Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2300927 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-27
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Synopsis
This volume examines the "Amazons", whose existence has been verified via documents and eye-witness accounts from battles for the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the 18th and 19th centuries. Originally palace guards, the Amazons had evolved by the 1760s into professional troops armed mainly with muskets, machetes and clubs. Theoretically wives of the king and quartered in his palaces, they were actually sworn to celibacy on pain of death. In compensation they enjoyed a semi-sacred status and numerous privileges, including the right to own slaves. By the 1840s their numbers had grown to 6000. The Amazons served under female officers and had their own bands, flags and insignia: they outdrilled, outshot and outfought men, became frontline shock troops and fought with ferocity and fearlessness till the kingdom's final defeat by France in 1892. This text is based on years of detailed archival research and includes more than 20 line drawings and photographs.

From the Author
History's only thoroughly documented amazons were African.
Amazons of Black Sparta is the first book ever published in English on the only thoroughly documented amazons in world history. They were the elite troops of the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No other group of women warriors, including those the Greeks dubbed amazons for their alleged lack of one breast, has ever been more than a myth.

Curiously, the female soldiers of Dahomey resembled those of Greek legend in many ways. The basic aim of both was to make war. From an early age, both groups were trained to handle weapons, to be strong and swift and hardy, to withstand suffering. They lusted for battle, rushed into it with blood-curdling yells, reveled in it, and fought with fury and valor, seemingly immune to fear. They terrified their neighbors. Men regarded them as worthy, implacable foes. In victory they were pitiless.

Besides fighting, both groups of women hunted, danced and played musical instruments.

But there were significant differences. The amazons of Dahomey never rode horses which, in fact, couldn't last very long there because of the presence of the tsetse fly. Instead of bows, spears and axes, the main weapons of the black warrioresses were muskets, machetes and clubs, and they rarely used shields.

Their breasts were intact -- there was no thought that removal of the right one would make it easier to shoot arrows or hurl javelins.

Unlike the amazons of Greek myth, they were vowed to celibacy (as nominal wives of the king) and so did not produce their own replacements.

They lived by themselves like their legendary counterparts, but in royal palaces, not off somewhere autonomously.

They had their own officers but fought in an army with a male majority (whom they always strove to outshine) and were ultimately ruled by men. They were completely devoted to their king, and would die for him, as many did.

After obscure origins in the eighteenth century, when the amazons of Dahomey paraded and fought topless, they evolved into a uniformed standing force, the shock troops of one of Africa's most powerful states. They reached their maximum strength around 1850, when they numbered between four and six thousand.

They fought to the bitter end against the French invaders of their country in 1892, and the last surviving amazon veteran died in the 1970s.

A word about the title of my book. Dahomey has been called Black Sparta because of its militarism and subordination of the individual to the state. Sparta did not have female troops, but its women did practice sports and do other physical training like the amazons of Dahomey. The difference was that Spartan women kept in shape to breed male warriors, Dahomey's amazons to kill them.

Amazons of Black Sparta came out first in England and has been praised by three leading British Africanists. John Fage rated the book "excellent, full of quite fascinating detail." Paul Hair called it "a definitive study of this fascinating social phenomenon." Christopher Fyfe said "Stanley Alpern...has written an impressively comprehensive study covering all aspects of this extraordinary military force...He has made an important scholarly contribution to the history of nineteenth century West Africa in which the Amazon achievement has until now been scarcely mentioned."

Customer Reviews

A gem of a book for history buffs
This is truly a gem of a book for history buffs. It treats a heretofore unexplored topic in enlightening and fascinating detail. For professional historians also, Alpern's well-referenced history of the world's only known all-female fighting units is a singular contribution to the documentation of this unique combat force. Military aficionados should also consider this book essential reading for a more complete knowledge of the history of the world's fighting forces.

For more than 200 years the kings of Dahomey (in West Africa - now Benin) used large units of women warriors, under female command, as part of their regular troops in that nation's almost continuous annual conflicts with its neighbors. Although slow reading at first because of Alpern's meticulous adherence to detail, the book fairly races at the end as it describes the battles, triumphs, and ultimate defeat of the women troops by a modern French army. The author's research is all the more remarkable because of the utter lack of indigenous written records of these illiterate people. His glimpses into the history of the Dahomean Amazons had to be painstakingly extracted from records in several languages of various European visitors to that area of West Africa from the 17th to the early part of this century.

This book dovetails neatly with both African-American and women's studies. Not only were the Amazons of Dahomey fiercely independent and strong but much of the warfare conducted by the Fon (the people of Dahomey) was for the purpose of obtaining slaves for their own use and later to sell to European buyers for transport to the Americas. Only the lucky enemies of the Amazons became slaves, however, because their usual practice was to decapitate their captives to use their heads and skulls to display as war trophies.

The short chapter format of the book is beneficial because there is much to absorb that is unfamiliar to one who is used to reading western and Asian military history. Alpern's terminology is, per force, western and the reader must try to imagine what words like king, soldier, warrior, unit, etc. mean in the indigenous African context. Alpern succeeds in helping us understand the vast differences between our two military cultures. The only addition to the book that I would suggest to the author is a chapter on the religion of the Fon. He explains that much of the warfare of the Amazons was driven by adherence to certain unfathonable animistic beliefs. Otherwise the author does a superb job of describing everything from the clothing to tactics to the weapons of the Amazons.

This book is highly readable and is an essential addition to one's library of military history.