I finally figured out what is wrong underlying Black Panther!
It's the American perspective that African is a thing.
It stems from pretty much the only kind of African we have here in The States is African-American; and they were given a unifying identity from their shared descent from slaves.
Such a shared identity doesn't exist on the African continent. In most places it doesn't advance past tribe.
Rwanda proved that. The Hutus and Tutsis identities mattered far more than being Rwandan or African.
Ask Willard if the Shona and Ndebele identified themselves as Rhodesians or Zimbabweans.
For Christ's sake, it's not just the native peoples who have this problem, South African whites divide themselves into Anglos and Afrikaner (which ironically enough is Dutch for African).
For Wakanda to unify Africa, they'd have to conquer it. They'd have to colonize it and replace the native's values with their own. Just like the Europeans they spare some time to condemn in the film.
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That was part of it, for me. Yeah, they chose pieces of whatever they thought was cool across the entire continent and blended it into Wakanda. Another part that I noticed was the accent they chose to have everyone speak with. That's specific to one part of Africa. I had a Nigerian friend about 40 years ago who spoke like that. They don't speak like that in Northern Africa, and South Africans sound more like Europeans.
ReplyDeleteBut by far, the biggest thing that clogged my "suspension of disbelief" was the whole idea that this incredibly advanced, intricate civilization that has no footprint in the outside world. No imports of any material? That means no supply chain and they're entirely self-sufficient; everything from iron ore to rare earth metals. No energy signature detectable from the outside? And yet the street scenes looked like the stereotypical street market in someplace like Marrakesh?
Yes, it is literally easier for me to accept Thor coming down from Asgard when the 9 realms line up, or getting bitten by a radioactive spider gives a kid super powers than to believe that.
Even the Great One himself, Robert Heinlein, fell into that trap. He kept saying that the blacks in South Africa should rise up and slaughter their white oppressors. He thought that "black is black is black," and didn't realize that the blacks in South Africa were and are deeply divided by tribe. The Xhosa might not have liked the whites, but preferred their rule to the chance that the Zulus could get back into business (a lot of tribes have bad memories of that, on the scale of how a lot of people still feel about Japan in Asia) and the Zulus knew that the Xhosa outnumbered them and didn't like the idea of submitting to their rule. And those are just two tribes---there are many more. Not to mention the "coloured" and Asian populations, who had ideas of their own.
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