The African kingdom armed women not for self-defense but to capture and enslave neighboring populations.
The African kingdom armed women not for self-defense but to capture and enslave neighboring populations.
A head of its debut in theaters today, The Woman King has been advertised as “the remarkable true story of a fierce, all-female unit known as the Agojie, who protected the west African kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s. Set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the film will chart how this military force protected the interests of this powerful African state, fighting the French and neighbouring tribes who enslaved their people and violated their honour.”
Well, I guess that is one way to tell the story of the kingdom of Dahomey and its cadre of female warriors. Hollywood can take all the dramatic license it wants with history in order to tell a good story, and it often does. But if this is what the film shows, it will be a preposterously misleading history of Dahomey and its “Amazons,” as Westerners of the day called those warriors.
Africa before 1850
With a few narrow exceptions, the European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa north of the Zambesi River took place almost entirely between 1850 and 1900. This was long after Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands had established overseas colonial empires elsewhere around the world. Over four centuries of commercial relations with Europe and the Americas before 1850, dominated by the Atlantic slave trade, Africa had remained mostly free to govern itself. Europeans were kept away by a variety of factors, many of them environmental, including Africa’s paucity of natural harbors and navigable rivers, the potent strain of malaria that made sub-Saharan Africa “the white man’s grave,” and the tsetse fly that made it impossible to import horses and other beasts of burden.
As the 1850s dawned, most of the people and territory of sub-Saharan Africa were still governed by Africans. There were exceptions, such as the British and Boer areas of modern South Africa south of the Zambesi, and the small freed-slave enclaves of Liberia and Sierra Leone. But outside of those footholds, European possessions were mostly just ports on the coast for ships to refuel and provision. These were dots and strips on the map of what Westerners then called the “Dark Continent” — a designation originally used by missionaries to denote a continent without the light of Christianity.
The Portuguese, for example, had been developing ports in Angola on the Atlantic coast and Mozambique on the Indian Ocean coast ever since Vasco de Gama in 1498. But they had yet to establish themselves far inland or leave much of a cultural imprint. The French presence in Africa was still modest, the Spanish presence even more so. The Belgians were not yet at the table, and the Germans and Italians were still occupied forging their own nations back home.
Europeans were not above meddling in the continent’s affairs, selling weapons to one or both sides of African conflicts, and occasionally throwing more direct support behind African allies. Portugal, for example, backed Benin in a war with its neighbors in 1515, and conducted a ruinous war against the Kingdom of Kongo between the late 16th and late 17th centuries that had long-term consequences for the stability and demographics of the Congo-Angola area of West-Central Africa. But the Kongo conflict was the exception, rather than the rule.
Throughout its history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was truly a trade: A voluntary exchange in which African kings and merchants engaged for their own perceived benefit. Virtually all of the nearly 25 million Africans sold into slavery down through the centuries — roughly half of them in the Atlantic slave trade — were taken and sold by fellow Africans. The influence of that trade on African politics was indirect, the result of choices by slave-raiding states within Africa. The militarization driven by ceaseless war for new slaves drove the centralization of states. With Africa’s limited manufacturing base, African kings were also dependent upon trade with Europe to obtain firearms, further increasing the pressure to engage in the slave trade, to be predator rather than prey.
Still, for all of the distorting effects of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans in the middle of the 19th century retained the power to determine their own political systems. Few people in Europe, and fewer still in the Americas, wanted that power. But that began to change when the British Royal Navy started intervening in the internal politics of West Africa for the purpose of stopping Africans from engaging in the slave trade.
The Kingdom of Dahomey
Dahomey was located more or less where the modern nation of Benin stands today. Its people were from the Fon ethnic group, which is the largest group in Benin today. French Dahomey, at its independence from France in 1960, renounced the name “Dahomey” and instead chose to name itself for the old African kingdom of Benin, which was located within modern Nigeria and was not a Fon state. A look at Dahomey’s toxic history illustrates why its people chose to abandon its name at independence.
Dahomey was not merely a nation that engaged in slavery or slave-trading. It was a kingdom built on enslavement and perpetual war, the most extreme archetype of the state defined by the capture and sale of slaves, and of what British historian Robin Law later dubbed “the commercialization of warfare.” Dahomey conducted war on an annual basis, conjuring up whatever casus belli was sufficient to motivate its troops. It was so comprehensively militarized, centralized, and dominated by a powerful king that globetrotting British explorer Richard Burton referred to it after an 1863 visit as a “small black Sparta.”
