Solidarity in Facing the Future- Interview with Ms. Hong Hyewon, a Korean Volunteer in Malawi, on THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND

Helping us appreciate The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a special guest, Ms. Hong Hyewon, with a unique experience of having worked in Malawi as a young South Korean volunteer. Ms. Hong is an undergraduate student at Sogang University, majoring in French Culture and Political Science. A Korean native, she has studied French, English, Japanese, Arabic languages and learned the basic command of Chichewa to work for the Africa Future Foundation in Malawi in 2017. Since January 2019, she has been volunteering at a Korean shelter service for international refugees, many of whom Africans, called Refuge pNan.

The interview was conducted via Skype between Seoul, Korea, and Berkeley, USA, in April 19, 2019 [Pacific US time]. It has been edited for length and clarity. The copyright for the interview content belongs to Ms. Hong Hyewon and anyone who wants to quote from the interview below should contact  Ms. Hong for an explicit permission. The letter “Q” indicates Kyu Hyun Kim, the interviewer, and “H” indicates Ms. Hong.

Q: My first question relates to the issue I have raised in the review, that William Kamkwamba's initial accomplishment, amazing as it was, was, in real life, not directly tied to the dramatic alleviation of drought as illustrated in the film. Perhaps this level of dramatization was necessary to get the project off the ground.  What do you think about this issue?

H: Right, as you have indicated in the review, this is a question of representation versus reality. I have read Kamkwamba's book [the source for the film], and he does state that the primary motivation for building the windmill generator was to get electricity for his home.

Q: I should state that the need for electricity and illumination, so that one could study at home in the nighttime, does not strike me in any way as less “important” or “desperate” than running a water pump, in the real-life context wherein someone like Kamkwamba found himself.

H: I absolutely agree. I think the irrigation pump was a dramatic device, in a way, to make Kamkwamba's “eccentric” behavior ultimately meaningful for those around him, to show that his accomplishments could benefit the community he belonged to.

Q: I see. So, he had to demonstrate to the community that his projects were not just for himself.

H: Right. And also to show those outside the local community that this type of engineering feat could be done with the meagre resources available within. I think the compressed narrative and dramatization strategy Ejiofor employs was necessary, generally speaking. Otherwise, his messages might not have been conveyed with the kind of urgency and strength seen in the film.

Q: It is worth noting that his peers and friends were the most sympathetic members within his community.

H: Yes, not only in the movie, but also in the Kamkwamba's book on which the film is based, William's cousin Jeffrey and Gilbert, the Chief of Wimbe's son, were early and important supporters of his endeavors. 

Q: What aspects of the Malawi culture and life that you had experienced and observed that you feel were not captured in the film? Or, this is perhaps a related question, what aspects of the Malawi culture you had observed that would have come across as different from what we usually expect from a film of this type?

H: Are we assuming the perspective of a typical Korean viewer?

Q: Well, you don't have to, but that is fine. We are both Koreans, after all [Laughter]. I suppose I could also take on the viewpoint of an American viewer, typical or whatnot.

H: Yes, well, I definitely am not an expert on the Malawi culture, so I hope the readers do not take my comments in that way. Having said that, to give an example, the scene in which the villagers gather together at Chief Wimbe's residence is a lot less like an American town hall meeting in real life than it perhaps appears in the film. The Chief's authority is complexly localized, and there are many types of protocols to follow.  I don't think we could simply assume that the locals would obey the chief's authority and decide what they would with the lands, either. The movie sort of collapses these forms of traditional authority into a series of symbolic depictions, and tends to focus on the individuals who already are "modernized" or being transformed into those in that mold, who could sell their lands essentially without the consent of their community.  So a village meeting is, for better or worse, not as simple as just a show of hands and then moving forward with everyone speaking their frank minds.   

Q: Before that the village meeting scene, I was not aware that Gilbert was Chief's son. William wants to attend the meeting too but he gets kicked out of it by his father [Laughter].

H: Yes, Gilbert is a designated heir to the village's leadership so he is given the privilege to attend the meeting. I thought it was clever for the film to point to the boy's privileged identity through that scene.

Q: Can we touch on a bit more personal dimension, in terms of resonances between Kamkwamba's experiences and your own?

