When Women Were King A new film starring Viola Davis reclaims the narrative of the fiercely resist
(A lengthy, important read)
When Women Were King
A new film starring Viola Davis reclaims the narrative of the fiercely resistant African “Amazons.”
8/30/2022 by Janell Hobson
Amazons of Dahomey, the only documented female army in modern history. (National Museum of World Cultures)
When French colonial soldiers in the 19th century first encountered fierce women on the battlefield in the Kingdom of Dahomey on the West African coast, they were completely bewildered. Their only frame of reference was to recall the all-female armies known as “Amazons” from ancient Greco-Roman myths. Subsequently, the “Dahomey Amazon” label stuck—especially after the women decimated the French army, which underestimated their military prowess and propensity for carnage. “Women warriors is what I call them,” said Lynne Larsen, assistant professor of art history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who is writing about women-only interior spaces in the Royal Palace of Dahomey. “Amazon is a European name for them because they were so different and strange to the French 19th-century sense of what gender roles should be. But today, people in Abomey still call them L’Amazones, so that’s a generally accepted term.”
As brave as these women warriors were, they were eventually defeated by the greater gun power of the French, who captured Dahomey in 1892 and much later renamed it the Republic of Benin. The female soldiers who survived were paraded in world fairs, most infamously at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. They reenacted battles and appeared with their breasts bare as they were simultaneously described to their fully clothed, predominantly white audiences as being “in full dress”—a stark contrast that was meant to define so-called African primitivism in comparison to the technological progress of Western civilization also on display at the expo.
Such cultural dichotomies supported global and local events of the time: from the West’s imperial “scramble for Africa” to the U.S.’s push for racial segregation and the subjugation of African American progress. Recognizing the racial propaganda of the World’s Columbian Exposition, prominent African American leader Frederick Douglass condemned the “Dahomey Village” exhibition, which he felt was designed to “shame the Negro.” From such public displays, the Dahomey Amazon grew into a mythical African savage in the popular imagination. Despite these racist and sexist tropes, the Dahomey Amazons eventually became figures for racial uplift: from Black Liberation-era celebrations of their history to radical Black feminists like Audre Lorde praising them as protofeminist models of sisterhood and solidarity.
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Lupita Nyong’o (left) played Nakia, a member of the all-female royal guard, in Black Panther.
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Viola Davis as Nanisca, a Dahomey leader, in The Woman King
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Cinema often contributes to such myths, but it can also reveal important truths.
“Look at Black Panther,” Larsen said. “Art historians have said for years that museums in the West needed to return art objects back to their place of origin. But it took that scene with Killmonger in the museum, and now there’s this huge movement. It absolutely forced the Met and museums in Paris to repatriate art back to Dahomey. That’s powerful!” With a new movie like The Woman King, we can only hope the same cinematic power is redirected onto a group of African women who were once the embodiment of resistance. “My hope is that young African-descended girls and women see themselves in these powerful women,” Achebe said. “I hope they too will aspire for greatness.”
https://msmagazine.com/2022/08/30/the-woman-king-review-africa-amazons-dahomey/
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