Ghezo intensified his slave trading, selling 10,000 slaves annually. He sent expeditions to seize slaves from neighbouring peoples, and turned his female bodyguard into the crack Ahosi, or Mino (King’s Wives, or Mothers, in Fon), vanguard of 3,000–6,000 girl soldiers who fascinated European visitors raised on tales of Herodotos’ Amazons. Joining as early as eight and banned from sex or marriage (except with the king), the women were trained to endure pain by barefoot tramping over thorns. They wore striped armless tunics and a
As blacksmiths forge iron and change its nature,
So we change ours!
We’re no longer women, we are men.
Some were recruited from palace women, some forcibly enrolled by their own families, many were widows of killed or enslaved captives. Ghezo used them not only as shock troops and slave raiders but also as his executioners; visitors chronicled hundreds of scalps collected by the warriors. Their commander, Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, was drawn by a visiting British envoy, holding a rifle in one hand and a bleeding severed head in the other.
In 1818, this young Dahomean prince had seized the throne from his brother, King Adandozan, with the help of an Afro-Brazilian slave trader, Francisco de Sousa, scion of the first Portuguese governor of Brazil. Adandozan increased his slaving expeditions while using slaves to work his plantations of palm olive that now became profitable in Nigeria. He even sold possible dissidents within the royal family as slaves. The grizzled, gruesome de Sousa, who combined Catholic and voodoo faith, was originally so poor that he stole cowrie shells from voodoo temples, but ultimately he thrived as a slave trader, living in sultanic splendour in a family compound, Singbomey in Ouidah, amid a harem of African women with whom he fathered 201 children. When he went to reclaim a debt from Adandozan in Abomey, the king imprisoned him. But he was visited in jail by Prince Gakpe (the future Ghezo), whose mother Sousa had rescued from Brazilian slavery, and they made a blood pact to destroy the king. Aided in his escape by the Afro-Dutch widow of King Agonglo, he delivered guns to the prince, who seized power, taking the name Ghezo, and promoted Sousa to
Ghezo and Bello were far from the only African potentates who resented abolition.* Slavery was booming in east Africa too, and in southern Africa a white tribe was also outraged by the abolition of slavery.
In 1836, Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, who regarded the enslaving of Africans as a God-given right, started to migrate from the Cape, to escape British rule and conquer a new homeland. These 14,000 Voortrekkers, righteous, heavily armed and well organized, accompanied by a similar number of enslaved Africans who, after abolition, had been retitled ‘apprentices’ but were often trained to fight beside them, clashed with the African kings. The Afrikaners became another tribe in the chain-predation of the
In 1840, Mpande and Pretorius attacked and defeated Dingane, who retreated to the mountains, only to be murdered by his own courtiers. Fat, indolent and good-natured but aware that ‘the Zulu people are ruled through killing’, Mpande had no choice but to divvy up the booty of cattle with Pretorius, to whom he ceded two-fifths of his kingdom. Britain, whose appetites and resources exceeded those of all local players, Dutch and Nguni, was on their tail, soon consuming the Afrikaner Republic of Natal.
