"The Amazons"... The Story of the Only All-Women Army in the World
Amazonian female fighters in Dahomey in 1897
The Amazon warriors of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) formed the world's only all-female army, and their descendants are fighting today to reclaim their humanity.
The Amazons, or Amazon warriors in the culture of peoples, are female fighters and the first to harness the horse for combat purposes, as mythology and legends tell, most notably Greek mythology.
The Washington Post highlighted these female warriors. It quoted Nanlehonde Hodano, an old woman from Benin, as saying that her grandmother could cut a man’s head off using a curved sword, and she could also climb a barbed wire wall, and she dedicated her life to defending the king.
These details were included in the memoirs of foreign explorers, but they failed to portray the whole story.
The only women's army
Nanlihundi wants people to know more about the Amazon warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the only documented female army in modern history.
Researchers have spent decades combing through the archives of European and West African countries to build a picture of them from the writings of French officers, British traders and Italian missionaries.
But time and colonial rule have erased an important part of the Amazon women's legacy: their humanity.
“My grandmother was an Amazon warrior and she was kind,” said Nanlihondi, 85, one of the last people on Earth who grew up with an Amazon. “She was known for protecting children.”
In 1894, France took over what is now Benin. Colonial officers disbanded the territory’s unique female warrior force, opened new classrooms, and the Amazon warriors were never mentioned in the school curriculum. Even today, many of Benin’s 12 million people know little about their grandmothers.
Amazon Warriors and the Rewriting of History
The newspaper quoted Beninese economist Leonard Wantchekon, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, as saying that the French were careful not to introduce this history, adding that they “said that we were a backward people, and that they wanted to help us catch up with civilization, but they destroyed the opportunities to know the history of women who did not exist anywhere else in the world.”
A team of Beninese researchers is working to reconstruct their narrative. For the past three years, historians at the African School of Economics, a private university founded by Wantchekon near the capital, Cotonou, have been tracking Amazonian descendants across the country.
They aim to collect local memories for a book that can be taught in schools, with the aim of providing a three-dimensional vision of the real Amazons. Only 50 women are believed to have survived the two-year war with France. The last of them died in the 1970s.
Finding their descendants has proven increasingly difficult as time goes on. Unlike Europeans who wrote letters to record their past, West Africans preferred the oral method, passing stories down from generation to generation. Little has been documented about the Amazons after the war.
These narratives die with the death of their owners, says Serge Oituna, a researcher on the project. “The Amazons were very powerful, they had a lot of influence,” he explains. “But after the colonial invasion, everyone stopped talking about them.”
Modernity in modern history
For at least three centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey was a formidable power in West Africa, comparable to Sparta (one of the most powerful cities in Greek history).
European visitors spoke of Amazon warriors, giving them titles such as soldiers and Medusa fighters (a Greek mythological symbol of strength), but the name that stuck in the minds of the people of modern Benin was Amazons.
"However adept the Amazons were among the ancients, this is a novelty in modern history," wrote Archibald Dalziel, a British administrator in the region, in 1793.
American journalist Stanley Alpern quoted a French official as describing the Kingdom of Dahomey as “certainly the only country in the world that presents a unique spectacle of an organization of women as soldiers.” The French publishing house Larousse declared that these women were “the only Amazons known to us in history.”
Great courage in the face of defeat
The origins of the Amazon warriors are shrouded in mystery, but historians say the Amazons may have their roots in the reign of Queen Hangbe, who ruled alongside her twin brother in the early 18th century and maintained a retinue of female bodyguards.
By the mid-19th century, the kingdom of Dahomey boasted thousands of female troops as it sought to outdo rival kingdoms. Amazonian women began training as children to wield blades, load flintlock rifles, and climb barbed wire fences. They drank imported brandy and sang war songs.
This tradition ended with the French invasion of the country. A French general wrote that the women "gave evidence of very great courage in the face of defeat."
When fighting broke out, victors were known to force their enemies to work or sell them into the slave trade. Historians estimate that as many as 2,000 Amazon warriors died in the massacre, while the 50 survivors were absorbed into the new state. Little trace of them remains in Abomey, the kingdom’s former capital.
King Jalil's palace is decorated with banners of Amazon women holding guns, fighting with men and holding severed heads. A rusty sign on one of the city's streets tells visitors that a Catholic church has been built on the grounds of a former Amazon warrior camp.
Nafifofo.. The Human Rights Expert
At community meetings, Nanlihundi tells of her grandmother, Nafifofo, a warrior who made okra soup for hungry children. She tells them that her tall, slender grandmother came to Nanghwe village after the war and worked as a palm oil harvester for money before marrying Nanlihundi’s grandfather. The couple settled in a brick house, where her relatives live today.
“My job is to keep my grandmother’s story alive,” Nanlihundi says, sitting at the door of the house. “I am one of the old women in this village, so I have a duty to teach the young people their history.”
Nanlihundi was a teenager when her warrior grandmother died. Memories come flooding back when she smells the mustard seasoning. Grandma Nafifofo cooked for the neighborhood children, who would rush to her house whenever they had trouble.
“Their parents wouldn’t dare beat them in her house,” she said with a smile. “Even before we started talking about human rights, Nafifofo wouldn’t allow it. Everyone knew the old lady would win any fight.”
Adana and the nostalgia for the battlefields
Adana, another warrior, longed for the battlefield. She told her grandchildren that she disliked housework and preferred ambushing the enemy. She fought with her bare hands, her weapon of choice; it took too long to set up a rifle.
“She told me how she would strangle her opponents, using her long nails,” says her granddaughter, Aibile Dhui, 72. She turned her fingers into claws.
Adana believed the battles taught her life lessons, such as learning to be patient, calm, and to act in a measured manner.
The Amazons taught their grandchildren self-defense after they came of age. One day, Ebele found herself in an argument with a woman in the market, so she hit her with a ceramic pot. “I could have run away, but my grandmother taught me to defend myself,” she said.
Yakito..and her agricultural empire
There was no tobacco in Daitoho's village before the Amazons arrived. After surviving the battle with the French, Yakito rejected gender roles, rising above the domestic chores traditionally performed by women, in order to focus on building her agricultural empire.
Yakito knew where to find the plant she needed to smoke. So she went there to get it. “It was quite an adventure,” said her grandson, Dah Digica Digbo, 73.
Digbo was young when his grandmother died, so his memories of Yakito are dim. But he remembers his upbringing with pride: “His grandfather married a warrior, and her bag of tobacco seeds became a business that employed other women. Digbo’s granddaughter is in the same business. This is her legacy,” he said.
Yakito struggled to conceive a child, so the family built a concrete temple on the outskirts of town as an offering to the gods in a request for a child. But when Yakito failed to conceive, she turned her focus to mentoring girls.
These days, the young women who live with Digbo have left the village for the capital, in search of better job opportunities. Digbo credits the influence of the Amazons for this.
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