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Wakanda: A Nation Without Chains
The mythical African nation in 'Black Panther' is allowed to thrive on its own terms—offering a fascinating and rooted alternative to existing Western notions of nation-building.
by Agunda Okeyo
It's funny to call a blockbuster movie "authentic." Especially when that movie was conceived specifically for enormous financial gain, features an elite cast, many of whom were classically trained at places like Oxford and Yale, and depicts a fictional nation that somehow escaped the horrors of slavery and colonization.
And yet, as a Kenyan and the daughter of an African feminist anthropologist, I found Black Panther remarkably authentic. Throughout, it remains true to itself as a fictional world. Even more importantly, it draws heavily on truisms in the real world across Africa and her diaspora to tell a story that is at once familiar and totally unexpected.
In numerous interviews, thirty-one-year-old African American director Ryan Coogler, who also directed the critically acclaimed films Fruitvale Station and Creed, articulates the care with which he and co-writer Joe Robert Cole of American Crime Story approached the script. And the specificity woven into the film's costume design, casting, language, and accents in the film, has been well-documented. Even the electric soundtrack produced by rapper Kendrick Lamar is reflective of this tender attention to various African traditions.
But the most impressive element? Black Panther's mythical quasi-utopia, Wakanda. While it reads as an Afrofuturist dream, it also offers profound truths about how a genuinely progressive nation succeeds.
In Wakanda, gender parity, technological innovation, and a reverence for tradition without stagnation lead the way. World leaders should definitely take note—there is much to be learned from African cultures outside of the stereotypical gaze, and from the film's Afrofuturistic vision.
At the core of Black Panther's jubilance is the agency and diversity of its female characters. There are four women central in the film: Princess Shuri, the nation's foremost scientist and young sister of the titular Black Panther, King T'Challa; Nakia, a national spy who crusades for social justice; less prominently, T'Challa's love interest; Queen Mother Ramonda, the regal mother of King T'Challa; and Okoye, leader of the royal guard and general of the national armed forces.
Unlike 2017's Wonder Woman, Black Panther represents many facets of womanhood, and the audience isn't forced to choose a favorite. Each of these four women looks different, is endowed with specific individual talents, and has clear point of view. And because Wakanda is drawn from diverse African cultures, a great deal of the qualities that viewers adore in them exist in real African communities and traditions.
For instance, the royal guard led by Okoye, played by an arresting Danai Gurira, is based on the 19th-century royal guard of King Houegbadja of the kingdom of Dahomey, now the modern-day Republic of Benin. King Houegbadja's all-female army, Ahosi of Dahomey or the "Dahomey Amazons," were respected and feared warriors. Growing up, I learned many things about Africans in pre-colonial times, but the Dahomey Amazons stand out in my memory.
Contrary to popular belief, many African cultures and traditions are quite advanced. In a time when Western constructs are so clearly failing across the globe, a franchise about an African nation allowed to thrive on its own terms presents a fascinating alternative.
Equally fascinating is Princess Shuri, played the bright and endearing Letitia Wright, who wields enormous power as the nation's chief scientist. She works almost exclusively manipulating the benefits of the precious Wakandan mineral Vibranium, the source of the country's wealth. Vibranium powers trains, is the key element in their weapons, undergirds their infrastructure, and even gives Black Panther his claws.
Shuri's real world counterpart might well be the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize: late Kenyan biologist and environmental activist Wangari Maathai. Maathai introduced the idea of community-based tree planting to the region and developed this idea into a broad-based grassroots organisation The Greenbelt Movement, which her daughter continues. In traditional cultures, African women are often the healers, tending to the health of the environment and people. My own grandmother, as according to the traditions in Western Kenya, ran the homestead—there, women manage the land.
Contrary to popular belief, many African cultures and traditions are quite advanced. In a time when Western constructs (North-South divisions, environment vs. employment, and twentieth-century notions of one-size-fits all democracy) are so clearly failing across the globe, a franchise about an African nation allowed to thrive on its own terms presents a fascinating and rooted alternative to existing Western notions of nation-building.
