A prince uses the talents of those at hand as if they were his own, and so seems more accomplished than a man has any right. If he's wise.

- Elizabeth Bear

/I guess every superhero need his theme music /No one man should have all that power/

- Kanye West, "Power"

_{Black Panther}

Two weeks since the release date, 700 million dollars later and the whole movie-going world is still reverberating with those two words. Black. Panther.

And those two other words: Wakanda. Forever.

Clearly, Ryan Coogler, Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman did something right.

Since this is the spoiler-free review (the spoiler-heavy one comes later when I have written it), I won't be saying much about the movie itself. You probably know the basics already anyway: King T'Challa, superhero-king of technologically advanced hidden East African Nation that is really an African-American fantasy rather than an African fantasty (well, really, it's both and it strives to be both on purpose and that is fantastic.) Vibranium tech. Bald badass Dora Milaje bodyguards. Badass fights. Awesome special effects.

Marvel

Suffice it to say, the movie is as good as everyone said it was. Believe. The. Hype. The costumes. The acting. The entire meaning of the whole enterprise for people of my skin colour who have not seen anywhere near enough heroes that look like us, dress like us, sound like us and in fact are us on the big screen. This is that movie you didn't know you wanted since you were five years old. Believe it. Watch it. Watch it twice. I have.

I therefore won't be saying much until my proper Skeleton of a Better Movie spoiler-heavy review is written. Instead, I am going to go all thematic on you. We are going to talk about royalty, we are going to talk about race and we are going to talk about how those things can both unite and divide us at the exact same time

So really, this is going to end up looking like a Human History X post. Here. We. Go.

_{Chief? Try King.}

There is a reason why, in every human culture and at every point in human history, we have always been fascinated by royalty. Queens. Emperors. Crowns. In the past, this was quite natural; most nations were ruled by kings and other such. It was the normal standard, the way things had always been done.

However, even today we are still just as fascinated by it. Our history and mythology, our fiction and our entertainment, they are a never-ending cavalcade of people sitting on thrones, making grand pronouncements, surrounded by loyal soldiers and devious courtiers, power and certainty flowing from their mouths down the line to strike hammer-blows of sheer consequence upon the world. Even if we ignore Game of Thrones and look at real life, what do we see? Kate Middleton and that girl from Suits marry a couple of state-sponsored celebrities from the UK and everyone loses their goddamn minds.

What is it about kings and queens that makes them such an irrepressible part of our human psyche?

Maybe it's the authority. Maybe it's the story potential of being able to take all the complexities of government and politics and condense them into the person of a single human, take all the nuance of geopolitical strategy and re-render it as interpersonal tactics. Maybe it's the pomp and pageantry of court, of being unified by culture, connected to a shared past by the link of a single bloodline, redolent of ritual, close to religion, the religion of nation from a time when they were essentially one and the same, king an unbroken line to king all the way up to gods. Maybe it's that the vast majority of humans are followers and you can't be a follower without someone you think is worth following.

_{maybe it's just the cool clothes.}

'"... Every white nation, even Belgium, found its slaves on the continent of Africa. From then on, African kings learned that they must surrender their sovereignty or accept deportation. The title "King" was changed to "Chief," so that even now if an African ruler calls himself "King," it sounds ridiculous to the uninformed white observer."

- Nwafor Orizu, Without Bitterness (1944)

Now, let's talk about race. For Nigerians in particular and Africans in general, race doesn't really exist. We love or at least, comfortably tolerate white people and they're generally pretty happy to see us too. We treat them like kings when they deign to grace us with their presence. They love our sun and how it tans or burns their skin and they love the "colorful" bustling messy intensity of life in the third developing world and boy oh boy do they love the money they make here.

No, we are not really about race in Nigeria because, just as the fish does not taste water, we care not that we are black because we are all black. The conflict here, the outlet for good old natural human xenophobia has invariably been about tribe. Igbo versus Hausa. Hutu versus Tutsi. Black on Black.

NOPICTURES

In America however, things are a little different. When you are of African descent in America, you are black. If you are half-black (like Obama), guess what? You are black. You will be treated black because that is what you are. More importantly, you are specifically and specially not-white.

How did this happen?

Centuries ago, Europeans came to Africa to expound and to explore, but soon the mission changed. They came then to exploit, to extract, to colonize and then eventually to take, take everything they could until eventually they took even the people. Blacks were kidnapped, blacks were deceived, blacks were sold by other blacks -- in all cases, the outcome was the same. Slavery. Many nations were guilty of this unspeakable crime but America -- ahhhh, America drank deep of this poisoned chalice, so deep that they fought an entire war amongst themselves on the subject and have now spent centuries pretending that it doesn't matter, that it's all in the past, that blacks should have gotten over it by now, that those actions don't have consequences.

