Whats the deal with Black Panther?

When the movie Black Panther first came out in the US my family and I were some of the first ones to buy tickets to see it opening night. We have had a bit of a family tradition to try to see Marvel movies during their opening weekend but this one seemed especially important. We were right in predicting that it would impact us in a different way from the others. The diversity of the characters in the movie was beautiful and unlike any other mainstream movie I had seen.

One thing that I hadn’t really expected was that people here in South Africa would feel much the same way about the movie and the representations of people like them on the big screen. There were worries that the movie made a caricature of African cultures or that the representations made were unrealistic. However, everyone that I have talked with about the movie has brought it up in a way that expressed how grateful they were for the movie and how excited they were to have diverse content that highlights the beauty of the African landscape and cultures.

The topic was first brought up when I was being taught to say the word Xhosa, which is much harder than I imagined it would be. I was stuttering through the initial click into the gliding vowel of the o in the middle of the word, a process which is supposed to be much smoother than my tongue can seem to manage. The student who I was talking with asked me if I had any other exposure to the language and I said no but was surprised when she asked me if that meant I’d never seen Black Panther, which uses the language as the native tongue of the fictional Wakanda. I said that of course I had seen the movie and was greeted by her gushing about how wonderful she thought the movie was.

This scene was not an isolated one. It happened again with different students over the course of a month, while sitting at my survey booth, while at parties, and during casual conversations with other students from the local university. Most people said the same things, that they were incredibly proud to have the movie and be represented in it. The use of Xhosa also came up quite a bit because it is one of the 11 official languages of SA.

One of the reasons that I feel the movie has been accepted so fully is that it shows African cultures in way they have never been shown before. For the most part the way media is shared here feels more like a one-way funnel of cultural information into my host country than it does an actual interchange of cultural media. Things like music and movies to make their way here to SA from the western world long before any media native to the country can make its way out. But movies like Black Panther work to even the playing field, allowing people from areas such as my host community to see themselves depicted on screen in popular media. Hopefully this movie will act as a stepping stone towards more authentic and self-directed (excuse the pun) representations of people like the amaXhosa in media.