H: Yes, well, I feel that William Kamkwamba had an orientation toward scientific inquiry and Western modes of thinking to start with, and possessed both an ability and a drive to look for opportunities and colleagues who could help him navigate through the complex processes of negotiating with his own society and culture.  At Malawi I did observe some startling cases of the old traditions and these scientific, modern orientations co-existing-- some folks resisting blood tests because they believed that the samples might be used for occult purposes, for instance. Having said that, his father's contradictory behavior in the film-- wanting his son to go to school and “succeed,” and yet stick to traditional values of-- in the film, at least-- a farmer, deeply resonated with my own ambivalent feelings. 

Q: As I have mentioned in my review, Chiwetel Ejiofor could have portrayed Trywell as his son's only or one of the few “supporters,” but I think he goes an extra mile to reject that kind of triumphalist characterization. Instead, he attempts to illustrate the difficulty, on the part of Trywell or someone like him, of adapting to a new world. In a conventional narrative, the obtuse and the unenlightened are either proven completely wrong at the end, or they get “enlightened” by the protagonists at the drop of their hats. This is not what happens in the film.

H: No, it's never that simple. I think colonial and postcolonial modernization of Malawi, mediated through the educational system of the British empire, has not really closed the gap between the “traditional” and the “modern” components of the nation. This is a bigger issue than merely a difference in wealth between upper and lower classes.

Q: I do not believe this type of dilemma was that different from the one that faced South Koreans, as late as in '80s. I believe many among democratic activists of my generation-- so-called the “386” generation, a term that I dislike but keep using, I plead guilty to that-- sometimes inadequately dealt with the gap between what they intellectually understood as “enlightenment” and “social revolution” as members of the elite classes and what the rural population actually wanted, during the former's encounters with the latter during a phase of agrarian activism (so-called nonghwal).  For the farmers, “enlightenment” did not necessarily mean learning how a world capitalist system worked, but learning such "mundane" stuff as how to keep the book properly, how to get loans without being cheated, or even how to get better transportation, sometime as simple as learning to ride a bicycle better.

H: Oh, what you just said reminds me of the case studies in Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo's Poor Economics. During my sojourn there, one of the strategies for inducing Malawi children to go to schools was to hand out soaps to them.

Q: Tell me about that.

H: We did a brainstorm session with the local project assistants to figure out the reasons for the children dropping out from schools and expressing reluctance to attend them. I eventually learned that the reasons were quite diverse: sometimes they had to skip school because they were too poor, but at other times they were ostracized for being dirty, or not clothed well.  Giving them bars of soap, change for buying clothes or sandals, or bags of salt or corn powder produced positive results in enhancing their “motivation.”

Q: I also feel that the kind of pat criticism directed to movies such as The Boy, to the tune of “Okay, so William Kamkwamba did make it, what about other children who had not have the kind of access to the knowledge he had?” really misses the point.  

H: I think I understand where such criticisms come from, but yes, I do agree that there is no shortage of the "motivated" people, once the kind of hurdles and obstacles more specific to the lived experiences are addressed.

Q: Can you talk a bit about Gule Wamkulu? Have you watched them perform?  

H: Yes, I did.

Q: Wow, tell me about that experience! [Laughter]

H: Well, not at a funeral. I watched them perform at the Kuti Wildlife Reserve in Salima, Malawi. They were introduced as Gypsy-like itinerant dancers.  Looking at their interaction with the tourists, I was reminded of the Korean masked dance troupe, who uses humor and satire to entertain the audience. And they were awesome: until watching them perform, I had never realized a human body could be shaken with so much energy and vigor.  And when they stamped their feet in rhythm, it was like an earthquake. But they demand money for their work, and from what I have observed, pretty on the nose, too.

Q: Well, why should it be otherwise?

H: Of course! [Laughter] In contrast to my first-hand experience, the Gule Wamkulu dancers in the film seem to function in similar ways to shamans and represent the tradition and community solidarity of Malawi.  In the early part of the film, they disrupt the Christian funeral rites led by a pastor, and the attendees cannot help but turn their gaze toward them, despite their professed beliefs in the new religion of the missionaries. They also seem to symbolize the natural world being displaced by the introduction of Western civilization and industrialism, as hinted in the scene where a lone dancer with a baby doll mask mysteriously gazes at William. William Kamkwamba's autobiography refers to the Gule Wamkulu several times: he actually sponsored their dance at a community gathering raising awareness for HIV/AIDS at one point.

Q: Anything else about the film that you have noticed you want to share?

H: I have visited Malawi during a wet season, so I have never experienced the wind the way it was depicted in the film. I felt that the wind was almost like a character in the film: the filmmakers did an excellent job of keeping it present throughout the feature, seguing into the climax where it is finally brought under control by Kamkwamba.  In addition, the struggle between Annie and Agnes I strongly sympathized with, in the sense that even very loving and intimate relationships could be affected by material needs in such a circumstance they faced together as a family. One element that struck me as somewhat--- I don't want to say unrealistic, but perhaps overly idealistic-- is Trywell speechifying his political discontent and hitching a truck ride to another town for the explicit purpose of helping an opposition party candidate. I heard sometimes that the locals describe themselves as complaisant, compared to their neighbors in Mozambique and Tanzania. The flip side of it is that perhaps what looks to some outsiders as indifference to democratic agitation might be, for Malawians, an ingredient of political stability. Given the horrible political struggles taking place in another African nation such as Democratic Republic of Congo, maybe we should not be so quick to judge them for "not being politicized enough."

 

Q: The industrialized sector is represented by tobacco companies in the film. Near the end of the film, Trywell talks ruefully about how he could have been a tobacco farmer, producing tobacco that “looks like milk chocolate.”

H: Based on what I have seen, the critical positions in the tobacco companies were largely occupied by foreigners such as South Africans. Similar to the case of peanuts cultivated in Senegal, tobacco is a commercial crop that needs to be sold in the market in order to be exchanged for other necessities, including foodstuffs. There is always a concern whether the downturns in the international market for commercial crops such as peanut, coffee and tobacco would become burdens on the shoulders of African farmers. Actually, while I was staying there, I had a chance to meet the former President of the Koreans in Malawi Association, married to a tobacco company VIP.

Q: Wow!

H: There were about 200 Koreans living in Malawi at that time. The oldest generation among Korean residents included those who had settled there during '70s working for the national highway construction projects.

Q: What an amazing level of global reach. The '60s-'70s "national" history of Korea must be rewritten.

H: And the former President was very well-off.  Her husband was indeed a South African, with their children going to colleges in Cape Town.  

Q: Let's return our talk to William Kamkwamba, or more precisely, the resonance between his life and yours. I know there is no one correct answer to a question like this, but if we determine that, even if you are a beneficiary of Euro-American higher education, it is important that you still maintain a form of local connection, how would you reconcile the desire to help those who remain in your local areas to the yearning to reach out to the larger world?  I know this question could be taken as a very personal one [Laughter].

H: Yes, well, it sounds very clichéd but I think solidarity and fighting together is the answer. [Laughter] Solidarity, as I interpret it, starts from finding, organizing and joining in with the like-minded people. But these days I also think a lot about self-preservation, trying not to push myself to the point that, if I happen to buckle from the outside pressure, I would then lose sight of my ideals. I think those who have gained new knowledge and insights should take care to communicate these things in the ways that make sense to those around them.

Q: Do you think William Kamkwamba has managed to resolve this dilemma?

H: Not necessarily. I think he still has many obstacles in the future to face, many hurdles to overcome. As he matures as a social person and a community leader, the issues that he will have to tackle will become bigger and more complex. How would, for instance, ESCOM, the dominant electricity company in Malawi, legally and politically respond to his initiative for self-producing electricity?  In other words, we should be careful not to simply stop at the level of recognizing, wow, there is this very smart young person in Africa doing some great engineering work, and recognize that there are always more things to be done, more problems to be solved.   

Q: Any final comment?

H: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a very inspiring and well-made film. I just wish that those who watch it, wherever they are, and whatever their backgrounds are, do not subscribe to the fantasy that the problems and the issues facing Kamkwamba, his community, Malawi and Africa were even partially resolved, when the movie ended. That is simply not true, as we have discussed above.  William's story is far from finished yet.  I sympathize with him, a brave and talented inventor-community-activist, but also see how tough his life could be from this point on.

Q: It will be a continued struggle with many issues, as your life is likely to be. So there is a feeling of solidarity in that sense between you two as well.

H: Yes!

Q: Thank you so much Hyewon, it was amazingly inspiring to talk to you.

H: Thank you, Professor Kim, for providing this wonderful opportunity to reflect on my experience in Malawi!  

"God is the Wind, Which Touches Everything"-THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND (2019)- Film Review

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. UK-Malawi, 2019. A BBC Films/BFI Film Fund/Blue Sky Films Production Services Malawi/Head Gear Films/Lipsync Post/Metrol Technology/Econet/Participant Media/Cornerstone Films/Potboiler Productions Co-Production, distributed by Netflix. 1 hour 53 minutes. Aspect Ratio 2.35:1. Screenwriter & Director: Chiwetel Ejiofor. Based on a book of the same name by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer. Cinematography: Dick Pope. Costume Design: Bia Salgado. Production Design: Tulé Peake. Music: Antonio Pinto.  

CAST: Chiwetel Ejiofor (Trywell Kamkwamba), Maxwell Simba (William Kamkwamba), Alïssa Maïga (Agenes Kamkwamba), Lily Banda (Annie Kamkwamba), Lemogant Tsipa (Mike), Joseph Marcell (Chief Wimbe), Phibert Falakeza (Gilbert), Robert Agengo (Jeremiah).

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a directorial debut and labor of love for the Nigerian (Igbo tribe)-British star Chiwetel Ejiofor, who had worked with such luminaries as Stephen Spielberg, Woody Allen, and Alfonso Cuaron, among others, and nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013). Oh right, he plays Baron Mordo in Dr. Strange, too. For his debut project, Ejiofor was probably thinking like a theater director who happens to be a movie star, locking on to the kind of universally inspiring human-interest story that, nonetheless, has some substantive dramatic conflicts at its core, all the while depicting a section of Africa that has hitherto had little chance to be seen throughout the world in an accessible popular cultural form. 

I will come back to this issue of dramatization vs. real life shortly, but Ejiofor's first right step was to create an entirely believable look for the film, miles apart from either the exoticized glamour of "nature documentaries," or the aesthetized grunginess of a high-end Hollywood production, usually cluttered with hundreds of extras and colorful details framing perfectly made-up and coiffed stars. Although the substantial part of the dialogue is in English (the rest of the conversation is conducted in Chichewa, one of the languages spoken in Malawi, which Ejiofor, Alïssa Maïga, a Senegalese-Malian-French, and some other cast members had to learn afresh), Ejiofor seeks to maintain a careful balance between a believable ethnographic representation and an involving fictional narrative, both of which come with certain expectations and conventions.

Divided into five chapters, four of them titled after an agricultural cycle, Sowing (Kufesa), Growing (Kukula), Harvest (Kukolola), Hunger (Njala), and the climactic chapter named Wind (Mphepo), The Boy starts off with a surrealistic and foreboding vision of masked dancers called Gule Wamkulu, covered in colorful rags, some walking on stilts. They are professional mourners who visit the sites of death, but for young William a source of mystery and fear. The veteran British cinematographer Dick Pope (The Illusionist [2006], Mr. Turner [2014]) utilizes the scope width of his canvas to capture not only the aridity and vastness of planes but also the vibrancy and warmth of Malawian communities. As the family members of William Kamkwamba (Maxwell Simba, a Kenyan young actor, admirably restrained in what amounts to be his first professional performance) are introduced to the viewers, Ejiofor also unhurriedly unfurls his layered narratives, which not only involves William's effort to educate himself in the basics of engineering at a school where he has to sneak into its library, due to his inability to pay tuition, but also his father Trywell's (Ejiofor) resistance to being exploited by the government and farming corporations (specifically tobacco companies), making him a valuable ally to the justice-seeking Chief of Wimbe (Joseph Marcell, from the '80 sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). A harrowing middle section shows Kamkwamba's family, with the mother Agnes (graceful yet sturdy Maïga) and daughter Annie (Lily Banda, a Malawian actress) left by themselves to face thieves and potential rapists coming after their painfully harvested grains (barely enough for the family's survival for the fallow season as they are), while William and Trywell run around desperately to purchase food from the government stations.

Ultimately, however, Ejiofor refuses to frame this film as a story of heroic patriarchal struggle. His  acting prowess at full throttle, Ejiofor instead lays bare all the contradictory aspects of Trywell's personality, including his failure as a father-protector, his stubborn will unmistakably tinted by a measure of self-righteousness. He structures the narrative in such a way that William's construction of the wind-powered electronic generator is not merely a personal triumph for him, but serves as a representation of-- at the same time a clarion call for-- a new generation of Africans to respectfully learn from but also surmount their fathers, with their dependable authority but close-mindedness toward new types of solutions.

