement of the nuisance within 48 hours, and ordered Mr. Martin to pay the costs.
The Cologne City Gazette reported that one of the women who performed there was taken to the local hospital for a minor hand injury she suffered while wielding a sword. Despite the ‘good’ care she received, she was ‘yearning and dreaming [to] go to Africa.’
"Don't die here," she said to the leader of the troop who was visiting her, "not buried among [the] Whites." She was terrified.
By all indications, this woman eventually recovered. Another performer named Jambga was not so lucky. She died while being treated for pneumonia.
Reportedly, city residents described the funeral as ‘an additional and free spectacle.’
Fellow performers held a traditional home-going service for the deceased at the local cemetery. But to the dismay of many locals, it was a special ceremony in which no Whites were allowed.
Perhaps, the exclusion of common spectators (and the bourgeois buzzards who flocked to join them) can be taken as evidence of the Africans’ resentment for the “Dahomean” displays. As such, those who did manage to view this procession and to hear their wails of woe were witnessing a protest against a culture that was not indisposed to capitalizing (or, preying) on Black bodies – even in death.
Gutta also died of pneumonia in Prague. She was 24 years old.
As perhaps evidenced by the letter quoted previously, her death was due to willful neglect on the part of the show’s organizers.
Two years after a grand funeral that drew crowds of well-wishers, the body was exhumed from the central Prague cemetery by a physician named Jindřich Matiegka (1862-1941) who sent it to Univerzita Karlova (Charles University). As head of the university’s Anthropological Institute Matiegka transferred the remains to a wing of the Faculty of Science, which became the Hrdliček Museum of Man in 1937.
The “damsel of Dahomey” is still on exhibit at Mateigka’s museum to this very day.
Gutta (also spelled Guthu in German, Goutto/Gouthout in French)
around 1858-1892
(Source: Musée du quai Branly via Staged Otherness)
modified by Ludomir Franczak)
Jindřich Matiegka
founder of the Czech Anthropological School and co-founder of the Hrdlicka Museum of Man
(Source: Academic Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
What was true name for the women warriors of Dahomey?
Names such as “Senior Warrior Gumma” and “Princess Fassie” appeared in posters and news advertisements.
Tourists journeyed from all over to see them.
Announcement poster for a human exhibit of 24 female and 14 male Dahomey warriors under the leadership of “Chief Warrior Gumma” in 8 daily presentations at the Frankfurt Zoo in Germany
(Source: Postcolonial Frankfurt)
But these were not the mighty “monsters” they were looking for.
“Amazons” was a label that was given to the soldiers of Dahomey by Europeans some time in the 1840s. It was not a word they gave to themselves. This name was based on the fierce Amazonians of Greek lore – women who secluded themselves from men and defended their own territory in what is now believed to have been western Russia. These Amazons were known to capture men just to copulate with them and force them to raise the next generation of warriors (if the offspring was female).
The original Greek word for the “Amazon” translates as “without a breast.” The idea was these women either burned one of their breasts or had it removed in childhood so that they could be more proficient at archery.
Stanley B. Alpern, a researcher based in France, who wrote the most highly referenced text on the warrior women of Dahomey, clarifies that unlike the ancient adversaries of the Greeks, these “Amazons” kept their breasts intact. Besides living on palace grounds and serving a king, they also used a different set of weapons and lived to kill men, not breed them.
The Amazon river in South America has no relation to Dahomey. It is named for a group of women who ambushed the Spaniards as they traveled there in 1542. A local description of their customs reminded them of the Greek legends.
The women of the royal court of Dahomey were referred to as the ahosi, meaning “the king’s wives.” Some of these women were drafted into the army of Dahomey. Although it is not certain if these women had a name for themselves, these warrior women were referred to by the men of Dahomey as mino, meaning “our mothers.”
What did the real women warriors of Dahomey look like?
It is obvious that the people who organized these programs did not care too much about the accuracy of the images they were promoting. Much like show business (and social media) goes today, they were rewarded bases on how well they could appeal to the masses. And, based on the popularity of “freak” shows hosted by P. T. Barnum (1810-1891) and Robert Ripley (1890-1949), it was that which was most unusual that sold the most tickets.
Thus, “Dahomeans” were often cast in skimpy outfits coated in cowrie shells – ‘dressed, says Alpern, ‘as no Amazons had ever been dressed.’ Ads for “Dahomey” exhibits played upon images of muscular men and half-naked women. And candidates were carefully selected to fit the description.
The more “savage” and “exotic” they appeared, the more convincing the story.
As such, any analysis based solely on photographs taken at European studios and backdrops does not do justice to this subject.
While a colonial-era European lens is hardly devoid of bias, whether the person is a scientist or a soldier, descriptions recorded by people who saw the so-called “Amazons” on location in Dahomey are more reliable than those of conniving show-boaters.
One traveler to Dahomey wrote that in addition to 500 male bodyguards, 900 ‘Amazon’ women attended the king’s court.
They wear a sleeveless gown, yellow in front and blue behind, a Scottish loincloth with red top and a black and red police cap. They have the same rifles as the [men]...Some Amazons are young, most are of a mature age, some have white hair. They seem quite warlike, and when they dance, they look no less terrible than men.
French explorer and administrator Alexandre L. d’Albéca (1858-1896) wrote that even in the dense forests, the “Amazons” could be ‘recognized by their white cotton cap, decorated with lizards and blue caimans.’
He described one of three injured captives as ‘very pretty.’
British explorer and spy Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was appointed by King Gelele of Dahomey as general over an entire Amazon brigade.
On the right is a sketch he made showing the chief officer under his command.
