In 2010, director Jenna Prince Pythwood faced a surprising question from her then 13-year-old, who was a fan of Marvel superheroes, as he asked her why there are no black superheroes.
That question, says Bythwood, was a defining moment in her career, and instead of answering that she wished she could do it, she decided her answer would be: I'll do it (1).
Thus, after more than 10 years, her epic movie "The Woman King", which was shown for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of this year 2022, came to achieve great success greater than critics' expectations, with profits of more than 64 million dollars.
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The film, which is classified as a historical drama and action movie, deals with the historical role played by the "Agojie", the female fighters who defended the Kingdom of Dahomey, an ancient West African empire founded in 1625 and lasting until 1894, whose ruins still remain in The modern Republic of Benin, which occupies a narrow strip of coast between Nigeria and Togo.
There are many accounts about the emergence of these fighting squads, but the most widespread and common version is that they were the guardians of Queen Hanegbi and the kings who followed her.
However, it was not decided that they would officially join the Dahomey army until the reign of King Gezo, who ruled between 1818 and 1858, in order to fill the shortfall in the number of male fighters in the army, which occurred as a result of the turmoil and wars in the region at that time.
The Europeans who visited the kingdom in the nineteenth century called them the Amazon warriors, in reference to the fierce fighters in Greek mythology.
Dahomey fighters (social networking sites)
In its main narrative line, the film follows the female warrior heroism, and focuses on General Nanska, the female warrior leader, brilliantly played by Academy Award-winning American star Viola Davis, who trains a new generation of female warriors, including the rebellious young girl Naoi. , played by Thoso Mpidou, who entered the ranks of the fighters after resisting her family's desire to marry her off to a wealthy and abusive person;
What prompted her father to hand her over to the king and the army of warriors in order to get rid of her rebellion.
The film traces the strength, valor and brotherly spirit of the female fighters, and because it is a Hollywood movie, it is not without the emotional line represented in the love story between "Noi" and the Afro-Brazilian slave trader "Malik".
The acting team presents an amazing performance, especially Viola Davis, who manages to dive deep into the character of a strong and resolute leader who hides her inner fragility, with a performance that is very deep and delicate.
The film also presents carefully drawn action and combat scenes, in which "Bythwood" demonstrated her directing abilities in a new challenge added to her career.
The other side of the truth
Dahomey fighters (social networking sites)
Despite the great success achieved by the movie "The Woman King", whether at the critical or public level, it has faced great controversy since its release, and even calls for a boycott of it spread on various social media, where the hashtag "#Boycottwomanking" spread widely.
The criticism focused mainly on the distortion of the facts of history, as the plot of the film relies on a central dualism that advances the evil kingdom of Oyo against the innocent kingdom of Dahomey that seeks to end the slave trade, and King Gezo appears in the film committed to ending the slave trade in the face of the greed of the Brazilian slave traders and the rival kingdom of Oyo The film presents the female Dahomey warriors as fighters to end the slave trade.
While historical documents provide us with different facts, the slave trade remained one of the most important sources of glory and wealth for the kingdom of Dahomey and played a major role in its prosperity, while the Dahomey fighters depicted in the film as anti-slavery and freedom fighters were actually just fighters in the service The interests of the king carried out many brutal massacres in order to capture and sell slaves to his favor, and they also helped to suppress rebellions among slaves before they escalated into violent uprisings.
King Gezo did not agree to end Dahomey's involvement in the slave trade until 1852, after years of pressure from the British government, which had issued decrees to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833.
That film made a romantic, melodramatic portrayal of the bleak history of slavery in Africa during the nineteenth century. Africans sold other Africans as slaves, a fact that cannot be avoided, though it does not diminish or exclude the responsibility of European slave traders.
Book: Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo
In 1927, the famous American anthropologist, journalist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to meet more than eighty-year-old Cudjo Lewis, who was one of the last survivors of the slave ships bound for America in 1860. The interview was published in the book "Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo".
Kodjo Lewis was 19 years old when the female warriors from Dahomey attacked his tribe and slaughtered most of his family and his family with another group to be sold into slavery.
In her book, Hurston described how the impact of pain and shock was evident in his face when he remembered those events, even though he was several years old when he told that story to her.
Historians estimate that approximately one million enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas from the port of Aweidah (in present-day Benin) between 1659 and 1863;
This makes it the second largest supplier of African captives in the history of the slave trade.
The Dahomey Warriors have ruined the lives of thousands like Kodjo, the octogenarian whose atrocities have lingered in his memory for decades, which explains the boycott calls and the refusal of many people to turn the story of the Dahomey Warriors into a story about empowering women. Opponents of the film argue that this tendency To present a romantic image instead of historical facts does a great damage to the history of the African struggle against slavery, and shows a persistent obsession shown in films, such as "Black is King", "Black Panther" and "The Woman King", with avoiding reality and reinventing Africa's past (3) .
