Posted: Fri 20 May 2005 16:27 Post subject: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
I recently engaged in a conversation with one of the instructors at my college. The following is taken from a series of e-mail correspondance we have been having:
Quote:
Hi, Joel:
I've been doing some research. Several peoples in South Africa, the Xhosa, the Bushmen (also called San or Kung) are an ancient people who used to be spread widely in Africa, but now are located mostly in South Africa and Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia. They may be light (like Nelson Mandela), varying colors. See the posting below. As you see from her posting, this is not a result of European or North Africa contact. I think skin color is a lot more complicated that most people know.
There's variability among people who've lived in southern Africa depending on how far away from the Equator people have lived.
We have a book call "Nisa," which is about a Dobe Kung or Khosan woman from southern Africa. They are light skinned, just as the person who posted on thumperscorner.com indicated. There does not appear to be evidence that the lighter skin color comes from north African, European or Middle Eastern contact. Coloureds in south Africa are mixed, but Xhosa are not coloured.
We have a book called "Mapping Human History," by Steve Olson. He writes that the Bushmen's skin color ranges from reddish brown to yellow.
As I might have mentioned in that thread, Steve Olson's Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) is one the best popularizations of recent findings. As far as I can tell, it contains only one serious error of fact, and that has nothing to do with this topic.
So some Africans are light-complexioned without any admixtures?
Sure, if by "light-complexioned" you mean the beige skin tone of the Khoisan. The albino-like pink skin tone of the northern European is world unique. Actually, both the very dark brown skin tone of the Bantu-speaking peoples and the pink skin tone of the northern Europeans seem both to be recent adaptations consequent to the invention of agriculture. For details, see The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone.
So some Africans are light-complexioned without any admixtures?
Sure, if by "light-complexioned" you mean the beige skin tone of the Khoisan. The albino-like pink skin tone of the northern European is world unique. Actually, both the very dark brown skin tone of the Bantu-speaking peoples and the pink skin tone of the northern Europeans seem both to be recent adaptations consequent to the invention of agriculture. For details, see The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone.
Where I live there's a growing population of ethiopians and eritreans. I once met a person from erirtea, he and his family were all light skinned, they had long curly hair and thin lips and nose. Not the typical features that we associate with africans. By looking at them, I thought they were arabs but when I asked he simply stated that he was black and not mixed. So my question is are east africans more closesly related to middle easterners than they are to west africans? Because the skin tone and hair look much different.
are east africans more closesly related to middle easterners than they are to west africans?
Yes, I suppose you could say that. The beige-colored Ethiopians and Khosian are the last surviving remnants of the original pre-agricultural people of Africa from whom all the rest of us descend.
Some of them migrated east into Asia and eventually became the Arabs (and Melanesians, Chinese, Native Americans, Europeans, Australian Aborigines, Polynesians and everyone else on earth outside of Africa).
Others of the original people migrated west and eventually became the very dark people whom we think of as "black" Africans. These Bantu-speaking people then invented agriculture and spread back eastwards and southwards throughout Africa, driving the Ethiopians and Khoisan (their distant ancestors and ours) nearly to extinction.
Posted: Mon 08 Aug 2005 23:25 Post subject: What is "light-skinned"?
I believe Joel was seeking a reply to a person who has an agenda of trying to denigrate a "mixed" or non-black identity in those the "black" elites usually liike to claim. Nelson Mandela - "light-skinned"? Come on! I have often seen the phrase "light-skinned" used to describe everyone from the fairest "tarbrushed" Nordic white to people who look totally Negroid in phenotype and color. The agenda seems to be to promote the "one drop rule" via the myth that "blacks" come in all colors.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Mon 08 Aug 2005 23:37 Post subject: Re: What is "light-skinned"?
Powell wrote:
I believe Joel was seeking a reply to a person who has an agenda of trying to denigrate a "mixed" or non-black identity in those the "black" elites usually liike to claim. Nelson Mandela - "light-skinned"? Come on! I have often seen the phrase "light-skinned" used to describe everyone from the fairest "tarbrushed" Nordic white to people who look totally Negroid in phenotype and color. The agenda seems to be to promote the "one drop rule" via the myth that "blacks" come in all colors.
Hi,
Regardless of skin color, Koisan and Bantu peoples seems two different races to me, as different as East Africans, Hindues and Australian Aborigines.
I agree that the term light skinned can have different meanings to different people. But when most people use the term, we're reffering to people who are a yellow complexion. I don't think the term is used to denigrate a mixed or non-black identity, if you're reffering to people who are not mixed. Nor does it mean that blacks come in all colors, it just implies that you can be fully african and still be light skinned.Africans have more genetic diversity compared to the rest
of the world population. According to research, this is because H.sapiens originated from african and a small group migrated out of it. Thus, the African population hadmore time to produce more genetic diversity than the rest. You can't argue with scientific fact
Where I live there's a growing population of ethiopians and eritreans. I once met a person from erirtea, he and his family were all light skinned, they had long curly hair and thin lips and nose. Not the typical features that we associate with africans. By looking at them, I thought they were arabs but when I asked he simply stated that he was black and not mixed. So my question is are east africans more closesly related to middle easterners than they are to west africans? Because the skin tone and hair look much different.
I live in an area with a high concentration of people from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea and for the most part, they are very different in appearance from African Americans and the other Africans (mostly from West Africa) I come across. Some, especially Eritreans, look like Arabs to me or even dark East Indians. Since many of them speak Semitic languages, I assume there must have been some mixing between peoples who lived in those regions and the areas around Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Here's some information from the web site Color Q (keeping with the multicultural ideological orientation of the site, they ignore the role of Arabs as imperialists and colonialists in some of these parts of Africa, but this is still a good source of information):
I don't even know if my grandfather was Arab or black. He had grey eyes. People here are so mixed you can't really tell them apart anymore. Arabs have been crossing over from the Red Sea and intermarrying with us for ages.
