Nakia and Okoye walk side by side, confident and stoic, next to their king, T’Challa. They’re inside a secret underground casino in Busan, South Korea, in pursuit of the vibranium-obsessed arms dealer Ulysses Klaue.
Nakia, expert in all things espionage, and Okoye, whose iron-fisted hand-to-hand combat skills and use of a spear are unparalleled, are in disguise — dressed to the nines and truly a sight to behold. During an incredibly intense, action-packed scene, they battle with guards, embark on a car chase, and eventually capture Klaue.
The impressive special effects, exceptional fight choreography, and explosions of the Korean casino scene would be at home in most big-budget action movies. But Nakia and Okoye are two of the most important characters in Marvel’s new film Black Panther. Here, significantly, the action stars are black women.
Black Panther, which stars Chadwick Boseman as the titular character, isn’t the first superhero film with a black lead. One could argue that earlier films like Blade, Spawn, and Hancock, all with black superheroes at their center, helped pave the way for director Ryan Coogler’s film. But Black Panther celebrates African aesthetics, language, and cultural traditions with a healthy dose of Afrofuturism, which all combine to set it apart from those previous films.
But just as groundbreaking are the film’s female characters, many of whom belong to the Dora Milaje, a team of Wakandan women trained from birth to be some of the best fighters in the world when it comes to martial arts, hand-to-hand combat, and weaponry. They protect the throne, as well as whoever is the Black Panther at that time. Seeing the Dora Milaje working together at the film’s center — and knowing this is only the beginning of their story — has proven a thrill for many viewers.
So now’s the time to learn more about these distinguished protectors of T’Challa and the people of Wakanda. Here are five things you need to know about the Dora Milaje.
1) The Dora Milaje made their comics debut in 1998 but were very different from their cinematic counterparts
The Dora Milaje made their debut in 1998 in Black Panther Vol. 3, No. 1. Written by Christopher Priest, it introduces Nakia and Okoye, the characters played by Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira, respectively, in the Black Panther movie. Known as the “adored ones,” the Dora Milaje, as illustrated by artist Mark Teixeira, had a different physical appearance from their look in the film, as well as a different role within the Wakandan royal structure.
The comics version of the Dora Milaje were more feminine, with long, straight hair, red miniskirts, and high stiletto heels — one could say they looked like the lost members of En Vogue. In the comics, the Dora Milaje also spoke only to the king and only in Hausa, a native African language not widely spoken in Wakanda, and two of their ranks accompany the Black Panther wherever he goes: Okoye is T’Challa’s chauffeur and Nakia is his personal aide.
Priest imagined the Dora Milaje as subservient wives-in-training to their king — a ceremonial designation T’Challa rejects but which nonetheless informs his relationship to the women who also serve as his protectors. In the comics, T’Challa has a more paternal relationship to the Dora Milaje, including Nakia and Okoye, who were teens when they first served under him. (However, if you look at the panels drawn by Teixeira, they don’t appear to look like teens at all.)
This relationship between T’Challa and the Dora Milaje informs Priest’s version of Nakia, which will seem very different to those who primarily know the character from the film. In the film, Nakia is a skilled Wakandan spy and War Dog, as well as T’Challa’s former girlfriend. Priest, however, wrote the character as a relentless pursuer of T’Challa’s affections. In Black Panther Vol. 3, No. 3 (1998), T’Challa experiences a hallucination brought on by the supervillain Mephisto in which he believes he is making out with his former love interest Monica Lynne, but it turns out he is actually kissing Nakia. This exacerbates Nakia’s romantic obsession with T’Challa, but the feeling is not mutual, so she develops into the villain Malice, forming an alliance with Erik Killmonger to take down the Black Panther.
Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole’s screenplay for Black Panther represents a massive improvement on this characterization: Rather than depicting Nakia as lovesick, Black Panther presents her as a complex and powerful character whose presence in the storyline deeply resonates with her role as both a spy and a love interest for T’Challa.
Okoye receives a more subtle overhaul in the film, but it’s notable that she now bears the title of “general,” one she never had in the comics. Thus, she goes from being T’Challa’s subservient protector to leading the entire Dora Milaje army.
