Elephant Footprints and Trampled Grass
It should have been louder.
From her stance in the shallow waters of the pool, Shuri gazed upwards, higher, higher, higher, at the natural mezzanine stretching up the craggy cliff face. Each of the tribes congregated there in full ceremonial garb, chanting and ululating and drumming with all their strength, as their ancestors had done for generations upon generations. It was daunting to be beneath such a cataract of sounds and eyes and expectations and Shuri wished she had broader shoulders to carry it all.
Shuri swallowed again and held her shoulders as high as she could and kept her eyes fixed on where her mother sat, her beautiful, devastated smile the cement beneath Shuri's quivering knees.
When it was T'Challa's turn, it had been louder. She remembered. She'd witnessed this ceremony not just once, but thrice. T'Challa had been declared king three times, and he had stood strong and proud and regal every single time.
Like a king should.
But Shuri could not stand like a king. She stood to become a queen.
The first queen of Wakanda.
While a handful of brave daughters of kings had stood like her, legs firmly planted in the soft mud of the pool and body painted with the symbols of strength and battle, none had proved victorious in the hand-to-hand combat required to become the sole ruler of Wakanda.
It was tradition. They had to defend the realm against all foes and rivals and the ceremonial battle for the throne prevented large-scale civil wars and conflicts over succession. On a small scale, they symbolically fought for the throne and the deaths of the would-be monarchs were seen as a worthy sacrifice to prevent the death of the Kingdom and its denizens. In Shuri's view, it meant Wakanda was never meant to have a queen.
She waited, every nerve and sense both heightened and dissolved by the roar of the waters and the sounds of the crowd.
Is there any member of a royal blood who wishes to challenge for the throne?
Those words reverberated through her ears louder than even her own heartbeat. She strained to hear the inevitable footsteps and the boastful acceptance of the challenge.
It was no challenge and everyone in Wakanda knew it. Shuri, daughter of T'Chaka, was never meant for the throne. T'Challa, strong and tall and as courageous as a lion, he was the one to lead Wakanda and rule in the footsteps of their father. Even when challenged by both M'Baku and N'Jadaka, he proved victorious and came back to lead Wakanda again.
Shuri…Shuri made blueprints and plans, models and machines. She built and rebuilt Wakanda from the inside out, but she was not supposed to be Queen. She created weapons suited to her small, light frame which gave her an advantage against her enemies. She learned to fight and protect herself from within her lab and not from the central ring of hand-to-hand combat, where all her skills and "toys" were stripped away and left her bare.
Like an antelope facing a lion.
"I do not want to fight," Shuri said.
"You must, Shuri," her mother had told her. "You are next in line to be the Guardian of our People."
Ramonda's calabash eyes glimmered with tears and long sorrow painted shadows of melancholy across her beautiful face. Her griefs of recent days could fill all of Lake Victoria twice over and still have enough tears to fill the Nile, too. Shuri gave her mother a forced and uncomfortable smile, too full of her own sadness to overflow with any real warmth.
"I wish I did not have to," she said, her voice sounding small and child-like in her own ears.
"Even me, I wish you did not," Ramonda said and her hand caressed her daughter's cheek, as it had when Shuri wept as a child over a skinned knee or a lost cowry shell. "But Wakanda needs you, more than you will ever fully know. You are a light in a dark time and you are our hope for our future."
Shuri almost rolled her eyes, but she stopped herself in time. Instead she asked her mother something she had always wondered about.
"Mama, did Baba ever regret it?"
"What, child?"
"Taking only one wife. Producing only two children. The elders, I heard them complain and again. 'The more children a man has, the higher the respect due him, and the greater strength he has to maintain his homestead and provide for him in his old age,' they said. 'He is a fool and puts Wakanda in danger.'"
Ramonda sighed and in the shadows of her face, Shuri could see old arguments and old discussions rise like oil on water. She swept them away with all the practiced dignity of a queen and she gave her daughter a wan smile.
"Your father often struggled with how to balance the needs of Wakanda with those of his family. He had to decide how to be a man and a king. He did not always make the perfect decision, but in this, he did not make his decision lightly.
"You see, he did not want you to experience what he had. 'Jealousy is a poison more powerful than the venom of a Black Mamba,' he said. 'It goes to the brain and makes it ill and ferments into violence.'
"He did not want his children to be competing for the throne. He wanted you and your brother to work together for the good of Wakanda - like the ant with the acacia tree. The ants ward off the enemies of the tree and the tree provides for the ants. They are stronger together than they are apart. A house divided against itself cannot stand and leads to many full graves and broken families."
Shuri nodded and nestled into her mother's shoulder, allowing herself to be the child she still felt herself to be. At least for a few more minutes as she considered her mother's words.
T'Chaka had only spoken to his children in broken bits and pieces of his early life. In the crumbs and creases of his musings and memories, Shuri knew enough to know he had been unhappy. And he, too, was not supposed to be King.
T'Chaka was the fifth born of twenty children. His father, the previous king, took six wives, as was expected from a man of his status and position. T'Chaka was the only child born to his father's fourth wife. His mother died in childbirth, leaving him without an ally in the den of vipers that was the royal family. His stepmothers fought like feral cats over which blew the wind that swayed the reeds of the King's opinions and each wished their own child to wear the crown. After the two eldest children died of unexplained illnesses, his father feared T'Chaka would be poisoned or have a spell placed upon him to make him sicken and die as well. To preserve the young boy, he was sent to live with his mother's family, upcountry. He grew up there, far from the mires of jealousy that threatened to swallow up the farthest reaches of the royal family.
T'Chaka found himself next in-line for the throne after his remaining elder brothers killed each other in their ritual combat over the next King's coronation. The third born determined he was more worthy than the fourth and so both went to join their ancestors. T'Chaka did not want to be the next in line to meet his ancestors so instead of seeking to consolidate his rule using his fists, he met with all the other brothers and sisters and sought their loyalty. Through promises of high positions throughout Wakanda, he bought their promises that they would support his rule and not fight against him. When his coronation day came, none challenged him and he was crowned.
The elders had worried that T'Chaka would never take a wife. He was too, too slow and when he finally married, he took only one wife and refused any other. When his wife produced only two heirs, he still refused to succumb to their pressure.
"What need have I of more heirs when I have enough nieces and nephews to fill all Birnin Zana?" he had said.
While it was true and Shuri had more cousins than a cheetah has spots, each of those cousins could legitimately lay claim to the throne by challenging her during the ritual combat before all of Wakanda. If any of the tribes determined that the second child of T'Chaka would make an incompetent ruler, they could set their own champion of royal blood to confront her and make their own case to become ruler.
Shuri knew better than to refuse. She couldn't. Not after everything.
"When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled," her mother used to say.
Wakanda had provided the grass for an inter-galactic battle that had ramifications for millions and billions and trillions of lives in places and peoples and planets she would never even dream of. Of course, it was a worthy sacrifice, but sacrifices still came at a high cost. This seemed an especially high cost now that she looked out at the broken city and the ghosts of bodies that had filled her brother's coronation.
There should have been so many more voices and faces here today.
Wakanda had barely reached a new equilibrium after the battle of succession had claimed so many lives and destabilized the collective psyche of the already grieving and roiling kingdom. A battle with an alien army sent to destroy all in its path did not improve their situation. The spontaneous evaporation of half of the remaining population-including both the heirs to the throne-left the nation absolutely crippled. They had never fully recovered.
For five years, Ramonda, M'Baku, Zuri, and the tribal elders created an uneasy peace and fragile stability, but the footprints of the cosmic elephants ran deep and the grass struggled to grow again. Then, a bittersweet tonic was poured into the throats of Wakandans when the apparitions of those they thought lost spontaneously reappeared. This tasted all the more bitter when those apparitions vanished again through a portal to battle again - the same battle. The battle which had already robbed them of five years of precious life with those who had been forced to stumble along without them. Many did not return and they had to be mourned all over again, the hope stirred by their reappearance now as sour as a raw mango when it was their corpse which returned to them. There was no miraculous reanimations of those who died on that day.
Not even T'Challa.
Shuri had thought she saw her brother die at her cousin's hand. He came back.
Ramonda thought both her children had evaporated into ash at the whims of a Mad Titan. They were resurrected.
