Africa: Black Panther As Neo-Tarzanism

23 February 2018
opinion

Hollywood expects everyone to cheer whenever African characters are starred as superheroes even if the roles assigned to them include the mass murder of fellow Africans while subtly promoting the interests of colonisers.

Hollywood films should always come with a consumer health warning to people of African descent: "Beware of The Ideology of the Aesthetic", as Terry Eagleton would put it. With all the hype, Black Panther: Long Live the King falls under this manipulative ideological warfare genre and should have been subtitled, Down With The King, for subscribing to what Wole Soyinka would dismiss as the pseudo tradition of neo-Tarzanism.

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