What If Black Panther's Killmonger Had Won?

Erik Killmonger's last line in Black Panther was uncomfortable.

Sitting in the theater, I felt angry that Marvel had just made me feel a resounding empathy for their psychotic villain (and make no mistake, he is psychotic). I also, as a writer, felt jealousy over the brilliance of what they'd just done.

A good villain does need to be relatable to an extent, or at least the villain's goal should be. But damn. Killmonger didn't just make me feel a sympathy for his twisted dreams; he made me feel guilty. And I don't think any film character has ever done that to me before.

Compare Killmonger to the other MCU bad guys for a moment: Loki, Malekith, Hela, Ultron, Winter Soldier, Whiplash, "Mandarin," Iron Monger, Killian, Vulture, Shocker, Yellowjacket, Ronan, Ego, Thanos, Red Skull, Zemo, Kaecilius, Dormammu, Abomination, to name a few.

We as the audience can feel for a few of the above characters—obviously Winter Soldier, or Bucky Barnes, being the most notable. But even the brainwashed Bucky's long, sick story arc does not pull us into the murky moral pit that Killmonger's does in just one film.

This article contains spoilers for Black Panther, so read on at your own risk.

In Judgment of Wakanda

The past kings of Wakanda had always resisted an interaction with the rest of the world, remaining isolated and, indeed, intentionally misleading the governments of the world as to the sophistication of their society and technology.

King T’Challa, upon his ascendance to the throne, was initially no different, though he did pose questions to his aides to evaluate their opinions about the pros and cons Wakanda's secrecy.

Should Wakanda, as literally the most advanced nation in the world, make their presence known in order to help the rest of us?

Or should they remain in their protective bubble, flourishing year after year as the world continues to slide into chaos?

Killmonger, nephew of the former Wakandan King T'Chaka, was playing basketball on the court below his Oakland apartment the night T'Chaka killed his father N'Jobu. Prince N'Jobu, serving as a spy in the United States, had grown frustrated with his brother's policies of ignoring the plights of black people suffering through the ongoing racism of the 1970's, in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

His intention was to steal vibranium—Wakanda's most valuable resource and the strongest substance in the universe—and sell it to an arms dealer, Ulysses Klaue, in exchange for weapons to use in his growing resistance movement.

Learning of his brother's plans (via a second spy named Zuri), King T'Chaka was less than amused and turned up unannounced at Prince N'Jobu's apartment. His intention was to take the prince back home to stand trial, but this worked out as one might expect—N'Jobu resisted and attempted to murder Zuri for betraying him. Choosing to protect Zuri instead of his own brother, T'Chaka killed N'Jobu... and left.

Thus we set the origins of the young boy who would be king.

Little Erik, who'd spent his young life in an impoverished and violent town of northern California, was abandoned by his uncle King T'Chaka, left with no father but with the memories of the legends of Wakanda... amazing stories of a place which had the ability to liberate all oppressed people on Earth, if only their government had the courage to stand up and do something to help others.

Wakanda, then, was not portrayed to young Erik in the most shining of lights. On the contrary, it was a neutral African nation which had stood by and watched for generations. Watched as African persons had been snatched away from their homes and enslaved, watched as the descendants of those slaves continued to live under bigoted policies, blatant racism, and outright subjection.

The kicker? This view of Wakanda was totally correct. They were just watchers on the sidelines, hiding in plain sight.

And little Erik—the seed sown by T'Chaka himself—had a good cause to grow into a vengeful zealot.

Are Erik Killmonger's Dreams Evil... or Enlightened?

Killmonger grew up obsessed with not only avenging his father but seeing N'Jobu's plan enforced. But not by stealing vibranium piecemeal from Wakanda, that's small potatoes. No, Killmonger's goal was to train himself by any means necessary in order to prepare for a coup to seize Wakanda as his own.

Like a self-made legend, Killmonger saw himself becoming the man who would take over Wakanda and, as the new king, swiftly change their international policy and begin bringing his vision to light on a massive scale.

Big dreams for a young man and yet... he came extraordinarily close to achieving them all. But what exactly was his vision and how exactly did he hope to achieve it?

By meticulous planning, for starters...

