Discover · History · Ouidah, Benin
They are neither a European legend nor a film character. The Agojié were the elite army of Danxomè, and Ouidah was one of their posts.
Known abroad as the Amazons of Dahomey, the Agojié, also called Mino, our mothers, formed a female military corps without equivalent in the history of the continent. A standing army, trained in the handling of modern weapons, they embodied for nearly two centuries the striking force and the close guard of the kings of Abomey. In Ouidah, the kingdom's port, they held garrison.
Oral tradition attributes the creation of this corps to Queen Tassi Hangbé, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the form of a close guard of elephant huntresses, the Gbeto. It was however under the reign of Ghézo, from 1818 to 1858, that the Agojié became a professional standing army, numbering by some estimates up to a third of the kingdom's military strength.
Recruited among the young women of the kingdom or among captives, they swore loyalty to the sovereign and kept a strict discipline, including ritual celibacy for the duration of their service. They were organised into specialised regiments: riflewomen, archers, gunners, and reapers armed with great war blades.
In Ouidah, all of this stopped being abstract. The port was the commercial lung of the kingdom, administered in the name of Abomey by the Yovogan, and companies of Agojié held garrison there to guard the king's interests. This is the point that foreign accounts almost always omit: these women were not confined to the capital, they held the coast, where the money came in.
During the wars of resistance against French penetration, under the reign of Béhanzin, the Agojié led the hardest fighting, at Dogba, at Poguessa and at Cana. The royal army was dissolved in 1894, after the capture of the king. Their adversaries, in their own reports, did not conceal what that resistance had cost them.
Their history is seeing a renewed international interest today, driven in particular by cinema. Our guides work to restore the documented part rather than the spectacular one, and to connect it to what Ouidah and Abomey actually preserve of it.
Visit duration
Historical context included in the Abomey and Ouidah circuits
Access
Abomey, about 1h30 by road from Ouidah. The garrison context is read on site, in royal Ouidah.
Coordinates
7.1833, 1.9911
Origin of this content · July 2026
Fiche established from the historiographical works cited and the national archives of Benin, by the After Vodundays team.
Sources and further reading
Frequently asked questions
Did the Agojié really exist, or are they an invention of the film The Woman King?
They really existed. The Agojié, or Dahomey Amazons, formed a standing female military corps of the kingdom of Danxomè, active from the early eighteenth century until the royal army was dissolved in 1894. The standard academic reference is Stanley B. Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta (New York University Press, 1998). The film released in 2022 draws on this real history but remains a dramatised fiction: our guides restore the documented part, not the spectacular one.
Who founded the Agojié, and when did they become a standing army?
Oral tradition attributes the creation of this corps to Queen Tassi Hangbé, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the form of a close guard of elephant huntresses, the Gbeto. It was under the reign of Ghézo, from 1818 to 1858, that they became a professional standing army, numbering by some estimates up to a third of the kingdom's military strength.
Did the Agojié fight French troops?
Yes. During the wars of resistance under the reign of Béhanzin, the Agojié led the hardest fighting, at Dogba, at Poguessa and at Cana, before the royal army was dissolved in 1894 after the capture of the king.
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