Black Panther finds his stop with Wakanda's Subway Map
Cartographer Jake Berman puts Wakanda on the Map
With Wakanda opening up to the world, it's high time they let visitors know how to get around.
Anyone who saw Black Panther knows that Wakanda is the best Afrofuturistic portrayal of what a city could be. What do Afrofuturistic idealized cities not have? Traffic! So although the Marvel film doesn't have time to go into these details we can assume comfortably that it had a first rate public transit system. Now Map enthusiast Jake Berman has provided us with a map of that system.
As the cartographer explained,
"Design-wise, I've chosen to present Wakanda as a sort of city-state connected by its maglev system. With the speed maglev trains provide, Wakanda can be crossed end-to-end in an hour and a half, meaning that the places which were once Wakanda's border fortresses also serve as suburbs of the Wakanda Golden City. Wakanda's opening has brought large numbers of foreigners to the country for the first time, leading the Government of Wakanda to translate its subway map into English and French. As Wakanda is in East Africa, per writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, I thought it would be reasonable for the day-to-day language of Wakanda to be Swahili. (I apologize in advance to any Swahili speakers for grammatical errors.)
In essence, I wanted to synthesize the various iterations of Wakanda the nation-- both the original Silver Age concept of a hidden super-powered tribe with Ta-Nehisi Coates' modern re-envisioning of it as an African Hong Kong or Singapore. To that end, I took slight liberties with the canon, interpreting the Silver Age maps of Wakanda as Wakanda as it was in the '60s, merging it with Coates' new Wakanda as the modern city-state."
With Black Panther 2 already a sure thing it won't be long before Mr. Berman is contacted to consult.
Check out the link to some of his other projects as well as the map below:
Compared to Mr. Berman's map of NYC Transit: