Women warriors of west Africa

Smithsonian has a neat feature on the Dahomey "Amazons"—an elite troop of female soldiers who fought in the 18th and 19th century for the independent African country of Dahomey (it's now Benin).

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.

... 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.

... 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.

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 [knives] admirably.”

• [Incipient Madness]

   Dahomey metalwork from this period is some of the best art I’ve ever seen. Beautiful castings in bronze and gold  with incredible detail . Too bad they got the money to support all those artists by being middlemen in the slave trade.

  Even so, interesting culture with great art. Never knew about this women’s regiment. Doesn’t surprise me though.

• [angusm]

  It always surprises me that there haven’t been more female soldiers. I doubt that women’s exclusion from the ranks had much to do with effectiveness. In many societies throughout history, women did at least as much – and often much more – physical work than men. Even allowing for physical differences between the genders, many women certainly wouldn’t have lacked the required strength or stamina. In more modern times, women have shown themselves to be able to shoot or handle machinery as well or better than men. And the idea that women are delicate little flowers who must be protected from violence falls down on just about every level: historically, war has never spared women.
  The only thing that I can think of is that war, like hunting, had a ritual or even ‘recreational’ aspect, and so women were shut out of this uniquely masculine preserve for that reason.

  • [phisrow]

    I suspect a second reason(possibly articulated, possibly something that tended to curtain the efficiency of societies that tried it):

    A population’s reproductive capacity, unless males are virtually extinct, pretty much hinges on how many females of reproductive age it contains. Depending on one’s cultural mores regarding polygamy, pregnancy out of wedlock, remarriage, etc. you can lose quite a few males of prime breeding age without denting the size of your next generation appreciably. Females, by contrast, more or less reduce the potential size of the next generation proportionally with combat losses and potential childbearing time spent not being pregnant so as to be ready for combat.

    Societies start to get pretty shell-shocked if the losses get too high; but losses of fractious younger sons who would otherwise be making trouble at home can be downright socially stabilizing, in addition to whatever ‘conquer thy neighbor’ benefits they may provide…

    • [Guest]

      Ooh, evo-psych ‘splaining! XD

      Please, tell us more about ‘females’ and how we’re needed to ‘produce’ more babies for the men, so they can go off and kill each other. /s

      • [phisrow]

        I’m not quite sure what I did to elicit your hostility: 

        It is simply true, for humans and most mammals, that the potential size of generation n+1 depends largely on the number of females, not the number of males. That means that using male cannon fodder doesn’t reduce the supply of cannon fodder for the next war, while using female cannon fodder does(unless death rates are low enough that you were bumping up against environmental population constraints anyway…)

        There was no mention of evolution, no mention of psychology, no normative judgement at all.  What’d I do?

        • [Nadreck]

          To quote Obama “That’s not politics: that’s Math!”

  • [Guest]

    Yes, and also, patriarchy! Can’t let the women get too uppity and learn to read, vote, and shoot guns and stuff. Or, worse yet, not have any baybeeeeez… lol

    • [onereader]

      For most of history the majority of men where excluded from those things as well. Let’s try not to project our modern attitudes where they’re not a correct framework for understanding events.

• [Carl Guderian]

  I’m thinking tennis in the Hamptons of 1920, only with human heads.

• [JonCarter]

  This tribe was mentioned in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

• [fjsr]

  That is admirable technique, decapitating your enemy with your musket. Wardrobe generously provided by Lacoste. 

• [Janet Croft]

  Not to mention Flash for Freedom!, Flashman’s adventures in the slave trade.

  • [troutfishinginamerica]

    That’s the first thing I thought of. God, I love that series.

• [Nadreck]

  It makes sense on a tactical, but not (as other commentators have pointed out) a strategic, level.  No group has better reflexes than teenage girls: check out the tennis circuit.  Until the recent counter-revolution, the Libyans had an All-Girl Attack Battalion for just this reason.  That, and the fact that it freaked out visiting Muslim rulers from the region.