Madame Abomah: The Towering Life and Legacy of Ella Williams, the African Giantess
- dthholland
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
In an age when spectacle was king and public fascination with “human curiosities” filled theatre seats from New York to New Zealand, one woman managed to command attention not just because of her extraordinary height, but because of the remarkable story she built for herself in the face of a world too often determined to define her.
Ella Williams, who performed under the stage name Madame Abomah, stood an astonishing 6 feet 10 inches (2.08 metres) tall. Touted as “the tallest woman in the world” during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her life intersected with global show business, racial exploitation, and female representation in entertainment.
Early Life: From Bondage’s Shadow to the Circus Stage
Ella Grigsby was born in October 1865, in the rural surroundings of Cross Hill, Laurens County, South Carolina. Her birth came in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, during the Reconstruction period, a decade of sweeping, but tenuous, reforms aimed at rebuilding the Southern states and integrating formerly enslaved African Americans into civic life.
Both of Ella’s parents had been enslaved. This lineage shaped the first chapter of her life. As a teenager, she worked for a white family, Elihu and Harriet Williams, and adopted their surname, likely as a strategic move to escape the connotations of the Grigsby name, associated with her family’s enslavers. Such changes were not uncommon among African Americans during the post-emancipation period, where creating new identities was a way to exert control over one’s future.
At the age of 14, Ella contracted malaria. After surviving the illness, she began to grow at an extraordinary rate. Her transformation from a slight girl into a statuesque young woman was so dramatic that it drew the attention of showmen, who were always on the lookout for human anomalies they could present as exotic wonders.
Yet Ella resisted the circus circuit at first. She worked as a domestic servant and a cook. It wasn’t until 1896, when she was in her early 30s and working in Columbia, South Carolina, that she agreed to enter the world of performance. She was approached by Frank C. Bostock, a British showman known for his work with exotic animals and “freak show” performers, who promised her a glamorous career abroad. Bostock rebranded her entirely, and Madame Abomah was born.
Reinventing Herself: The African Giantess from Dahomey
To capitalise on the Western world’s obsession with Africa, Bostock and his promotional team constructed a fictional backstory for Ella. She was no longer a South Carolinian domestic worker, but now “Madame Abomah,” a fearsome warrior of the Dahomey Amazons, a real all-female military regiment from the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin).
This reinvention was more than marketing. It reflected the complex intersection of race, exoticism, and feminine power. European and American audiences at the time were fascinated by African kingdoms, but this interest was tinged with colonial fantasy and racism. In advertisements, Ella was depicted in regal gowns and towering headdresses, often with spears or tribal jewellery, presenting a commanding figure that balanced both elegance and imagined savagery.
Despite the constructed narrative, Ella’s performance was not one of brute spectacle. She sang, she posed gracefully for portraits, and she captivated audiences with her self-possession. Photographs from the period show her in elaborately embroidered Victorian gowns, often seated to accentuate her scale in comparison to tiny chairs or co-performers. There was an intentional juxtaposition: Ella was at once royal and unreachable, yet also courteous and composed—a strategy that disarmed viewers and made her seem more human amid the exotic mythology.
A Global Sensation: Touring the Stages of Empire
Madame Abomah was no sideshow footnote. She became an international headliner, touring Britain, continental Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. She was especially well received in the UK, where she appeared in music halls and variety theatres, and featured in souvenir postcards—a popular collectible in the Edwardian era. Her likeness was sold by the thousands, and she was sometimes photographed alongside children or seated in diminutive chairs to highlight her height.
In New Zealand, newspapers praised her grace and presence, and audiences were reportedly charmed by her gentle voice and polite manners. She was often billed as “The African Giantess,” and in every city, the story of her Amazonian roots was retold as fact. Her height was reported as 7 feet 6 inches in some advertisements, a common exaggeration in show business at the time, though contemporary sources and surviving measurements confirm her height at around 6 feet 10 inches.
Despite the admiration, Abomah’s tours were fraught with racial tension and social limitations. She was often forced to travel and eat separately from her white colleagues, and faced housing discrimination in some cities. Even in countries that outlawed slavery long before the United States, the residual structures of racism made it difficult for her to move freely.
Later Years: The Return Home
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, international touring became too risky, and Madame Abomah returned to the United States. She continued to perform, including for the Ringling Brothers Circus and other touring outfits, but by the 1920s, the appeal of “freak” attractions was beginning to decline.
She performed at Coney Island and in travelling carnivals, but as newer forms of entertainment—such as cinema and radio—began to dominate, live sideshows lost cultural traction. The final years of Ella Williams’ life are not well documented. Some sources suggest she died in Hawaii in 1928, though this remains unverified. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she left no known memoirs, and few interviews survive.
What does remain, however, is her photographic legacy and the legend she carefully built. She remains one of the few Black women of her time to achieve international fame on her own terms, however constricted those terms may have been by the racial and gender politics of the age.
Remembering Madame Abomah Today
In recent years, Ella Williams has begun to receive renewed attention as historians and cultural critics seek to understand how marginalised performers navigated a deeply exploitative industry. Scholars like Jeffrey Green have examined the historical context of her work, while community-led projects have reclaimed her story from obscurity.
Madame Abomah was not simply a novelty. She was an artist, a master of self-presentation, and a woman who turned a condition that might have otherwise confined her to invisibility into a global career. Her story challenges us to rethink our assumptions about performers from the so-called “freak shows” of the past. Rather than victims, many—like Ella—were shrewd businesspeople, cultural diplomats, and creators of their own myths.
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