Op-Ed: Black Panther’s Biggest Challenge Isn’t Finding a New Hero; It Is Reimagining Africa

It’s 2018, and Black Panther is playing in theaters. Elsewhere, there's Kente and Dashiki at every turn. “Wakanda Forever" bellows throughout the Black diaspora and beyond, crossed arms over chest, as if pledging allegiance to a new world order. And maybe so. A sacred piece of Black superhero media has just come to life, producing a cultural afterglow almost impossible to describe. Reviews, essays, and commentaries discuss this unprecedented blockbuster through the rosy lens of “representation.”

Following the news of another Black Panther movie coming in 2028 and the unveiling of rising British star David Jonsson to pick up the mantle after Chadwick Boseman, the conversation has threaded into multiple places around story continuity, Marvel dethroning Shuri so quickly, and, strange enough — or not so strange — diaspora wars. 

However, a real concern has gone under-examined: a Black Panther movie with a new face in Jonsson, while culturally joyful, can’t just retreat into stealth mode without reckoning with the fact that times have changed.

This is no longer 2018 with the chants and billow of ancestral garments. Or Wakandan Jollof and Kenkey. This is no longer the Africa that was supremely happy with representation. The movie, under the helm of Ryan Coogler, must decide how it wants to portray an idea of Africa that resonates with the present. 

A Changing Continent 

To measure how different Africa has been since the release of the first installment, a close look at what remains the same within the world of Black Panther is required. As a work of fantasy, Wakanda and vibranium are pretty much stable motifs, a geographical shorthand for Africa and the technological resource it naturally produces.

They are not just familiar cues that have grounded how audiences engage with the movie, but have contributed to shaping out-of-canon, worldly experiences. But with another installment on the way, the familiar has ostensibly reached a ceiling. How does a fictional, isolationist, technologically advanced African country map out onto today’s nuanced, modernist, culture-exporting, globally-interactive, ethnically-heterogeneous African continent?

The truth? It doesn’t map properly. This is because Black Panther, for the most part, still plays with the building blocks of Western imagination. It draws from Euro-Western-Afrofuturist tropes that depict Africa as impossibly futuristic. The other side of it: an Africa that is desperately poor. 

As a result of these extremes, Wakanda may not be able to fathom a South African star like Tyla bursting out of containment to perform on international stages, or Afrobeats dominating global music charts, or how Africans are interacting with the rest of the world as cultural influencers, co-shaping modernity through axes of social media, literature, fine arts, fashion, and so on.

Africa Should Be Ordinary As Well As Extraordinary 

Perhaps the reason Black Panther, as a franchise, is beloved within the Black diaspora is the escapism it provides from material conditions. Police brutality, crippling infrastructure, wars and conflicts. As such, Black people live vicariously through Black Panther because it allows them to slip into the movie’s extraordinary avatars without guilt. 

However, it hides from view how ordinary African lives can be. The student who commutes to and from school. The nurse leaving for a night shift. The traders in market stalls. The software engineer working in tech companies. Ordinary lives break the binary of spectacularly poor or miraculously advanced, and can offer a different kind of interiority. 

For example, the Nigerian stylist Rachel Ojuromi, who was featured by Instagram, leads an ordinary life, curating stylish looks for herself while using Lagos as a runway. Ojuromi uses real environments (potholes, puddles, corner shops, broken-down vehicles), all staying as backdrop, conveying her relative location in a way that feels authentic. 

It isn’t a picture of stark poverty, nor is it a luxurious sight. African exceptionalism isn’t a problem. It only becomes such if it is one of the ways Hollywood understands Africa. Showing ordinary African life can just be as radical as showing vibranium. 

Let Africa Disagree With Itself 

Perhaps the most interesting Africa today is one full of debate. Young Africans argue over feminism, LGBTQ rights, religion, capitalism, Pan-Africanism, capitalism, luxury, climate change, artificial intelligence, migration, democracy, and so on. Too often, in movies of the caliber of Black Panther, Africa is presented as culturally unified. What would make for much stronger storytelling is presenting an Africa that isn’t collectively agreeable. 

Move Beyond Afrofuturism Toward African Futurisms

Black Panther (2018) redefined mainstream by centering Africa through the lens of Afrofuturism, a cultural framework that blends Black history, speculative futures, and technology, often shaped by the experiences of the Black diaspora. But 2028 is not 2018. African creative landscapes have expanded, and African Futurism, as articulated by writers such as Nnedi Okorafor, offers a different orientation: one rooted first in the continent’s histories, cosmologies, ecologies, and political realities rather than diasporic displacement. 

While Black Panther is ideologically grounded in Afrofuturism and can’t easily abandon that foundation, its next chapter could create space for African Futurism. This entails imagining futures generated from Africa’s own intellectual traditions, material realities, and cultural possibilities, rather than treating the continent primarily as a symbol.

The Challenge Facing Ryan Coogler 

Even with flaws such as generic African accents and the homogenization of cultures, Black Panther (2018) was still groundbreaking. If the first installment gave audiences permission to imagine an African future, perhaps the next one’s responsibility is something even harder. This is to imagine an Africa that doesn’t need myth or fantasy to justify its existence. 

Africa has become increasingly impossible to compress into the symbolic role Hollywood often assigns it, and Coogler must recognize this at the very least. Perhaps the most radical image of Africa in 2028 is not a hidden utopia beneath the mountains. It is simply that of a continent confidently participating in the world, with all of its nuances and contradictions.