The harrowing episodes showing the consequences of a poor harvest, with their graphic yet non-exploitative depictions of despair, rage and resilience, are certainly powerful, greatly aided by, again, restrained and finely honed performances from the principals. Nonetheless, I do believe that there are some grounds for questioning Ejiofor's choice to tie William's invention to revitalization of a water pump, thus making his windmill power-generator essential for the survival of his community. Would William's achievement have been considered less "moving" by the viewers, had it not been responsible for alleviating the hunger of his village? Maybe. However, we can defend Ejiofor's narrative stratagem, too, for allowing the viewers to access the greater truths distilled out of the compressed or modified facts. Kamkwamba's windmill generators did contribute to increasing agricultural output, after all, just not so dramatically as the film version's events would indicate. And William and his family did experience a famine, one of the main reasons that he could not pay tuition to his school.

Make no mistake, The Boy is somber and earnest. Yet, neither is it a lugubrious production reeking of self-importance. The filmmakers do not forget to show us simple pleasures of life threaded by casual, affectionate conversations, with strikingly authentic locations (mostly filmed in Malawi, near the real-life lived environments of the characters) showing a junkyard full of the detritus of the mechanical civilization, a schoolyard gathering with students dressed in primary colored uniforms, instantly swallowed up by an explosive shower of rain, and other vistas that bring forth complex affective responses in the viewers, no matter what their cultural backgrounds are (For me, it is difficult not to be reminded of my glimpses of the '70s and even '80s Korean countryside). Production designer Tulé Peake and Costume designer Bia Salgado, the Brazilians who had worked on City of God (2002), do a great job of mixing natural and man-made environments, neither over-selling hardship and harshness nor prettifying the simple accoutrements of rural Southeastern African lives.  Antonio Pinto (The Host [2013], Self/Less [2015]), another Brazilian, provides a light-on-the-feet, non-pushy yet suitably emotional score. 

 

Ejiofor, a superb and committed actor, probably tries a bit too hard with his own portrayal of the Kamkwamba paterfamilias, set up to be the story's final obstacle that William needs to overcome (one of the core themes of Black Panther --yes, that Marvel superhero movie-- as well), but it is difficult to question his sincerity and, in the end, directorial acumen in putting this project together. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind may be an unassuming little film, but it succeeds in reminding us that these seemingly "small" endeavors, such as the construction of William Kamkwamba's first jerry-rigged generator, partially from a wheel and sawed-off chassis of an old bicycle, are ultimately the ones that will change the world for the better.

BLACK PANTHER's African Connection-- Interview & Discussion with Professor Corrie Decker, Associate Professor of African History, UC Davis

Black Panther, the solo starring vehicle for the Marvel Comics' African superhero, invented in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (also the year the Black Panther Party was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, perhaps not-so-coincidentally), had already received much pre-release attention due to its rare status as a major studio tent-pole blockbuster with a predominantly black cast.  Once it was released in February 2018, the film decimated box office, earning more than 412.9 million dollars domestically and reaching the total figure of appx. 704 million dollars worldwide total (as of February 28), with the United Kingdom, South Korea (yay!), Brazil, Australia and, not surprisingly, African nations leading the fray (for some reason, it is not playing as strong in Germany and Italy).  Most industry analysts agree that the film will eventually surpass 600 million dollar mark domestically to become one of the five or six biggest hits of all time, possibly outgrossing all Marvel superhero films in the process. 

All this is pretty staggering in itself, but Black Panther is also provoking discussions all over the world for its dazzling portrayal of the fictional African nation, Wakanda, and its powerful characterizations and themes that draw upon the real-life histories of colonialism, imperialism, systematic racism and transnational exploitation of resources.  For instance, many reviewers and critics have noted that how the film's central villain Erik Killmonger (Stevens) is so much more than just a comic book bad guy.  Erik explicitly criticizes Wakanda's stance of isolationism and seeks to usurp the throne from T'Challa, the film's hero, so that he could turn the superior technological power of the African kingdom to "liberate" the black races throughout the world against their white oppressors. 

