Wakanda’s Afro-Futurist Dream Is More Remote Than Ever

Behind most visions of a high-tech future, there’s an assumption that energy will become super-abundant. Take Wakanda, the secretly rich, technologically advanced nation portrayed in Marvel’s Black Panther series. With its flying cars, maglev trains, and levitating, invisibility-shielded fighter aircraft, it’s positively dripping in the power gleaned from deposits of the fictional metal vibranium.

The reality across today’s Africa couldn’t be more different. Living without a plug socket is rapidly becoming an almost exclusively African problem; of the 685 million people globally without access to power, 571 million live there. Just five countries outside the continent — Haiti, Myanmar, North Korea, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu — have been unable to give more than three-quarters of their population access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, 39 out of 45 nations fail that test.