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Nubian history: discussion in Arabic about ethnic group in Egypt

| 9 comments | Category: culture

After leaving Cairo, the first stop on my Egyptian travels was Aswan, the furthest south in the country where you can find a major settled area, and where the Egyptian part of the Nile begins after Lake “Nasser” and the High Dam.

By far, the most interesting part of my time there was discovering things about the ethnic group known as the Nubians, which at one point in history were able to overpower the Pharaohs of Egypt, but have had an unfortunate history of displacement and migration, especially in the last century.

To share that story, I let Gasser M. Anwar, a Nubian working in the tourist industry, take the microphone to share his perspective on it all with us. With subtitles in English and Arabic as always!image1234

I have of course been recording plenty of videos, but I could only upload this one so far thanks to a very quick stop in Cairo for decent Internet before hitting the road again. More videos and travel stories coming up soon enough ;)

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Comments: If you liked this post or have anything to say, please leave a comment! I love reading them :)
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  • http://twitter.com/yaquigrande David

    Benny, it’s very very cool to see these videos of you conducting these interviews when we all were there a few months ago when you began to learn Arabic.
    This video was very informative as well!
    Shukran!

  • Saab

    Do you make the intros of your videos yourself?

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      No, I got some help, although I contribute a lot to it.

      • nikonoel

        They are very nice anyway!

  • Gaius Julius

    This is a very interesting video. Gasser speaks beautiful Arabic and his perspective on the subject is fascinating. Sometimes people don’t know that minorities exist even in Egypt, and that they suffer from discrimination like minorities in other countries.

    Did you prepare the subtitles yourself? If so, that must have been VERY hard :P

  • Crno Srce

    Interesting video! I know you’re deliberately staying out of the conversation to let the other person do all the talking, but how much of this conversation did you actually understand? It’s hard to tell because you didn’t really ask any follow up questions in response to what he said. I guess what I’m asking is what the video can’t show – what was happening in your head at the time :-)

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      Please see most recent post. I was very sick that week, but I really wanted to make a video about this topic even if it was my last night in Aswan, so I let him do most of the talking.

      I read up a lot about Nubian history in advance, and because of that the huge help of context meant that I followed most of what he said, despite tricky words and a different accent. Without preparation I am not sure if I would have been able to follow such a conversation though.

      • Crno Srce

        Ahh, yeah, I read that. Sorry to hear it. Something similar happened to my wife and I in Egypt when we ate salad at the only really touristy restaurant we went to. SALAD! What was I thinking? What followed was one very unpleasant overnight, 2nd class train trip to Aswan.

        I know you mentioned you don’t like to take medication, but for travelling in these sorts of countries, medication that stops cramps from the runs is essential. You don’t want to end up dehydrated and in a local hospital :-) The symptom is the disease trying to spread itself more in the environment, not your body trying to clean it up, so taking the medication is a benefit for public health, especially in countries with poor sewerage systems.

        Anyway, glad to hear you’ve picked up now!

  • Tom

    This site is so cu-ray-Z! I live in the UAE and have been learning Arabic for about 5 years with real consistency – this is after 3 months? My God…very cool that you’re out there in the deep end immersing yourself in Egyptian culture and really shortcutting the ineffective ‘high school’ language learning methods.

    Keep ‘em coming!