The 2017 Marvel film, “Black Panther”, was a joy to watch, with it being able to seamlessly guide audience members to the film’s wonderful characters within the fictional setting of the African nation of Wakanda.
However, the film’s world building might be a little too good, as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had the nation being listed as one of their free trade partners.
Wakanda is listed as a US free trade partner on the USDA website?? pic.twitter.com/xcq1OFTIPh
— Francis Tseng (@frnsys) December 18, 2019
The hilarious discovery was made by software engineer Francis Tseng, who mentioned that he was initially very bewildered to see Wakanda on the list. “I was very confused at first and thought I misremembered the country from the movie and got it confused with something else,” he told Reuters.
The fictional nation appeared alongside other real-life nations in the US department website’s tariff tracker, where it even listed out the goods that was being traded by the two nations. The list showed that live ducks, sheep and poultry being part of the trade, though, Vibranium was no where to be found in the list.
In any case, trade talks between the US and the African nation seems to have turned sour since the discovery, as the USDA has removed the nation from their website. “While we removed the Kingdom of Wakanda from our list of US free trade partners, our relationship will always be strong #WakandaForever,” the USDA tweeted on the removal.
Jokes aside, it seems that Wakanda was a forgotten file that was leftover from a past test on the department’s system. A USDA spokesman explained, “Over the past few weeks, the foreign agricultural service staff who maintain the tariff tracker has been using test files to ensure that the system is running properly. The Wakanda information should have been removed after testing and has now been taken down.”
In all honesty, we’re a tad disheartened by the removal of Wakanda from being a US trade partners. However, we wonder if any other Marvel’s fictional nation will encounter the same incident.
