Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  They were undoubtedly very much the king’s women. Another eyewitness, a naval officer named Frederick Forbes, was told by one Amazon that the king ‘has borne us again, we are his wives, his daughters, his soldiers, his sandals’. They formed an elite, well supplied with food and slaves, cut off from their families, devoted exclusively to the king and the interests of his nation. They gloried in their power and ferocity, singing:

  Let the men remain at home,

  Growing corn and palms!

  We, the women,

  We’re going to bring back entrails

  With our hoes and our machetes.44

  At first sight, this looks as if the Amazons were a vanguard for women’s rights. Not so, because the women spoke of themselves as transformed into men. ‘We were women, we are now men,’ one of them told Forbes. Or as an ancient Amazon interviewed in the 1920s said, after she had killed and disembowelled her first enemy she was told, ‘You are a man.’ For them, the path to self-advancement lay through, rather than out of, subservience.45

  Ferocity was encouraged. As part of their training, the Amazons made mock assaults over barriers of thorns, ‘tearing their flesh as they crossed the prickly impediment,’ in the words of a Portuguese traveller in 1830. Others witnessed numerous staged attacks, slave-hunts and battles under the eyes of King Gezo and his successor Glele. All was done with tremendous zest, which often tipped over into brutality. In 1850, at the annual Customs celebrations, two visitors (the British trader and consul John Beecroft and the naval officer Frederick Forbes) watched four trussed and gagged prisoners carried in large baskets through the waiting crowds on to a platform, where four Amazons tilted the baskets and tumbled the prisoners to their deaths at the hands of the bloodthirsty mob. There were many beheadings. In 1889 and 1890, French visitors saw what was apparently an annual ritual, in which Amazons tore an ox apart with knives and their bare hands, smearing themselves with the entrails. Perhaps, they suggested, this was ‘insensitivity training’, hardening them to bloodshed.

  Burton was the opposite of a natural diplomat. He handed over all the gifts immediately, and told Glele what was expected of him in no uncertain terms. He said slave-raiding and slavery had to stop, ignoring the fact that ending it would destroy the relationship with Brazilian slavers, deprive the king of the income to support his army and officials, and generally wreck the economy. Glele was appalled. Peace with neighbours? Impossible. Oyo had invaded four times in the previous century, Glele’s predecessor had been shot by a Yoruba. Burton had a strong case, morally, but he was – as a black pastor who was present put it – all ‘hot passion and harsh temper’. Glele himself commented afterwards ‘that if the Queen send such Commissioners to him it will spoil everything.’ In fact, it did. There would be no treaty, no more presents, no more missions from the British. Burton’s days in West Africa ended shortly afterwards, in turmoil, because he had authorized payment in a court case that the Foreign Office refused to reimburse.

  A month after Burton’s departure, Glele set out to take his revenge on Abeokuta, with some 10–12,000 troops, including 3.000 Amazons. They arrived exhausted, after a twenty-two-day march. It was a disaster. The inhabitants were ready for them, behind repaired walls. The Amazons fought with fanatical zeal. Only four warriors managed to climb the earth ramparts, all Amazons, all killed. A popular story told of an Amazon who, to show her scorn of the enemy, sat on a copper cauldron not far from the ramparts, turned her back and began smoking a long pipe, bullets zipping around her, until a sniper shot her dead. The inhabitants sent out a sortie, cut off her head and displayed it around town. It was all over in an hour and a half. Glele escaped, losing his tent, throne, sandals, 1,000 captured and some 2,000 dead, including 700 Amazons. Abeokuta remained an obsession for Dahomey for another twenty-five years. There were later raids, but no victory.

  In those years, Glele launched several other campaigns beyond his borders. In 1879, he destroyed a Yoruba town, Meko, seizing 3.000 captives and taking 4,000 heads; Ketu, a town of 20,000 with a 7-kilometre wall and a 5-metre ditch, fell twice, in 1883, when its king was beheaded, and again two years later.

