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Wakanda’s position as independent, strong, wealthy and peaceful is a very useful way to
illustrate how slavery and imperialism harmed Africa over the long term. For example, research
demonstrates that slavery hurt African economic development; areas that lost more people are
not only still poorer today, but are also more internally divided, have weaker political institutions
and see higher rates of violence. Wakanda’s isolation would almost certainly have protected it
from such effect.Similarly, the legacy of colonialism in Africa has been largely negative and
pernicious, compounded because the European powers tried to run African colonies on the
cheap. The most extreme example came in the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic
of Congo, or Congo), where Belgium’s King Leopold II ran the colony as a personal fiefdom in
which the Congolese were routinely tortured, maimed, flogged and raped to the point where the
population decreased by (estimates vary here) 8 to 10 million people out of a total population of
16 million. When Congo finally gained independence, there were only 16 college graduates in
the entire country. The king, and later the Belgians, looted Congo and murdered its residents
while making little investment in its people or infrastructure.

While other countries were not treated as harshly as Congo, colonialism generally produced
weak states with poor economies, low legitimacy, high internal division and an increased
propensity for conflict. Many negative associations that people in the West have of Africa —
poverty, corruption and conflict — are actually the result of interactions with these same
Western countries.

In short, Wakanda functions as counterfactual history. It shows us what African political, social
and economic development might have looked like uninterrupted by colonization.

Wakanda also is remarkable for its high level of technological advancement. Here, too, the film
echoes themes from real life. Early post-independence leaders saw science and technology as a
path to autonomy and respect. Demonstrating proficiency with modern technology was
especially important to counter colonial claims that Africans were intellectually inferior and
incapable of governing themselves.
Taking an example, in the late 1950s, Ghana’s new government made establishing its own
Atomic Energy Commission a high priority; in 1961, it even tried (unsuccessfully) to import a
Soviet nuclear reactor to generate electricity and enable scientific experiments. Ghana also
established a national airline, Ghana Airways, staffed with black pilots and crew. (Around the
same time, Marlon Green, an African American former Air Force pilot, was suing Continental
Airlines to get U.S. passenger airlines to hire African American pilots in a case that went all the
way to the U.S. Supreme Court.) Ghana’s Ministry of Education made science education a top
priority, establishing a network of laboratories across the country to teach basic science.

Building African scientific capacity was difficult. Unlike in Asia, independent African countries
started from a very low level of human capital. Colonial powers made such little effort to educate
Africans that in 1958 there were fewer than 10,000 Africans enrolled in universities anywhere in
the world, and the majority of these were from just two countries, Ghana and Nigeria.

In addition, brain drain has proved a significant hurdle to post-independence technological

advancement in Africa. From the start, many Africans were trained in the West, making it easy
for them to take up permanent residence abroad. Over time, Africa lost one-third of its trained
personnel. to overseas jobs. The rate of brain drain has only increased with globalization. Right
now, the United States alone has more African doctors than the countries of Ethiopia, Ghana,
Liberia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe combined; Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born
doctor responsible for the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football
players, is a professor in California. Wakanda shows us an Africa that was able to retain and
benefit from its indigenous talent.

Reaching Wakanda-like levels of technological advancement on the continent may seem

impossible. But in some areas, African countries have made great technological strides. For
example, most Africans skipped over ever having traditional landlines, making the continent the
fastest-growing market for mobile telephones in the world. They pioneered the use of mobile
money. Rural communities not yet on national energy grids are building local microgrids, often
powered by solar energy. That said, technological growth is uneven; most African states still
need to develop significantly in basic science, especially for research in medicine and
agriculture.