1897 photo of Dahomey Amazons / via GETTY Images
1890s photo of Dahomey Warriors / via Getty

And these women warriors are actually real, not fictional comic book superheroes. Although Wonder Woman is pretty cool too!

But this should be music to the ears of many – especially those who long for stories based on African history that have little or nothing to do with slavery; fertile ground to mine from, for both film and TV content creators, and almost entirely untouched.

The Dahomey Women Warriors (they were called the Dahomey Amazons by Westerners) were a 19th century all-woman military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Republic of Benin in West Africa; Dahomey was renamed Benin in 1975). For the better half of 200 years, they fought (in the thousands) and died while trying to expand the borders of their West African kingdom. Even their enemies, at whose hands they would eventually fall – specifically the French (although there were others) – acknowledged their incredible acts of bravery.

Their story will be told in an upcoming TV series from “NCIS” producer Charles F. Johnson, along with French producer/director/writer Joy Fleury, and producer Karen Gordy.

Co-created by French writer Didier Lacoste and writer/director Armand Bernardi, the series will be titled simply “Amazons.”

The team of creatives also comprises of specialists on the subject matter and African history academics, with the obvious goal here being to produce as authentic and true-to-life a work as the series’ budget will allow.

The project has been in development since last summer (2016), and there haven’t been any news updates since then. No network is attached at this time, but this would probably be best for a cable TV network or SVOD platform, should it ever become a reality. It may have been seen as an unlikely pick-up a year ago, but with the success of “Wonder Woman” and the excitement it’s inspired worldwide for more female-led action-adventure-dramatic stories, a project based on these mostly-unknown real-life Amazon women warriors may be a slightly easier sell today. File them under a “Hidden Figures” franchise.

There’s a lot of history here which I’ll unpack in a future post.

Below is a photo of veteran Dahomey warriors, said to be taken in the early half of the 20th century by a French newspaper, referring to them as the Amazons of Béhanzin, once a King of Dahomey who died in 1906.

Veteran Dahomey Warriors