You know how Chadwick Boseman is visibly tired of doing the “Wakanda Forever” salute during press tours? Imagine if he had to do that in real life as the Wakanda ambassador for the sake of international relations.
The last time Wakanda and the U.S. had notable relations was back in 2018 when journalists were tasked with the mission to ask a “very serious” question to President Impeachment about the country’s trade agreement with the fictional country from Marvel’s Black Panther.
Well, it turns out, that ridiculous trade agreement was documented for a hot minute. But, it was only a test.
According to NBC News, Wakanda was listed on the Agricultural Tariff Tracker as a free trade agreement (FTA) partner of the United States on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Services’ official Agricultural Tariff Tracker. Until Wednesday afternoon, it was listed along with Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru. It is now removed.
“Over the past few weeks, the Foreign Agricultural Service staff who maintain the Tariff Tracker have been using test files to ensure that the system is running properly,” U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesman Mike Illenberg, told NBC in an email. “The Wakanda information should have been removed after testing and has now been taken down.”
Like the social media heroes they are, a few Twitter users posted screenshots from the website before it was inevitably removed. One screenshot showed Wakanda as an option to choose under the “FTA Partner” category.
Another screenshot detailed the description of potential trades such as cattle, chickens, buffalo and live asses (this one seems like a sneaky attempt to be racist about our backside attributes, I’m onto you America! *shakes fist*)
Naturally, I wondered just how long it was listed on the site before someone noticed the error to take it down and per NBC (who checked the Internet Archive), it appeared on the site sometime after June 10. Which seems like… forever ago, since 2019 has lasted 10 years.
Wakanda forever, indeed.
Update: 12/19/2019, 12:01 p.m. ET:
Oh, and since we’re keeping things officially documented, the USDA actually posted an update to the shenanigans on its Twitter account noting, “While we removed the Kingdom of Wakanda from our list of U.S. free trade partners, our relationship will always be strong.”
See? Told ya Wakanda is forever.