Beneath the mountains of a fictional African land, a radiant blue current flows like a heartbeat. It lights villages and cities, powers technologies, and binds a nation through shared energy that belongs to everyone. This is Wakanda — the luminous vision that entered the global imagination through Black Panther. For all its Western projection in cinematic packaging and geopolitical distortions, the film carried an unmistakable idea: a technologically advanced African civilisation, sovereign, collective, and uncolonised, sustained by its own inner force.
The meaning of “Wakanda” reaches beyond Marvel. In Sioux culture, Wakanda refers to “Inner Magical Powers” or the “Great Spirit.” In various African languages, it evokes lineage, family, home, and shared belonging. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby drew on these resonances in the late 1960s to name their fictional nation — but in the African context, Wakanda went way beyond a comic book invention. It became a symbol of what a future Africa could be: a thriving, technologically brilliant civilisation untouched by colonialism, rooted in cultural strength, and united by a shared energy inheritance.
Beneath the surface spectacle of the film lies a serious political idea. Wakanda represents Africa’s unclaimed future — a vision of sovereignty, ubuntu, and collective technological mastery. It speaks to the possibility of energy systems that are locally controlled, equitably shared, and spiritually grounded. And that idea matters now more than ever. Energy has become the organising principle of global power. The world is reshaping itself, and at the centre of that reshaping is energy sovereignty. Black Consciousness Academic, Professor Elelwani Ramugondo, captured this moment sharply when she wrote: “We are at the precipice of a major geopolitical shift, centred on Energy. Black South Africa should wake up to this or we have a pathetic future ahead.” Her words land less as commentary than as a summons.
Energy and Power
Across the world, new energy fault lines are emerging. The United States, Germany, the UK and the EU are exporting green transition frameworks to the Global South. They present these as climate solidarity, but they are also instruments of soft power — structuring financing, technology, and governance to preserve leverage. South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET) is one such mechanism. It promises billions but delivers loans tied to foreign procurement and external influence. Africans are positioned as beneficiaries, erased as architects, of their own energy futures.
Meanwhile, BRICS+ nations and other actors in the Global South are forging reciprocal energy partnerships. Russia’s Rosatom is building nuclear plants in Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, Bangladesh and Belarus with financing models that provide up to 85% long-term credit, embed skills transfer, and secure local industrial participation. China is exporting its Hualong One reactors. The UAE’s Barakah reactors are operational. Ethiopia, Niger and Rwanda are moving toward domestic nuclear capabilities. This is the multipolar energy map taking shape: nations asserting control over baseload power to shape their destinies.
South Africa, with decades of nuclear experience at Koeberg, trained engineers and authorised sites, could have led this shift. Instead, political drift allowed that strategic position to slip away.
Consciousness and Sovereignty
Steve Biko reminded us that liberation begins with the mind. Black Consciousness is the refusal to view oneself through colonial eyes. It asserts agency, collective strength and psychological independence. In this new energy epoch, Black Consciousness demands that we recognise energy as the foundation of sovereignty. A people who do not control their energy cannot shape their future.
Frantz Fanon warned of post-colonial elites becoming ‘zombies’ working for external power. South Africa’s energy landscape reflects this. A technocratic consultant class — the “Green Gurus” — has emerged, translating donor frameworks into policy that keeps ownership offshore while presenting themselves as saviours. Liberal media platforms amplify this agenda. Coverage most often frames BRICS initiatives as suspect and Western funding as benevolent, shaping public consciousness to accept dependency as progress.
The Zuma Moment
This crossroads was most visible during Jacob Zuma’s presidency. His government pursued discussions with Rosatom that could have secured long-term baseload power, embedded skills transfer and anchored South Africa within a multipolar energy architecture. This wasn’t just a technocratic plan — it gestured toward a kind of Wakanda dream: sovereign energy in African hands.
