Chains. They remain. Invisible, they weigh heavy, like memories of Ghana’s sun-baked red clay dirt that I see as symbolic of the blood of Africans shed on the horrific journey to American slavery.
Standing in Assin Manso Slave River in Ghana earlier this year, I cried. Amid the solemn green forestation that holds the gold flake-filled river, where slaves once bathed bloodied and bruised after a grueling 2½-month march in shackles before the final leg to slave castles, I cried salty tears.
Tears for the horror that still reverberated centuries later as the anguish of my ancestors’ souls washed over me. Tears over the undeniable truth of Africans’ involvement in the brutal enslavement of Africans, which suddenly unfolded in an epiphany, even as the river’s cold waters rippled over my bare feet.
I could see only Black bodies at Slave River and an excruciating truth that does not absolve the white man but still reflects a truth I had perhaps never wanted to see.
That Africans had been complicit, co-conspirators. And that, as traders of Black flesh, they had witnessed — and engaged in — the brutality against my ancestors. Sold their brothers and sisters like biblical Joseph’s brothers sold him. And that, like white European slave-traders, some Africans, too, had indelibly blood-stained hands.
So I was left feeling numb recently after seeing “The Woman King,” the big-screen rendition of wholesale half-truths in Hollywood’s depiction of the “Amazon” all-female army of the kingdom of Dahome known as the Agojie warriors, starring Viola Davis as Gen. Nanisca. A movie that, despite its mostly Black cast and inspired acting, could not overcome the truth I know of the Agojie’s brutality, depravity and inhumanity.
I applaud any portrayal of Black female power, strength and resolve. But misinformation and skewed narratives that belie historical truth are arsenic for those yet to come into the knowledge of the truth. And the glorification of an unquestionable evil that romanticizes the Agojie as superheroes is unforgivable.
As disturbing is the movie’s current of anti-Black man, anti-family sentiment in a story that is without any Black male characters of redeeming value and that bears a feminist agenda slant even in its title. For a woman king, in reality, is a queen.
As the great-great-grandson of a man born an American slave, I abhor the narrative’s celebration of the Agojie, whose true story provides a grisly window into the “Maafa” in which millions of Africans were sold into slavery over more than 300 years.
The movie — written, incidentally, by two white women — is highly fictionalized. It recalls the powerful Dahomey kingdom (modern-day Benin), which used its woman warriors, according to historical accounts, to war against other African tribes to fuel the slave trade. The real Agojie were brutal. Merciless. Known to behead their enemies.
Actress Lupita Nyong’o, who had been set to star with Davis, was no longer attached to the film after producing her own short documentary in 2019 about the Agojie, “Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o.” She told the Hollywood Reporter, “I felt it wasn’t the role for me to play” but declined to get into specifics.
By the documentary’s end, though, a tearful Nyong’o struggles to reconcile the Agojie’s violent legacy.
“As much as we highlight their strengths,” she says, “we also have to acknowledge their crimes.”
No one gets a pass. Not African nor American nor European. It was English King Charles II and his brother James II who in 1660 created the Royal African Company, which transported the highest number of Africans to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade, searing brands into their chests.
Seared into my soul is the brutality inflicted upon my ancestors.
Seared into my heart are female warriors like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth whose bravery in the face of pure evil nurtured and saved generations. Queens like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Mamie Till-Mobley, my own grandmother Florence Hagler and her church “prayer warriors” — and Lupita Nyong’o — whose strength, courage and protection still uplift my soul from the chains that remain.
#JusticeforJelaniDay
