(Click here for a newsclipping of that demonstration)
Unfortunately, Africa is really complicated, to the point where I can't call what polite US society would term "African-Americans" that for the rest of this article without being confusing. And when one talks about Egypt (or Khemet) being "African", one has to figure out in what sense one means that before the conversation can continue.
Image from Wikipedia, using its Common License
The image above is a break down of African continent into language groups, which are related to ethnic distributions, but of course not equivalent to them. That would make things too easy, and Africa is anything by easy. Anyway, the Red, Orange and Yellow sections roughly correspond to three families what we would consider "African" - i.e. "Black African." The Green corresponds to the distribution of what would consider "Pygmy Africans"; and the Blue corresponds to what is termed "Afro-Asiatics"; I would term them "Semitic Africans" but that is my own (and somewhat loose & incorrect) phrase. The population along the Mediterranean coast west of Egypt are better known as the Berbers. In politically un-correct terms, these people are "Non-Black Africans". The Purple guys just there to make things even harder, and are speaking something related to Indonesian - that's another long story in itself. Anyway, notice Somalia & Ethopia are in the blue zone - but we know from news-footage and whatnot that a good chunk of those people are "black", so what gives?
This further underlines the complixities of what one has to deal with when discussing Africa. What we have here, to once again put it somewhat loosely, is a population of Blacks speaking a non-Black language. Which in today's world, with all of the colonization in the recent past and the globalization going on now, isn't that uncommon - after all, Blacks in the US are speaking a Non-Black language (English), and I'm speaking a .. well, North American history is complicated as well, but a non-Amerindian* language (aka "Red" - or "the Other" - "Indian").
*I grew up thinking of my ancestors on my Dad's side of my family as "Indian", and then I started to work in the tech sector with "real live" Indians from -golly- India, and now identifying myself as "Indian" has proven to be really confusing. But I still prefer it to Native American ("Native" is meaningless) or First American (increasing evidence is pointing to the "First" being incorrect - or at least, more complicated). The way I figure it, George Carlin's skit about how extra syllables drain the life & meaning from English hits close to home here, which is why I am uncomfortable calling "blacks" "African Americans". I'll take the shortest descriptor that isn't openly perjorative.
What this means is that sometime in the past, these blacks learned a semitic-family language. This can simplitistically happen in two ways: 1) the blacks moved into a population of Semitic speakers and became linguistically assimilated, then their population outgrew the culture that they assimilated into; or 2) the Semitic speakers moved in and dominated the blacks long enough for their language to take root, and then were enthically assimilated by the population they moved into. This can get into a heavy discussion about the "status" perceived by one class about another class's or their own language; but there are readily available examples of both.
The easiest example of #2 is India, where the British moved in, taught everyone English, and then were forced out. An example of #1 is trickier, but example of that is Finland. Finland is strange in Scandinavian because though they (largely) look like the other Scandinavians, they speak an language that is wholly different. Current theory on how this happened was that Finland was previously occupied by Finnish speaking Uralic types (I have no idea what to call the previous inhabitants of Finnland beyond "the previous inhabitants of Finnland") when some Scandinavians moved across one of the waters in a small enough group to be linguistically assimilated. Then, over time, the Scandinavian Finns outbred the "Other" Finns until they dominated the gene-pool, though long after they had stopped speaking their ancestral language.
So, in Ethiopia, which was it? Since it's Africa, and most of the Arab world is to the northeast, one my think that it was it was populated by black Ethiopians first and then conquered by Arabs. Historically, this is pretty accurate to what happened in the Sahara, which is why Arabic is the current popular language of Egypt. But there are some other facts that point to the fact Ethiopia was first inhabited by (possibly proto-) Semitics, who then expanded out into the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb (Mediterranean Coast of Africa) and the Levant; and then came back, a'conquering to establish the Muslim Caliphate Empire of the first millenium AD/CE.
There is a constant truth in linguistics that whenever you have time or distance, languages will tend to fragment into many dialects. Notice I say "or", and not "time and distance" - this is important. If you look at England, there are many, many dialects for a small island half the size of California. There is not a lot of distance here, and yet we have two dialects as different from each other as Scotch and Surrey. To further ram home the importance of time, a city the size of London, which is big as cities go but not as large as the entire island itself, is fragmented into many, many dialects spoken by a variety of economic classes and neighborhoods (which, if one remembers, is the basis of the plot of My Fair Lady (^_^)).
What this means is that the place where a language family is resident the longest will have the greatest number of dialects & sub-languages; and, conversely, if you want to find a "homeland" for a language group, look for where there is the most variety of a language family found in a small area. A modern analogy is that European languages are spoken all over the world, and just based on size territory, one would expect that the the Europeans would've originated in the Americas - two whole continents that speak French, English, Spanish & Portuguese. But if one looks for the area of the most variety of dialects, one one find that the English homeland is in Northern Europe (many kinds of German, Danish, Norwegian, many kids of Dutch, Norweigian, Swedish) and that the French, Spanish and Portuguese homeland is in Southwest Europe (with Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Provencal, etc). This leads us to reason that Europe is the homeland of the major political languages spoken in the New World (I say political because many Amerindian languages are still extent in the Americas, particular South America, but these most of these countries don't share their Amerindian languages - another example of high language diversity in a small space - and so they have to use Spanish to communicate amongst themselves).
So, in the area Ethiopia, there is much higher density of (Coptic, Amharic )Semitic languages than elsewhere, which points to Ethiopia being the homeland of the Semitic languages. In that link, look at the diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages ("Arab") versus the Nilo-Saharan languages ("Black").
Now where was I.. I got on this linguistic rant for a reason. That's right, the reason was to establish that once upon a time, there was a large population of "non-blacks" in Africa as far south as Ethiopia, in order to combat the claim that, just because Egypt was in Africa, the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amen "had to be" black. I'm not saying the Egypt didn't have black people in, or that Egypt was never black. I'm just saying that the actual situation is really complicated, much more complicated that the protestors would have one to think. Now to give credit, they claim that Tut Ankh Amen is Nubian (Nilo-Saharan), which would definitely make him black if he were. But I obviously haven't been reading the same sources as they have, 'cause I haven't seen that claim myself. To be honest, though, I have seen other cases where Nubians would control the Pharaonic Throne for some number of dynasties - which plays into my whole over-arching point: it's really complicated. But the Egyptians spoke a Semitic language, as demostrated by surviving offshoot, Coptic, and they spoke the language when the Semites were still based in Africa. This points to fact that even if Tut was genetically black, culturally, Egypt was something much more murky than a simple "black or not" question.
And so what really goads me about the protestors - and why I wrote this in the first place - is that their demand is for the museum to "Document and display the research and accomplishments of the renowned African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in scientifically proving that Kemet [Egypt] was an African civilization" [My emphasis]. This is complete balderdash - there is no way that history as field can be "scientific", much less "scientifically proven". Science is based on the cycle of hypothesis, test, observe, repeat, until you have theory that is water-tight enough that it can deal with all of the evidence so far. All that hub-bub I wrote above was to offer evidence in contradiction to the theory that Egypt was was a (Black) African civilization; but there is no way that we can ever know for certain or scientifically, one way or the other or more likely shade of grey inbetween, because we can't go there ourselves to find out. All we can do is speculate, and that is not "scientific". All we have is second-hand or third-hand accounts passed down the generations by people who had a vested interest in doctoring the documents for their own needs, or maybe if we are lucky, some first-hand accounts by somebody on the ground who was limited by the biases and prejudices of his time, location, class, and station in life, and whose writings were similarly doctored. DNA might give evidence that Tut the individual was black or not (most likely mixed race, in my own opinion), but it can't show whether or not the larger society was African or not.
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