Black Panther: The Difference Between Yalls Ancestors and Ours

Unpacking decades old tension between Africa and its diaspora through one fantastical film

— — WARNING: SPOILERS LIKE A MOFO! — —

I scored opening night tickets to Black Panther and couldn’t be more excited walking into the UA Court St. theater in downtown Brooklyn with two of my long time homegirls and a longline of black pageantry, crowns and kente cloth.

I planned to see Black Panther twice, once with black folks (assuming I may not hear much dialogue among the celebratory negritude) and the second time with some predictably quiet white folks to do a close read. Luckily for me, that opening night audience of mostly black folks weren’t having the shenanigans and I was able to take every line of the script in. And with that I observed something that kept my jaw open and my cheeks wet.

Who is this author that was sitting in the theater balling her eyes out? I am that negro; your classic American made mixed bag of identities. I was raised African-American (AA) muslim but now identify as Buddhist. I also practice honoring my ancestors which is deeply rooted in many African traditions. Whether this tradition is in fact part of my people’s tradition, is a question I cannot answer. Where bouts in Africa I’m/we’re from is the open wound of most African-Americans and perhaps the weary foundation of our existence. Our anger, for the most part, has been directed at white Americans; who are the benefactors of a reining practice of black-skinned oppression; but I’m not here to write about them. I’m here to write about us.

There I sat in the theater inundated with rhino sized metaphors, intended or not, in a script, thankfully, written about us by us. Now, before I unpack the more coded drama played out on screen, let me restate what was obvious to most of us.

The estranged family tension between T’challa and Killmonger was an obvious metaphor of the relationship between Africans and African-Americans or to a greater degree the diaspora. But for the purpose of avoiding putting a cultural foot in my mouth, I’m going to speak through the lens of the African American experience, because I am one.

We African Americans, the estranged distant relatives of the African. Africa, which is the imagined embodiment of the original “black monolith” is explored on many levels in the film. Now, I shouldn’t have to state what should also be obvious, that Africa is not a country or a monolithic people or culture; and if we were honest, neither are African-Americans.

We differ from state-to-state, city-to-city, and shoot, neighborhood-to-neighborhood. The fictional black monolith is in fact a diversified black humanity. Our differences stem from our very human experiences affected by our varied social and physical environments. That is not a black thing, it’s as human as it gets. And if anything, this fantasy film has done a better job at highlighting that humanity than many before it.

Regardless of your faith, we gotta talk about the ancestors’ role in this film and the ritual that allowed both T’challa and Killmonger to talk to theirs.

Note: I desperately tried to find still shots of N’jobu and young Killmonger scenes together, but to no avail. If you have access to some I can use, please tweet me at Hanifah Walidah. If you’ve seen the film, then you can imagine, if not, warning, descriptive spoilers ahead.

When T’challa is crowned King of Wakanda, succeeding his father T’chaka, he has to go through a ritual in which he’s covered in sacred earth and transported to the purple indigo world of his ancestors. He arrives dressed in white cloth and comes to a tree inhabited by black panthers perched on every branch. One panther then transforms into the spirit of T’chaka. T’challa talks with his father in his resting place among the long lineage of ancestors and assumed Wakandan royalty and warriors. In this initial discussion, T’chaka counsels his son and helps ready him for the job of being king. He refers to the life long training given to him since he was a boy when under the wing of his father, then king and Black Panther before him. T’challa, after counsel, awakens shaken exiting the land of his ancestors, is asked to breathe by spiritual advisor Zuri and then ensues with his kingly duties.

The story continues. Fast forward to Killmonger having apparently killed T’challa and taking over as King of Wakanda.

Killmonger, too, has to visit with his ancestors to complete his transition into being king. But Killmonger doesn’t awaken to a land of purple indigo and black panthers perched on branches. He awakens to the same Oakland apartment in which his father N’jobu was killed by his older brother, King T’chaka.

Killmonger doesn’t enter the apartment as a man draped in white garb, but as a boy in a hoodie. The same hoodie he had on when playing basketball that fateful day just steps away from the apartment where his father was murdered by his own family. Murdered and left. Both he and his father were abandoned to die and grieve. N’jobu left without proper burial in Wakanda and Killmonger left spending the rest of his life seeking answers, connection and ultimately revenge. Both were officially severed from their birth and ancestral rights.

Why wasn’t N’jobu found perched on a tree beneathe a purple indigo sky?

