Catching up here; I had all-day obligations at the end of last week.
No fancy cookery over the weekend: I just made a buffalo chicken dip, guacamole and potato skins for the Super Bowl.
Football is not my favorite sport, but I kind of like any sport when the stakes are high (playoffs, championships, etc) because the narrative outcomes have such emotional intensity. When that extra dollop of feeling gets added because a team is a hometown team or a past hometown team (go Dodgers), that magnifies that effect.
As a result, though, when a game turns out badly it is kind of painful. Even in cases where you don’t care about any of the teams involved, how a pivotal game or championship resolves matters a lot. The best case scenario is like the recent World Cup final: lots of turns and twists with surprising shifts of momentum, and an outcome that ultimately feels fair. A bad outcome is a one-sided drubbing (though Germany v. Brazil in the World Cup 2014 was so unexpected that it was at least interesting). A game where both teams are low energy, passive and defensive is equally bad.
The absolute worst-case scenario? A game that is decided by a single highly debatable call by a referee and which is then decided by a manager using the rules to advantage. Which is what happened in this year’s Super Bowl. An exciting, tense tie got resolved on a call that really didn’t need to happen, which led to a boring anti-climax of remorseless time management. When you refuse to score a touchdown because you’d have to surrender control over the clock, you have a game with flawed rules. It was like watching an accountant find a new loophole in the tax code.
On to another irritant from this weekend. I finally got around to seeing “The Woman King” and I’m more frustrated than ever with AHA President James Sweet pre-emptively including the film on the list of objectionable “presentist” works.
I’ve always hoped that historians could thoroughly shuck off the need to correct popular representations of history for their inaccuracies and instead focus on what particular representations mean to do and are made to do by audiences. Along with that might be some appreciation for what film-makers get right by either yardstick.
So yes, I could (and did) note some of the things wrong with “The Woman King” in factual terms. The soldiers of Oyo are represented as villains who enthusiastically trade in slaves (with a bit of odd iconographic framing that makes them seem more ‘Arabic’) who are directly in control of Ouidah and who ride their horses throughout the entire territory of Dahomey down to the coast. (There is a side remark about tsetse fly that shows that the screenwriter and director were aware of why that’s a problem.) King Ghezo of Dahomey is shown as more or less eager to get out from underneath the burden of the slave trade and his tributary obligations to Oyo at the same time. His agojie, the so-called Amazons, are expressly in favor of both of those goals and force Ghezo’s hand late in the film.
The last quarter of the film is where most of the no-that-didn’t-go-like-that stuff is located. No, there weren’t spectacular battlefield pyrotechnics and so on in the nighttime raid where Ghezo’s revitalized Dahomean military defeated Oyo. No, Ghezo (or the agojie) did not go on to raid Ouidah. Oyo was already badly weakened by civil war and the threat of Sokoto’s power to the north.
There are a lot of things about Ghezo’s reign which are hinted at in the film—Edna Bay argues that he’s the one who built the agojie into a militarily capable force instead of just being a palace guard. Ghezo came to power in a complicated coup and then after defeating Oyo’s forces went on to repeated raid what is now central Nigeria to capture slaves for the trade.
More generally, Dahomey’s reputation as a state that was heavily dependent on the slave trade was fairly well deserved, whatever debates historians have about the awareness of its kings about the drawbacks of that dependency.
So ok. The thing is that it’s a good movie with some stellar performances that puts sexual violence and enslavement front and center in some remarkable ways. And while there’s the de rigeur custom-designed European-aligned character who is actually a good guy (he turns out to be a biracial Brazilian whose mother was a Dahomean slave) the movie is absolutely not told from the perspective of white visitors. There are no expository infodumps to patient Europeans. (The one European visitor to Abomey, the capital, is I think meant to be a fictionalized version of Francisco Felix de Souza, who aided Ghezo in his coup.)
This is a black movie with African characters at its core. And essentially it understands the relations between Dahomey, Oyo and Ouidah reasonably well. It’s a great power rivalry like many that figure in European historical fiction. The Woman King’s core themes are full of tragedy and pain, but I was struck that its backdrop version of Dahomey and Oyo is not all that different than France and England in The Three Musketeers or Spain and England in Elizabeth.
The movie should have been nominated for tons of Academy Awards, and it is hard not to think that the main reason it wasn’t is precisely that it is so black, and largely not even “black in relationship to whiteness”—that it mostly takes seriously the idea that Dahomey and Oyo had their own struggles over power that involved slavery but were not coordinated by masterful white European puppeteers. I think Hollywood would be more comfortable with the movie if it were that, and that’s more evidence that Hollywood has a problem. But historians, including James Sweet, should be happy with the movie: it’s miles away from any other big-budget Hollywood treatment of African history that I can think of.
I haven't seen the film yet, Tim, but maybe I will. I was fairly sure that it would be another problem, but if you think it's worth a look, then look I will. As for the "Big Game," I can't seem to generate any enthusiasm for sports ball of any sort anymore. I tried to think of what the opposite of watching it would entail and settled on a rewatch of the first season of "Fleabag." Because, why not?