Working for the CIA, Killmonger learned all the tools of the trade related to destabilizing governments. But he also became a master combatant, readying himself for personal combat with T'Challa himself. After T'Chaka was killed by a bomb in Vienna (in Captain America: Civil War), T'Challa became the new king, putting him in the position of having to accept challengers, as we saw at his coronation at Warrior Falls.

In the Black Panther film, we learn that Wakandan tradition allows for any tribe to put forth a challenger to the throne. Only one tribe accepts the anti-technology Jabari, so T'Challa is required to drink an herbal potion (administered by the priest Zuri, ally to the former King T'Chaka), which temporarily strips away his enhanced strength. The challenger loses, and everyone thinks it's finished...

Enter Killmonger. Days after the coronation, Killmonger arrives on the scene with the corpse of Klaue, who'd just escaped T'Challa, Okoye (his general of the Dora Milaje) and Nakia.

After defeating T'Challa and throwing him to his presumable death, Killmonger is accepted by the tribes as their new king.

His aim is to export the advanced weapons technology of Wakanda and export it across the globe, to arm the oppressed peoples of the world so that they might band together, rise up, and create an empire over which Killmonger himself would rule. Is this a silly comic book villain plot? Yes and no.

Certainly we can see some of the "over the top" world dictator syndrome, not unlike most Marvel comic villains such as Doctor Doom, Red Skull, or Magneto (or James Bond villains, for that matter). But while his goals are far-reaching, this does not mean they are unattainable. Or necessarily wrong. Let's examine...

Washington Post did an article on The Foreign Policy of Black Panther. They discuss the policy prior to Killmonger and T'Challa's end-of-film revisions, and Wakanda's exceptionalism, of sitting on top of the world but doing nothing to help others.

Killmonger despised that aloof neutrality; he demanded that Wakanda exercise its might to help those who cannot help themselves.

“Two billion people all over the world who look like us whose lives are much harder, and Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all,” Killmonger states.

Thus, upon his rise to the throne, Killmonger immediately allied himself with the those tribes who believed as he did, who knew that Wakanda should be flexing their muscle and establishing themselves as not just a global superpower but THE global superpower. Wakanda wasn't just capable of helping the world. It was ready to rule it.

King Killmonger

As pointed out, Killmonger is a psychopath. He wasn't setting himself up to be some benevolent dictator. His treatment of women, in particular, comes across as very disturbing if viewed as a trend.

Remember his first murder in the film is that of the female museum curator who, honestly, he had no particular reason to poison during his heist. Klaue's goons came in and shot up the others, but Killmonger personally took the time to poison this woman's coffee so she could die at his feet. It was a cold and unnecessary move. And her only crime? She was wrong about the historical origins of certain relics on display.

Erik also shot his own girlfriend, the Bonnie to his Clyde, when Klaue held her as a temporary shield to protect himself. Upon his victory of T'Challa at Warrior Falls, it was the women who instantly fled, perhaps recognizing the danger he posed to them specifically. And in the subterranean chambers where the magical heart-shaped herbs grew, Killmonger had no qualms grabbing an old lady priest by the throat and picking her up, Darth Vader-style, to let her know in no uncertain terms that when he tells them to do something, they better get it done.

Bottom line here is that Killmonger, whose father was murdered when he was a boy and whose mother we never see in the film, does appear to have a complex if unstated issue with women in general. And then, of course, we have the scars... As we see in the bare-chested fight scene, Killmonger takes relish in marking up his own body with scars which represent his body count. His entire torso is covered with scars, proving he is not only a homicidal killer but that he takes great pride in that fact. He enjoys taking lives. He is literally a harbinger of death.

Most film clashes feature a Yin and Yang dichotomy between the hero and villain. But as science fictiony as Black Panther is, the political issues it addresses are very real. Perhaps it is a stretch, but if we were to consider T'Challa a rough equivalent to Martin Luther King, Jr. then would Killmonger be Malcolm X?

Al-Jazeera writes:

"While King advocated non-violent direct action and passive resistance to achieve equal civil rights, Malcolm X was the spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI), the black Muslim movement which violently rejected white America and its Christian values, and preached the supremacy of blacks over whites."

Would Killmonger have attempted to turn whites into slaves? It's an issue the movie doesn't come right out and say, but we do know Erik intends to rule the world by arming oppressed black citizens.

