The Problem With Hollywood’s Africa 

The Woman King opens with a narrative choice that immediately signals what’s to come. A voice-over, delivered in what can only be described as a Hollywood-manufactured African accent, introduces us to the legend of the woman king. This foreshadows the film’s broader struggle with cultural authenticity, particularly in handling narrative, accents, and dialects.

Throughout the narrative, a subtle war unfolds alongside the central Dahomey-Oyo conflict. This secondary battle plays out in the realm of authentic accents, where the performances create an uneven acoustic landscape. John Boyega’s accent is a notable highlight, while other performers, including Viola Davis, deliver interpretations that feel disconnected from the historical and geographical context of 19th-century West Africa. By the end of the film, one reaches a certain conclusion: the film prioritizes Western accessibility over cultural authenticity.

The Woman King is just one example in a troubling pattern that has persisted for decades. In Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, the fictional kingdom of Zamunda was rendered as a simplistic, animal-filled fantasy. The sequel, Coming 2 America, leaned even harder into outdated tropes, animals leapt from bushes, and the film doubled down on tired clichés of African poverty, disease, and conflict. While the original 1988 release could be chalked up to the ignorance of its time, the 2021 sequel had no such excuse. Despite the global reckonings around race and representation sparked by movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, the franchise failed to evolve.

Similarly, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) turned the San people of Southern Africa, a complex, indigenous hunter-gatherer group, into comedic fodder. While its humor may have had entertainment value, the film’s portrayal was ultimately undignifying. Director Jamie Uys built the comedy on exaggerated stereotypes and mockery, inviting laughter at cultural differences and the people themselves. Despite its global commercial success, the film reduced the San to objects of amusement rather than offering any meaningful engagement.

These depictions are part of a broader cinematic trend in which Africans are often framed as loud, overly expressive, and abusive to their children, while white characters are portrayed as more composed and morally upright. The sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola is a modern example. Despite its premise as an American-Yoruba romantic comedy, the show stumbles in its cultural authenticity. While Folake Olowofoyeku delivers a technically accurate Nigerian accent as Abishola, her character becomes a Yoruba mother caricature, heavy-handed with her son and emotionally distant from her American husband, Rob Wheeler. The show reduces the complexity of Yoruba women to a series of predictable behaviors, missing the nuanced reality of their lives and relationships.

The cultural missteps become even more apparent with the introduction of Abishola’s Yoruba mother, who arrives from Nigeria with no semblance of a Nigerian accent. Additionally, the show’s arbitrary use of Ankara fabric by various characters further demonstrates its superficial engagement with Nigerian culture. Similarly, the 2006 movie Phat Girlz, for example, features Nigerian doctors speaking in an accent that exists neither in Yoruba nor English traditions, butchering the few Yoruba words they attempt to pronounce.

Even high-profile music projects like Beyoncé’s Black Is King, despite its visual splendor, fall into the trap of cultural oversimplification. While the production aims to celebrate African heritage, it inadvertently reinforces a romanticized vision that flattens the continent’s complexities. The project presents Africa through an African American lens, creating a wealthy, harmonious fantasy that glosses over the continent’s ethnic diversity and economic realities. While attempting to challenge colonial narratives, it ironically filters Africa through Western eyes.

This tendency to reduce Africa to either an opulent fantasy or a site of suffering also extends to documentary filmmaking. Many Western-produced documentaries fall into what critics call “poverty porn,” depicting Africa solely through images of starving children and dilapidated infrastructure. The continent exists in multiple states simultaneously: traditional and modern, wealthy and developing, urban and rural. Western media’s inability or unwillingness to portray this nuanced reality does a disservice to the richness of African cultures and experiences.

These misrepresentations in contemporary media are not accidental; they stem from Hollywood’s long history of distorting Black narratives. Early film history was marked by the widespread use of harmful stereotypes, with Black characters consistently relegated to roles that emphasized subservience, criminality, or comic relief, reflections of the era’s pervasive racial prejudices.

However, counter-narratives emerged in response. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s sparked a cultural revolution, redefining Black identity across literature, music, and film. In the 1960s, a collective of African American students at UCLA pushed for more nuanced cinematic storytelling. Their work was instrumental in challenging negative stereotypes, particularly in the portrayal of black music and everyday life. Despite these strides, Hollywood remained reluctant to invest in authentic Black storytelling until the success of Black Panther forced a shift in industry perceptions.

Yet, Hollywood’s financial structures still reflect systemic bias. A revealing McKinsey and Company study quantified the cost of racial inequality in entertainment at approximately $10 billion annually. The study also exposed a troubling disparity: films featuring Black leads or co-leads receive budgets averaging 24% lower than those without. This economic bias persists despite mounting evidence that authentic, well-funded Black stories resonate with diverse audiences and achieve significant commercial success.

One consequence of this systemic exclusion is Hollywood’s continued dominance over African stories, even when African filmmakers are best positioned to tell them. The controversy surrounding the adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone illustrates this ongoing struggle. Despite initial promises to prioritize African talent, particularly Nigerian actors who could authentically represent the story’s Yoruba cultural context, the casting decisions largely defaulted to Hollywood’s conventional patterns. This raises concerns that the film will resort to Hollywood’s generic “African” accent and stereotypes, reinforcing the industry’s reluctance to engage with true cultural specificity.

This recurring cycle of misrepresentation underscores an issue Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie refers to as the danger of a single story. Nigerian actors are not seen as good enough to represent their own stories. Films like Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave, which capture black struggles, are crucial in documenting historical injustices, but their dominance could risk overshadowing the full spectrum of black experiences. 

The 2003 Nigerian film Osuofia in London offers a counter-example of how cultural stories can be told with authenticity and humor. Director Kingsley Ogoro and star Nkem Owoh created a narrative exploring cultural collision without reducing the Nigerian or British characters to stereotypes. In Nollywood, there is an untapped potential for Nigerian filmmakers to take control of their narratives. Netflix’s strategy of partnering directly with local filmmakers has yielded promising results, with films like Isoken proving that Nigerian stories can maintain cultural integrity while reaching global audiences.

The push for diverse storytelling should never come at the expense of authenticity. True representation isn’t about inclusion for its own sake, it’s about telling stories in ways that honor their origins. As Kunle Afolayan noted, reducing dependence on external platforms and strengthening Nollywood’s infrastructure is key to maintaining creative control. By investing in high-quality storytelling and asserting ownership over its narratives, Nollywood can define itself as the authoritative voice for Nigerian stories rather than allowing Hollywood to misinterpret them.

The ongoing discussions among Nigerian creators on social media about improving script quality and storytelling depth reflect a growing recognition that change must come from within. The ultimate goal isn’t to compete with Hollywood’s version of Nigerian life but to render it irrelevant. By proving that authentic stories have universal appeal, Nigerian and African filmmakers can reshape global perceptions on their terms.