Sure… unless, after forcing the Europeans out of Africa, he continued the fight, eventually conquering and enslaving Europe. Then he’s not the hero of the story, he’s just the more effective villain. Killmonger was right in recognizing the vast evil of colonization. He was wrong in that his solution was to make Wakanda into a colonizing nation. It would be like if Luke’s solution to the Death Star threatening Yavin wasn’t just to blow it up, but to take it over and use it to start blowing up planets loyal to the Empire.
It’s also worth noting that Killmonger himself is, effectively, colonizing Wakanda. Regardless of his heritage, he’s an outsider who comes in, takes over, and immediately starts cementing his power by destroying key pillars of Wakandan culture - specifically, burning the garden where they cultivate the heart-shaped herb. Considering what he does to his girlfriend, I think it’s also likely that Wakanda’s tradition of gender egalitarianism wouldn’t last long under his rule. There’s a strong argument to be made that Killmonger’s plan isn’t actually to make Wakanda into a global super-power: it’s to get Wakanda, Europe, and America to all destroy each other, so he can get revenge on all of the cultures that betrayed, tortured, or abandoned him.
This is an excellent point. Killmonger can be viewed as a creation of white colonialism/oppression – a Frankenstein’s monster.
Totally. This is part of why I think Black Panther is – like Thor: Ragnarok – a great comic book movie. It tries to do the same kind of exploration of history and politics and the whole human condition that the best comics do. It’s literary, not just cinematic.
These are all good points. I can understand and sympathize with the “Killmonger Was Right” point of view (in a way I could never understand and sympathize with the “Klaue Was Right” POV). Because Killmonger is largely correct in his analysis of the problem, even as his dogmatism blinds him to the best solutions – and would corrupt and ruin any of his attempts to enact any solutions.
Like Thanos in Infinity War, he’s a good villain not because he’s 100% right, but because he’s not 100% incomprehensible. We can get into his head and get where he’s coming from. He’s a better villain than Thanos because he’s not Malthusian.
But that huge “if” makes all the difference. Imagine an alt-history scenario in which a secret group of Jewish scientists in hiding in Poland outpaces the Manhattan Project and develops nukes in 1943. They incinerate Berlin—and simultaneously Wolfsschanze in Poland, and Berchtesgaden in Austria, to make sure to get Hitler and generally decapitate the high command. They are heroes, right? A bunch of innocent people die, but we can set them aside as collateral damage just as we do with many others from that conflict.
But what if some maniac got control of the Israeli government or the IDF now, in 2018, and nuked German population centers tomorrow (with those nukes Israel doesn’t acknowledge having, but we all know they do)? Is that person a hero? Clearly not (and I hope no one disagrees). That latter case is much closer to what Killmonger is setting out to do.
Another way to view it is that Killmonger was allowed to rise to the highest echelons of the American military. The country that supposedly oppresses him so much that violence is the only answer.
I’m not sure I’d go that far. Or at least that’s overstating it.
If you’re in the highest echelons of the American military you’re not a shooter. Your killing the bad guys one on one is over with. It might be more accurate to say that Killmonger’s been found useful to the highest echelons of the American military. But he’s nowhere near a policy-making position.
The thing about Wakanda is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you examine it too deeply. Like, they get this big Vibranium meteorite back in the day, but how do they know what to do with it? At that time, they weren’t anymore advanced than the rest of the world. Did they ever use steam engines? Internal combustion engines? Did they have scientists who slowly developed the physical principles that let them understand vibranium? How did the whole civilization develop from “A big rock of magical metal falls from the sky” to the Wakanda we see in the movie?
I don’t mean to pick on Wakanda here. They don’t make any less sense than Asgard, SHIELD, Stark Industries, or Kamar-Taj. And of course the answer is comics. They aren’t meant to be thought about too deeply, and the edifice does shake a little when you try to graft genuine real world issues on them. Wakanda should have done more to help the oppressed peoples of the world, and if it actually existed it might have.
