{"id":92962,"date":"2018-06-10T13:28:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-10T17:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=92962"},"modified":"2018-06-10T13:28:01","modified_gmt":"2018-06-10T17:28:01","slug":"lost-wakanda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/lost-wakanda\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Wakanda"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WAKONDA\"<\/a>I have been a Black Panther fan for over half a century, ever since the character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s debut in <\/span>\u00c2\u00a0(1966). He has starred in his own title as well as being an important member of the Avengers super-team. Prince T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122challa, son of T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122chaka, was the creation of the greatest comic book visionary of all, Jack Kirby, whose various characters, series, and ideas are too numerous to list here. He pioneered a dynamism of illustration, panel composition, and character anatomy depiction hitherto unimagined. No one has since surpassed him, and his creations are ever-new, as witness this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s film, <\/span>The Black Panther<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Black<\/a>Originally Kirby dubbed the character \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Coal Tiger,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an indigenous designation for the eponymous jungle cat. He (or perhaps editor Stan Lee) thought better of it and switched to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Black Panther.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This was just before the formation of the militant Black Panther Party with their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Communitarian\u00e2\u20ac\u009d ideology. (I remember seeing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Free Bobby Seale\u00e2\u20ac\u009d posters on the walls of Harlem back in the day.) I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe the group got the name from the comic hero, but the superhero\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name was certainly not based on theirs. Nonetheless, the sudden notoriety of the Black Panther Party made Stan and Jack entertain second thoughts on the name. For a brief while they changed the name to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Black Leopard\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (which is what a panther is, after all, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153black panther\u00e2\u20ac\u009d being a redundancy), but soon they decided \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To hell with it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and returned to using \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Black Panther.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But that wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite the end of the matter. Ostensibly because of the redundancy, they soon started to call him simply \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Panther.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This was during his Avengers stint, which I loved. But eventually they went back to the full \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Black Panther\u00e2\u20ac\u009d title again. What about the original \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Coal Tiger\u00e2\u20ac\u009d moniker? Well, in a 1990s series called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A-Next\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (AKA \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Avengers Next Generation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), the Panther retired and was succeeded by T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122chaka, son of T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122challa, who broke with tradition and called himself the Coal Tiger. Hitherto, the costume and the name Black Panther were both hereditary, exactly analogous to another costumed jungle hero ( a white-skinned one), the Phantom, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Ghost Who Walks,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who simulated immortality by handing on the role from father to son over the centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n

(And speaking of white Africans, I happened to catch a few minutes of an old Johnny Weissmuller flick called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tarzan and the Mermaids\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which the Lord of the Jungle encounters a group of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Africans\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who are clearly Polynesian pearl divers, though some, like the beautiful heroine, are obviously Caucasian! Their high priest is played by George Zucco without even a token gesture of make-up. How racist is this! You make a movie set in Africa, and all the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153natives\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are white!)<\/span><\/p>\n

By the way, in an Atlas Comics title, quite short-lived, called <\/span>Tiger-Man<\/span><\/i>, Marvel veteran Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-Man) illustrated a story featuring a villain (who soon turned out to be a hero) called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Blue Leopard\u00e2\u20ac\u009d! He was much more interesting than the ho-hum Tiger-Man.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Black Panthers were the kings of a hidden African kingdom called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wakanda,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a realm of fantastic technological super-science combined with traditional African culture and customs. This Lee-Kirby creation mirrored their version of Asgard, the realm of Thor, Odin, Loki, and Heimdall. It, too, combined futuristic tech and architecture with highly stylized neo-Norse chic. Asgard was, of course, part of historical Norse myth. Wakanda is not a mythological place in Africa as far as I know, but the name itself is genuinely African. It denotes a kind of magical energy, supernatural power, or just great good luck: that force that makes a king a king, that brings prosperity to traders or farmers, that enables shamans to heal and commune with the ancestors. American Indians refer to it as <\/span>orenda<\/span><\/i>, South Sea Islanders as <\/span>mana<\/span><\/i>. Luke Skywalker calls it simply \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Force.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d So Wakanda is a name of power for a place of power.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the enormous popular response to the movie shows this power in abundance. It is clear by now that superheroes are the modern gods of a new mythology. <\/span>The Black Panther<\/span><\/i> is hardly alone in this. But it has a unique cultural and social importance. It upholds an inspiring model for African-American youth, a stentorian voice in opposition to the nihilistic and self-destructive propaganda of much Rap music and the slave-morality fostered by the poisonous rhetoric of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan. In filling in the Panther\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s background, Stan asked himself, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there be scientific geniuses in Africa?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Indeed, why not? And why shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there be scientists, scholars, and experts among African-Americans?\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, <\/span>there are!<\/span><\/i> But the Leftist self-hating victim-mentality of black demagogues discounts such people, assuring young African-Americans that these successful fellow-blacks are exceptions that prove the rule. They can have succeeded in the white American system only by selling out to it. They are race traitors, betraying their brothers and sisters by doing what Whitey does\u00e2\u20ac\u201d<\/span>succeeding!<\/span><\/i> What a recipe for cultural and social suicide! If this is how you see it, you have internalized the racism of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t notice it because the Grand Dragon was in minstrel-show black-face and calling himself Al Sharpton. <\/span><\/p>\n

But <\/span>The Black Panther<\/span><\/i> calls that bluff.<\/span><\/p>\n

You might be thinking, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153One flaw in your argument, Price! There <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> no Wakanda! No kingdom of African super-science! You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just promoting an illusion! An idol of false hope!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"University<\/a>
The University of Timbuktu in Mali<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not. True, Wakanda does not exist, but something much like it once <\/span>did<\/span><\/i>. Did you ever hear about the glorious Muslim empires of Late Medieval Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay? They had civilizations matching or surpassing those in Europe. Ghana could boast a university, Timbuktu<\/a>. That name probably sounds familiar, but few know what the name referred to. And the names of some of these empires have been appropriated by a few modern African states, though, thanks to arbitrary boundaries carved by European colonial powers, they do not cover the same territory as their namesakes. Remember how Wakanda\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scientific mastery was enabled by their huge deposit of meteoric Vibranium? That actually mirrors history, since the wealth of these old African empires was based on their great gold mines. It ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Vibranium, but it ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bad!<\/span><\/p>\n

A couple of decades ago, controversy raged over \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Afrocentrism,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a tendentious rewriting of history bogusly claiming, e.g., that the Egyptians, with their grand civilization, were black Africans. The goal here was in effect to appropriate one nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heritage for the benefit of another. The odious implication was that African-Americans had no real heritage in which to take pride, so why not steal someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in order to boost African-American self-esteem? During all this nonsense, I was baffled as to why schools did not instead teach black youth about the <\/span>real<\/span><\/i> glories of old Africa. I still cannot understand it! I learned about the African empires in unspectacular, working-class Bloomfield High School in my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Non-Western History\u00e2\u20ac\u009d class, where I also first learned about Islam. Why does this rich heritage remain a big secret? George Santayana famously warned that those who fail to learn the hard lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. But it is equally true that those who remain ignorant of the glories of the past are doomed <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> to repeat them.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, no, there is no Wakanda, but there <\/span>used<\/span><\/i> to be. And if we taught new generations about it, there might be one again. That is the hope and the promise represented by <\/span>The Black Panther<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra. \u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0