This week, the CIHA Blog is taking advantage of our multi-sited positionality to provide a unique set of reviews on the blockbuster film, “Black Panther.” Given the Blog’s focus on humanitarianism, and on bringing to the fore religious voices and critics of religion, the film resonates in many ways: it concerns a fictional African country that has never been colonized and consequently has never been or needed to be a site for either emergency or “development” aid from outsiders. African religious traditions are also showcased in the film. Our reviewers, writing from Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, and the U.S., bring a range of different perspectives to bear on these as well as other themes of the film.
We begin today with a review from Gerald Acho (from Cameroon, writing from Kenya), who discusses the long-standing history of portrayals of Africa as uncivilized and brutish in both popular culture and the academy. Given this historical context, Acho highlights the importance of positive narratives about the continent and hopes that “Black Panther” will be a flag-bearer for better portrayals of the African continent and its people.
This week also includes International Women’s Day (Thursday, March 8), and several of our reviews highlight the role of women and sexuality in the film. Stay tuned for a more critical perspective from Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo from South Africa, reviews from our Ghanaian partners and another Ghanaian studying in the U.S., and an assessment of whether the film has been less of a phenomenon in parts of francophone Africa, as well as a collation of some of the most interesting reviews we have read from across the continent.
“Black Panther”: A Break from Long-Standing, Ill-informed Portrayals of the “Dark Continent”
By: Acho Gerald Anji, HIPSIR
The African continent has from time immemorial been regarded as a Dark Continent. Western philosophers such as Hegel (1892) have even portrayed the people of the continent as uncivilized. This portrayal of the continent and its people as uncivilized and brutish was used as a justification by the early Christian missionaries to Africa who argued that their mission was to save the African lives and educate the people. The colonial masters also based their arguments for colonization on the premise that the African people cannot govern themselves. This explains why the French believed that the only way to educate Africans was to transform them into French people through their policy of assimilation. However, such depiction of Africa and the idea of transforming Africans into Europeans is what Mudimbe calls “epistemological violence” (1988).
Joseph Conrad in his novel Heart of Darkness (1899) depicts the African as a brute and cruel creature. This depiction of the African was greatly influenced by the image the colonial masters had painted about the African continent as a dark continent. Chinua Achebe critiqued Conrad’s novella as displaying the “dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination” (2001, 1793) and more of product of its times than an accurate representation. Over the years, many African thinkers have come to regard colonization as a process of crippling minds and exploiting the land of Africans. However, it has been more than sixty years since colonialism ended in most of Africa, yet the image of the continent remains the same in the minds of many authors who still write about the African continent as if it were a homogenous entity.
We live in times where music, movies, and documentary tend to tell a lot about the cultures and traditions of a people. Africa has often been portrayed in many Western movies as a corrupt, uncivilized, and brutal continent. This image of Africa has been challenged by the widely discussed and celebrated Marvel Studios film, “Black Panther” (2018). There are many commentaries about the movie, but I will focus on its positive Black imagery and the remarkable fact of a Hollywood portrayal of a black king. The film is the first of its kind and is important for us as Africans to appreciate the efforts of the director and producers of the movie who took a step in a positive direction towards changing the trajectory of perceptions of Africa as “underdeveloped” and “uncivilized” people.
Situated in the genre of fantasy, Wakanda is portrayed as a technologically advanced state that has utilized its valuable natural resources for the positive development for all its inhabitants. Most importantly, the Wakanda kingdom did not use its capabilities to conquer any other nation for personal gain or domination – a lesson that former colonialists could well have used. A slight drawback on this was the fact that they did not use these resources to benefit other nations in terms of humanitarian development, but the movie ends by the leadership making the decision to develop its humanitarian outreach programs and begin to share their advancements with the rest of the world. On the plus side is that initially, I think part of their reason for not sharing was so as to prevent those with bad intentions from gaining access to their resources/technology who would then go on to use it for personal gain and the destruction of others – this was a noble position.
Africa, as portrayed through the Wakanda Kingdom, is technologically advanced. I hope that this positive portrayal of Black people especially on the African continent will set in motion better narratives about the continent moving forward. Especially given the long-standing history of poor representations of Black Africa as outlined in this post, I appreciated the positive narrative about Africa that the “Black Panther” film is creating, and I hope the imagery present in the film will have long lasting effects on narratives about the continent and its people.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. 2001. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton. 1783-1794.
Conrad, Joseph. 1899. Heart of Darkness.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1892. The Philosophy of History. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover.
Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. African Systems of Thought. Indiana University Press.