I’m grateful that I began my career before the online age really got going in South Africa. I would rather that some of my earliest writing should NOT be read today. This includes by myself, with the hindsight of age, experience, and endless compromises with reality.
However, I recently found myself thinking about one of my earlier efforts. Written sometime in 1998 if memory serves, it discussed pop culture movies and their capacity for influencing our view of the world. The immediate prompt for this had been the phenomenally successful James Cameron movie Titanic, which had done a formidable job of recreating the eponymous ship, but had stirred some confusion as to the identities of those on it. It seems that there was in fact a ‘J. Dawson’, now at rest in a cemetery in Nova Scotia, but he was not the bohemian artist portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. Legions of fans didn’t understand this and had made a pilgrimage to his gravesite. (Perceptive readers will note that I referred to this some weeks ago in discussing fake news.)
Similar thoughts occurred to me while reading reviews of a movie currently on circuit entitled The Woman King. It was shot in South Africa and featured a good deal of local talent. Set in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th Century, it depicts the Agojie, the so-called Dahomey Amazons, an all-female military unit respected and feared for their prowess in battle. It has received generally positive reviews, with a strong ideological and identarian slant, in large part because it showcases strong, hardy black women in a pre-colonial setting.
As Dr Dominique Somda, a research fellow at the institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, commented: ‘The Dahomey “amazons” were exceptional, but heroic women warriors, queens and princesses leading armies and resisting colonial expansion existed elsewhere across the continent, such as Queen Nzinga in Angola and Queen Nana Yaa Asantewaa in Ghana. For some African feminists, African women have never been frail and defenceless. The feminisation of the spectacle of violence still presents an exhilarating sense of disruption in an often male-dominated historical order.’
Another reviewer described it in rather more prosaic terms, though with a similar focus: ‘The Woman King digs its heels into familiar dramatic beats, leaning into universal themes of love, community and unambiguous moralism. For a crowd-pleasing epic — think Braveheart with Black women — that combination is more than enough.’
Skop, slash, en donder
The Braveheart reference gets my attention. Braveheart’s a great skop, slash, en donder movie. Serve with popcorn and beer on a Sunday afternoon. It’s just that it gets almost everything about the history wrong. Clothing, politics, timelines, the works. (I wouldn’t be the first to note that the Battle of Stirling Bridge in the movie would have greatly benefited from, well, a bridge.) If it illustrates anything profound, it’s that entertainment and accuracy don’t always line up well.
It seems The Women King has indulged in some of this and taken some flak for it. The Agojie were an interesting piece of history to be sure, perhaps even an inspiring one, but their history was like pretty much any other, which is to say chequered and complicated. Dahomey was a slave-holding region, and a major participant in the supply of slaves for the transatlantic trade – the Agojie were known to participate in slave raiding.
The story of Oluale Kossola, later known as Cudjoe Lewis, is instructive. Believed to have been one of the last surviving victims of the transatlantic slave trade to have been trafficked to the United States, in his old age he told an interviewer of his own abduction: at the hands of those very Agojie. ‘No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey,’ he said in the patois of his time and community.
For those seeking to make a contemporary ideological point, particularly from an American perspective, this is problematic. It’s difficult simultaneously to laud as positive racial and gender exemplars those who contributed to the original injustice on which subsequent racial and gender oppression is held to be premised.
From what I can establish, the movie sidesteps this contradiction, with the women seen as fierce opponents of slavery, and in so doing does a disservice to history. Julian Lucas wrote in The New Yorker: ‘Dahomey’s complex history can no more be reduced to slave-raiding than England’s. As the historian Isaac Samuel has noted, the kingdom had many motivations, and one of its rulers was astonished when a European visitor assumed that “we go to war for the purpose of supplying your ships with slaves”. If the scriptwriters had wanted, The Woman King could have been an amoral epic about swordplay and statecraft, no more consumed by slavery than The Great—a Hulu series about Empress Catherine of Russia—is by serfdom. Or, if they wanted Agojieheroism, they could have turned to Dahomey’s courageous struggle against its French colonisers in 1892. (Then, of course, it wouldn’t have a happy ending.) But The Woman King chooses to make resistance to slavery its moral compass, then misrepresents a kingdom that trafficked tens of thousands as a vanguard in the struggle against it.’
