Way back in the early days of television, there was a series on CBS called “You Are There,” hosted by Walter Cronkite. The gimmick had Cronkite anchoring a newscast about historical events, with real-life CBS news reporters in their modern-day, 20th century garb showing up at historical events to report on the sidelines and interview actors who portrayed the likes of Plato, Anne Boleyn, Harriet Tubman and Paul Revere in their respective time periods. Cronkite would kick off every episode by saying, “All things are as they were then, except …” — and then an omniscient narrator would say: “... YOU ARE THERE.”
I was reminded of “You Are There” while screening the Netflix four-part documentary series “African Queens: Njinga,” an enlightening and captivating and invaluable deep dive into the life and times of Njinga, the 17th century warrior queen who ruled what is now known as Angola. Not that the series invokes the technique of dropping modern-day correspondents into an historical setting, but “African Queens: Njinga” does take a rather unorthodox (though not unprecedented) approach in that about 80% of the series is a straightforward historical drama, with a fine cast portraying Njinga and other key figures from the time, and the other 20% consists of traditional, talking-head, on-camera interviews with scholars and historians who provide rich context and keep us up to speed as we transition from scene to scene.
