Towards Wakanda Chadwick Boseman’s Passing and The Power and Limits of Afrofuturism
PHOTO CREDIT: ELSA YOUNG/ BUREAUX WRITTEN BY: CLARE CORBOULD
I f 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 colonization. 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 childhood” where history was meaningless. European powers dubbed it the “Dark Continent,” as if its people could never make progress. Fields of science emerged to classify human beings, relying on simplistic notions of evolution and psychology. They all agreed “black” people inhabited the ladder’s bottom rung. “We must find a way to look after one another … as if we were one single tribe.”
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