Royal Flush

Here’s what I cannot escape: in the summer of 2020, locked in my Tokyo apartment while Black Lives Matter protests erupted globally, I watched Beyoncé transform my continent into a dream sequence. The beauty was undeniable; so was my nausea. Being in Mozambique, raised across borders, educated into placelessness, I recognize displacement when I see it. Yet when one African American woman told me she cried after watching the same film, saying she’d never seen herself portrayed as unconditionally beautiful, I had to sit with an uncomfortable truth: her tears and my nausea both matter…and neither cancels the other. They are born from the same chasm, from the unassailable fact that defines some part of our relationship; we grew up watching you; you did not grow up watching us.

This visual album operates through what I’ll call celebratory extraction—not because it intends harm, but because its structure reproduces the patterns of taking and transforming that have defined Africa’s relationship to global capital. It’s what happens when a nation has spent a century convincing the world that its definitions are the only ones that matter. When the American way of life becomes the default, other cultures are filed into neat drawers: savage if they challenge the story, exotic if they can be sold back to you. Understanding this requires holding multiple truths simultaneously without resolving them into false simplicity.

The Mechanics of Beauty

The aesthetic strategy is apparent from the film’s most-discussed sequence, “Already.” Beyoncé and Shatta Wale perform against three distinct African locations that the film never identifies, treating them as interchangeable backdrops. The lush forests of Ghana’s Ashanti Region, sacred spaces tied to specific histories, are rendered visually indistinguishable from the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Centuries of unique cultural and political identity are flattened into a single, monolithic “Africa”. The choreography follows the same logic, borrowing from Gwara Gwara, a South African dance that went viral when Childish Gambino used it. Here, it melts into movements from a dozen other traditions with the result being genuinely stunning. It’s also a form of aesthetic strip-mining. Like its industrial counterpart, it extracts the most valuable, easily accessible resources from a landscape, leaving the complex underlying ecosystem (the context, the history, the meaning) behind. The potent cultural forms are taken, and what is left for the communities of origin is a hollowed-out, globally-commodified version of their own heritage.

This logic of decontextualization continues with the objects themselves. The cowry shells that appear throughout, for instance, have served in various African societies as currency, divination tools, fertility symbols, and spiritual conduits linked to wealth and womanhood. The film transforms them into pure ornamentation: beautiful but emptied of their histories. This isn’t simple appropriation in the crude sense; rather, the dynamic is far more complex, especially as the production employed African designers who chose to include these elements. Their participation doesn’t negate the critique, it deepens it, showing that extraction is not always an antagonistic act but can be cooperative, in an unequal, process driven by the irresistible gravity of the global market. It is the phenomenon that occurs when cultural symbols enter global circulation and with all that comes with fast fashion and haute couture.

It’s the same dynamic that causes an international incident when a pop star like Tyla says she is not Black but Coloured. She speaks the specific language of her own country’s complex racial history, yet her words detonate in the USA as though they were aimed there. This happens because America’s soft power—its decades-long, global exportation of film, music, and media—has successfully installed its own operating system onto the world’s cultural hard drive. Its internal social constructs, like the one-drop rule, are unconsciously accepted as the universal standard, making local identities like Tyla’s seem like a deviation from a norm that was never hers to begin with.

The critique of the film’s inclusion of South-East Asian people often reveals a narrow, Atlantic-centric view of African history. The relationship between Africa and Asia and the Middle East predates European contact by centuries, especially in East Africa, where that influence is deeply embedded in language (e.g., Mozambique’s name deriving from Arabic), cuisine, and fashion. Acknowledging these ancient connections is essential to understanding the continent in its own global context, not merely in relation to the West.

The film’s gorgeous cinematography reinforces this process of beautiful simplification. Consider the sequence for “Brown Skin Girl.” The scenes are shot with a soft, ethereal focus, bathed in golden light. The compositions often mimic the formal portraiture of European debutante balls, positioning its subjects, including Lupita Nyong’o and Naomi Campbell, alongside Beyoncé’s daughter, Blue Ivy, with a regal stillness. The camera’s gaze is undeniably reverent, celebrating Black women so often denied such adoration. Yet, the visual grammar is inherited directly from a Western, almost colonial, lens. The unspoken compliment is that these Black women are as beautiful, as regal, as worthy of a portrait as a European aristocrat. While powerfully affirming, this approach validates Black beauty by measuring it against a pre-existing European standard, subtly reinforcing the very power structures and hierarchies of taste it seems to critique rather than asserting a new, independent framework of value altogether.

