I feel like a lot of people reviewing this (on baka and aggregate sites) are jumping immediately to racism right off the bat. And I partially agree, this is not a good look overall and contains a lot of racist portrayals of Africans. Of course, this is from a Chinese author unfamiliar with actual Africans, writing about a Chinese doctor forced to go to rural Africa for work and meeting unfamiliar people that he sees as uncivilized. Yes, there is racism, but I do see a little bit of the point of the manhua shining through in that the doctor spends time with the natives and grows to like them and interacts with some of them with curiosity and care. Of course, the translations haven't gotten far (7 chapters) so it remains to be seen if it gets better.

Main racism issues: cannibalism being a theme for why this tribe is scary, the main character being held captive with the threat of death showing they are dangerous, reliance on tribe medicine vs modern medicine to show they are uncivilized plus the "white" savior complex aspect. Additionally, the two "powerful" members of the tribe (the leader and the shaman/witch) were noticeably visibly different from the rest of the members. They had straight white hair, lighter skin, etc. And that weird Wakanda moment, I have a feeling the author might believe that Black Panther's Wakanda was somehow named after a real community...

Things I thought were promising: Equal art styles in that the African people were sometimes drawn with stereotypical features but so was the main character, like they both had cartoonish moments but also had scenes were they were drawn quite nicely. There are kind characters, they aren't portrayed fully as "savages" but are shown to have individual characteristics and the doctor interacts well with them, which is why I even gave this one half a chance as I could see it was meant to be a "learn to be a better person who doesn't look down on others" kind of story (at least so far it looks that way, we'll see if it actually is). The art is intermittently quite nice to look at, though I think the artist still has a ways to go as I can see that a lot of their character art looks nearly identical (like they only have 5 good drawings of X character so they just keep redrawing those same 5 positions and facial expressions). Regardless, the nice art is interspersed with cartoonist chibi-type scenes which break up the seriousness a bit. I personally really like that the artist seems to put actual effort into the hair, skin tones, clothing, etc of the African community.

The racist qualities may get worse, they may get better, it's hard to tell with only 7 chapters. I think I may check in on this one in a few months to see if there's any improvement or if it's a lost cause, but as it stands I would not recommend this title to anyone and caution people who find it that it is quite problematic from the start.

... Last updated on April 9th, 2024, 10:31pm

This is just gross.

This is just so racist. Don't read and don't support this author.