Black Panther is more than just an Oscar-winning part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is a cultural phenomenon, not least due to how it brought to life the source material, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, from the characters, to the setting, to the fictional African nation of Wakanda itself.
Director Ryan Coogler crafted a world that resonated with many in the African diaspora, stacking his cast with incredible Black actors and groundbreaking production design by Hannah Beachler that leaned heavily into African art history and Afro-futurist aesthetics.
The Wakanda that Black Panther and its sequel, Wakanda Forever, created on the big screen has come to represent, particularly for Black audiences, a connection to culture, strength, and legacy that white supremacy still seeks to repress; soon after its release, critic Natasha Alford summed it up in The New York Times as “a master class in what it means to be proud of who you are.”
A tweet from a now-suspended account unfavorably compared Wakanda to Chicago, a city often name-dropped by alt-right trolls as a kind of racist shorthand. In a display of trollery, a screengrab of the tweet is being used as a springboard and cudgel by some other tiresomely “anti-woke” Twitter accounts. One account even harkens back to the “go back to Africa” jibes of the Jim Crow era.
Other Marvel fans were quick to piggyback, perhaps unaware of what they were playing into.
One user brings up a lame point about Wakanda, but an interesting one about Chicago.
And apparently, the image on the right isn’t even of Chicago:
But, let’s face it, we think this is reading the initial post, whether or not it’s the work of a troll, a teeny bit too literally. We don’t think there are many people out there who genuinely believe Wakanda is a real place; it’s always been an imaginary vision of what an African country might have achieved if it weren’t for European colonists plundering them for resources and enslaving their peoples. Well, perhaps they wouldn’t have flying cars, hyper-advanced tech, and rhinoceros mounts, but the point still stands.
Life in Wakanda will be the focus of an upcoming Disney Plus show, said to be an origin story for Danai Gurira’s Okoye. Ryan Coogler’s studio Proximity Media is working with Marvel Studios on the show, with Gurira confirming that she’s already signed a deal to reprise the role. More on that as we hear it, but we hope other Marvel Studios movies and Disney Plus shows return to Wakanda, as even if we can never visit, the country exists in the imagination of audiences around the world.