Peplum-like Hollywood blockbuster, The Woman King depicts the epic of the Agojié, a body of warriors from Dahomey (now Benin) in the 19e century. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood takes certain liberties with the history of the kingdom and its slavery past, underlines historian Sylvia Serbin, author of Queens of Africa and heroines of the black diaspora (MeduNeter, 2018) and co-author of The Women Soldiers of Dahomey (“women soldiers of Dahomey”, Unesco-Collins, 2015). But the blockbuster, spectacularly filmed, also brings welcome visibility to a part of African history that is still little represented on screen.
The least that can be said of The Woman Kingis that it divided the spectators and the critics… Did you find it convincing, as a spectator and as a historian?
Sylvia Serbin: I really enjoyed this film. I was pleasantly surprised to see, for the first time, a page of African history treated in this way by big-budget Western cinema. Gina Prince-Bythewood and her teams have shown great respect for sticking as close to reality as possible. In this region of the Gulf of Guinea (Benin, Togo, Ghana, Nigeria), in the 19e century, women played an important role in society and the economy. They had great financial autonomy, a political role, could be advisers to kings… This is a tradition that had existed for a long time, and which the film restores well in its cultural, social and hierarchical dimension.
Not without taking some liberties with historical reality…
Of course, the film is not exempt from a Hollywood touch of good feelings, sometimes a little anachronistic. It is a bias of the director. An artistic bias because, it seems necessary to remember, this is not a documentary but a fiction. There is a visible concern to stick to the values of the spectators of today, and it is skilfully done, because it also makes it possible to avoid “indexing” a country, Benin, for its past participation in the slave trade. slave.
Some critics have indeed criticized the film for presenting King Ghézo as favorable to the anti-slavery discourse held by the heroine, General Nanisca, while the kingdom of Dahomey precisely based its power on the slave trade.
Indeed, Dahomey is known for its role in the slave trade, which King Ghézo defended tooth and nail and which his successors perpetuated almost until the end of the 19th century.e century. It was a warlike state which, starting from the plateau of Abomey inland, succeeded in a formidable expansion to reach the coast, where it annexed all the small kingdoms in order to be able to trade directly with the slave traders and stock up on weapons. That being said, who can know the opinion of the little people, those who suffered directly from the consequences of these wars? By putting this anti-slavery discourse in the mouth of Nanisca, the film chooses not to attribute a homogeneous and unanimously belligerent thought to the people of Dahomey. And I think that it is not unthinkable that part of this people was exhausted by all these conflicts and these human losses.
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