US stand-up and actor Kevin Hart’s debut show in Egypt has been cancelled following the comedian’s alleged statements calling ancient Egyptian kings Black.
According to the Middle East Eye, the comedian had announced on Twitter that he will be performing for the first time in Egypt at the Cairo Indoor Stadium in February 2023. However, his post promoting his “Reality Check” tour prompted many Egyptian users to call for the show to be boycotted or cancelled due to Hart’s Afrocentric views of Ancient Egyptian civilisation.
“We must teach our children the true history of Black Africans when they were kings in Egypt and not just the era of slavery that is cemented by education in America. Do you remember the time when we were kings?” Hart allegedly stated. Egyptian management group R Productions would later release a statement saying that “local logistical issues” forced them to call off what would’ve been Hart’s debut event in the country, per Middle East Eye.
“It is with a heavy heart that we share with you, due to local logistical issues, the cancellation of our Kevin Hart event scheduled for February 21st, in Cairo,” the company shared via Facebook.
A movie star in his own right, Hart has seen up close and personal an overabundance of slave movies or the predictable tales of ‘resilience’ in the face of unprovoked racism. However, what Hart and Black moviegoers have not seen are historical depictions of our people as the royalty many of us have always known previously existed.
In 2015, Gods of Egypt’s casting controversy followed a slew of other films such as Pan, Aloha, in which directors and actors both apologized for or defended the casting of White actors in roles that are written as non-Whites. The film, which cast White actors such as Gerard Butler (Olympus Has Fallen) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) as the Egyptian gods Set and Horus, as well as Brendon Thwaites (The Giver) as the Egyptian thief Bek, received online backlash after the character posters and trailer revealed that the majority of the cast was white, except for the late-heroic Chadwick Boseman as the god Thoth.
The erasure of Blackness from Ancient Egypt storytelling is akin to the historical and current depictions of Jesus Christ. From Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, many paintings were introduced during A.D. 1350 to 1600 in direct contradiction to the physical description mentioned in the Bible.
In Revelations 1: 14-15, it states, “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.” In response to the alleged statement, a wave of dissenting views from Egyptians on Twitter ensued, many of which called for the cancellation of Hart’s scheduled show.
Per the report, tweets condemning Hart’s alleged comments included one from a user who claimed that followers of Afrocentrism “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.”
As an American citizen, husband and father first, perhaps Hart sees the rush to ban all introspection into Black experiences from domestic political leaders and feels compelled to advocate for rich Black history, or maybe he simply answered a question with his honest opinion absent of malice or condemnation. Whatever Hart’s motivation, the comedian has dropped the mic after telling his truth with no sanitizing punchline to wash it down.