  Meanwhile, beyond Glele’s reach, greater forces were gathering. The French claimed authority over the ports of Porto-Novo and Cotonou, on the fringe of Glele’s territory. Glele agreed, then changed his mind and sent raiding parties into nearby villages. A French delegation went to Abomey to negotiate, but to no effect, for by then King Glele was dying. Jean Bayol, the head of the mission, was shocked when a ‘ravishing’ sixteen-year-old Amazon recruit named Nansica was called upon to kill for the first time. Her victim was a prisoner tied up and sitting in a big basket. She severed his head with three swings of her sword, cut the last bit of flesh connecting head to trunk, then (according to one witness) swept the blood from the sword with her fingers and licked them clean.

  In early 1890, France built up a contingent of 359 Africans under French officers in Cotonou – small, but newly armed with eight-shot Lebel repeating rifles, which could kill at 300 metres with high-velocity bullets. These bullets seem to have been dum-dums (named after an armoury in Calcutta), with soft lead heads that expanded on entry, leaving a fearsome exit wound. Winston Churchill recorded the effects after seeing action on India’s North-West Frontier in 1898: ‘The Dum-Dum bullet, though not explosive, is expansive . . . On striking a bone this causes the bullet to “set up” or spread out, and it then tears and splinters everything before it, causing wounds which in the body must be generally mortal and in any limb necessitate amputation.’ The Lebel far outgunned the attackers’ muzzle-loading flintlocks.

  The French arrested some Fon officials and set up a log fence in front of their trading post. In the darkness before dawn on 4 March, several thousand Dahomeans, including a ‘regiment’ of Amazons, attacked the stockade, prising the logs apart to fire inside. Bayol saw a young Amazon behead a white sergeant before being shot down. He recognized her as the ‘ravishing’ Nansica, who had decapitated the prisoner back in Abomey. French firepower, supported by a gunboat shooting from the shore, forced the Dahomeans back, leaving 120 men and seven women dead, with ‘several hundred’ others nearby uncounted. A Fon tale relates an incident that has become legendary, in which an Amazon, disarmed by an African-French soldier (or ‘French officer’, for versions vary), ripped his throat out with her sharpened teeth.

  Six weeks later, some 350 French troops and 500 locals intercepted the Dahomean army at the village of Atchoupa, some 7 kilometres north of Porto-Novo. The Dahomeans, with a huge numerical advantage, routed the African contingent, but the French formed a square. Retreating steadily, they poured withering fire from their Lebel rifles. Over 600 Dahomeans died, including many Amazons, for the loss of eight on the French side. That was the First Franco-Dahomean War.

  A treaty ensued, by which Dahomey recognized France’s authority over Cotonou and Porto-Novo, but clearly more violence would follow. The new king, Béhanzin, started buying modern weapons from German traders, including lever-action Winchesters (the 1873 version of which is known as the ‘gun that won the West’).

  It was the Second Franco-Dahomean War of 1892 that finally did for the Amazons. War came quickly. In March, Fon warriors raided villages on the Ouémé River claimed by Porto-Novo. The French sent a gunboat to investigate. It was attacked. The French protested. The king rejected the protest. France declared war. The king said, in effect, bring it on: ‘If you want war, I am ready.’ So were the French, their army pumped up with Foreign Legionnaires, engineers, artillery and cavalry to over 2,000 men, with another 2,600 porters. In early July, gunboats shelled villages on the Ouémé and two months later the French were 80 kilometres upriver, at a village called Dogba on Dahomey’s border. On 19 September, some 4–5,000 Fon soldiers attacked.

  That was the first of twenty-three engagements over the next seven weeks, in all of which some 2,000 or more Amazons, from a total force of about 10,000, fought with conspicuous bravery. ‘Oh, those Amazons!’ wrot
e a French officer later. ‘How they excited the soldier’s curiosity!’ The Fon, said another, fought with ‘ferocious rage, spurred into action by their fetishers [priests] and the Amazons.’ Their assaults were suicidal, given the effects of the Lebel repeating rifles. Twenty-four kilometres upriver, after several furious charges by the Fon, the French replied with their first use of bayonets, which outreached the Fon swords and machetes. In hand-to-hand fights, Amazons fought to the death. In one incident, one of them bit off a marine’s nose; at his scream, a lieutenant turned and cut her down with his sword.

