Black Panther Soars To $225 Million Opening

I wasn’t expecting to write this series of articles for Black History Month 2018. It wasn’t until late January when I heard about Black Panther when everyone was cracking jokes about Wakandans. It turns out there was a HUGE market for this stuff in the United States:

“LOS ANGELES — Hail, King T’Challa.

The Disney-Marvel movie “Black Panther,” which finds the superheroic T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returning to his remote African kingdom to assume the throne, roared into theaters over the weekend as a full-blown cultural event, breaking box office records and shattering a myth about the overseas viability of movies rooted in black culture. Global ticket sales by Monday will total an estimated $387 million, according to comScore.

“Black Panther” instantly became the top-grossing film in history by a black director (Ryan Coogler) and featuring a largely black cast. The previous record-holder was “Straight Outta Compton,” which collected $214 million worldwide in 2015 — over its entire run — after adjusting for inflation. …”

Millions of black people will come away from this movie convinced that they would be as wealthy and technologically advanced as the Wakandans if da Whyte man hadn’t stole dey vibranium. This is a cultural phenomenon we will probably be dealing with for a long time.

In reality, some of the themes of this movie were enacted on a grand scale in many countries in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere herded millions of people into ujamaa villages and destroyed the economy. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah styled himself as the liberator of Africa and championed African unity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was an official policy called authenticité that forced Africans to LARP as ‘authentic’ Africans. In Ethiopia, Guinea and Angola, there was a descent into Marxism. The Portuguese were driven out of Guinea-Bissau.

Ethiopia was the only African country to really avoid European colonialism. It was located deep in East Africa like Wakanda. It was finally conquered by Mussolini’s Italy which liberated two million black slaves in the 1930s. We’re going to get into Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia next week. Ethiopia was the real world Wakanda for a generation of Jamaicans who wanted to move there.

I realize that none of this matters. The allure of the fantasy of Wakanda to African-Americans is so strong precisely because the reality of the history of Black Africa is so dismal. If Wakanda was a real place in Africa, Hollywood would have already made movies about it by now.

Whites are largely ignorant of African history. I’m doing this because many of these stories will probably come as a surprise to them. They have no idea how badly Africans wrecked Africa.