Unknown tournaments
On the other hand, there are many other stories worth telling in African history about the anti-slave trade in pre-colonial Africa, which makes the choice of the Kingdom of Dahomey to focus on it unrealistic and serving certain purposes regardless of the facts.
Vast areas of the struggle against anti-slavery in Africa have been neglected in many important points that deserve attention, perhaps the most ancient of which is the correspondence of "Nzinga Mbemba" - the ruler of the Kingdom of the Congo - to King João III of Portugal in 1526, in which he demanded an end to illegal displacement to his kingdom, which his successor, "Garcia II" also did, but without much success.
In the early 17th century, Nzinga Mbandi, Queen of Ndongo (modern Angola), fought against the Portuguese as part of a century-long campaign of resistance against the slave trade.
Several Islamic states in West Africa also opposed human trafficking, including Fouta Toro in the Senegal River Basin in the late eighteenth century, and Fouta Djallon in what is now Guinea in the early nineteenth century. A religious leader wrote In the area is a letter to British slave traders threatening to kill anyone who tries to take slaves from his country.
The climax of this struggle came in 1791, when slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue defeated 3 European powers to establish the first black republic, Haiti (4).
In response to the accusations against the film, Viola Davis said that you will never win an argument on Twitter, and that the film's story is fictional and not true, and Davis cautioned that audiences who boycott the film support the narrative that assumes that black women cannot box office. the tickets.
Julius Tenon, the film's producer and Davis' husband, commented that "the film is entertainment, not a documentary or historical film, and whoever wants the facts must search for them himself."
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Certainly, this is not the first time that the cinema has presented a feature film based on real events, and changed it to present its vision, for example, we may remember the movie "Inglourious basterds", which manipulated events on the sidelines of World War II, but we cannot compare the two films, while there are Most audiences around the world have a general knowledge of the events of World War II, but African history remains unknown to most.
While the producer advises those who want to know the truth to search, unfortunately the reality is that the majority of viewers will not bother to search for the history behind the artistic inspiration of the film, which raises the question about the possibility of enjoying a work of fiction based on real events that have been falsified. To become better symbols than they were in reality, and if we can bear the brutal truth about the identity of these fighters while receiving the more elevated and humane meanings their presence in the film symbolizes.
(5)
In an exclusive interview with Maidan, we asked the film critic "Alia Talaat" about her opinion on the relationship of art to history in cinematic works that are based on historical origins, and if art is primarily an entertainment role, and cannot be considered a lesson in history, do we - the viewers or even the critics - have the right to His trial as a falsification of history?
She replied that "in normal cases, art, especially feature films, are not historical documents that can be relied upon, but there is a kind of responsibility that falls on the makers of work, especially when they deal with a thorny subject, especially if the history is clear."
She adds, "For example, in the case of this film, he not only changed history, but rather falsified it and completely overturned its truth. This film carries a clear message to empower women, especially women of African descent, so it cannot be accepted by the tribe that contributed strongly to The slave trade as an honorable tribe opposed to that trade, not only did he ignore the historical facts for the sake of the dramatic path, but he twisted the neck of history to serve his goal, and here it is not just an artistic goal, but an ideological goal.
The women of Dahomey and the women of today
Despite the uniqueness of the fight scenes and battles, "The Woman King" cannot be considered just an action movie, as it raises many questions about the meanings of power and sacrifice and the roles that women play in patriarchal societies, how much freedom they are, and what prices they should pay for it.
At the beginning of the film, we can see the strength and influence of these women in the scene of their procession passing through town, where no one dares to take their eyes off the ground, and despite all the values of heroism and feminine strength that the film offers, we cannot see Dahomey here as a utopia of feminism, On the contrary, the women here still fight in the service of the patriarchal patriarchal society, sacrificing their lives and their freedom to fight for the king and the empire.
Outside the battalion of fighters, Dahomey's women and bodies are still treated as property of husbands and fathers, or possessions of barter and exchange in slave markets, we can see this beginning with Nawi's father, who tried to marry her off to a wealthy and abusive man.
Even in the romantic line in the film that unites "Noi" with the slave trader, we see how he presents her in one of the scenes with modern European clothes, which she wondered when he described her how the women in wearing them could run and fight.
In the end, it remains to confirm that the controversy raised by the work stems from the fact that it adopts certain ideas that go beyond the declared nature of the film, which is referred to as just a "action" movie.
The real problem, then, is that the film has gone beyond the framework in which its makers put it into clear ideological contents, so the audience cannot be blamed for criticizing the work from this angle as well.
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Sources:
1- The Real Warriors Behind 'The Woman King'
2- Viola Davis responds to call for boycott of 'The Woman King
3- the woman king the truth about slavery matters
4- Resistance and Rebellion
5- "The Woman King" poses the conundrum of making a great action movie about exceptional killers