When I was two years old, my family moved from London, where I was born, to Accra, Ghana. We lived there for three years—not very long—but enough time for Ghana, through my child’s eyes, to take on the heightened reality of a dream. Even today I think of the huge jars of palm nut oil, glowing cadmium orange, sold by women at the side of the road. And the open drains at the edge of the pavement, their entropic scent and the terror of falling into the stream of iridescent green slurry that ran through them. The moon after dark, large and low, brilliant as a star, its light reflecting in our eyes, turning our pupils silver, bright and glowing. At dusk one evening I looked up and saw a bat flying overhead. I spotted another, and more, and then the sky was filled with them, flapping ungainly, swarming into the gathering darkness to feed on heedless insects.
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Returning to London was disconcerting. It was the mid-1970s and Britain seemed to be living in the past, fixated on memories of war and empire. The Africa that existed on TV shows and in playground games was nowhere I recognized. It was the imperial continent of H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Michael Caine in Zulu: perpetually savage and primitive, untouched by progress, the antithesis of Western civilization. Everyone was watching Roots, and the mornings after each new episode in the playground were filled with shouts of “Kunta Kinte!” As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had written a decade earlier, “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none, or very little; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness…The unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”
It was superheroes that came to my rescue. The British-made comics at my local newsagent were dour fare, war stories printed on coarse paper with names like Death Patrol and Fight or Die! By comparison, the American superhero comic books I loved were slick to the touch and audaciously imaginative. They were also masterclasses in social allegory, and though I wouldn’t have put it in those terms at the time, I had already started reading them with that perspective in mind. For instance, the members of the X-Men were gifted with fantastic powers. They could read minds or walk through walls or call lightning down from the skies. But as mutants, a genetic race apart from ordinary humans, they were feared and despised by the very people they sought to protect. The X-Men were born different. Prejudice made them outsiders. In their experience of the world, I saw something of my own.
As an African, rather than an American, the Panther was allowed to transcend the urban everyday and to embrace instead the speculative and the mythic.
By eight years old, my bedroom floor was piled deep with copies of Marvel comic books: Moon Knight, Warlock, Star-Lord, Ghost Rider. And most of all, The Black Panther. I first discovered him in a reprint of Fantastic Four #52, the July 1966 issue in which he made his debut. The Fantastic Four are invited to visit the isolated African kingdom of Wakanda by T’Challa, the nation’s young prince. The country proves to be an African Shangri-La, where science and spirituality comfortably coexist, with T’Challa the heir to powers of superhuman strength and agility conferred by his ancestral connection to Bast, the powerful panther god. T’Challa cuts a cosmopolitan figure. He has the looks of Sidney Poitier, the erudition of a man schooled at “the best universities of both hemispheres,” and a sensualist’s eye for interior decor. Invited into his groovy bachelor apartment, the Four can only gape: “Wow! Wotta pad! I’ll bet even Hugh Hefner couldn’t improve on this layout!” The apparent paradox of a hyper-advanced nation in “the heart of the jungle” baffles the group. “How does some refugee from a Tarzan movie lay his hands on this kinda gizmo?” they ask, when T’Challa gives them a ride in a noiseless Wakandan aircraft powered by magnetic waves.
Marvel superheroes tended to have a signal vulnerability. Iron Man’s impenetrable armor shielded a weak heart. The Hulk was a scientist given to transforming into an uncontrollable id monster. The Fantastic Four were an extended family whose bonds were weakened by constant bickering. The Black Panther was different. What should have been his biggest weakness—his origin in a seemingly backward country—was his greatest strength. And where many comics offered sympathetic allegories about prejudice and otherness, the Panther storylines often dispensed with subtext altogether. T’Challa’s enemies were colonialists and racist mercenaries. He even travelled to the Deep South and fought the Ku Klux Klan in a memorable story arc that reached its climax with the hero bound to a burning cross.
Over time, my exposure to the Panther comics emboldened me. Amid the pervasive racism of the 1970s, being Black could often feel like a burden. The Panther showed the opposite was true.
