Comedian Kevin Hart is coming under fire in Egypt – for daring to say that the ancient Egyptians were Black – a belief held by many of the top Egyptologists in the world.
Media Take Out has learned that Egyptians have taken to social media, calling for comedian Kevin Hart’s debut show in the country to be “cancelled” over his past comments in support of what they are calling “Afrocentrism on Ancient Egypt”.
A hashtag calling for Hart’s show to be cancelled or boycotted has become one of the top trending topics on social media in Egypt over the past few days.
One prominent Egyptian Twitter user said Afrocentrists “want to steal and attribute Egypt’s civilization to Africans and tell modern Egyptians that we are occupying Egypt from them. We must all participate in the campaign to cancel Kevin’s concert.”
Hart, a popular US comedian, has said openly that he wants historians to begin examining history through a lens that doesn’t hide the role of Black Africans.
Modern Egypt was at various points in history part of the Greek, Roman and Arab empires. The country is an ethnically and religiously diverse nation of more than 100 million. Egyptians even claim ancestry from Circassians and Turks going back to the Ottoman Empire. There are also Egyptians of Nubian descent.
Some schools of thought claim that Coptic Christians, who number between 10 and 15 percent of Egypt’s population, are the most direct descendants of ancient Egyptians.