The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Fewer movies have arrested international attention, and in particular captured the radical black imagination the way Black Panther has done.
The movie that was co-written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Kyle Coogler is directed by Ryan Coogler himself and produced by Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, an outfit that is owned by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Marvel Studios are famous for their productions under the series Marvel Comics of such superhero films as X-Man, Spider-man and The Incredible Hulk. Black Panther too is a superhero movie that profiles the historical, military and political hero T’Challa of the imaginary African and black Republic of Wakanda, a valiant black hero who overcomes challengers and all historical and political adversities. Wakanda itself is a miracle Republic of African and black development, advancement and progress combined.
In the animal kingdom, we must remember that a panther is a member of the cat family that includes lions, leopards, cheetahs and Jaguars, a monster that metaphorises courage and heroism.
In 1966, black Americans Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence which was a political organisation that vigilantly stood out for the protection of black political rights and for the opposition of political brutality against people of colour in the United States of America. Clearly, the title Black Panther for the present movie carries the connotations of black and African courage and suggests black and African political activism and heroism in a world that is enveloped by a multiplicity of forms of white supremacy.
Scholars and activists have been quick to describe the movie as a vivid representation of Afro-futurism and even radical decoloniality. The movie is not only optimistic but it is also convinced about the future of blacks and Africans as projected in the miraculous advancement of the Republic of Wakanda that is fictionalised in the story.
Wakanda the city state, the republic or the kingdom depending on how one reads the movie defies all stereotypes about African and black countries.
The majestic architecture, sky-scrappers built of bricks and blocks that are shaped after African bead designs, state-of-the-art flying objects and the true witchcraft of technology there in, are all re-inventions of the image of Africa as it has always been represented in the global media. Wakanda negates the representations of an Africa that Donald Trump recently compared to a toilet and projects an Africa of limitless possibilities.
The Enchantments of Black Panther
One of the highlights in the movie is the Dora Milaje, an all-female brigade of the special forces of Wakanda. The swift and stealth female commandos invoke the memory of Muammar Gaddaffi’s Amazon elite military unit of women soldiers. But the Dora Milaje are imaged after the Masai, tall and strong female fighters, and very dark.
It is enchanting for black, African and female people to watch a movie where a woman is boldly addressed as: General! Generalhood, the world over is a preserve of strong men. In a world of movies and of the media in general where heroes have been known to be white, Black Panther is a breath of fresh air with its black hero and many female achievers. The technological wizard behind the technologisation of Wakanda is a Tom-Boy girl called Shuri, the little sister of the king, a beautiful institution of a human being that walks with a bounce and says the most amazing things in a childish voice.
In our world scientists, inventors and technological wizards have always been men, especially white men, so Shura is a true discovery, and she seems to know it. At one interesting point of the movie Shura exclaims “don’t scare me like that, coloniser!” to a white and male CIA detail whose life she had saved with her out of this world science. The perplexing paradox which is one of the qualities of the movie is the overturning of roles and collapsing of stereotypes; medical saviours and messiahs have always been the Europeans, Americans and white specialists, not bouncing, beautiful and black African girls.
African minerals and other natural resources that brought slavery and colonialism upon Africa, and continue to not only to be siphoned by Empire but are the cause of many civil wars and western sponsored conflicts, have almost become a curse rather than a blessing to Africa. In defiance of this imperial and colonial reality, Wakanda makes full use of its powerful mineral and natural resource, vibranium, and resists external exploitation and interference. Wakanda becomes a miracle of self-determination and sovereignty in Africa as it shows what a people can do with their natural resources when left alone.
Further, Wakanda show what, as a human resource, women and children can do in developing their country and continent. Wakanda and its people are a defence first of human, then of black, African, female and youth potential and possibility in a world that has been damaged by imperialism and coloniality. Wakanda promises, in its fictive way that one day African countries will be donor countries and also reminds all of us that there was once a flourish of African civilisations before the slavish and colonial encounters that brought the historical, political and economic stagnation of the continent. Wakanda at once represents Africa’s powerful past and prosperous future.
The Slippery Politics of Representation
Debate rages and it will continue to rage on what Black Panther means to Africans and blacks. We have seen the black and female stars of the movie as a promise of liberation, and experienced the movie as a stubborn statement of African and black potential, Afro-futurism. The movie is written by blacks and acted by mainly black actors who speak African languages such as Zulu and Xhosa in the movie. The image of Africa and the dignity of the Africans and blacks is recovered and restored by the story that projects an African utopia, paradisal and majestic.
But it is still a movie. When it comes to money we know the political economy of the media and all media products, it is still the white people that own Marvel Studios that will reap the lion’s share of the harvest from a black story, by black people about black Africa and black Africans. Black effort always ends somehow in white profit and in white pockets.
There is also a way in which Black Panther almost collapses to some neo-tarzanism of an Africa of spears and arrows, a wilderness. Modern and western capitalism knows how to be black, to use black stories and black people and say those things that enchant blacks, but only for its own profit motives and not the liberation of the black world.
Capitalism knows, at its most venomous cruelty, how to make itself look indigenous, speak local languages and front people with black skins as its face, when it is still “white monopoly capital” as South Africans say.
At the end of the day, as Jeremy Tunstall says, the media are American, and we may add that their products no matter how black and African are for the profit of America. Something is forcefully colonial and imperial when a black story about black people of Africa by Africans and blacks is exploited for white profit.
The idea of Afrofuturism itself must be differentiated from such political discourses as the “Africa Rising” movement that circulates optimistic slogans about Africa when in reality the continent continues to be exploited and its human and mineral resources siphoned.
There was a time, however, and we must remember, when white capitalists would have found it better not to make money at all than support a story that projects blacks and Africans as heroes.
To invest and reap profits in black heroism by white people may not be such a total loss for blacks representationally. After all, as a media product, Black Panther does not have to use us but we can also use it, for instance to read our own revolutionary meanings into it, to inject into it our own discourses and derive from them the optimism and courage for Africa to work and be great again.
For Marvel Comics, Black Panther might really be another superhero comic that will bring the profits, but for those Africans and blacks that are equipped with an Afro-futurist and decolonial consciousness, the movie is a call to black excellence.
At the end of the day Wakanda may be an attitude and a mindset that motivates and inspires Afro-futurist and decolonial work.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Durban, South Africa:[email protected].
