it's deeply funny to me how Black Panther was held forth as a milestone victory for racial justice, given how incredibly racist the film actually is. most African nations have shit like blue jeans, secular governments, and legal systems. however, in Wakanda, the most advanced nation in the world:
- everyone looks like a National Geographic parody
- they worship animal spirits to the point where their leaders must embody them to gain legitimacy
- they decide their leaders through ritual combat to the death
- in the only African nation to escape European colonization, their great ancestral enemy is the tribe that follows the White Ape and its power-hungry leader
seeing these pictures out of context, they almost look like something out of a Wayans brothers movie. but no, these are highly accurate, deeply researched,
incredibly important depictions of real-life African tribal tradition, because in the most advanced nation in the world, whose existence has continued unbroken since prehistory without sectarian conflict, who solved resource scarcity through super-advanced technology, society is still organized into culturally primitive tribes because lol idk black people or whatever.