# Dahomey’s Women Warriors: What the Number 6,000 Actually Rests On

Six thousand. The figure appears on the back cover of the one scholarly book on the subject, in encyclopaedia entries, in the wave of articles that followed the 2022 film The Woman King. It sounds like a settled fact about a two-century institution, the all-female regiments of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, known to Europeans as Amazons and to the Fon as Mino, „our mothers,“ or Agojie.

It is not a fact about the institution. It is a fact about one decade of it, reported by outsiders, and the rest of the record thins out fast in both directions from that point.

Where 6,000 comes from

Stanley Alpern’s Amazons of Black Sparta, published in 1998 and still the only full-length scholarly study in English, states that the force had grown to 6,000 by the 1840s. That is a specific claim about a specific period, the reign of King Ghezo, who ruled from 1818 to 1858 and is credited by most sources with expanding a smaller royal guard into a large standing force. Before Ghezo, the numbers were far lower. Alpern and other historians working from the same evidence describe an original palace guard, dating perhaps to the seventeenth century, of a few hundred women; estimates for the earlier period run to several hundred, not thousands.

So „6,000“ was never a description of the Amazons as an institution. It is Alpern’s reading of what European visitors reported during roughly one twenty-year stretch out of more than two hundred years the force is thought to have existed, from some point in the 1600s to the kingdom’s defeat by France in 1892.

What the number rests on

Almost none of that reporting comes from the women themselves. The earliest mention, cited across the popular and scholarly literature, is the Dutch merchant David van Nyendael, who visited Dahomey around 1700 and noted armed women guarding the palace, a detail, not a count. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the pattern repeats: French naval officers, missionaries, slave traders and colonial administrators who watched parades, reviews, and eventually battles, and wrote down impressions of scale that varied by visit and by writer. Alpern’s own book is explicit that his sources span two centuries, sometimes secondhand, sometimes written long after the events they describe, and that he compares and weighs them precisely because they disagree.

They disagree by a wide margin on the 6,000 figure specifically. Some later historians, working from the same nineteenth-century European reports Alpern used, put Ghezo’s peak force closer to 1,000 to 3,000 rather than 6,000, and note that the higher number comes from accounts that had every reason to inflate a rival’s or an enemy’s strength for effect. A number reported by a French officer describing an opposing force he had just fought, or a European visitor being shown a ceremonial parade staged for his benefit, is not the same kind of evidence as a payroll or a muster roll, and no muster roll survives.

The one first-person voice, and how late it comes

Against two centuries of outside description stands a single named individual who could speak for herself, and she does so from extreme old age, decades after the fact. Nawi, encountered by a Beninese historian in the village of Kinta in 1978, said she had fought the French in the campaigns of 1892. She died in November 1979, at an age estimated well over a hundred. Alpern, weighing the claim, notes that a woman who fought the French as a teenager would have been no older than sixty-nine in 1943, which makes a survivor reaching 1978 or 1979 plausible rather than implausible, and argues it is likely one or more Amazons lived to see Benin’s independence in 1960. Between 1934 and 1942, British travellers in Abomey also recorded brief encounters with a handful of other elderly ex-Amazons, spinning cotton or living quietly, but none of those encounters produced a sustained account in the woman’s own words comparable to Nawi’s.

That leaves the institution’s entire two-hundred-year record built almost entirely from the outside, by observers who did not fight in it, did not live among the Mino as insiders, and were describing a closed royal institution most of them saw only in curated form, official parades, staged reviews, the occasional battlefield encounter. The single voice from within the institution belongs to one woman, speaking once, at the very end of her life, about events from her own distant youth.

What doesn’t add up

**A single-decade estimate has become the institution’s defining number.** Alpern’s 6,000 describes the 1840s, under one king, based on European reports he himself treats with caution. Applied loosely, as it is in most retellings, it implies a stable size across two centuries that the same sources do not support: a few hundred in the earliest period, a contested range of 1,000 to 6,000 at the nineteenth-century peak depending on which observer is trusted, and an unknown, probably much smaller, number in the final years before 1892. What would settle it: not a document, since none is thought to survive, but a systematic side-by-side comparison of every individual European visitor’s count against the date, purpose and access of their visit, so that a parade estimate and a battlefield estimate are no longer averaged together as if they measured the same thing.

**The record is a chorus of outsiders around one very late insider.** Every number in this dispute, 600, 1,000, 3,000, 6,000, was written by someone who was not a Mino. The one first-person account, Nawi’s, was recorded seventy-plus years after the events it describes, from a woman in her hundreds, by a historian who could not independently verify most of what she said and, by his own account, could not disprove it either. This is not a reason to discount her; it is a reason to notice that the institution’s only interior witness arrives too late to confirm any of the numbers the exterior witnesses reported. What would help: the oral histories Beninese anthropologist Amélie Degbelo collected from descendants and communities in Abomey in the 1970s, which exist as a body of material distinct from Nawi’s single interview and from the European travel accounts, and which have had far less attention in the English-language literature than either.

What stays open

How large the Amazons were at any point before the 1840s, how fast the force shrank after Ghezo’s death in 1858, and what size it had reached by the final wars of 1890 to 1892 are not settled by the sources available. The 6,000 is real, as a reading of one set of mid-nineteenth-century accounts. It was never a census, of the institution or of any single year, and the two centuries around it are held together mostly by outside observation and a single, very old, very late voice.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

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Sources

• Alpern, Stanley B.: Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. New York: New York University Press, 1998
• Toler, Pamela D.: Fierce in Plain Sight, Dahomey’s Full-Time Women Soldiers Meant Business. Beacon Broadside, 2022. https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2022/09/fierce-in-plain-sight-dahomeys-full-time-women-soldiers.html
• Thompson, Helen: Dahomey’s Women Warriors. Smithsonian Magazine, 2014 (Alpern’s assessment of Nawi’s age and the likelihood of survivors past 1960). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/dahomeys-women-warriors-88286072/