What’s refreshing in the film is how Nakia and Okoye work together, rather than fight over T’Challa, as other interpretations of the Dora Milaje might have had them do. Removing the Fatal Attraction-esque storyline where Nakia obsesses so much after T’Challa that she tries to kill Monica Lynne was the best decision the filmmakers could have made, and moves the film away from what Nyong’o, in an interview with Teen Vogue, called “the expected female-rival narrative.”
These creative liberties taken by Coogler and Cole prove to be both strategic and successful, making Nakia and Okoye compelling, three-dimensional characters in their own right, not just in their relationship to T’Challa.
2) The film doesn’t feature one of the comics’ most important Dora Milaje characters: Queen Divine Justice
At the beginning of Black Panther, viewers get the backstory of Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger told through the perspective of his father N’Jobu (Sterling K. Brown), the younger brother of T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka. But the story of N’Jobu, told in the film outside of Wakanda in 1992 Oakland, California, reminded me of a different character from the comics: Chanté Giovanni Brown, a Wakandan-American character initially based in Chicago and later recruited to the Dora Milaje. Eventually after her recruitment, she goes by the alias Queen Divine Justice.
Chanté’s father was a chieftain of the Jabari tribe, one of the five tribes of Wakanda, which consists of a community of renegade Wakandans who have isolated themselves in the snow-capped mountains and submit to their own rules and traditions. (If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, their society is similar to the wildlings who live beyond the wall.) Chanté is also a cousin to M’Baku (played in the film by Winston Duke), leader of the deadly White Gorilla Cult, which resides in a region of Jabari. (As a black panther is the deity symbol for the Wakandans, a gorilla is the deity symbol for White Gorilla cult. Their rallying war cry in the film is the sound of a gorilla.)
As a result of the rise of the White Gorilla cult, extremists targeted the entire Jabari tribe, and Chanté’s parents were forced to flee Wakanda for the US — where they were murdered by extremists when Chanté was an infant. After that, T’Challa assigned a Wakandan security force agent, whom Chanté believed was her grandmother, to look after her as she grew up.
The adult Queen Divine Justice made her first appearance in 1999’s Black Panther Vol. 3, No. 13, written by Priest with art by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond. Chanté only learns of her Wakandan heritage when T’Challa approaches to recruit her into the Dora Milaje; it still takes several months for him to explain the circumstances of her parents’ death, however. (Shady.)
Although both are Wakandan Americans, Queen Divine Justice and Erik Killmonger have very different motives and principles. Killmonger is a revolutionary, and he promotes a by-any-means-necessary approach to injustice. Chanté, on the other hand, is loyal and dedicated to the king of Wakanda and accepts where she stands as a protector of the king and a Dora. Her loyalty to the king, however, is a bit complicated: After Nakia grew into the villainous Malice, T’Challa, concerned that Malice might use Chanté as a target for her fury, recruited Queen Divine Justice as a member of the Dora Milaje — which was also a strategic move to maintain balance amid the political unrest surrounding the Jabari tribe.
Queen Divine Justice doesn’t appear in the live-action adaptation of Black Panther, but there’s plenty of room for her to appear in a presumed Black Panther 2. As an outsider to Wakanda and a black character getting acclimated to a new world filled with other black people from a different culture, Queen Divine Justice could offer an amazing perspective on various aspects of the African diaspora, proving further illustration that blackness is not a monolith.
3) A major Dora Milaje romance didn’t make it to the big screen
In 2016, the short-lived comic book series World of Wakanda — written by Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, and Ta-Nehisi Coates with art by Alitha E. Martinez and Afua Richardson — examined the story of Ayo and Aneka, which takes place before Coates’s version of Black Panther, which also debuted in 2016.
In World of Wakanda, Aneka is captain of the Dora Milaje, and Ayo serves under her. After Aneka is found guilty of killing a chieftain who had been victimizing the women in her village, she and Ayo become the vigilante duo known as the Midnight Angels. The chemistry that brews between the two from the comic’s earliest issues develops organically into a romance that becomes a significant story arc.
While the romance between Ayo and Aneka deepens, turmoil and strife befall the residents of Wakanda in the aftermath of a destructive flood of the Golden City. When T’Challa elects to form an alliance with Namor, the undersea dweller who caused the flood, both Ayo and Aneka inform T’Challa that they no longer serve him, and they leave the Dora Milaje.
The story of Ayo and Aneka is unprecedented in many ways, but especially because readers get to see the women operating outside of the confines of the king’s leadership. They have their own stories to tell and their own loyalties that go far beyond an obligated compliance to a royal monarch.
