The Warrior Queens of Dahomey
In 2022, Hollywood put out a movie called “The Woman King”, which was (very loosely) based on female warriors in 19th century West Africa. I haven’t seen the movie, but I am sure it takes huge liberties with the truth. (The name alone is ridiculous.) But I haven’t seen it, so I won’t critique it. Instead, I’ll just talk about the historical reality on which it is supposedly based: the Kingdom of Dahomey and its female warriors. The Kingdom of Dahomey existed from about 1625 to 1904, in what is now Benin. It did have female warriors, the Agojie. These feminist icons were the third-class wives of the king, judged too ugly for him to have sex with: As Alpern told Smithsonian magazine in 2011, the Agojie were considered the king’s “third-class” wives, as they typically didn’t share his bed or bear his children. Because they were married to the king, they were restricted from having sex with other men, although the degree to which this celibacy was enforced is subject to debate. In addi