Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The Woman King’s flawed history lesson

This Hollywood version is both less complicated and less interesting than the reality

Nanisca, portrayed by Viola Davis, is the star of The Woman King (Credit: Sony Pictures)

As a general rule, it’s worth remembering that Hollywood is in the business of mythologising, rather than retelling history. The Woman King, which was released in cinemas this week, represents the latest effort at constructing a past more in tune with 21st century progressive political narratives. In the film, King Gezo of Dahomey and his loyal Amazons – an elite band of women warriors – struggle to free his kingdom and his people from the evils of the slave trade, the dominance of the Oyo empire, and the creeping tendrils of European colonisation. It’s a stirring tale of African resistance and female empowerment. It’s also deeply flawed.

King Gezo, Dahomey, and the Amazons really existed, and did fight a war with the Oyo. At that point, the parallels with reality end. The real Dahomey was a country of almost unrivalled brutality, its economy built on slavery and its religion on human sacrifice. The wars it fought had the intention of preserving the slave trade, and its conflicts with Europeans were driven by British attempts to suppress it.

In 2018, a book called Barracoon was published, containing old interviews with Cudjoe Lewis – the last survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Lewis was kidnapped by soldiers from Dahomey in 1860, and the raid on his home town featured the kingdom’s ‘women soldiers’. The slave ship set sail in the first place following King Gezo’s resumption of slave trading – the same Amazons and the same Gezo lauded by The Woman King as proto-abolitionists.

The story told by The Woman King is both less complicated and less interesting than the reality

In Hollywood’s history, Gezo is a reluctant slaver forced into the selling of prisoners to fund his purchases of weapons. In the real world, the King was an enthusiastic participant in the trade.

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