A new exhibit at a Dutch museum declares: ‘Egypt is part of Africa’which most people who have seen a world map might consider an uncontroversial statement.
But the exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden goes beyond geography. It explores the tradition of black musicians—Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas, and others—taking inspiration from and taking pride in the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The exhibit is framed as a useful corrective to centuries of African cultural erasure.
However, what might sound encouraging in the Netherlands is anathema to the Government of Egypt and many of its people, who they have flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages with complaints about what they see as a Western appropriation of their history.
Many Egyptians do not consider themselves African, identifying more closely with the predominantly Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa. Many look down on darker-skinned Egyptians and sub-Saharan Africans. Some feel that their culture and history are being erased in the Western quest to correct historical racism.
The exhibition “attacks the civilization and heritage of the Egyptians” and “distorts the Egyptian identity,” said Ahmed Belal, a member of Parliament, on May 2, shortly after the exhibition opened and around the time it Uproar has erupted over a Netflix docudrama portraying the ancient Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra as black.
The museum’s exhibition, “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-hop, Jazz, Soul, and Funk,” looks at how Afrocentrism has manifested itself in music. Beyoncé and Rihanna have decked themselves out as Nefertiti, the ancient queen of Egypt; and Nina Simone said that she believed that she was the reincarnation of Nefertiti.
The cover of Nas’s 1999 album “I Am…” carves his features into the golden mask of King Tutankhamen.
The exhibit, whose curator Daniel Soliman is half Egyptian, added a statement to its online description after the “scandal.” He said that he sought to explain “why ancient Egypt is important to these artists and musicians and from what cultural and intellectual movements the music arose”.
Today’s Egyptians descend from a many-branched family tree. But it is Islam and the Arabic language that predominate.
But in an audio recording, Typhoon, a Dutch rapper, says that Egyptian exceptionalism feeds off discredited European theories “used to determine which ancient cultures were considered important and therefore could not belong in Africa.”
Those theories, they say, “separated ancient Egypt from its African context”.
VIVIAN YEE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6771028, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-21 20:50:07
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