This is not a critique, this is an observation of what I felt was one the most powerful metaphors of the film. The historical severing of African peoples from their land, lineage and ancestral resting place. The creation of the diaspora. The messy erection of questions around cultural access and continuum.

King T’chaka represents an abandonment still felt and embodied by African-Americans today. His/their original sin impacts how we are viewed and treated in and in conversation with different African peoples around rights to culture and lineage.

Killmongers consults with his father in a dirty Oakland slave shack (oh apartment) affirms his anger, resentment and sense of entitlement to not only find Wakanda/return to Africa, but to right a familial and global wrong erected since his and the diaspora’s severance from Wakanda/the Motherland. N’jobu’s spirit is visibly saddened by not being able to change what’s been done to his son. As an ancestor, in step with tradition, he can guide, support, and warn but he ultimately cannot change what has been done or what is to come; that is for the living.

Allow me to illustrate this further in my relationship to my own ancestors. When I speak with them, I don’t imagine them in Africa. I imagine them in Atlantic City, Harlem, Brooklyn, Delaware and North Carolina…and that is where my imagination stops. I imagine them in the clothes they are wearing in the photographs given to me. Clothes from the 60s, the early 1900s and from that point on I have no more images. In fact, my eldest known ancestors are only acknowledged by names on my wall above my alter, because they were slaves (freed within their lifetime), though I am blessed to at least, know their names. To imagine them in Africa or perched on a tree is as fantastical as the film. It would be a dishonor, of sorts, to imagine them say in Sierra Leone, when maybe instead they/we might have been from Ghana or Nigeria or Mali. Most African Americans were completely severed from any African documentation before 1865.

I could fantasize with Killmonger’s pain and plan, but better understood what made him distinctly American down to his learned tendencies towards destruction. Though many of us often resist much of what America stands for in the world, yet there in lies our stagnant pool of tears that I, we, the diaspora are left to bathe and drown in. The same pool I continued to fill while sitting in my seat watching these scenes. Ok, I sense a tangent around the validity or implausibility of Killmonger’s plan creeping into this post. So let me reign it in and stay on track.

Fast forward to T’challa’s second visit to the ancestral plane after having learned of the injustice enacted by his father on Killmonger and N’jobu.

Here he challenges his father in the presence of a host of ancestors standing in the distance. He challenges T’chaka’s decision to leave N’jobu and Killmonger in America. He challenges his isolationist policies that allowed it to happen. His resistance to change, the stagnation found in unyielding tradition, that allowed him to turn his back on his immediate family and descendants found throughout the diaspora. Again with the other Wakandan ancestors standing quietly by as witness; listening, not arguing the point.

Now. Fast forward to Killmonger’s sunset death.

Black Panther, T’challa, Africa, after having defeated his distant American cousin, carries him to the mouth of the Panther embedded in the mountain that overlooked the Wakandan sunset. A sunset N’jobu told a young Killmonger was the most beautiful sunset on earth. T’challa gives Killmonger a lifeline by offering the opportunity to be healed with Wakandan science. Killmonger looks at him and rejects his offer by simply saying:

Bury me in the sea with my ancestors.

He didn’t say “our” but “MY ancestors”. He continues, knowing that if he were to live he most likely would not be allowed to roam free in Wakanda and at the very least be deemed an outsider. Again, he says, “Bury me in the sea with my ancestors who threw themselves from the ships. Because they knew that death was better than bondage”

YO!!! Black panther writers, ya’ll f*cking me up. I’m a hot mess up in the theater at this point free-styling poetry in my head.

I can imagine speaking with my ancestors underwater
Breathing salt and blood
Human treasure turned gold
Our ancestral plane of Blue indigo
gold and choral

This place marked in and over time.

This is the new imagined land where perhaps our African-American ancestors can be found. This is our magic truth made of horror, heroism and choice. I pray the cinematic atom bomb that is Black Panther, promotes continued conversation between those who identify as African and have the documented or oral lineage to prove it and those who simply don’t; rather identify as Black (specific to African-Americans) or Caribbean, English, Brazilian, French and so on.

Back to the real world. Yes, I know some Africans think we AA’s are a bit silly or worse, co-opting African cultures through films like the Black Panther. Perhaps, but we need to have a more nuanced conversation that leans towards a mutual healing from both slavery and colonization; and that just may mean allowing us AA’s some silliness like the video below. Allow us to imagine what was denied. However inaccurate or fantastical it may be, the ability to imagine magic is our hard fought entitlement, if we were to have any.