Towards Wakanda – Chadwick Boseman’s passing and the power and limits of Afrofuturism
If you’re not a comics fan, you may have been surprised at the extent of the heartfelt grief expressed following the death of actor Chadwick Boseman.
One explanation lies in the extraordinary power of the 2018 movie Black Panther, in which Boseman starred as T’Challa/Black Panther, to address racist stereotypes about Africa and Africans.
Boseman’s character was heir to the hidden kingdom of Wakanda, a mythical African nation free of European colonisation. The film’s subtext explores African Americans’ varying identifications, past and present, with Africa and a global Black diaspora.
Dark continent
Westerners’ ideas about Africa are steeped in myth. The United States, wrote German philosopher Georg Hegel in 1830, was “the land of the future”. Africa, by contrast, was “the land of chi...