This article describes and comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2018 “State of Nation Speech”. 

Power is sweet, even unavoidable, at times. Call him president, commander-in-chief, head of the security council, party chief, and chairman of everything from innocuous intra-governmental agencies to multi-lateral conglomerates baptised into China’s mainstream socialistic agenda; Xi Jinping may be brewing a cocktail too detrimental to the future of democracy in Africa.

The article critiques Black Panther movie’s narrative as dictating the terms of black people’s responses to systematic violence. It does this by critically examining the imagery and story around ancestral connections. I argue that the movie is used to craft a modern colonial imagination of Africa’s future. I delve into the symbolisms in this movie and analyse them in light of the arguments made.

Post-1994 South Africa has a theatrical crisis of selective amnesia and partisan remembering of history. History telling, whether at school, university, in the media or public celebrations and commemorative events, is biased towards a singular political trajectory and one particular school of thought that is portrayed as the sole agents of the socio-economic and political transformations that have apparently occurred in the past 24 years.