I was buoyed not just by the Blackness in the room — a photogenic mix that included tall, elegant-looking older men in jackets and kente shirts, young, stylish women in clashing graphic prints with all manner of braids and twist-outs, and lean, straight-backed tracksuit-wearing guys with towering, free-growing dreadlocks — but also the Blackness hanging on the walls. Collaged, painted, beaded and gold-flecked odalisques, Black women in regal and sensual repose. A constellation of Afroed heads. Teardrops containing the image of slain Stephen Lawrence. Cut-out images from Blaxploitation films. Ice T. Don King. Blackness was the star, subject and guest of honour at the show.
Near the gift shop, a line snaked its way through the ground floor as guests waited for the artist to sign catalogues and prints.
The mood was celebratory and dazzling. The night felt glamorous, even if much of the work on the walls was haunting and devastating. The evening was a moment and a rarity — a historically white institution and an enduringly homogenous industry honouring the country’s most famous Black artist.
But this was a different era to where we are now. Instagram had launched but #Blackexcellence hadn’t yet taken off as the natural progression from the Black Power Movement, born in the 1960s, it would eventually become. And I hadn’t yet solidified the network of girlfriends I would go on to build following that night — effervescent, ambitious journalists, artists, stylists and executives with thriving careers who not only lived Black excellence but wanted to create space for other women to join them. Women who did make space for other women, building out teams, publishing imprints and brands that created new jobs and platforms. I had finally found my tribe! And the shared experience helped minimise the isolation I felt in my work life.
No, Black excellence hadn’t yet evolved into a social media phenomenon and cultural sea change. But that was where it had reached by the time Marvel’s Black Panther, perhaps the decade’s most definitive visualisation of Black excellence, beyond the Obama White House itself, hit theatres in 2018.
Like the Chris Ofili exhibition, the Black Panther premiere in London had taken place in February. Not that the cold weather stopped anyone from showing up in their boldest, brightest clothes, accessories and African prints. And not since the Ofili exhibition had an unapologetic study and celebration of Blackness generated such fervent excitement among Black folk and the white mainstream alike. Yes, London had hosted the Basquiat retrospective Boom For Real at the Barbican a year before, but that was largely an American show staged in the UK. There was something about the Black Panther moment that, like Ofili’s evening, felt uniquely British with its cast full of homegrown talent filling both the screen (despite being written and directed by Americans) and the theatre.
My life had changed considerably in the years between the two events. I was no longer a new expat homesick for community, searching for like-minded friends. By that point I had become a part of a large, loosely connected network of Black creatives, many of whom were planning to be at the premiere of Black Panther at the Hammersmith Apollo. And when I arrived at the theatre, I realised I had finally found that sprawling, expansive, loud and proud mass moment of Blackness I had been craving when I first moved to the UK.
Outside, the streets were cold and dark. But inside, the venue was alive, every seat full and the walls vibrating with a mix of loud music and animated voices reverberating throughout the space: speaker-shaking bass, Kendrick Lamar’s flow and high-pitched ‘Ayyyyyeeees!’ The audience doubled as a fashion show — all party dresses and heels, statement jackets and sunglasses, conversation-worthy hair and nails.
I had arrived nearly an hour late to find the movie was nowhere near beginning, despite the 7 p.m. start time listed on the invitation. I fell in line with a string of latecomers, climbing the theatre’s red-carpeted steps behind a boisterous group of fabulous-looking women including the actress and comedian Michaela Coel. From my seat I scanned the audience and could make out the rapper Stormzy and actor John Boyega, as well as a slew of media peers and friends. On stage, stars Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira stunned in beaded dresses.
The opening scene rolled nearly fifty minutes later. The screen went black, white stars gradually appearing to reveal a dark night sky. A young boy’s voice, optimistic and inquisitive: ‘Baba, tell me the story of home.’ A glowing, blue meteorite emerges from the darkness speeding towards the continent of Africa and landing in a field of baobab trees, as the boy’s father explains the history of Wakanda, a technologically advanced African nation, hidden away from white colonialism and powered by the strongest substance in the universe, Vibranium.
Moments later we watch another little boy in Oakland, California playing basketball with his friends unaware that inside his apartment upstairs, his father, an undercover Wakandan agent, is being confronted by his brother, the Black Panther.
Throughout the next two hours and fifteen minutes, the audience whooped and cheered as we watched a film in which Black people are hero and villain, saviour and victim, with complicated paths to getting there. And in between the raucous moments of laughter and applause, we sat in contemplative silence as the film told a story of Africa and Black America, posed questions about Black liberation and Black radicalism and presented the possibilities of gender equity. It was a film for and about Black culture, with a record-breaking $200 million budget.
Few works of pop culture are as widely consumed as the superhero film. Of the twenty-five top-grossing movies of all time, more than half are big-budget, meticulously commercialised blockbuster productions revolving around men with superhuman capabilities. One of the most momentous feats of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is that it takes the globally revered medium and bathes it in Black. It was the eighteenth Marvel film, but the first to star a Black superhero and all-Black cast. The first to be set in Africa. The first Black film of any kind with such a massive budget. It was a movie in which women ran the place, with women warriors and matriarchs saving the day. It was nominated for an Academy Award. And it was the highest grossing superhero movie ever made (more than $1.3 billion globally).
It was also a gift to a global community of people of all races still reeling from the election of Donald Trump two years earlier and the rise of populism — and a gift released during America’s Black History Month at that.
Much has been made of all these things. But I was struck most by how the movie shifted the conversation around Blackness away from America (a place that has long dominated the conversation) and became a rousing phenomenon for people of colour everywhere, with social media serving as the Vibranium that powered it.
In the film, residents of Wakanda showed their solidarity by crossing their arms over their heart in salute, a move the director Ryan Coogler styled after, among other things, the Egyptian Pharaohs’ burial pose. Years later, some would interrogate the film’s mash-up of African references and argue it was a form of cultural homogenizing that did more harm than good. But as we sat in the theatre we were all self-declared Wakandans too — immigrants and expats and homegrown Brits with roots that spanned Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, America, Senegal, Bermuda, Trinidad, South Africa, and more. One big diasporic tribe.
In an interview on The View, Lupita Nyong’o described it like this: ‘Wakanda is special because it was never colonised, so what we can see there for all of us is a reimagining of what would have been possible had Africa been allowed to realise itself for itself. And that’s a beautiful place.’
Wakanda demonstrated to many of us what we already knew, that #Blackexcellence exists on a global scale, on screen and off.
To be clear, Black culture has always had currency and Black excellence has always existed. One need only scroll through centuries of history to see this. But I’m talking about #Blackexcellence, the social media-driven amplification and celebration of Black culture. I’m talking about the rebirth of the