While the importance of the slave trade to the larger African economy in this period remains a matter of much scholarly disputation, slave-trading was central to Dahomey’s government revenue, and to its political and military organization. In 1849, it was estimated that King Gezo earned around $300,000 per year from $5/head duties on slave exports — an astounding figure at the time, especially for a comparatively small country. Some historians have argued that the religious importance of human sacrifice in Dahomey outweighed the economic importance of capturing slaves, but either way, neighboring Africans were treated by Dahomey for centuries as game to be hunted.
Once an obscure landlocked kingdom, Dahomey began conquering neighbors in the 17th century. It rose to prominence under King Agaja, a savvy and aggressive warrior whose conquest of the trading ports of Ouidah and Allada in the 1720s made it a crucial player in the Atlantic slave trade during the period of the trade’s greatest expansion. Agaja, like the men who built the Japanese shogunate in the 1590s, was an early convert to eliminating bows and spears from his army, switching his troops entirely to European muskets and swords. Few, if any, sub-Saharan African states had more regular dealings with Europeans than Dahomey, the result of which is that its history is better documented than that of most of its neighbors. Agaja wrote to George I of England. Dahomey sent regular embassies to Brazil and Portugal, and was the first nation to recognize the independence of Brazil in 1822.
A pungent account of the attitude of the kings of Dahomey towards the slave trade and British efforts to end it can be gleaned from the report by Commodore Arthur Wilmot, a British naval envoy who visited Dahomey in 1862–63, during the reign of Gezo’s son and successor, King Gelele. Wilmot’s trip was an attempt to persuade Gelele to sign a treaty abandoning the trans-Atlantic slave trade and abjuring human sacrifice. Burton, then the British consul, visited Dahomey shortly after Wilmot and described Gelele as “a jolly looking party about 45 with a pleasant face, a frank smile and a shake of the fist like a British shopkeeper.” Wilmot did not try to talk Gelele into forswearing slavery itself, but argued that Dahomey should instead keep its slaves and use them to grow palm oil and other crops. The king first deflected blame to tradition and outsiders:
He said that the Slave Trade had been carried on in his country for centuries, and that it was his great means of living and paying his people. He did not send slaves away in his own ships, but “white men” came to him for them, and was there any harm in his selling? We ought to prevent the “white men” from coming to him: if they did not come he would not sell. . . . It was not his fault that he sold slaves, but those who made his fathers do it, and hence it became an institution of his country.
Then, he pivoted to the practical difficulty of weaning his country from the slave trade, and argued that if the slave trade were abolished, he would simply kill his captives:
We had seen what a great deal he had to give away every year to his people, who were dependent on him: that this could not be done by selling palm oil alone. He said, “I cannot stop it all at once: what will my people do? And besides this, I should be in danger of losing my life. . . .” He said there were plenty of blacks to sell, and plenty to remain; that the price of a slave was 80 dollars, with 4 dollars custom on each. . . . The customs of his kingdom compelled him to make war, and . . . unless he sold he must slay his captives, which England, perhaps, would like even less.
Finally, when pressed by Wilmot for his bottom line, Gelele fell back on the pride of his position:
I asked him how much money he would take to give it up. He replied, “No money will induce me to do so; I am not like the Kings of Lagos, Porto Novo, Benin, &c. There are only two Kings in Africa, Ashantee and Dahomey. I am the King of all the blacks. Nothing will recompense me for the Slave Trade.”
Asante (or Ashanti), west of Dahomey, was a fearsome military power; its name literally meant “because of war.” Dahomey targeted its neighbors to the north and east because it dreaded tangling with Asante.
The Amazons
Dahomey’s most unusual feature, which attracted the most Western comment and is the inspiration for The Woman King, was its corps of female soldiers, dubbed “Amazons” by European observers in a nod to the female warriors of Homer’s Iliad. While the origins of Dahomey’s Amazons are the subject of their own persistent scholarly debate, Dahomey had two traditions and one urgent need that merged to create them. One tradition was a longstanding practice of using the palace women as doorkeepers and armed guards to protect the king and his palace. No man, other than a few palace eunuchs, was permitted to sleep in the king’s palace at night, to preserve the king’s uncontested sexual dominion. With no men in the palace, it was a practical necessity for the women to serve as guards.
