If you were planning on going to the movies to watch the (whitewashed) movie Exodus . . . Have a read at this before. Exodus: Cinematic Success or Not, It’s A Failure at History on December 17, 2014 • As Ridley Scott’s Exodus opens in cinemas it is evident that the cast is not the only thing which has been whitewashed by Yassin Assoudani To us black people it is no surprise that the glorious history of our civilizations is confined to the irrelevant pages of history. My 8 year old nephew is a mixed-race African, his mother black Sudanese and his father an Algerian of Roman descent. Yet my nephew identifies as white. When I tell him that he should take pride in his blackness, he takes great offence and points out how his skin-tone is lighter than mine. Last month, he came home from school with art work themed on Ancient Egypt. He gushed about how great the Pharaohs were and their contributions to modern history. I asked him if he was happy to be finally learning about black history and told him he should take pride in sharing the Nubian and Macrobian genetics of the Pharaohs. He was adamant that I was lying and brainwashing him into believing that it’s ‘cooler’ to be black, citing the Ancient Egypt documentary they had watched that day. He insisted that I didn’t know more than his primary school teacher who told him that all the Pharaohs were beige-skinned just like the modern day Egyptian Arabs. Perhaps she went to the same school as Rupert Murdoch _______________________ Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are. — Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) November 29, 2014 ______________________ After much anticipation Ridley Scott’s epic set in Ancient Egypt, Exodus: Gods and Kings opened last week. So far the reviews and the reception have been somewhat lackluster. Time-Out magazine gave it 1 star out of 5, Yahoo branded it ‘a disappointment’, Time Magazine described it as being a ‘stolid mess’, while the critic score on website Rotten Tomatoes stands at an unimpressive 28%. For months the film had been surrounded by controversy due to its #allwhite main cast. The $140million production tells the story of Moses, played by (wait for it) Christian Bale. The unveiling of the cast four months ago led to the creation of the high traffic #boycottexodusmovie twitter hashtag and campaign. _____________________ #BoycottExodusMovie its 2014 and Hollywood are still portraying ancient Egyptian royalty as white people? FOH. pic.twitter/7MqAFzuUgc — ᶖ ᶗᶘ ᶙ ᶚ ᶸ ᵯ ᵰ ⏠ ⏡ (@_CRXXKLYN) July 16, 2014 ____________________ Scott’s response to the casting controversy was as underwhelming as the film reviews:”I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” Director of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Terence Nance in a blistering polemic at Talkhouse said in response to this ‘you know you could’ve slipped Chadwick or Chiwitel or Idris in there to play Ramses and no one would’ve blinked an eye on the financing side and you would have avoided the embarrassment of having Joel Edgerton in full brown-face drag, complete with awkwardly drawn eyeliner’ In some ways Hollywood’s attempts to whitewash ancient African history are understandable. It’s not Ridley Scott’s role to depict reality. Hollywood is a global empire, a multi-billion dollar business where the box office revenues make or break a film far more than a snarky review on a tumblr blog that racks up 5 views a month. But this is the 21st century. We are deep into the digital age, whereby social media ensures we are one thumb touch away from spreading a hashtag like #BoycottExodusMovie, giving a film which already had huge investment behind it bad-press before it’s even released. This is in massive contrast to movies representing Ancient Egypt in a previous era such as Nefertiti Queen of The Nile (1961). Back then, there were certainly no forms of instantaneous communication such as Twitter to protest the all-white casts. Even if there had been, social conditions of the time meant that first, the casting of black actors was few and far between and second, contemporary racial attitudes meant that cinemas wouldn’t risk playing movies that had black actors in lead roles anyway. But this is 2014. What rational explanation can be offered for the only people of colour cast in a multi- million budget film being servants, thieves and assassins? The decisions are even more baffling when you consider the time period the film is meant to represent. Bear in mind that the movie’s protagonist, prophet Moses lived between 1393 and 1273 BCE, no white person had ever set foot in Africa, let alone Ancient Egypt – yet white actors were still cast as royalty presiding over their lesser, uncivilized black counter-parts. __________________ Ancient Egyptians be like We left you instructions written in stone. #BoycottExodusMovie pic.twitter/s6H1Wi6ZKU — Suleiman (@Payitforward87) July 29, 2014 ____________________ It’s either profound ignorance or a lack of research that leads to, as Todd Brown puts it, a; ‘white Moses versus white Pharaoh saving a bunch of white guys from the other bunch of white guys, none of whom should actually be white.’ If Hollywood really wanted to depict things accurately, they’d bring back black-face rather than covering Joel Edgerton (playing the role of Ramses II) in the sort of spray-tan better left to TOWIE and Jersey Shore. But if whitewashing the movies characters (apart from the criminals and slaves obviously) wasn’t enough, they had to go and whitewash a precious artifact of Ancient Egyptian history, the Sphinx of Giza too. The Sphinx is located in the Nubian town of Abu Simbel close to the border with Sudan. But Hollywood seemingly hell-bent on injecting a dose of European into the already dwindling veins of a forgotten ancient African civilization did this: _________________________ Exodus movie Sphinx (top) vs. actual Kemet Sphinx (bottom) – distinct African features removed #BoycottExodusMovie pic.twitter/yszSs7083Z — Black Consciousness (@ilovemymelanin) July 29, 2014 ) _________________________ The whitewashing of Ancient Egyptian history is deeply rooted in the scientific racism trotted out by various academics up until the early 20th century, to justify white supremacist ideals. Prussian archaeologist, George Reisner wrote that that “Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans.” Furthermore, James Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and regarded as one of America’s most respected Egyptologists wrote in a 1935 publication entitled Ancient Times, “[that the Egyptians are] members of a race of white men, who have been well called the Great White Race”, adding that “The Negro peoples of Africa [had no influence] on the development of earlier civilization.” It is worth noting that the word ‘Egypt’ was derived from the ancient Greek ‘Aegyptos’. However, before the European invasions, the indigenous ancient Egyptians referred to their land as ‘Kemet’, a plural of the word ‘Kem’ which meant black. Contrary to the beliefs of eurocentric Egyptologists, the black does not refer to ‘soil’, a theory which seems all the more far-fetched considering that Egypt always has been a desert nation. The ‘black’ referred to the people of the nation, in a similar way to how Egypt’s brothers Sudan are named as a derivative of ‘suwood’, Arabic plural for blacks. “Egyptians were Black African people (read everything by Cheikh Anta Diop) who did amazing, world-changing shit. They invented paper, pyramids, toothpaste, eyeliner, the written word, prenuptial agreements, feminism, the calendar you are using right now. It goes without saying that as one of the world’s Blackest, most ancient and inventive cultures they deserve a more original and inventive movie” — Terence Nance As a child, I used to stare at my black skin and secretly wish I was white. Not because I was self-loathing – but because the only black people my peers and I aspired to be like were footballers such as Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole. I like my nephew couldn’t believe that black people were capable of greatness. I remember being taught about slavery, Jim Crow and apartheid in school – and that Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela came riding along on black horses to bring ‘equality’ for all races and the idea that we now live in a utopian, post-racial society. Oh, and they elected Obama too so it’s all fine and dandy now. It wasn’t until I left school that I learned about Mansa Musa , the lost libraries of Timbuktu, Sungbo’s Eredo and the great Benin empire. Most importantly, I learned in much greater detail the gruesome nature of the systematic pillaging inflicted on Africa during colonialism. The latter in particular informed me that history is always written by the winners. If you’re still considering watching the film and haven’t been put off by the casting, Scott’s excuses and the blatant whitewashing of history then you may want to bear in mind the numerous reviews that have described it as boring. Next time Scott may want to consider giving historical accuracy a go.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 10:10:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015