Motus Mentis

By now you may have heard of a movie called Black Panther. It’s a Marvel Comics offering about a fictional, technologically advanced African Utopia called Wakanda. I haven’t seen the movie (I don’t think it’s even out yet), but I can certainly understand all the buzz, and why America’s black community would be happy to have a unifying and uplifting movie to rally to.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is the extent to which the picture seems, to many people, not to be fictional at all. I recall seeing, for example, an NBC tweet saying that the splendor and sophistication of Wakanda (which, if I understand correctly, derives its wealth from the existence of a miraculous mineral called “vibranium”) “will prove to the colonialists that if they had not interfered with Africa, we’d be so far advanced.”

Well, with all the publicity the film’s getting, I’m sure any colonialists still at large in the world will take note. But at the risk of seeming stingy, Wakanda doesn’t exist — and I do think it’s a bit of a reach to use a thing that doesn’t exist to prove a historical counterfactual.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is as a cultural variation of Anselm’s ontological argument: Wakanda must exist.