Dead Horse Interchange

"How accurate is The Woman King?" we learned that in real life, the Dahomey are much more the villains than the heroes. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a bloodthirsty society bent on conquest. It was customary for the Dahomey to return home with the rotting heads and genitals of those they killed in battle. They conquered neighboring African states and took their citizens as slaves, selling many in the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for items like rifles, tobacco, and alcohol. Many of the slaves they sold ended up in America. They also kept some slaves for themselves to work on royal plantations. The business of slavery is what brought Dahomey most of its wealth. For them, it very much came down to either enslave others or become enslaved yourself.

The Agojie (women warriors) fought in slave raids along with the male fighters. There are accounts of Dahomey warriors conducting slave raids on villages where they cut the heads off of the elderly and rip the bottom jaw bones off others. During the raids, they'd burn the villages to the ground. Those who they let live, including the children, were taken captive and sold as slaves. The movie strategically downplays this part of Dahomey's history, so as to not complicate the story with the truth.

Each year in Dahomey, roughly 500 slaves and criminals were mass executed in large-scale human sacrifices during the religious ceremonies of a festival known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Most were sacrificed by way of decapitation, a method of killing widely used by the Dahomean kings. The 1727 Annual Customs of the Dahomey ceremony reportedly saw as many as 4,000 people sacrificed.

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The French attacked them because they were invading villages to capture the villagers and sell them as slaves, this is after the British blockaded them to stop them from exporting slaves in 1851. Dahomey not only got rich mainly from selling slaves, but they also performed tons of human sacrifices, but it was a one sided defeat, something like only 16 french died to the 1000-2000 Dahomey slave trades in the first war.

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I’m glad this movie is coming out because it’s existence has brought awareness to some of the most hidden aspects of the slave trade, of which this kingdom that they’re glorifying took a horribly big part in. People always assumed thanks to the dramatized portrayal of the history in media. Lots of people still assume Europeans would raid and capture Africans themselves, when in reality during the colonization of America, white people 9/10 times chose to buy the slaves on African ports from kingdoms such as this one because they hadn’t yet developed proper immunity to foreign African diseases.

I’m not in any way saying it wasn’t a terrible issue, nor am I saying that African involvement makes it justified, nor am I saying many white people didn’t have a hand in it, I’m just saying it’s not as black and white (ironically) as you’d believe