America is inundated with narratives about the nobility of pre-colonial Africa. Hollywood’s “The Woman Queen,” is about an all-female warrior unit that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey, has elicited lavish praise from corporate media this past summer. High school curricula such as that peddled by the 1619 Project or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Hard History” excoriate the West for disrupting (and terrorizing) supposedly peaceful traditionalist African societies. And thousands of African American U.S. citizens have abandoned the nation of their birth by moving to countries such as Ghana in search of a better life — and
