Dahomey Amazons warriors are also the main focus and written about in Layon Gray's stage play "Black Sparta". The Dora Milaje, army/bodyguards to the "Black Panther", are based partially off the Dahomey Amazons. In Zora Neale Hurston’s "", 86 year old Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the slaver Clotilda, describes his own capture by Dahomey Amazons when he was 19 years old. 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
In Dahomey San Francisco. They were again supposed to occupy the African pavilion. Having learned of the use of people in exhibits at the fairs, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song, "In Dahomey," for their 1927 musical, "Show Boat." Intended as the last number in Act II, Scene I, "In Dahomey" is performed by a purported group of African natives featured in an exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The song begins with the "natives" chanting in what is supposedly an African language. After the watching crowd disperses, they switch to singing in an American dialect, revealing they