Also, on an unrelated note, in the real world surely some Wakandan would have said, going into the 20th century, “Hey, it’s great to have a symbolic guardian-king to unite the people and protect us. And he can even fight aliens and such in the outside world. And why not have him be chosen in a ceremony that involves ritual combat? The guardian should be a great warrior, after all. But shouldn’t real legislative power be in the hands of an elected parliament?”
It appeared as though there was a bit of a council, leaders of the different tribes. They probably held most of the day to day actual power, with the king being largely ceremonial and symbolic. It was democratically decided that none of the other tribes would challenge for the rule, when it is quite possible they could have fielded a warrior capable of beating the current king. They chose not to, due to the current lineage being what they wanted to continue to follow.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t really written down as a form of govt, so instead of saying to the new king, “That’s not really how it works, the king is mostly ceremonial with little actual power”, they didn’t really know how to react when someone with completely different ideas sat on the throne.
Even if the gorilla tribe had won the challenge in the beginning, it probably would have been handled with power limiting checks and balances, but killmonger was just something so different, and he came along at just the right time of uncertainty and doubt in the current king’s ability, that there was little resistance to his takeover.
It’s also important to remember that, while the Ewoks dead from the Battle of Endor were tragic, they were collateral damage. Killmonger’s plan had no collateral damage, just primary targets and secondary targets. To him, innocent families who had nothing to do with oppression dying wasn’t tragic, but something to be desired in its own right. That’s clear villainy.
I agree, but there are quite a few people like that Alternet writer who—even if they wouldn’t frame it this way—believe “two wrongs make a right”, and that it’s justifiable to take vengeance on the descendants of those who wronged your ancestors.
There is no evidence of that in the movie. If this were true and Killmonger tried to launch his global conquest someone would have said “Sorry, my king, but although you are the Black Panther now, since you killed T’Challa–which sucks, by the way, we all liked him–The Black Panther does not have the authority to go to war. War must be initiated by the Prime Minister and approved by a majority of Parliament.”
Of course there were councilors, every king has his councilors, but Wakanda appeared to be an absolute monarchy.
I wonder if the next movie in this series will either show (in a flashback) or reveal that Killmonger had the burial at sea he requested. It seems like T’Challa would do that.
The councilors were the leaders of the other tribes, so they were more than just basic advisors.
The king is away quite a bit in his role as black panther, protecting the kingdom rather than pushing around paper, so there has to be some sort of local governance that is effective over the population while the king is not holding court.
I’m not sure what your “if this were true” part exactly is referring to, as I specifically said that it is probably not something that is formally written down, and that due to that, they would not be able to override his wishes.
I’m sure a good king like T’Chaka let the tribes operate autonomously unless absolutely necessary, but he still could override them. If there was any structure at all, formal or informal, to stop Killmonger, why wasn’t it employed?
And anyway this is irrelevant to my original point, which is that a real enlightened society would have a formal written structure, and would select leaders using elections rather than ritual combat.
Also, T’Challa was the first Black Panther to stray from Wakanda in a long time, and only did so in response to T’Chaka’s murder.
One of the reasons real world societies moved away from the concept of trial by combat was that we realized it didn’t work: God did not intervene to ensure the righteous party would win.
That’s not necessarily the case in Wakanda, where Bast is a very real and active presence in the process of choosing a leader. And, in general, superhero universes tend to operate on the principle that a pure heart and noble intent literally makes you stronger. So, there might be something to the idea that Wakanda avoided turning Imperial for so long precisely because Bast favors candidates that would make wise and just kings, and that favor has been enough to keep Wakanda’s system of government stable.
That does raise the obvious question, “Why did Bast let Killmonger win?” I don’t have a great answer for that, other than, “Gods work in mysterious ways,” and “It all turned out okay in the end.”
Also, on Killmongers military background - given the MCU timeline, most of the work Killmonger did for the American government would have been done when large parts of the government were secretly under the control of Hydra. I’m not saying Killmonger himself was Hydra, but I bet a lot of the assignments he went on were actually Hydra ops, and involved some deeply fucked up shit. That, plus growing up an orphan in the Oakland streets, must have powerfully shaped his view on what sort of a nation he grew up in.