‘This is an old story of heroism, of feminism’: the truth behind The Woman King

‘Even now, it’s hard to imagine such a situation existing anywhere: that people trusted women at that level and that the society prepared women to actually play this role’ … A still from The Woman King. Photograph: Ilze Kitshoff/AP

When French soldiers tried to colonise the west African kingdom of Dahomey, they encountered a foe unlike any they had faced before. The Agojie were known for raiding villages, taking captives and cutting off the head of anyone who resisted. And they were made up entirely of women.

“The French were shocked,” Professor Leonard Wantchekon, a leading Agojie scholar, says by phone from Princeton University in New Jersey. “They knew about them before but they didn’t know they were such effective soldiers, so brave, so strong.”