Books from Benin

The Kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin in West Africa, maintained an unusual military force from at least the mid-eighteenth century until its defeat by France in 1892. Its army included thousands of women soldiers, often called Amazons by European observers. Stanley B. Alpern's study traces the origins and development of these troops, who began as palace guards and grew into a professional fighting corps numbering around 6,000 by the 1840s.

Alpern examines the structure of this force in detail. The women served under their own female officers and carried muskets, machetes, and clubs. They had their own flags, insignia, and military bands. The book draws a comparison between Dahomey and ancient Sparta, noting that both societies practiced intense militarism and collective discipline, and that women in both cultures underwent demanding physical training from a young age. But the purposes diverged: Spartan women trained to bear strong sons, while Dahomean women trained to fight on the front lines themselves.

The book covers the social conditions that shaped recruitment, the daily life of the soldiers, and the military campaigns they took part in, including the final conflict with French colonial forces. Dahomey's territory corresponds closely to the modern nation of Benin.

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Autobiography of the Lower East Side is a novel told through linked short stories, set in New York City during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Rashidah Ismaili, a writer born in Benin, draws on the sensory life of Manhattan's Lower East Side to build a portrait of a neighborhood shaped by immigration, poverty, and creative energy. The streets carry the smell of African cooking from tenement kitchens, the sound of jazz from basement clubs, and the voices of poets reading aloud in small gatherings.

The stories follow different characters through overlapping scenes of daily survival and political tension. Among them are drug users caught in addiction, anarchists distributing pamphlets on sidewalks, and pacifists helping draft resisters travel an underground route from New York to Canada. Ismaili maps the alphabet-lettered avenues of the Lower East Side as spaces where African, Caribbean, and American lives intersect, each story adding a layer to the same few city blocks.

The book sits at the border between fiction and memoir, using a neighborhood as its organizing principle rather than a single plot. Its structure allows Ismaili to shift between perspectives and decades while keeping the geography tight and specific.

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Cuisines of the World: Benin by Elise Leclerc is a cookbook focused on the food traditions of Benin, a narrow West African country that stretches from the Gulf of Guinea northward into the Sahel. The book presents a selection of Beninese recipes organized to include meat, fish, and plant-based dishes, offering a range of options across different dietary preferences. Each recipe is accompanied by a large color photograph intended to show the finished dish.

Beninese cooking draws on ingredients such as cassava, yams, palm oil, and dried fish, and the book aims to guide readers toward versions of these dishes that use ingredients available outside Benin. The recipes are described as straightforward in preparation, with an emphasis on preserving the character of the original flavors rather than simplifying them beyond recognition. The collection sits within a broader series titled Cuisines of the World, which positions each volume as an entry point into a specific national food culture.

The book is structured as a practical kitchen reference rather than a cultural survey, though the food itself carries historical layers tied to trade routes, local agriculture, and regional cooking methods found across southern and central Benin.

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Say You're One of Them gathers short fiction by Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest. Each story is told from the point of view of a child, and the settings move across Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia. Poverty, ethnic conflict, and the daily work of survival shape what these young narrators notice and are able to describe.

In An Ex-Mas Feast, an eight-year-old boy living in a Nairobi street shanty wants only enough money for school fees and books. Food comes first in his household, and even when his twelve-year-old sister goes out onto the streets to earn, the sum never stretches far enough. Affection and exploitation sit side by side within the same family.

A second story, set against the conflict in Rwanda, is narrated by a young girl who, with her small brother, watches their parents face a decision no family should have to weigh. Other stories move to West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Two of them first appeared in a special fiction issue of The New Yorker, and the ebook edition adds an interview, author photographs, and discussion questions.

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Bruce Chatwin's novel follows Francisco Manoel de Silva, a destitute Brazilian who crosses the Atlantic to the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. His purpose is straightforward and brutal: to trade in enslaved people and build a fortune. Dahomey, a powerful state on the coast of what is now Benin, was one of the principal sources of the transatlantic slave trade for centuries, and Ouidah was its main port of departure. Manoel arrives as an outsider with little standing, but his ambitions quickly outpace even his own expectations.

As Manoel rises to control the slave trade at Ouidah, the title of viceroy becomes both a mark of power and a trap. The wealth he accumulates and the authority he holds over the port do not shield him from the corrosive reality of his enterprise. Chatwin traces the slow unraveling of Manoel's grip on his own mind as the violence and instability of daily life in Dahomey close around him.

The story draws on the historical figure of Francisco Félix de Souza, a Brazilian slave trader who operated from Ouidah in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chatwin visited Ouidah while researching the book, and the novel reflects his characteristic attention to landscape, movement, and the strangeness of displaced lives.

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