esoanem:

metsew:

esoanem:

blazeduptequilamonster:

mai-asrepressednerd:

secretsunkept:

onlyblackgirl:

naturally-nikkilynn:

thottopia:

africanaquarian:

briannatheloner:

We finally get to hear Wakandans speak Xhosa!

There’s so much rhythm in this language

marvel is lazy as fuck for choosing Xhosa as the language

Well John Kani who played T’Chaka is from South Africa and speaks Xhosa so when he took on the role he brought that with him and taught Chadwick how to speak it. So they more so follows his wishes. Don’t see why you have such an issue

Y’all be mad at everything.

Lazy?? If I spoke Xhosa, I’d be offended as hell if someone considered the cast “lazy” for learning it.

Yess for a clicking languange!!

One thing im not looking forward to is how great this movie is gonna be, but due to the hype how many people are just waiting to pick it apart and find issue in the TINIEST, most insignificant details… I’m over it already.

Ok, like, picking Xhosa really isn’t that trivial a detail. Xhosa is spoken in South Africa whilst Wakanda has consistently been placed in East Africa (somewhere between Uganda and Ethiopia) by the MCU.

That’s some 6000km.

Other places similarly far away are China and Ireland.

This is symptomatic of a much more general problem with black panther where it presents a vision of Wakanda a utopian nation with cultural touchstones taken from across one of the most diverse continents I’m the world; cultural touchstones that have no business existing next to each other and someone who recognises the importance of one will probably not recognise it in any of the others. This blending of the myriad of African cultures into one single “Africa” is part of the legacy of imperialism which has always treated such distinctions as trivial.

As@metsew has pointed out, across most of Africa (with some notable exceptions such as South Africa), most Africans identify far more strongly with finely grained ethnic labels than they do with race so, from that pov, speaking Xhosa as Wakandan ought not be any less shocking than them speaking Irish or Mandarin.

This film is a big and important step forwar for African-Americans, but it is a continuation of a long history of imperialism for Africa

It’s cultural imperialism. At least someone says it who isn’t myself.

The MCU films actually give us a good alternative model to compare to in Sokovia.

Now we’ve not seen it in as much detail as we see Wakanda in Black Panther, but what we do see contrasts quite well.

Sokovia is placed with a similar level of vagueness, being somewhere between the western border of Slovakia and the northwest of the black sea in Ukraine. They write in Cyrillic (some people online are saying the Serbian variant rather than the more plausible Ukrainian or Belarusian variants, which would be a little off, but I didn’t actually see any of the Serbian characters so I’m not sure how accurate that is) and speak a Slavic language. Their flag uses the panslavic colours (albeit rotated from their usual horizontal configuration) with a crowned eagle. The architecture, dress, and customs of the Sokovians appear to all be consistent with a post-soviet Eastern European country.

The biggest incongruity there is in using the Serbian alphabet (if they actually are) which depending on the exact placement of the country is at most 1000km away (remember, Wakanda is 6000km from any significant Xhosa population). That same distance could get you from Sokovia to Xi'an in China or to Mumbai in India.

A Sokovia portraying Eurasia similarly to how Wakanda portrays Africa could have people in salwar kameezes watching Turkish wrestling, be speaking Tundra Nenets whilst doing vodka shots over fish and chips all in a Venetian Palazzo. I mean, it’s all Eurasia right so who’s going to sweat the little differences between those cultures?

If you’re going “but that’s different, those cultures are completely different and the people with those cultures are of different races” I’ve got some news for you: Africa is at least as culturally diverse as Eurasia and race was socially constructed deliberately to lump all of Africa into one group that could all be dismissed as primitive.

Black panther is an important film and I am excited to see it, but these sorts of apologia for its (major) flaws serve no-one and continue the very harmful legacy of non-Africans ignoring the many, many differences between various African peoples.

As ever, all media is flawed. That doesn’t mean you have to entirely disregard it, just acknowledge those flaws and engage critically with the work rather than glossing over and/or ignoring them

mapsontheweb:

Etymologies of African Currencies.