On February 15, 2018 the film “Black Panther” was released to movie theaters worldwide, a film that has now become the highest grossing movie directed by an African in history.
In light of the box office records that it shattered and the attention the film got through massive promotions by white ruling class media, political questions have been raised within the international black community.
Both the African petty bourgeoisie and the poor working class are voicing opinion on the film.
The film is rich with political contradictions that are obvious to the masses who went out and saw it, as the different opinions attest to.
According to the storyline, the “Black Panther” is from a place called Wakanda, located in Africa.
What makes Wakanda significant is that before the Atlantic Slave Trade, a meteorite struck the land 10,000 years ago and it contained a substance known as “Vibranium”, the strongest metal in the universe.
Wakanda eventually decides to hoard this valuable resource from the rest of Africa and the rest of the world and uses this metal to visually hide itself from the world.
In the film, Alien nations view Wakanda as a starving nation with the highest levels of poverty in the world, due to the visual blinding Wakandans have placed on their country.
This sounds awfully similar to the actual conditions faced by the masses of poor, working-class Africans on the continent to this day, minus the hidden land of liberated Africans at the expense of the rest of the nation not having access to clean drinking water and not being in control of their resources.
Eventually, the primitive attack on Africa occurs and colonialism begins in Africa. Africa is being raped and looted─its people being murdered and enslaved and turned into commodities for white power.
Where is Wakanda in all of this? It was still secluded in invisibility from the rest of Africa while hoarding Vibranium; something that could be used to resist colonization and assist the people of Africa from being murdered off by a then starving Europe who wished to divide and conquer Africa.
Fast forward hundreds of years to the founding of the United Nations, we have all the colonial dominant nations coming together to see how best to divide the stolen resources of the oppressed nations of the world for their own interests.
Wakanda is an active participant in these meetings. The truth is that Wakanda is a country that has assisted with the colonization of African people and assists white power by not interfering with this process of looting, rape, and murder so that its valuable resource can remain hoarded and separate from the rest of Africa.
The film places the heroism in the crushing defeat of the main antagonist, Erik Killmonger, who acts as closely to an actual Black Panther of the 1960s than any character in the movie.
His main goal was to seize power of the monarchy in Wakanda so that he could be king.
Then, he would equip the masses of African people worldwide with the Vibranium being hoarded to create weapons, gear, and tools necessary to defeat white power colonialism to liberate Africans worldwide.
He would still be king, however. The contradiction with this is that the way to become king or queen is feudal, meaning that power came through “divine right”, or they’ve been ordained by God, himself, to dominate the lives of the poor peasantry.
Here is where the political split comes; poor and working-class Africans were disheartened to discover that Killmonger was NOT the hero of the movie, despite speculations already lingering based on the museum scene where he recognizes that the wealth of white nations come at the expense of the attack of Africa and the abundance of resources in Africa.
The African petty bourgeoisie then undermined the importance of Killmonger and his struggles and instead put the onus onto how he attacked African women and his anger towards Wakanda for their existence.
In reality, the army of African women was working in the interest of Wakanda and Wakanda’s complacency with the starvation of 80 percent of the African nation worldwide, while they hoard the rarest metal on Earth and its possibilities to assist the liberation struggle of the African nation.
Another contradiction in the film was the placement of African women, where the key roles for women were those either in royalty or part of the military. This means that Wakanda found no leadership roles in the governing of Wakanda suitable enough for poor working-class African women, doubting their ability to lead.
Also at the Black Panther’s prime time, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) acted as the merciless police of sustaining international capitalism, while in the process overthrowing governments and nations as sacrifice.
If these foreign leaders don’t cooperate with the exploitation of their nations by white power and allow white power to do as they please, it will result in assassinations of leaders and/or drone strikes onto that nation.
Despite this violent and parasitic relationship that the C.I.A. has with African nations, one of the main allies of Wakanda and also a main character in the film was a white C.I.A. agent assisting Wakanda with the downfall of a “socialist” revolution against this feudal kingdom.
To further distort history, one argument suggested that the invention of the Black Panther cartoon character outdated the actual revolutionary Black Panther Party of the 1960s that took the world by storm.
Actually, the Black Panther Party was initially the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in 1965 and had the Black Panther as its symbol. The LCFO was known as the Black Panther Party.
According to Stan Lee, the Black Panther character was not created until July of 1966.
The LCFO’s main struggles in Lowndes County, Alabama was leading the struggle for voting rights for African people, to have African people on the ballot and for self-defense─all occurring under the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
At the time of struggles to vote and being represented on the ballot, the Black Panther Party would need a ballot symbol for their new political force.
The reigning political party of the south was the Democratic Party, with their symbol being a white rooster.
The LCFO then decided to have their symbol be a black panther, to dare and challenge the white rooster.
This wasn’t taken lightly by white people throughout the U.S.
They were infuriated that a revolutionary party dared to have a black panther as their symbol and saw it as a violent attack against the white community.
The Chair of the LCFO made this statement in 1965, “The Black Panther is an animal that when it is pressured, it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death.
We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”
After this statement, the people began to call this Party the Black Panther Party, off of the symbol alone.
It instilled an uneasy rift in the white community around the nation and set the stage for the beginning of the triumph of the Black Panther Party to come.
Ultimately, the Black Panther movie promotes white power and assists the C.I.A. with counterinsurgency.
The movie is, without fear of contradiction, a deliberate attack on the African Revolution and the theory that leads it forward, African Internationalism.
They’ve made a situation in which the hero of a Marvel film gets his heroism from being complacent with the oppression of his own people and ensuring that the entire African nation is separated from its natural resources that could assist with their liberation.
The villainizing of Killmonger makes sure that the masses of African people despise any attempts at recognizing their material interest, especially at a time where Africans are putting themselves forward as their own leadership.
Instead of putting this notion forward, they promote the idea of a feudal kingdom by the name of Wakanda as the leadership of the African Nation.
What Marvel and Disney, two representatives of white power cultural imperialism, don’t realize, however, is that they can make hundreds of “Black Panther” or similar movies but the international African Revolution is an unstoppable force and we don’t need a Killmonger or a T’Challa.
All our confidence is in the organization of the African working-class and poor peasantry under the leadership of its advanced detachment, the African People’s Socialist Party and the African Socialist International.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
