The Yasuke Reclamation: Moving the African Samurai From Colonial Novelty to Global South Hero

Floyd Webb on reclaiming Yasuke through memory, cinema, and the long reach of African warriorship.

The Story Beneath the Controversy

The story of Yasuke, the African samurai, has become a global Rorschach test.
For Hollywood, he is a box-office premise. For gamers, a controversial character. But for those of us engaged in global Black cinema, he represents a far more urgent question: who has the right to tell our stories — and from what soil must those stories grow?

The uproar over Ubisoft’s 2024 game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows — featuring Yasuke as a playable protagonist — was just the latest skirmish in a longer war over historical imagination.

Online debates raged: could a Black man really have been a samurai in 16th-century Japan?

The question itself betrayed the problem — a failure to imagine Africa before the Middle Passage, or to see that the Global South had long been a world of warriors, traders, and diplomats before Europe monopolized the very concept of civilization.

From Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry to the Canceled Civil War Creed

In 2013, Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry told the story of Adéwalé, a man born into slavery in Trinidad who escapes, joins a pirate crew, and ultimately becomes an Assassin fighting to liberate enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean. The game followed him as he captained his own ship, raided slave-trading vessels, and helped build a free Black society in Port-au-Prince. It was a rare depiction of resistance in a major franchise — revolutionary, humanizing, and deeply political. Yet it came and went with little controversy.

It was, after all, a downloadable expansion — a spinoff of Black Flag, not a flagship title. That lower profile insulated it from the commercial and cultural scrutiny that a mainline game would face. A Black hero in the age of slavery could be tolerated in that format, nestled safely inside an established universe and distant enough from the present to avoid existential panic.

More than a decade later, the climate had shifted. In July 2024, reports surfaced that Ubisoft had canceled a planned Civil War–era Assassin’s Creed set during Reconstruction. The protagonist — a formerly enslaved man turned Assassin — would have returned south to confront the newly risen Ku Klux Klan.

While the rise of a virulent online culture war is a significant factor in this shift, it is an insufficient explanation on its own. A more complete analysis must also account for Ubisoft’s evolution into a risk-averse global corporation, the radically different commercial stakes between a small expansion and a tentpole title, and the uniquely volatile political resonance of the Reconstruction Era in the American psyche.

To attribute the cancellation solely to online toxicity overlooks critical context. The reported project represented an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry now defined by consolidation and layoffs. For a publisher seeking global, mass-market stability, the perceived financial and reputational risk of a story centered on the unfinished business of Reconstruction — a period that still shapes contemporary battles over race, citizenship, and historical memory — was enormous.

The decision, then, reflects less a single villain than a convergence of forces: a corporate calculus, a volatile culture, and an unresolved history. In that intersection, Assassin’s Creed ceased to be a franchise about rebellion and became a mirror of its own constraints — unable to risk telling the story it was born to tell.

That same pressure — now international in tone and algorithmically amplified — found its next target in Yasuke, a figure whose very existence disrupted the fantasy boundaries of both Japan and the West.

Who Owns the Samurai?

In Japan, Yasuke is not a mythic invention; he is a documented historical figure. His service under Oda Nobunaga is recorded in both Jesuit and samurai sources. Japanese artists, historians, and even children’s books have long treated him as an intriguing, dignified part of the country’s complex past.

But in the West, Yasuke’s very existence became a crisis.

Why? Because Western audiences have long cast Japan as a stage for their own samurai fantasies, where Japanese characters play bit parts in a white hero’s journey toward honor and mastery. From The Last Samurai to Ghost of Tsushima, the trope is the same: Japan is a spiritual gymnasium for Western self-discovery.

So when a Black man appears at the center of that story — a real one, no less — the fantasy collapses.

The problem isn’t that Yasuke is implausible; it’s that he breaks the racial contract of Western myth-making. In that contract, Black people are allowed to appear only within the narrow corridors of slavery, victimhood, or moral redemption. The idea of a free African adventurer, an elite warrior — one who travels, fights, and is respected in a foreign empire — contradicts every visual grammar Western audiences have been taught to recognize.

That ignorance of African history — centuries of trade networks, scholarship, and exploration stretching from the Swahili coast to the Indian Ocean world — feeds the disbelief.

Yasuke’s reality exposes a historical world where Africa was not isolated but interconnected, where Blackness existed outside of bondage. And that threatens the colonial narrative Western pop culture still quietly depends on: Africa as tragedy, not adventure; Blackness as burden, not mobility.

So the outrage over Yasuke isn’t really about Japan.

It’s about who gets to be mythic — and who must remain historical.

A Personal Quest

My own search for Yasuke began far from Japan — in Chicago, when I was eleven years old.

In the early 1960s, Chicago was a hotbed of Japanese martial arts. Few had been accepted into the kung fu schools of Chicago’s Chinatown at that time. After World War II, when Japanese American internees were released, Chicago was one of the few cities that would accept them. That openness transformed the city. By the time I was coming of age, dojos flourished in church basements, park district gyms and the YMCAs in Chicago. A Black kid in Bronzeville could learn judo from a master trained at the Kodokan or practice karate under a marine veteran who had once studied with Okinawan elders, in spite of the racism that existed in the martial arts. The Chicago Police Department discouraged official martial arts schools from accepting black students in the 1950s and 60s.

