pine cone

"Martin Meredith quotes GHEZO telling the British, "The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery." -Meredith, Martin (2014). The Fortunes of Africa. "The aspect of Dahomean military custom that attracted most attention from European visitors, however, was “insensitivity training”—exposing unblooded troops to death. At one annual ceremony, new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets containing bound and gagged prisoners of war, and hurl them over the parapet to a baying mob below. There are also accounts of female soldiers being ordered to carry out executions. Jean Bayol, a French naval officer who visited Abomey in December 1889, watched as a teenage recruit, a girl named NANISCA “who had not yet killed anyone,” was tested. Brought before a young prisoner who sat bound in a basket, she: walked jauntily up to , swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk… She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it."-Smithsonian Magazine (2011) It is a movie glorifying slave traders and war criminals- Enough said. Welcome to a veiled version of Birth of a Nation set in Benin.