The Ahosi Of Dahomey

They often attacked at the break of dawn—a mass of fearless warriors, bearing down upon the unfortunate village, giving no quarter to the terrified victims who were certain to meet a painful death.

Their weapons? 3 ft. machetes, flintlock rifles and when the trade allowed it, Winchester rifles. Their teeth were filed to sharp points, and they were skilled in hand combat. Their training was even more vicious, forcing them to climb and run over 2in. thorns without flinching, and they gave captured enemy combatants arms so that they could clobber them senseless, their version of live fire training. Their battle standard was a macabre array of the skins and bones from past conquests, and people who ran away from battle were hunted down, dragged by their hair, and over the next four days, had their ears and fingers chopped off, eyes gouged out, and later decapitated.

Such were the gruesome tales coming from a special warrior unit in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a West African state that exerted much influence around West Africa’s Slave Coast from the 17^th to the 19^th Century, their expansion stymied by France’s colonial aspirations.

This warrior unit was not exceptional because it disposed its enemies with a lot of violence; it was so because it was an all-female unit, and was pretty much the only such female unit engaged in active combat in the world. Even in our emancipated and progressively egalitarian world insofar as gender roles are concerned, there are very few women in mixed gender fighting units, and there are no all-female fighting units in the military. What we are all familiar with is an all-female bodyguard unit, something like the detail that protected former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.

At some point, the ahosi (“the king’s wives”), as the female warrior of Dahomey were called, used to serve that role, serving as the king’s bodyguards, as they could be allowed within the precincts of the palace at night, something which only men who sought summary execution would dare. By law, these women, who were also called mino (“our mothers”), were nominally married to the king, so no man was allowed to approach them; merely touching them could lead to execution. 

But they did not start out as protectors of the king. Originally known as the gbeto, the women who would later visit fear and death upon much of modern day Benin and Nigeria began as elephant hunters.

They had been established in the 1600s, but it was in the 1800s that they really became a force to reckon with. At their peak, they were about 6000 ahosi, which was half the number of the Dahomey army.

It is with the help of these women that King Gezo saw the Kingdom reach the apex of its influence, and defeat the Oyo Empire that had been subjugating Dahomey for a while. Brave as they were, these women were not invulnerable, and suffered major defeats during the battle with Abekouta, a rival town and the French, who had been slowly advancing territorial claims on territories held by the Kingdom.

It was in the Franco-Dahomean Wars (1890 and 1892) that the ahosi were wiped out, mowed down as they charged towards machine-guns and other advanced European weaponry. One of the first things the French did in the newly acquired colony of French Dahomey was to bar Dahomean women from carrying arms or joining the army, an acknowledgement of their courage even when the odds were against them.

Not much is not about what happened to the remaining ahosi, but the last surviving ahosi is believed to have been a certain Nawi, who died in 1979, aged more than a 100 years.

By Matengo Chwanya

Sources: Smithsonianmag, Blackpast, New world encyclopedia, Wikipedia

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