He compared his nation to the British Empire with his line about the sun never setting on the Wakandan Empire. But the British were colonists; as Killmonger sees it, he doesn't just represent the nation of Wakanda but all persons of African descent, therefore he doesn't have to go through the hassle of colonizing other countries, because his people already live there. All he's got to do is somehow convince them that they need to take up arms and start overthrowing their local governments.

Actually... this is where Killmonger's goal does seem a little vague. How exactly does he intent to carry out this plan of his?

He spent approximately twenty seconds of on-screen time explaining his agenda, and from there on it was just a matter of filling ships with weapons and launching them off to other, unspecified locales where they would begin to pass those weapons out to unspecified persons who would take them and begin using them to battle... unspecified other persons.

Alright, the plot is ambiguous, but still better than Ultron's intention of cracking off a piece of Sokovia and flying it up into the air (using a somewhat unbelievably small number of his clones to lift such a massive plot of land, but I digress...) so he can drop it back down and obliterate the human race for no apparent reason.

But the point of this article is to explore what would the world be like had Killmonger won? If Black Panther hadn't come back to reclaim his throne? If instead, all those random and unnamed masses of "people who look like Wakandans" suddenly turned into vibranium-gun-toting paramilitary types and started shooting up the local Powers That Be, aka the police, government officials, any law enforcement agents of any kind. Is this seriously what Killmonger had in mind?

What other means would he have been talking about? If his aim is to turn black oppression on its head, he'll have to disrupt the status quo, literally upend every non-black government on Earth and replace it with those loyal to him.

I think it's safe to say that, like the Wakandans themselves, not all people of color would be amenable to Killmonger's dreams of conquest. In other words, he'd need to scratch up a lot more welps on his own skin in order to get to where he wants to go, and a lot of the lives he'd have to take would be black ones. This isn't a problem for Erik. He said it himself; as a soldier he'd killed his own kind in Africa. But we're assuming those were acts of war, right?

Or are we? In the final scenes of the film, Killmonger's forces clash with those loyal to T'Challa. Here we see Africans fighting Africans while, overhead, we witness Agent Ross, the white American CIA agent, shooting down Killmonger's ships as they attempt to smuggle out weapons to arm the "oppressed." Man, this is a complicated movie, and these are not coincidental scenes. They are representative of real life issues about U.S. involvement (and interference) with other countries which are struggling with their own internal agendas and identities.

So Killmonger's plot does have "pros" and "cons." It's not a black and white issue (no pun intended), but rather one up for debate and discussion. Comic book villain goals aren't known for depth, and movie adaptations rarely solve this problem. But Black Panther does, which is one of the reasons it has gone on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

The timing of the film matters. Black Panther become popular because it tackles race issues which are on everyone's minds, as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement also points out. The world is on the cusp of radical changes in race relations, and there's never been a better time to engage in open and candid talks. Fighting and disagreements are an inevitable part of the growth process, but as long as we can approach things with sincerity and respect, we can come out the other side better.

The plight of Killmonger can and should be used to facilitate such talks. It is a tried and true method, to use fictional situations to debate actual ones.

As Oscar Wilde put it, "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." Whether one agrees or not, surely we can view Black Panther as cinematic art, and use its story to launch deliberations and discourse on a wide range of topics... including whether or not Killmonger is actually a good guy who became a villain, or a bad guy who actually believed his goals were good.

Why Killmonger Chose Death Over Jail

In closing, it's noteworthy how Killmonger faced death knowing he had a choice to be saved if he wanted.

Wakanda had the technology to heal him of his mortal wounds. King T'Challa made the offer, but Killmonger refused to accept.

Dying before the setting sun, in similar fashion to the death of many heroes throughout cinematic history, Killmonger's last words were (to paraphrase) that he preferred death over a lifetime of incarceration.

He'd rather die, just as many kidnapped Africans had chosen to commit suicide by jumping overboard slave ships along the Middle Passage instead of facing the living nightmare of being a slave on some foreign soil. That's how deep Killmonger's sentiments run. Whatever else one might say about him, Erik is a true believer.

And that's the core of the issue with this character. What exactly does he believe, and what exactly was he trying to achieve? I said he was a psycho, but couldn't the same be said of many revolutionary leaders? Is he truly a monster... or just misunderstood?

All issues have two sides. All political debates are heated. All rebels are branded as terrorists by the leaders whom they wish to oust.

So what are we to make of Killmonger?

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