Poster from the Black Panther film

I walked out of the Black Panther like most people: astounded. Everything from the story to set pieces to the cast was brilliant, but what stood out the most to me was how deep and efficient the world building was in this film. Ryan Coogler was somehow able to show off the nation of Wakanda in a way where you really got to know this unique world, but didn’t bog the story down by too much exposition. So for a while, I went my way just happy with the brilliant movie I had seen. That is, until a few days ago when I was told that the language which stood in for Wakandan in the film was Xhosa. This set off some red flags in my head, and brings brought up some even more serious issues regarding the Western perception and representation of African cultures in the way that the West sees and represents Africa as a whole.

Xhosa

In order to understand why Wakandans speaking Xhosa is so strange, Alright so to get why having the people of Wakanda speak Xhosa is so strange we really need to go over some basics. Xhosa is a language spoken in South Africa by almost 20 million people and belongs to the Nguni language group along with other languages like Zulu and Swazi. These languages and people moved into the region of South Africa during the later stages of the Bantu migration, possibly arriving in the region anywhere between 2,000 and 500 hundred years ago. The language evolved during this time to adopt the clicking sounds of the indigenous Khoisan people but retained enough of its structure to still be considered a part of the Bantu language family. Now, why would this choice of language be so ill-suited for the nation of Wakanda? Well for starters Wakanda, if its location in the film is to be believed, is about 5,000 miles from the area where Xhosa speakers now live.

Where’s Wakanda?

Screen grab from Captain America: Civil War

Granted, this is a poorly made map that seems to severely misrepresent modern borders of the surrounding countries. However, despite all of this map’s issues, we can tell that Wakanda is located somewhere in-between Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan and possibly Ethiopia, and hugs the shore of Lake Turkana. This would make Wakanda essentially a replacement for the Kenyan County of Turkana and the north-west corner of Marsabit County, which is over five thousand kilometers away from the region of South Africa that speaks Xhosa. For reference, that is a longer distance than New York to Los Angeles. This leads to another problem, the fact that the region of Turkana isn’t even home to Bantu speakers in the first place.

Turkana County and Indigenous peoples in an African Context

Turkana County is the poorest part of Kenya and primarily makes its money off of the exploitation of its oil, water and mineral wealth. It’s also home to one of Kenya’s 14 indigenous peoples, the Turkana. While, Indigenous peoples aren’t really something that we think about when we look at old world nations, but indigenous people exist all over the world from the Sami of Scandinavia to the Ainu of Japan. And like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a majority of these groups have been marginalized and erased by modern society. In the case of Kenya, indigenous groups are mainly defined by a set of criteria defined by the Kenya National Commission of Human Rights as:

● Having a sense of collectivity/solidarity/belonging; ● Claiming rights to ancestral land in collectivity / common originality; ● Practicing and retaining cultural lifestyle; ● Retaining traditional institutions and social organization; ● Depending on natural resources in their respective territories; ● Suffering exclusion and discrimination from and by the mainstream systems; ● Possessing unique or common religion and spirituality: and ● Utilizing unique means of livelihood and traditional occupation.

These classifications bring the number of indigenous groups in Kenya to 14, a majority of which still lack a solid legal framework of protection in areas such as land rights and education. However, Kenya is one of the better countries in the region when it comes to the rights of its indigenous peoples. Kenya’s neighbors like Uganda who have similar indigenous groups but doesn’t even recognize them as such. Now with that all cleared up we can talk about the Turkana people and why planting Wakanda on top of them is pretty problematical.

The Turkana People

The Turkana are a Nilotic people group of a little under a million people who occupy the north-west corner of Kenya, they along with groups like the Pokot, Samburu and Maasai represent some of the indigenous peoples who lived in the great lakes region of Kenya before the Bantu migration. Now the Nilotic people rarely receive attention as they are a minority on the continent of Africa and represent the ethnic groups that trace their roots to the Upper Nile. Unfortunately, they have been displaced time and time again by Bantu, Sudanese Arabs, European Imperialists and a variety of other groups that we don’t have time to get into here. So when you place the traditionally wealthy society that has in control of their natural resources and is this supposedly ancient and isolated civilization on top their land then have that nation speaks a language belonging to the language family that has historically displaced and marginalized the native group you run into a problem. And while there was substantial influence of the related Maasai and Surma people in the costume designing for the film, and I don’t want to diminish Ruth E. Carter amazing work on designing the costumes of the film, but the established geography and the long-term history of the region make her pan-African style quite out of place, even if it does include designs from related cultural groups. But even if Marvel had given more credit to the indigenous peoples of the region it still would have been a major historical misfire

