Black Panther’s Afro-optimism can tame scramble for Africa

In the wake of the referendum in Crimea and Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, this column predicted that creeping western isolationism could set off a new scramble for Africa (SN, March 22, 2014).

With the election of Donald Trump, America has shrilly returned to isolationism — with Trump’s ‘America first’ mantra as its emblem — with many fretting that the 21st century might become even more violent and insecure than previous centuries.

It is with this spectre of isolationism and resurgent racial populism in mind that I watched the much-vaunted film, Black Panther.

Since making its debut in Los Angeles on January 2018, Black Panther has become sensation in Africa and its diasporas, and a commercial success, netting in over $1.2 billion worldwide and ranked as the highest-grossing film of 2018 and 10th highest-grossing film of all time.

STUDIES
Arguably, the film is Hollywood’s response to a growing African film industry (Nigeria’s Nollywood is now the world’s second largest film industry after India’s Bollywood).

Significantly, Black Panther is also making a powerful entry into the academy, inspiring fervent scholarly reviews and discourses on the pasts and futures of Africa.

The most recent of these is by Professor Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice-Chancellor, United States International University (USIU, Nairobi) titled: Black Panther and the Persistence of the Colonial Gaze (March 31, 2018).

Black Panther is radically different from earlier films on Africa such as Professor Ali Mazrui’s The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986) or Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Africa’s Great Civilizations (February 2007), both of which took a melancholic scholarly gaze at Africa’s pasts to explain the present, with little imagination of the continent’s future.

WAKANDA
Black Panther exudes with the 21st century afro-optimism and imaginations of an African continent rising.

It heralds “an historic opportunity to depict a black superhero” at a grave moment when African-Americans and African immigrants are facing vilification and dehumanization across the post-liberal West, but also powerfully affirming their identities.

The film’s storyline centers around Wakanda, a fictional African nation-state.

Centuries ago, five African tribes fought over a meteorite containing vibranium, a fictional rare metal found in mineral-rich Wakanda.

One warrior ingests a “heart-shaped herb” containing vibranium, gaining superhuman abilities, and becoming the first “Black Panther” and King of Wakanda.

VIBRANIUM

Even then, one tribe, the Jabari, opposed the four-tribe coalition that governed Wakanda.

Wakanda’s power rests on its vibranium, which its founders use to develop advanced technology.

But the Wakandans isolated themselves from the world by posing as an underdeveloped Third World country.

The film imaginatively explores challenges in African politics, development and diplomacy.

One is political transitions and elections as moments of Africa’s great vulnerability.

King T’Chaka, the Black Panther, kills his brother, Prince N’Jobu, in America for helping Ulysses Klaue, a British black market arms dealer, to steal large amount of vibranium from Wakanda.

This sets stages for a fierce succession war between T’Chaka’s heir, T’Challa, and his estranged African-American cousin, Erik Kilmonger (N’Jobu), which degenerates into a cataclysmic ‘inter-tribal’ warfare. 

MALCOM X
Finally, T’Challa defeats Killmonger, ending his plan to share Wakanda’s technology with people of African descent around the world.

Second is the role of African Diasporas, imagined collectively by the African Union as Africa’s “Sixth Region”.

In some ways, Black Panther brings to mind the Black Panther Party (1966-1982), the anger and strident radicalization of African-American politics in the wake of the assassination of Malcom X in 1965 and the waging of the African struggle on a global scale.  

Killmonger displays the Black Man’s anger and militancy forged on the anvil of the violence, isolation and despair of America’s inner city and the trenches of its imperial wars.

Third, despite the sophistication of 21st century diplomacy, Africa is still a fertile frontier of western hippies, spies and black market wheeler dealers who contribute to Africa’s instability.

One is Ulysses Klaue who allies with Killmonger to steal a Wakandan artifact from a London museum.

Kaue is killed by Killmonger as he tries to sell vibranium from Wakanda to a CIA age Everette K. Ross in Korea.

GENDER
Fourth is the politics of gender in Africa.

Black Panther makes daring efforts to imagine a futuristic Africa of gender equality and even progressive leadership of women.

The Maasai of Kenya are said to have inspired about 80 per cent of the futuristic imaginations of the design of Wakanda’s Dora Milaje, a fictional all-female special forces that envisions women as bastions of African militaries in the turbulent 21st century.

But Dora Milaje also shares similarities with the ‘African Amazons’ (“our mothers”), the Fon people’s all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Republic of Benin.

But relics of a patriarchal society linger on in Black Panther. 

TECHNOLOGY
Fifth is the role of technology in harnessing Africa’s global influence.

The film has a message for modern African rulers: Guard and use Africa’s mineral wealth signified by vibranium — whose rarity relates to the real-life mineral coltan found almost only in Congo — for the benefit of its people.

Wakanda symbolize Africa’s hi-tech future, reflected in the sophistication of the technological centre where Shuri heals and shocks Everett Ross.

Sixth, the film envisions a future Africa intellectually anchored on the progressive African aesthetics and personality imagined by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah decades ago.

SHARING

It relies on music recorded from local musicians from Senegal and South Africa to form the “base” of its soundtrack and displays the symbology, colour and richness of “African cultures”.

But Wakanda’s “futuristic city” reflects a new Africa designed with steel and glass.

However, while trying to hone in on some of the well-known histories, cultural influences, the film incurs the wrath of critical African historian, who rightly sees a dangerous recycling of old and tired colonial stereotypes.

Finally, the film is an avowed rejection of isolationism and an advocacy of the need for humanity to share technology and wealth for the benefit of all.

Despite its many flaws, Black Panther is “a tribute to the Afro-centric imaginary of Africa” and a trailblazer for futuristic films on Africa, and a refreshing and beautiful rendition of a continent rising.

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute