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1805-06-12

Victoria Montou, Grann Toya, dies and is buried with imperial honours

Women

Victoria Montou died on 12 June 1805. She was called Toya, or Grann Toya, and she came out of Dahomey into bondage in the north of Saint-Domingue. She was enslaved on the same plantation as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who called her his aunt, and she taught him how to fight. She carried arms through the revolution herself. When Dessalines crowned himself emperor in 1804 he made her a duchess, and when she died he gave her a state funeral – the honour reserved for the country’s greatest. Haiti was seventeen months old.

Source Researched: Wikipedia (FR and EN); Infinite Women