A Bit More General African History

According to official Marvel canon, Wakanda was formed 10,000 years ago when the first Black Panther united the four tribes, and the Jabari tribe left for the mountains. Now, this would make Wakanda the oldest nation ever and given that Wakanda is this bastion of isolationism (at least up until the end of the film) that the cultures, language, and peoples of the region should be based off or be the peoples who inhabited the region during that time period. So 10,000 years ago was a really long time ago. Like this was back when the first settlements in the Middle East were just forming, and all the groups we have talked about so far weren’t even in East Africa yet. Ten thousand years ago this part of Africa was home to hunter-gatherers who were most likely related to the Khoisan people who now reside in Southern Africa. It wasn’t until later that the Cushitic peoples of The Horn of Africa moved in followed by the Nilotic peoples of the upper Nile and finally by the Bantu peoples represented in the language and casting of the film. But really who are the Khoisan people? They’re not a group represented very well in western, or really any media, but in the grand scheme of human existence there a group which we should know.

The Khoisan

If you were to look at the family tree of people the Khoisan would be the oldest branch to break away from the rest of us. They truly represent the first people and for a majority of human history have represented a majority of the humans alive. However, though the Bantu Expansion, they were displaced, and their communities were absorbed which has led them to become a very minor group on the modern continent. Today this group resides mainly in Southern Africa with only a population of around 400,000. But 10,000 years ago they would have been established in the region that became Wakanda for at least 65,000 years. Today what’s left of the early Khoisan related peoples still exist in Kenya as the Aweer peoples. The Aweer people are a small ethnic group of 8,500 people that through the ages have lost their traditional language through cultural pressure by Cushitic groups and have lost their traditional lifestyle due to the Kenyan government. So when you make a film that is rooted in history that film should represent some historical realities and thus represent these people, and not ignore them in favor of the group that moved the region last. But that’s what this film did and it’s where the problem arose.

What to do, what to do

Now here’s where I need to put my criticisms in context. Nothing that was done here was done with harmful intent, heck most of the decisions that I’m criticizing weren’t even made in the Black Panther film but in Captain America: Civil War. The use of Xhosa as Wakanda’s language was made just because John Kani who plays T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka is South African and speaks it. The decision to place Wakanda on top of Turkana was probably meaningless to the graphics person who made map, and the very name Wakanda from the original comics made back in 1966 was probably taken from the Kaw people of the American Great Plains. So nothing here was probably done on purpose to marginalize the peoples who live in this region or have lived in this region, and really none of these decisions were even made by Coogler and his team, but I think for coming sequels maybe some changes should be made. For starters, why not just move Wakanda, I’m sure not that many people noticed the geography of the film And retconning Wakanda to West Africa would make more sense story-wise as well. It’s established in Black Panther that Wakanda has been in historic contact with the Fula people in Benin, we see T’Challa fight Boko Haram in Nigeria and in Captain America: Civil War it’s established that Wakandan aid workers are working in Nigeria’s Capital of Lagos. All of this shows that for a nation located far off in East Africa they are weirdly involved in West Africa. So a move to be closer to Nigeria would make sense, and make the issues with linguistics and unrepresented ethnic groups far less of an issue. It’s also not like the location of Wakanda hasn’t changed before; the comics have shifted the place around a multitude of times so one more wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But if Marvel is truly tied to having the nation located in the African Great Lakes Region then there are a few things that should probably happen. A Wakandan constructed language, or conlang, should probably be made based off of an interpretation of the languages of Khoisan people like !Kung or Khoekhoe, I am sure there are linguistic nerds out there who would love the opportunity to work for Marvel and I’m sure there are fans who would love the opportunity to learn whatever they create like Klingon!. I think it would also be really cool if they film in the African Great Lakes Region and got the people who actually live there to act in the film, even if only as extras I’m sure this would serve as a major economic boon to the region that is still so underdeveloped much like Ragnarok director Taika Waititi employed Aboriginal and Maori. It would also serve as a way to show off a more genuine look at the cultures and peoples that live there.

Black Panther is a great film, but it suffers from the collision of the fiction world and reality on that group stories of this type typically do. The politics, culture, and histories in this part of the world are things that just aren’t things that are well known in the West, and that makes this an even bigger problem as it feeds into this fictionalized picture of Africa that diminishes the real peoples who live there. We see Africa mainly as a monolith, and mainly through the lens of West and South Africa. We don’t really think about the massive diversity and the complex histories behind said diversity. Black Panther is a springboard for the Western world to learn about the amazing peoples of Africa, so I think that it’s fair to ask that it holds true to some things that actually affect the African continent.