Dahomey Amazons Dahomey Amazons The Dahomey Amazons or Mino, which means "our mothers," were a Fon all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the present-day Republic of Benin which lasted until the end of the 19th century. They were so named by Western observers and historians due to their similarity to the mythical Amazons of ancient Anatolia and the Black Sea. King Houegbadja (who ruled from 1645 to 1685), the third King of Dahomey, is said to have originally started the group which would become the Amazons as a corps of elephant hunters called the "gbeto". Houegbadja's son King Agaja
Dahomey Dahomey during the reign of King Ghezo. The anthropologist Judith Gleason wrote a novel, "Agõtĩme: Her Legend" (1970), centered on one of the wives of a king of Dahomey in the late 18th century, who offends her husband who sells her to slavery in Brazil; she makes a bargain with a "vodu" (deity), putting her son on the throne of Dahomey and bringing her home. Another novel tracing the background of a slave, this time in the United States, was "The Dahomean", or "The Man from Dahomey" (1971), by the African-American novelist Frank Yerby; its hero is an aristocratic warrior.