This photograph of Ella Abomah Williams was taken in 1900. The woman in front wasn’t a nanny or a maid — she was one of the personal bodyguards of the King of Dahomey, an ancient West African kingdom (modern-day Benin) famed for its fierce female warriors: the Dahomey Amazons.

Standing over 2.5 meters tall, according to reports of the time, she was said to lift a grown man with one arm and possessed strength and endurance that bordered on mythical. Her skill in combat was legendary.

Yet, colonial exoticism tried to reduce her to a spectacle. The British press wrote of her as though she were a sideshow attraction: “This dark-skinned beauty… will soon visit our major cities,” they reported, failing to recognize they were witnessing not a curiosity, but a living legend.

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Her name was Ella Abomah Williams — also known as Mme Abomah — and history has largely forgotten her. But her story reminds us that true heroines often walk among us, unseen by those who don’t know how to truly look.