Although Wakanda has a ruling royal family, economic inequality appears absent. Egalitarian principles are the cornerstone of Wakandan civilization so the benefits of the wealth generated by Vibranium are shared widely for an economically stable and thriving culture. A scene in the film beautifully illustrates this when Nakia (the resplendent Lupita Nyong'o) and King T'Challa (a regal and compassionate Chadwick Boseman) walk the streets of Wakanda without an entourage. Yup, there are no military parades in Wakanda, but a sense of inclusion and vitality.
I've written a number of times about the mineral wealth of Africa, the richest continent on earth. Africa is the source of a lion's share of Western cumulative wealth: From gold bullion in the banks, to museum artifacts, to animals in zoos, to the coltan and tantalum that power all electronics, to the human beings who bankrolled Western domination as slaves. In imagining an African nation in total control of its land, people, and natural resources, the film presents a real history of pre-colonial egalitarianism in Africa and also the potential to reimagine a future where Africans control those resources. In my own culture in Western Kenya, in addition to each family having their own land to sow, we traditionally had a plot of open land available to anyone in search of food; only after the British arrived did structural (inescapable) poverty exist.
Wakanda is an interesting society perhaps most of all because of its conflation of tradition and innovation. In a time when "tradition" in Western culture conjures nativism, gestapo-like raids or mass deportations, and a general panic towards the future, Wakanda looks very ideal. The nation of Wakanda is made of up several tribes with their own traditions, but the nation holds to shared rituals. In a mesmerizing scene when T'Challa is coronated, all the tribes are present in full regalia standing atop the various ledges of a dammed waterfall. It's a truly eye-popping scene of enormous scale, described by actors in the cast as reverentially as you feel when viewing it in theaters.
The character Killmonger, played by the delightfully menacing Michael B. Jordan, represents Western notions of domination as a mercenary figure who has an interesting connection to Wakanda. Killmonger isn't exactly a foil to T'Challa as a typical villain might be, but a complex, tragic figure that represents all the ultimately untenable notions of Western leadership that is literally killing the planet through unchecked capitalism and environmental degradation. He also represents Wakanda's past failings to share their knowledge beyond their borders to the wider global community.
Turning your back on the suffering of others, especially those who helped build your nation, assures self-destruction. But the opposite is also true—extending a hand when you have the resources to do so, assures the security of your nation without any shots fired.
Nakia is actually the first character to express a yearning to do more for people outside of Wakanda. In fact—mild spoiler—in the opening scene of the film we meet Nakia undercover disrupting the kidnapping of girls by a band of militants similar to the plight of Chibok girls in Northern Nigeria (dozens of whom were taken just days ago).
But it's Killmonger who drives this point home—turning your back on the suffering of others, especially those who helped build your nation, assures self-destruction. However, the opposite is also true—extending a hand when you have the resources to do so, assures the security of your nation without any shots fired.
To a great extent, Black Panther asks: what happens to people when they lose tradition or perhaps misremember it? And, what can happen when we balance the humanizing elements of tradition and world-changing innovations?
For many, it seems radical to show women leading without apology, technology reshaping and fundamentally helping society and tradition as clarifying the future rather than as a funny mirror to a false glorious past. My mother, Dr. Achola Pala, who writes about pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-colonial African society, was the first person to call me a radical because of an ability to suss out the root causes of things.
In many Western spaces, the word radical conjures negative or destructive images. But before that framing could affect me, my mother taught me the real definition of the word: to grab a problem at the root and remove any trace of the original defect. Or rather, that in order to make progress, the status quo must be challenged straight on—even if that means something must be lost to move forward.
If Black Panther is indeed is a radical tale, its $387 million global opening weekend and currently $500 million in sales worldwide is indicative of a world hungry for a radical story—a story where, for a change, women lead, black people set the tone, and the whole is bigger and more important than the sum of its parts.
Agunda Okeyo is a writer, producer, organizer, and activist who writes from a global perspective about race, gender, politics, culture, books, film, and comedy. She's @AgundaOkeyo on all social media.
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