The new film, starring Viola Davis and John Boyega, sheds light on an all-female African army
The fiercest battle movie to hit cinema screens in a long time only came about after the producer, Maria Bello, pitched it to Viola Davis in front of a crowd at an award ceremony.that, on the podium at Skirball Cultural Center’s National Women’s History Museum in Los Angeles, she spoke about an epic historical drama about an African warrior named Nanisca and asked: “Wouldn’t you want to see Viola Davis in a role like that?” The crowd went wild and “rose to their feet in raucous applause.
The third king of Dahomey, King Houegbadja, is said to have initially set up the tribe as elephant hunters, but under the rule of his daughter, Queen Hangbe, who was in power from 1708 to 1711, she began to use them as female bodyguards. And after her brother, King Agaja, used the troop to successfully defeat the Savi in 1727, they became established as warriors, called Mino, or Our Mothers in the Fon language, known throughout Africa and beyond as the fearsome “the Black Sparta”.
Female soldiers were reportedly signed up from the age of eight-years-old and underwent a gruelling training regime to prepare for battles. They learned survival skills; taught to foster indifference to pain and death; trained to run through thorn bushes, and taught to execute prisoners with barely a blink of an eye, through their “insensitivity training”.records exercises where the new recruits were exposed to brutal deaths, and ordered to carry out executions.
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