Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
If it is doubtful if there are any Amazons an the river of that name, there is no doubt of there being Amazons at Dahomey. Some have a blue shirt with a blue or red scarf, with white-and-blue striped trousers and a white cap; others, the elephant-huntresses, have a heavy carbine, a short-bladed dagger, and two antelope horns fixed to their heads by a band of iron.
The town lies not very far from Dahomey, and this power, which has conquered and enslaved all its other neighbors, has been unable to conquer Abeokuta, although it has several times besieged it. The Dahomey people have every advantage, being supplied with firearms, and even cannon, by the rascally white traders at Whydah, the port of Dahomey.
All that night, the great genius of the nineteenth century tossed wakefully on his bed revolving the problem in his mind. Visions of flesh-coloured tints shot with blood-red perturbed his brain, but he fought against and dismissed them; that combination would be commonplace in Dahomey.
What is seven times eleven? What is the capital of Dahomey? When did the Americans beat the British at Lexington? What is the meaning of the universe? We shall never escape the feeling that these questions are put only to vex us by those who know the answer. I said that I am looking forward to be summoned for jury-duty.
It is even a matter of politeness when the King of Dahomey receives a visit from some high personage or some foreign ambassador to give him a surprise present of a dozen heads, cut off in his honor by the minister of justice, the "minghan," who is wonderfully skillful in that branch of his duties.
MR. BARRAUD. "In Dahomey, at a particular period of the year, a grand annual festival is held; and, amidst feastings and rejoicings, deeds are done from which the civilized mind recoils with horror. Numbers of human victims are sacrificed in solemn form.
In savage states, whenever anything untoward happens to the king or chief, it is the business of the witch-finder to disclose the wrong-doer; and sooner or later, you may be sure, "somebody gets whopped for it." Whopping in Dahomey means wholesale decapitation. Now, is it not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind that entails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat?
But the ballads of Grand Voyvoda Mirko King Nikola of Montenegro's father gloating over slaughter, telling of the piles of severed heads, of the triumph with which they were carried home on stakes and set around the village, and the best reserved as an offering to Nikola himself for the adornment of Cetinje; and the stripping and mutilating of the dead foe, give us a vivid picture of life resembling rather that of Dahomey, than Europe in 1860.
The powerful state of Dahomey arose early in the eighteenth century and became a devastating tyranny, reaching its highest power early in the nineteenth century. Ashanti, a similar kingdom, began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave trade.
For it would be mere childishness to point to the different conditions of England and Dahomey, and to plead that no more was intended to be said than that, with uniformity of circumstances there would also be uniformity of results. So much no one, in the least competent to discuss the subject, would for a moment dream of disputing.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking