right to rule. Monarchy and meritocracy aren’t usually compatible, but somehow Wakanda found a way.
Sort of. In the comics, the trial to become the Black Panther involves more than fighting, but ritual combat has always been the final and most glamorous test in Wakanda. Pacifists need not apply. Also, while strife between the five Wakandan tribes is a long-running theme, solutions for this conflict have never been pretty. The Jabari Tribe is basically Wakanda’s Tibet, cast into the mountainous hinterlands because of its religious beliefs. And the Dora Milaje weren’t originally an elite security unit. Instead, each tribe sent a teenage girl to the Black Panther as a ceremonial wife-in-training, with the idea that any tribe might theoretically wed itself to royalty.1 Hence their name, “the Adored Ones.” Training them to be badasses doesn’t offset the fact that they’re political pawns.
Wakanda is even worse on foreign policy. Of course, a fictional country can do nothing to aid its real-world neighbors, but within the world of the comics, Wakanda has a lot to answer for. It ignored every crisis that scourged central Africa: colonialism, the slave trade, drought, famine, HIV, ethnocide, and the list goes on. So, if T’Challa wants Wakandan justice to be “more civilized,” he’s got a lot of work to do.2
Justice and Retribution
Now what should Wakanda do with Killmonger? Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), an enormously influential philosopher on the subject of justice, would say the first concern is that Wakanda must not use him merely as a means for its own ends. That is, it can’t punish him to make the country safer. If it plans to imprison him – or execute him, or fine him, or let him bleed out after a knife fight with the king – it has to be because he deserves it, not because it will benefit anyone else.
What we’re talking about here is retributive justice, the kind of justice that’s concerned with punishment rather than rehabilitation. Killmonger has too many misdeeds to count, so let’s focus on the one we opened this chapter with, the one that leads up to the climactic showdown in Black Panther: T’Challa isn’t dead and he didn’t yield, yet Killmonger refuses to give up the throne. What would Kant say to this?
In good Kantian fashion, his answer is anything but obvious. (In the average college-level ethics class, Kant is usually the hardest philosopher to understand.) On the one hand, Kant says your duty to obey your ruler has nothing to do with how your ruler came to power.3 That sounds like Killmonger deserves no punishment at all. In fact, it sounds like T’Challa is the one who deserves punishment, because the throne is rightfully Killmonger’s as soon as he takes it. On the other hand, if it really doesn’t matter how the ruler comes to power, then usurping the throne is exactly as legitimate as being presumed dead after being thrown off of Warrior Falls and then clinging to life long enough for your sister to schlep a Heart-Shaped Herb halfway across the country instead of just drinking it herself and becoming the ass-kicker she is in the comics.4
Regardless of whether it’s T’Challa or Killmonger who has the stronger claim to the throne, the other guy deserves punishment, and Kant would almost certainly say the just punishment for him is execution. Why? For one thing, Kant was an avid fan of the death penalty, advocating it even for crimes as trivial as adultery.5 For another, he thought physical violence was the correct tool to use when dealing with Black people. In fact, Kant said they aren’t capable of moral reasoning on their own, but if you want them to behave morally an effective method is to beat them. (We aren’t making this up.6 ) And if you think that’s bad, don’t forget, when it comes to justice, Kant is still one of the most influential figures in all of Western philosophy.
So yeah, maybe Kant isn’t the best person to ask. Let’s try John Locke (1632–1704), who would say what Killmonger deserves goes well beyond the question of punishment. There’s also the question of what he’s owed.
Justice and Reparation
Killmonger’s deep-seated anger toward the Wakandan government didn’t arise out of nowhere. He’s angry because they treated him unjustly. In the film, they abandoned him in a foreign country after accidentally killing his father. In the comics, his motivations are more fluid – different writers portray him differently – but there’s one constant: he never picks Wakanda at random. His motherland always does him wrong.
Locke would say we’re now facing two questions of justice. Like Kant, he wrote on retributive justice, but Locke says there’s also a second brand of justice, reparatory justice (sometimes called rectificatory justice), which asks, if someone does you wrong, what do they owe you to make it right? Locke’s vision of justice was pretty radical in his day, because he thought monarchy was inherently unjust. Instead, he said we have certain natural rights – rights born into us by our very nature – which dictate that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”7 If you’re minding your own business and someone harms you in any of these categories, Locke says the offender owes you reparations.8
John Locke has a presence in the world of Black Panther. The Wakandan philosopher Changamire quotes him in the 12-issue run “A Nation Under Our Feet,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze. There, a rebel group called The People, inspired by Changamire’s vision of a Wakanda ruled by its people instead of its monarch, rises up to overthrow the Black Panther once and for all. Their motto, “No One Man,” is Lockean at heart.9
For Coates, Wakanda is an allegory for the United States, and his questions of reparatory justice apply to both countries. Before he came to write for Marvel comics, Coates was a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he made waves nationwide with his article, “The Case for Reparations.” There he asked a question that makes lots of Americans uncomfortable: what does the United States owe African Americans for the harm its policies have done to them?
It’s not an easy question to answer, in part because reparatory justice is tricky. Sometimes making reparations is easy, like paying someone’s bill from the body shop if you rear-end their car. Sometimes it’s difficult, like paying that bill when it costs as much as the vacation you’ve been saving up for all year. And sometimes it’s just plain impossible. For all its technological marvels, Wakanda can’t un-kill N’Jadaka’s father. (Maybe in Black Panther 2 T’Challa will borrow the Time Stone and go back in time to make things right. And hey, Marvel Studios, if that’s the way you decide to go with it, we want a cut.) The United States can’t un-exploit anyone, and even if it revoked every exploitative law on the books today, there are still millions of African Americans living with the everyday consequences of past exploitation.10
The trickiest part of reparatory justice is dealing with powerful people who owe reparations but can’t be forced to pay – or, for that matter, to even consider what payment might look like. As Coates observes, the US government has shown no interest in even raising the question of reparations: no president has ever asked for a study, and the House of Representatives has turned down every opportunity to study the question. It has done this regardless of which party was in power, and it’s done it 26 times in a row.11
In the film Black Panther, reparations are tricky for a different reason: Killmonger wronged Wakanda because Wakanda wronged him first. Had T’Chaka not orphaned and abandoned him, young N’Jadaka might never have become Killmonger. He might still have challenged T’Challa at Warrior Falls, as is every Wakandan citizen’s right, but he wouldn’t have had to murder anyone along the way. As he sees it, he’s taking by force the very thing Wakanda owes him anyway. But as the Wakandan government sees it, he’s setting the country on a course that can only end in violence and destruction. That’s no way to bring about justice.
However, what if there were a way to bring Killmonger and Wakanda to the table to discuss how to repair the damage done? What if that table included
