Today marks the start of Black History Month. African-American history is celebrated in the classroom and in our daily lives during the month of February. The state of Egypt is important to the African Diaspora because of the link to Egypt.
Ancient Egypt is often cited as one of the starting points of human civilization, yet it is hardly mentioned that the ancient Egyptians were actually African in race. African scholars argue against this as a biased interpretation of world history. By revealing that ancient Egypt had a black population, they establish that Africans, not Europeans, played the major role in the early stages of human civilization. This has a big impact on black history’s objective of making African-Americans understand that they belong to a rich heritage. Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian and anthropologist, asserts that the Nile Valley and its indigenous African population was the southern cradle of civilization with ancient Greece as the northern counterpart. By doing so, he is able to demonstrate how Egyptian culture influenced the rest of the continent. More importantly, he relocates Egypt and its significance back into the African world and opposes official history that classifies Egypt as Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. Black history is thus firmly rooted and starts in ancient Egypt, which is why the state of Egypt should be important to us.
Our past connects us to present day Egypt and the Egyptian fight for freedom. On January 25, 2011, extensive civil unrest and rioting in Egypt began as part of a wide class demographic protest against President Mubarak’s regime. The spark of revolution in Tunisia seemed to set fire to decades worth of smoldering grievances against the heavy-handed rule of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets calling for Mr. Mubarak to step down, defying bans and curfews. It was by far the most serious challenge to the regime in memory: A curfew order was ignored, and the army took a semi-neutral stance on enforcing the curfew decree. Some protesters, a very small minority in Cairo, expressed nationalistic views against what they deemed was foreign interference, highlighted by the then held view that the U.S. administration had failed to take sides, as well as linking the local police with Israel. Despite some local violence and shop looting, the situation seemed more controlled than the rioting chiefly through the moderating effects of the army’s presence on the street. The protesters turned the rioting and looting into a revolution before the world’s eyes. The Egyptians’s are now keeping their eyes on the prize–the removal of Mubarak’s regime.
The turmoil in Egypt – and its potential for grave consequences for U.S. policy throughout the region – was inevitable. The recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic reports showed that Washington knew what problems it increasingly faced with the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and his three decades of iron-fisted rule.
President Mubarak’s iron-hand rule is the root cause of the uprising. The protests, which followed the government-toppling demonstrations in Tunisia, swelled over the last few days to encompass a broad swath of Egypt’s population. They reflect anti-Mubarak sentiments as well as frustration with problems such as high unemployment, inequality, and immigration. The protesters themselves want the president to step down and allow free and fair elections so that a new democracy can come in and resolve these growing problems.
Egypt’s uprising, even more perhaps than the scenes recently from Tunis and Thursday in Yemen, has drawn global attention for its mixture of youth outrage, police crackdown, and the presence of long-marginalized political rivals of Mubarak’s regime – namely Mohamad ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize winner who has said he would run for president if Mubarak allowed it. ElBaradei flew to Egypt earlier in the week to join the protests. Last Friday afternoon, ElBaradei had been placed under house arrest.
In a statement ElBaradei declared, “The Egyptian people will take care of themselves. The Egyptian people will be the ones who will make the change. We are not waiting for help or assistance from the outside world, but what I expect from the outside world is to practice what you preach, is to defend the rights of the Egyptian to their universal values.”
We share an intricate history with the egyptian people along with a legacy of struggle. We understand the fight for freedom. We fought for our own freedom here in America. This has left an indelible imprint on the minds of all Africans in the diaspora. Let us not forget about our own slave rebellions that took place in the South. There was always resistance. We should never forget that the slave rebellions and the Civil War prompted Abraham Lincoln to free the slaves. If you look closely at the many uprisings, you will discover that the people always played a big role in freeing themselves.
President Obama no longer supports his old ally in his regime. A new day is coming. A new Egypt is on the rise.
Please keep Egypt in your prayers.
Love, hope, peace, and joy,
Rachel Araya
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