Low Resolution History
Toye Oladinni
Lupita Nyong’o is said to have refused a role in The Woman King out of concern the movie would skate over the reality of African complicity in the Atlantic slave trade. She wasn’t alone: even before the film’s release, its alleged minimisation of African involvement angered some Black Americans as well as right-wing whites. Nyong’o instead reprised her role as Nakia in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, is clearly indebted to Black Panther and its success. The Marvel film created slightly more room for Hollywood depictions of Africa that do not revolve around ‘Black trauma porn’: child soldiers, Somali pirates, genocides and long, long marches to freedom. The Woman King uses this space to focus on the West African Kingdom of Dahomey in the early 19th century and its all-female regiment, the Agojie. The movie is an unflinching spectacle of choreographed violence, as the soldiers slice and hack their way to victory.
Tafi Mhaka has criticised The Woman King on al-Jazeera for romanticising African history, and stoking ‘sweet and melodramatic nostalgia for an Afrocentric fantasy’. Far from a romanticised image, however, Prince-Bythewood’s movie portrays a Dahomey that engages in the horror of slave trading of its own volition, for its own wealth and survival. The plot concerns the head of the Agojie, played by Viola Davis, growing more uncomfortable with this participation as the film progresses. By the end, after winning Dahomey’s freedom from the dominion of the nearby Oyo Empire, she manages to convince King Ghezo (John Boyega) to pivot to palm oil and away from the traffic in slaves.
This isn’t entirely historically accurate. Ghezo ended the slave trade only under huge pressure, and resumed it a few years later. The film portrays its ending as a new dawn, but it’s a false one. Not that there’s anything unusual about a historically inaccurate movie. It’s understandable for Black people to hold movies by other Black people to a higher standard in their representation of Africa, but at least The Woman King isn’t yet another movie set on a fantasy version of the Western Front.
One of the most revealing things about discussion of The Woman King has been how low-resolution popular knowledge of African history remains. Half a century after the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford declared that there was no African history to teach, only the ‘history of Europeans in Africa’, many in the West would still fail to name a single pre-colonial African kingdom if asked. The Woman King represents a step forward in general awareness, but it’s in a cultural climate where discussions of Africa cannot take any pre-existing knowledge for granted. For many, the image of pre-colonial West Africa remains one of undefined ‘tribes’ and men with spears.
Discourse about ‘Africans selling Africans’ is also common, but slaves were most frequently captured in inter-state conflicts, by people who saw them as categorically different. This was a time before Pan-Africanism was even a twinkle in Kwame Nkrumah’s eye. And attitudes differed among those in power: Ghezo’s commitment to ending the trade was shaky but, as Walter Rodney noted in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, one of his Dahomey predecessors, Agaja Trudo, actively raided and looted European forts and slave camps on the coast.
All this nuance is lost in the widening gyre of contemporary political imperatives, and no Hollywood movie can reasonably be expected to act as a microcosm of an entire historical era, let alone an already underrepresented one. Writing in the Spectator, Sam Ashworth-Hayes suggested we put ‘political mythology aside’ and ‘examine the world as it was’, but almost all calls for apoliticism are in fact calls for continuation of the status quo, which has never had an interest in portraying Africans fairly. On the other hand, impulses to erase African involvement in slavery – more common in the diaspora than on the continent – risk robbing our historical forebears of their agency and masking the ever-regressive tendencies of Africa’s ruling classes.
Much of the controversy around The Woman King evaporated once the film came out, and the presence of many pro-slavery African characters made clear that fears it would erase Dahomean involvement in the slave trade were overstated. Viola Davis was widely expected to get an Academy Award nomination, but The Woman King hasn’t been shortlisted in any category, while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been nominated for five Oscars.
Comments
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31 January 2023
at
12:02pm
AndrewL
says:
In case anyone else was wondering who that unnamed Oxford professor was, and when they were speaking, Hugh Trevor-Roper delivered a series of lectures on "The Rise of Christian Europe" at the University of Sussex in October 1963, which were broadcast on BBC television, printed in The Listener in 1963, and then published in his 1965 book of the lectures.
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1 February 2023
at
11:43am
MattG
says:
@
AndrewL
I think you are being unfair. History as an academic subject is mostly about the interpretation of written sources not about the story people tell about the past .
