The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940 offers a detailed study of girlhood, kinship, slavery, and colonial rule in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Through court records, oral histories, colonial archives, and what she calls “speculation as theoretical method” (67), Reuther reconstructs the lives of girls and women between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The book shows how girlhood in Dahomey was shaped by power, gender expectations, kinship systems, and colonial intervention.

The first chapter, “The Value of Girls to the Royal Household of Dahomey, 1720s–1870s,” examines gender roles within the royal court. Reuther explains that boys and girls were valued differently. Boys were often sent away to be nurtured outside their immediate family but later returned to strengthen natal ties. Girls, however, were married off and did not return to their birth families. As such, royal power was also measured by the number of women in a king’s court. This concentration of women contributed to the formation of the Agojie, the well-known female warriors of Dahomey in the eighteenth century. The chapter further establishes how gender, politics, and kinship were closely connected in the kingdom.

In the second chapter, “Dashing and Entrusting Girls,” Reuther discusses the practice of dashing (47), a euphemistic term for gifting. She describes how Dahomean kings, particularly King Gezo, gave young girls to visiting Europeans. Many of these girls were war captives, often from neighboring Yoruba or Mahi communities. One notable example is Sarah Forbes Bonetta, originally named Àìná, who was given to the British diplomat Frederick Forbes between 1849 and 1850.

In the subsequent chapters, Jessica Reuther presents a complex picture of girlhood in Dahomey by showing how girls and women could both benefit from and be exploited by systems of kinship, slavery, and colonial rule. Across these chapters, she resists a simple victim narrative and instead reveals how slavery operated in layered and sometimes contradictory ways. Yet this approach also raises important questions about method and interpretation as words such as entrust, pawn, dash, sold, trade, and enslaved have proved to be critical in understanding how girls are moved from one household to the other. The story of Agbessipé in Chapter Three is central to this tension. Born to a Yoruba enslaved mother and a Gold Coast father with European affiliations, Agbessipé occupied a social position shaped by both vulnerability and opportunity. Reuther argues that these connections gave her certain advantages, which she used to build wealth through pawning and the trading of girls and female dependents who worked in her palm oil and brothel businesses. On one level, this example shows that the system of “ownership” by Agbessipé in this chapter is not based on the concept of slavery but either a system of apprenticeship or familial responsibility that is common in the West African region; something Reuther loses focus of in this chapter. While Reuther establishes that some women were able to navigate the systems of dependency and turn them to their benefit, she observes these through a Western gaze, and shapes her conclusion based on the preestablished concept of slavery and not the complex extended familial relationships in West African societies.

In the remaining chapters of the book, the cases of Aholoupé, Houmé, Akouéle, and Télé shift the focus from female benefit to female sexual exploitation and resistance in Dahomey. The case of Aholoupé in Chapter Four recounts how she was entrusted to Kodokoué as a child, she fled servitude and sought refuge in Porto-Novo—an event that led Kodokoué to be imprisoned on the charge of possibly selling Aholoupé into “slavery.” Her return years later, which led to Kodokoué’s release from prison, reveals the ambiguity of the tension between colonial definitions of slavery and Dahomean practices of entrustment and marriage. This discussion of this ambiguity is further complicated in Chapter Five.

Reuther observes that the French colonial administration in Dahomey faced a labyrinth of dilemma about the institution of marriage in Dahomey which by extension they concluded that marriage in West Africa often functioned as a cover for slave trafficking (104–05). This is a questionable claim that feeds into the colonial narrative of the time to reduce the relevance of indigenous African institutions during colonialism, but Reuther hesitates to argue this. While the claim underscores the vulnerability of girls like Houmé, who was abducted and pawned (in Chapter Five), the defilement of Akouéle in 1929 (Chapter Six) or the disappearance of Télé in 1936 (Chapter Seven), it also risks collapsing complex marriage practices in West Africa into a single colonial narrative of exploitation.

Overall, The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey powerfully centers girls as historical actors in Dahomey through the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet Reuther’s reliance on fragmented archives and speculative reconstruction invites careful reading and invites us to think about gender, African studies in colonial and precolonial civilizations, as well as ethnographic reportage of history when existing documentation is insufficient.