Black Panther Nitpicking
Feb. 26th, 2018 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sebenikela(Edited slightly from a comment I put on staranise's Black Panther post)
So, the the zoom-in-map bit at the beginning of the movie suggested that Wakanda is somewhere around Uganda-ish, and assuming that's right, that makes the recent past REALLY INTERESTING.
Because in the last 30 years, in that region, you have: the Rwandan genocide, the various DRC wars, Joseph Kony and the LRA... and unlike, say, the Atlantic slave trade, those conflicts (except MAYBE the DRC stuff, but even there...) were small enough in scale that Wakanda could have made an absolutely enormous difference without risking many Wakandan lives. (I mean, this in no way lets the rest of us off the hook, but Wakanda was RIGHT THERE...)
If I was Rwandan and found out that Wakanda had sat there and watched in '94 I would be fucking furious, honestly.
And then on the flipside, how much information from the outside gets INTO Wakanda, because if you're sitting there comfortably in Wakanda and hear about genocide happening practically on your borders, I would guess there'd be at least SOME people who'd demand their government do something to stop it. Was there a thwarted uprising in 1994 over Rwanda? Earlier, over Idi Amin? Apartheid? Somalia? Famines in Ethiopia or the Sahel? Or is there super strict information control--if you block the BBC world service on shortwave, keep the internet out and rely only on state media and you'd be able to control what people know about the outside world, but that gets dystopic really fast.
ha, and now I want the fic about the War Dogs in neighboring countries SCREAMING about how they had to DO SOMETHING and getting told no and... well, basically the Wakandan Romeo Dallaires. Because fuck, there'd have to be a few of those. (Unless they only send War Dogs outside of Africa? but again, that ALSO gets dystopic pretty fast...)
So okay, and now they're going to get involved in international aid and development work, which is cool, but the fact that they're Africans doesn't mean they necessarily know how to do foreign aid all over the continent. Aid is hard. It's a big, diverse continent. Being African doesn't make you immune to the same patriarchal, patronizing bullshit that white folks pull. See, for example, Ethiopians I worked with who don't know shit about how to work effectively in Mali. Or the African extension workers who tell farmers they're stupid for not doing what they're told. Humans are humans, regardless. So I would actually be surprised if there weren't some early Wakandan aid fuckups of the sort that often happen when people go "hey we have this cool tech, we should Save The World with it!" and end up with solutions in search of problems rather than the other way around... but we'll be hopeful that the Wakandans have a pretty quick learning curve on that.
Maybe all the Wakandan Romeo Dallaires and the rest of the frustrated War Dogs stationed on the continent who've been sending increasingly exasperated memos about how if only someone would give them the resources they could just FIX THE THING can be in charge of WAID. Nakia at least seems to have her head on straight, and T'Challa seems to realize that. So that's a good start.
Anyway, that's my day-after thoughts for now...
staranise's Black Panther post)So, the the zoom-in-map bit at the beginning of the movie suggested that Wakanda is somewhere around Uganda-ish, and assuming that's right, that makes the recent past REALLY INTERESTING.
Because in the last 30 years, in that region, you have: the Rwandan genocide, the various DRC wars, Joseph Kony and the LRA... and unlike, say, the Atlantic slave trade, those conflicts (except MAYBE the DRC stuff, but even there...) were small enough in scale that Wakanda could have made an absolutely enormous difference without risking many Wakandan lives. (I mean, this in no way lets the rest of us off the hook, but Wakanda was RIGHT THERE...)
If I was Rwandan and found out that Wakanda had sat there and watched in '94 I would be fucking furious, honestly.
And then on the flipside, how much information from the outside gets INTO Wakanda, because if you're sitting there comfortably in Wakanda and hear about genocide happening practically on your borders, I would guess there'd be at least SOME people who'd demand their government do something to stop it. Was there a thwarted uprising in 1994 over Rwanda? Earlier, over Idi Amin? Apartheid? Somalia? Famines in Ethiopia or the Sahel? Or is there super strict information control--if you block the BBC world service on shortwave, keep the internet out and rely only on state media and you'd be able to control what people know about the outside world, but that gets dystopic really fast.
ha, and now I want the fic about the War Dogs in neighboring countries SCREAMING about how they had to DO SOMETHING and getting told no and... well, basically the Wakandan Romeo Dallaires. Because fuck, there'd have to be a few of those. (Unless they only send War Dogs outside of Africa? but again, that ALSO gets dystopic pretty fast...)
So okay, and now they're going to get involved in international aid and development work, which is cool, but the fact that they're Africans doesn't mean they necessarily know how to do foreign aid all over the continent. Aid is hard. It's a big, diverse continent. Being African doesn't make you immune to the same patriarchal, patronizing bullshit that white folks pull. See, for example, Ethiopians I worked with who don't know shit about how to work effectively in Mali. Or the African extension workers who tell farmers they're stupid for not doing what they're told. Humans are humans, regardless. So I would actually be surprised if there weren't some early Wakandan aid fuckups of the sort that often happen when people go "hey we have this cool tech, we should Save The World with it!" and end up with solutions in search of problems rather than the other way around... but we'll be hopeful that the Wakandans have a pretty quick learning curve on that.
Maybe all the Wakandan Romeo Dallaires and the rest of the frustrated War Dogs stationed on the continent who've been sending increasingly exasperated memos about how if only someone would give them the resources they could just FIX THE THING can be in charge of WAID. Nakia at least seems to have her head on straight, and T'Challa seems to realize that. So that's a good start.
Anyway, that's my day-after thoughts for now...
no subject
Date: 2018-02-26 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-28 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-28 02:26 pm (UTC)But in a world where Cuban doctors have been going and helping out all over Africa for the last 50 years, it looks worse for Wakanda to have done NOTHING.
....Aaaaaand now I really want the AU where Wakanda has volunteer doctors/teachers/etc/??? along the lines of Cuban medical volunteers, and it's semi-covert because they don't want everyone to realize that they're not just as poor as Cuba, but they somehow have all this great innovative tech, and the CIA is SUPER FUCKING CONFUSED and ...hijinks of some kind?
no subject
Date: 2018-02-28 02:31 pm (UTC)Mostly I think in order to make Wakanda work as afrofuturist utopia you have to posit some alt-history or push this stuff to the side some other way. So it's less a criticism of the movie than just...this is baked into the premise? And that's kind of uncomfortable? Honestly I'm mostly just glad they acknowledged the contradictions as much as they did.