Wakanda Reborn

Tour Black Panther’s reimagined homeland with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Published on May 15, 2017

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In Coates’ words:

This is the voice of journalist, cultural critic, and best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates is the writer of Marvel’s latest entry in the Black Panther canon, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet. With the book, he’s been charged with turning one of Marvel’s least understood and appreciated black characters into a marquee superhero.

In Coates’ words:

Even if you don’t read comics, you likely know about the character Black Panther, thanks to his on-screen debut in last year’s Captain America: Civil War. As the first black superhero in mainstream comics, he’s an important figure in the history of the medium.

Art: Marvel Entertainment

In 2014, Marvel announced that it would give Black Panther a standalone film. Starring Chadwick Boseman in the titular role, the film will be the first in the billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe to star a person of color as a headlining superhero.

Art: Marvel Entertainment

The film will focus on T’Challa as the latest in a long line of Black Panthers, the kings who’ve ruled Wakanda for 10,000 years. T’Challa is one of Marvel universe’s most intellectual heroes, and like every Black Panther before him, he has superhuman strength, speed, and agility.

Art: Marvel Entertainment

Ahead of the film’s 2018 release, Marvel has made a big, public effort to breathe new life into Black Panther, T’Challa, and the nation of Wakanda through the pages of its comics.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

But to accomplish that, Marvel had to address problems that dated back to Black Panther’s origins. Created by two white authors in 1966 — the legendary Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — Black Panther was a bizarre mix of progressive ideas and regressive cliches.

Art: Jack Kirby

The fictional nation of Wakanda was unconquerable and technologically advanced. But its people were drawn from broad African stereotypes, wearing “native” headdresses and carrying spears. It lacked history and authenticity.

Since then, writers have tried to depict Wakanda as a three-dimensional country, with its own customs, prejudices, and ideas about where it stands in the world. But Wakanda still felt dated.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

So in 2015, Marvel turned to Ta-Nehisi Coates to breathe new life into Black Panther. As a national correspondent for The Atlantic, he’s become a leading voice in the ongoing conversation around race in America, with pieces like “The Case for Reparations” and “The Age of Mass Incarceration.”

Marvel approached Coates after he published Between the World and Me, a searing exploration of the state of black life in the United States. Alongside his life as a reporter and thinker, Coates has been a vocal and high-profile comic book fan.

In Coates’ words:

Art: Mark Bright (Priest, 1999)

Coates is now one of just a handful of black writers to work on Black Panther. In 1998, former Marvel editor Christopher Priest turned T’Challa into a high-tech strategist utterly devoted to his country. In 2005, BET’s then-president of entertainment, Reginald Hudlin, launched an arc that showed Wakanda’s epic history.

But what Coates is currently doing in A Nation Under Our Feet is far more ambitious: reimagining the fictional nation of Wakanda, giving it a richer history and context, and challenging where T’Challa belongs within it. Coates is creating a nation unto itself, one that aspires to be as complex and conflicted as any real country.

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

In Coates’ words:

Coates sees Wakanda as a product of the black nationalist myth.

Art: Marvel Entertainment

Wakanda has always been an idealized nation: stronger and more technologically advanced than any other on the planet, and completely divorced from Western influence. The first step was creating a new map that captured the history of Wakanda’s people.

In Coates’ words:

Art: Rich Buckler

Wakanda, as originally imagined by Lee, Kirby, and later Don McGregor, was a collection of characterless and problematic locations, with names like Piranha Cove, Primitive Peaks, and Serpent Valley that traded on Western stereotypes and ignorance.

In Coates’ words:

Art: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Manny Mederos

Coates’ Wakanda is a sprawling, geographically diverse nation, located in East Africa on the coast of Lake Victoria, one of Africa’s Great Lakes. Each of Wakanda’s regions serves as a springboard for larger political and social questions that Coates has been trying to explore.

Birnin Zana: How does a leader face a rebellion?

At the center sits the capital city, Birnin Zana, from which Black Panther rules. Through most of Black Panther’s history, the capital — also known as the Golden City — resisted foreign invasion from worldly and otherworldly powers. But it has, in recent years, become vulnerable.

Art: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Manny Mederos

In Coates’ words:

Namor destroying Wakanda. | Art: Adam Kubert

Over the past eight years of Black Panther stories, Wakanda has been attacked by a variety of Marvel villains: Doctor Doom. Thanos. Morlun. Even the anti-hero Namor. This nation, predicated on its isolation and invulnerability, has been bombed, flooded, and burned.

In Coates’ words:

Now, citizens from across the country are fighting to determine the future of Wakanda — with or without the Black Panther. A civil war is brewing. With the mythologized idea of Wakandan unity upended, Coates imagined the philosophers, dissidents, and freedom fighters of Wakanda sowing the seeds of revolution. These parties form the basis of the uprising T’Challa faces in Coates’ new storyline.

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

Birnin Azzaria: What does it mean to be exceptional?

Birnin Azzaria is just southwest of Birnin Zana, and it’s the philosophical heart of Coates’ story. It’s named for Azzari the Wise, T’Challa’s grandfather and the Black Panther who defeated Captain America during World War II.

Art: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Manny Mederos

Changamire, Wakandan philosopher.

Known as the Learned City, Birnin Azzaria is a city devoted to enlightenment. It’s where Coates introduces a scholar named Changamire, whose teachings about power have inspired the people of Wakanda to revolt and establish a new government free of monarchy — and free of the Black Panther.

In Coates’ words:

Art: Chris Sprouse

Changamire is versed in philosophy and forgotten Wakandan history, and he thinks that Wakanda’s exceptionalist identity is a lie propagated to keep its people powerless. Fighting that lie is for the good of Wakandan society, and it’s the responsibility of Wakandan royalty to make themselves obsolete instead of all-powerful.

In Coates’ words:

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

But, like anything in academia, there’s a difference between theory and practice. Will the scholar who teaches about theoretical revolution really stand by and watch while an actual revolution takes place?

Niganda and the Alkama Fields: Is a nation entitled to the land it claims?

In southern Wakanda, there’s the People’s insurgency at the Nigandan border, led by Tetu, one of Changamire’s former students, and Zenzi, a Nigandan rebel. Niganda is Wakanda’s impoverished neighbor, and the two nations have a territorial conflict over the fertile Alkama Fields between them.

Art: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Manny Mederos

In Coates’ words:

Tetu, left, and Zenzi, the main antagonists of Black Panther.

Tetu and Zenzi use the antipathy Nigandans have toward Wakanda for stealing the Alkama Fields to kickstart their revolution. By claiming the Fields for themselves, they hope to lay the foundation for a new nation that feeds its people instead of serving the Black Panther.

The Jabari-Lands: Should a nation be led by one man?

In the wild Jabari-lands to the north, there’s a revolutionary movement led by lovers Ayo and Aneka, two former members of the Dora Milaje, Black Panther’s all-female royal guard.

Art: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Manny Mederos

Ayo, left, and Aneka of the Midnight Angels.

They witness the mistreatment of Wakanda’s women at the hands of bandits and men in power in the north, all while T’Challa does little to stop the abuse. So they set out to protect the innocent and create a nation of their own under the banner of “No One Man.”

Roxane Gay

Women are an integral part of Wakanda’s story — and writing their stories meant that women writers needed to be involved in its creation. Marvel tapped Bad Feminist writer Roxane Gay to expand on Ayo and Aneka in World of Wakanda, a series that builds on what Coates is establishing.

In Gay’s words:

“While Black Panther is preoccupied with so much, who is looking out for the women in Wakanda? Having the Dora Milaje rise in the service of justice for the country’s women felt like an incredible story to tell.”

“I love when women are efficient and fierce and complex. I tried to incorporate those traits into Ayo and Aneka. They are incredibly skilled in their jobs, firm in their convictions, and open to love.”

Ayo and Aneka manage to topple the region’s leader, Man-Ape, who is regarded as the second most powerful warrior in the country after the Black Panther. By defeating him, they prove how formidable a force they would be if they marched on the Golden City.

