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Yes, but still: Dude plants a flag and claims a kingdom in Africa

Caperton

Yes, in the grand scheme of things, there are things of more urgent concern than one imperialist guy and his princess-obsessed daughter. But still, we have yet another entry into the saga of White Guy Plants a Flag in Africa and Calls Dibs:

Jeremiah Heaton, who has three children, recently trekked across the Egyptian desert to a small, mountainous region between Egypt and Sudan called Bir Tawil.

The area, about 800 square miles, is claimed by neither Sudan nor Egypt, the result of land disputes dating back more than 100 years. Since then, there have been several online claimants to the property, but Heaton believes his physical journey to the site, where he planted a flag designed by his children, means he rightfully can claim it.

And call his 7-year-old daughter Princess Emily, the fulfillment of a promise he made months earlier.

“Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a fixation on princesses. She asked me, in all seriousness, if she’d be a real princess someday,” Heaton said. “And I said she would.”

(My parents called me “princess” all the time*, and those assholes never even got me a Power Wheels.)

Heaton flew to Egypt in June and took a 14-hour caravan through the desert to land where “Bedouins roam the area; the population is actually zero,” he says, to plant the flag in what is now the totally rightfully claimed Kingdom of North Sudan. He then flew home to Abingdon, Virginia (originally home to the Mattaponi tribe of the Powhatan confederacy, while we’re talking about flag-planting), where he and Queen Kelly bought their daughter a tiara and ordered the family to address her as Princess Emily.

Lest this sound like some guy willing to go way, way far (like, a $1,500 plane ticket and 28 hours on a camel far) for a gag, the new king of North Sudan has expressed an intent to pursue formal recognition with other African nations, starting with Sudan and Egypt, possibly on the new letterhead he’s ordered. In the meantime, the royal family is discussing what to do with their new kingdom, thinking specifically about agriculture, since that’s what’s on Princess Emily’s mind. Because in the end, it’s all about her. And him. And love.

But the main intent, he said, was to show his daughter that he would follow through on the promise he made.

“I think there’s a lot of love in the world,” Heaton said. “I want my children to know I will do absolutely anything for them.”

*Sarcastically, when I was being a jerk

17 thoughts on Yes, but still: Dude plants a flag and claims a kingdom in Africa

  2. hahahahaha but colonialism and imperialism and white supremacy are totally outdated frames of reference in the modern globalized era, right?

    What a tool. And boy do I feel sorry for that kid’s, er, Princess Emily’s, future teachers and college instructors. Bet she won’t grow up to have a stunning sense of self-entitlement and self-importance, no sir!

  5. I couldn’t really understand how the 800 square mile tract of land was both roamed by Bedouins and uninhabited.

    2. Ah, well. Try harder to get into white imperialist mindset: see, Bedouins may roam there, but they don’t really live there, because living means settling in one place and doing agriculture, like little Emily says. Nomads can’t live in, much less own a space, because they don’t use it like the English/Americans would use it, so they don’t count.

      This has seriously been the line of “logic” since the English encountered Ireland and were appalled at Irish nomadism.

      1. Opposition to nomadic groups isn’t limited to European/Western imperialism, but arguably intersects with it. Many of the Arab countries in the Middle East have policies hostile to the Bedouin, and otherwise encourage them to urbanize.

        1. Not easily to hand. It came out of a late medieval-early Renaissance text I read many, many years ago in college in a sociology of race class. Let me see if a quick google turns up anything.

          Ah. Page 41 of Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation by Thomas Herron reads “English propaganda and European literature had for hundreds of years portrayed the native Irish as nomadic, “Scythian” barbarians who (in a common colonial trope) couldn’t value or properly use the land they inhabited.”

          As an example, Spenser talks about how dreadful it is that the Irish live by driving their cattle from pasture to pasture depending on the time of year and living in whichever pasture is green in 1589’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. The footnote on Herron’s book refers the interested reader to Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience by Andrew Hadfield pp. 21-29 for an overview of such descriptions.

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