Netflix and Egypt Are at Odds Over an African Cleopatra
Adele James, a biracial actress, was cast as Cleopatra in “African Queens,” a Netflix docudrama series.
CAIRO — On this much, at least, everyone can agree: Cleopatra was a formidable queen of ancient Egypt, the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great, who went on to even greater posthumous fame as a seductress, immortalized by Shakespeare and Hollywood.
Beyond that, many of the details are fuzzy — which is how one of the world’s dominant streaming services ended up in an imbroglio with modern-day Egypt, called out by online commenters and even the Egyptian government for casting a Black actress to play Cleopatra in the second season of the Netflix docudrama series “African Queens,” which was released this month.
Soon after the show’s trailer appeared last month, Netflix was forced to disable comments as they turned hostile, and occasionally racist. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency in charge of heritage, declared the show a “falsification of Egyptian history.”
For the show’s makers, the four episodes about Cleopatra were a chance to celebrate one of history’s most famous women as an African ruler, one they portray as Black. But for many Egyptians and historians, that portrayal is at best a misreading, and at worst a negation, of Egyptian history.
Despite her Macedonian Greek lineage, the producers of the show say there is the possibility that her mother was of another background.
The identities of Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother are unknown, leading some experts to argue that she was partly Indigenous Egyptian.
“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them,” Jada Pinkett Smith, who produced “African Queens,” said in a Netflix-sponsored article about the show.
Cleopatra was descended
from a line of Macedonian Greek kings who ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C., when it was annexed by Rome, and many scholars contend that she likely had little, if any, nonGreek blood. The Ptolemies — as all the dynasty’s kings were called — tended to marry their own sisters or other relatives, though there is some evidence that she had a Persian ancestor, some scholars say.
“Statues of Queen Cleopatra confirm that she had Hellenistic (Greek) features, distinguished by light skin, a drawnout nose and thin lips,” Egypt’s government said on Twitter on April 30.
Modern battles over Cleopatra’s heritage and skin color have erupted time after time, finding fresh fuel with each new Hollywood casting, from Elizabeth Taylor, who played her in 1963, to Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga and Gal Gadot, all recent contenders to portray her in various projects.
Netflix’s casting of Adele James, a biracial British actress, is a reflection of Western arguments over Black representation in Hollywood and whether history is too dominated by white narratives that revolve around European primacy. But it stirred up a different debate in Egypt. There, the question is whether Egyptians and their ancient ancestors — geographical location notwithstanding — are African.
The show’s director, Tina Gharavi, wrote in a piece defending the casting in Variety last month, “Perhaps it’s not just that I’ve directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as Black, but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”
Egypt sits on the northeast corner of Africa. Today, it holds membership in the African Union and other continental groups. But in Greek and Roman times, historians say, Egypt was seen as a major player in the Mediterranean world, the gateway to Africa, rather than fully African.
Since Arabs conquered Egypt in the seventh century, bringing the Arabic language and Islam with them, Egyptians have shared more cultural ties with the Middle East and North Africa than with the rest of Africa. The ancestors of today’s Egyptians include not only Arabs and native Egyptians, but also Nubians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Western Europeans and other conquerors, traders, slaves and immigrants.
For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue: The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no place.
“How can someone who’s not even from my country claim my heritage just because of their skin color?” said Yasmin El Shazly, a deputy director at the American Research Center in Egypt.
In 1987, Martin Bernal’s book “Black Athena” argued that historians had erased Egyptian contributions to ancient Greek culture. Though many scholars agree that much of the evidence it cited was flawed, it became a canonical text of Afrocentrism, a movement that seeks to counter ideas about the supposed inferiority of African civilizations. The pyramids and the pharaohs became sources of pride for Afrocentrists, and Cleopatra a heroine.
Egyptians, too, are fiercely proud of the pyramids and the pharaohs. For many Egyptians, the pharaohs — whose skin color and ancestry are still a matter of scientific debate — were Egyptian, not African. It does not help that some Afrocentrists hold that modern-day Egyptians descend from Arab invaders who displaced the Black Africans of ancient Egypt, a theory many Egyptians consider offensive.
Some historians say the fixation on what Cleopatra looked like would have felt alien to the ancients. Alexandria, the capital of her kingdom, was a cosmopolitan city with Greeks, Jews, ethnic Egyptians and people from all over who, the Cambridge University historian David Abulafia said, largely saw themselves as part of the Hellenistic world. They identified by culture, not skin color.
“Race is a modern construct of identity politics that’s been imposed on our past,” said Monica Hanna, an Egyptian Egyptologist. “This use and abuse of the past for modern agendas will just hurt everyone, because it’ll give a distorted image of the past.”
An ancient queen becomes a figure in modern battles.