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2 February 2023
at
11:25am
AndrewL
says:
@
MattG
He was talking about "the history of black Africa", which I expect is being used for a synonym for the regions often described as "sub-Saharan Africa" to exclude Egypt, Carthage, etc.
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2 February 2023
at
3:34pm
MattG
says:
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AndrewL
My central point is that we are being unfair to HTR. You and Iwagumi below date the new way of looking at African history developed in the 70's and 80's. Which makes my point for me. You call it " the subsequent development ". I would like to stress subsequent.
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2 February 2023
at
9:29pm
Andrew Seal
says:
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MattG
My goodness, the scholars who were publishing the Cambridge History of Africa starting in 1975 must have worked very hard to learn all that history in the twelve intervening years after Trevor-Roper made his remarks!
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1 February 2023
at
11:29am
MattG
says:
I think you are
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1 February 2023
at
9:33pm
Idowu Omoyele
says:
Long before the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper declared in the early 1960s that African history was unavailable as a subject fit for pedagogy, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770—November 14, 1831), in lectures on the philosophy of history delivered at the University of Berlin between 1822 and 1831, erased Africa from global history. According to him, Africa "is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit." He asserted that Africa was crude and primitive, inhabited by the savage and barbaric; devoid of history or progress or of ethics, faith and political organization. He also offers vindication of Europe's subjugation of Africa through slavery and imperialism.
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1 February 2023
at
10:29pm
Idowu Omoyele
says:
@
Idowu Omoyele
Error alert!
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2 February 2023
at
12:15am
Niiashie Adjaye
says:
There are many ancient writing systems throughout Africa which recorded history http://www.taneter.org/writing.html
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2 February 2023
at
8:20am
MattG
says:
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Niiashie Adjaye
for me this is an insecure link?
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2 February 2023
at
1:44pm
Iwagumi
says:
This is a thoughtful summary of the film and fast assessment of the various contemporary cultural dynamics at play. Per the accuracy of the film, I find its historical fidelity similar to BRAVEHEART, which is to underscore that facts rarely get in the way of a rousing story.
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3 February 2023
at
9:23am
Scaramouche
says:
Victorians would have been familiar with Sir Richard Burton's "Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey", a readable and essentially anthropological account of his travels to what is now Benin in 1861-4. Its 1966 edition (Routledge) has a lengthy introduction on the slave trade in that region by C.W.Newbury. Maurice Glele, a descendant of Dahomey's king, was a moving force behind the UNESCO multi-volume history of Africa (edited by Prof. Joseph Ki-Zerbo), published in the 1980s. Whether the screenwriters bother to consult such tomes is another matter.
Read moreTo give some context, he said:
"Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history."
Which I suppose to be generous goes to "what is history", albeit with disparaging and Eurocentric overtones. I think most people today will accept that it is perfectly possible to study the history of people in Africa - and indeed the Americas, or elsewhere - without forcing it through a European lens.
Eg when I did history Britain did not have a political history in the last 20 years because cabinet papers are not published. That was considered journalism and sneered at.
What's wrong about his comment is that it ignores the Nile valley which has a long written history.
As I said, being generous, you could read it as a comment about the nature of history. But poorly expressed, and to be frank displaying his own ignorance if not bias.
But his statement is problematic for a number of reasons. First, I doubt most historians would consider "history" to be limited to a study of written sources. Oral accounts, material object, archaeology, are all suitable sources for historical enquiry. Is there no history or historical enquiry without literary sources?
Secondly, contemporaneous written sources about "black Africa" do exist, not least because a number of African cultures developed their own writing systems (for example, Sudan and Ethiopia). Others also adopted writing systems including Arabic, which it is hard to describe as "European" with a straight face.
And thirdly, the subsequent development of academic studies of African history shows this assumption of impenetrable "darkness" before Europeans arrived to be false . And not just in recent years, but when or soon after Trevor-Roper was speaking. As a simple example, the multi-volume Cambridge History of Africa was published in the 1970s and 1980s.
I fully agree with your suggestion that he talked about sub-saharan Africa . That's why he omitted the accounts Phoenicians and the the 25th dynasty.
Hold on, I'm sorry, yes, I've just been handed a paper that informs me that Roland Oliver was appointed Lecturer in African History at SOAS (which stands for what again?) in 1948 or thereabouts, and that the Journal of African History debuted in 1960. That seems a bit... earlier than when Trevor-Roper denied the possibility of African history.