I have sat down with Associate Professor Corrie Decker, my wonderful colleague from History Department at University of California, Davis, to inquire about Black Panther's "African connection," and how the film could help us understand history and politics of the continent.  

Professor Decker, a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley History program, is the author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In addition to histories of African regions, she also teaches courses on sexuality, gender, youth and education.  I learned so much from her knowledgeable commentaries on various aspects of Black Panther's portrayal of Wakanda and other elements. Needless to say all this education further increased my appreciation of the film.  I am sharing our discussion below, slightly edited for flow and clarity: I hope you find it as enlightening as I did. 

The interview was conducted at Berkeley, CA, on February 23, 2018. The content of the interview is copyrighted to Corrie Decker, 2018.

Kyu Hyun Kim (hereafter Q): Let's begin with the geographical location of Wakanda. In the movie's prologue they actually show the map of the African continent and to my surprise Wakanda's location is sort of specified. It looks like somewhere near Uganda.

Corrie Decker (hereafter D): I got the sense from the map shown briefly in the film that it would be located somewhere around the border between Eastern Congo and Uganda. The map and geographic features imply that Wakanda could be in Central or Eastern/Southern Africa, but other elements of Wakanda point to other regions in West or West/Central Africa, and of course the language used (isiXhosa) is South African.

Q: And the filmmakers show the landscape of Wakanda.  The city looks futuristic, of course, but the plains, the waterfalls… do they remind you of specific places in Africa?

D: They did not look like specific places in my view. There are the very large Victoria Falls on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and there are certainly other places with large waterfalls and lakes in the Great Lakes region. Plains and savannahs seem to invoke Eastern Africa-- Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania… the mountainous region on the other hand…

Q: The Jabari territory.

D: Right, that was more of a fictional landscape, at least in terms of what really exists in Central/East Africa.

Q: I am impressed nonetheless that they tried to show a diversity of climates, including snow-covered, presumably very cold places.  Many North Americans might not immediately associate "Africa" with snow (Laughter).

D: It does snow in the tops of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, for example.

Q: Vibranium is of course not a real resource. The idea that a country becomes dependent on a particular mineral actually dates from the original comics. What do you think about this set-up involving vibranium?

D: You know, I kept thinking about coltan and cobalt. They are metals/minerals mined in Africa and are used in almost all high-end electronic products, such as cell phones and laptops. The scramble for coltan has contributed to some serious conflicts in Eastern Congo.  It does make me think about the alternative history-- not likely, but still-- in which Congo had actually controlled the mining and selling of coltan, what might have happened then?  Congo had been subject to external mining, beginning with copper, for the past one hundred plus years, of course, under Belgian colonialism.  

Professor Jim Smith in the UC Davis Anthropology Department has done fieldwork on this issue, and it is an extraordinarily complicated situation.  There are dozens of militia groups in conflict with one another and with various governments, and also refugees from Uganda and other countries, a lot of border crossing, upheavals, based on the exploitation of resources that goes all the way back to rubber.

Q: The main villain is Erik Killmonger, an American, and his career trajectory seems to openly indicate that the US has played a colonizing, politically destabilizing role.  And T'Challa's sister Shuri uses the term "colonizer" as a generic term for white people.  The filmmakers don't dwell on it, but still I find the choice very interesting. 

I think Lupita Nyong'o's father stated in an interview that Wakanda shows the third alternative between Africans sticking to traditions at the expense of keeping up with the rest of the world, and, conversely, embracing the Western modernity and abandoning their traditions.

D: That is very interesting.  In some ways, though, I feel that statement is a bit of an oversimplification. The dichotomy between African traditions and Western modernity has never been clear-cut.

Q: There have been African forms of modernity that this dichotomy tends to ignore.

D: Absolutely.  This idea makes more sense in terms of political discourse, as much of the political struggles in Africa have been about negotiating the impact of Western colonization, but to describe this in terms of tradition vs. modernity does not take into account the ways in which both change over time. Also, the notion that African tradition has been under threat by Western modernity has led to highly problematic ideas and arguments, such as, for instance, the concept that homosexuality is a "disease" brought by the colonizers to Africa. This kind of idea completely disregards the multitudes of sexual orientations that had existed in Africa prior to colonialism.  

Scholars such as Ugandan legal studies professor Sylvia Tamale (editor of African Sexualities: A Reader [2011]), really challenges this dichotomy through her work.

