Cleopatra actress defends her casting
(archive.vn)
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We didn't separate Egypt from the rest of the continent; the fucking Sahara did.
Explaining that crossing the Sahara was about as difficult as crossing the Atlantic to a black supremacist is totally impossible, you simply can't impart that knowledge into their heads no matter what.
This is both accurate and inaccurate. Travel was possible, and even common, in certain contexts. Pilgrimages, for instance, involved people from as far away as England making the trek to Jerusalem (though, much more common, was simply to Canterbury). BUT the difficulty and expense were astronomically high. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a life-long goal and/or luxury, and someone would have to plan for decades and arrange their entire lives around an absence of a year or longer to make the journey.
Without some huge incentive driven by religious fervor, the likelihood that someone would make such a sacrifice is very very low. Black Africans, as a whole, had almost no reason to even imagine traveling to Northern Europe for most of history, with the only exceptions being hard-core travelers like pirates or sea-traders, and they did not migrate but simply pass through. So it's fine to depict the unicorns of blacks in, say, London or other port cities, but in the context of visitors and ocean nomads, not permanent settlers.
One could sail up or otherwise travel the Nile.
There are several parts of the Nile that you can't really get boats through because of rocks and shallow water, and we're dealing with people who were beaten to settling Madagascar by people who had to cross several thousand miles of ocean to get there first.
You can go along the river. Drinking water's here, and shade from trees, and even settlements.