"Wives of the Leopard" explores power and culture in a
pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of
human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of
late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred
years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest
in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One
was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and
wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a
household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and
managed state functions.
Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave
trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches
for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together
evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts,
from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic
studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly
integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems,
effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it
argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were
gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources
contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth
century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible
portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without
exoticizing it.
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