Ancient Egypt and modern America

When you think about contemporary politics in the United States, Pharaonic Egypt may not be the first place that comes to mind. But stories and ideas about that civilisation have shaped the African American experience for decades; more recently, they have begun to affect more mainstream politics.

Ben Davies was at UCL’s Petrie Museum on 24 November to hear Birkbeck’s Dr Anna Hartnell give a lecture on the topic of ‘Excavating ‘Egypt’ in the African American Imagination’.

Dr Hartnell identified two main ‘narratives’ that have been appropriated by African Americans. Although at first they seem entirely at odds with one another – and indeed are often presented as such – she explained that they are actually harder to separate than it appears.

The first way of viewing Egypt in the African American imagination revolves around the Exodus story of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In this version, Egypt is somewhere to be escaped from, a land of oppression.

Rhetoric from this tradition can be clearly seen among key figures of the USA’s civil rights movement; its most famous leader, Dr Martin Luther King, used the Egypt metaphor throughout his career, with African American civil rights as the ‘promised land’, and a racially oppressive America as Egypt.

The second, seemingly opposite, tale has more association with the black power movement, typified in the popular imagination by Malcolm X. This narrative regards Ancient Egypt as a black civilisation, older than the Greek and Roman civilisations that mainstream liberalism holds as its intellectual heritage.

Many in the black power movement preferred this sense of Egypt because they felt that the Exodus story, and the civil rights movement that took it up, was too limited to portraying African Americans as victims and nothing more. The second story identifies African Americans not with the slaves of Egypt, but with the rulers. Some modern interpretations, most notably that of Malcolm X, have also made the link to modern Egypt by identifying with Islam.

The division between these two views of Ancient Egypt – and of the modern African American – are more intertwined than is often supposed. Dr Hartnell pointed out that the portrayal of Dr King as a sanitised version of Malcolm X is inaccurate; particularly in the period before he was killed, Martin Luther King was increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of a truly equal USA.

The Obama presidency has, perhaps not surprisingly, brought this conflict over African American identity further into the mainstream spotlight. Although Obama is a self-declared admirer of Malcolm X, Dr Hartnell showed us how he has moved away from this more threatening representation, with its ideas of African American identity being partly located on foreign shores: hardly a suitable motif for the President of such a deeply patriotic country.

Obama has coupled an echoing of Dr King’s more optimistic rhetoric – Dr Hartnell noted the parallel between his inauguration speech and the ‘Mountaintop’ speech Dr King gave the day before his assassination – with symbolically powerful acts such as resigning his membership of the church he was a member of for more than 20 years, with its controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Even that may not be enough for some people. Dr Hartnell showed us an image of Obama represented pejoratively as a Pharaoh, and argued that for some sections of America, the combination of “blackness and power” would always be perceived as a threat.

On the other hand, some fear that Obama has moved himself too far away from a demographic that propelled him to power on the back of promises for a post-racial America, with civil rights activist Andrew Young warning him not to forget how he got to the “Promised Land” of power.

Dr Hartnell gave an engaging presentation on racial identity in America, a topic that has less exposure than its relevance deserves.

As she noted at the end, it will be interesting to see how Obama decides to present his racial identity in the 2012 Presidential campaign; with a disappointed civil rights movement, and many sections of the country using his race as a focus for disagreement, will he risk deploying the civil rights rhetoric that propelled him to office in 2008?

Ben Davies is an intern in UCL Communications & Marketing.