It is an example of Netflix reading African history through the dull lens of American racial politics. Photo / Netflix
It is an example of Netflix reading African history through the dull lens of American racial politics. Photo / Netflix
Opinion by Marie Daouda
OPINION
For a forthcoming series, Netflix has announced that Cleopatra will be portrayed as a black queen. The result has been consternation – not least in Egypt itself, where a lawyer, Mahmoud al-Semary, has filed a complaint with the public prosecutor calling for the streaming serviceto be shut down.
Why the outrage? It is not because the actress in question happens to be black. Viewers have surely grown used to actors playing characters of another ethnicity, even when the purpose seems to be to make a political point.
In 2021, Channel 5 regaled its audience with a black Anne Boleyn, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, supposedly because the experience of adversity that Anne Boleyn faced was akin to that of a black woman today.
I certainly don’t care how much an actor in a piece of historical fiction looks like the figure portrayed, because that is what acting is meant to be about. It is what a professional does on stage or in front of a camera to make the audience see someone he or she is not.
If actors only played characters that looked exactly like them or lived exactly what they lived, the entertainment industry would be rather dour.
Nor is this merely a case of Netflix offending against historical accuracy. Cleopatra was not a black queen, but very much a Greek one, a descendant of Ptolemy, the bodyguard of Alexander the Great. Ptolemy became pharaoh and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled over Egypt from 305BC to Cleopatra’s death in 30BC.
Liz Taylor played Cleopatra in 1963. Photo / File
Cleopatra’s name, in Greek, means Glory of the Father; her story is indeed a legendary one, where it is hard to separate fact from fiction. From sneaking naked into Caesar’s room in a rolled rug when she was 21, to her suicide through the deadly bite of a snake after Mark Antony’s defeat against Octavian, her life is, as the saying goes, “Netflix material”.
Because of her birth and character, she played a crucial part in the history of Mediterranean empires. Her death in 30BC marked the twilight of Alexander the Great’s epic and the rise of the Roman Empire.
No, the reason this series is so problematic, particularly in Egypt, is encapsulated in the words of its producer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith’s wife. It is important to tell “stories about black queens”, she said. Pinkett Smith appears to assume that, just because Cleopatra was African, she was black.
Egypt is aware and proud of its complex ancient history, from the unification of the Upper and Lower kingdoms of Egypt along the Nile to the Hellenistic period when Alexandria flourished as an intellectual beacon.
The successive waves of conquest that Egypt underwent made its cultural richness; and the heirs of the Pharaohs shall not be ruled by Netflix’s mercantile interests.
Cleopatra is an example of Netflix reading African history through the dull lens of American racial politics; but African history can’t be enslaved by the diktats of Californian corporations. The idea that non-white people are a homogenous group, whose history can be explained entirely by reference to the arrival of evil white men, does not withstand scrutiny.
Resentment is addictive and that is just what Netflix seemingly wants ethnic minorities to feel: addicted to its stream of grudge and bitterness.
