In still deeper ways, Black Panther and its kingdom of Wakanda serve as a glittering, cinematic maroon colony to which, for a few hours at least, we can all escape. And this is where we go down history’s rabbit hole. You think Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the first people to imagine an unconquered black nation in the shadow of a white world? When the creative team behind “the Sensational Black Panther” thought up a never-colonized, isolated and futuristic Africa in Fantastic Four No. 52 (1966), it's because it seemed appropriately fantastical, like a high school kid with spider powers or an intergalactic surfer traveling the cosmos faster than light.
But dreams of a place like Wakanda began sometime around 1512 in the Caribbean mountains and forested hills above the mines and fields of Spain’s colony, Santo Domingo. Then and there, Africans in the Americas first broke away from slavery to form their own societies with indigenous island people. They did it again in the maroon enclaves of Dutch Surinam and British Jamaica. In villages, town and cities, too, beyond the reach of slave-catchers in the eventual United States, black people carved out spaces and hoped-for futures of their own. Slavery and variations of colonialism, in the U.S. and abroad, forced linguistically and culturally disparate people, again and again, to understand themselves as “black,” as a race. And, for just as long, African-descended people have imagined and endeavored to build places free from the brutalities and indignities of those systems. From Colombia to Canada to, later, coastal Liberia, a black homeland became the stuff of dreams.
Black utopias are nothing new. Neither are the ways people endeavored to bring them about. Before a massive 1791 slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, black folk in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean hoped for and swapped rumors about some possible end to slavery. In hushed tones over the mistress’ laundry, men and women in bondage spoke the stuff of planters’ nightmares. They whispered freedom’s name by lamplight in slave cabins. They called out to it from the decks and holds of war and merchant ships. Rumor and talk of freedom swirled up into revolution and served as what the historian Julius Scott famously called “the common wind.” And when Saint-Domingue, through force of arms, finally became Haiti in 1804, news spread quickly. A free black nation, it seemed, had already been what enslaved people were waiting for.
Wakanda might not be Haiti, it's true. But it's what Haiti was before such a place even existed. It's a dream and a wish spoken into the wind.