ok, so i wasn't just hearing things in Black Panther, M'Baku actually did say 'glory to Hanuman' in that one scene. When i was in the theater, I didn't trust what I heard, because while it sure *sounded* like Hanuman, this was an African movie, and i didn't want to project.

But! independently, a bunch of different people and articles today basically told me that no, i really DID hear the name of my patron in this movie, so that means that i have to rescind my first tweet, because i actually DO have a connection to Africa

So let's talk about this. I won't do the full story on Hanuman, because there's a lot and he's super important and beloved, and deserves his own thread. But for now, my dude.

he's the archtype of devotion, of kindness, of being the best possible friend you can be, of loyalty, of healing, of a shoulder to cry on, and of a willingness to drop everything to move mountains for people. Also wrestling and strength.

Now, Black Panther's Wakanda is already a Pan-African paradise, right? You all have seen those threads going around, with influences from the Tuareg and Himba and Masaai and Zulu and everyone in between. And BP worships Bast, the Egyptian cat deity. Egypt is still Africa!

So why then would M'Baku and the Jabari tribe be calling to my monkey, an Indian deity if there ever was one? Glad you thought of asking, briefly and in passing!

So caveat, i'm a nerd who has spent maybe one point in 'comics lore' ever in my life, so i know literally nothing about canon reasons why, except what i found through google searches this morning. It doesn't matter anyway since that's not what i want to talk about anyway.

I didn't even know who black panther was until this movie, tbh

What i *do* know, though, is story structure, history, and syncretism. In the movie, BP needed a foil who didn't follow the prime faith of the culture to cast doubt on his leadership. That's standard hero tale stuff. Panther's crew worshipped Bast, so this other needed to not.

The movie casts the Jabari as a tribe that didn't buy into the first panther's plan, and never abandoned their own roots as a tribe with a different deity. Where is your god now, etc. So how do Bast and Hanuman show up together?

Religious syncretism! The same way Hanuman showed up in Hinduism in the first place. Sometimes your pantheon has a hole in it, and another culture introduces you to a god that fits that slot perfectly, and so you adopt that deity wholesale.

See Isis in Greek Temples and so on. And it makes sense that a tribe based around worshipping and acting like Gorillas would take to a Monkey lord of strength and courage and loyalty (look at how M'Baku acts when talking about his people!)

And yes, Hanuman is a monkey, not a gorilla, but details always change with cultural transmission to fit the needs of the receiving group. Thus Durga riding a Lion in one part of the faith and a Tiger in another

but what about the source culture? India's not on Africa. It does, however, have boats, and milennia of experience going back and forth between the land masses. Gujarati and Malayali traders and sailors plied the spice trade back and forth, and brought language and faith too

They even brought slaves and soldiers back to india, creating the Afro-Indian Siddi people and tribes. (there's a hell of a story there too)

So over the centuries Indian people start building a footprint in East Africa. First the Hindus, and then after some random taboo against sea travel, Indian Muslims fill the gap. They settle in places like Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania and South Africa.

later this also became part of the British colonial legacy. The Raj needed workers with higher status than Africans but lower than whites so they went to their big labor pool and started indenturing folks and dragging them west

Mohandas Gandhi, for instance, was a barrister who lived and worked in South Africa, where he started developing the basis for the idea of throwing the Brits out of India.

Plus, one of the biggest languages of south and east africa, Swahili, derives a ton of vocabulary from Arabic and Sanskrit, once again brought by those early Indian traders.

So in that vein it makes complete sense that those sailors, wearing their amulets of the monkey of courage and sailing across treacherous waters, would have attracted converts to their faith

And the stories of Hanuman would have been familiar to the people of South East Africa. a tricky monkey fighting evil spirits, flying over the trees and waters, trying to eat the sun.

But Pan-African culture, why not use indigenous deities? To be honest, I don't know, but i gotta say that as a person with significant amounts of family in Uganda and Kenya, it honors me greatly that the filmmakers consider the indian diaspora part of africa too

When Idi Amin went and led his Ugandan coup in 1971, among other things, he tried very hard to cleanse that part of Africa of Indian people, both through violent means and through 'economic warfare'. Their homes and business were taken away, and they were given 90 days to leave

something like 60,000 Indians were displaced. About 30,000 of them fled to the UK (irony, no?) because they held passports of the empire, and formed the basis of the Indian diaspora in England. lots of gujus three times removed from the motherland there

But what about the other 30k? All over the world, but also to the rest of Africa, bringing their gods and languages with them. Nearly the entire continent has seen or been impacted by Indian people over the past 2000 years, in ways subtle and dramatic

in any case, i don't know why they went in this direction, but in a movie celebrating the power of an independent brown society free to grow and evolve on its own merits, i'm grateful to have been included.

(also i joyfully laughed my ass off when M'Baku said his people were vegetarians. Because why wouldn't worshipers of Hanuman be vegetarian?)