Oh, but they do.

Their history is forever marred by this brutal multi-generational trauma, this dark venomous undertow of racism that has soaked and even dried into the fabric of their nation. Jim Crow Laws, crack, guns, the prison-industrial complex, the disruption of the black family and the black community by all of the above, together formed a never-ending physical, social, psychological onslaught and undertow of racism that soaked through the fabric of society from top to bottom; white contemptuous of black (while still happy to appropriate whatever nuggets of culture and excitement form under that pressure), of black enraged by white (while envious and aspiring to the prosperity and power they hold) -- this is the shadow that undergirds the American Dream. For centuries followed by decades, Blacks have suffered relentlessly at the hands of whites, have been forced to fight for the right to work, to earn to vote, to live, to be considered fully human. This onslaught on the black mind and society has made it almost impossible for blacks to flourish on that side of the world.

Almost.

'"... Nigerian communications became infinitely better and the Biafran monitors heard clipped British voices issuing instructions across the ether. Complex co-ordinated manoeuvres previously beyond the scope of the Nigerians became the order of the day."

- Fredrick Forsyth, The Biafra Story (1969)

Meanwhile, back in Africa, nations ruled by blacks have been nigh-unmitigated disasters. WIthin months and years of the colonial masters leaving us to our own devices, we were embroiled in civil war after civil war, tribal conflict after tribal conflict and infrastructural failure of epic proportions. Is it our fault? Oh most assuredly yes.

Is it all our fault? Hmmmm. Consider the words of the famous British writer Frederick Forsyth in the quote above from his book about the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War written live from the trenches during the war. British interference in a internal conflict in a country they had supposedly relinquished all colonial holds upon. You see?

That is a microcosm of what actually happened to all of Africa. Colonialism never ended, it just mutated into capitalism. Thomas Sankara saw this and he died for it. Patrice Lumumba saw this and he died for it (I am not speculating here, the American CIA declassified their direct involvement in his death.) Africa was thoroughly infiltrated by the Western powers and sabotaged at every turn so that our good leaders would die and venal corrupt wastes of human skin would rise to the top and stay there, so that our resources would remain cheap, so that we would continually buy back the finished products made from those same resources, so that we would stay in debt to them for a hundred years and more.

It worked. Brilliantly. They handed us the matches and we lit ourselves on fire happily. They handed us kerosene and we poured it on.

Great. Now we're all very pissed off and sad, yes? What does all this have to do with Black Panther? I will answer.

What if there was a country where none of that happened?

_{I'm talking about Wakanda}

What if there was an African country that kept its resources, that was never colonized, from whose borders not one single slave was taken let alone sold, that retained complete secrecy, that grew in time and pride and strength and then emerged in the modern world to reveal itself? What would that be like? Africans on par with and in many ways better than the Western powers -- and most of all, free. A nation that kept its culture and its history and its religions, unbroken and uncompromised.

What would that be like? Welcome to Wakanda.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we have two continents. North America and African Africa. On one, blacks used to be and (truly) remain unofficial second-class citizens, their history erased from their sight but heavy as a mountain on their backs. On the other, blacks rule in a morass of corruption and infrastructural failure. their history rendered irrelevant by the now. On one, blacks are damaged by racism and the present-day iteration of slavery that is the prison-industrial complex. On the other, blacks are damaged by colonialism, hosed by greed, screwed by the neo-colonialism that is eclipse-phase capitalism. Both have been so separated by time and pain and space that blacks in America look to Africa for a past they can never regain and blacks in Africa look to America for a future that seems not to include them.

_{representation matters}

Enter Black Panther, the megablockbuster movie with a cast of blacks, a crew of blacks, an audience of blacks (and everyone else) that is shaking Hollywood to its core?

So, what is Black Panther? Black Panther isn't just a Marvel movie, it isn't even just the Marvel Black Superhero movie. That's too small. Black Panther is the Black Star Wars, the Black Star Trek, the Black James Bond all in the span of a single incredible project that we never really believed would happen. Now we out here inspiring children and giving them heroes that Look. Like. Them. Now we out here believing in our selves.

I know. It's ridiculous. It's just a movie. Get Real. Grow Up. Real Problems. Boko Haram. Chibok Girls. Corruption. Money-Eating Snakes. All True.

However.

As I myself once said before, "... dreams are ephemeral things that barely survive the light of waking — and yet all reality is shaken by contact with them."

What is a movie if not a shared dream? If the dream of one can shake reality, what can the dream of a million, ten million, a hundred million inspired black fans do?

#wakandaforever!

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