The other tradition was that Agaja had, in his 1729 campaign against Ouidah, deceived his enemy as to the size of his army by marching a corps of unarmed women in the rear. Female soldiers began as a ruse, and for decades were a small auxiliary. But under King Gezo, who seized power in 1818 and reigned until 1858, the Amazons were converted in the 1840s from a tiny force of a few hundred women into a fearsome army of 6,000 female warriors.
Dahomey’s urgent need for female warriors was explained by Wilmot:
There are far more women than men— I should say three to one, which may be the reason why the Kings of Dahomey, who are always at war, are obliged to raise and keep up the Amazons, or “woman soldiers,” to the extent that they do. As war is made one of the necessities of the State, a constant drain upon the male population is required, and it naturally follows that the supply is never equal to the demand; hence the remarkable circumstance of nearly “5000” women being found in the Dahomian army.
Gezo regarded the Amazons as an innovation unique in the world; he had his court praise-singers proclaim that he was “the only monarch in the world who held an Amazon army.” (In fact, the Taiping rebels in China used sex-segregated regiments of female soldiers beginning in 1851, but news did not travel much between the Chinese interior and West Africa in those days.) Annual celebrations featured the Amazons staging a mock battle in which they captured slaves from a fortified town, a practice they engaged in commonly. An English observer recorded a speech by an Amazon soldier to the Great Council of Dahomey, proclaiming that “war is our great friend, without it there would be no cloth, nor armlets [jewelry].”
Visitors were more often than not impressed by the Amazons: Wilmot wrote that the women drilled with marvelous precision, and they were known to be able to reload and fire faster than Dahomey’s men. Burton noted that the women shot their antiquated flintlock muskets from the shoulder — the proper way to control the weapons — while the men shot from the hip, a chronic bad habit of African soldiers.
The pageantry masked the desperate reality of a slaving state: A modestly sized nation constantly at war for new captives will often exhaust its available manpower. Even after the 1835 collapse of the larger neighboring Oyo Empire, against which Gezo waged years of war to end Dahomey’s tributary status, Yoruba-speakers in the region likely outnumbered Fon-speakers (such as the Dahomians) by a ten-to-one ratio. Gezo found fighting women where he could — surplus palace wives, foreign captives, daughters of the state’s elite families presented on demand — because he continually ran out of fighting men. And he put his fighting women to work as predators.
The Amazons’ high-water mark came in Gezo’s March 1851 campaign against Abeokuta, a walled city east of Dahomey founded by Yoruba refugees from Oyo. This was no raid on a poorly defended village; it was a major military campaign, and the Amazons played a central role in it. All 6,000 Amazons and 10,000 male soldiers were thrown against the city, with the Amazons deployed as the storming party to breach the walls.
The Egba defenders, however, were forewarned of the attack by the British, and they reportedly fought with renewed fervor at the shameful prospect of being defeated by women. The result was a bloody fiasco. A third of the Amazons were killed. They did, however — on this and other occasions — distinguish themselves through their courage and refusal to retreat or surrender. They were known for their fierce and unceasing resistance even when taken prisoner.
The Amazons would survive as an institution until the fall of Dahomey to the French in the 1890s, but their military stature was much diminished after the debacle at Abeokuta. Burton disdained them as a fighting force in spite of their marksmanship, noting that many of them seemed too old to be soldiers: “They maneuver with the precision of a flock of sheep. . . . An equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick would . . . clear them off in a very few hours.” Reflecting on the battle twelve years after its conclusion, Burton wrote that, “King Gezo lost the flower of his force under the walls of Abeokuta, and the loss has never been made good.”
Gelele returned to attack Abeokuta again in 1864. Again, the Amazons distinguished themselves through their fighting spirit, storming the walls with muskets and machetes and breaching the city using tunnels dug by sappers; one account tells of an Amazon solider continuing to fire her musket at the city’s defenders after having an arm chopped off. But the Abeokutans had been armed with British field guns, and Dahomian casualties were again heavy. Dahomey never succeeded in capturing Abeokuta; it had to content itself with wiping smaller, softer targets off the map and enslaving or sacrificing their people.
Anti-Slavery Colonialism
Dahomey’s frosty relations with the British were no accident. Britain banned the trans-oceanic slave trade in 1807 (the same year it was banned by the United States), and in 1833 banned whites from owning slaves anywhere in the British Empire. A more gradual campaign to end the legal protection enjoyed by natives of British possessions who engaged in slavery followed. At the same time, Britain used its dominance of the seas to coerce various other powers into pledging to abolish the slave trade. Portugal (1815 and 1836), Spain (1817), and Brazil (1826) all signed treaties with Britain agreeing to abandon the trade in full or in part. Portuguese traders remained, in spite of their nation’s treaty, the chief exporters of slaves from West Africa into the 1850s. In 1850, Britain compelled the end of the slave trade in Brazil by threatening the Brazilians with naval force, cutting off one of the last major markets for slaves in the Western Hemisphere.