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

The Djalia: What is a nation if not a people’s collective memory?

For Coates, holding on to ideas about the glorious past sets Wakanda, and really any nation, up for conflict. A nation shouldn’t be defined by myths. People need to define their present by learning from and grappling with the lessons of the past.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the Djalia, a mystical realm that functions as Wakanda’s collective memory. Coates uses the space to visually and philosophically juxtapose the nation’s present and past.

Art: Brian Stelfreze

In Coates’ words:

Shuri

It’s also where Shuri, T’Challa’s half-sister, a former Black Panther, and the Queen of Wakanda, resides in a state of living death. Shuri fell at the hands of Thanos’ Black Order, but her spirit came to the Djalia. There, she’s guided by a griot, who teaches her Wakanda’s true history.

In Coates’ words:

Shuri eventually returns to the living world, empowered by the history she’s uncovered. She becomes the keeper of Wakanda’s lore, with the clearest view of what Wakanda was and is.

Shuri as the Aja-Adanna. | Art: Wilfredo Torres

In Coates’ words:

Wakanda is ultimately split over the central question of Coates’ story: with the nation’s identity threatened by invaders, does Wakanda still need a king? Does it need the Black Panther? It might have been easy for Lee and Kirby to envision an advanced country still ruled by a divinely appointed monarch. But Coates’ Wakanda feels more true as it grapples with the history and practical needs of its population.

Black Panther faces the People. | Art: Chris Sprouse

By the story’s end, there are no easy answers. T’Challa retains the throne, but the country will draft a constitution, and a new representative government will be formed. T’Challa decides that Wakanda still needs its royalty, but as figures who share power with the people’s representatives.

The constitution is a single but significant step forward for the country, but there are challenges ahead. How Wakanda will define itself is still an open question. Perhaps that’s the point. No nation on Earth can consider itself complete. There is no singular identity.

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

A Nation Under Our Feet reflects Coates’ writing on America as a nation blinded by its own myths of greatness, stymied by its eagerness to be a great monoculture, when, in actuality, it’s a collection of ideas and philosophies in constant conflict.

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

However, for all his efforts to make Wakanda feel real and complicated, the series still struggles with the obligation of being a superhero comic. The complex story is sometimes undermined by the medium Coates loves, where problems are solved with magic and punching. And so Coates’ work feels like a significant, but preliminary step — one that the writer himself will follow up.

Coates suggests that forging a path forward means constantly grappling with history and the present and what that conflict means for the millions of people living in a nation composed of many parts. So, what’s next for his fictional nation?

Art: Brian Stelfreeze

In Coates’ words:

Coates is only getting started. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet was recently nominated for a prestigious Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. In the meantime, he’s inviting other writers to explore Black Panther — Roxane Gay, poet Yona Harvey, and New York magazine’s Rembert Browne, who have brought their talents to bear on recent installments of World of Wakanda.

However, another corner of the Black Panther universe has struggled to get off the ground. Black Panther & the Crew — a revival of Christopher Priest’s series that sees T’Challa team up with the likes of fellow black superheroes Storm, Luke Cage, and Misty Knight — was canceled last week, a year ahead of the Black Panther film’s release. The project was a collaboration between Coates and Harvey.

Art: John Cassaday

With his first arc of Black Panther complete, Coates has managed to apply his deep well of knowledge about culture, power, and history to a character who deserves a place next to Marvel’s most popular superheroes. The Wakanda he created is more textured and complex than ever before, a far cry from the stereotypes that troubled its creation. But in his own opinion, Coates still has a long way to go.

In Coates’ words:

Back to the beginning

Written by Kwame Opam

Edited by Chris Plante, Michael Zelenko, and Tasha Robinson

Copy-edited by Kara Verlaney

Audio by Andrew Marino

Illustrations by Brittany Holloway-Brown

Produced by Kelsey Scherer, Frank Bi, Ryan Mark, and Casey Miller

QA by Steven Leon, Jon Douglas

A Storytelling Studio Collaboration