When France sent ambassador Jean-Marie Bayol to Dahomey to secure a deal for the kingdom's rich natural resources, he was greeted by an elite force of all-women warriors known as the Agooji.

We see women in the African context who were the first fighters ... What did you admire about these warrior women? They were valiant fighters who didn’t ascribe to cultural norms.

But in Black Panther, Gurira plays another kind of female warrior -- one who wields her womanhood as a strength, and casts femininity in a whole new light in the process. "Okoye flies in the face ...

Made up of Wakanda’s most skilled warriors ... similarity to the Dahomey Amazons, a female militia that operated in what is now Benin in West Africa throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.