Winnie Mandela Is No Longer Here With Us; So Let’s Make Do With Lupita O’Nyango

The renowned Hellenic-Classicist Denise McCoskey is smack on target, when the affiliate of Black World Studies at the University of Miami emphatically asserts that the Ancient Greeks - and I suppose Contemporary Greeks as well - would have been more flabbergasted to envisage or perceive the epic role of Helen-of-Troy played by an English-speaking blonde, than have the same played by an Indigenous Continental African Woman like the legendary Mexican-born Kenyan actor (or actress, the Dear Reader may choose their pick) Lupita Nyang’o of the movie “Twelve Years a Slave” fame (See “Elon Musk Is Furious that Lupita Nyang’o Is Playing Helen of Troy. I Asked a Classicist How She really Looked” Slate 7/17/26).

This is an interesting question because even as this author learned some some 36 years ago, at The City College of The City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), at a lecture and a book-signing engagement hosted on behalf of the presently deceased Third-Generation Classicist and Sinologist Martin Bernal, globally renowned and the distinguished author of the multivolume treatise titled “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization” (1987+), and at the time Professor of Government and Near-Eastern Studies at Cornell University, right here in New York State, the Ancient Greeks would have been implacably offended to have been seminally affiliated with the so-called Aryan West and/or European Civilization of the sort so imperiously upheld and scandalously glorified by the Neo-Fascist likes of Mr. Elon Musk, the Apartheid-Era-Born South African “Trillionaire” recent immigrant of the United States of America.

For even as Professor Bernal, of British birth and nationality, authoritatively held at the time of his standing-room-only lecture and book-signing event at City College, staunchly backed by the extant President of CCNY’s Greek Students’ Association, both the Ancient Greeks and their descendants in the Contemporary Era, the present generation never envisaged themselves as an integral part or a constituent component of any such nondescript phenomenon as European or Western Civilization.

At its most charitable acknowledgement of any affinity or geopolitical consanguinity with the so-called Aryan-West, the Greeks - both Ancient and Modern - have always perceived and envisaged themselves to be of “Northern-Mediterranian Provenance,” which would charitably locate them on the southernmost fringes of their northern and northwestern neighbors. At the time presently in reference, both Professor Bernal and the President of the Greek Students Association or Organization at the City College of New York, Circa. 1990, unanimously and unreservedly agreed that both the Ancient Greeks and their Modern and Post-Modern Descendants or offspring fully and unabashedly recognized themselves to be far more closely related to Present-Day North Africans and the rest of the residents and the inhabitants of the putatively Primeval Continent and their Cultures or Meta-Culture than their Aryan neighbors to the north.

Even more emphatic in their thesis/theses was the exasperatingly weird and outlandish idea or ideationally phenotypical concept of “Whiteness” as having anything to do with both Ancient and Modern Greeks. Which is why when the scholar and the renowned classicist Denise McCoskey observes poignantly that the purely mythological character of Hele-of-Troy did not really exist in any objectively specified ethno-racial form, Ms. McCoskey can absolutely and unreservedly not be forensically rationally or truthfully be impeached or contradicted with any modicum of certainty, except, of course, in the clinically pathological imagining/ideation of Make America Great Again (MAGA) Fascist Hallucinators like Monsieur Musk and his breed of morally and psychologically irredeemable Aryan Supremacists.

Which is also why the great and genius filmmaker Christoper Nolan’s purely merit-based decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o as the Epic Shero Helen-of-Troy is simply beyond reproach. Which is also why Elon Musk’s rather scholastically clueless attempt to impugn the professional integrity of Mr. Nolan, the director of the recently released filmic blockbuster “Odyssey,” without question, tells us, the general reading and viewing public, far more about our morbidly self-infatuated sourpuss of a critic than anything credible about the esthetically inimitable genius silver screen artist, whom we delightfully and morally refreshingly learn was gifted the fiscally remarkable sum of € 6.5 or $7.4 (USD) by the Government of Greece as its “humble” contribution towards this epoch-making and esthetically and historiographically conscientious project that further uplifts the global image and the reputation of one of the greatest civilizations and cultures of all time. Could Tesla Assemblyline proprietor Elon Musk presume to know more about Hellenic Culture and Heritage than the Hellenes themselves? Give me a break!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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