African Mythology in Hollywood: What the Screen Gets Wrong

I keep one number when I watch a film that borrows from this continent. Not box office. Not runtime. I count how long it takes for somebody on screen to name a people.

That is the whole test, and it is not a hard one. A country is not enough. "Africa" is not even close. Somebody has to say the Fon, the Akan, the Yoruba, the Xhosa — has to attach the borrowed thing to the people who made it. Most of what Hollywood has done with African mythology fails this test inside the first minute and never recovers. A few recent productions pass it before the title card.

Last winter I ran the count on a studio horror picture built entirely out of what it called voodoo: the drums, the doll, the candles, the priest lit from below like a monster. Ninety minutes. The count never started. Nobody said Haiti. Nobody said Benin. Nobody said Fon or Ewe. A religion with clergy, congregations, songs, initiations and a moral order had been used as weather.

Why does Hollywood keep getting African mythology wrong?

Because it takes its material from other films rather than from the people who hold the tradition. A studio picture about a spirit does not usually begin with a Yoruba priest or an Akan elder; it begins with the last studio picture about a spirit, which began with the one before that. Each copy loses the specifics — the region, the lineage, the language the name is said in — because specifics slow a genre down. What survives the copying is atmosphere: drums, masks, candlelight, a close-up of an old man's eyes.

The second reason is arithmetic. The continent holds well over a thousand languages and a corresponding number of belief systems, and no single one of them is "African mythology" any more than a Sicilian saint's day is "European religion". A script that wants a quick supernatural threat cannot carry that many footnotes, so it invents a nowhere — a village, an island, a forest with no map reference — and furnishes it with pieces taken from four peoples who never met. Chinua Achebe made the same complaint about literature in his 1975 lecture on Joseph Conrad, and it transferred to film almost unedited: the place becomes a backdrop for a visitor's crisis, and the tradition becomes set-dressing.

The horror was borrowed from an occupation

The zombie is the clearest case, and its paperwork is public.

Zonbi is a Haitian Kreyòl word. Vodou — the religion of Haiti, rooted in the Vodun of the Fon and Ewe peoples of present-day Benin and Togo, and reshaped in the Caribbean by enslaved people from many nations — carries a specific and sombre idea of a body worked after death. On a plantation island, that image means something exact. It is a story about ownership.

American audiences met it during the United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934. A travel writer named William Seabrook published The Magic Island in 1929, full of the scenes an occupying readership wanted. Three years later White Zombie put Bela Lugosi in a Haitian sugar mill, and the template was set: the religion as menace, its priest as villain, its language left untranslated. Most of a century of horror descends from that one commercial decision, and although the cinema zombie long ago lost even its Haitian address, the slander has not worn off. Vodou congregations still spend part of their public life explaining that they are a faith rather than a threat.

Notice what gets kept, and what gets dropped.

What it looks like when a production does the work

The count can start early. Ruth E. Carter's costume design for Black Panther (2018) is the example most readers have already seen: the border guards' blankets are Basotho, from Lesotho; the neck rings of the Dora Milaje are Ndebele; there are Maasai, Tuareg, Turkana and Suri references, each traceable to a people rather than to a mood board. Carter won an Academy Award for it. Wakanda is invented, and it works precisely because everything inside it is borrowed with an address. John Kani, who is Xhosa, spoke isiXhosa on set, and isiXhosa became the language of the kingdom.

Since then the naming has moved upstream, from the wardrobe department to the writers' room. Iwájú (2024) came from Kugali, a studio founded by Nigerian and Ugandan creators, co-produced with Disney Animation and set in a Lagos so particular that even the traffic behaves correctly. Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (2023) gave ten African directors an episode each, and several went straight to the myth they grew up inside. Supa Team 4 (2023) was created by Malenga Mulendema, a Zambian writer, and set in a future Lusaka.

None of these is a documentary and none of them owes anyone one. The difference is not accuracy in the museum sense. It is that the borrowing has a return address, and somebody from the tradition was in the room while it happened.

Èṣù was never the devil

Here is the standing error most worth correcting, because it is still repeated by people who mean no harm.

Èṣù (ESH-oo), also called Elegba or Elegbara, is an òrìṣà — one of the divine powers of Yoruba tradition, in Nigeria, Benin and across the diaspora. He is the messenger who carries words and offerings between people and the other òrìṣà, the keeper of the crossroads, the one who tests. He is a trickster in the exact sense that word has in oral literature: the figure whose mischief exposes what a person is actually like. He is not the enemy of God.

The confusion has a paper trail. Nineteenth-century Yoruba Bible translations needed a word for Satan and reached for Èṣù, and the equation stuck — in hymnals, in sermons, and eventually on film. Yoruba scholars and writers, Wole Soyinka among them, have objected for decades. When a screen story casts Èṣù as a demon, it is not drawing on Yoruba belief. It is quoting a translator's shortcut from the 1800s.

Versions differ, as they should. What Èṣù does in an Ifá verse in Ọ̀yọ́ is not identical to what Legba does in a Vodou house in Port-au-Prince, or what Elegguá does in Havana. Lineage and place change the telling. None of the tellings make him the devil.

A story you can retell; a practice you cannot

There is a line worth drawing here, and the screen almost never draws it.

A creation story can be retold. It is a story: actors, sequence, consequence, and people have been retelling it for centuries with their own emphasis. Anansi (a-NAN-see), the spider of the Akan of Ghana, belongs to a body of tales called anansesem — spider stories — told for pleasure and for instruction. Adapting them is what they are for; that is how they crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Akan people and turned up in the Caribbean and the American South.

A living practice is a different object. Ifá divination, performed by a babaláwo who has memorised an enormous body of verse; ancestor veneration, which is happening in the present tense in Ghana and Nigeria and Louisiana this week; the ceremonies of a Vodou house — these are not source material lying around unowned. They belong to lineages and to initiates. A film can show what a practice means, who performs it and where it sits in a community's life. What it cannot honestly do is turn a ceremony into a set of instructions, or invent one and call it traditional.

Names and terms

• Vodun — the religion of the Fon and Ewe peoples of Benin and Togo.
• Vodou — its Haitian development, with priests (oungan), priestesses (manbo) and congregations. "Voodoo" is the Hollywood spelling, and it carries the Hollywood baggage.
• Òrìṣà (oh-REE-sha) — the divine powers of Yoruba tradition, each with their own character, colours and stories.
• Èṣù / Elegba — the òrìṣà of the crossroads and the messenger between worlds.
• Ifá — the Yoruba divination system and the vast body of verse it draws on.
• Babaláwo — a diviner trained in Ifá; the title means "father of secrets".
• Anansi — the spider trickster of the Akan of Ghana.
• Anansesem — the Akan word for the tales he appears in: "spider stories".

What the number is actually for

I ran the count again last week, on the Kizazi Moto episode a friend had been pressing on me for months. It started inside the first thirty seconds — a place, a people, a name said the way its speakers say it — and then the film went off and did exactly what it liked, which was a great deal, and none of it respectful in the tame, careful sense. That is the point. Naming is not a limit on invention. It is the thing that makes the invention somebody's.

So the number I keep is not really seconds. It is one. One people, named once, out loud, and everything after that is free — the dragons, the spaceships, the liberties, the version your grandmother would argue with. What the ninety minutes of that horror picture proved is not that Hollywood is careless with African mythology. It is that a story which names nobody has nobody to answer to.

Akan storytellers open anansesem with a formula that gives the whole game away: we do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. The people saying it are, though. That is the part the screen keeps leaving out.