A summary about the most important aspects of the movies follows, starting with The Woman King.

The Woman King, set in the 1820’s, stars Viola Davis as a general and is a rare movie in Hollywood because it is a positive portrayal of Black people in a historical epic that takes place in Africa. It is about a kingdom in an African nation with an all-female regiment of soldiers, who also fight against the Portuguese slave trade that seeks to enslave their homeland. It is an inspiring story that explores the truth that there were African nations who fought white Europeans enslavement of their people. The plot centers around the Kingdom of Dahomey in western Africa famous because it contains an all-female unit of soldiers called Agojie.  Dahomey was a real country and today is the nation of Benin, still lead by the Yorubas, a Nigerian ethnic group.

The Agojie fought from the 1600s to the 1900s and were not just soldiers but led full lives and were political influences. Hollywood creates fictional characters in the movie, but nothing diminishes the historical facts these women were widely known as fierce defenders of their realm. Go and see this movie to be inspired by historical women who did not live under gender bias and in their society could be soldiers, but elite soldiers that the King called into battle when he needed the fiercest fighters.

I enjoyed the blockbuster movie, Black Panther, like most people in America, primarily because of the excellent actors, starting with the late Chadwich Boseman. Boseman, not only lived a life of integrity but after being diagnosed with color cancer in 2016, kept his condition private, continuing to act until his death in 2020 from the illness. Boseman stated that he prayed to star in Black Panther before he was cast as the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I confess that while I watched the movie over and over, I was asking myself, why they didn’t base the movie on ancient African kingdoms that were historically real and not imaginary like Wakunda.  I wanted a note at the movie’s end about all of the great African kingdoms on the continent of Africa that were more advanced than European countries and were responsible for great inventions in the world. Nevertheless, I laughed my head off at the one liner, such as calling the CIA agent, “colonizer,” which was a historical fact.

The second movie, Black Panther: Wakunda Forever, was honoring Boseman’s memory and still had the same high level of acting.  I heard a bad review of the movie, before I went to see it, given by a European American and it was clear that he hadn’t liked the first movie, and that both were culturally beyond his understanding.  Black Panther: Wakunda Forever raised some unsettling questions for me. I loved the inclusion of another colonized people and the historical fact that Blacks were not the only ones to suffer because of contact with Europeans.  Indigenous people suffered too, were stricken by European diseases and were also colonized.