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Thursday, April 6, 2023

The Woman King - Netflix Movie


THE WOMAN KING – Official Trailer (HD)
Sony Pictures Entertainment

Not a particularly great movie, but I've got to give them credit for even trying to make a film about African slavers in today's political climate. There's lots of action, but there are also lots of machetes and lots of cloth. I would have expected more use of spears / pikes, but wild women swinging machetes has more action. Everyone is dressed modestly. I would have expected more nudity, but that's still mostly taboo.

I remember reading about this gang not too long ago. Wikipedia has several pages about the movie and the people. I extracted this from various Wikipedia (herehere and here) pages and edited.
The Woman King is a historical action drama film about the Agojie, the all-female warrior unit that protected the kingdom of Dahomey during the 17th to 19th centuries. It is set in the 1820s.

The Kingdom of Dahomey was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. Dahomey became a regional power in the 18th century by expanding south to conquer key cities on the Atlantic coast.

For much of the middle 19th century, the Kingdom of Dahomey became a key regional state, after eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo Empire. European visitors extensively documented the kingdom, and it became one of the most familiar African nations to Europeans. The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor, significant international trade and diplomatic relations with Europeans, a centralized administration, taxation systems, and an organized military.

The Agojie, also know as Dahomey Amazons, were a Fon all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey (in today's Benin, West Africa) that existed from the 17th century until the late 19th century. They are one of the few documented female armies in modern history. 

The emergence of an all-female military regiment was the result of Dahomey's male population facing high casualties in the increasingly frequent violence and warfare with neighbouring West African states. This led to Dahomey being one of the leading states in the slave trade with the Oyo Empire, which used slaves for commodity exchange in West Africa until the slave trade in the region ended. The lack of men likely led the kings of Dahomey to recruit women into the army.


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