Egypt in South Africa

Egypt has held an exceptional place in the western imagination: located within the world’s largest desert, the country is an elongated oasis along the Nile river. This setting nourished one of the world’s earliest civilizations, its monumental architecture and writing system conferring a distinctive cultural status. Westerners have viewed Egypt as timeless and exotic, an ‘orientalist’ fantasy. In South Africa’s history, ancient Egypt has been implicated in colonial ideologies, offering a template for monumentality and for antiquity itself.