That’s not to say the comics were above criticism. The Black Panther was created by Marvel Comics visionaries Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the prolific writer-artist duo responsible for the likes of Iron Man, the Hulk, the Avengers and the X-Men. It was Lee and Kirby who introduced to comics the premise of the hero as flawed outsider—an idea that may have been inspired by their own background as the Depression-era children of Jewish immigrants. With their eyes on the turbulent social currents of the 1960s, the duo also pioneered a character-driven, naturalistic style that revolutionized comics by addressing contemporary topics such as drugs and the Vietnam War. But they were less sure-footed on the subject of race.
The Panther’s first appearance came at the height of the civil rights struggle, just one year on from the Selma Marches and the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Four months after the character’s debut, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party. The choice of name was coincidental but Lee and Kirby were anxious to avoid any connection to radical politics. Their hero was briefly renamed the Black Leopard, with T’Challa offering an awkward justification for the change: “I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name—but T’Challa is a law unto himself.” Later the Panther, his original name restored, was given a solo comic with the ill-judged title of Jungle Action. His nemesis in this series was a bestial Wakandan in a gorilla suit called Man-Ape.
Despite these missteps, the Panther comics had a particular timeliness. T’Challa’s glorious homeland of Wakanda—a nation of wealth and learning that had never been colonized—spoke to the fascination with, and longing for, independence-era Africa shared by a generation of African American artists and activists in the 1960s, including Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, Eldridge Cleaver and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom emigrated to the continent during that decade. Kirby drew Wakanda as a dazzling vista of soaring towers and glass domes, but also a place that remained tied to its spiritual roots. His images recall the paintings of Aaron Douglas, the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, who conjured a stylized, romantic Africa of regal sphinxes and elegant pyramids. An Africa of beauty and boundless possibility: “Transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.” The Panther was the first Black superhero to be featured in a mainstream American comic.
Others followed through the 1970s, although none possessed the inventiveness of T’Challa. Most either came with labored reference to their racial identity—Black Lightning, Black Goliath, Black Racer—or else they were stuck fighting jive-talking drug-pushers in the ghetto, like Luke Cage and the Falcon. As an African, rather than an American, the Panther was allowed to transcend the urban everyday and to embrace instead the speculative and the mythic. By the late 1970s, his adventures had become wildly cosmic. He fought time travelers and aliens and went on a quest to find the lost treasure of King Solomon. In a vision, he journeyed into outer space, watching in awe as “galaxies drift like cosmic ghosts, and stars and planets wheel in lonely majesty.”
The Panther walked between the worlds of realism and fantasy with an ease that confounded even his own creators—and which spoke to W. E. B. Du Bois’s powerful notion of “double consciousness.” Du Bois, the great civil rights scholar and activist, had coined the term more than half a century earlier to describe the disquieting experience of living as a Black person physically within and psychologically outside white society. “It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one ’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one ’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” For Du Bois, writing in 1897, double consciousness was bitter proof that Black people were doomed to spend their lives in embodied alienation. The Panther showed how the idea could also be understood as a gift—a superpower of sorts—that enables Black people to move freely between parallel, coexisting truths and realities. It was a prompt for us to imagine ourselves on our own terms, with all the fierce dreaming we might summon to that task.
It can be argued here that the Panther’s journey into increasingly esoteric territory represented a step back from the grappling with racism which had made the comic so special. But it seems to me that Kirby’s change of direction didn’t mark a retreat from questions of race. Rather, it offered a thrilling vindication of the fantastical as a site of liberation. An embrace of the possibility of alternative worlds. A territory within which Black people can assert the simple and fraught nature of their aliveness.
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For Black people, the future lay beyond West or East, beyond science and technology and myths of progress.
The Black Panther’s forays into the other-worldly put him into unanticipated company with Sun Ra, the mystic jazz musician and self-styled “traveller of the spaceways.” Ra was born Herman Poole Blount, in 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, named after Black Herman, a vaudeville performer who billed himself as the “world’s greatest Negro magician.” A gifted pianist from childhood, he was composing his own music by the age of eleven and was playing with adult bands in his teens. Jailed for being a conscientious objector during the Second World War, he was told by the judge at his trial, “I’ve never seen a nigger like you before.” Blount replied, “No, and you never will again.”
In the early 1950s, Blount sequestered himself in Chicago with a huge library of books on magic, the occult and Egyptology. By the time he emerged, he had changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, or Sun Ra for short, after the Egyptian god of the sun, and claimed to have been abducted from Earth as a child and raised by aliens on Saturn. Ra’s decades-long adherence to this personal mythology, along with his air of serene bemusement and his extravagant robes and headdresses, led to his popular image as a colorful eccentric. But it’s more instructive to set him within a lineage of self-fashioned African American seers dating back to the nineteenth century. Figures like Jarena Lee, the first Black female preacher in the United States, who was said to have gifts of healing and clairvoyance. Or Rebecca Cox Jackson, the Shaker mystic, who left her husband and six children after a religious awakening, becoming an itinerant preacher and eventually the leader of her own sisterhood of Black Shakers.
In her spiritual autobiography, Gifts of Power, Jackson described developing extraordinary skills, including the ability to read minds, divine the future and travel “between the living and the dead.” Or the author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who traveled to Haiti in the 1930s and was initiated into the religious practices of Vodou. Undergoing secret rites, Hurston had a vision in which, as she wrote, “I strode across the heavens with lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling thunder following in my wake.” Whether Sun Ra’s claim to alien abduction was fabulism or extraordinary fact, it enabled him to look, with an outsider’s perspective, on an America warped by racial division and the tensions of the Cold War. “I am strange,” he wrote in a poem. “I am not a part of the world which hates / and the world which destroys.” In the 1960s, as America and the Soviets competed to put a man on the moon, Ra argued that Black people should leave behind the corrupt terrain of planet Earth and embrace an “altered destiny” in the stars. The theme of interstellar escape ran consistently through his songs: “Astro Black,” “Door of the Cosmos,” “Next Stop Mars,” “We Travel the Space Ways.” The mysterious synthesizer sounds and swirling violins on “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of )” suggest celestial searching, celestial yearning. Amid an orchestral swell, voices chant in whispers: “There are other worlds they haven’t told you of.” Then the chanting grows louder and more insistent: “They wish to speak to you.”
Ra’s faith in cosmic travel put him at odds with other prominent African American figures of the period, who saw the space race as a distraction from the more urgent struggles of the civil rights era.
The day before the Apollo 11 moon launch on 16 July 1969, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led a march of poor Black families, complete with wagons drawn by mules, to the fence of Cape Kennedy in Florida. Carrying signs that read “Rockets or Rickets” and “Moonshots Breed Malnutrition,” the marchers had gathered, said Abernathy, to protest against the “distorted sense of national priorities” behind the $25 billion moon program. With the giant Saturn V rocket looming behind him, Abernathy addressed the march. “We may go on from this day to Mars and to Jupiter and even to the heavens beyond, but as long as racism, poverty and hunger and war prevail on the Earth, we as a civilized nation have failed.”
Others concurred. At a Stevie Wonder concert in Harlem the next day, mention of the lunar module brought boos from the crowd. Activist poet Amiri Baraka decried the Western technology that took humans into space even as it “kills both plants & animals, poisons the air & degenerates or enslaves man.” Singer Gil Scott-Heron was equally scathing on his track “Whitey on the Moon”: “The man just upped my rent last night / Cause whitey’s on the moon / No hot water, no toilets, no lights / But whitey’s on the moon.”
Ra, who’d grown up amid the poverty and discrimination of the Jim Crow South, shared the goals of the civil rights movement. But he continued to keep his head turned skyward. In the 1974 science fiction film Space is the Place, he starred as an extraterrestrial prophet come to lead America’s Black people away from Earth. Stepping down from his spaceship in Oakland to recruit volunteers, his character is initially met with scepticism. “How do we know you for real?” scoff the kids at a youth center, taking in his shimmering robe and gold platform boots. But Ra sets them right. “I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we ’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth because that’s what Black people are, myths.” In the film’s closing scene, Ra and a group of teenagers fly off in his spaceship. Behind them, the Earth, fatally riven by conflict and prejudice, finally explodes, its shattered pieces spinning into space, until all that remains is darkness.
Despite the film’s apocalyptic ending, Ra’s broader message was an optimistic one. For Black people, the future lay beyond West or East, beyond science and technology and myths of progress. Look up and see. Other worlds are waiting.
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Excerpted from The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them by Ekow Eshun. Copyright © 2024 by Ekow Eshun. Reprinted with permission from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