After 1833, leading British abolitionists and missionaries turned their attention to the African roots of the trade, and to slavery within Africa itself. These Brits popularized the argument that Africans would never stop selling one another into slavery until they had been converted to Western forms of agriculture and trade — and to the Bible. No less a Continental cynic than Metternich remarked, in 1841, “There is nothing but the gospel and the plough which can civilise Africa.” This was the message of the huge 1840 public meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa, chaired by Prince Albert himself in his debut on the public stage. David Livingstone, the most influential of all British explorers in Africa, became an ardent champion of this argument between 1852 and his death in 1873. It was Livingstone who brought to the attention of the British public the extensive slave trade through Zanzibar on Africa’s eastern coast into the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, which was only ended through a treaty with Britain in 1873.
Between 1841 and 53, Britain convinced 65 African chiefs to sign agreements ending the slave trade. Those agreements, along with technological improvements in steam-powered gunboats and malaria treatments, laid the groundwork for Britain’s turn towards an African colonial empire, and with it, a wider European scramble to colonize Africa.
As it invariably happens, there were mixed motives: Britain certainly hoped to profit from controlling the “legitimate” trade it aimed to promote on the African continent, and British Christian missionaries saw the spread of the Gospel as a virtuous end in itself. Few Victorian statesmen would even have considered these to be conflicting or competing objectives. As Colonial Secretary Edward Cardwell said in 1864: “The great design which has always interested this country in connection with our proceedings on [the West African] coast is the repression of the slave trade, and with it the introduction of legitimate commerce and of Christianity as the civilizing agent of mankind.”
Lagos
The pivotal point in British policy in Africa came when the Royal Navy bombarded Lagos in November and December of 1851, in order to install a new oba, or king. Today, Lagos has more inhabitants than Paris or London. It is the largest city in Nigeria, a nation of 200 million people that has the largest economy and by far the largest population on the African continent. But in 1851, there was no such place as Nigeria, and Lagos was an independent city-state whose writ did not run far inland.
African states in this period varied widely in the strength and sophistication of their governments. The spaces in between strong states were often dotted with villages and city-states, many of which were tributary to some stronger state. Lagos itself paid tribute to Benin, a kingdom dating back to the tenth century whose territory mostly lay further East within what is now Nigeria. Benin by 1851 was a shadow of what it had been at its peak in the 16th century, but it had belatedly entered the slave trade in the late 1700s, bringing in the money needed to finance an adequate military.
A tiny frontier town at the beginning of the 1600s, Lagos saw its population quadruple between the 1790s and the 1810s. By 1851, it was home to 22,000 people, an estimated 90 percent of them slaves. Lagos’s location near the midpoint between the fertile Niger and Volta river deltas made it a commercial crossroads. By 1851, it handled a significant share of the trade of the surrounding area, and the largest export in that trade was African slaves. The “Slave Coast,” as this region was known, passed some 2 million slaves across the Atlantic over its history, some 16,000 per year by the late 1840s. In the first half of the 19th century alone, between 75,000 and 124,000 captives from Central Sudan left Africa through the Bight of Benin (the “notch” in the West African coast), many of them through Lagos.
What made the British attack on Lagos different from the coastal bombardments of slave ports that had happened in the 1840s was a decades-old succession dispute in the city-state. Kosoko, who was the incumbent oba in 1851, had usurped the throne and protected the slave trade; the deposed oba, Akitoye, had ingratiated himself with the local British merchants and beseeched the British to restore him to his throne. By the 1850s, coastal African kings had been dealing with Europeans for centuries, and were just as well-versed as their opposite numbers in the intricacies of diplomacy. Akitoye conveniently renounced his previous ties to slave-dealers, presenting himself as eager to sign a treaty against the slave trade if the British helped restore him as oba.