But who could breathe new life into the chest of a man run threw on an alien weapon? Shuri didn't even know what it was or how it worked, but she knew it had killed him. Shuri had to watch her brother's spirit leave his body for the last time, and her own soul was rent in two like a coconut on a sharp machete.
Her brother – the one who had snuck her biscuits under the table when her aunt tried to make her eat fingerlings with g'nut sauce. He had carried her home from Mama W'Kabi's when she fell out of that mango tree and broken her arm. He had cried almost as much as she had when he saw her injury.
The yawning promise of silence that enveloped their short, shared lifetime of memories and moments threatened to consume her.
But there were no words for the grief that overshadowed Ramonda.
When T'Challa returned to Birnin Zana, it was in a funeral procession headed by his sister. The elders of each tribe walked in front of her, their somber faces, mournful songs, and chalk-painted bodies all attested to their shared grief. Behind them, the bark-cloth clad figure of their King, proudly entombed in his Panther Habit, was carried on an ivory and ebony litter held by four of his strongest cousins in formal mourning attire. The citizens of the capital poured out to the streets, also painted in mourning and tossing flowers and rice on the road. They joined in the process, adding their tears, footsteps, and voices to the music of the dirge.
They placed T'Challa in the courtyard of the palace after their hours in procession through the city. The council could barely convene as Ramonda's shrieks overpowered all other conversations.
"My son! My son! First my husband, and now my son! You gave him back only to take him away again! Ancestors? What have I done to grieve you so? Why are you so unkind to me?" she said, tearing her shawl and crumpling onto the stone ground in her grief. Shuri threw herself on her mother and held her as she wept.
For once, Shuri sat in silence.
The next morning, after few had slept and even fewer had found rest, the council meeting sat in the dining hall instead of the throne room- at Shuri's request.
"I'm a temporary queen. We should have a temporary space to meet in," she said with a forced cheerfulness and they abided by her wishes. The long, cushioned wood benches were pulled into a circle facing a tall set of windows overlooking Birnin Zana. Shuri sat on a carved acacia wood chair on a seat made of a leopard skin. She wore a golden dress embroidered with scarlet patterns of gazelle. Golden hoops dangled from her ears and wrists and she wore a tall, scarlet hat upon her head.
She tried to stop fidgeting with her bracelets but she couldn't help it. She was too, too nervous and she hated it when everyone looked to her to tell them what to do and how to fix things that did not have a solution. When she thought of the confidence and authority T'Challa so effortlessly exuded, she stretched her head a little taller and took a deep breath.
"Good elders," she said, rising and formally addressing the gathering of tribal elders and advisors around her. A few positions remained empty and those glaring absences prickled into her heart like acacia thorns. "You are welcome to share your counsel at the first official meeting of Shuri, Unofficial Queen of Wakanda."
She tried to hide how her hands trembled by burying them in the folds of her dress. She cleared her throat and continued. "We are here to discuss the current state of Wakanda. General Okoye-your report, please?"
Shuri felt as lost as a hippopotamus in the Sahara after that meeting. Her young mind held a picture of Wakanda that was now as woefully out-of-date as a computer that still used floppy disks. The entire world had changed. Without her. She did not know how it worked anymore than she knew what her place in it was supposed to be. It was as if she had stepped out of a time machine into another version of Wakanda…one that was atrophied by war and depopulation…and this was the one she was now supposed to lead.
She knew her brother became king during a tumultuous time, as did their father before them and his father before him. Each reign was filled with its fires and floods. Still Wakanda stood firm and secure, resting balanced on its three pillars, just as a saucepan over the fire.
"First, to understand Wakanda, you must understand their history," her tutors had told her again and again. As a young girl, as wily as a jackal pup and as curious as a vervet monkey, she had loathed those history lessons. She wanted to tear apart computers and reprogram security systems and build automatic sprinklers filled with honey. Her father's stern face sent her back into the school room, again and again and again. No matter how she cried or pouted, pleaded or bribed, he did not budge.
"This is your birthright and your foundation, Shuri. Learn it," he told her. "The houses of the present are built on the foundations of the past and if you do not know your foundations, you will crumble."
So, off she marched, back into the school room, her bottom lip quivering like a rabbit, and her unrepentant huff projected throughout the room to ensure her teachers knew the extent of her displeasure. They only shook their heads and kept teaching (though her father threatened her with another trip upcountry to herd goats if she disobeyed again).
"All peoples have a story of their birth as a people," they told her. "In Wakanda, we say we were born when a meteor fell from the heavens and gave us our sacred store of vibranium. The vibranium gives the land its fertility, the people our strength, and our economy its cornerstone. It also provided the impetus for the alliance between the five original tribes under the rule of Shenga, the first Black Panther.
"Unlike most of our neighbors, these tribes allied together willingly and for mutual benefit. No blood was shed and no conquest achieved. In Wakanda, we say this alliance occurred in peace because of a vision Shenga received from the goddess Bast on the night of the meteor's fall. Bast appeared in the form of a panther and spoke to him.
'Siri is your shield. Unyenyekevu is your spear. Ushirikiano is your strength. Secrecy, humility, and unity. These are the Three Sacred Pillars of Wakanda that undergird everything else.'
"You cannot understand Wakanda without understanding these core values which are interwoven throughout every aspect of political, economic, social, and spiritual life. 'It takes three legs to support a stool,' and these are the three legs which support Wakanda.
"Siri, or secrecy and hiddenness, is our shield or our protection from the hungry eyes of the rest of the world. What is unknown cannot be coveted or stolen. We fiercely protect our secrecy because it is our greatest defense against conquest. We have a saying, 'Walls keep in and keep out.' We have remained a self-contained island in an ocean of constant change and continual power struggles by building tall walls of invisibility around ourselves.
"Next, unyenyekevu is compared to a spear because we say it is our offensive weapon against destruction. It is humility, but it is also modesty and a desire to stay small. We believe it is not power that preserves but the restraint of power. 'The tallest tree is the first the meet the ax.'
"Some call this 'tosha' or a policy of 'enough.' Wakanda intentionally refuses to depend on growth based on unsustainable exploitation of human or natural resources, or through conquest of other nations. The vibranium, our land, our sacred herb which grows on the vibranium mound, are only enough when our hearts are at peace. If our hearts are hungry, we will eat it all and then starve. We will eat our own hearts in our desire for 'more.'
"Finally, ushirikiano is our strength because our cooperation and cohesiveness provides the mortar for all of Wakanda to build. We say 'if the grass is gone, the lion will starve.' The kingdom is only as strong as its weakest member and all are interdependent on each other. The fate of the king will be determined by the fate of the farmer.
"These Three Pillars were given to us by Bast in order to protect and preserve our sacred kingdom throughout all generations. Our oral history, which eventually developed into written history, says the alliance of tribes grew because we held to the vision Bast gave us. For thousands of years, we grew slowly by slowly. Our priests, shamans, and prophets developed spiritual protections for our kingdom. Our craftsmen build ever stronger vibranium weapons and tools. Our architects built monuments to reach to the sky and house all the multitudes. Our farmers' fields grew in fertility and production. The vibranium-soaked land bestowed upon residents a resistance to disease and a slightly longer life expectancy than surrounding peoples. As long as we maintained the Three Pillars, we thrived.
"We did not always remember or hold to their values. At one point, back when we were known as the Kingdom of Shenga, or Bashenga, we nearly forgot our origins. The king and his people grew proud. They desired to shine like a glorious flame for all their neighbors to see. They set up a public capital at Ntusi and decided to trade with other kingdoms. The metal work of the Bashenga was sought by all. Their salt mines in Kibiro brought them incredible wealth. Their cattle were a gift from the gods and the envy of all. Their trade networks ranged from Egypt to the Indian Ocean.
"Bashenga shone as the brightest star and the eyes of the surrounding nations grew envious. They were invaded by the Luo to the north in the 16th century. They abandoned their capital in Ntusi and returned to hiding, resuming their adherence to the Pillars.
"Our ancestors soon forgot the lessons of their past a second time. They built a mighty empire which they called Kanda. Their trade of ironwork, ivory, salt, and firearms expanded their influence farther than it ever had before. They built a public capital in Masindi and developed a strong military to protect their people from invaders and slavers. They remembered enough of their pillars that they refused to join in the sale of slaves that began to infiltrate the continent like a contagious parasite. In the 18th century, they grew to be the largest of all the trees in the Great Lakes region.
"However, other nations grew and longed to be the tallest tree. Lands that the Kanda had conquered now began to fall to others. The Ankole took the lands in the south, Rwanda broke away, and the kingdom of Buganda fought to conquer their eastern edges and take over control of trade routes across Nyanza.
"Buganda grew large and fat on the sale of slaves and weapons. They wished to be the tallest tree of all. When they could not defeat the Kanda quickly, the Baganda sold their freedom to the British colonizers to prove themselves the strongest. They gained their victory against Kanda and lost the real war and soon their kingdom fell to the British ax.
"At their defeat, our ancestors were reminded of the wisdom of their ancestors and embraced their Pillars again. They sought to remember their values. They no longer wished to be the tallest tree. They moved our public capital to Hoima and made sure to fortify their defenses even further. They hid. They developed both Muslim and Christian enclaves within their public capital to ensure the Arab and European colonizers had no reason to send missionaries. They refused explorers and humanitarian workers. Their lack of participation in the slave trade removed economic and moral justifications for their conquest.
"But, Europe grew hungry. Like roosters sparring to show their strength, the kings of Europe met to show which would be the biggest and the strongest. They fought over a map and drew lines in ink which would eventually become lines of blood across a continent three times larger than that of its colonizers.
"Outsiders came and conquered our highest peaks with their flags and their names. They redrew our borders with their guns and their maps. They conquered our people with their money and their bullets. The taller the mountain, the more desirable the ascent. The stronger the people, the more glorious their defeat. The more powerful the river, the greater the desire to dam its torrents, to claim and control its rapids. They vied even over piles of sand and desert simply to make it theirs and show how great they were.
"The outsiders called this the 'dark continent'-we were the nameless, faceless void upon which they could inscribe their own names, their own stories, forge their own fortunes, and recreate a world in their own image and for their own glory. The peoples they found, they simply erased and wrote a new story on top.
"Because of the continent which birthed us, outsiders have told us for generations that we are made to be ruled-that it is our birthright, no matter how far from our homeland our feet take us.
"Kanda and Ethiopia were the only survivors, though neither escaped entirely unscathed. Kanda was renamed Wakanda by Europe and has been known by that name ever since. Europe rewrote the entire continent with their labels and policies and reformed the people into their image. After decades of draining the resources from the rest of the world, Europe turned inward and warred to conquer itself. This led to two wars that spread across the world and provided tinder for what would eventually become a cry for freedom by the colonized.
"African nations spilled blood and many tears and gained their physical independence but not their mental and economic independence. There is a saying, 'the colonists never left, only their color changed.' The systems of exploitation the colonizers created were not removed, but simply given newer and hungrier masters to drain the continent. Seeds of violence and exploitation grew deep roots and bore fruit in many bloody, bitter wars.
"Wakanda has spent the last few decades surrounded by an ocean of conflict. The times of N'Jobu's death came during dark days for Wakanda. Uganda, southern Sudan, Rwanda, and the DRC were all beset by rebel armies (even as they harbored the rebels of their neighbors). Blood watered the soils as much as the seasonal rains and the turning of the Cold War in the northern countries of Europe meant their proxy wars in Africa were no longer of as much value. The Derg in Ethiopia crumbled first, tumbling neighboring Somalia into Civil War. The American support for the kleptocratic dictatorship of Mobutu in the DRC slowly withdrew, leaving the entire Great Lakes region ripe for reaping the violence that had been sown and carefully kindled for decades. Parasitic leaders (allowed and encouraged by Western political aspirations) ruled with iron fists, hungry pockets, and trigger-happy fingers surrounded Wakanda on all sides. Wakanda remained an island surrounded entirely by an ocean of petrol, ready for the match that would set the heart of the continent on fire and leave Wakanda scorched along with all the rest.
