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Notes -
I enjoyed your comment and generally agree. However, just regarding African languages - it feels to me like the wider world has never been less interested in African cultures than it is now. At least for a while Kwanzaa had some cultural significance. But consider: when was the last time a cultural trend happening in Africa was discussed on this forum? Has it ever happened? Especially apart from white South Africa.
For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force. I do often wonder what kind of stuff they're getting up to down there.
Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism? But I agree, not much about cultural trends. Though now and again musical trends seem to come and go - see world music, Paul Simon collaborating with Ladysmith Black Mombazo, Mory Kanté having a late 80s hit, Youssou N'Dour, Ali Farka Touré, Amadou and Mariam, various others.
No more African than Kwanzaa - Marvel is a US company targetting an audience of Black Americans and their simps. The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.
Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.
The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.
There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.
We don't disagree on substance here - my spin would be that
Wakanda's decision to start their outreach in the US was so egregiously bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. Even if you accept the assumptions of the universe, it isn't plausible.
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Afrobeats did have a moment with artists like Burna Boy being successful and working with members of the diaspora in Britain. From South Africa Tyla is probably the most prominent artist that's making waves in the US?
Their momentum seems to be stymied in the US though which might explain why it doesn't feel like it has any impact. In both cases their promotional runs seem to have poisoned the well a bit either because they were perceived as lecturing American blacks or not responding correctly to awkward questions - the whole colored category in SA apparently sounds awkward to AA ears and Tyla really failed to give a soothing answer, or any answer at all. Now every time she comes up in the hip hop media so does this issue and they're not kind. Probably doesn't help build up a head of steam.
In her defense, it's kind of a no-win. The answer that I see is that "colored" is a different thing from black and saying that might be even worse than appearing uppity.
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As if to further drive home your point, Kwanzaa—the one traditional African cultural celebration Americans used to know about—isn’t even African. It was invented by a black American radical activist in 1966 as a replacement for Christmas.
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