What’s Up With Wakanda?
By Malaika Magadza
Wakanda is a place of dreams. A symbol of what an African country could, or should, look like, had the continent not been redrawn as resource pools for its colonisers. It’s a what if. Undoubtedly, the world needed to reimagine Africa through a filter that wasn’t NGO lenses trained on suffering children, or wildlife documentaries revelling in our emptiness. But we don’t live in a what if. The reality of Africa is not utopic. And that’s okay.
Stick with me. Wakanda doesn’t exist. So, when all at once people’s Instagram/ Tinder/ location tags changed to ‘from Wakanda’ and the rallying cry from the Black American diaspora went up to ‘return to Wakanda’, one is reminded forcibly of the ‘kings and queens’ narratives of American hoteps, who take it upon themselves to remind all who will listen, and all who won’t, of the royal roots of Africa’s stolen people. What’s the problem with that? Well, nothing and everything. Pride in oneself, one’s Blackness, one’s Africanness, is vital. However, real talk, most enslaved people were ordinary people living ordinary lives.
This leads to the crux of my worry. What’s wrong with being normal? Pride resting in romanticised origin stories and a fictional state is conditional love. We’re celebrating wealth, riches, novelty. Wakanda is celebrated because it has what Africa doesn’t yet. But these are still Western binaries of worth. Civilised, uncivilised. Rich, poor. Praise, shame.
Wakanda mourns the loss of an African future that was stolen by its past, but just as much as Wakanda does not exist, it is real. Malawi or Eritrea or Angola may not evoke that fictional magic, but they are here, they are people, they are beautiful and exceptional in their struggles and mundaneness. What are we saying about how we see our own identities when we’re ashamed of reality? How do we beat our own othering? Glorify what our otherers consider powerful? Militarism and status? How we view Black bodies, and the attributes assigning value to Black and Brown bodies is still Western-led, still within the demands of capitalism. One must be impressive by Western standards to be considered valuable life.
We’re ashamed of how we look and match up, our passport poverty, how when we say where we’re from we can see them imagining jungles and flies around the head of a naked child. But just as Africa and Africans are real, African superheroes are real. All nations in Africa fought back against colonisers. Why look to Western screens for our heroes when we were raised by them? Africans fought for independence until 1994 with bare feet and empty stomachs and won against all odds. Wakanda’s narrative shouldn’t be painted over our own ancestors, our parents - real superheroes.
This all wouldn’t matter if African countries had meaningful representation to begin with. It‘s the extremes of media depictions of a violent, regressive, impoverished place and the futuristic glory of Wakanda that is so unhelpful: neither of these images are authentic. In creating a vision, Wakanda failed to see the African people it drew from. As Nhundu rightly points out, Black Panther was incredibly profitable for its makers, but perpetuated the mining and commercialising of African aesthetics. For example, Beyonce has drawn heavily from African sources but has never toured in Africa, and remains notably disengaged from the societies she extracts from and homogenises into theatricised, fetishised images of an ‘African culture’. In the words of South African filmmaker Emmanuel Ossai, “they gave us rhinos and ancestors'' and constructed an easily commercialised “black spectacle” for Western consumers. Africans, our history, our image, can’t be normalised until we grasp our own narratives and refuse to be complicit in our exotification in the Western eye, much less bask in it.
The issue of consumption recurs in these conversations. Black Panther was conceived by White Western men for Black-American audiences and it shows; but much like with hoteps, there is a risk of attaching to an image of Africa that is... unAfrican. Mandisa Kunene, studying in the USA, points out how selective and romanticised the “inauthentic” Wakanda that Black-Americans want to reconnect with is. Wakanda is elevated by wealth, militarism, and comparability to Western countries. As Nyabola emphasises, Wakanda is “a stand-in for the real Africa” whose capitalist triumphs we’re expected to revel in. Let’s be honest, it did little to alleviate ignorance towards Africa, homogenising the continent in outside minds even further. Why should we participate so enthusiastically in our own fictionalisation?
I’m not trying to dismiss Wakanda’s importance wholesale. Powerful imagery of Africa does matter, and projects like the AU’s Wakanda One might not be on the table without the excitement Black Panther generated. It has revitalised us and re-engaged the diaspora, but we cannot allow it to replace our own, real, sources of pride and identity.
About the Writer
Malaika Magadza is a recent graduate with a master’s degree in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an undergraduate degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of York. Malaika’s research focuses primarily on race and indigeneity, guerrilla warfare, and decolonisation in media.