  In the penultimate battle, the French suffered forty-two casualties: five Europeans killed, twenty wounded, the rest being African troops. One participant described seeing

  a little Amazon; quite young almost pretty, her big eyes open, glazed by a short agony. A Lebel bullet had fractured her right thigh, turning the limb completely inside out, chewing up the femur and detaching a hundred splinters. A very small hole could be seen on the inside edge of her left breast, while below her shoulder blade on the same side was a gaping wound.

  ‘When the bullet encounters a bone,’ said another, ‘the latter is pulverized, shredded; the flesh around it is chewed up. It was a heart-rending spectacle.’

  Setting out on the final 40 kilometres to Cana, where the king had his residence, another battle on 6 October left 95 bodies, including 16 Amazons, for the loss of 6 dead on the French side. Fon sources suggest far worse: of 434 Amazons fighting, only 17 escaped. As the French made slow progress, hardly more than a kilometre a day, attacks came daily. On 26–27 October, the French fought with bayonets across trenches, while Amazons mounted counterattacks, ‘uttering terrible cries and making their big cutlasses whistle’. A few warriors were found drunk in their fox-holes, apparently having sought Dutch courage in the face of defeat. For a last-ditch stand in early November, the king assembled some 1,500, mostly Amazons, according to one account. After four hours of fighting, the Dahomeans withdrew, leaving the field strewn with dead. On 4 November came the final battle, and one of the most deadly. A last bayonet charge killed or scattered the remnants.

  There would be no surrender, despite a few days’ grace. The king, having lost some 2–3,000 dead, burned his capital and fled north. The French hoisted the Tricolour over Abomey on 17 November. Their losses: 52 Europeans and 33 Africans dead. Another 200 died of disease, mainly dysentery and malaria.

  Though the king tried to rally his surviving troops, there was no more fighting. Two years later, his brother was chosen as king. Béhanzin surrendered and was sent off to Martinique with five wives. In 1900, the French abolished the monarchy and began direct rule.

  Many reports of the war followed. Accounts are dotted with words of praise for the Amazons: ‘Extreme valour’ . . . ‘Outstandingly brave’ . . . ‘Savage tenacity’ . . . ‘Remarkable for the courage and ferocity’ . . . ‘Prodigious bravery’ . . . ‘Really strange to see women so well led, so well disciplined.’ ‘They bring to battle a veritable fury and a sanguinary ardour,’ concluded Major Léonce Grandin in his two-volume account of the war, ‘inspiring by their courage and indomitable energy the other troops who follow them.’

  There were many survivors, but they didn’t adapt well. Many never married, considering marriage to be servitude, and those who did, in the words of one historian, Auguste le Hérissé, writing almost twenty years later, seemed ‘to have reserved from their former condition only a certain bellicose temper . . . directed especially against their husbands.’ A friend of another writer described how in 1930 in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, he once saw an old crone leaning on a stick and muttering until she heard a stone being thrown, and took it to be a rifle-shot. She straightened. Her face lit up. She crawled. She pretended to load and fire a rifle. She pounced on an imaginary prey, and then, just as suddenly, stopped, hunched and staggered away. ‘She is a former warrior,’ an adult explained. ‘In the time of our former kings, there were women soldiers. Their battles ended long ago, but she continues the war in her head.’

  In 1943, Eva Meyerowitz, a South African sculptor-turned-anthropologist, described how she had seen ‘the only Amazon still alive . . . A very old woman, hanging around the courtyards of the former royal palace.’46 There could have been others. If Nansica, killed at sixteen, had had friends, and if they had survived into their eighties, they could have lived to see her Dahomey meld into a French protectorate, which, almost sixty years later, became independent as today’s Benin.

  43 In an epigram: ‘Some say there are nine Muses; but they should stop to think. Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth’.

