Wakanda, the fictional kingdom that is part of Marvel's Cinematic Universe and the home base of the Black Panther, was discovered to have been listed on 18 December 2019 by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website as a trade partner. The discovery was first publicized by New York based software engineer, Francis Tseng, who was doing researching for a fellowship application when he happened to click on the drop-down menu listing the countries that are trade partners for agriculture products to the USA.

A day later, on 19 December 2019, the USDA eventually removed Wakanda from the list of trade partners.

"While we removed the Kingdom of Wakanda from our list of US free trade partners, our relationship will always be strong #WakandaForever" tweeted the USDA in response to the much publicized listing of Wakanda on their website.

USDA lists Wakanda as a trade partner. Source: Francis Tseng/Twitter

What's even more funny (or perhaps should be a concern) is that the country of Wakanda, just like all other real USDA trade partners, had its own unique partner code along with agricultural products it could trade with the USA. These were listed as, but not limited to, "Live asses", "Mules and hinnies", "Live goats", "Live sheep", and more.

This is despite the USDA saying Wakanda had been added to the list on its website for testing purposes.

“Over the past few weeks, the foreign agricultural service staff who maintain the tariff tracker have been using test files to ensure that the system is running properly. The Wakanda information should have been removed after testing and has now been taken down," said Mike Illenberg, a spokesperson of the USDA when speaking to NBC.