ADDIS ABABA
The Marvel Comics movie Black Panther has wowed audiences across the United States and around the world, including Africans who have cheered on the African superheroes and their fictional Kingdom of Wakanda.
There is a little something for everyone in Wakanda for Africans. The show’s designers seem to have attempted to incorporate stylistic elements from all over the continent to create the film’s look.
Ethiopian audiences, in particular, have warmed to the movie, and more than a few have cited their own country as the inspiration for Wakanda, a hidden mountain kingdom in the movie that was the only country in the whole of Africa not to be colonised.
Indeed, Ethiopia itself has the distinction of being the sole country on the continent to resist the European scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, when the continent was divided up into colonial possessions.
Shrouded in mystery
In fact, a bit like Wakanda, Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was once known, was also long shrouded in mystery for Europeans during the Middle Ages, a mythical kingdom of great wealth, surrounded by other states, hidden in the mountains and home to the legendary Prester John.
A number of Ethiopians have noted on social media the similarities between Wakanda and Ethiopia.
Among them is Tsedale Lemma, editor of the Addis Standard, one of the few independent media outlets in the country, who took time out of reporting the country’s state of emergency to say that Ethiopia is Wakanda, “minus the techno-utopia.”
How much the legend of Ethiopia influenced Black Panther creator Stan Lee is up for debate, but the character first appeared in 1966, three years after Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie visited the US and President John F. Kennedy, treating the world to the spectacle of African royalty claiming centuries of lineage.
Addis Ababa’s one cinema showing foreign films has had sold-out screenings several times a day since the film premiered here, and theatre manager Elias Abraha expects it to stick around for weeks to come.
“People really liked it because it has connections to the way of life here, and the characters are somewhat related to tribes in Africa; it touches everyone,” he said.
Black Panther is the best-selling film at the theatre since the 3-D release of Avatar in 2013, he added.
—Washington Post
On March 1, the country celebrated one of its most important holidays, marking the battle of Adwa, a victory in 1896 against an invading Italian army that planned to subdue Africa’s last free territory.
The Italian army of some 20,000, many of them conscripts from the recently colonised Eritrea, faced off against Emperor Menelik II’s 100,000 troops. The Italians likely did not worry much about the odds. After all, this was the late 19th century when well-armed and well-trained colonial armies repeatedly defeated vast armies of “native” troops.
Except this time was different. Aside from having a civilisation that dated back some 2,000 years, Ethiopia was also united for the first time in centuries under Menelik, who had also succeeded in buying modern weapons to arm his troops.
Colonial armies had been defeated in Africa before. Zulus had overwhelmed a British force at Isandlwana in South Africa in 1879, and the religious army of the Sudanese Mahdi successfully besieged Khartoum in 1885. But all were defeated in the end.
At Adwa, the Ethiopian victory was decisive, and the Italians would not come back for half a century. It was an inspiration to Africans across a colonised continent — although some of Ethiopia’s other ethnic groups might argue that Menelik, in uniting the country, was actually carrying out his own brand of colonising and conquest.
The Italians, then under Fascist rule, did return in 1936 and briefly occupied Ethiopia with help of copious amounts of mustard gas.
—Washington Post
