"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.

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible retentions of Africa among descendants of slaves in the Americas.

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible retentions of Africa among descendants of slaves in the Americas.

"By focusing on the participation and consequences for ordinary people, this collection offers a fresh perspective on the eruption of violence in sub-Saharan Africa. None of the contributions takes the easy way out--either by claiming any special propensity of Africans to violence, or by calling attention to titillating aspects of the violence itself. Rather, they offer 'thick descriptions' of particular violent episodes to develop their contexts and the larger causes that made them happen. The case studies, drawn from field research in Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, search for the meaning of specific instances of collective violence to the individuals caught up in them."--Nelson Kasfir, Dartmouth College

"This coherently assembled set of contributions illuminates crucial aspects of the disorder and insecurity afflicting much of contemporary Africa. The potent social force of a marginalized youth generation is explored in its different manifestations in a variety of settings by an excellent roster of scholars."--Crawford Young, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"Unmatched in its ethnographic depth and attention to critical dimensions of African conflicts.... This volume cuts across the continent and across several intertwining themes to provide highly contextual analyses within a well-definedframework." --Catherine Besteman, Colby College, editor of "Violence: A Reader "

The essayists whose work is collected here--historians, anthropologists, and political scientists--bring their diverse disciplinary perspectives to bear on various forms of violence that have plagued recent African history. Exploring violence as part of political economy and rejecting stereotypical explanations of African violence as endemic or natural to African cultures, the essays examine a continent where the boundaries on acceptable force are always shifting and the distinction between violence by the state and against the state is not always clear.

Edna G. Bay, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University, is author of "Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey "(Virginia). Donald L. Donham, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, is author of "Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. "

"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.

This collection of papers-all but one previously unpublished-presents the results of recent field research in the disciplines of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and economics. The chief emphasis here is on change: on viewing African women as agents of change from the first arrival of Europeans to the present; and on seeking to change the perspective from which African women have been studied in the past.
The papers encompass settings as diverse as eighteenth-century Senegal and contemporary Mozambique. Politically and socially, too, the local settings are various, including an Igbo village, the marketplaces of Abidjan and Accra, a development scheme in rural Tanzania, the churches of Freetown, and the streets of Mombasa.
The contributors are Iris Berger, James L. Brain, George E. Brooks, Jr., Margaret Jean Hay, Barbara C. Lewis, Leith Mullings, Kamene Okonjo, Claire Robertson, Filomina Chioma Steady, Margaret Strobel, and Judith VanAllen.