British Airways’ In-Flight Magazine Thinks Lupita Nyong’o Is From Wakanda, the Fictional Setting of Black Panther

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British Airways’ in-flight magazine, High Life, recently ran a round-up of best-dressed celebrities. Being a publication centered around travel, they included the home town of each celebrity. For Lupita Nyong’o, they seemed to think that town was Wakanda.

If you, like the writer/editor/everyone else who let this make it to print, are somehow unfamiliar, Wakanda is not a real place. Not even a little. It’s the fictional nation ruled by T’Challa, aka Black Panther–a completely made up place in the Marvel Universe.

You might think that someone would have noticed that Wakanda doesn’t exist, given that they–again–are a travel publication.

Of course, if we’re gonna throw around fictional homelands…

Nyong’o will be co-starring in the upcoming Black Panther movie, as a citizen of Wakanda. But it’s fine, I’m sure they made the same mistake with Chris Hemsworth of Asgard, right? Or Daisy Ridley of Jakku?

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page: Wakanda is fictional, Kenya (where Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o grew up, though she was born in Mexico City) is real, and–while we’re at it, just because this bit of ignorance simply will not die–Africa is not a country.

(via Okay Africa, image: Shutterstock)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.