Sword & Soul Media

Dossouye emerged from my imagination in response to a challenge. In 1978, author/editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson put out the word that she was editing an anthology of stories about women warriors under the title Amazons! The exclamation point was, I assume, for emphasis. At that time, I was still writing short stories, not novels. Most of those stories were about Imaro, an African-inspired warrior hero. In the course of my research for the Imaro stories, I came across references to the Amazon soldiers of the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Unlike the Amazons of Greek mythology, the Dahomean women’s corps existed in real life, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Dahomey was conquered and colonized by the French in the late 1800s. The country became independent in 1960, and fifteen years later, it changed its name to Benin. Regardless of what it chooses to call itself, Benin/Dahomey provides some fascinating grist for the imagination of a fantasy-writer. Dossouye and her setting developed quickly after I decided to answer Jessica’s call for submissions. She accepted the story “Agbewe’s Sword,” making me the only male contributor to Amazons!. During the early 1980s, I wrote three more Dossouye stories: “Gimmile’s Songs,” “Shiminege’s Mask,” and “Marwe’s Forest,” all of which appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. Eventually, there would have been either a Dossouye collection or novel, to complement the Imaro novels published by DAW Books from 1981 to 1984. Then disaster struck. In 1985, DAW discontinued the Imaro series after three books because of poor sales. At that point, my fantasy-writing career slipped into limbo, and I turned my hand to a semi-successful attempt at screenwriting and a more-successful foray into journalism, which continues to this day. Dossouye was revived in 2000, when Sheree Renee Thomas reprinted the story “Gimmile’s Songs” in her groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter, which was the first collection of the work of black speculative-fiction writers. A new Dossouye story, “Yahimba’s Choice,” appeared in the second Dark Matter volume in 2004. By then, the idea of amalgamating the Dossouye stories into an episodic novel had taken firm root. In the process of doing that, I gave “Agbewe’s Sword” an extensive rewrite, adding plot and background detail and expanding what was originally a short story into a novella. And I wrote a new story called “Obenga’s Drum.” It is based on the real-life experiences of a man named Ota Benga, of the Batwa (also known as “pygmy”) people of the Congo region. Ota Benga was taken from his home and placed on exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Later, he was exhibited with monkeys and chimpanzees at the Bronx Zoo. His story is both tragic and outrageous. It inspired both my creativity and my sense of justice to transpose Ota Benga into Dossouye’s world. Bringing Dossouye to life has been as gratifying for me as the creation of Imaro. Thanks to the efforts of Bro. Uraeus of Sword & Soul Media, the complete saga of Dossouye has at last made its way to the printed page. Last—but in no way least—an old saying tells us that a picture is worth a thousand words. But it would take more words than that to adequately describe the painting noted artist Mshindo Kuumba provided for the cover of this book. Start with “awesome”... Dossouye’s world is different from Imaro’s, as are her circumstances. The two characters have one thing in common, though: they’re warriors. And if they ever met, each would recognize that quality in the other. — Charles R. Saunders