How The Woman King changed Viola Davis, colorism, and the deficit of roles for black actresses and it is number 1 at the box office and it gets a good rating. Viola Davis fought for this movie and got a real budget. And it works for real. This is really a triumph on screen and it really a lot of fun to watch. This is an action for real.
The movie is one the best movies I have seen in years it tell the raw truth about the complicated nature of the slave trade and it does gloss over the involvement of Africans. In war, Africans sold other Africans out for guns and alcohol and that is so damn sad. The dollar is evil. Places to buy booze is plentiful in poor and black neighborhoods.
The Woman King, the historical epic from Gina Prince-Bythewood out Sept. 16, chronicles the trials and triumphs of the Agojie and Dahomey (a region in present-day Benin). Leonard Wantchekon, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, was also a historical advisor on the film. He’s finishing up a book containing biographies of more than 50 of the Agojie, based on interviews with their descendants and communities.
“I think it’s something which even today would be considered revolutionary,” Wantchekon says of the women warriors. “Because all the training that it took, all the preparation it took, it’s actually something that happened. It’s not made
While the Agojie are very much real—they existed for over a century—they also have inspired plenty of interpretations in pop culture, perhaps most notably the Dora Milaje in Black Panther. The all-female special forces for the fictional African nation of Wakanda first appeared in Marvel comic books but migrated onscreen in 2018, where they played an integral role. (The sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, appears to focus even more closely on the women of Wakanda.)
Prince-Bythewood has credited Black Panther with helping to pave the way for this film—especially in an industry in which the stories of people of color have not always been prioritized by studios. But The Woman King marks the first time that a major motion picture in the U.S. has told the story of the Agojie. It also addresses the role that Dahomey played in the slave trade—although it glosses over the fact that the king at the time only temporarily paused the kingdom’s participation in 1852.
“I believe in the movie that Dahomey is presented as a highly, highly sophisticated state in a modern sense: with a standing army, with bureaucracy, with officials in charge of logistics,” Wantchekon says. “It’s not very surprising that something that extraordinary, like these female warriors, arose from these institutions.”
“You might see those institutions of women in isolation, as if it came from the sky or somewhere,” Wantchekon says. “But they are products of a social environment that enables women to do anything they want to do or they can do—including going to war.”
And third, King Ghezo catalyzed the expansion of military might. “The idea was there, the social conditions were in place, but then he led the way—King Ghezo—to raise this to the highest level in terms of organization, a number of people involved,” Wantchekon says. “Roughly anywhere from one-third to 40% of the whole army [was] made of women.” (At its peak, the Agojie included as many as 6,000 members.)
“When I came aboard, those were some of the first conversations,” Prince-Bythewood told The Hollywood Reporter. “But it was, ‘We’re going, to tell the truth. We’re not going to shy away from anything.’ But also we’re telling a part of the story which is about overcoming and fighting for what’s right. And I think we got it right.”
“Five percent of slave exports come from Dahomey,” Wantchekon says. It’s a “massive” number of human lives, he says, out of the total number, across Africa, of roughly 12.5 million people enslaved.
“There will always be time to consume the legacy of Dahomey and the slave trade,” Wantchekon says. “But also at the same time, like you do for any other continent, any other country, we also need to talk about things that they did independent of this—because the Agojie women of 1823 who were portrayed in the movie were not slave raiders.”
