Jeremiah Heaton after planting a flag on land in Sudan and calling himself a king.

Jeremiah Heaton after planting a flag on land in Sudan and calling himself a king.

When I came across social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about this yesterday, I sincerely thought it was a hoax. It couldn't be true. Everything about the story was so offensive and ridiculous and racist I thought it must be some type of modern-day satirical joke.

See, 17 years ago, as a freshman at Morehouse College, I read Walter Rodney's classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and what I was seeing yesterday on social media was truly a personification of the very colonial BS that Europeans pulled during the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 in which they studied maps of Africa and decided how they would divide up the continent among themselves. They acted on that impulse and their colonial pursuits cost millions of lives. The artificial borders they drew up and enforced still cause problems to this very day.

Jeremiah Heaton, a mining executive and native of Mt. Airy, Georgia, a town with 604 residents and hometown of Ty Cobb, the most racist player in the history of major league baseball, heard his daughter say she wanted to be a princess and doggone it, what Jeremiah's daughter wants, she gets. Where Jeremiah's from, they don't read Walter Rodney.

Now living and working in Virginia, Heaton, as a birthday gift for his daughter, has claimed the land as his own. He didn't buy it—he just put his homemade flag on it.



Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.” There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess. “I wanted to show my kids I will literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes and dreams come true,” Heaton said.

So, wanting to keep a promise to his daughter, Heaton decided he would make a flag and go plant it on some African soil. After all, that's all you have to do to own land and become African royalty, right? Be white, make a flag, plant it in the ground, call yourself a king, your daughter a princess, and it's all true. Right?

WRONG.

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