"During those days in Wakanda, some of the younger, more ambitious, more idealistic politicians felt it their duty to 'step in and assist their neighbors.' Their well-intentioned and short-sighted aspirations only grew louder after the metaphorical 'match' was lit and bloody wars exploded around them. The refugees became more plentiful than gazelle, weapons easier to obtain than safe passage, and all spoke in fearful whispers of the horrors which floated across the lakes and rivers and kept the crocodiles well-fed. The elders, those who clung to tradition and the Pillars and kept a long view of history, said this too would pass. They warned the younger generation that if Wakanda revealed their secrets, they could never recover and it would be Wakanda that the vultures of the world would descend upon next.
"This precarious position has only reinforced our reliance on our Pillars. As technology has developed, Wakanda has sent emissaries to observe the innovations of many nations in order to incorporate the best ideas into their own defenses.
"There are some, especially those who have seen first-hand the violence of the past forty years in this region, who feel Wakanda should take a more active role in world politics. They say that they are obligated to help those less fortunate and share their wealth of knowledge and resources with the rest of the world-especially those who bear the scars of colonialism. They say Wakanda should allow refugees a home and place of safety. They say that Wakanda lives in perpetual deception and should be allowed to finally walk in truth.
"Their elders, however, feel very differently and say that the well-intentioned aspirations of the youth are simply a new form of the 'white man's burden' and a Wakandan version of colonialism. They cite the need to maintain their traditional values of humility, unity, and secrecy. They fear all outsiders, regardless of origin. Individual ambition, greed, or quests for recognition are taboo and seen as contrary to their values. The individual is secondary to the group and the nation and this leads to some feeling caged or trapped by their context. This also means certain elements of change or creative expression are seen with skepticism.
"This is the Wakanda that your brother and you will inherit, princess. Your role as Guardian is to protect the Pillars, guard the kingdom, and ensure our longevity to the next generation."
Shuri designed three more drafts of a vibranium-powered clothes steamer by the time this lecture was complete and ignored anything she did not find helpful…which was most of it.
She had to learn, though. And now, as the sole monarch of Wakanda, she needed it. She knew she was not the nation's first choice. Her creativity and desire to create change ran counter to Wakanda's deep aversion to change. She did not handle boxes very well and tended to break all molds, whether intentionally or not, and she had transformed the nation repeatedly in her short life simply by being herself. Yet, the more conservative elements of the elder council distrusted the royal family because of their openness to Shuri's creativity.
"She is unruly and dangerous. She is the princess. She must conform to her expected role," some of the elders told her father, again and again and again. He only shook his head and stared at them as if his gaze alone had the power to remove such a preposterous notion from their minds.
Her father never not worried about the late hour when he came to see her. He knew he would find her awake. On one night, when he opened her door, she threw down her set of wires and jumped into his arms with a delighted laugh.
"Baba!"
"Daughter."
"Why are you not sleeping?" he asked her.
"I had an idea and couldn't sleep until I tested it to see if it worked. It didn't," Shuri said with a sigh. A pile of computer parts sat dismantled next to her bed and strewn across her desk. Some years earlier, a large dining table had made its way to the center of her room and never managed to migrate back to the dining hall. Now it was pitted with knife marks, soldering burns, and the occasional calculation written onto its surface instead of the notepaper too inconveniently far away for her current stroke of brilliance.
Her room still held an air of girlhood about it. Her large ebony shelf on one side of the room displayed her collection of dolls. Since her birth, T'Chaka brought her one doll from every country he travelled to. Her dolls no longer filled her arms or her bed, but she was not ready to part from them. The walls on one side of her room showed posters of her favorite Bollywood films, while the other had her favorite Lugaflow musicians. Every other surface seemed littered with test tubes, wires, tools, charts, and books. Ever since one experiment exploded, Shuri refused the cleaners from entering her room. She said she preferred her own mess over one created by well-intentioned watunza.
Shuri quickly knocked a pile of screw drivers and wires off one chair and brought it for her father to sit in. She knelt on a woven banana fiber mat beside him, her hands on the knees of her dark brown night dress. Her hair was wrapped for the night in a green and yellow scarf. T'Chaka could read a series of calculations scrawled in a marker up her left arm when she turned it to gesture for him to sit down.
