‘The Woman King,’ a Whitewash of African Tribe’s Slave Trade, Tops Box Office Despite Woke Boycott Calls

viola-davis-the-woman-king
TriStar Pictures
Paul Bois

Call it a woke civil war: the Viola Davis star vehicle The Woman King has topped the North American box office on its debut weekend, even as online activists called for a boycott over the film’s blatant whitewashing of an African tribe’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

Critics have awarded The Woman King with a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, hailing its “fresh female perspective” and its timely message of “women empowered to own their own bodies,” and with a $19 million gross, the film ranked #1 at the weekend box office and earned an A+ CinemaScore from viewers.

Woke social media users, however, brutally trashed the film for overlooking the fact that the Dahomey tribe it glorifies had a dubious history of selling slaves to Europeans — promoting the hashtag #BoycottWomanKing. Even the far-left Slate had to call the makers out on it.

“The Dahomey had fierce female fighters. They also sold people overseas,” Ana Lucia Araujo bluntly said in her review of the film.

The Smithsonian Magazine also admitted that “the kingdom’s involvement in the slave trade doesn’t align as neatly with the historical record.”

“As historian Robin Law notes, Dahomey emerged as a key player in the trafficking of West Africans between the 1680s and early 1700s, selling its captives to European traders whose presence and demand fueled the industry—and, in turn, the monumental scale of Dahomey’s warfare,” wrote Meilan Solly of The Smithsonian.

“Though the majority of individuals taken prisoner by Dahomey were enslaved abroad, a not-insignificant number remained in the kingdom, where they served on royal farms, in the army or at the palace,” she added.

Solly even noted how Dahomey King Ghezo (depicted by John Boyega in the film) had to be pressured by the British government in 1852 to end its participation in the slave trade.

“Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade,” she noted.

As has always been the case, woke content is never woke enough and the Twitter trolls were merciless.

“The Dahomey warriors were not just slave traders They would take all the young healthly people, murder the elderly & disabled and burn down everything left in the village The term for what they did is #GENOCIDE,” lamented one user. 

“Let’s be honest folk. It’s movie about a African tribe famous for selling slaves to Europeans that was made into a female empowerment story by two White women writers. You don’t have to be very ‘woke’ to see the problem here,” said another.

“I am not telling you to #BoycottWomanKing but I am telling you to do your research on the Dahomey Tribe. If then, you decide to watch it, so be it. But being willfully ignorant of the destruction caused by their involvement in the Slave Trade isn’t the flex Hollywood thinks it is,” exclaimed another.

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