Heckles and eyebrows are rising at the news that Disney Corporation has trademarked the Swahili tagline “hakuna matata” from the film The Lion King. First popularised in 1982 in the song Jambo Bwana from the Kenyan band Them Mushrooms, then Disneyfied a decade later, the phrase roughly translates to “no worries”. Though Disney applied for the trademark when the movie came out in 1994, a petition was launched asking us to “say no to Disney or any corporations/individuals looking to trademark languages, terms or phrases they didn’t invent”. It has already received more than 120,000 signatures.
And the resistance is coming from Africa itself. Shelton Mpala, who started the petition, told the BBC: “Growing up in Zimbabwe, I always had an understanding that a culture’s language was its richness.” Mpala doesn’t speak Swahili himself – the language is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But the diaspora has had enough. The post-colonial empire is striking back.
There is backlash to the blacklash, of course. This is just PC nonsense, it’s just a song, just an animal movie. But this is precisely the problem with these cultural products: they paint this “Africa” as an imaginary space but nevertheless use broad, stereotypical tropes about the continent (animals and warrior tribes and mangled accents). This inaccuracy is longstanding and pervasive in Hollywood, from Coming to America to Hotel Rwanda. Why is this the tipping point?
Disney is too big to ignore, for one thing. But there is a patent absurdity to the idea that hakuna matata would be subject to trademark. It’s like copyrighting “goodbye” or “hang loose”.
Disney’s move feels so rampantly greedy, especially given that the corporation is about to capitalise again via a “live action” Lion King remake. Should they ever be allowed to put money or claims of ownership on to cultural products? As my sister texted me: “OMG American corporations and their efforts to own sh*t that’s not even ownable.” She and I – mixed-race Zambian migrants to the US – have been chatting a lot about cultural appropriation lately. We’re torn. We both tend towards cultural mixing, be it in fashion or in literature. Creolisation makes for the best art, and we all know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But the thing is: money matters and so does power.
The film Black Panther has a whole interlude about the appropriation – or rather expropriation – of African cultural products. The anti-hero, Killmonger, stands in a British museum examining a Wakandan pickaxe inside a glass case. It could be a tool or a weapon or a work of art. “How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a full price for it? Or did they take them like they took everything else?” he accosts a curator, then promptly breaks the glass to steal it – or restore it to its rightful owner, that is. This scene has now become a fitting meme to accompany the recent calls for the European museums to return cultural artworks and artefacts to China, to Easter Island, and to African countries such as Senegal.
How ironic then that Black Panther was recently issued with a lawsuit for allegedly stealing the work of a Liberian-British artist for the set design in the film soundtrack’s video (Kendrick Lamar’s All the Stars). The Lion King wasn’t woke enough in 1994 to theorise its use of African culture, but the new remake has sharpened the stakes of the debate. Just as trademarking hakuna matata feels like a parody of Disney’s voracity, rendering an animation of animals into photographic realism raises too many questions about what’s real. New objections have arisen: why would Beyoncé’s black Texan voice be coming from Nala’s maw? (But why is it a human voice at all?) I’ll be honest. I’m a big fan of Disney films – I have The Little Mermaid and Aladdin practically memorised – but the first and second times I tried to watch The Lion King I fell asleep during the very opening scene.
I finally made it through the film a few weeks ago, but I felt bored and annoyed. This is a picture of Africa I’ve been resisting my whole life: that we are just one giant safari; that we sing and dance and cavort all day (“no worries!”); that we are only credible as beasts. Not only that, the Lion King can’t decide whether lion rules or human rules apply; whether love comes in polygamous prides or monogamous brides; whether kings come to power through bloodlines or bloodshed. The best kind of multicultural art immerses itself in the cultures it’s mixing, even the social practices of lions. Cultural appropriation isn’t just about freedom within an artistic marketplace: it has to be good in both senses. That means giving the art and the cultures in question figurative and literal credit. Hakuna matata! but maybe hire some more Kenyans for your multimillion-dollar film production?
• Namwali Serpell is a writer and associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley
