America Ends Free Trade Agreement With Wakanda
Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

America Ends Free Trade Agreement With Wakanda

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Parker Diakite
Parker Diakite • Dec 20, 2019

The Sub-Saharan African nation Wakanda, home to King T’Challa, better known as the Black Panther, is trending on Twitter. 

Up until Wednesday, the fictional East African country was included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s online tariff tracker as a free trade partner with actual countries.

According to the department’s online tracker, ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows are among the list of goods that two nations apparently traded. 

Wakanda first appeared in the Fantastic Four comic in 1966 and made a reappearance when Black Panther was adapted into an Oscar-winning film last year.

Remember reminding yourself after watching the movie Black Panther that Wakanda is a fictional place? Well, apparently it took the US a little longer to accept that unfortunate reality and only after the error was pointed out on Twitter by Francis Tseng.

 “The Wakanda information should have been removed after testing and has now been taken down,” U.S.D.A spokesperson Mike Illenberg told the New York Times. 

Francis Tseng, a New York-based software engineer who was looking up agricultural tariffs for a fellowship he was applying for, told Reuters that when he first saw Wakanda on the list, he got “very confused”: “[I] thought I misremembered the country from the movie and got it confused with something else.”

After the US took it down, Tseng added, “well, the USDA took Wakanda off the list. guess we’re in a trade war with them too.”

Others chimed in.