Woman King is set in Benin but filmed in South Africa - in the process it erases real people鈥檚 struggles

Woman King is set in Benin but filmed in South Africa - in the process it erases real people鈥檚 struggles

Hollywood undermines Africa鈥檚 struggles, creating a false impression of the continent to please western viewers.

By Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre

November 15, 2022

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A scene from the new movie Woman King, with three female warriors overlooking the ocean.
While the story told in The Woman King took place in what is now Benin, the film was shot in South Africa. Image courtesy (Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment)

The latest film by director , , is about a legendary all-woman African army in the 1800s, the of . It takes place in what is today the Republic of Benin in west Africa. It wasn鈥檛 filmed in Benin, but in South Africa, in the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces using locations that look like west Africa.

The film has had an overwhelmingly , but some have against ignoring history in favour of crowd-pleasing storytelling. I would like to draw attention to the film鈥檚 use of the African landscape, as Hollywood tells new stories while ignoring the struggles of the present.

I am a curator of African art in Kingston at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. I arrived in Canada from Cape Town around the time The Woman King was being filmed in the coastal town of in the Overstrand, where I鈥檇 lived with my family. I was struck by how the town was depicted.

The film uses Kleinmond as the site of great battles that glorify Africa鈥檚 history. But the town鈥檚 actual history is one of struggle and the oppression of black people that lives on to this day. The Woman King shows a pristine version of Kleinmond, digitally altering the landscape to erase black lives and settlements.

Cheating one film location for another is common practice. Film infrastructure exists in the Western Cape and there are financial incentives that attract international film makers. Not only is the natural diversity of South Africa appealing, it鈥檚 also marketable.

But film locations in Africa are often used as a generic Hollywood backdrop or African cities are easily traded. For example, is set in Sierra Leone and was filmed in Cape Town. More recently 鈥檚 battle scenes in downtown Johannesburg.

These distortions are part of the global film industry, but they can also lead to a distortion of a continent and its history. The Woman King鈥檚 use of Kleinmond鈥檚 setting may seem like just a technical gimmick, but it points to a bigger issue: even when telling African stories, Hollywood reimagines the true history and geography of the continent to serve western audiences.

Kleinmond

Kleinmond bears witness to . During , white minority rulers implemented a policy of separate development, and allocated racial groups to different living areas.

The original town was settled from the 1850s by fisher families who made their living from the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1950s, when it became part of a 鈥溾, Kleinmond was bulldozed by the apartheid government, its people forcibly removed to Protea Dorp on the mountainside near the town dump. A letter by a local fisher, , attests to growing up in Kleinmond harbour and to his family鈥檚 forced removal. He writes about the ongoing struggles to secure scarce government fishing quotas.

Retelling Africa and cinematic erasure

It鈥檚 ironic that Kleinmond was the backdrop for The Woman King鈥檚 battle scenes, and appropriated into a story of a glorious, fictitious African past. Frequent in the area show that the real life struggle for the ocean and the land is still underway. During recent protests for better housing, burning tyres were positioned around an area called Perdekop and it became a true battleground for its inhabitants.

The port of Ouidah in Benin was filmed in South Africa鈥檚 Western Cape. (Image courtesy Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment)

In a similar way, Kleinmond鈥檚 complexities and its embattled people are erased for the purposes of tourism. According to , the natural beauty and biodiversity are the 鈥渇inest example of mountain fynbos in the Western Cape and (the Kleinmond biosphere is) a world-renowned World Heritage Site鈥. But this heritage has yet to yield enough sustainable jobs, and for many Kleinmond men, the illegal trade in endangered is one of only a .

The white South African art world also has countless examples of black erasure and distorted storytelling. The apartheid state鈥檚 favoured painter painted empty, detailed landscapes of South Africa that were hung in government buildings across the country. He never showed the conflicted human life inhabiting those landscapes, erasing black people, the original inhabitants. , favoured by white liberals, preferred painting scenes in the or black reserves of South Africa to show an 鈥渁uthentic鈥 African life. She ignored the everyday trauma of living under apartheid to capture what she considered the African ideal.

Pristine Africa

The Woman King continues this elided narrative by presenting Africa as largely uninhabited and pristine. But what does it mean when the real, battle-worn Perdekop is not acknowledged and becomes part of an elaborate computer graphic of a white settlement instead? Or a graphic of fictional houses is overlaid on the Overhills settlement?

As a curator, I think about which stories we tell in the present, which stories will endure, but most importantly what shape our collective responsibility takes. Kleinmond is close to my heart, which is perhaps why I鈥檓 especially troubled by this new kind of historical erasure, as the African landscape is digitally emptied and its people ignored so that its image can be used as the canvas for a redemptive story.

All this is not to say that The Woman King does not carefully counter harmful African stereotypes; it does. It presents African women as strong, healthy and independent, Africans as the inheritors of a rich cultural tradition and Africans as majestic purveyors of lost ideals. But at what cost does this fictional black redemption come?

In erasing the past, the film undermines Africa鈥檚 struggles, creating a false impression of the continent to please western viewers.The Conversation

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, Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre,

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