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.

Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey PDF

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