Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
The American novelist S. E. Hinton once said, “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky.” By that logic, boxer crabs are the luckiest creatures alive because they can turn one good friend into two by tearing it in half.
A similar but more dramatic link of status and service is evident in the study of the warrior women of the 18th and 19th century African kingdom of Dahomey. The “Dahomey Amazons”, a corps of exclusively female, musket-armed, superbly drilled warriors, present perhaps the most notable example of women being used in warfare. These soldiers originated around 1725 as royal palatial guards, drawn from the least delicate and most physically robust of the king’s thousands of royal wives. A number of circumstances contributed for these women’s selection as palace guards rather than mere concubines. As personal consorts of the king, royal wives were utterly loyal, and since African social tradition forbade men from inhabiting the king’s royal quarters, women took the role instead. The physical robustness of these West African women and a consistent lack of military aged males due to war and the slave trade led to the employment of two to five thousand female bodyguards at any one time after 1725. Increasingly comprehensive drill and training transformed this royal bodyguard into an offensive combat force over the next five decades, which Dahomean king Gezo employed successfully against neighboring African tribes like the Mahi, Yoruba and Oyo. The amazon regiments came to constitute the elite soldiers of Dahomey, often outperforming the Dahomean men on the field of battle. Due to their proximity to the authoritarian king and impressive military prowess, the amazons were endowed with remarkably high social status, above that of most men of the kingdom, a social reversal seldom seen in West Africa. This connection of military service and social status helped secure more recruits to replace the amazon’s losses in battle. The amazons’ legacy might have endured longer had the French not attacked the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1890. The far better equipped Imperial French Army decimated the Dahomean army and conquered the kingdom, dispersing the remnants of the female regiments.
Samir Streatfield – Women in Combat – A Historical Perspective(2016)
“My parents disappeared during the last dictatorship. They were political activists. My father was taken first in 1977. My mother was taken a year later during the World Cup. We were standing in a public square, and two cars stopped, and they grabbed me and my mother. They let me go. But my mother was never heard from again. I learned all of this later because I was only three at the time. My grandparents raised me. When I was a child they would tell me that my parents were working. I used to imagine them building a skyscraper, wearing helmets, and getting closer and closer to the top. It wasn’t until the age of ten that I learned what really happened. But even then, my parents were only ideas to me. They were two-dimensional. But when I turned seventeen, I visited the town where they first met. I found their old friends and they told me stories. I learned that my father loved the Beatles. He also loved to dance. A man gave me a costume that my father would wear when he danced. And suddenly my parents weren’t ideas anymore. They were people. They were Daniel and Viviana. And for the first time, I cried for them.”
(Buenos Aires, Argentina)
I also want my son to understand, in a way that I never could, that the world is bigger than Shenyang, bigger than China.
secretive dreams 