Is “The Woman King” Based on a True Story? Here's Everything You Need to Know
In The Woman King, Viola Davis stars as General Nanisca, leader of a powerful squad of female warriors tasked with defending the African Kingdom of Dahomey. “It was a different state of mind to tap into that spirit—that bravery,” Davis told Vanity Fair of her “transformative” role, for which training involved five days a week of weights, sprinting, martial arts, and machete work. “Certainly, that’s not a mindset that I carry on a day-to-day basis. I’m someone who carries pepper spray and a little alarm on my key chain.”
Davis debuted that bold new persona in the first trailer for The Woman King, which lets viewers know that the film is “based on powerful true events,” and teases “the most exceptional female warriors to ever live.” So if you were wondering whether The Woman King was based on a true story, the answer is yes! But just what is that story, exactly?
If you haven’t heard of the women warriors known as the Agojie, you’re not alone. “The only thing I knew [before working on the film], literally, was that there were women somewhere in Africa that were called Amazons,” Davis told Vanity Fair, explaining that there was just one English-language book dedicated to the subject “written by a white man,” she added. “I had to cross out a lot of it because it was full of editorial comments like, ‘They looked like beasts. They were ugly. They were mannish.’ You had to sift through all of that.”
According to BBC Travel, King Ghezo (played by John Boyega in the film) formally assembled Dahomey’s warriors during his reign from 1818 to 1858, a time when “manpower was increasingly scarce due to the European slave trade.” But the outlet also notes a theory that suggests Hangbe, a queen who ruled in the previous century, started the group to supply her own bodyguards.
And what about the warriors themselves? In The Woman King, Davis is joined by Thuso Mbedu as Nawi—described by Deadline as “an ambitious recruit” to Nanisca’s unit. According to Smithsonian Magazine, women by these names do, in fact, appear in historical accounts of Dahomey. Nanisca, for example, is described by a French naval officer as a teenage soldier who performed her first execution with a sword, then “squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.” But this Nanisca doesn’t seem to become the powerful general Davis portrays—because according to the same officer, the young woman was killed in battle only three months later.
Nawi’s story goes on much longer, however. The magazine cites a Beninese historian who met “an extremely old woman” by that name in 1978. She said that she’d fought the French in 1892—nearly a century earlier. “Probably she was the last [of the Dahomey warriors],” per Smithsonian.
So while people named Nanisca and Nawi existed in Dahomey, their on-screen counterparts may not completely follow their historical journeys beat for beat—which is understandable, especially given how little has been written about these warriors. Of course, either way, it’s clear that The Woman King aims to shine a light on this little-known piece of global history. “We didn’t want to show them as just one thing—badass women who killed,” director Gina Prince-Bythewood told Vanity Fair. “They also laughed and loved and cried. We wanted to show their full humanity, not just the cool part that that would look good in a trailer.”
The Woman King hits theaters on September 16.
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