MYRON B. PITTS: 'BLACK PANTHER' BOOSTS SALES IN AFRICA, INSPIRES PRIDE

Eki Ingunbor busily moved around her shop full of brightly-colored African wear, re-hanging clothes, as she considered what the release of the hit movie “Black Panther” has meant for her business.She paused.“The first and second week of the movie it was so fun,” she says. “The way people were coming.”The month of February is always strong for Ingunbor’s sunny, yellow EKI African and Carribbean Market on Ramsey Street, because of Black History Month.

But this February, business has more than doubled.She enlisted the help of two daughters and a friend to handle the busy times, where 10 or more people would stuff into the small clothing shop and food market. Often families would want dashikis — the traditional, unisex African shirt — for the whole family, including kids.She would ask them, “Are you going to the movie?”

The answer invariably came back “yes.”“Black Panther” is a Marvel Studios movie set in the fictional African country of Wakanda, ruled by a superhero king, T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman).  The movie has spent three straight weeks at No. 1 and has already clearing $920 million internationally.It has also inspired many African-Americans, including in Fayetteville, to wear dashikis, head wraps, dresses and skirts that represent Africa when they go to see the movie.Ingunbor says most people want dashikis, because they’ve heard of them. She will wrap head wraps for the first-timers so they can keep it that wayfor the movies.

Though she adds: “Just go to YouTube, you can do it easy.”Ingunbor, who is a native of Nigeria in west Africa and also a seamstress, is glad for the interest in African clothing, and not just for the extra business. She enjoys seeing more people wear the kind of clothes she saw growing up, and learning about them, too. She in thepast has had to correct people who complimented her on her “costume” when she wore African dress.She says: “A lady from my country in New York said that during Black History Month and because of the movie, a lot of people in the streets she saw them with African wear, and they’re smiling and they’re happy. It’s like something happened to them.”It makes her happy, too, Ingunbor says.“This is your culture,” she says. “You don’t need to be ashamed of it.”Adegoke Ademiluyi is thrilled as well bythe “Panther” phenomenon. He is a native of Nigeria, too, and chairs the department of government and history at Fayetteville State University.“I just had a feeling of euphoria,” he says after he saw the film for the first time. He saw it a second time, for an evening show, and that’s when he saw many moviegoers dressed in African clothing or pro-black shirts, he says.

But he has another reason to feel connected. As a graduate student at University of California at Los Angeles, Ademiluyi met members of the Black Panther Party, an Oakland-based political and revolutionary organization.The party was founded a few months after the comic book on which the movie is based, but was using the panther as a symbol earlier, when it was a neighborhood organization.Ademiluyi says he had been in the states for less than a year when a whitecampus administrator advised him not to have dealings with American blacks, who weren’t going to amount to much. At that time Ademiluyi dated a woman who attended Panther meetings, where he heard a different view.“That really brought me back to reality,”he says.A subplot of “Black Panther” involves Oakland, and the central villain, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) comes from there. Ademiluyi didn’t know beforehand about the Oakland scenes, so it was a pleasant surprise.Killmonger is also Ademiluyi's favorite character, he says because of his “swagger.”Ademiluyi says he wears mostly dashikis in the summer. He is 70 and says that contrary to what some may think, even in Nigeria, when he was growing up, traditional African wear was often frowned upon, which he saysis a legacy of colonization.“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Black folks were wearing three-piece wool suits in the heart of summer, because that’s how you looked ‘cool.’ ”He says that has changed and he saw that change in the clothes people wore to “Black Panther.”To see young folks especially embrace African wear, he says, “Just brought some nice feelings for me.”




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