Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  There was never any doubting how formidable these women were. They formed teams of hunters known as gbeto, and would eagerly attack elephants and crocodiles (some wore caps with a crocodile logo to prove their success). ‘Their appearance is more martial than the generality of the men,’ wrote John Duncan. ‘If undertaking a campaign, I should prefer the females to the male soldiers.’ In the opinion of a naval office, Arthur Wilmott: ‘They are far superior to the men in everything – in appearance, in dress, in figure, in activity, in their performance as soldiers, and in bravery.’ The men fired their muskets wildly from the hip, and reloaded on average in fifty seconds; the women fired from the shoulder and took thirty seconds to reload.

  They could not, however, guarantee victory in warfare. In 1851, 6,000 women, with another 10,000 men, attacked Abeokuta, in today’s south-west Nigeria. They lost, disastrously, and this became the defeat that had to be avenged. A story told later in Abeokuta claimed that the use of women warriors helped the defenders, because when they attempted to castrate one of their attackers, they discovered they were fighting women and were so ashamed by the possibility of defeat by women that they redoubled their efforts and won a stunning victory. According to the disputed estimates, Dahomey’s Amazons lost 2,000 in that battle.

  The most vivid portrait of these warrior women came from that most colourful of Victorian personalities, Richard Burton. Into his forty years he had already crammed lifetimes of adventure, travel and scholarship. A youth spent back and forth in France and Italy, with various tutors, taught him French, Italian, Neapolitan, Latin and also (rumour had it) Romany, the result of a love-affair with a gypsy. A genius at languages, he was an outsider, with broad interests and little respect for convention. At Oxford he studied Arabic, took up fencing and falconry, and got expelled for attending a steeplechase, which was against college rules. Fit for nothing but to be shot at (as he said), he joined the East India Company and was posted to Gujarat, where he learned another six Indian languages – Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Marathi and Persian – seven if you count Saraiki as a language rather than a dialect of Punjabi. Never had any outsider gone quite so native.

  Turning his dark, smouldering good looks and bushy, drooping moustache to advantage, Burton took on the persona of a Persian named Mirza Abdullah and was put to undercover work. His research included the brothels of Karachi, which employed boy prostitutes, a subject on which he wrote in rather too much detail for some. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was given leave to go on the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – in disguise, of course, because if discovered he risked death. He prepared by having himself circumcised. Claiming to be a Pashtun to explain his accent, he displayed a convincing knowledge of Islamic traditions, kept meticulous notes and survived to tell the tale, which, when published, made him famous.

  Back with the political department of the East India Company and supported by the Royal Geographical Society, he headed into the East African interior – becoming the first European to enter Harar in Ethiopia – an expedition that ended in an attack by Somalis, which left one member dead, the co-leader John Hanning Speke severely wounded and Burton with a spear through his cheek. More books followed. A later expedition with Speke was supposed to check out the possibilities for trade, but a hidden agenda was to find the source of the Nile, which had become one of the greatest issues of the day. Many diseases later, they found Lake Tanganyika. Burton was too ill to continue and Speke, half blind, went on without him, to find Lake Victoria, which is very nearly the Nile’s source. Back in London, claim and counter-claim led to a violent quarrel between the two. They were in the midst of arguing the matter in public when Speke walked out. Later that day he went hunting and in a bizarre accident, never properly explained, apparently shot himself while climbing a stile. Later expeditions under Grant, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley would confirm the Nile’s real source, ending the second greatest controversy of the century, at least in England (the greatest being the one swirling around Darwin’s Origin of Species).

  Meanwhile, Burton, eager for a post that would allow for his scholarly interests, had been appointed consul in West Africa, based in Port Clarence on the island of Fernando Po. He arrived at a crucial moment. For over 200 years, the West African coast had been both a treasure trove and a malarial death-trap for slavers. In the words of a well-known couplet:

  Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin,

  Where few go out and many go in.

