Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther
embraced Africa in set, costume, language and post-colonial narrative. Now
African audiences are rewarding these efforts by contributing to the global
hype and box office sales.
For the first time a black
superhero, surrounded by a cast of black warriors, will save his own world on
the big screen. Long before it premiered the film became a celebration of
filmic representation for African American audiences. For African audiences, the
film represents a fantasy and a reality at the same time: where Africa could
have been without interference and contemporary real-world references
recognizable to Africans but usually ignored by mainstream Hollywood.
The futuristic world of Wakanda
shatters negative stereotypes that Hollywood has relied on for so long. It
helps further that costume deisgner Ruth Carter drew heavily on Afrofuturism to
dress Wakandans from everyday attire to battle gear. And when T’Challa speaks
to his father, it is in the South African langauge Xhosa.
African audiences will also get
the chance to see themselves on screen, literally, with the film’s cast
including a large number of known and unknown African actors. Arguably the most
famous name is that of Lupita Nyong’o and to celebrate Kenya held the earliest
premiere of Black Panther in Kisumu state on Feb.13, where the actress’ father
is a senator because Nyong’o is “a girl from that soil,” as Kenya’s Imax marketing manager said. The Feb. 15 premiere in Nairobi was already sold out weeks before.
There’s no word on whether Daniel
Kaluuya and Florence Kasumba’s roles in the film led to early screenings, but
British-born Kaluuya’s recent success has forced Ugandans to ask tough questions on how they could better support the arts so future Kaluuya’s and Kasumba’s are
born and bred at home at superheroes.
In Zimbabwe, the few cinemas
Harare still has have already sold out the Feb. 16 premiere, even at $12 a
ticket—pricey considering the country’s economic woes. Zimbabweans are likely
keen to see actress Danai Gurira, who plays Okoye, the strongest of the Black
Panther’s all-women guard Dora Milaje. Months before the film’s release, Gurira
was in Zimbabwe where she greeted fans wearing Marvel T-Shirts for an event
that had nothing to do with the Black Panther. Gurira tweeted that she and
Nyong’o were headed to South Africa this weekend to attent the premiere.
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| Danai Gurira |
“It means a lot, to see Africa
put on this platform, and it meant a lot to me to play a character who speaks
in an African language,” said Gurira, who spent her childhood in Zimbabwe. “You
just never see these things, so it’s very special to those of us who grew up on
the continent, and those of us who knew how distorted or very misrepresented
Africans can be.”
In South Africa, anticiaption was
heightened even more when rapper Kendrick Lamar tweeted the track list for the
official soundtrack that featured several South African performers, including
the queen Durban house music Babes Wodumo.
T’Challa’s father T’Chaka is played by
Tony-Award winning South African actor John Kani, while veteran actress Connie
Chiume plays a Wakanda elder.. It was Kani, who introduced isiXhosa to the film
as the official language of Wakanda.
On social media, Africans around
the continent are planning to join in on what is becoming a global event for
black culture by dressing up in their best traditional attire for the film. The
excitement around the film, and the box-office sales it will likely translate
to, show that a positive representation of Africa and the diaspora pays off.
Source: https://qz.com/1196592/black-panther-african-fans-join-in-the-fantasy-africa-experience/
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