  44 Recorded by A. le Hérissé in 1911. My translation from the French. See Bibliography.

  45 From Robin Law, The “Amazons” of Dahomey’. See Bibliography.

  46 In the Geographical Magazine, the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. See Bibliography.

  11

  AMAZONS WITH WINGS: RUSSIA’S NIGHT WITCHES

  THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF WARRIOR WOMEN, WEBSITES LIST them by the score. Some fought, some were great leaders, some visionaries, some (like Joan of Arc) all three, but that’s not the same as being Amazons. The defining trait of the Amazons was nothing to do with any of their qualities as individuals; the point was that they were a group. That makes them so out of the ordinary that, for almost all their history, they existed only in legend. Even their real prototypes, the Scythian Amazons, were not a group, regiment or nation: they were an integral part of their societies – honoured warriors and eminent leaders.

  Until a few decades ago, there were many who found it hard to accept the non-existence of Amazons en masse. Quite the opposite: in the late nineteenth century, Amazons enjoyed something of a renaissance. Up until about 1860, conventional wisdom held to the idea, based on the generations as listed in the Bible, that mankind was created by God and that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. There simply wasn’t the time for a succession of prehistoric societies, of which the Amazons would have to be one. Not everyone believed Genesis, but few dared deny it, because there was no evidence and no theoretical framework. Then came Darwin, proclaiming slow evolution combined with a geological revolution that rubbished Genesis. Suddenly, here was a timescale that could accommodate any number of prehistoric societies. In the late nineteenth century, social anthropologists became convinced that matriarchy, of which an Amazonian nation would be an extreme example, was a foundation from which patriarchies evolved. A pomposity47 of male Victorian academics became obsessed with the supposed sexual promiscuity in which these hypothetical prehistoric societies lived. What they were looking for was a pattern of cultural evolution, as the ‘survival of the fittest’ explained biological evolution. It was all wishful thinking. Cultures may be similar, but similarity does not mean they are connected (as, for instance, Lafitau thought that Hurons and Amazons were connected). A writer on the history of anthropology, Marvin Harris, called this ‘one of the most heated and useless discussions in the history of the social sciences.’48 But it did not die easily. Through much of the twentieth century, archaeologists and feminists, picking up the baton dropped by anthropologists, pointed to prehistoric ‘fertility’ statuettes of women with drooping breasts and distended stomachs to claim that during the thirty centuries of early agricultural society (c.6500–3500 BC) Europeans worshipped a Great Mother Goddess, and that the fundamental form of government was a village-based matriarchy. But the evidence fell short. It is not possible to use statuettes from preliterate times to say anything firm about social structures.

  Anthropology worldwide has had no better luck. In all the hundreds of societies, proto-states, tribes and clans studied in the field, no true matriarchies have ever been discovered. Yes, there were and are a number of egalitarian societies in which men and women are of equal status. I lived with one of them, the Waorani of Ecuador, who are considered not only egalitarian but also sometimes referred to as one of the few ‘simple’ societies, with very few artefacts or rituals, and basi
c social structures. But in none of them were there bands of women warriors. Apparently Amazons as a group existed only in legend – or in Dahomey.

  Well, not quite so. There is a recent example of a group of female warriors, a unique product of a large-scale, complex society under intense pressure.

  Before we get to them, it’s worth asking if there are other examples of groups of women that might have become violent if the circumstances had been just a bit more pressurized. Two come to mind: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which campaigned vociferously to ban alcohol in the US, and succeeded for thirteen riotous years (1920–33); and the Suffragettes, who fought for votes for women on both sides of the Atlantic. Many in both groups had the warrior spirit, being prepared to destroy property, suffer and in a few notorious cases die for their cause. But neither group espoused assassination, let alone all-out warfare. They were, after all, part of the societies they sought to reform. They wanted change, not conquest or victory through violence.

  Nothing creates more intense pressure than war, except plague and famine. In 1937, Russia had been at war for over twenty years, first against Germany in 1914–17, then against itself – in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a terrible civil war, and a class war, all involving a nationwide struggle for industrial advancement. Grim times, made worse by a state sending millions to a variety of battlefronts and Stalin’s secret police sending millions more ‘enemies of the people’ to Siberian prison camps. But for young women not stigmatized by the arbitrary arrest of some family member, there were new socialist freedoms: equality, childcare, education, divorce and work, bringing unheard-of opportunities, in cash, in status, in self-confidence.