“The Chief Officer of Richard’s Brigade of Amazons,
Sketched by Himself”
From The life of Captain Sir Richd F. Burton
By His Wife, Isabel Burton, Volume 1 (1893), page 383
(Source: Ross Archive of African Images)
Burton thought the women were “masculine” while the men were “feminine.”
Here’s Burton describing the outfits he saw the women wearing during a dance routine. These, he identified as the ‘parade uniform’ as opposed to the ‘traveling garb,’ which consisted of a simple brown tunic.
The "Amazons"...were armed with muskets, and habited in tunics and white calottes, with two blue patches, meant for crocodiles. They were commanded by an old woman in a man's straw hat, a green waistcoat, a white shirt put on [backwards]...a blue waist-cloth, and a sash of white calico.
For most of their existence, the Mino, like most women in that region, went about bare-chested. But by the 1840s, they started wearing uniforms that covered up their breasts, as witnessed by Burton and others. Generally, their battledress consisted of dark cotton tunics or grass-cloth shirts. These were completed with headbands, armlets, waistbeads, and sashes.
Though they usually shaved their heads, some had full heads of hair. Officers, messengers, and musicians dyed their hair indigo or silver to distinguish themselves. They also wore helmets and turbans in the second half of the 19th century.
This is all a far cry from the pornographic ‘soldiers in petticoats’ which were being fawned over for years on end in the German press.
What was the true purpose of the women warriors of Dahomey?
It seems there is no end to the wild misconceptions about the Mino.
With a large emphasis on the female forces of Dahomey, it would be easy to believe that this regiment of Black women were the totality of the army.
But that is not the case.
D’Albéca, in his account of the Franco-Dahomean Wars, wrote that the “Amazons” were usually accompanied by an army of men three to five times as large.
This was not simply an African army to fight off European invaders. Nor was it built to make a statement on the role of women in African societies. As a matter of fact, Alpern identifies that the Mino were constantly striving for recognition as “honorary men.” “The men are the better sissies and we are the better bruisers,” was the gist of every song they ever sang. But ultimately, the Mino as a military unit was assembled for one purpose: to serve the king.
In the course of their duties, they made many enemies.
On one hand, they were the vanguard of an entire community. But Africa’s “Amazonians” were also a double-edged sword.
We can hardly ignore the reality that Dahomey was an actor in the slave trade, which displaced many Africans and their descendants to other lands.
For the better part of the 18th and 19th centuries, until the fall of Dahomey in 1894, they raided weaker villages and went to war with the surrounding nations, plundering and taking prisoners to serve as domestic servants and tradesmen. Sometimes, as King Kpengla explained to a group of Englishmen in the late 1700s, their pleading victims were outright executed, to serve the ancestors of the royal family in the afterlife. At other times, these captives were sold as slaves to the British and Portuguese. These wars, he insisted, owed very little – if anything – to external influences, and almost nothing to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
But European observers placed slave profits at the center of the Dahomean economy. The customs of Dahomey as it relates to the “Amazons” and their ‘slavehunting,’ noted Burton, ‘have made the country in parts a desert.’
The impact of Dahomey and its imperial endeavors is evident in the history of such notable African figures as Cudjoe Lewis (c. 1841-1935), one of the last American survivors of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843-1880), an adopted child of England’s Queen Victoria.
In recent years, the Mino have joined a pantheon of women who are celebrated as champions of women’s dreams in a world that continues to prioritize the fantasies of mediocre men.
Last “Amazons” of King Behanzin
1925-1929
Benin
(Source: Quai Branly Museum)
The surviving members of King Behanzin’s Dahomey “Amazons”
The caption reads: ‘Those who were the Amazons. (fearsome women-warriors)’
Early 20th Century
Photographer: François-Edmond Fortier
(Source: Wikipedia Commons)
The history of the Mino of Dahomey is one shrouded in glory and in shame.
The old allure of the new-found “Amazonians” has had its greatest resurgence in the wake of the Disney movie Black Panther (2018). The warriors of King T’challa painted a portrait of Black potential, inadvertently unparalleled in modern entertainment. But, as we celebrate the comportment of the Dora Milaje in a world of Black déclassé, and as we honor the tenacity of the Mino in the face of White bravado, let us be careful that, in the restructuring of our future, we do not perpetuate past injustices.
Even if the photos shown here were, in fact, accurate representations of how the Mino appeared in battle and Mino women were part of these exhibits, it was at a time when they were at their very lowest. As explained in the 2018 documentary Inside Human Zoos, all of these exhibits were nothing short of glorified minstrel shows. Even as they were held under the pretenses of scientific education, conservation, and philanthropy, there was no escaping the underlying causes and effects: the commercial interests of the organizers and the widespread demonstration of cultural inferiority for the viewers.
Why should we continue to share these images of our people so blindly?
Why should we continue to acknowledge the fantasies of men whose business was only to turn people into profits?
We have seen that when we do our own research and dig a little deeper, we realize that there is more to the popular narrative than meets the eye.
It is important that we find the inspiration to persevere with whatever little we can still glean of our greatness. Equally important is the conservation of our true history.
Omri Coke
Omri is a history and science buff with a passion for research.
Through his research, he hopes to inspire others like himself on their own path of self-education and self-development.
This article was originally posted online on February 26, 2020.
It has been re-posted here and updated by the author.
References
Historian Jeffrey Green’s blog – “098: Amazon Warriors From Dahomey, 1893”
British Library – Creating the West India Regiments by Tim Lockley, November 16, 2017
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (1998) by Stanley B. Alpern
Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (2000) edited by Bernth Lindfors
Tropenmuseum – Group Portrait of the So-called ‘Amazons From Dahomey During Their Stay in Paris