The intrigues of a monarch’s court–the convoluted politics, treason, loyalty, and the legacies of queens and kings–are mostly reserved for European historical fiction on our screens. Streaming platforms are rife with white-centric tales like The Tudors, and The Crown among others, which reinforce a narrative that absolves powerful European dynasties of the guilt of imperialist plunder and colonial violence. Often, biopics on queens like Mary Queen of Scots or Elizabeth - I, are peddled as ‘feminist’ stories, regardless of what their regimes did to colonised people.
Now, compare this to productions on Black history by Hollywood. Films by big studios with multi-million dollar budgets rarely tend to focus on much else than Black trauma— a trend that has been called out multiple times by Black cultural commentators. What would it be like if we could watch the intrigues and plots that took place in the courts of African rulers, instead? What kind of stories of resistance can come out of such screen adaptations? Last year’s The Woman King starring Viola Davis and Netflix’s new docu-drama series African Queens: Njinga starring Adesuwa Oni, address these questions, challenging the skewed, white-centric telling of history.
Season one of African Queens: Njinga, a four-part docu-drama, traces the life of Njinga, a 17th-century warrior queen of Ndongo and Matamba (present-day Angola in West Central Africa). The show focuses on Njinga’s rise to power and her fight against Portuguese colonisers and slave traders. Executive-produced by Jada-Pinket Smith, the series will focus on one queen from the African continent in each season. Reportedly, season 2 will tell the story of Cleopatra.
The docudrama series opens in the year 1617 at Kabasa, the kingdom’s capital city. The opening sequence shows Njinga, still a princess, as an established warrior, and her close relationship with her father, King Ngola (Thabo Bopape). Soon, betrayals within the court leave the throne ripe for the taking with the twin threats of the Portuguese and neighbouring African powers looming large. Njinga’s ascension as queen is bloody, in the background of multiple African kingdoms participating in slave trade themselves. The release of African Queens: Njinga comes during Black History Month. Rich with histories that need to be told and marking a shift in how Black lives are represented, Njinga is intercut with shots of historians talking to the camera, to add background to the story. What they all agree on is the significance of Black people telling their own stories: how this breaks away from how and who told these stories before.
While the ideas of a woman ruler and women warriors are progressive, we’re made to understand the complexity of how Njinga’s people viewed womanhood. She cannot become queen before having to first deal with men like her brother Mbande (Philips Nortey), younger than her and unfit to be a leader, yet ruthlessly ambitious.
The makers seem to have intentionally started off the show with Njinga, rather than the more globally popular Cleopatra, as reported by the Deadline. While many of us are unaware of her, Njinga played a role in the popular imagination of Angola’s struggle against the Portuguese in the 1960s, writes Linda M Heywood, series advisor and author, in her book Njinga of Angola: African Queen. By the next decade, through political change, Angola attempted to rescue the erstwhile queen’s image from colonial depictions of her as ‘savage’ and a ‘sexual deviant’, Heywood elaborates, adding that eventually, Njinga became, “a figure of history, memory, and myth”.
However, as outsiders, we may also wonder at the re-imagining of Njinga as a nationalist icon by the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) that has ruled the country since its independence from Portugal in 1975. What the Portuguese saw as ‘sexual deviancy’, as we are shown, was just regressive Catholic thinking about the culture of male concubines, for example. In the first episode, we are introduced to Kia Ituxi, Njinga’s favourite concubine and father to her infant son. Their togetherness is shown with such tender warmth that the sequence becomes a form of reclamation and a rejection of Euro-centric ideals about sexuality.
Adesuwa Oni as Queen Njinga carries the weight of depicting all these histories. Her Nijinga is at once inexorable and almost constantly pushed to breaking point. We see a woman having to put on many faces– ruler, sister, diplomat, and warrior–each threatening to drown her own rage and sorrows. Through her, we see an evaluation of the nature of power itself and the multiple factors that can bestow or deny it. In Njinga’s fight against the Portuguese–invaders and enslavers—and her struggle against men like her brother, her gender is consistently a point of friction. Ultimately, we understand this telling of Nijina’s story as a contemplation of the cost of power and freedom.
While the series offers a historical figure as an icon of resistance, it doesn’t shy away from talking about the complex history of African kingdoms and their own entanglement with the slave trade. Both The Woman King and Njinga attempt to grapple with this past to a large extent. Njinga tells us how a group of mercenaries called the Imbangala was enlisted by the Portuguese, and how the infighting among the Imbangala itself was used to the advantage of warring African kingdoms.
Where it does appear to falter is while depicting the hierarchy in the Ndongo society, including the already existing practice of enslaving other African people captured in war. There is little essential critique, unlike The Woman King, which took a very clear stand on the matter.
Even today, makers of historic fiction centred on long-dead kingdoms in Indian cinema industries would do well to learn from Black filmmakers. In India, across film industries, such movies disregard the violence of caste. In this aspect, it demands an emphasis on how we not only see a shift in racial representation, but also an unravelling of colourism in Hollywood.
In recent times, the Black Panther movies foregrounded dark-skinned Black women in powerful roles. The director of The Woman King fought to cast a spectacularly fitting Viola Davis when studios wanted light-skinned Black actors instead. Such ruptures paved the way for reclaiming Njinga, a queen European historians had demonised. It is immensely satisfying that that reclamation was enacted by a superbly talented Black actor like Adesuwa Oni who has not only called out colourism in the cinema industry but also starred in the award-winning 2018 film No Shade that challenges the preferential treatment of lighter-skinned Black and brown people within these very communities.