Searching for Wakanda: The African Roots of the Black Panther Story written and narrated by Dr. Thomas McDow
The much-anticipated film, Marvel’s Black Panther, sold more tickets to its opening
weekend than any movie in history, and the New York Times called it “a defining
moment for Black America.” The Black Panther himself is T’challa, the king of Wakanda,
a mythical African nation that also happens to be the world’s most advanced civilization.
The buzz leading up to this movie’s release was filled with questions and discussion
about the titular hero’s homeland. But, often lost in all the excitement is the fact
that the fictional story of Wakanda has real historical origins in nuclear-age Congo.
The secret to Wakanda’s superiority is vibranium, an indestructible alien element that is found
only in Wakanda but is in great demand by both scientists and evil-doers. The source
of vibranium is a meteor that landed in the country long ago, and T’challa’s father
kept it secret from the world as he developed his nation.
The Black Panther and Wakanda first appeared in Fantastic Four #52 (on July 1, 1966) and his
story was elaborated in the next issue (#53, in August 1966). Marvel Comics’ dynamic duo
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the character. His debut was more than three months before
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in October
of that year. Wakanda’s location has shifted over time
and writers have attributed various African inspirations for the story. But the Black
Panther’s back story makes clear that the Congo was Lee and Kirby’s imaginative jumping off
point for Wakanda. When Marvel published its Marvel Atlas #2
in 1988, Wakanda was near Lake Turkana (northwestern Kenya, near the Ethiopian border), and
near the fictional nations of Canaan, Niganda, Rudyara, Ujanka, Ghudaza, Mohanda, Zwartheid,
and Azania. Some have looked to the Monomutapa civilization
of Great Zimbabwe as the inspiration for the Black Panther story. The writer Te-Nehisi
Coates, who has penned the storylines for the Black Panther comic since 2016, has also
pointed to Ethiopia, a country that defeated Italian forces in 1896 and remained independent
during the colonization of Africa, as an inspiration. The movie's director Ryan Coogler
has said that he was influenced in part by his trip to Lesotho. The small kingdom, surrounded
on all sides by South Africa, avoided the worst of colonialism.
But to locate Lee and Kirby’s original idea in 1966, the comics provide better clues.
Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards, notes that “Though the Wakanda Tribe lives in the tradition of
their forefathers, they possess modern super-scientific wonders we can only marvel at!” T'challa
then tells Richards and his friends that western greed and a quest for African resources had
disturbed peaceful Wakanda. It was not just a “greedy ivory hunter,”
but someone much more dangerous. The evil Ulysses Klaw sought out vibranium as “the
one element I need—the one element which will power” his all-destructive weapon,
a sound transformer that could convert the energy of sound into living forms. When T’challa's
father, T’chaka tried to prevent Klaw from controlling the vibranium supply, Klaw had
him killed. T’challa witnessed this as a boy and vowed to avenge his father's death.
Lee and Kirby had both served in World War II. Working in 1966 they were steeped in the
science and technology of their day: the nuclear era and the space age.
In 1961, they created the Fantastic Four, a foursome of American astronauts whose exposure
to cosmic rays gave them super powers. The next year they rolled out the Incredible Hulk,
the green monster alter ego of scientist Bruce Banner who emerged after Banner was exposed
to gamma rays during the detonation of a bomb. In 1962, Lee introduced the Spider-man, an
unlikely hero created after wallflower teenager Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider.
The following year, Kirby and Lee teamed up launch the X-Men, a group of human mutants
who were born with super powers. After exploring the possibilities of radiation
and mutation, it is no wonder that they turned their attention to the source of such powers.
Indeed, in the half-decade before the Black Panther appeared to protect vibranium, the
world had watched a struggle for the control of the source of another element that could
power fearsome weapons: uranium, and it was found in the Congo.
The Shinkolobwe mine contained the richest deposit of uranium anywhere on earth, and
it just happened to be in Congo’s Katanga province. Albert Einstein had written to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 about Enrico Fermi’s atomic work and the potential for
a weapon. They would need high quality uranium, and Einstein noted, “The most important
source of uranium is in the Belgian Congo.” In 1945 uranium from Shinkolobwe was used
in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and protecting the mine during and after the
Second World War had involved deep espionage. When the Belgian Congo became independent
on June 30, 1960, what would happen to its uranium? Who would control it? Less than two
weeks later, Katanga seceded from the Congo under the leadership of Moise Tshombe, with
the support of Belgian industrial and military interests. Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s Prime
Minister, sought to regain control, and called on the United Nations for help. When the UN
was reluctant to subdue the Katanganese rebels, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union.
In the resulting Congo Crisis, Lumumba was overthrown and assassinated in 1961, and the
UN Secretary General was killed in a mysterious plane crash later that year. As the crisis
unfolded, American support helped defeat forces that remained loyal to Lumumba.
In the U.S., Malcolm X injected Lumumba and the Congo strongly into debates about African
American rights. Malcolm X called Lumumba “the greatest black man who ever walked
the African continent.” Malcolm X criticized the Johnson administration’s support for Tshombe; and
called on black veterans to go fight in the Congo. If Congo was controlled by a “real
dyed-in-the-wool African nationalist,” Malcolm X argued in New York in December 1964, it
would bring an end to white rule in southern Africa (Angola, Southern Rhodesia, Southwest
Africa, and South Africa). Malcolm X also linked the U.S. civil rights movement to
the Congo: “the same schemes are at work in the Congo that are at work in Mississippi,” he said.
African representatives at the UN picked up this comparison, and the New York Times covered it.
Malcolm X lectured on Lumumba and the Congo
until he was assassinated in 1965. Later that year, the Congo Crisis came to an abrupt end.
Army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu’s coup d’état put him in charge of a unified Congo.
Mobutu, a ready ally of the United States, assured that the world’s most important
deposits of uranium would not fall into Soviet hands.
So the origin story of Black Panther introduced in 1966 looks like what would have happened
if Batman/Bruce Wayne’s parents had been Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X. In the face
of their murder, the loyal son dons a mask and uses the wealth at his disposal to avenge
his parent’s death. For Black Panther, this also meant keeping
the world safe from the misappropriation of vibranium. And Black Panther took on white
supremacy. As his story line developed, Black Panther fought apartheid in South Africa and
the Klan in the southern United States. We can now locate him in the pantheon of Marvel
heroes and as the star of his own feature film. When we go looking for Wakanda, however,
we can find it in a Cold War crisis and an African mine.