Tochi Onyebuchi Brought Immigration to Wakanda for Black Americans and No One Noticed

“Wonders on every side, life in marvelous times”- Yasiin Bey *Swirls ginger ale in glass tumbler* My father was visiting me once, he saw the sweatshirt I had happened to be wearing and told me to get him the same one. The sweatshirt was from Philadelphia Printwork’s ‘School of Thought’ line and said, ‘Garvey Industrial Institute’. I know it must have been my father who told me about Marcus Garvey and his Black Star movement. Garvey’s whole mission in the 1920s was to get Black people to fuck with being African and embracing their Blackness. Mans had a whole movement about us going back to Africa. Fast forward to 1966, where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are world building Marvel and decide to create Wakanda. A country in Africa that’s the most technologically advanced nation on the face of the earth. Once the Black Panther movie dropped in 2017, Wakanda truly took off in the main stream as “Wakanda Forever” becomes a real world greeting and understanding among Black folk. There ain’t a Black person alive that doesn’t wish Wakanda was real, man. In the real world, Liberia and Ethiopia are the only two African countries that were not colonized. In the Marvel universe not only was Wakanda not colonized but they are hundreds of years ahead of every other country on earth in terms of technology and medicine. Wakanda was closed off to the rest of the world. It only started opening up really through T’Challa’s Grandfather (King Azzuri), Father (T’Chaka), and then T’Challa’s own action…