Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
ZIMBABWE-BORN actress Danai Gurira, who stars as Okoye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lucrative Black Panther movies, has said taking part in the blockbusters has given her a better understanding of her country’s past, as many Africans like her often wonder what their native countries would have turned out like without the yoke of colonialism.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever last week crossed the US$300 million threshold in the American Box Office, with its success coming despite the death of star Chadwick Boseman before the filming of the superhero flick. Gurira in particular has been praised for her strong showing in the movie, as her stock continues to grow in Hollywood.
Black Panther has struck a chord with black people worldwide, as the idea of a fierce nation state jealously guarding the interests of Africans against foreign interests is particularly relevant.
In an interview with Collider, she said as an African, her admiration for Zimbabwean pre-colonial society had grown while she was researching for one of her plays.
“One of my plays is called The Convert. Letitia Wright performed it in London, I think, in early 2020. It’s based in Africa in the 1890s; I’m Zimbabwean, so it’s based in what was then Rhodesia. When I researched it to create it, it was crucial for me because even though I was raised in Zimbabwe and I did the British system A-level history, which is a lot of history, let’s just say there still wasn’t a lot of exposure to my own history.
I had to research my own history for this play many, many years after high school, and I was like, how astounding. We don’t know all this stuff about how we walked the earth back then. And that was specifically when Zimbabwe was turning into a colony, when the Brits were clamping it down and saying, ‘This is ours,’ and clamping down any uprisings of the natives’” she was quoted as saying.
Gurira said the fictional Wakanda resonated with her and others because she often wondered what would have become of Zimbabwe and other countries had colonialism not taken root.
“As Africans, the thing that messes with us sometimes is that we will never know what we could have been had we not been colonised. That process was obstructed, and it was destroyed. We didn’t get our process.
So that trauma is something we now have to navigate through to find all that we could be. That really hit me: We’ll never know. I love that Okoye is preserving what they did know. Wakanda got to do that and came to be this powerful place.
I think that’s what resonates a lot with me and with a lot of Africans about Wakanda: It’s mythical, but at the same time it resonates with the idea of who we are. We have all this genius in us, but it was so obstructed and our process of our own development was also obstructed.”
It was for this reason that she resonated with her character Okoye, a warrior that defended her nation at all costs.
“Okoye protects that legacy, and that, to me, was so easy to connect to. I was like, I get her. If I had something like that to protect, I would do it with everything I had. I would give my life for it. It would not be a question.
The idea that that’s her role and her duty, and the passion she has for her people and her nation, just made total sense to me because really researching the onslaught of colonisation and living through the aftermath of it, if there was an alternative world that I could protect? I would give it my all too,” she was quoted as saying.