  Though ships still slipped through to Cuba and Brazil, the trade was virtually over, thanks to the British navy. Coastal forts were closing, the interior opening, turning West Africa, indeed all Africa, into a free-for-all. Europeans and others – French, Dutch, English, Spanish, Brazilians – were beginning what would later be called the Scramble for Africa, carving up tribes and cultures and ecologies with lines on empty maps. No one knew much about the interior, but as quinine brought relief to the scourge of malaria, explorers began to trace the great rivers, traders sought new products and missionaries dreamed of converts by the uncounted million, all of these elements dragging government in their wake. In West Africa, with kings determined to control the coast, returned slaves threatening upheaval and middlemen wanting their cut of exports – in particular of palm oil – European nations, Britain being the main one, sought to impose law and order.

  Dahomey, though, was not easily reached. Quite a few had been there – missionaries, naval officers, consuls, traders – most trying to get King Gezo on side. These efforts had achieved little when Gezo was killed by a Yoruba sniper in 1858. In 1860, with a new king, Glele, in place, events took an uglier turn. From Lagos the consul and the Church Missionary Society reported that Dahomey was about to attack Abeokuta again. That would ruin decades of trade and missionary work. The government considered sending in troops, then reconsidered, and annexed Lagos. The Foreign Office decided on diplomacy. They sent a naval mission to Abomey to persuade King Glele to sign a treaty: slavery should stop, human sacrifices should stop, there should be peace with Abeokuta. To these demands Glele said no, no and no. Foreigners could not just come in and change centuries of tradition; his country had been invaded four times by Oyo. The navy, with better things to do than argue the British case, withdrew.

  Over to Burton. He could hardly wait. He had started to study the Fon language and had read everything available about them. He saw, noted and understood more than anyone before him, and many who followed, until modern anthropologists and historians filled the gaps, as best they could for a culture that had vanished.

  Carried northwards, slung between the shoulders of five bearers known as ‘hammock-men’, with six guards and a Dahomean escort of twenty, Burton had been provided with a selection of gifts requested by Glele: a 40-foot silk tent, a silver pipe, two silver belts with ‘lion and crane in raised relief’, two silver-and-gilt stands, and a coat of mail, with gauntlets. Glele had also asked for a horse-drawn carriage, such as befitted sovereigns like Queen Victoria and himself. Burton was told by the foreign minister, Lord John Russell, to explain that transporting a carriage and horses to the West African coast was tricky, and that ‘it would be very doubtful, from the nature of the country and climate, whether they would long survive.’ Burton was then supposed to hurry on with a reassurance: if future relations ‘should be of a nature to warrant such a proceeding, Her Majesty’s Government would not hesitate to endeavour to comply.’

  What he found on the plateau between two swampy, wooded rivers was a mini-nation of no more than 200,000. The capital, Abomey, had perhaps 20,000 inhabitants. For 200 years, the kings had ruled by exercising strict control of their many wives and children. They tried to avoid disputes over succession by nominating heirs in good time and favouring women as administrators. There were still altercations, but far fewer than among neighbouring groups; the average reign of the eleven Dahomean kings (1650–1894) was twenty-two years.

  Women were favoured in an extraordinary way. The system in which ev
ery official had a female counterpart prescribed a ‘mother’ whose job it was to shadow the official’s movements, policies and finances. Even the king had a shadow, based in the countryside, though a male shadow, not a female one. When and why this system evolved no one knows – possibly it went back to rule by twins in the early days of the kingdom – but it imposed checks and balances that would have amazed Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of American democracy, and might have given some radical ideas to women in England on their slow march for women’s rights.

  Several Europeans had written of this strange society, but Burton was the first to record many of the details, with scathing comments, some witty, some crudely offensive, occasionally both. On the first day, a few miles short of the capital, there was a reception, including jesters who specialized in making faces and pretending to be deaf and dumb, which in Burton’s view made each of them ‘as lively as a professionally engaged mourner’. There were march-pasts, toasts, presentations of flags, and gun-salutes. The viceroy of the port of Whydah (today’s Ouidah), a former slaving kingdom conquered by Dahomey, introduced himself, doffing his felt hat. ‘His appearance revolts,’ wrote Burton, who knew him by reputation. ‘He is as bad as he looks, and his avarice is only to be equalled by his rapacity.’ Singers, drummers and bards followed, and ‘a truly barbarous display: eight human crania dished up on small wooden bowls like bread-plates, at the top of very tall poles.’

