Street Peeper Zimbabwe Street Peeper April 2018 | Page 33

When Black Panther star Danai Gurira was five-years-old, her parents
moved her from Grinnell, Iowa, population 9,218, to their homeland of
Harare, Zimbabwe – a bustling, urban city over two-and-a-half-
thousand times bigger than the rural former factory town where she
was born. She looked like a local girl, but spoke like a kid from the
Midwestern plains. "An American accent isn't unusual," says Gurira on
a brisk afternoon in Los Angeles, "but sometimes from somebody who
looks like me." Later, her high school theater friends would give her
the nickname Megaphone because she had an American girl's courage
to speak her mind. "My voice was really loud," she claims, grinning. But
"no one made fun of my accent. They were so used to it from movies."
Ignorant folks have recently called her family's country an eight-letter
slander – and if such insults ever reached Gurira's General Okoye, the
closest advisor of Panther's regent-turned-costumed Avenger and
guardian of his secret crushes, she might be tempted to grab a retract-
able spear. One glimpse of her taut, dignified and tougher-than-leather
character leading Wakanda's all-female special forces squad known as
the Dora Milaje or as one character gapes, "some Grace Jones-looking
chicks" – and anyone who wants to stay alive in the 21st Century will
quickly realize they've undervalued Africa at their own peril.
Ryan Coogler's epic, gamechanging superhero blockbuster may re-
volve around the adventures of King T'Challa and his efforts to protect
his hidden, technologically savvy homeland while adapting to the new
responsibility of wearing the crown. But the 39-year-old actress'
Okoye is the movie's secret weapon – steady, strong, the kind of an-
choring presence that can seem fierce one second and, courtesy of a
skeptical side-eye glance, be terrifically funny the next. She commands
attention from her first scene in the film: a broad-shouldered protector
in lotus position waiting for a call to attack.
And after rescuing a caravan of kidnapped Nigerian girls, she is the one
who gets what may be the movie's most breathtaking cinematic hero
shots: A warrior lit from behind and rimmed in gold. "I want to tell
stories about strong, complicated, African women," says Gurira. It's the
night after Black Panther's premiere and while everyone else seems
exhausted, she sits tall in a cream-colored coat tucked tightly around
her neck, nibbling on brie without smudging her perfect berry lipstick.
Stories matter, especially to kids. In Zimbabwe, they helped her stay
connected to the United States. Her mother hung an autographed pic-
ture of Martin Luther King Jr. on the mantel and told her daughter
about meeting the Civil Rights leader when she was a college student
in Illinois.
Mostly though, Gurira kept connected to her birthplace through pop
culture. "I read Judy Blume, I read Roots, I read everything," she says.
The self-described "Zamerican" listened to Snoop Dogg and-
watched Dynasty, imitating Joan Collins' Alexis Carrington in her back-
yard. Sometimes, the culture even came to her, like when she got to
shake hands with a visiting Nina Simone. And, of course, she watched
Hollywood movies. "American culture is everywhere," notes Gurira.
For better or worse: "My culture isn't everywhere," she adds,
though Black Panther's likely blockbuster status will help.
But at least Hollywood gave her a tie to her small-town birthplace. And
occasionally, it would reflect her roots back to her: Long before she
became a warrior of Wakanda, she says, her spirit wandered Zamuda,
i.e. Eddie Murphy's fictional African kingdom inComing to Amer-
ica. The Eighties comedy about a restless prince in search of a inde-
pendent black princess remains one of Gurira's favorite movies, and
like Panther, it's story about African royalty that imagines a proud
culture uninterrupted by colonizers – a myth about what history
should have been.