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
History of the Kingdom of Dahomey slave traders and the conclusions were that the slave trade was a process of freeing the population from the highly militarized, very brutal, and despotic Kingdom of Dahomey. William Snelgrave and Archibald Dalzel wrote key histories and memoirs of Dahomey presenting the case for the slave trade to save the population from human sacrifice. Abolitionist historians, in contrast, argued that the brutality of the Dahomey state was the result of the slave trade itself. Dahomey was thus portrayed with a host of very negative stereotypes, with significant exaggeration, by European historians in the 18th and 19th century. With increasing debates