Yale historian Marlene Daut breaks down the meaningful references to Haiti and its revolutionary spirit in the blockbuster Marvel film.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT, PH.D · UPDATED NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Marvel’s blockbuster “Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever” immerses us once more in the fictional African Kingdom of Wakanda, a Black refuge from the predatory nation states of Europe and the United States. The Black Panther, known as T’Challa, was the former king of this wealthy and hyper-modern asylum from the colonialists and capitalists who impoverished the real continent of Africa, but he perished in the first “Black Panther”released in 2018.

[Editor’s note: SPOILER ALERT, but if you haven’t seen the film yet, what are you waiting for?]

The sequel features a stunning revival of his legacy when we learn that the Black Panther left behind a son with his wife Nakia, a Wakandan warrior. In a mid-credit scene meant to set up the next “Black Panther,” Nakia and her son are revealed to have been living in Cap-Haïtien, a northern port city that was famously the capital of the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Haiti, ruled by King Henry Christophe.

It is not only the story of the first and last king of Haiti that the film evokes with this setting. The life and legacy of Christophe’s comrade-in-arms, the famous revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture who helped end slavery on the French-claimed island of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), surges forth when T’Challa’s son tells his father’s sister, Shuri, who has recently arrived in Cap, that his “Haitian name” is Toussaint. “Toussaint is a beautiful name,” she softly replies.