This archive report was first published on 19 December 2019.
On December 18, 2019, a researcher stumbled upon an unexpected entry on the US Department of Agriculture's website: Wakanda, a fictional nation from the Black Panther movie, was listed as a trade partner.
According to officials, Wakanda was mistakenly included during a test-run of the website, but it was not removed afterwards.
Mike Illenberg, a USDA spokesman, explained that the Foreign Agricultural Service staff had been using test files to ensure the system was running properly, and the Wakanda information should have been removed after testing.
However, the error went unnoticed until the researcher, Francis Tseng, spotted it on the website. Tseng expressed his surprise, saying, "I definitely did a double take, I Googled Wakanda to make sure it was actually fiction, and I wasn’t mis-remembering. I mean, I couldn’t believe it."
Wakanda is a fictional country in the Black Panther movie, featuring African actors such as Lupita Nyongo and Atandwa Kani. The US Department of Agriculture has since removed Wakanda from its list of trade partners.