Chicago’s mix of cultures created an unlikely bridge across the Pacific — a meeting ground where discipline and diaspora met.

I bought my first judo and karate uniforms at Toguri Mercantile, a Japanese import shop owned by Madame Iva Toguri, the same woman the world would later know as Tokyo Rose.

One afternoon, as I flipped through martial-arts books in her store, I asked if she knew of a Kendo school. She smiled and said, “Yes — but when you go, ask the teacher about the African samurai. It’s a famous story in Japan.”

The idea stunned me. A Black samurai? It sounded like myth.

A few weeks later, I found myself in front of a stern Kendo instructor who dismissed the notion outright.

“I don’t know such a story,” he said. “How serious are you about training?”

That exchange stayed with me — a door half-opened and slammed shut.

But I was already serious, not only about martial arts, but about the histories hidden inside them.

In Chicago’s Black intellectual world, I found mentors: Frederic Hammurabi Robb, martial artist and historian, and J. A. Rogers, author of From Superman to Man and World’s Great Men of Color. They taught that our story didn’t begin in captivity. They taught me to read the silences — to follow the traces between African science, warriorship, and art.

For years, Yasuke remained a fragment — a rumor in a Chicago dojo, a footnote in a book. It wasn’t until I lived in East Africa during the liberation wars that the fragments fused into a clear picture. There, I finally understood what Eva Toguri’s quiet smile meant.

I saw firsthand the living traditions of African warriorship — the metallurgy, the spiritual order, the codes of discipline that shaped whole communities.

“The story of Yasuke didn’t begin in Japan. It began in Africa — and, for me, it began in Chicago.”

Before Japan: The Forgotten Lineage of African Warriorship

In the 14th to 16th centuries — before a unified Europe, before Britannia ruled any waves — Africa and Japan mirrored each other. Both were landscapes of city-states, warrior clans, and spiritual hierarchies.

In Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, and the Mutapa Empire, boys were trained from childhood in the arts of battle and balance. Metallurgy was sacred; the blacksmith was priest and engineer. Through the Limpopo River and Indian Ocean trade routes, African elites spoke Swahili, Arabic, and sometimes Chinese, mastering diplomacy and epic poetry alike.

Like the samurai, African warriors held dual identities: soldier and scholar, fighter and poet.

To understand Yasuke’s arrival in Japan is to understand that he came not from captivity but from an unbroken tradition of mastery.

“He was not a curiosity. He was a mirror.”

This was not a world of isolated tribes, but a connected Global South — a web of trade and cultural exchange stretching from Africa to Asia.

Yasuke didn’t step out of a vacuum; he moved between equals.

The Struggle Over the Story

For a decade, Hollywood has chased Yasuke’s legend: a Lionsgate feature once set to star Chadwick Boseman, a Netflix anime, a Warner Bros. script, and a live-action series with Omar Sy. Yet nearly every version stumbled into the same trap: they started him in chains.

By anchoring his identity in Jesuit reports, they framed Yasuke through the eyes of empire — the “exotic servant who rose.” Their imagination could not conceive of a man who was born free.

“Hollywood keeps finding Yasuke, but not his freedom.”

That is the creative blindness that Mandla Dube’s Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly — a co-production with Japan’s legendary Toei Company — seeks to correct.

Toei, home to Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Dragon Ball, built its reputation on mythic spectacle. Dube, the South African director of Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu and Silverton Siege, brings a liberation-cinema sensibility that Hollywood has never dared.

Together, they are crafting something new — a Global South collaboration that restores Yasuke to the world he truly came from.

The Global South Imagination

This is precisely the tradition that Dube and Toei are joining.

Yasuke’s story belongs beside the great warrior epics of the Global South — films that rejected empire’s gaze and redefined heroism through resistance.

Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo, where spiritual rebellion becomes political revolt.

Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen, where cosmology and science are one.

Med Hondo’s Sarraounia, where a queen defends her people with magic and modernity.

And in the East,  Gareth Huw Evans’ Indonesian Merantau with the Silat tradition, where motion itself becomes philosophy.

These works speak a shared language: struggle as art, defiance as memory. They are not Western hero myths of conquest, but Southern epics of return.

Way of the Butterfly stands firmly in that lineage — a bridge between Africa and Japan, between warrior cultures that once recognized one another across oceans.

The Tragedy That Taught the Lesson

When Chadwick Boseman accepted the role of Yasuke in the Lionsgate project, he reached out to me. He wanted to talk — and he was uneasy about the script. He didn’t like that it began with slavery.

We never got to have that indepth conversation. But his instinct was right.

Boseman understood something fundamental: representation without context becomes repetition. Telling our stories without our origins turns liberation into myth. His legacy — and Yasuke’s — remind us that the goal is not merely to appear in history, but to appear truthfully, carrying the weight of our civilizations with us.

Return

Yasuke’s story is not fantasy. It is memory — a record of connection, Africa and Japan in dialogue long before colonial maps redrew the world. And the new wave of Global South cinema — from Dakar to Jakarta, Johannesburg to Kyoto — is not inventing the future. It is remembering one.