The sonic landscape reinforces these visual dynamics, where African musical elements are treated as spice rather than foundation. To be a foundation, a musical tradition requires its grammar to be respected. This means honoring the call-and-response structures that encode community dialogue, or the polyrhythms of a djembe ensemble that communicate specific events. In “Already,” for example, despite the presence of Ghanaian star Shatta Wale, the track’s production — credited to Major Lazer (Diplo) and the Picard brothers — flattens the song’s potential for polyrhythmic or call-and-response complexity into a single, looping drum pattern under a familiar pop chord progression. Instead, the film’s production, helmed by American producers, often smooths out these intricate and communicative functions, layering a single drum sample over a familiar pop chord progression. The instruments are transformed from active storytellers into passive atmospheres, placing African sound in service of an American narrative structure, even as the project claims to center the continent. This is where the African collaborator faces the harder question. The critique of an American-led production’s aesthetic choices is one thing; understanding the motivations of the African artists who participated is another. Their presence complicates the narrative of extraction, revealing a system that is as seductive as it is inequitable.

Consider an artist like Nigerian Laolu Senbanjo, who painted the body art in the film. His work undoubtedly reached more people in a single day than perhaps in his entire career. His participation forces us to ask the central question facing every creative in the global periphery: Should one refuse because the structure isn’t perfect? The question is not rhetorical; it is the fundamental dilemma. In a world where African artists struggle for visibility and capital, the choice is not between a “pure” path and a “compromised” one. It is a choice between a potentially career-making opportunity and continued obscurity.

For performers such as Busiswa or Moonchild Sanelly, a feature on such a project can translate into a quadrupled global listenership or the kind of financial stability (e.g. rent paid for a year) that is otherwise unimaginable. This is not an abstract debate about cultural extraction; it is a material calculation for survival and advancement in an unforgiving industry. The critique is of a global structure so inequitable that participation in one’s own commodification feels like the only path forward. The crucial question is not “Why did they say yes?” but “What system makes this the best offer they are likely to get?” When African creativity can only reach global audiences through American corporate mediation, when local artists must choose between invisibility and instrumentalization, the problem isn’t individual decision-making; it’s the architecture of cultural capitalism itself. Black Africans arriving in the West often face a double bind: they must contend with primitive, inaccurate stereotypes of Africa perpetuated by Western media, while in a country like the US they are often lumped together with Black Americans, a group whose culture and history are distinct from their own. That can feel like a form of re-victimization — erasing their specific identity and forcing them into a cultural box that isn’t theirs, further incentivizing social distance.

Extraction and Affirmation

The economics of the project are as stark as its aesthetics. Disney+ launched in November 2019, and by the time Black is King was released, it had amassed over 60 million subscribers, almost exclusively in North America and Europe. This was the target audience. The platform wouldn’t reach South Africa until 2022 and Nigeria until 2024; most of the continent, the very subject of the film, still can’t access it legally. This was not an oversight but a strategic calculation. Global corporations like Disney build their digital empires to service markets with disposable income and reliable payment infrastructure, reinforcing a digital divide that mirrors old colonial lines. The result was a profound irony: a film celebrating pan-African pride was partitioned from most of Africa, forcing millions to access it through piracy. They became unauthorized consumers of their own authorized extraction, participating in a global conversation about their identity on terms entirely set by others in distant markets.

This extraction is formalized through the cold logic of intellectual property law. Traditional knowledge—beadwork patterns refined over generations, dance movements tied to specific ceremonies, spiritual concepts at the core of a culture—enters the production pipeline as “inspiration.” It exits as a series of copyrighted elements, legally the property of a Delaware corporation. Western IP law, built around the idea of a single, named author, is ill-equipped to recognize, let alone compensate, communal and ancestral creation. Through this legal sleight of hand, the culture that is being celebrated is simultaneously being possessed, with no legal recourse for the communities that originated it.

But extraction is only half the account. The demand side — the profound hunger the film was designed to meet — has its own claim. For Black Americans, the descendants of a population that survived the Middle Passage, the connection to history is not an abstract concept. That journey was a profound cultural annihilation, a deliberate erasure of memory that severed languages, religions, and kinship systems, leaving a wound that persists across generations. Years after we immigrated to the United States, I asked my father about what it was like to engage with the community, and he shared an observation that still haunts me. He described them as such:

When we moved to the US, there was a disconnect between our expectations of what life was like for people like us and reality. What we saw were people unmoored because they were taken away from their homes, and people who flailed wildly while attempting to connect to their roots.

When the film presents Black women as queens and goddesses, it responds directly to this deep, unmoored hunger. In the face of intersecting oppressions that have historically denied them beauty, power, and worth, these images provide a crucial counter-narrative. They are an antidote to a long history of being portrayed as caricature, threat, or afterthought. Released during a pandemic that was disproportionately killing Black people, while the streets filled with protests against police violence, this vision of Black excellence was not frivolous. It was a form of psychological PPE. During a time of intense physical confinement and psychological siege, when the world was saturated with images of Black bodies as sites of trauma, the film offered a visual sanctuary. It was a transport from claustrophobia and fear into a world where Blackness, for a precious hour and a half, meant unconditional beauty rather than imminent threat.

The Persistence of Hierarchy

But the film’s primary solution, royalty, reveals its profound ideological limitations. The fantasy of kings and queens is seductive precisely because it offers a simple, potent answer to a history of being rendered powerless. For a people described as “unmoored,” a royal lineage provides the ultimate anchor. It suggests an inherent, almost divine, worth that cannot be taken away by centuries of oppression. Yet, by obsessing over this imagery, the film implicitly naturalizes hierarchy itself. It reinforces the idea that some people are born to rule and others to be ruled, that power is a matter of bloodline rather than a right to be collectively built. This vision not only flattens the vast diversity of pre-colonial African political systems—many of which were council-based or republican—into a singular, Eurocentric model, but it also runs directly counter to the philosophies that have animated modern African liberation. The great anti-colonial struggles were often explicitly anti-monarchical, rooted in visions of popular sovereignty and socialist self-determination. The film’s fantasy clashes with the legacy of thinkers like Thomas Sankara, who emphasized horizontal solidarity and the power of the people.

This embrace of monarchy is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is the film’s core political function. It offers a therapeutic myth of a noble heritage to soothe the deep wounds of historical trauma. This provides a powerful form of individual comfort, a fantasy of a lineage that was stolen and can now be reclaimed. In doing so, however, it subtly impedes the harder, more urgent work of collective liberation. The fantasy of royalty turns a political struggle into a personal journey of discovery, suggesting that power is something to be found within, rather than something to be built together. The myth is a powerful analgesic for the persistent pain of historical erasure, but a cure requires changing the material conditions that perpetuate inequality. This therapeutic function is also highly marketable; it sells a feeling of empowerment without demanding any actual shift in power, which is the ideal product for the architecture of cultural capitalism.

Consider what actual, material solidarity requires in the 21st century. In 2019, the African Continental Free Trade Area finally came into effect. It was built from years of grinding negotiation between 54 nations with radically different economies, languages, and political systems — no glamorous costumes, no cinematic score. Only the unsexy, bureaucratic work of trade lawyers, diplomats, and civil servants hashing out tariff schedules and rules of origin in sterile conference rooms. While the film offers a spectacular, aesthetic unity, the trade agreement represents a procedural one—messy, imperfect, but tangible. That process honors complexity rather than erasing it for a beautiful shot. It is the slow work of building interdependent power — not a feeling of solidarity, but its material conditions.

Toward Something Else

So what would a genuine cultural alternative look like? It would look less like a single, monolithic film and more like a decentralized, living ecosystem. It would be built on a different architecture, one designed for reciprocity, not extraction. Imagine, for instance, a production model where 15% of the budget is contractually placed into a trust, administered by a council of the featured African artists, to autonomously fund new projects in their home communities. This wouldn’t be charity; it would be a structural reinvestment, a way of ensuring that cultural capital generates material capital for the communities of origin, not just for a distant corporation. Imagine an interactive digital version of the film where every costume, dance style, and spiritual reference links to a short documentary profile of the community and artists who originated it, with a direct “tip” button for each. This would transform a passive viewing experience into an active, educational one, re-establishing the context that was stripped away and creating a direct line of support between the global audience and the local creator.

Imagine a creative process, however slow and messy, that budgets for conflict and disagreement between collaborators. A process that understands that true solidarity is forged in negotiation—in the difficult, unglamorous work of navigating different perspectives and power imbalances—not in the seamless execution of a singular, top-down vision.

These alternatives are speculative. They require not a better production model but a different political economy — one this essay can gesture toward but cannot design. What it can say is that the communities being represented deserve not just celebration but sovereignty: the material capacity for self-determination. That condition does not yet exist, and no visual album will create it.

This essay is written in English, in a Western critical framework, for a readership that is not primarily African. A pan-African voice operating in that space is itself a form of celebratory extraction: the continent’s complexities are mined for argument and nuance, then offered back to the same markets that the essay critiques. That is not a disclaimer. It is the structural condition of the exercise. Naming it is the essay’s most expensive available move — the one that might earn the confidence of what follows.

The film, in all its stunning beauty and profound contradictions, ultimately reveals our current moment’s central paradox: the transformation of liberation into a style, leaving the actual, grinding work of building power undone. Its beauty is real; so is its extraction. Both truths matter. Neither resolves the other. The African American woman whose tears affirmed her worth deserves that affirmation; the African communities whose cultures become raw material for that affirmation deserve sovereignty over their representation. These needs don’t compete; they reveal the same system of dispossession operating at different points on the globe. The work, then, is not to choose a side, but to refuse the false choice. It lies in the unresolved tension, in our refusal to simplify a complex reality into a simple resolution. The monopoly on meaning is breaking. The old center can no longer hold. In that new, fractured, and more honest landscape lies the work still to be done.