Fiddling with history
Of course, The Woman King wouldn’t be alone in fiddling with history. Think Titanic and Braveheart. The Patriot – one of a surprisingly small number of movies depicting the American War of Independence – has the British army in SS mode, slaughtering a village in a massacre clearly inspired by the fate of the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944. And while it included enslaved characters in supporting roles, it absolved the central characters of complicity here. The Civil War wannabe epic Gods and Generals (which I truly enjoy as a costume drama and for its magnificent battle scenes) twisted itself into knots to reduce slavery in the antebellum South to a historical footnote incidental to the conflict.
U-571 has an American naval crew capturing a German Enigma encoding machine during the Second World War, thereby enabling the Allies to whip the Nazis. In fact, an Enigma machine was first captured by the Royal Navy in 1941, months before the US was even at war.
The Power of One took Bryce Courtenay’s novel about coming of age in South Africa and transposed a melange of faux mysticism, mangled history (often more about the United States than South Africa), dreadfully done accents, and pseudo philosophy, overlain with respectable set design and a decent cast (John Gielgud and Morgan Freeman particularly – Daniel Craig made his debut here too). I was especially amused that the hero could zip out of Johannesburg to what looked rather like the Victoria Falls for an afternoon’s reflection. And maybe it was, since they shot this one in Zimbabwe. Looking back, the Wokeistas would probably be livid if it came out today, with the white saviour thing going on there…
Oliver Stone’s JFK is the definitive conspiracy theory exposition of the assassination of President Kennedy. Awesome movie, by the way. Though be warned, the key witness in the actual trial that it depicts was one Perry Russo, who does not feature as a character in the movie at all, although he had a cameo role as a customer in a bar. His role in the events was assigned to the wholly fictitious Willie O’Keefe, a male prostitute and all-round more colourful and dramatic presence for the big screen.
That’s all fine and good. Enjoy your entertainment for its own sake. Just don’t take it seriously – or if you do, check out its veracity.
Concern
My concern though is that nowadays we’ve become so accustomed to having our information packaged and delivered to us so as not only to inform, but to entertain and to confirm our worldviews, that I fear we are conversely particularly vulnerable to drawing our information from our entertainment. Entertainment helps to construct and fortify narratives that we take with us into our understanding of the world. It is often made with a conscious appeal to the preferences of its audience. Entertainment above all makes us feel rather than think.
Sometimes this sort of misinforming may simply be about entertaining – it makes a better story than the reality itself. Sometimes, it may consciously be geared to making ideological points – storyline morality needs to fit into a storyline world. I tend to find the former facile, and the latter pompous; but as reflections of reality, beware of both. That is, if we can recognise them.
And where audiences uncritically accept these offerings because they make them feel good, or because they have an element of what the American comedian Stephen Colbert called ‘truthiness’, they stand to produce a distorted view of reality.
Understanding and discussion becomes more difficult in a world in which even the idea of truth is now treated as a legitimate object of dispute. We should guard against allowing our leisure to compound this.
Don’t misunderstand. I hope to see this movie. It has an intriguing premise, and depictions of West African history are rare, at least Anglophone ones. I’ll just have to suspend disbelief, have fun in the moment, then break out the books, and annoy everyone with nitpicks…
One big downside, as a colleague pointed out, is that having made this movie as a type of moral statement, it has probably precluded another, more accurate depiction of this history in film for the foreseeable future.
Dr Somda writes: ‘Thanks to the hype around The Woman King and the conversations it has begun to ignite, the movie will undoubtedly help to shed more light on the extraordinary legacies of the Agodjies.’
One can hope! And one can hope that the light to be shed will be the illumination of clear understanding inspired by fiction, and not something self-referential inspired by ideology.
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Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash