I gather that she’s been in today’s Guardian, where she’s written a piece about the death of Tina Turner. Turner was one of the greatest soul singers, even appearing as Auntie Entity, the ruler of Bartertown, in the film Mad Max 3, for which she also sang and performed a theme song. Shola’s piece lamented the fact that the singer had died before Blacks had received their proper compensation for their historic enslavement by White Europeans and Americans. She’s an intensely controversial figure. Some people feel that she is anti-British and I believe there was 38 Degrees petition launched by someone to stop the TV companies using her as a guest on their shows when debating racism and related topics. I feel that the issues of Black compensation for slavery raises questions about such compensation that crosses racial and national boundaries and which may affect Shola herself. Slavery was practised for millennia across the globe. Black Africans were enslaved by other African nations, as well as Muslim Arabs and Turks, as well as Indians, Persians and Afghans. Odiously, slavery still persists in Africa and the global south, and has been revived in Islamist-held Libya and Uganda. At the same time, Europeans were held in bondage as serfs until into the 19th century in parts of Europe, and were also enslaved by the invading Turks and pirates from Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. This rises the issue that if compensations is to be paid to enslaved Blacks, then the same principle should mean that the victims of these forms of slavery should also receive compensation from those, who historically enslaved them.
I’ve therefore sent her this message via the message box on her website. I’ll let you know if I get an answer
‘Dear Shola,
I was struck by your article in today’s Guardian about the death of the great soul singer, Tina Turner, and lamenting the fact that she died before Black people had received reparations for slavery. The question of slavery reparations raises issues extending beyond western Blacks, including the complicity of African aristocracies, the enslavement of Blacks by other nations, including Islam and India, as well as indigenous White European forms of bondage and their enslavement by the Barbary pirates and the Turkish empire. As the granddaughter of an African prince, I would be particularly interested in your perspectives on these issues.
Regarding indigenous African complicity in the slave trade, I’ve doubtless no need to tell you about how generally Black Africans were captured and enslaved by other Black African peoples, who then sold them on to White Europeans and Americans. The most notorious slaving states were included Dahomey, Benin and Whydah in west Africa, while on the east coast the slaving peoples included the Yao, Marganja and the Swahili, who enslaved their victims for sale to the Sultan of Muscat to work the clove plantations on Zanzibar. They were also purchased by merchants from India, and then exported to that country, as well as Iran, Afghanistan and further east to countries like Sumatra. It has therefore been said that reparations should consist of Black Africans compensating western Blacks. Additionally, Black Africans were also enslaved by other Muslim Arabs in north Africa and then the Turkish empire. What is now South Sudan was a particular source of Black slaves and one of the causes of the Mahdi’s rebellion was outrage at the banning of slavery by the British. This raises the issue of whether Turkey, Oman, India and other north African and Asian states should also compensate the Black community for their depredations on them.
The complicity of the indigenous African chiefs in the slave trade has become an issue recently in Ghana and Nigeria. I understand that the slavery museum in Liverpool was praised by campaigners and activists from these nations for including this aspect of the slave trade. I would very much like to know your views on this matter. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but I understand you are of the Igbo people. These also held slaves. I would also like to know if you could tell me a bit more about this, and how this may have affected your family’s history. Your grandfather was, after all, a chief, and this raises the awkward question of whether your family owned slaves. If they did, how were they manumitted and did your family give them reparations for their enslavement?
There is also the question of the enslavement of Whites both under conditions of domestic servitude and by the Muslim powers of the Turkish empire and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Serfdom in England died out in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it continued in European countries into the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussia only liberated its serfs in 1825 and the Russian serfs were only freed in 1860. Serfdom is considered a form of slavery under international law, as I understand. If Blacks are to be granted compensation for their enslavement, then as a general principle the descendants of White European serfs should also be compensated for their ancestors’ servitude.
In Britain, a from of serfdom continued in the Scottish and Northumbrian mining industries. Miners were bondsmen, whose contracts bound them to the mining companies and who were metal identity collars to prevent them running away exactly like slaves. I would be grateful if you would tell me whether their descendants should also receive compensation for their forefathers’ virtual enslavement.
Over a million White Europeans and Americans, mostly from southern European countries such as France, Spain and Italy, were enslave by the Barbary pirates. This only came to an end with the French conquest and occupation of Alegria. If people are to be compensated for their ancestors’ enslavement, then presumably America and Europe should also receive compensation from these nations for this. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14th century by Mehmet II resulted in the depression of the indigenous White Christian population into serfdom as well as the imposition of slavery. When Hungary was conquered, the Turks levied a tribute of a tenth of the country’s population as slaves. When one of the Greek islands revolted in the 1820s, it was put down with dreadful cruelty and the enslavement of 20,000 Greeks. Do you feel that the descendants of these enslaved Balkan Whites should also receive compensation from their former Turkish overlords?
There is also the fact that after Britain abolished the slave trade, she paid compensation to the former African slaving nations for their losses as part of a general scheme to persuade them to adopt a trade in ‘legitimate’ products. This was believed to benefit both Britain and the African nations themselves. How do you feel about the payment of such compensation? Do you feel that it is unfair, and that these nations should pay it back to us, or that they should pay it to the descendants of the people they enslaved?
Finally, slavery still persists today in parts of Africa and has even revived. The Islamist terror groups that have seized control of half of the former Libya have opened slave markets dealing in the desperate migrants from further south, who have made their way to the country in the attempt to find sanctuary in Europe. At the same time, slave markets have also opened in Uganda. Slavery is very much alive around the world today. I would be greatly interested in your perspectives on this issue, which is affecting people of colour in the global south. How do you feel it should be tackled? Are you working with anti-slavery organisations, such as Anti-Slavery International and the various organisations by former African slaves to combat this? If not, I would be very grateful if you could tell me why not, when you are obviously motivated by a human outrage at the plight of the historic victims of western slavery.
I hope you will be able to provide me with answers to these questions, and very much look forward to receiving your reply.
I got this message earlier this afternoon from the pro-democracy organisation, Open Britain, commenting on Sunak’s inability to sack Braverman despite her breach of the codes governing ministerial conduct. In their view, and I think it’s the correct one, this is because Braverman’s part of the hard line, anti-European ERG, who now appear to be the major force pulling the strings in the Tories. This is another indication of the parlous state of our democracy, as no-one should be above the law.
I found one detail particularly interesting, because I hadn’t heard about it anywhere else. Perhaps it has been reported, but I simply missed it. It’s that Braverman founded a charity with members of the Rwandan government who were part of Rwandan immigration scheme. This is, in my view, utterly corrupt, and demonstrates more clearly than the speeding fine fiasco why she shouldn’t be in government. Here’s Open Britain’s message
‘Dear David,
No matter the circumstances, it seems that Rishi Sunak is completely unable to hold his ministers to even the most basic standard of conduct. It speaks not only to the ERG’s stranglehold on the Conservative party, but Britain’s ever-lowering bar for standards in public life under this government.
Remember, Braverman’s tenure didn’t start on a high note. Sunak reappointed her just six days after her resignation as Home Secretary under Liz Truss, which she tendered for committing a serious national security breach in violation of the Ministerial Code. Despite the public outcry at the time and Sunak’s laughable commitment to “integrity, professionalism and accountability”, the PM ultimately succumbed to the power of the Brexit lobby.
Today, we’ve learned of two new Ministerial Code violations by the Home Secretary. Firstly, three days ago, Braverman was alleged to have used her position to change the punishment for a speeding violation. And now a further accusation has emerged that Braverman failed to disclose her co-founding a charity linked to members of the Rwandan government, including several key officials involved in her Rwanda immigration scheme. So far, Number 10 has refused to announce an investigation into either matter.
How exactly did Suella Braverman become politically untouchable? For her, standards that would apply to any other job in the world seem to be completely absent. Even as a communications officer at Open Britain (an important role, but not one quite as consequential as Home Secretary), I wouldn’t be allowed to perform to such an abysmally low standard. I’d have personally resigned in disgrace long ago.
There is one disturbingly simple answer. Braverman is part of the ERG clique, a secretive and “militant” wing of the Tory party which has exerted immense power over government policy and operations. Sunak, in a futile attempt to unite various splinter groups within his party, has no choice but to put up with her or face the full wrath of this “party within a party”. Sunak, like the rest of us, is hostage to the insanity of these swivel-eyed loons.
But there is a deeper explanation. As our democratic institutions crumble, our rights fade away, and our political debates descend into the realm of petty grievance, the standards we once expected of those in public life simply slip away. Nothing illustrates our steady slide towards authoritarianism than the way government has become more about pledging fealty to Brexit fundamentalism than to honouring a commitment to deliver proper democracy or effective governance. Braverman stays because she is loyal to the cause, not because she serves the people or institutions of Britain. It’s the mark of a nation in steep decline.
It’s time to re-assess. Who are we as a country? What are our values? What do we, as a nation, actually believe in? Right now, the great ship of state is just chugging along to nowhere in particular, with the worst among us steering us closer and closer to the abyss.
Proper democracy means taking back the reins. It means giving real people a real say in what Britain is and what Britain will be in the future. It means having politicians who are happy to be held to account by the public, not focussed on covering the backs of those who climbed the same greasy pole they did. In a proper democracy, no one is untouchable.
I’m proud to be fighting for a system like that. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, but we’re not resting until it’s done.
This is a very short video of just over two minutes or so, in which Konstantin Kisin of the Triggernometry YouTube channel argues that we should also teach schoolchildren about slavery in the rest of the world, such as Black Africa and Islam. He states that he’s often asked the question of whether slavery should be taught. He replies, ‘Yes, but we don’t teach slavery. We teach transatlantic slavery’. When asked himself about slavery and its history, he talks about his family’s history as slaves in Russia. He also remarks on Britain’s great achievement of ending slavery globally. Teaching children about slavery in the rest of the world doesn’t excuse of us of our crimes, which are many, but would provide the historical context for them.
Triggernometry is a very right-wing YouTube outfit, rather like the Lotus Eaters. However much I strongly disagree with their politics, Kisin is right about this issue. We don’t seem to be teaching slavery in schools, as he says. We only teach transatlantic slavery, and this gives the impression that slavery was only something the west did to Blacks and other people of colour. But it was practiced across the world and throughout history, and its apologists were well aware of that. They argued that it would be unfair and harmful for Britain to get rid of slavery when so many other countries and nations retained it. They didn’t think emancipation would work, and so denounced it as ‘visionary’ and ‘philanthropic’. Which translates it modern English as something like ‘cloud-cuckoo land’ and ‘do-gooding’.
I doubt, however, that teaching the global history of slavery would be welcomed. In fact, I can see it being denounced by Black and anti-racism activists as ‘racist’ and ‘islamophobic’. Teaching Black African complicity in the slave trade as well as their domestic systems of enslavement would run counter to the current demands for teaching Black history. Its advocates want an inspiring Black history of great empires, inventors and freedom fighters taught to raise Black pupils’ self-esteem and inspire them to do well at school and life. Furthermore, current racial activism is based on exploiting slavery as an historical grievance and a crime which still affects Black Americans and Brits. But this would be complicated by any teaching of the global history of slavery which would show it wasn’t unique to the west.
I was also struck by this comment to the video left by @darkryder13: ‘My grandfather was born a slave in the later days of the Ottoman Empire. His region of Greece wasn’t liberated until a little after he was born. He was lucky to grow up a free Greek, but he was born with the legal status of livestock in the Ottoman Empire. And this was in the 20th century, not the 19th.’
This is interesting, as you don’t hear about the mass enslavement of the indigenous White population by the Ottomans. Thomas Sowell mentions it in one of his books as well as the fact that Macedonia only banned slavery in 1919. This aspect of the Turkish empire seems to be ignored by historians.
Looking through Google earlier I found an article on the Speccie’s website claiming with that more or less as its title, authored by none other than its editor, Fraser Nelson. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the article because you have to be a subscriber, and I’m not. But hold on! Weren’t all the right-wing, Tory anti-immigration types pushing Brexit as the solution too mass immigration and all those pesky people heading across the Channel to us on rubber dinghies?
And was this a pack of lies? Yes, yes, they did and it was. The anti-immigration Brexiteers – there were others on the Labour left who support Brexit, and who were definitely not racist or anti-immigration – told anybody who would listen that the migrants heading over here after passing through Europe had been able to do so because of the European constitution. That isn’t the case. The European constitution does call for freedom of movement across the Union for EU citizens, but from what I understand asylum seekers are required to settle in the first country they travel to. The Schengen Agreement allows immigrants from outside the EU to travel freely from one country to another, but that’s a separate treaty which only binds the specific countries that signed it. Quite simply, the Brexiteer right lied to people about this issue, just as they lied to people about oven-ready deals with the EU, using the money spent on our contribution to the EU on the NHS, the rest of the world flocking to us desperate for trade deals after we left, no traffic queues at Dover or extra bureaucracy and so on, and on, ad nauseam. And now it has dawned on them that, rather than stopping mass immigration, the number of immigrants entering the country has actually increased.
I’m not actually surprised. I was talking to a friend of mine about immigration a while ago, who’d been doing some reading on the issue. He told me that immigration also increased massively after Britain first passed legislation cutting down on it. Before then, it had been largely chain-immigration. Immigrants would arrive from south Asia or wherever and take up residence in a certain area, but would generally only live there for a short period of time before returning to India or Pakistan. They would then be replaced by another set of immigrants, who would also live there for a relatively short space of time before returning and being replaced by a newer set of migrants in their turn. But in the run-up to the date when the new anti-immigration legislation came into law there was a surge in the number of people immigrating to the country, presumably hoping to get in before the door shut. I wonder if something like that is happening now with the people coming here from Africa and the Middle East. Some of the rise in immigration that’s occurred over the past year has been caused Ukrainians seeking refuge in this country as a result of Putin’s invasion of their homeland. I’d say that this was something of an anomaly, as it’s the result of warfare in Europe itself while the pattern of migration that bothers the anti-immigration lobby is that of non-Whites from outside Europe. The exceptional circumstances of the war in Ukraine may mean that in subsequent years the level of immigration may well be lower.
The anti-immigration crew have been aware for some time that Brexit hasn’t been the solution to the issue they believed, or they told people. I’ve seen disturbing articles on various right-wing blogs and YouTube channels talking about this, and suggesting that what we need to do is get out of the 1950s United Nations treaty on refugees. The Nat Cons are taking their inspiration and ideology from the American ultra-Conservative right, and there has been a strain in extreme right-wing American thought that’s been critical of the UN for a very long time. There are very conspiracy theories about the United Nations, which see it very much as the beginning of the Satanic One World Communist dictatorship. Other, less bonkers views attack it for supposedly being anti-American and anti-Israel. My guess is that it may not be too long before we see similar attacks on the United Nations appearing on the right in Britain with the purpose of discrediting the Refugee Treaty. Not that this will be such a radical change for some of the papers. When the UN criticises us for the poverty and suffering Tory policies have inflicted on our citizens, papers like the Heil respond with shrill attacks on it for being anti-British. I think we can expect this hostility to increase and become louder and more vitriolic as the Tories and other right-wing parties like Reform try to stir up anti-immigrant feeling.
This is a video from Lawrence Fox’s Reclaim the Media channel on YouTube, which is part of his Reclaim party. I’m very much aware that by reblogging it I’m tempting the ire of the Labour party for publishing the ideas and content of a rival party. But I think here Lozza and his crew have a point. Looking at it, he doesn’t object to drag as a late night entertainment for adults. What he objects to is very sexualised drag performances being staged in front of children as a vehicle for indoctrinating them with Queer Theory and the gender ideology.
I state again that I am definitely opposed to anyone being stigmatised or persecuted because of their sexuality or gender identity. I’m putting this video up because I do think that there is an attempt to use drag as a vehicle for indoctrinating children, and that the theories about human sexuality and sexual identity are fundamentally wrong and dangerous.
The video traces the history of drag from the days of ancient Greece, the middle ages and the early modern period, when male actors took female roles because of the social taboos against women appearing on stage. He claims that drag as a distinct form of entertainment appeared in the 19th century. The word itself may be a contraction of ‘Dressed As A Girl’. By the late 19th century drag was subversive and political, critiquing social norms about gender. It was originally late night fun for adults, but now there are attempts to put into the classroom. Drag Queen Story Hour is in the vanguard of this campaign.
Queer Theory, which is part of this new movement, has its origins in the postmodernist philosophical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality. Lozza says that Foucault definitely wasn’t a paedophile. This is almost certainly irony, as Foucault used to travel to north Africa for sex with young, pre-teen boys. He also explicitly argued that children can give sexual consent. His book claimed that sexuality was a social construct shaped by culture and history. This was then extended further by Gail Rubin, a lesbian anthropologist in her Thinking Sex. This also argued that sex and gender were the product of cultural norms, which were themselves oppressive and had no basis in nature. She defended every sexual taboo, including ‘boy lovers’.
Rubin was followed by Judith Butler and her book, Gender Trouble, which introduced into the debate the theory of performativity. Gender was not innate, but something people perform. She also challenged the gender binary of male and female. Drag Queen Story Hour differs from other forms of drag in that it is an exercise in gender performativity. This is unlike pantomime dames, who are comic figures exaggerating some female mannerisms while preserving their male gait. Drag queens themselves evolved from gay nightclubs and cabaret to challenge gender norms, but they were adult entertainment.
Drag Queen Story Hour itself began in 2015 in San Francisco, launched by author and activist Michelle Tea. She started it as a way of spreading knowledge of gay culture. Tea was already involved with transgressive culture, touring with a sex workers’ artistic collective and with a Queer feminist poetry collective, Sisterspit, whose anthology included pieces by and about drug addicts and other marginalised, underground groups. Drag Queen Story Hour was launched with Tea’s own group, Radar Productions, and was first staged in San Francisco public library. It was intended to introduce children to gay culture and diversity, equity and inclusion. It was an immediate success, and spread to other cities and across the Atlantic to Britain.
Lozza states that the claim by its defenders that Drag Queen Story Hour is just about teaching children to read in a fun way is dishonest. Here he mentions the recent scandal of the drag king, who performed in schools in the Isle of Man. This individual sparked controversy and a review of the programme by teaching children that there were 72 genders. Amongst themselves, the advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour are quite clear about their intentions to indoctrinate children. He talks here about the paper ‘Queer Pedagogy’, co-authored by the drag queen Little Miss Hot Mess, which appeared in an American journal of education. This stated the goal was to attack racist, capitalist modes of reproduction and the nuclear family.
From this he moves to the matter of expense and how much these events cost. Much of it is funded by the Arts Council. In 2019 the British Library hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour as part of their ‘Live, Love, Liberty’ exhibition. Last year, 2022, New York public library spent $200,000 on such events. The organisers insisted that these performances were safe, with background checks made on the performers and the performances themselves not sexual and suitable for children. This was belied by clips of some of these events showing very sexualised performances. Seven of the drag queens who performed in the Story Hours have been charged with child sex offences. Sharon Le Grand, another drag queen, also said in 2022 ‘We need to teach our children to open their hearts. We need to teach our children to open their minds. We need to teach our children to open their legs.’ Drag kings, a recent addition to the show, have also exposed their chests during the performances to show their mastectomy scars, blurring the line between drag and strip shows. He also talks about the problem of the adult nature of the drag acts away from children. Many of them have web pages with very adult jokes and content, which children can easily find. As an example, he gives a rather coarse joke from Ruby Violet’s description of herself, who performed in front of children aged 3-11 in an event staged by Hertfordshire council.
He concludes by discussing the way opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour has been misrepresented and the attempts to outlaw protests against it. The Beeb declared that opponents of drag queens were motivated by conspiracy theories and were members of the far right. In Canada a law has been passed banning protests within a certain limit of drag queen performances, punishable by a fine of $25,000. The video concludes with him mentioning that there are a number of organisations fighting the gender ideology and Drag Queen Story Hour, whose details he’ll put in the blurb about the video, and a plug for another YouTube series from Reclaim, Bad Education.
While I feel that the video is broadly accurate, obviously that doesn’t mean that each and every drag queen involved in story hour is ideologically motivated or a danger to children. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh have said in their YouTube videos, The Queens’ Speech, that many drag queens are just gay men trying to make a buck, and so don’t want a blanket ban on such shows. The EDIjester has also drawn a distinction between British and American drag. In his view, British drag, unlike its American counterpart, came out of the music hall tradition and wasn’t sexual. Again, I remember when British TV comedy frequently included drag. One of the major stars of 70s week day TV was Danny La Rue, while comedians and comic actors like the Two Ronnies, Dick Emery and Les Dawson also performed in drag. Also back in the 70s and 80s were Hinge and Bracket, which mixed musical comedy with drag. Again, this was mainstream entertainment on TV and radio and considered entirely innocuous. There have also been Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage and Barry Humphries with Dame Edna Everege.
And yes, some of the opponents of Drag Queen Story Hour are far right conspiracy theorists. You can see that with Correct, Not Political, who hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, staged counter-protests against left wing demonstrations and openly admire Mosley. Their opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour comes from a deeper hostility to homosexuality and its promotion.
But I think critics of Drag Queen Story Hour and Queer Theory, like James Lindsay, are absolutely correct about the attempts to use drag as a vehicle for explicit political indoctrination and very harmful ideas about gender. It’s this aspect of it that needs to fought and combated.
Another video criticising Netflix for casting a Black woman as Cleopatra. I’m post this up, not just because of its content, but also because the author of the post is of Asian heritage. They have their own history of colonisation and discrimination, and so it’s not just case of White supremacists or generally offended Whites criticising the casting. . As I hope is also clear by the fact that it’s the Egyptians themselves who are objecting to what they see as the appropriation of their history by Black Americans. I noticed he’s also dyed his hair blue, which also probably would raise alarm bells amongst the militant right and mark him down as a ‘woke’ leftie weirdo
Fang makes many of the same points as the Fun Slaying King about the historical evidence for Cleopatra’s racial identity. But he also adds that under the Roman Empire, the Egyptians were subject to an apartheid system which heavily discriminated against them in favour of the Greek and Roman colonists. At one point he says that showing Cleopatra as Black is like portraying King Leopold, the butcher of the Congo, as Black. He swiftly changes his mind, and says it’s more ridiculous than this, it would be like portraying him as an indigenous American.
He also makes the same point that the concentration on Cleopatra ignores some really stirring events in genuine Black African history. He talks about the last stand of the Songhai empire, when they drove cattle against the muskets of the invading Moroccans. Or when the Cushites fought off a Roman invasion and even decapitated the head of a statue of the Roman emperor. I think this is a real problem. There’s some fascinating discoveries being made about the rise of urbanism in Black Africa. A few years ago a White archaeologist teaching in Nigeria discovered the remains of an urban complex covering an area the size of Salisbury plain. But he’s the only one exploring it, as his Nigerian students are all keen to go to Egypt.
I’ve put up a couple of clips on this channel of some of the science being done in Africa. The video, entitled ‘Young Scientists Kenya 2022’ from the On Air Studios channel on YouTube, is of an official expo in that country, staged to get the country’s young people interested in science and technology. The event bore the slogan ‘Using STEM to Redefine Our Nation’ or something like that. The video shows the event’s organisers and speakers, as well as the stalls surrounded by fascinated and enthusiastic young people. One of them is for the Kenyan Space Agency, which surprised me, as I didn’t know there was such a thing, along with another stall on astronomy, that has the kids peering through a telescope. There are also robots, as well as stall about medicine and medical technology. Unfortunately, the movie is silent except for the backing sound track, so you don’t really know what’s going on or who the speakers are. As for the exhibition itself, from what I can see it doesn’t appear to be much different from some of the science events in Britain, like the Cheltenham Festival of Science. It demonstrates that there’s a real interest in cutting edge science in Africa, even if one of the boats featured was definitely low technology, and a determination to build a better future for the country using it. Just as our government is determined to get more kids into STEM in this country.
This might interest some of the readers of this blog, who are interested in the rich history of Africa. The Conversation has posted an article by Nancy Bird, a postdoc research assistant at UCL, ‘DNA study opens a window into African civilisation that left a lasting legacy’ about how she and her fellow researchers analysed DNA samples from Africa to reconstruct the movement and expansions of different ethnic groups in the continent before European colonisation. The article describes their methodology and talks about how the samples were collected and analysed, and that there had been little genetic sampling and research of this type previously in Africa. The article then goes on to discuss some of their findings.
These begin with the probability that two ethnic groups in what is now Cameroon, the Kanuri and Kotoko, are descended from three ancestral peoples in the Kanem-Bornu empire, which flourished for 1000 years after its foundation c. 700 AD and covered northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. The study also revealed how African genetic heritage had been affected by the Arab expansion into Africa. This included Arab contact with the kingdom of Makuria in the Sudan. The signed a peace treaty with the Arabs in 700 AD, which allowed the kingdom to survive for 700 years. The genetic evidence revealed that the racial mixing occurred after the treaty was beginning to breakdown and the Arabs were expanding into the area. The study also examined the genetic legacy left by the southern Arab migration into Africa that resulted in the empire of Akxum, which covered what is now Ethiopia, Djibouti and part of Yemen and was considered one of the world’s four great powers alongside Persia, China and Rome. It also suggested that the expansion of the Bantu languages was the result of migrations from a part of Cameroon which began in 2,000 BC and had spread south and east over the next 2000 years. But the study also revealed that they had spread west as well. During their expansion, the Bantu met and mixed with other ethnic groups. No-one knows what caused this expansion, but it may have been climate change.