  A slow walk along a pebble road led to the palace compound. Eight gates, with guards under umbrellas of many colours – signs of status – opened on to thatched sheds about 30 metres long, tall at the front, sloping almost to the ground at the back. Rank upon rank of officials are all listed and described. One, ‘very old, with a peculiarly baboon-like countenance’, wore ‘a long coat which makes him look like a magnified bluebottle fly’. Finally came the royal reception: King Glele was ‘athletic, upwards of six feet high, lithe, agile, hair of the peppercorn variety’, eyebrows scant, hair thin, teeth sound, eyes bleary, which Burton put down to tedious receptions, perpetual smoking of a long-stemmed pipe and ‘a somewhat excessive devotion to Venus.’ He was on a bench swathed with red and white cloth and cushions. Behind him sat a throng of spouses. ‘If perspiration appears upon the royal brow, it is instantly removed with the softest cloth by the gentlest hands.’ He rose and shook hands vigorously. Through his prime minister and interpreter, he asked after Queen Victoria’s health, and that of her ministers, people and all recent visitors that he could remember. Stools were placed, toasts drunk, guns fired.

  Outside again for a pageant, under a canopy, Burton took notes, to the delight of the king. A line of twenty-four scarlet, green, purple and white umbrellas shielded the monarch and his wives. Male warriors were divided from female ones by bamboo palms. In lofty chairs sat a woman known as the Akutu, ‘a huge, old porpoise’, who was the ‘captainess’ of the king’s bodyguards (Burton feminized nouns whenever possible), and the corresponding ‘veteraness’ on the prime minister’s side, ‘also vast in breadth’, for ‘the warrioresses begin to fatten when their dancing days are done, and some of them are prodigies of obesity.’

  ‘The flower of the host was the mixed company of young Amazons lately raised by the King; this corps (about 200) . . . was evidently composed of the largest and finest women in the service.’ Each had a strip of blue or white cloth binding the hair, a sleeveless waistcoat and a skirt of blue, pink and yellow, kept tight around the waist by a sash, a cartridge box, belt or bandolier, a bullet bag on a shoulder strap, a knife and a flintlock in a black monkey skin.

  While a selection of Amazons danced and sang, officers grovelled in the dust, ‘and shovelled it up by handfuls over their heads and arms, showing that they were of lower rank than the ministers,’ an act common to ‘all semi-barbarous societies.’ Before the king, even the highest officers rolled, crawled or shuffled forward on their knees, to frequent cries of ‘King of all kings!’

  More songs, more dances followed, this time in the presence of

  a dozen razor women, who, defiling past the King . . . took their stations near the throne; they held their weapons upwards in the air like standards, with a menacing air and gesture. The blade is about 18 inches, and shaped exactly like a European razor; it closes into a wooden handle about two feet in length, and though kept in position by strong springs, it must be, I should think, quite as dangerous to the owner as to the enemy. These portable guillotines were invented by a brother of the late king Gezo.

  Perhaps because they were both impractical and recently invented, we hear nothing more of them in the fighting that is to come. There were more displays from ‘bayoneteeresses’ and ‘blunderbuss-women’, a final song –

  We like not to hear that Abeokuta lives;

  But soon we shall see it fall.

  – then the king wrapped his robe around himself and left, ‘every inequality of ground was smoothed, every stick and stone was pointed out, lest it might offend the royal toe’, and the reception was over.