Joanna Robinson of Vanity Fair reported in April 2017 that a scene was cut from the film that hinted at a romance between the film Ayo (played by Florence Kasumba) and Okoye, who as general of the Dora Milaje functions in a similar capacity as Aneka in the comics:
In the rough cut of this Black Panther scene, we see Gurira’s Okoye and Kasumba’s Ayo swaying rhythmically back in formation with the rest of their team. Okoye eyes Ayo flirtatiously for a long time as the camera pans in on them. Eventually, she says, appreciatively and appraisingly, “You look good.” Ayo responds in kind. Okoye grins and replies, “I know.”
More recently, Screen Crush interviewed writer Joe Robert Cole, who backpedaled in his response to the cut scene:
I know that there were quite a few conversations around different things, different directions with different characters, and characters that we may have. We thought, Well, maybe we’ll work it this way with an arc or work it that way with an arc. The scene you’re talking about, I don’t remember. I can’t remember the exact exchange you’re talking about, but I think it was really brief. I’m not sure. I know that it was not — there wasn’t some major theme through that we were looking to explore with that in terms of the story. We didn’t like, pull out a full thread of some theme.
In the completed movie, Okoye’s relationship is not with Ayo but with W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), and thus an opportunity for a Marvel film to represent black queer characters was missed. Black Panther offers so much in the way of representation for black superhero fans, but giving Okoye the queer storyline that may have ended up on the cutting room floor could have offered representation for yet another marginalized group rarely reflected in blockbusters.
4) We’ll see more of Okoye soon — but Nakia’s future is still in question
Danai Gurira will appear in Avengers: Infinity War, out May 4; the most recent trailer for the film shows Okoye running alongside T’Challa and the Avengers, ready to kick some ass. However, Lupita Nyong’o has not been confirmed for Infinity War and has stated that she doesn’t know what the future holds for Nakia — who is, after all, not a member of the Dora Milaje in the film.
In Black Panther, as Wakanda is under the threat of Killmonger, Shuri grabs weaponry and points Nakia toward a Dora Milaje uniform, but Nakia hesitates, saying that she is “not a Dora.” While she does end up joining the battle at film’s end, it’s highly unlikely we’ll see her fight alongside the Dora Milaje in Avengers: Infinity War. However, given that Black Panther scored the biggest February box office debut ever, it’s a safe assumption that a sequel announcement will come sooner rather than later — and when it does, Nakia’s involvement is all but assured.
But fans of the new movie characters should be excited for the return of characters beyond Okoye: It’s been confirmed that both the tech wizard Shuri and Jabari tribe leader M’Baku will appear in Infinity War.
5) The Dora Milaje represent characters that a fandom starved for representation can embrace wholeheartedly
Seeing big-screen versions of Nakia, Okoye, Shuri, Queen Ramonda, and all the women of the Dora Milaje was something that I, a black female comic book geek, never expected to see in my lifetime. I’ve read, researched, interviewed, and written about black characters in comics over the years; I’m deeply invested in comic book fandom, but the comic book industry rarely seemed invested in me.
Any given white man can easily walk into a comic book store and see an abundance of superheroes that look like him. He’s surrounded by an industry that empowers him to believe he can be anything he wants to be — at least metaphorically. But Black Panther takes that supernatural, extraordinary stuff of modern myth and gives it to a bunch of characters who aren’t white men — and include black women. It bolsters our confidence and gives us the courage to believe in how we see ourselves.
When you don’t see yourself represented in popular culture, you feel like you don’t matter. You feel like you don’t have value. You feel like your worth is not as important as that of others. I can’t say this enough, but the fact that Shuri, a 16-year-old black girl, is the head of the Wakandan Design Group — and according to producer Nate Moore is the smartest person in the world — is a big damn deal. I’m certain that Shuri’s presence alone will empower more black girls and women to join science, technology, engineering, and math groups and organizations, just as I’m certain that the depiction of the Dora Milaje will encourage more black girls and women to take martial arts classes — or at least cosplay as their new favorite characters.
This is how representation works: You see someone (real or fictional) and you feel inspired to do what they do. It may not necessarily be the same exact thing, but you feel bold enough to take a leap of faith: “If they can do it, so can I.” The Dora Milaje are superheroes, and thanks to their portrayal in Black Panther, so many of us black women can see ourselves as heroes too.