“The Woman King” has been billed as a “powerful true story.” But one wonders what Kossola and Hurston—one of America’s first Black woman filmmakers—would make of its narrative. For one thing, Ghezo was not a reluctant participant in the slave trade. He fought hard to preserve it from the British, formerly his favorite customers, who blockaded the coast and unsuccessfully lobbied for abolition at his court. His defeat of Oyo led to an explosion in the number of slaves sold at Ouidah—a commerce that he zealously defended, once giving a British envoy a six-year-old girl as a gift for Queen Victoria. Nor do I know of any evidence that the *Agojie* ever resisted the trade. Some used their voices to clamor for war in the royal council, expressing on one occasion a preference for invading weaker neighbors: “If we fail to catch elephants, let us be content with flies.” The film’s conceit is, charitably, an elaborate exercise in wishful thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice if Dahomey’s brave women warriors had also been fighters for justice?