Egyptian-Sudanese-American novelist and poet Kola Boof has been an agent for Sudan’s SPLA and was the National Chairwoman of the U.S. Branch of the Sudanese Sensitization Peace Project. She has written for television and her many books include, “Flesh and the Devil,” “Long Train to the Redeeming Sin,” “Nile River Woman” and “Virgins In the Beehive.” She blogs at Kola Boof. com
I wouldn’t dare presume to know exactly, tone and texture, what Cleopatra looked like in 30 B.C. But when Americans claim that she was a White woman, even a supposedly dark White woman like Angelina Jolie or Elizabeth Taylor—and when they use modern day Egypt, Greece and the White Arab world to justify such claims—I find it akin to claiming Black Americans are a “mostly” light-skinned group of Indians who came to this country light-skinned from some fictional great Redbone Tribe five hundred years ago.
It simply isn’t accurate.
Still and all, Hollywood, the NAACP, pioneer Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and even JOHNSON PUBLICATIONS have traditionally tried to pretend that Lena Horne and Fredi Washington are what the “motherseed” of the Black Americans looked like—instead of Cicely Tyson, Nina Simone, Angelique Kidjoe and Esther Rolle—which, I, as an African woman, know for a fact is far more accurate.
Casting Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra is a continuation of this lie. And if Halle Berry indeed stars in a film about the life of truly gingerbread-colored Ingot-eyed Queen Nefertiti, then I say the same thing—these images are wholly Colorist and par for the course in a White Supremacist movie industry that primarily lessens the power of Black African people by disallowing positive and attractive images of authentic Black females—the original genetic womb-bearer of all Creoles, Berbers, Mende-Race (Negroes) and everybody else claiming to be Black.
The intent, of course, is that the Black-Seeing-Eye will gradually reject its actual mother and choose lighter and whiter images—until, POOF—the Blacks don’t exist anymore. The music video and magazine images that African people create (think Wale and Puff Diddy) are just as cancerous, colorist and Anti-Black Womb as the ones created by White Hollywood, but right now, we’re focusing on the hidden face of Cleopatra.
To be clear—Egypt had several Queen’s called Cleopatra, so I am speaking on the child Queen who became mistress to Roma’s Cesar and had a love affair with Marc Antony.
I am Half-Egyptian; my pale eggshell-colored father was the renowned archeologist Harith Bin Farouk. Technically, I am Biracial. And please make a note—that like most Biracial people in North or East Africa, I don’t look Creole; I look completely Black. Again, repeat after me—the overwhelming majority of Biracial people in Africa look Black, despite the Whitest of admixture, because our parents and families are a lot purer than Western Blacks to begin with.
Many Nubians in Egypt (and hell, the Black-skinned Egyptians of Upper Egypt themselves) are so deep dark skinned (what you call “Blue Black”) that no one would ever believe they are in fact—biracial. But in many instances, that is the case. Of course, in Africa, whether it be Egypt, Sudan, Tanzania or the Congo, we don’t care about “DNA” or who your parents were. Mariah Carey could be the daughter of Michael Jordan and Grace Jones and our question would still be this: “Are the ancestors showing?”
