The Agojie | Dahomey's Female Warriors and the Woman King

The Warriors History Forgot

For over a century and a half, they existed. An entirely female regiment, trained in combat, survival, and total war. They fought hand to hand. They died for the kingdom. They were Dahomey's most feared soldiers — preferred by kings over their male troops, better equipped, better fed, sworn to celibacy and consecrated to violence.

And then, for most of two centuries that followed their dissolution, history largely ignored them.

Today, the Agojié — also known as Mino ("our mothers" in Fon), Ahosi, or the "Amazons of Dahomey" — have returned to global consciousness, partly through the film The Woman King (2022). But their real history is more complex, more ambiguous, and more morally challenging than any fiction can hold.

A Regiment Born from the Hunt

The Agojié emerged in the Kingdom of Dahomey — whose capital was Abomey, in the interior of present-day Benin — around 1720–1730, under King Agaja. Their origin was a corps of female palace guards known as the gbeto — elephant hunters — women who had demonstrated extraordinary physical courage in hunting the most dangerous animal on the West African savannah.

Agaja formalised these women into a fighting regiment and gave them a name that would echo for two centuries: Mino, meaning "our mothers" in Fon. It was both a title of deep reverence and a calculated instrument of psychological warfare: these were women who had surrendered family, domesticity, and safety for the absolute service of the kingdom. Their ferocity was partly the ferocity of the fully and irrevocably committed.

Under King Ghezo (1818–1858), the Agojié reached their height. At their peak, they numbered between 4,000 and 6,000 soldiers — approximately one third of the total Dahomey army. They were better paid than male soldiers, better fed, better equipped. No man was permitted to touch them. They were granted rights and freedoms unavailable to other women in the kingdom. In exchange, they gave everything.

Their weapons were those of their era: blunderbusses and muskets acquired through trade with European merchants, heavy machetes for close combat, and later Winchester rifles. In raids and pitched battles alike, they were regarded as the elite of the Dahomey military. Kings did not deploy the Agojié as a last resort — they deployed them first.

Feared by Their Adversaries

The French soldiers who fought the Agojié during the Franco-Dahomean wars of 1890–1892 left accounts that have never been seriously disputed. General Alfred Dodds, who commanded the French expeditionary force, wrote in his dispatches that the female warriors were "more dangerous than the male soldiers." His men — professional colonial troops who had fought across West Africa and Madagascar — were shaken by their discipline, their aggression, and their absolute willingness to fight to the death.

The Agojié did not retreat. They did not surrender. In the accounts of French officers who survived the engagements, the memory of facing women in combat who showed neither hesitation nor fear became one of the defining images of those campaigns.

The Franco-Dahomean wars ended in French victory and the dissolution of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The regiment was disbanded. The last documented Agojié, a woman named Nawi, was interviewed by National Geographic in 1978. She died in 1979, reportedly aged over one hundred.

The Shadow of the Slave Trade

The history of the Agojié is inseparable from an uncomfortable truth: the Kingdom of Dahomey was one of the most active participants in the Atlantic slave trade. The Agojié were not bystanders to this. They participated directly in the raids on neighbouring villages and kingdoms that captured the captives sold through Ouidah's trading posts — into de Souza's networks, and then onto the ships.

The Agojié were not heroines of anticolonial resistance. They were soldiers of a state that practised slavery on a vast scale. Their courage was extraordinary and real. Their context was morally loaded. Both things must be held at once — and holding them together, without collapsing into either condemnation or uncritical celebration, is the exact intellectual challenge that the Agojié pose.

This is where The Woman King (2022) — the film starring Viola Davis as a fictional Agojié general — takes its most significant historical liberty: in casting the Agojié as opponents of the slave trade, it inverts what the historical evidence shows. The film is powerful cinema. It is not accurate history. And that distinction matters, because the real story of the Agojié is more interesting than the fictional one.

A Memory Returning

In Abomey, the royal palaces — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985 — preserve bas-reliefs and artefacts evoking the Agojié in battle: primary sources of stone and pigment, made in the 19th century, that show these women as their own kingdom chose to see them — ferocious, armed, triumphant. In Cotonou, a major statue is dedicated to them. The Ouidah Museum of History contextualises their role in the slave trade with unflinching honesty.

Their global rehabilitation — driven partly by film, partly by diaspora reclamation — raises genuine questions about how we tell the history of people who were simultaneously extraordinary and complicit. The Agojié demand a more complex kind of remembrance: one that neither erases their achievement nor sanitises the world they served.

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Explore the connection between the Agojié's history and that of Francisco de Souza, the other central figure in the commercial world that made their raids necessary.