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human
[MCU] I'm sitting in my Intro to African History course in college circa 2010. I asked my teacher why Wakanda was never colonized. What is her answer?

Wakanda passed itself off as a rural, isolated, peaceful nation. It didn't have a western backer (like Liberia) or a large population and history of imperial organization (like Ethiopia). All its neighbors, who, at the time, offered little in the way of exploitable resources to Europeans, were colonized anyway. How did Wakanda remain separate?

Edit: A little background on the Scramble for Africa, to put some of these answers in context. At the 1884 Conference of Berlin, European powers effectively split Africa among themselves along relatively arbitrary lines, even for territories that had not really been thoroughly explored yet. At that point, the goal of imperial prestige far outweighed the prospect of material gain, so things like harsh terrain and lack of wealth didn't really matter.

As such, some European power would have staked a claim on the land of Wakanda, without really knowing what was there.
gpt
Ethiopia was not colonized until the Italians invaded in 1935 and even then the Italians never really had full control.  While Wakanda's location varies presumably it has natural defenses/borders like Ethiopia and a clearly had a single unified government without a lot of tribal factionalism that made other parts of Africa easier to colonize. The combination would put it in a situation like Ethiopia, a native kingdom surrounded by colonies. 

The Wakandan's had to keep white settlers out from the start. All of them. No Voertrekkers, no traders, no mineral prospectors, no Stanley and Livingston looking for the the source of rivers and the like. With no knowledge of what is going on in Wakanda the justification for invading used for many colonial seizures falls away. They were often to  "protect" settlers or traders in the area already.