Perhaps we ought to consider that he was merely egregiously uninformed about what was going on in his own country, not to mention historical work on Africa carried on elsewhere?
Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964; revised edition, 1974), the two greatest novels by the distinguished Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe, are an attempt to address the admixture of arrogance and ignorance in such errors of judgement in Western history, philosophy, as well as in literature (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for example). In his novels, Achebe offers a more complex and complicated, nuanced and unsentimental portrait of Africa and Africans than would be found in most writings anywhere, at any time. He is careful not to portray his characters as innocent as saintly, nor does he reduce them to caricatures or cardboard cut-outs. He gives us an Africa and Africans in three dimensions, full of humanity, warts and all.
As though responding to philosophers, writers and historians from Hegel to Conrad to Trevor-Roper, Achebe, in his essay "The Role of the Writer in a New Nation" (1964), contends "that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity."
He is careful not to portray his characters as innocent or saintly...
I also appreciate AndrewL's context regarding HTR's oft quoted comment, as I had not been exposed to the full statement, which is far more insightful than the oft quoted snip implies. In fact, 60 years later, it has only slightly aged, thereby taking on almost a patina of wisdom.
Why?
Fortunately, the generation of historians who would have been on the discouraging side of that message simply ignored it and pressed on. To do so, there've been some innovations with respect to what history is and how it's done, which is to say MattG's viewpoint is anachronistic at best. One can see this in a collection of papers, essays, and anthropological perspectives assembled in the late seventies by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, entitled SLAVERY IN AFRICA. Fast forward three decades, and there's an extensive publication on the same subject by Paul Lovejoy, an incredibly well researched, reasoned, and informed account that stretches back to 7th century AD. These are examples simply pulled off of my shelf, and are hardly representative of the historical scholarship regarding Africa, which includes oral traditions and even linguistic morphology. So, indeed, as Mr. Oladinni asserts, too many have poor understanding and appreciation of sub-Saharan African history, which is a segue to the first crop of non-European historical observers in the region and what they said.
One could do worse than start with Ibn Khaldûn's, THE MUQADDIMAH. Khaldûn is oft cited as the first modern historian, mostly due to his acknowledgement that bias is present in archiving, curating, synthesizing, and sharing of any history. Moreover, he's recognized for being rather astute in his synthesis, strikingly for an Islamic scholar, his rejection of the biblical "Decedents of Ham" origin for the region. And after Khaldûn there are others, notably, Ahmad Bābā who worked in Timbuktu in the late 16th century, providing a strong record prior to European colonial rule.
I bring all this up because it forces one to confront what they actually said. It is nothing other than appalling by today's standards, racist as can be, motivated by the lucrative slave trade they're running. They had to justify it in some way, especially when a clever captive claimed to be muslim (muslim slaves are problematic in Islam). Thus, there's all the current structural elements of racism (taking a certain phenotype profile to assert a hierarchy in humans in order to justify an essential structural factor in their economy, while reconciling their spiritual consciousness), centuries prior to European first contact (circa 1440 or 60ish).
What did they say?
From the MUQADDIMAH (translated by Franz Rosenthal)
"Their buildings are of clay and reeds. Their foodstuffs are durra and herbs. Their clothing is the leaves of trees, which they sew together to cover themselves, or animal skins. Most go naked. Their qualities of character, moreover, are close to those of dumb animals. It has even been reported that most of the Negros of the zone dwell in caves and thickets, each herbs, live in savage isolation and do not congregate, and eat each other."
(Third Prefatory Discussion)
"Negros are in general characterized by levity, excitability, and great emotionalism. They are found eager to dance whenever they hear a melody. They are everywhere described as stupid."
(Fourth Prefatory Discussion)
Of course, this kind of commentary goes on for hundreds of pages, all in the aim of educating the elite of the Arab world. This would have been taught in University of Qarawiyyin (oldest active university in the world), University of Cordoba, Al-Azhar, etc. An educated citizen from that era would have been exposed to Khaldûn's work and commentaries and accepted them as an enlightened form of knowledge. Simply put, racist views of Sub-Saharan Africa were embedded in a culture that far predated European colonization. And... how many people who so confidently declare possession of a high resolution of African history are even aware of this?
Put another way, our current state of knowledge and 'discourse' feels akin to THE WOMAN KING, even in so-called educated circles. There is a long, long way to go, and it's not due to a lack of scholarship or writing.