Tricksters and female warriors: womanist interweavings from Oríta to Wakanda

Abstract

Túndé Kèlání's The Narrow Path (2006) may be read as prefiguring the emancipatory, womanist project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Hence, a broad understanding of the black struggle in Black Panther as encompassing an African presence propels this article's womanist reading of Túndé Kèlání’s The Narrow Path, from the Nigerian film industry, alongside Coogler’s film. The article uses images of the trickster deity, Èṣù, and the warrior woman to respond to Ananya Kabir’s call that Black Panther demands an interpretive model which excavates the layers of signification that make Afro-Futurism the arena where the African diaspora and the African continent confront each other. Both films reveal how women, marginal to patriarchal power structures, may come to possess an ambivalent agency rendered visible in their transformation of marginality through rhetorical, and technological weaponry.