The reaction from Western-aligned forces was immediate. Liberal and conservative parties, NATO-aligned governments, the World Bank, IMF, NGO networks and media outlets launched a coordinated smear campaign. Zuma’s interest in Rosatom was portrayed as reckless and corrupt, echoed through Western funded media and their ecosystems of donor-funded think tanks. Western states wanted South Africa to choose their preferred energy partners, despite lagging behind technologically. In the end, a tiny legal loophole was weaponised to unravel the deal. What might have been a transformative partnership was dismantled through lawfare and media pressure aligned with Western strategic objectives. National debate was captured and steered toward the soft coup against what was named “the Zuma Regime’.
It’s worth imagining where South Africa might be today had that plan not been undone: a regional energy powerhouse, training thousands of engineers, exporting expertise across the continent. Whatever one thinks of Zuma politically, that strategic vision was cut short deliberately.
Afrofuturism as Political Horizon
Afrofuturism is often treated as cultural style, but at its core it is a political horizon. It insists that Africans must author their futures using their intellectual traditions, spiritual philosophies and technological capacity. Wakanda, for all its fictional trappings, symbolised energy shared collectively, technology serving people rather than foreign creditors, and sovereignty secured through infrastructure owned by the nation itself.
That horizon remains possible. But it requires political clarity. Energy is not only technical policy. It is civilisational. Nuclear-building embedded in reciprocal partnerships is about strategic autonomy and dignity.
Liberalism, Nationalism and the Purge
Around the world, white nationalism is rising like a desperate tide — a last, loud attempt by colonial powers and their ideological heirs to remain relevant in a world they no longer control. Statues multiply as empires fade; media grow louder as their grip weakens. Walls go up while the future moves elsewhere.
This resurgence has not happened in isolation. Western liberalism has historically cultivated white nationalism as its secret weapon, unleashing it when imperial power needs a more brutal edge. Today, the two currents are working in tandem. Under Europe’s liberal banners of democracy and humanitarianism, in partnership with both the US and Israel, racial extremis, even genocide, is normalised and deployed to secure geopolitical and economic interests. Liberalism and nationalism are not opposites. They are strategic partners in maintaining global racial hierarchies.
The consequences are visible. Gaza, Congo, Sudan — and South Africa itself — reveal a coordinated pattern. Black and brown bodies are rendered disposable, their lives weighed against the demands of extraction and militarisation. Rather than disconnected crises these are parts of a single neo-imperial project on fast-forward. NATO’s gaze is fixed on Africa’s minerals and strategic geography. Black and brown populations stand in the way — and are treated accordingly. This purge cannot be written off as speculative. It is happening now, through bombings, displacements, coups, financial instruments such as tariffs, and information warfare. The mechanisms are more sophisticated, but the logic is unchanged.
A Different Future
The hour is late, but the future is unwritten. Black South Africans stand at a threshold. The global realignment is ruthless. Those who do not act will be overwritten. Energy sovereignty, land, knowledge production and political unity are no longer matters of aspiration; they are matters of survival.
This requires clarity and courage. It means cultivating independent political and intellectual formations that understand the stakes. It means creating African-centred think tanks capable of fighting the enemy through developing policy, technology and vision that serve the continent. It means reclaiming land and resources decisively and strategically. Without land, energy control and intellectual sovereignty, political freedom remains artificial.
To ignore this is to surrender agency in real time.
Melanin Rising
The forces arrayed against African sovereignty are organised and technologically advanced. They use liberal rhetoric to justify intervention, and unleash white nationalism when the mask slips. Their media ecosystems delegitimise resistance before it begins. Yet history is not fixed. Power can shift. When Africans act collectively — politically, intellectually, materially — they change trajectories.
Energy sovereignty anchored in reciprocal partnerships, land reclaimed and defended through decisive action, strategic means, and intellectual autonomy institutionalised in African-centred structures are not simply utopian ideas. What they are is the pragmatic and ideological groundwork of survival and renaissance.
Let the rise of white nationalism continue to build their meaningless statues, and the liberals continue with their empty anti-Black rhetoric. They are redundant, relics. Africans, will rise up and claim the Wakanda that is theirs.
* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
