The movie The Woman King is about female warriors of a fictional African kingdom. The story makes heroes of them. But it is based on the historical existence of an all-female army in the kingdom of Dahomey, and in reality the women were savagely evil. They captured and sold hundreds of thousands of members of rival tribes into slavery. Many of the slaves were shipped to Brazil. The British Navy sometimes succeeded in intercepting the slave ships and setting the captives free in the Bahamas.
Daniel Greenfield writes about the real history:
Edited Quote:
A British embargo of Dahomey and pressure on Brazil and Portugal proved especially effective in finally shutting down the slave trade.
Frederick Forbes, a British naval officer – visiting Dahomey to try persuading the monarch to stop trading slaves - described “guards of amazons” following in a procession behind a member of the [male] king of Dahomey’s harem, some using umbrellas to shade her. One such umbrella was “decorated with 148 human jaw bones”.
When wealthy Dahomeyans were dying, they took wives and slaves with them as human sacrifices. Large scale mass sacrifices were practiced, including the brutal and horrifying killings of hundreds to thousands of slaves to honor Dahomey’s monstrous monarchs.
One account from 1860 presented in Parliament described how “a great pit has been dug which is to contain human blood enough to float a canoe. 2000 persons will be sacrificed on this occasion.” Those killed were captives from other tribes. “The young people among these prisoners will be sold into slavery, and the old persons will be killed [by being chopped up] at the great custom.”
Later the British imperialists also fought to stop the land traffic in slaves through Egypt and to the Muslim Middle East. They were successful until the end of colonialism. Then the slave trade revived. So now again cargoes of enslaved human beings are worked to death – in Qatar for example – just as they were before the days of European imperialism.
