Only Xhosa speakers caught Trevor Noah’s best joke about Black Panther at the Oscars

Trevor Noah, who is from South Africa while introducing Black Panther as the Best Picture nominee joked about knowing the film's main character, T'Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman.

By: Trends Desk
New Delhi | February 26, 2019 01:02 PM IST

5 min read

The 91st Academy Awards may have been host-less but there was no dearth of memorable speeches, but the best joke perhaps came from comedian Trevor Noah. Teasing people who think the country of Wakanda from the film Black Panther is real, Noah told the world an incorrect translation of a sentence he said in Xhosa, one of South Africa’s languages.

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Noah, who is from South Africa, was introducing Black Panther as one of the Best Picture nominees and joked about knowing the film’s main character, T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman. After saying that people all over the world say “Wakanda forever” to him, The Daily Show host said, “Growing up as a young boy in Wakanda, I would see T’Challa flying over our village, and he would remind me of a great Xhosa phrase — ‘Abelungu abazi ubu ndiyaxoka'”.

He went on to explain the phrase to everyone watching, saying it translated to: “It means, ‘In times like these, we are stronger when we fight together than when we try to fight apart’.”

Except that his translation was deliberately wrong, and wasn’t understood by those present in the theatre, who responded to the lofty sentence with applause.

The sentence really meant: “White people don’t know I’m lying.”

South Africans and other speakers of Xhosa, didn’t miss it, and took to Twitter to point out what he had said in front of a live audience with a straight face.