"You must spend the next month with the Dora Milaje," T'Chaka said. She frowned, but by his expression, she had known whatever he came to tell her was bad news.
"Why?"
"You must learn to fight and defend yourself. In case you are ever called on to become queen, you must know how to fight in the ritual combat ceremony."
"But, Baba, I do not want to become queen. That is T'Challa's job."
"One thing you must learn, daughter, is that you do not know what life will bring you tomorrow. You must welcome whatever a day brings, but be prepared. You, as my daughter, must be prepared."
"Yes, Baba," she said with a long-suffering sigh.
She had never excelled, no matter how Okoye grumbled and Ayo swore, it made no difference. She would never have made it into the Dora Milaje on her own merit and even the best of the Dora Milaje could only marginally improve her skills in single combat.
She probably would have tried harder if she had known she would need to use her skills someday. Then again, who could have predicted aliens killing half the population of the earth with the snap of their fingers? There really was no preparing for something like that.
She wondered if her father had known. As a child, she had been convinced her father knew everything. He didn't, of course, but she thought he did. It comforted her to think someone did. Now the elders and even her own mother looked at her as if she were a lifeline, the three cooking stones meant to keep the saucepan of Wakanda level over the fires of the world. She wondered how her father managed to keep it steady and balanced.
She supposed he hadn't managed it perfectly and that in itself was a comfort.
She almost hoped that someone challenged her right to the throne. If M'Baku wished to try again, she would not even pretend to fight him. He had been so involved in the leadership of Wakanda during her absence, if he wished to continue, she would not oppose him. He was more of what Wakanda looked for in a king, anyway. He was strong and tall and would be a force to be reckoned with as the Black Panther. He could unite Jabari and Wakanda together.
(And plunge them all back into the technological dark ages, her mind whispered to herself. She quickly hushed that part of her mind with platitudes she neither believed nor found based in truth. She reassured herself that M'Baku would rule without difficulties.)
However, M'Baku did not come.
Tribe after tribe came forward, the elders who had so often corrected her "improper behavior" and chided her "childishness" now peered down upon her as if they were vultures on a tree branch.
"We will not challenge today," the first said, surprising her.
When the second and the third and the fourth also refused to challenge, Shuri nearly gasped outloud. When none came forward to challenge her, she could only gape at her audience like a panting wildebeest.
Wakanda wanted her as Queen. Unanimously and completely, they were speaking their support of her as their ruler.
Despite her eccentricities and smallness, they were choosing her. They were behind her. They would not fight her.
And she would need to figure out how to make the grass grow again.
"I now present to you Queen Shuri," Zuri said with a unhindered enthusiasm. "The Black Panther."
Each cliff face exploded into cheers and cries which echoed off of the rocks and made the air come alive and dance around her in long-absent hope. It glistened off their faces and overflowed from their tongues and they stood united as a people in support of her.
"Wakanda forever!" her people shouted as they saluted her.
Their new queen.
The first queen of Wakanda.
Oooo
Author's notes:
I wanted to leave a tribute to the memory of Chadwick Boseman since his tragic early departure from us. The dignity, beauty, and grace he gave to this role (and so many others) was absolutely unparalleled and I can't imagine Black Panther without him.
This is a lot of recycled materials refurbished for this one shot, but I wanted to have something set aside specifically for the Black Panther fandom world instead of the Avengers world.
I continue to delight in seeing Kenyan street kids wearing Wakanda Forever shirts and hearing Ugandans say that once all the African teams are out of the World Cup, they will cheer for Wakanda. Black Panther gave the world something so desperately lacking – a movie that celebrates so much of what is good and beautiful in the continent. It captured the current tensions between Africans and the African diaspora so poignantly and I'll never forget that line from the post-credit scene.
"What can a nation of farmers offer the rest of the world?"
The profound truth and irony in that entire scene still speaks to me in so many ways and layers. Really, there is so much from this movie that continues to linger.
I do not own anything from the MCU…or from East African history. I just borrow it and rewrite it. "When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled" is an East African proverb...and probably my favorite.
Note, I use Swahili instead of Khosa. If it's wrong Kiswahili, I blame my terrible sheng, and beg for all apologies and corrections.