excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 18,092
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Heh. No wonder black Africa is mostly a mess. Not to mention inner cities in America. All the reparations in the world can't make up for stupid.
With last week’s streaming release of the Eddie Murphy sequel Coming 2 America, some of the world’s greatest black minds are hard at work on the defining question of the era: Which is better, Zamunda or Wakanda?
Yes, two upscale, prosperous, well-governed, peaceful…and completely fictional African nations. And big black brains are locked in a fierce debate over which has the better government.
The BBC ran a lengthy article detailing the Zamunda vs. Wakanda dispute. The various black intellectuals interviewed for the piece agree that Coming 2 America’s Zamunda and Black Panther’s Wakanda are equally “black empowered,” so on that score, they’re both fine places to live, and black people can “take pride” in the existence of both nations.
A quick reminder that neither nation exists.
Gabrielle Tesfaye, a U.S. film director of Ethiopian and Jamaican descent, admits that Zamunda and Wakanda are “imagined states of being,” but that’s irrelevant because they’re both “connected to truth.”
Of course, one could argue that if they were “connected to truth,” the great black thinkers could debate the “true” nations and not the fictional ones.
Former Guardian scribe David Jesudason criticizes Zamunda as “a regressive kingdom, in which women can’t own businesses and male-only royalty is obligatory.” Lindiwe Dovey, film professor at the University of London and head of the African Screen Worlds project, agrees. She worries that Zamunda’s policies might skew people’s perceptions of Africa as a whole. She also laments that Coming 2 America was shot in Georgia instead of on location.
Another quick reminder: Zamunda doesn’t exist. There is no “location.”
Jesudason points out that Wakanda is “a progressive kingdom that had strong roles for women in its hierarchy. It is a nation whose rulers have cut it off from the rest of the continent, while also pretending to the outside world that it is poor to prevent other countries stealing its stocks of the precious mineral vibranium.”
Third quick reminder: Like Wakanda, vibranium doesn’t exist.
Funny (well, unfunny) enough, as the black elites were debating whether Akeem or T’Challa is a better king, in actual Africa, specifically Nigeria, 279 girls were kidnapped from a boarding school by bandits…who released them a few days later. It seems that no one was paying attention to their ransom demands, because even the Nigerians were too busy arguing over Zamunda vs. Wakanda. So the bandits sent the girls home and started planning their next extortion attempt, in which they’ll storm the royal Zamundan palace to kidnap Akeem’s daughters.
The scheme’s hit a small snag, though; the kidnappers are having a hard time finding Zamunda on a map. Surely an oversight on the part of racist cartographers who don’t understand that nonexistent African nations are just as “connected to truth” as real ones.
www.takimag.com
With last week’s streaming release of the Eddie Murphy sequel Coming 2 America, some of the world’s greatest black minds are hard at work on the defining question of the era: Which is better, Zamunda or Wakanda?
Yes, two upscale, prosperous, well-governed, peaceful…and completely fictional African nations. And big black brains are locked in a fierce debate over which has the better government.
The BBC ran a lengthy article detailing the Zamunda vs. Wakanda dispute. The various black intellectuals interviewed for the piece agree that Coming 2 America’s Zamunda and Black Panther’s Wakanda are equally “black empowered,” so on that score, they’re both fine places to live, and black people can “take pride” in the existence of both nations.
A quick reminder that neither nation exists.
Gabrielle Tesfaye, a U.S. film director of Ethiopian and Jamaican descent, admits that Zamunda and Wakanda are “imagined states of being,” but that’s irrelevant because they’re both “connected to truth.”
Of course, one could argue that if they were “connected to truth,” the great black thinkers could debate the “true” nations and not the fictional ones.
Former Guardian scribe David Jesudason criticizes Zamunda as “a regressive kingdom, in which women can’t own businesses and male-only royalty is obligatory.” Lindiwe Dovey, film professor at the University of London and head of the African Screen Worlds project, agrees. She worries that Zamunda’s policies might skew people’s perceptions of Africa as a whole. She also laments that Coming 2 America was shot in Georgia instead of on location.
Another quick reminder: Zamunda doesn’t exist. There is no “location.”
Jesudason points out that Wakanda is “a progressive kingdom that had strong roles for women in its hierarchy. It is a nation whose rulers have cut it off from the rest of the continent, while also pretending to the outside world that it is poor to prevent other countries stealing its stocks of the precious mineral vibranium.”
Third quick reminder: Like Wakanda, vibranium doesn’t exist.
Funny (well, unfunny) enough, as the black elites were debating whether Akeem or T’Challa is a better king, in actual Africa, specifically Nigeria, 279 girls were kidnapped from a boarding school by bandits…who released them a few days later. It seems that no one was paying attention to their ransom demands, because even the Nigerians were too busy arguing over Zamunda vs. Wakanda. So the bandits sent the girls home and started planning their next extortion attempt, in which they’ll storm the royal Zamundan palace to kidnap Akeem’s daughters.
The scheme’s hit a small snag, though; the kidnappers are having a hard time finding Zamunda on a map. Surely an oversight on the part of racist cartographers who don’t understand that nonexistent African nations are just as “connected to truth” as real ones.
