Opinion Just imagine

Sadly, the imaginary country was quietly removed from the pages after a software engineer in New York discovered it on the list and alerted the Twitter community.

Tired of battling China, the United States has launched a trade war against the state of Wakanda, the world’s only source of the metal vibranium, by taking it off the online list of nations with free trade agreements. That’s as unbelievable as putting it on the list of the Department of Agriculture in the first place, since Wakanda is a fictional African nation which exists only within the Marvel universe, as the home of Black Panther. Imagine some unsung lower-rung bureaucrat, tired to death of moving files on alfalfa and Brussels sprouts, swerving to his monitor and with a rebellious but steady hand, injecting the database of the world’s biggest economy with the fiction of Wakanda. This is fandom at its noblest.

Sadly, the imaginary country was quietly removed from the pages after a software engineer in New York discovered it on the list and alerted the Twitter community. All traces of Wakanda vanished, down to interesting details like tariffs on tobacco and booze, live animals and dairy products. What a pity, when the myth of the relatively stodgy Kailasa, allegedly established by fugitive rape accused godman Nithyananda, is allowed to linger, to offer succour to allegedly dispossessed Hindus from the world over, who have “lost the right to practise Hinduism authentically” in their countries.

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On the other hand, maybe Wakanda and Kailasa are authentic, and those who doubt their existence aren’t. The world is now full of people who wonder if they had been sleepwalking in the alternate histories of their countries, and have now woken up in the authorised version. But actually, it is we who make history. Tintin exists irrespective of whether Syldavia and Borduria exist, but these mythic nations can only exist in Tintin’s world.