Meet Nnedi Okorafor, the Black Panther comic writer, who redefined Marvel's Wakanda

Kochi: When Marvel Comics first asked acclaimed Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor to write for its ‘Black Panther’, a world millions knew through the blockbuster films and bestselling comics, she did not leap at the opportunity. In fact, she paused.

“I hesitated, because I didn’t like the concept of Wakanda as it was written. You have this super-rich, technologically-advanced, hidden and landlocked African nation that never shared anything with the countries around it, even during colonialism? That didn’t feel right. The flaw wasn’t Wakanda. The flaw was in the writing,” Okorafor said.

Yet she still accepted Marvel’s invitation. As she is in Kochi to attend Manorama’s Hortus festival, Okorafor told Onmanorama why she took it. “Because I believe sometimes the best way to deal with a problem is to get inside it and do it from within. I go in there, and I write something, then I can kind of mess around with it? If I am in there, I can push at the boundaries, question things, maybe even change a few things,” she said. This philosophy, reshaping narratives from within, has defined her journey as one of the most influential voices in contemporary African speculative fiction. 

The global conversation around Okorafor’s work often circles back to two terms she coined: Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. She created them because existing labels were flattening the depth and identity of African speculative writing.

“A lot of Black speculative fiction was becoming very Westernised. Afrofuturism is rooted in the Black American experience and that’s perfectly fine. But what I write isn’t that. My foundation is African. The history, the worldview, the politics—they come from Africa.” She simplifies her definition. “Africanfuturism is science fiction, that is foundationally, African. It is primarily set in Africa, starts in Africa and it branches out to the rest of the world,” she said.

This distinction is precisely why Black Panther, for all its popularity, felt foreign to her. “People assume it’s African because it’s set in Africa. But if you look closely, the energy pulls toward the US. The example I always give is the Wakandans setting up an outpost at the end of the movie. Why is it in Oakland, California, and not in a neighbouring African country? That’s Afrofuturism, and that’s Western centring,” Okorafor said.

If Africanfuturism is about correcting geography, Africanjujuism is about correcting spiritual understanding. “I came up with that term because I was writing this literature that was being called fantasy, which it was, but there was a layer to it that I felt was being ignored and not understood. I was pulling from real African spiritualities and cosmologies—beliefs people hold, live with, pass down. They weren’t fairy tales. They weren’t random inventions,” Okorafor said.

So she named it herself. “Africanjujuism is an African-rooted fantasy that respects African belief systems. I’m not just making stuff up, but I’m honouring what people truly believe while blending it with the fantastical. Indigenous African beliefs are often misunderstood, dismissed, or exoticised. I wanted readers to understand them, not erase them,” she said. 

Born in the US to Nigerian parents who migrated in 1969, Okorafor carries two storytelling traditions within her. “I grew up going back to Nigeria from a young age. So I understood oral storytelling, how it lives in the air, and also the Western written tradition. I’ve always seen the power of both,” she said.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Okorafor said she found more creative space in real African cities than imaginary ones like Wakanda. “I felt more freedom writing in Lagos,” she said, referring to Marvel’s ‘Venomverse’ comic, ‘Blessing in Disguise’, set in Nigeria’s bustling metropolis. With Wakanda, though, she felt constrained.

“It’s not even about the freedom to invent things. It’s the freedom that comes from the stories already existing in Lagos. Sometimes you don’t have to make anything up, Lagos gives you the pieces. It’s like having a box of Lagos. The city is so alive, so intense, so full of motion and noise and possibility that the stories practically write themselves. Honestly, writing Lagos was easier for me than writing Wakanda,” Okorafor said.

“Storytelling saved me”: How an athlete became a writer
To understand the intensity with which Okorafor approaches storytelling, one must hear how she discovered it. Born to athlete parents, with her mother an Olympian javelin thrower and her dad a national hurdler, Okarofor was into athletics and sports from a very young age. Unfortunately, at 19, Okorafor was diagnosed with severe scoliosis, which changed her entire life.

“The doctors said the curvature on my spine was like an S and its gravity was pushing me down and all my organs were being squeezed. So I underwent the surgery, woke up nine hours later paralysed from the waist down. I was just ranked like the top athlete of my state. My surgeon’s eyes were red because he was afraid he destroyed Illinois' top athlete. They didn't know if I would ever walk again. It was sudden, bizarre and it was bad. So I'm in this hospital bed, and like with half my body disappeared couldn't even turn to the side,” she said.

One night in the hospital bed, she picked up Isaac Asimov’s fictional short story ‘I, Robot’ but was in too much pain to read. So she began telling herself a story. “I told myself a story about a woman who could fly. Of course, when you can fly, you don’t need to walk. Only later did I realise what my mind was doing.” As she spoke the story internally, something shifted. “The darkness pressing on me just went back. That story kept me sane. Storytelling saved me. That was the moment everything changed,” she said.

She relearned how to walk over the next months through various therapies. And since then, she never stopped writing.  “I’ve been telling stories ever since. I write from the heart, from the gut. That’s how it began, and that’s how it remains,” she said. 

Asked her about AI and writing, and she was both realistic and hopeful. “The future of literature is solid. It may become smaller, but it will never disappear. Human imagination is necessary. We don’t realise its importance yet,” she said.

In Kochi for the first time, and in India for the first time, Okorafor refuses to predict what her experience will be like. “I don’t expect anything because expectations limit you. I’m here to listen, to take it in, to be wowed. That’s it,” she said.

And with that same openness, she continues to reshape how the world imagines Africa, its past, its possibilities, its spirit. Not by rejecting Wakanda, but by rewriting it from within. But then again when asked if Marvel movies like Black Panther have changed from Afrofuturism to Africanjujuism, Okorafor says “No, I think Afrofuturism is more marketable in the United States. When it comes to Marvel, it's American and Americans like to center themselves. So yeah, and it's fine, it's fine. 

“I'm really happy for the success of Black Panther. But, I sometimes feel that the success of Black Panther could have done more for African films. But it's Marvel, I think there's only so much that it can do,” she said.