Här är en bild på de kvinnliga soldaterna jag skrev om, den kommer från "Africa's Armies: For honor to infamy" av Robert B. Edgerton, en alldeles förträfflig bok, varifrån även nedanstående citat är hämtade.
Dahomey riket grundades i början av 1600-talet och föll under franskt protektorat under 1890-talet.
The Amazons were often described by Europeans as they guarded their king with grim visages, danced athletically in public ceremonies, or returned from a military campaign, often bedecked with the severed heads, intestines, and genitalia of their slain enemies. Sometimes they returned with living captives. On many public occasions, the king was seen praising and bestowing war honors on the bravest among them.
[...]
Although the Dahomean troops suffered some defeats in the eighteenth century, they also won many victories, and during the nineteenth century they became dominant. The only neighboring people they could not defeat lived in the large, walled city of Egba to the west in Nigeria. Dahomey's army twice attacked this fortress city defended by the British-armed Egba soldiers, and twice it was driven off with heavy losses. During both battles, however, Dahomey's women warriors led the charge, and some clambered over the city wall before being killed or captured. Dahomey's male soldiers never reached the wall at all. European observers within Egba witnessed the battles and praised the bravery of Dahomey's women soldiers.
Dahomey's formidable army was one of the few ful-time, professional armies in all of Africa. Always under arms and always on duty, by early in the nineteenth centry, this army was dominant in the region and its women soldiers formed its elite corps. Highly competetive with the male soldiers, the Amazons often deried the men and on more than one occasion when the male soldiers could not take an objective, the women charged forward and were victorious.
Ett citat från en fransk främlingslegionär som stred mot dem:
"Anyone inclined to sympathize with the Amazons on account of their sex, and look at the combat between them and our men as unequal, may take it from me that their sympathies would be misplaced. These young women ... were quite a match for any of us."
Och ett från en brittisk officer:
"The bravery and military skill of these women soldiers filled us all with admiration and we were pretty well agreed that if the whole of the Dahomeyan army had been made up of them it would have taken a much larger force than ours have got to Abomey."
/Marcus
/Marcus