The decision to depose Kosoko was made by British consul John Beecroft, carrying out a broader policy approved by Lord Palmerston, then the British foreign minister. Both Palmerston and Beecroft did so with one eye fixed on Dahomey. Kosoko was Dahomey’s ally: He supported the attack on Abeokuta, and fired off salutes to honor Gezo’s assault. Since Lagos was mostly a middleman, with Kosoko selling slaves obtained from Dahomey and sources further inland, Beecroft argued to Palmerston in June 1850 that replacing Kosoko with Akitoye “would release the people of Abeokuta from the jeopardy that they are continually in, from the fear of the King of Dahomey.” In the spring of 1851, Palmerston instructed the Admiralty to prepare a plan to attack Lagos and blockade Dahomey. As Palmerston wrote to Beecroft:
H.M. Government cannot any longer permit that the accomplishment of a great purpose shall be marred and defeated by the criminal and piratical resistance of two barbarous African chiefs. . . . If Lagos, instead of being a nest for slave traders were to become a port of lawful trade, it would become an important outlet for the commerce of a large range of country in the interior, and instead of being a den of barbarism, would be a diffusing centre of civilisation.
Beecroft first tried to negotiate with Gezo, offering him three years’ subsidy equal to his profits from the slave trade. His answer, like that of his son to Wilmot in 1862, combined refusal with deflection. He told one English merchant that it would offend his royal dignity to submit and close his slave trade while it remained open in Lagos. In a masterpiece of passive aggression, he offered another British envoy two slave girls to send to Queen Victoria as gifts.
Lord John Russell, the British prime minister, concluded that a show of force against Lagos would be the best way to bring Gezo to the table. The availability of Akitoye presented a pliable local alternative in Lagos, which did not exist in Dahomey. As a matter of military geography, the Royal Navy also remained hostile to every proposal to move directly against Dahomey: Abomey was too far inland, while Ouidah was five kilometers from the sea, protected by swamps. Lagos, by contrast, could be handled without straying far from the sea.
The Royal Navy accordingly bombarded Lagos and landed a force of Royal Marines and seamen aided by hundreds of supporters of Akitoye. The battle was won when a lucky shot from one of Beecroft’s Congreve rockets hit Kosoko’s powder magazine, destroying the oba’s palace and setting fire to the entire town. Three-quarters of the population was gone (some killed, the rest fled) by the time the British re-installed Akitoye as oba. 1,000 soldiers from Dahomey arrived too late to save Kosoko; a small group of Egba warriors sent from Abeokuta to aid the British also failed to make it in time.
On January 1, 1852, Akitoye signed a treaty with Beecroft aboard the British flagship HMS Penelope. He agreed to ban the slave trade, ban Europeans from living in Lagos to deal in slaves, end human sacrifice, and make the city-state a safe haven for Christian missionaries and converts. The slave trade through Lagos was effectively over.
In 1851, just as he was rebuffing Beecroft, Gezo signed a friendship treaty with France, which allowed French merchants and missionaries into Dahomey; unlike the British, the government of Napoleon III did not demand an end of the slave trade as the price of doing business. Other holdouts against British abolitionism were driven into the arms of the French, as well: Porto Novo sought a French protectorate in 1863, two years after the British shelled and burned the city in part due to its continued slave-trading.
Twelve more British treaties with neighboring states and chiefs followed the agreement with Akitoye, further isolating Dahomey, which finally stopped trading slaves into the Atlantic market in 1865. This was not the end of Dahomey’s relentless wars of aggression, however: Dahomey continued to sack neighboring towns and carry away their people, sometimes to sell them inland, for the next quarter-century.
The French Conquest
All of this provides the background to the events that form the center of The Woman King: the wars between France and Dahomey in 1890 and 1892, which ended with Dahomey’s becoming a French colony. By this point, abolitionist motives had fallen away from their central place in European approaches to Africa: The great powers of Europe were simply grabbing land, in part out of fear that their rivals would get there first. The Amazons fought, for once, in defense of their kingdom rather than as aggressors. They impressed the French with their ferocious valor and the great losses they absorbed.
That is indeed a theatrical story, much like the story of how the soldiers of Joseph Stalin bravely defended their homeland against the Nazi invasion. But it is also the end of a longer story in which Dahomey acted, all the way to the end of its independent existence, as a brutal oppressor of other African peoples — with the Amazons as eager participants. Dahomey was not an African state that desired only to be left alone and preserve its traditional culture; its entire government and society were built around capturing slaves to sell to Europeans, and this had been true as far back as the early 1700s. Nor were the Amazons a defensive military force until the very end; their chief function for most of their existence was to capture and enslave free Africans. Few of the governments extinguished by European colonialism so richly deserved to be destroyed as Dahomey’s, which is why its name can no longer be found on a map of West Africa.