Wondering what true and what's not in the movie, The Woman King?
Stay tuned while I answer your burning questions about this awesome movie starring Viola Davis
as Nanisca, The Woman King.
Let's begin by exploring if there really were African women who fought battles and became
legend?
Yes, there was a warrior group of women, Black women; who were celebrated, even revered,
for their strength and resilience, and not defined by their femininity or potential as
wives and mothers.
We know about them from written and verbal historical accounts by Europeans who visited,
worked or lived along the slave coast of Africa in the 1800's up to the early 1900's.
These warrior women trained with intense physical exercise and learned indifference to pain
and death and they fought battles for their king and for their freedom.
So Who Were These Female Warriors?
They were called the Agojie, and they were an all-female military regiment of the western
Africa kingdom of Dahomey; renowned as a fiercely militaristic society bent on conquest.
In fact, they are the only known combat troop in all of world history populated exclusively
by women.
They made their first appearance in written history in the early 18th century when a French
slaver named Jean-Pierre Thibault described seeing groups of women armed with long poles
and acting as police at a Dahomey port of call.
They came to be referred to as the Dahomey Amazons by Western Europeans who encountered
them and wrote about them.
Their European assigned name is an obvious correlation with the fierce female warriors
known in Greek mythology.
Just to be clear, the Greek Amazons were a myth, a terrifying evocation of female domination
believed to derive from male fear of female empowerment; while the Agojie were real women
who actually existed, fought and died on the battlefield.
They each had their own uniforms and were commanded only by women.Their regiments were
made up of riflewomen, huntresses, archers, reapers (three-foot-long straight razors capable
of slicing a man clean in two), and gunners.
When photography reached Africa in the latter half of the 19th century, we were able to
have tangible record of these female warriors armed with Winchester rifles, knives and clubs.
So, How Did The Agojie Come To Be?
According to one explanation, the need for an all female military regiment resulted from
the large number of deaths Dahomey was experiencing as a result of wars with nearby West African
nations.
This at the very least, seems to explain how the Agojie ranks increased from a few hundred
to thousands under the formidable King Ghezo of Dahomey played by John Boyega in the movie.
Other explanations are that the Agojie warriors were once skillful female hunters who hunted
elephants and then were elevated to the position of palace guards in the early 1700s.
This does make more sense given that men were not permitted in the palace grounds where
the royal Dahomean women lived, and is the more acceptable version of history.
By the 1800's, the Agojie allegedly made up roughly a third of the Dahomey army under
the reign of King Ghezo.
Ghezo was a fierce ruler who governed a stratified society that included slaves, aristocracy,
and the common people.
These women warriors were considered to be an elite class ranking near the top of that
society.
As such, they were affluent and treated like royalty.
In my research, I found it interesting that the female soldiers of Dahomey were not the
only warrior women in history.
The most well-known of these was probably queen Nzinga of Matamba, one of the most significant
figures in 17th-century Angola.
She was a ruler who fought the Portuguese, drank the blood of sacrificial victims, and
kept a harem of 60 male concubines whom she dressed in women's clothing.
Female guards were also not an anomaly.
In the middle of the 19th century, King Mongkut of Siam (the same king famously portrayed
by Yul Brynner in The King and I) had a bodyguard of 400 women; but they were only for ceremonial
purposes, and the king could never bear to send them off to war.
The fact that Dahomey's female warriors fought and died for king and nation set them apart
from their counterparts.
Even the most reasonable estimates indicate that they lost at least 6,000 dead and maybe
as many as 15,000 while fighting the French (who had vastly superior weaponry) in the
second half of the 19th century.
At this point, especially if you've had a chance to see The Woman King, you might be
asking if there was a real life person named Nanisca in history.
Only as far as we know, Nanisca (played by Viola Davis in the movie) wasn't a general
of a troop of warrior women; but rather, the real Nanisca was a fierce, young soldier,
as the following story tells us.
According to an historical account by French naval officer Jean Bayol who visited the region
in December 1889; he came across a teenage recruit named Nanisca who, according to him,
had not yet killed anyone.
The story goes that he watched Nanisca as she approached a young male prisoner with
a sword.
She lifted up her sword in both hands and proceeded to swing it at the man's neck, taking
three swings in an effort to decapitate him.
Even more gruesome, Bayol says that she cut the remaining bit of flesh that held the head
to the trunk and squeezed the blood off her weapon into her mouth and swallowed it.
Bayol contends that this was an initiation rite of passage for the fierce teenage warrior.
It seems that Viola Davis's character of the same name was most likely named after this
young teenage warrior from history (but the Nanisca in the movie is much older and not
ageneral).
You can pretty much be sure that the character of Nanisca in The Woman King is fictionalized
and as most often happens in historical dramas, a composite of two or more people from history.
There was a real life Agojie named General Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh who commanded the Agojie
during at least part of the reign of King Ghezo.
In 1851, Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh led an army of 6,000 Dahomey female warriors against the
Egba fortress of Abeokuta in order to obtain slaves for the Dahomey slave trade.
Her actions contradict the anti-slavery stance of Nanisca in the movie.
One thing we know is most probably NOT true, is that any real life person represented by
Nanisca had a baby.
The movie made it clear that the Agojie did not need men in their lives and even as the
movie followed a story line that Nansca was raped there is no record of any of the Agojie
having a daughter in it's ranks.
And about the Agojie not needing any men in their lives; that was historically accurate.
The Dahomey operated like the Catholic tradition in that the Agojie warriors were considered
married to their king and therefore celibate.
In 1864, Captain Richard F. Burton documented seeing over 2,000 Dahomey Amazons and made
the conjecture that roughly two thirds of them shared passions and love between each
other.
My question is, how the heck did he even know that?
An English naval officer by the name of Frederick Forbes recorded his own observations in 1850,
writing, "The Amazons are not supposed to marry, and by their own statement, they have
changed their sex.
'We are men,' they say, 'not women.'
What the males did, the Agojie knew they could do better.
This is demonstrated in the movie when a male and female warrior stand with a double-tipped
spear between their chests, each leaning in to the spear tip to show who can withstand
the pain better than the other.
The male warrior was the first to give in, of course!
In another account, Sir Richard Burton, who visited Dahomey in the 1860s said that “when
amazons walked out of the palace, they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell.
The sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look
the other way.”
For to even touch these women meant death.
In other words folks, they really didn't need men.
One last question that you might have about the movie, The Woman King is whether or not
the character Nawi, was inspired by a real person?
In the movie, Nawi is a teenager who becomes a Dahomey Amazon under the tutelage of General
Nanisca.
She seems to have been very loosely inspired by the last surviving female warrior of Dahomey.
The real Nawi was interviewed in 1978 when she was 100 years old, the year before her
death.
She claimed that she fought the French in the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892.
Unlike what's seen in The Woman King movie, Nawi was not alive during King Ghezo's reign.
If you havent' seen The Woman King, I encourage you to do.
It is a fearless warrior epic with lots of heartfelt drama along with the amazing battle
scenes.
I'll be glad to hear your reactions in the comments below and please don't hesitate to
subscribe to my channel for more about all the fabulous, fierce and feisty women in history.