  As 1863 gave way to the new year, Burton witnessed the annual so-called Customs, celebrations during which executions supplied the previous king ‘with fresh attendants in the shadowy world.’ In a 30-metre shed, which had a tower ‘not unlike that of an English village church’, were twenty prisoners in long white shirts, tied to posts, destined for sacrifice. They were well looked after, and apparently unconcerned. At the entrance to a tent-like shed, which contained the relics of King Gezo, sat the king, surrounded by wives, protected by a mass of coloured parasols, and attended by Amazons squatting ‘with their gun-barrels bristling upwards’. A crowd of perhaps 2,500 watched. Burton and his companions were seated under white parasols. The king spoke, sang, danced, wiped his brow with a forefinger and scattered his sweat over the delighted audience. So it went for five days: speeches, pageants, songs, music, dancing, feasting, military displays, parades of fetishes and oaths to defeat Abeokuta. Hunchbacks, of which there were many, cut swathes through the crowds with whips. At one point, the king threw cowrie shells, which were used as currency, into the crowd, starting a free-for-all. ‘No notice is taken if a man be killed or maimed in the affair; he has fallen honourably . . . Some lose eyes and noses; the Dahomeans . . . bite like hyenas – I have seen a hand through which teeth met – and scratch like fisherwomen.’

  Burton adds a note on human sacrifice. True, when kings died they were followed into the grave by a court of wives, eunuchs, singers and drummers; and it was the custom to execute criminals. But things were not so bad when compared to practices back in England. After all, in that very year ‘we hung four murderers upon the same gibbet before 100,000 gaping souls in Liverpool,’ and strung up five pirates in front of Newgate prison. In Dahomey, ‘The executions are, I believe, performed without cruelty.’ That year, about eighty were to be beheaded, half of them ‘female victims killed by the Amazons in the palace, and not permitted to be seen by man.’ Adding those slain on suspicion of witchcraft, Burton guessed the annual toll to be 500. He reported that twenty-three were killed on the final night of the Customs. ‘The practice originates from filial piety, it is sanctioned by long use and custom, and it is strenuously upheld by a powerful and interested priesthood . . . Gelele [Burton’s spelling] I am persuaded could not abolish human sacrifice if he would; and he would not if he could.’

  Turning to the Amazons, he points out that they still maintained their roles as ‘wives’ and bodyguards, for ‘Gelele causes every girl to be brought to him before marriage, and if she pleases, he retains her in the palace.’ But now they were mostly warriors, ‘the masculine physique of the women enabling them to compete with men in enduring toil, hardships and privations.’ The force, some 2,500 – much reduced after the losses under the walls of Abeokuta – had five specialist units: ‘blunderbuss-women’, each with an attendant carrying ammunition; elephant hunters, the bravest of the brave; razor women; infantry, the bulk of the force; and archers, not many now that most had muskets, and used mainl
y as scouts. He saw them on the march. They were not exactly Grecian in their looks: they seemed old, Burton said, ugly, grumpy-looking, with immense buttocks. He might have added that they were determined, fiercely loyal, strong and willing to die for their king and country, just the sort of spirit needed in warfare.

  The privates carried packs on cradles, like those of the male soldiery, containing their bed-mats, clothes and food for a week or a fortnight, mostly toasted grains and bean-cake, hot with peppers. Cartridge-pouches of two different shapes were girt around their waists, and slung to their sides were water-gourds, fetish-sacks, bullet-wallets, powder-calabashes, fans, little cutlasses . . . flint, steel and tinder, and Lilliputian stools, with three or four legs.

  Supposedly the women were all celibate, since they were all legally the king’s wives; not that he had sex with many of them, and those few were exempted from military action. The rest were indeed celibate, at least while they were Amazons, because adultery with a royal wife meant dire punishment, even death. Not much of a deterrent, apparently: Burton reports that 150 Amazons were found to be pregnant and were tried with their lovers, eight of whom were executed, the rest being imprisoned or relegated. Some eyewitnesses suggested that enforced celibacy increased their ferocity. It also had another effect, as Burton claims in a footnote of surprising obscurity, given his interests. The Amazons, he says, prefer ‘the peculiarities of the Tenth Muse’. Today, the Tenth Muse is a comic-book heroine who is, somehow, the daughter of Zeus. Back in Burton’s day, some of those privileged with a classical education knew about the nine Muses who presided over all the arts, and also knew that Plato and many later writers referred to Sappho as the Tenth Muse43 – Sappho the poetess of Lesbos, renowned for her ‘amorous disposition’ towards her female companions, in the coy words of Lamprière’s Classical Dictionary. Burton meant the Dahomey Amazons were lesbians, a statement for which he provided no evidence at all.