The African woman king

At its height in the 1840s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey boasted an army so fierce that its enemies spoke of its “prodigious bravery.” This 6,000-strong force, known as the Agojie, raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war. Through these actions, the Agoije established Dahomey’s preeminence over neighboring kingdoms and became known by European visitors as “Amazons” due to their similarities to the warrior women of Greek myth.

As the Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Keegan writes, The Woman King is “the product of a thousand battles” fought by Davis and Prince-Bythewood, both of whom have spoken out about the obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women.

“The part of the movie that we love is also the part of the movie that is terrifying to Hollywood, which is, it’s different, it’s new,” Davis tells Keegan. “We don’t always want different or new, unless you have a big star attached, a big male star. … [Hollywood studios] like it when women are pretty and blond or close to pretty and blond. All of these women are dark. And they’re beating … men. So there you go.”

The Woman King opens in 1823 with a successful raid by the Agojie, who free captives bound for enslavement from the clutches of the Oyo Empire, a powerful Yoruba state in what is now southwestern Nigeria. Dahomey has long paid tribute to the Oyo but is beginning to assert itself under the leadership of Ghezo and General Nanisca. A parallel plotline finds Nanisca, who disapproves of the slave trade after experiencing its horrors personally, urging Ghezo to end Dahomey’s close relationship with Portuguese slave traders and shift to production of palm oil as the kingdom’s main export.

The real Ghezo did, in fact, successfully free Dahomey from its tributary status in 1823. But the kingdom’s involvement in the slave trade doesn’t align as neatly with the historical record. As historian Robin Law notes, Dahomey emerged as a key player in the trafficking of West Africans between the 1680s and early 1700s, selling its captives to European traders whose presence and demand fueled the industry—and, in turn, the monumental scale of Dahomey’s warfare.

Smithsonian