‘Nubian monkey’ song and Arab racism | Nesrine Malik

The fairness of Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe’s skin makes her patronising lyric all the more problematic for black Egyptians

Haifa Wehbe, a popular Lebanese pop singer, has always been a controversial figure. The queen of a relatively new breed of voluptuous, coquettish starlets, her provocative lyrics, attire and music videos have won her popularity among Arab men who lust after her, women who want to emulate her, and now children targeted by her latest album. It is in objection to allegedly racially insulting lyrics from this album that a group of Nubian lawyers submitted an official complaint to Egypt’s public prosecutor calling for one of the songs to be banned.

The offending track, Baba Feen, a children’s ditty shot in a bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Teletubbies video, features Wehbe as a very sexy mother trying to cajole her young son into going back to bed – which he refuses to do unless she meets several demands, one of which is to fetch him his teddy bear and “Nubian monkey”.

This perceived reference to black Egyptians has provoked anger among the country’s Nubian minority and the diva is now facing claims that the song’s lyrics are discriminatory and are fuelling racist attitudes towards Nubians, allegedly contributing to playground bullying of dark-skinned children. The episode seems to have galvanised members of the Nubian community, who originate from southern Egypt and north Sudan, the descendants of the founders of the Nubian kingdom, one of Africa’s earliest black civilisations, which flourished along the banks of the Nile some 3,000 years BC.

The singer has apologised profusely for any offence caused and claimed that the song was penned by an Egyptian writer who told her that the term referred to a popular children’s street game (which makes no sense in the context of the song, where the boy is ticking off a list of toys he wants including a teddy bear, Barbie and toy musical organ).

It is one of very few incidents I recall where racism against black Arabs has been addressed or discussed in the media and public arena apart from flash points over the treatment of foreign Arab black refugees. In an infamous incident in 2005, more than 20 Sudanese refugees died after heavy-handed treatment by Egyptian authorities.

While Egypt’s Nubian minority are largely absent from popular culture and the upper echelons of politics and business, some dark-skinned figures such as Mohamed Mounir and the late Ahmad Zaki achieved iconic status. Residual attitudes still remain, though. It always annoyed me that Zaki was often referred to as “the asmar (loosely translated as dark or dusky) artist”. That struck me as casual racism in the guise of fetishised endearment, similar to the way black girls are treated in the streets of Cairo when apparently being complimented on their dark complexions (being referred to as “Kit Kat” just isn’t cute). Perceptions are so entrenched that they are not seen as offensive and find their way into pop media.

The fact that a surgically enhanced fair-skinned Lebanese singer is at the centre of this controversy is perhaps not just bad luck. Lebanese standards of beauty and complexion have taken the Arab world by storm since the resurgence of the Lebanese in media after the end of the Lebanese civil war, further limiting the accepted definition of beauty as light-skinned, catty-eyed and slim-nosed. Fair & Lovely, a popular whitening cream, advertises itself on Arabic TV when a model is rejected for being too dark, only to be ecstatically accepted after a few weeks of applying the magic cream. As Wehbe is the very epitome and embodiment of this standard, the lyric is that much more patronising.

The absence of a culture of political correctness in a society that generally promotes very limited and monolithic ideals of identity means that minority rights suffer, and that most would dismiss the complaint as an overreaction to a mindless children’s tune sung by an equally vacant performer. But it is not only through obvious flare-ups and incidents that discrimination is perpetuated – it is also also through the everyday normalisation of racist address and the apathy this breeds.

The Nubians want a formal apology and an end to airing the song in Egypt. Perhaps this will call attention to an endemic culture of racial stereotyping in the region and raise the standards of reference to darker-skinned Arabs in Egypt and elsewhere.