Tricky

In 1835, a British colonial administrator named Thomas Macaulay wrote a document known as the Minute on Indian Education. He did not hide what he was doing. He wrote, in plain language, that the goal was to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." Not educated Indians. Not Indians with expanded access to knowledge. Indians who had been replaced, from the inside, with something more governable. He put it in an official document. He signed it. It became policy. And yet somehow, when people describe the colonial education project as a deliberate instrument of cultural erasure, they are accused of being dramatic. The man wrote it down. The drama is his, not ours.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o understood it with absolute clarity. You do not need chains if you have classrooms. You do not need to physically prevent a people from imagining their own freedom if you have already shaped the language in which they think. If the colonized child learns to read in the colonizer’s language. If the colonized child learns that the "great books" were written in the colonizer’s language. If the colonized child learns that the history worth knowing begins with the colonizer’s arrival. If the colonised child learns that success, sophistication, education itself, is measured by proximity to the coloniser’s standards: That child does not need to be imprisoned. That child will imprison themselves. Will measure themselves against a standard designed to find them lacking. Will work their entire life to approximate an ideal that was never constructed to include them. Will call this effort "self-improvement." The classroom was the most elegant instrument the colonial project ever designed. More durable than any fort. More effective than any army. Because armies are visible. Forts can be stormed. But a belief installed in childhood, in the voice of a teacher, in the language of learning itself, that is nearly invisible. And what you cannot see, you cannot dismantle.

The Nile is not a border. This is the simplest version of the argument and also the one that should require the least explanation. The Nile flows from the interior of Africa northward to the Mediterranean. The civilizations along its length were in constant contact, trading, fighting, exchanging people and ideas and religious concepts and agricultural techniques across what was not a separation but a connection. The civilization of ancient Egypt did not emerge in isolation. It emerged in relationship with the Nubian civilizations to its south, some of whose cultures predated the unification of Egypt, which contributed to and drew from Egyptian culture across millennia. The kings of Kush would eventually rule Egypt as its 25th Dynasty. And across the centuries that followed, Kushite civilization would leave behind something that still surprises people today. More pyramids. In what is now Sudan. Built by the civilization that the Western imagination has most completely erased. There are more ancient pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt. Most people reading that sentence right now are encountering it for the first time. That is not because the information is obscure. It is because the information does not fit a story that someone needed to be true. And the information that does not fit the story does not make it into the classroom.

Cleopatra. You picked Cleopatra. Out of three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids, medical texts, mathematical papyri, architectural achievements that engineers still study today, you reached for the one ruler whose dynasty wasn’t even Egyptian. The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great. His descendants intermarried obsessively, and we mean obsessively, sibling-marriage-as-policy obsessively, within their own dynasty, while also marrying into the Seleucid royal family, founded by another Macedonian general, Seleucus I Nicator. What the Ptolemies were not, in their dynastic origins, was indigenous Egyptian. They were a Hellenistic foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt for its last 275 years before Roman annexation. At the very end. Before them came the Persian conquests. Before the Persians came over two and a half millennia of Egyptian civilization. So your argument against the Africanness of ancient Egypt is: the last dynasty, installed by a Macedonian conqueror, whose ruling family maintained its predominantly Greek bloodline, wasn't indigenous Egyptian. That's like arguing Britain was never Celtic because William the Conqueror was Norman. You have just independently confirmed that foreign conquerors took control of a civilization that had existed in Africa for millennia before they arrived. Thank you, Mike. You walked in to rebut the argument and handed it ammunition instead. The pyramids were not built by Macedonians. They were built by ancient Egyptians. Africans. More than 2,500 years before Cleopatra was even born.