To all the ankh/hotep nikkas, please STOP calling yourselves “Nubian” or attaching the word “Nubian” to everything that relates to African American culture or your activism. When you make “Nubian” a synonym for Black, you erase MY people’s distinct history, ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity. If your origins don’t hail from a Nubian village in southern Egypt or Northern Sudan then you’re not Nubian. Period.
Not to mention that we happen to be a strongly matrilineal society, meaning that inheritance, descent and lineage are traced through the mother. Can you handle that? LMAO! We don’t live in a fukkin’ museum or some dusty ass history book in a library. We are a living and breathing people who survived to this very day despite all the odds stacked against us such as land thefts, forced expulsions from our historical homeland to make way for the Aswan High Dam, and being exiled into the forbidding desert where countless Nubians perished from thirst, loss or harsh conditions while those who survived were relocated to govt built homes with walls made of asbestos, a known and notorious carcinogenic (cancer causing) agent, leading to shocking rates of cancer, socially engineered poverty, and active suppression of our Nubian language and identity by both the Egyptian and North Sudanese states. I myself am a product of that tragic exodus.
Like many countless Nubians I was born in Khartoum, far away from old Nubia. And like many younger generation and diaspora Nubians I was prevented from learning and accessing my ancestral mother language because it was banned in schools and we weren’t allowed to instruct children in it. I had to make every effort to learn it. I had to teach myself despite the dearth of formal language resources, by forcing my elders who were shamed and stigmatized from passing it on to teach me what they could. So in essence we are fighting numerous campaigns that seek to eradicated our very existence by cutting us off our roots, our land and excising our beautiful language from our tongues and genociding us physically and culturally.
And you think you’re doing us any favours when our namesake is plastered all over Black porn sites or some fetishistic ankh nikka website filled with naked, breastfeeding Black women playing second fiddle to their men?? We aren’t some mythological bag of labels you can lay claim to whenever you like. Just like I can’t get up one day and start calling myself a Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Zulu or Xhosa just coz I feel like it. It seems you actually care more about an abstract Nubia that either no longer exists or never even existed, than the actual contemporary descendants of that civilization. And you actually have the temerity to call yourselves “conscious”??
I’m proud of my Blackness and Africanness. And no one can or should deny the Blackness of Nubians. I LOVE ALL my Black peoples and ESPECIALLY African Americans. They are pillars of beauty, survival, creativity and humour in the face of a society that kidnapped them, murdered them, enslaved them, raped them, and ATTEMPTED to erase and empty Africa from within them. I think African Americans have been extremely generous with sharing their music, culture and more with the entire globe. Unfortunately, despite that, many non AAs still help themselves to that culture without actually giving a shyt about the stories, history, pain and lived realities of AAs.
I will never fault African Americans for reconnecting with Africa and Africans. I strongly believe that it’s all part of collective healing from the ravages of white supremacy. But there’s a certain approach I dislike and that’s hotepping. Like its one thing if you actually try to learn about Nubians on a personal and human basis, far from unnecessary romanticization/fetishization. Like go visit them in their native communities, share each other’s stories, break bread with them, try to learn their language. I guarantee you that they will receive you with open arms and show you nothing but love.
Not to mention that we happen to be a strongly matrilineal society, meaning that inheritance, descent and lineage are traced through the mother. Can you handle that? LMAO! We don’t live in a fukkin’ museum or some dusty ass history book in a library. We are a living and breathing people who survived to this very day despite all the odds stacked against us such as land thefts, forced expulsions from our historical homeland to make way for the Aswan High Dam, and being exiled into the forbidding desert where countless Nubians perished from thirst, loss or harsh conditions while those who survived were relocated to govt built homes with walls made of asbestos, a known and notorious carcinogenic (cancer causing) agent, leading to shocking rates of cancer, socially engineered poverty, and active suppression of our Nubian language and identity by both the Egyptian and North Sudanese states. I myself am a product of that tragic exodus.
Like many countless Nubians I was born in Khartoum, far away from old Nubia. And like many younger generation and diaspora Nubians I was prevented from learning and accessing my ancestral mother language because it was banned in schools and we weren’t allowed to instruct children in it. I had to make every effort to learn it. I had to teach myself despite the dearth of formal language resources, by forcing my elders who were shamed and stigmatized from passing it on to teach me what they could. So in essence we are fighting numerous campaigns that seek to eradicated our very existence by cutting us off our roots, our land and excising our beautiful language from our tongues and genociding us physically and culturally.
And you think you’re doing us any favours when our namesake is plastered all over Black porn sites or some fetishistic ankh nikka website filled with naked, breastfeeding Black women playing second fiddle to their men?? We aren’t some mythological bag of labels you can lay claim to whenever you like. Just like I can’t get up one day and start calling myself a Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Zulu or Xhosa just coz I feel like it. It seems you actually care more about an abstract Nubia that either no longer exists or never even existed, than the actual contemporary descendants of that civilization. And you actually have the temerity to call yourselves “conscious”??
I’m proud of my Blackness and Africanness. And no one can or should deny the Blackness of Nubians. I LOVE ALL my Black peoples and ESPECIALLY African Americans. They are pillars of beauty, survival, creativity and humour in the face of a society that kidnapped them, murdered them, enslaved them, raped them, and ATTEMPTED to erase and empty Africa from within them. I think African Americans have been extremely generous with sharing their music, culture and more with the entire globe. Unfortunately, despite that, many non AAs still help themselves to that culture without actually giving a shyt about the stories, history, pain and lived realities of AAs.
I will never fault African Americans for reconnecting with Africa and Africans. I strongly believe that it’s all part of collective healing from the ravages of white supremacy. But there’s a certain approach I dislike and that’s hotepping. Like its one thing if you actually try to learn about Nubians on a personal and human basis, far from unnecessary romanticization/fetishization. Like go visit them in their native communities, share each other’s stories, break bread with them, try to learn their language. I guarantee you that they will receive you with open arms and show you nothing but love.
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