Wakanda was briefly listed as trade partner of the U.S. government

United States trade policy is a bit of a mess right now. Every week seems to include a new, arbitrary tariff dispute or threat of looming economic stand-off between both allies and our world stage rivals, so it can be hard keeping track of who we are and aren’t working with at any given moment. (Having a Commander-in-Chief with multiple bankruptcies under his belt and a pathetic grasp of how toilets work, much less macroeconomics, probably doesn’t help, either.)

So it’s not so much we were surprised Black Panther’s fictional African nation of Wakanda was briefly listed as a real country in our governmental databases, as that it specifically popped up on the USDA’s online list of “Free-Trade Partners,” as if Trump would have been that chummy with a country he couldn’t pronounce.

As a USDA spokesperson told the BBC, Wakanda was accidentally listed during a staff software test that was not meant to be made public, and was quickly removed after it was pointed out by multiple media outlets.

Too bad. We could probably do some cool shit with vibranium.