Ekow Eshun on the Black superhero who came to his rescue in mid-seventies Britain

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.

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.

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 armour 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 laboured 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 travellers 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.

This is an extract from The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them by Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton, £20).

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