Actress Jada Pinkett Smith believes it is important to talk about “stories about black queens” and, in her quest to vindicate the most powerful women in African history with the Netflix documentary series African Queens: Queen Cleopatra, has caused outrage in Egypt . The reason? Casting a black British actress, Adele James, to play the iconic Cleopatra in the project that she narrates and produces.
From the production it is defended that his skin color was "highly debatable" because, while his paternal ancestry is known, there is no information about the origin of his mother. What is known is that on his father's side, whose family tree went back to General Ptolemy, his family came from Macedonia, so experts assume that he did not necessarily have African features. In addition, she was educated in the Hellenic culture, speaking Greek in privacy.
However, Netflix has already received a formal complaint from lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary, according to the BBC, for violating Egyptian media laws and, furthermore, trying to "erase the Egyptian identity." He has criticized the promotion of such "Afrocentric" thought content and has also asked that access to the content platform from Egypt be prohibited.
The prestigious Zahi Hawass, former minister of antiquities of the North African country and Egyptologist, has declared directly that it is "completely false" that the pharaoh born in Alexandria in 69 BC was black: "Cleopatra was Greek, which means that she was fair-skinned , not black”.
Hawass also found that the only black rulers in the history of Egypt were the Kushite kings between the 8th and 7th centuries BC. "Netflix tries to cause confusion by spreading false and misleading facts about the origin of the Egyptian civilization as black," he explained to a local media, asking that the public show their rejection and disagreement openly with Netflix.
It is not the first time that Netflix unleashes the conversation about the choice of actors to play rulers. The period series The Bridgertons, one of his most successful productions, presents Queen Charlotte as black due to rumors about the Brazilian ancestry of George III's wife. In that case, the production went even further: it even imagines a biracial English aristocracy as a result of this marriage.
The difference is that, while The Bridgertons is sold as a fiction that uses elements of the past to build an invented story, in theory African Queens has a historical vocation to vindicate powerful African women and, incidentally, empower new generations of people from color.
And, at the same time, to what extent can it be ruled out that she did not also have African ancestry and that therefore the features of Adele James, who is biracial, are adequate to represent her? Starting May 10, the series can be seen on Netflix.
