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		Isra Dahab on Nubian Culture (length: 1 min 30 sec) Isra Dahab is a Nubian newswoman with Upper Egypt's Channel 8. She has her own weekly program called Nubian Treasures about Nubian life, traditions and history. Here, Isra shares with Gates how she feels about so much of her heritage being buried under the Nile River. Read Transcript This site includes RealVideo. Download RealPlayer now.

 

Video Transcript

M. WAIST SHOT ESRA L, GATES R - CUT TO CHILDREN RUNNING IN STREET.

ISRA: This area which the Nubia, the real Nubia was, and now it's under the water. Yes, because the water covered every place there. Just the monuments we could save it, and the people.

GATES: When I was a boy, a little boy, and the dam was being built it was famous, people talked about it all over the world. But the black Americans, in my home town, very angry, because they said it was racist. And I remember a woman, a school teacher, started a campaign to try to save Nubian culture because she said that the only reason they were building it here was to bury Nubian culture because Nubians were the black people. Does it make you angry that Nubian civilisation is buried under that lake?

ISRA: Not angry but it makes me sorry because I dreamed that one day I could visit this place. I dreamed that if I could have the chance to live even one day in the ancient Nubia, because my father told me many things about it, my grandfather and mother and all the history books, all the books which talking about the Nubia, and when I see the pictures of the Nubia and the palm trees which the water is covering, till the end, sometimes I cry.

GATES: Yeah.

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