▸ Column · Modern Wakanda under T'Challa's reign — two partners sharing a dwelling in the capital after one is elevated into Shuri's Design Group
BLACK PANTHER replies.
Replied to by Black Panther, with a rebuttal from Killmonger.
The letter
My partner Kembe and I took a dwelling together in the capital eight months ago, and from the first we agreed to share the household costs evenly — fair, since we both worked the river docks for the same wage. Since then I was raised into the Design Group on a stipend nearly three times what Kembe earns, but Kembe has never asked to revisit our arrangement and seems to take real pride in the "equality" of splitting things down the middle. The trouble is that his half of our lodging swallows most of what he brings home, while for me it is nothing. I watch him quietly go without — skipping the festival gatherings, the gifts for friends he would once have given gladly — while I set silver aside without effort. I want to propose we each give the same share of what we earn rather than the same coin. But I am afraid he will hear it as me naming him a burden, or worse, shifting the balance of power between us. Is there a way to raise this without making him feel small?
Black Panther replies
Slow this down before you decide, because you are deciding more than you think. The even split was not a tradition handed to you by ancestors — it was an agreement between two equals, and it was just. The two of you are no longer equal in coin. So I will not ask whether the arrangement is old. I ask whether it still serves the living, and it plainly does not — it is quietly bleeding the man you love while you set silver aside without noticing the cut.
Hear me on this, because I have stood in the larger version of your dilemma. My nation held wealth beyond measure and let our own kin go without, and we told ourselves the closed door was fairness. It was not. It was comfort, paid for by people who could not afford it, and the bill came due in a way I will carry to my grave.
You fear taking his pride. Then honor it: name aloud what the old split was for, that you both chose it freely, and that giving by proportion is the next form of that same fairness — not charity, not power. Do it in the light. A thing done in the open, with respect, is the opposite of making a man small.
— Black Panther
Killmonger weighs in
Cousin gives a beautiful speech about doing it "in the light." Meanwhile Kembe's sitting home missing the festival so you can pile up silver three times his size — and you're asking how to phrase a tender little conversation so HIS feelings stay soft. Be honest about whose comfort that protects. Yours. The fairness is already owed; you don't need his permission to pay more, you just need to do it. Don't make him audition gratitude for getting what was his. And that quiet pride keeping him broke? That's the same lie they sold me — suffer politely, it's noble. It isn't. Stop talking. Move the coin.
— Killmonger
▸ Read next