Released in November 2022, the second installment of the Black Panther franchise is today being talked about for political reasons. Wakanda Forever is, in fact, accused by the French authorities of “propaganda” for having depicted the mercenary looters of the film in the guise of French soldiers operating in North Africa within the framework of Operation Barkhane. This French military intervention, launched in 2014 and interrupted in November 2022, aimed to fight against armed Salafist jihadist groups in the Sahel region. It is a passage in the film in particular that raises questions: at the headquarters of the European Union, Queen Ramonda (of the fictional kingdom of Wakanda) denounces the acts of looting by French soldiers, kneeling in the middle of EU ministers, in outfits similar to those worn by the French in the Sahel. See also on Konbini This is Jean Bexon, a journalist with the Journal de l’île de La Réunion, who dissected the sequence of the film on Twitter to raise several suspicious points, introducing his threat with the word “propaganda”. He also notes a concordance between the place of looting of the film and the field of action of the French army: Ansongo, in Mali. The Twitter post was shared yesterday by the Minister of the Armies Sébastien Lecornu himself, denouncing a “false and misleading representation of our armed forces.” The ministry has announced that it is not asking for “no withdrawal or censorship” in the name of “the freedom of the artistic work”, but the entourage of Minister Lecornu insists: “he cannot there is revisionism on the recent action of France in Mali: we intervened at the request of the country to fight against armed terrorist groups far from the story told in the film, namely a French army which comes to plunder its resources natural”.