Q: This is fascinating, because some of the criticisms levelled at Black Panther's portrayal of Wakanda have been about its "unevenness," for example, how can a country still be a monarchy and also be so technologically and scientifically advanced?  But listening to you, it appears that this "unevenness" is actually much closer to the African reality.  Co-existence of traditions and modernity is a norm, not an exception, for Africans.

D: Exactly. In the Western notion of linear historical progress, democracy is always conflated with industrialization, for example, but that kind of view flattens our ability to comprehend histories of the other parts of the world.  I don't find any serious contradiction in the idea that there could be a human society ruled by a monarchy but with extremely advanced technology.

Q: Or, for that matter, a monarchy supported by very strong women.

D: Yes, although we can debate that part. Historian Robyn Spencer at Lehman College (author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and Black Panther Party in Oakland [Duke University Press, 2016]) has written a terrific critical reflection on feminism and the women of Wakanda.

Q: Yes! A great observation she makes in the article is that men are regarded as thinkers but women are actors. So this means that having very physically powerful, kick-ass women may not necessarily be the final answer.  Although I think someone like Shuri can perhaps be both a thinker and an actor.

D: Yeah!

Q: Let's talk about generational conflict.  What I found so moving about T'Challa's character arc is the way he recognizes the hypocrisies of his father's generation.  Chadwick Boseman gives an almost Shakespearian performance here, expressing the agony of the younger generation who painfully finds out the part of the narrative that constitutes his identity has been false, a series of lies.  

I think this kind of depiction is really resonant to the young people.  On the one hand they need role models.  But in the back of their minds they are aware that the actions and ideas of their elders have been flawed.

D: Totally.

Q: It's okay to challenge your fathers, even if you carry on their dreams.

D: Right! 

Q: How does Black Panther impact North American viewers, and not just Americans of African descent, to change their perceptions of Africa?  Or what would be the ways to improve the relationships between North Americans and Africans? Does the movie provide clear, positive messages regarding that question?

D: I think this is where the movie was perhaps a bit disappointing to me.

Q: You mean the ending?

D: In the sense that the gesture of generosity toward Oakland could signal the new beginning, it was fine, I got that. But I think it could have addressed… could have made explicit a few more issues. This topic is perhaps a bit sensitive, but I felt that Killmonger was calling to the African diaspora to rise up, but he is in a sense directing the criticism not just to the US but also to African nations. 

There is a big debate about the responsibility of African nations in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, for instance. A large number of slaves sold into the coastal slave trade came from the interior and had been captured by other Africans. So there is a nod, perhaps not explicitly intended by the filmmakers, to the abandonment of Africans in the diaspora by African nations going back to the era of the slave trade.

Q: I totally see that now that you have explained it to me. But I think that's where having a fictional nation like Wakanda works so much better. If Black Panther were an African-American hero, he would be a lot like Erik Killmonger and he would go to Africa to violently "help" "poor Africans" against the colonizers.  And in such a format there would be no room to address these complex and difficult real historical issues.

D: I am so glad that's not the movie they actually made (Laughter). What happens to the people who had left the continent against their will?  Erik's messages are conflicted: on the one hand, "let's join forces against our oppressors." On the other, "you have abandoned us."

It is a bit problematic that Erik's mother, an American, is never seen, too. But what Erik's father was trying to do, before he was stopped by his own brother, T'Chaka, in the context of black liberation movement in the US, carried much resonance with African independence movements, which, historically, led to the new wave of Pan-Africanism in the mid-twentieth century.  And yet some African Americans engaged in these global movements against racism expressed a sense of abandonment by Africans once African nations gained independence in the 1960s, and the connection between the movements faded.

African American Studies Professor Jemima Pierre at UCLA has conducted fascinating research on this and related topics centered on the African diaspora experience and global racial formation.  This disjuncture is, for instance, mirrored in the divisions between the academic fields of "African Studies" and "Black Studies" since the 1960s.

Having said this, I do think it is remarkable that Black Panther emphasizes the deep connections- past, present, and future, between the continent and the diaspora. The fact that we have a blockbuster movie centered entirely on Africans and African Americans is something to celebrate!

Q: Incredible. So many new things to learn!  Thank you so much for your time, Professor Decker.

D: My pleasure!