The article concludes
‘It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.’
Here’s another interesting video from the same sociology professor, who showed that Korea and other societies outside Europe also had the ideal of pale features as their standard of beauty. In this video he shows that other peoples also don’t necessarily see race the same way as Americans. He talks of a trip he and his students made to Haiti. They had a couple of Black Americans with them, who the Haitians called ‘Blans’ – Whites. The Haitians regarded them as White, despite their dark skin colour, simply because they were Americans.
I came across much the same attitude in Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist. Barley’s an anthropologist, and the book’s his hilarious account of his time doing field work with Dowayo of Cameroon. One of the other westerners in the area was a very racially aware Black American anthropologist. The man was very much into ideals of Black brotherhood, and so was keen to live the same way as the local people. They, however, regarded him as ‘the Black White man’, the African term for westernised Blacks. Rather than respect him for trying to live like them, they expected him instead to behave like every other American. They also despised him for being mean. The guy refused to have any servants to do his laundry, as his ancestors had been servants during slavery. But in Africa, if you’re wealthy you’re expected to spread it around by employing people. And so his refusal not employ laundrymen wasn’t seen as a gesture of Black dignity and solidarity, but simply him being tight-fisted. The guy also had been surprised to find out that nobody in that part of Africa had heard of a supposedly African festival celebrated at about the same time as Christmas. Thinking about the passage, it sounds like Kwanzaa. This is supposed to be an authentic African festival, but was actually invented by Black radicals in the 1960s, although it’s based on a Swahili harvest festival. Barley also talks about how he was blind to the racism within African society. For example, the fellow didn’t see the way the Fulani traders in the local market operated to keep other tribes out. There were other examples in the book. During conversations with some of the Africans, he was told that the nuns massacred in the Congo were killed because they were racist. When they were asked about the Dowayo, however, these same Africans denounced them as terrible pagans and ‘sons of dogs’ before asking him what was racist about that.
There are other ideas of race and other forms of racism not centred around colour, but this is too often ignored because of western ideas of race.
This is also interesting and riposte to some of the claims made about whiteness and white privilege. In this video a sociology professor argues that the notion of pale skin as the ideal beauty standard does not come from Europeans. The idea that it does is based on the idea that as Europeans expanded throughout the world, other races wanted to be us. But this was not the case. He gives the example of Korea, showing a Korean picture of a group of aristocrats. These all have pale or white skins. He states that this was down to class. The aristocrats marked themselves off from the peasants in the fields by being paler. He also states that when Europeans entered Korea in the 17th century, the Koreans didn’t call them ‘white’. Instead they referred to them as ‘people with coloured eyes’ or as ‘red’.
I’ve read before that the Chinese referred to Europeans as ‘hung mao’, ”red heads’, and I think Black Africans also used to refer to us as the red men, rather than White. I’ve also heard that in the west, the historical preference for pale skin came from the same basis in class. The peasants and rude mechanicals got tanned through working out doors. Therefor the middle classes and leisured aristocracy showed off their status by having pale skin. This only changed so that tans became fashionable in the 1920s when the western rich and famous started going to the south of France.
Class, however, is only one aspect of the story here. Certainly the global influence of the west has led some other races to adopt White ideals of beauty. Back in the 1980s I can remember reading an article somewhere that said that some Japanese women were having cosmetic surgery so that their eyes appeared round, like westerners. And there is a problem in that some Blacks use skin-lighteners to make themselves paler. These are terrible, as they work by destroying the upper layer of the skin to reveal the lighter flesh underneath. There was a nasty incident reported in Private Eye’s ‘Funny Old World’ column of a Ghanaian boxer, who’d been using these creams. Part of his skin peeled away after he was struck by his opponent. Akala, the Black British writer and activists, describes Black Brits using these creams in one of his books. However, this doesn’t alter the fact that there is clearly another side to the argument and that some extra-European peoples had paleness as their beauty standard long before contact with Europeans.
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