Who Were the Real Women Warriors of Dahomey?

According to oral histories passed down through the centuries, the first Dahomean kings settled in modern-day Benin in the early 1600s. King Huegbadja built the Dahomean capital in Abomey, about 80 miles (128 kilometers) inland from the Atlantic coast. The story goes that he formed a special band of female elephant hunters, possibly the earliest predecessors of the Agojie.

Next came Huegbadja's son King Akaba, who placed thousands of uniformed female fighters at the rear of his army as it marched into battle. The women weren't meant to fight — not at first, at least — but the sight of such a large and organized army intimidated Dahomey's weaker rivals.

When Akaba died unexpectedly, his twin sister Tassi Hangbe was quietly installed as "regent" or queen, explains Lynne Ellsworth Larsen, an art history professor at the University of Arkansas Little Rock who conducted research in Benin on the royal women of Dahomey.

"You have a woman ruling the kingdom," says Larsen, "and Queen Hangbe would have needed a female guard to keep the palace in order."

After Queen Hangbe's brief reign, a King Ajaba came to power and significantly expanded the Dahomey's routes in the Atlantic slave trade. King Ajaba was followed by his son, King Tegbesu, who reorganized the royal court to achieve a kind of gender balance that was centuries ahead of its time. He implemented the kpojito, which was a female reign-mate of the king. Kpojito Hwanjile and King Tegbesu ruled together, balancing the power between male and female. This ideology endured until the end of Dahomey kingdom.

"You had a male court and a female court, and a female army to balance out the male army," says Larsen. "The female soldiers also had privileges in the palace, where the male soldiers did not."

But it wasn't until the 19th-century reign of King Ghezo and his successor King Glele that Dahomey's female fighters officially became the Agojie, a standing army of thousands of virginal women warriors who lived in the palace and became infamous for their ruthlessness in battle.

"Neighbors feared the Agojie — they were highly skilled," says Larsen, who points to precolonial accounts of Europeans who were treated to military displays in Dahomey.

In 1861, a Portuguese missionary watched thousands of Agojie scale a wall of thorn-covered acacia branches and ignore their painful wounds as they executed a vicious mock attack on a village. And in 1889, a French naval officer witnessed a young Agojie recruit (reportedly Nanisca) who was ordered to execute a prisoner to prove her "insensitivity" to killing.

"She walked jauntily up [to the prisoner], swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk," reported the officer. "She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it."

The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade predate the Kingdom of Dahomey, but as soon as Dahomean kings captured the coastal port of Ouidah in the early 1700s, they became actively involved in the lucrative industry of buying and selling human beings.

Ouidah was situated on a large bay known as the Bight of Benin, which was one of the most active slave ports in West Africa. From 1640 to 1860, roughly 2 million people were exported from the Bight of Benin into slavery, equaling one-fifth of all enslaved Africans who were shipped off to plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America, historian Patrick Manning wrote in his 2004 book "Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960."

The Kingdom of Dahomey was responsible for capturing and selling most of those individuals into slavery at a rate of 7,000 to 15,000 each year. And by the reigns of King Ghezo and King Glele, when the Agojie constituted a standing army of 6,000 female fighters, women warriors were leading many of the fearsome raids that captured and kidnapped countless enemies for sale into slavery.

In 1928, African American author Zora Neale Hurston interviewed a formerly enslaved Alabama man named Oluale Kossola, who had been captured as a young boy in Benin in a dawn raid by the Agojie. When Kossola's king refused to pay tribute to Dahomey, he was beheaded, then the Agojie swept through the village, taking captives and even mutilating the wounded, according to the New Yorker.

"No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey," Kossola told Hurston, before he was unable to continue the interview. "Kossola was no longer on the porch with me," Hurston wrote. "He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask."

In return for captives, Manning says in his book, Dahomean kings were paid in imported goods like tobacco and rum from Brazil and the Caribbean, cloth from India, cowries from the Maldives and manufactured goods from Europe.

In the 19th century, every European power wanted a piece of Africa's wealth, and in 1863 French forces occupied Porto-Novo, a port city not far from Ouidah, and named it a French protectorate, which angered the Dahomeans. Tensions escalated until all-out war broke out in 1890.

The Agojie, armed with outdated rifles and swords, fought with characteristic fearlessness against the French, but even the women's superior training and ferocity was no match for the Europeans' heavy artillery and numbers.

"[They] flung themselves on [our] bayonets with prodigious bravery," reported a soldier with the French Foreign Legion. "[N]either the cannons, nor the canister shot, nor the salvo fire stops them. ...It is really strange to see women so well led, so well disciplined."

In the Second Franco-Dahomean War, fought in 1892, the results were even more lopsided. According to Smithsonian magazine, between 2,000 and 4,000 Dahomean men and women were killed during seven weeks of fighting, compared to 52 Europeans and 33 Africans who fell on the French side. The Agojie were gutted, with only 50 or 60 female warriors left alive from a regiment that started with 1,200.

Throughout the Franco-Dahomean Wars, the French press portrayed the Dahomeans — and particularly the Agojie — as the lowest type of "savages."

"Illustrated newspapers were a new thing and they published full-page spreads of female warriors with a machete raised in one hand and bloodied head in the other," Larsen says. "It was a misuse of these women, who were their own people and skilled in what they did. But for French colonials, it was a sign of their barbarity. According to French ideas of gender roles in the 19th century that was not OK."

In that way, "The Woman King" showcases the bravery, loyalty and skill of the Agojie, and treats them with a deep respect that was denied them by the outside world. However, whether the filmmakers could have accomplished that while including a more nuanced and accurate portrayal of their involvement in the slave trade is another question.