The 2018 news that "The Woman King" had been greenlit stirred in me a mixture of joy and something between curiosity and confusion. The joy should be obvious. No major studio had ever adapted an action movie based on a chapter from African history, let alone one starring dark-skinned Black women. Casting Viola Davis and (at that time) Lupita Nyong'o meant two very famous actors would provide the faces of that story. This was not the shape of a quiet release but one meant to arrive triumphantly.
That other sensation – let's call it intrigued bemusement – stems from the subject the film would feature, the Dahomey kingdom's woman warriors. Those fearsome figures provide one of the major reference points for modern incarnations of Amazons because they were encountered by 18th- and 19th-century Europeans, as major facilitators in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
