In 2009, the late Swedish journalist and writer Stieg Larsson wrote in his bestselling novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest that, “Despite the rich variety of Amazon legends from Ancient Greece, South America, Africa and elsewhere, there is only one historically documented example of female warriors. This is the women’s army that existed among the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa, now Benin.”
Larsson went on to lament that, “These female warriors have never been mentioned in the published military histories; no romanticized films have been made about them, and today they exist as no more than footnotes to history. Only one scholarly work has been written about these women, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B Alpern.”
It was Alpern’s book that South African actress Thuso Mbedu bought in late 2020 when she was told she had secured an audition for a part in director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King about the fearsome, fearless and legendary Agojie (Fon) — the female warriors of the Dahomey Kingdom. It seemed Larsson’s decried lack of films on the subject was soon to be rectified and that Mbedu would have a role to play in this significant moment for black and female on-screen historical representation.
Mbedu says that at the time she got the call to audition, she had, “zero knowledge” of the Agojie, who had played a pivotal role as a successful anti-colonial force for 300 years from the 1600s — when they were formed to help protect the Fon from neighbouring states and later served to ward off the attempted incursions of colonial powers — until their disbandment in the early 1900s when the Dahomey Kingdom was defeated and colonised by the French.
Mbedu had just finished filming her starring role in Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins’ series The Underground Railroad. When she went to audition for The Woman King and met producer Julius Tennon, she was told it would be an action film.
“I’ve always wanted to do action,” she says. “Then I heard that Viola Davis was attached to it — I’ve always wanted to work with Viola. Later I found out Gina Prince-Bythewood would direct it and I’ve always loved Gina”. And so there were many reasons to be part of the project.
Once she’d secured the role of Nawi — a young Dahomey woman who rebels against the expectations of her parents and finds herself deposited at the door of the Agojie, where she must prove herself to leader Nanisca (Davis) and Dahomey King Ghezo (John Boyega) before she can earn her place in the ranks — Mbedu got another pleasant surprise. The film was to be shot on location in SA.
“Not only that, but I found out we'd spend the first two weeks of production in KZN, which is my own province. That was an absolute bonus. Everything started on a positive note. It was also great to be able to speak my mother tongue.”
Mbedu may have been happy to be back home and even had some time off when the production was briefly shut down due to the Omicron variant late last year, but preparation for the physical demands of the role was intense. She says: “On a scale of zero to 100, it was 800. It was really tough. I had moments where I thought to myself, 'I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know how I got hired, but we’re in this together so we’ve got to keep pushing'.” Even veteran star Davis found the physical part “most arduous”.
The production was heavily female-powered with women taking the reins in most departments, making its set a film-crew version of the historical female warriors it sought to immortalise. Mbedu describes working on the film as “a wholesome experience”, where all involved were “in a space where every voice was equal in every sense of the word. I didn’t have to over-explain myself to be understood because we were speaking as women, as black women. It was also inspiring to see all these women excelling in all their departments.”
Here is a vision of righteous violence that embattled women in the modern era might wish they could enact on male abusers
Though the set may have been a democratic, peaceful, collaborative space, on-screen Davis, Mbedu and their Agojie co-stars — including Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim and Masali Baduza — kick some serious ass and offer a vision of the Dahomey warriors that’s ruthless, brutal and determined on the battlefield as much as it is empathetic, tender and caring off of it.
Here, in all its historical gory glory, is a vision of the kind of righteous violence that many embattled women in the modern era might ruefully wish they could enact on male abusers and perpetrators.
For Davis, the lessons to be learnt from The Woman King’s rousing historical epic are manifold and their story has resonance for women now. “As black women, we are the backbone of our society. In fact, women in general are the backbone of any community, of any family. We're the heart and the soul. Maybe because we've faced so much adversity as black women, we get the job done knowing that no-one is going to have our backs. We've saved elections. We've saved movies. We've saved our children. We've saved our marriages and our families, and we've done it solo a lot of the time.”
Mbedu adds: “In Africa and South Africa we subconsciously live by the idea that women are the backbone of society. We are the rock, but this potentially reminds us that we are as strong as we keep telling ourselves we are. You needn’t shrink back, you have a voice that can create change.”
In the film the Agojie stand up to those who are doing them harm. “They don’t wait for the attack to come, they initiate the change they want to see,” says Mbedu, who also acknowledges that the film may have a particular resonance for a country where gender-based violence is a daily scourge. She hopes it might help in a small way to make women realise “we cannot shrink back and let life happen to us. We have to do something because clearly no-one is on our side and doing anything for us.”
With a strong opening weekend in the US on the back of its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last week, it looks as if The Woman King may help to carve a space beyond the Afro-futurist, black superhero representational opened by the success of Black Panther in 2018. Hopefully it will open a door for more epic stories from black history to find their way to mainstream audiences. There’s even talk of a sequel, but we’ll have to wait to see if Davis, Mbedu and the Agojie return.
For now, Davis hopes that what audiences might take away from the film “is a tribute to our expansiveness as black people. I want them to take away not just our expansiveness in how we've contributed to history, our strength, our ingenuity, our excellence, our talent, our intelligence, our agency, but also how complicated we are, how vast we are as human beings. I want them to see us as human beings not just as a metaphor and an image or an anomaly.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE AGOJIE
The last survivor is said to have been a woman named Nawi. In 1978, a Beninese historian is said to have met Nawi, who said that she had fought the French in 1892
• The Agojie (aka the Dahomey) were an all-female group of warriors from the West African Kingdom of Dahomey (modern Benin).
• King Houegbadja (third king of Dahomey) created the tribe to work as elephant hunters. Under the rule of his daughter, Queen Hangbe (1708-1711), they were used as bodyguards.
• Hangbe's brother, King Agaja, used the troop to defeat the Savi in 1727. After this, they became known as warriors, called Mino (meaning Our Mothers in the Fon language). They were also known throughout Africa and beyond as the fearsome “Black Sparta”.
• In the mid 1800s, the Agojie formed a military army under the rule of King Ghezo (played by John Boyega in the film). By 1864 there were more than 2,000 women serving.
• In the 19th century, the Kingdom of Dahomey came under attack from rival tribes and European colonists, particularly the French, who had vastly superior weaponry.
• The troops were disbanded and Dahomey became a French protectorate.
• The last survivor of the Agojie is said to have been a woman named Nawi. In 1978, a Beninese historian is said to have met Nawi, who said that she had fought the French in 1892. She died, aged well over 100, a year later.
• There is only one recorded full-length, English-language book on the history of the tribe, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B Alpern.
TRAINING AND WAR STRATEGY
Female soldiers were signed up to be part of the Agojie from the age of eight. They went through a gruelling training programme to prepare for battles and learn survival skills. They were trained to run through thorn bushes and taught to execute prisoners without blinking an eye, through “insensitivity training”. They were also taught how to show indifference to pain and death.
The Smithsonian Magazine records exercises where new recruits were exposed to brutal deaths, and ordered to carry out executions. One young female warrior, named Nanisca, “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 ... She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it”.
During the warriors’ military lives, they were not allowed to marry. In theory they were married to the king and thus required to stay celibate. They had privileged status which included access to a steady supply of tobacco and alcohol and had enslaved servants of their own.
There were five divisions in their ranks: artillery women, elephant hunters, musketeers, razor women and archers. Their most successful military strategy was surprising the enemy by sneaking up on villages before dawn, taking captives and decapitating those who resisted.
• 'The Woman King' is on circuit