Somali-speaker from Djibouti, 20, 1994
Many people from East Africa look more like West Asians and South Asians. Non-Africans often assume I am from India. As with other Eritreans and Ethiopians, I am probably part-Arab.
Eritrean man, 2000
In school, we have to learn Swahili, which is the lingua franca of East Africa. Swahili and my mother tongue Kikuyu are not mutually communicable. Swahili is more like Arabic as far as vocabulary is concerned. Kikuyu from Kenya, 2000 (Kikuyu, like Swahili, is also a Bantu language) The people from the region of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia are different from the rest of Africa. They are more Arab in appearance. Even their music is different.
Ugandan, 2000
Arab immigration from Southwest Asia into East Africa has been ongoing since pre-Islamic times. Today, pre-modern Arab genetic infusion can be found in Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, as well as Swahili settlements on the coasts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. Some East Africans of Arab-black descent still maintain family ties in Asia. These are descended from relatively recent immigrants and have contact with relatives in Arab countries. Many Swahili have fairly recent Omani ancestors and have used this link to migrate to well-paid posts in Oman.1
Other Afro-Arab mixed East Africans cannot name individual Arab ancestors because the racial mixing was introduced hundreds, and even thousands of years ago. A 1st century B.C. Greek source Periplus of the Erythraen Sea reports large ships going to the East African coast manned by "Arab captains and agents who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language." 2
The Arab facial features which occur in Ethiopia and Eritrea's black populations also testify to Arab-black intermarriage prior to the advent of Islam. At the beginning of the 5th century B.C., Sabaen (south Arabian) armies settled in the Ethiopian highlands.3 The resulting intermingling of Sabaen and Ethiopian cultures produced the Axum kingdom, which became a powerful empire. 4 The term Abyssinia itself is taken from the Habashan, a powerful southwestern Arabian family which settled in Ethiopia.5
Wars in Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries sent a large influx of Arab refugees from Arabia and the Persian Gulf to African coastal cities of Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.6 Out of this intermingling of Arabs and black Africans was born the Swahili - a Bantu-based Arabized culture. By the 10th century, Arabs were living as far south as Sofala.7 Immigrants from Yemen and Hadramaut came to East Africa in the 13th and 14th century.8 ibn Battuta, who visited the Swahili coast in 1331 CE, wrote of Mogadishu, then a Swahili town, that Swahili businessmen each had personal ties with Asian merchants, whom they entertained and accommodated in their own houses.9
Until the 19th century, Arabs tended to integrate into the local culture and had relatively little impact on local African traditions.10 But some new imports from Arab culture became central to East African life. Apparently, East Africans were using Arabic script at least by the 9th century. According to Chinese official records of the Zenjistan ambassadors in 9th century China, (Persian Zenj from Arabic Zanj for the people of the East African coast) the Zenjistan language was "like Arabic".11 Quite likely, when asked by the Chinese to write some words, the East African ambassadors wrote in Arabic script.12
The Swahili language is Bantu with a high proportion of Arab loan words.13 The word "Swahili" itself is derived from the Arabic word for "coast". The Swahilis wrote their language in Arabic script for centuries before switching to the Roman script recently.14
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Sultans of Omani descent built Zanzibar City.15 (now part of Tanzania) Between 1880 and 1950, Immigrants from Arabia, from Aden and Hadramaut in particular, flocked to East Africa.16 These newcomers brought with them changes in fashion, architectural styles and vocabulary.17 Hadrahmi merchants began to dominate the Swahili trade with southern Arabia.18 Other Arabs of lower economic classes worked in Zanzibar City and Mombasa as hawkers, coffee sellers and unskilled laborers.19 Many died in the Zanzibar revolution of 1964, and the remaining have returned to Oman.20
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 13:19 Post subject: Re: What is "light-skinned"?
Powell wrote:
I believe Joel was seeking a reply to a person who has an agenda of trying to denigrate a "mixed" or non-black identity in those the "black" elites usually liike to claim. Nelson Mandela - "light-skinned"? Come on! I have often seen the phrase "light-skinned" used to describe everyone from the fairest "tarbrushed" Nordic white to people who look totally Negroid in phenotype and color. The agenda seems to be to promote the "one drop rule" via the myth that "blacks" come in all colors.
I think Joel meant just what he said in the question... I don't think he would be shy about stating that question of an 'agenda' I think the conversation was straight forward...
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 13:44 Post subject: Re: What is "light-skinned"?
gemini072 wrote:
I think Joel meant just what he said in the question... I don't think he would be shy about stating that question of an 'agenda' I think the conversation was straight forward...
This is very true!
Every African that I have talked to has said that there are plenty of light skinned unmixed Africans on the Continent! This statement does not sound like a so call ODR but a belief that's all over the region (I've heard plenty of people repeat this). If I recall correctly, it is the Fulani or Hausa-Fulani tribe that many people piont out as unmixed, naturally light skin (well SOME members), and light eye colors as proof of the natural variation amongst people of West African descent!
Also, most Africans I have talked to have said they do NOT believe that a Black/White person is soley Black. However again they DO believe that there are TONS of "pure" Black people that are the same color or lighter than mixed raced people such as the coloreds(sp).
Last edited by girlfromthenc on Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:07; edited 2 times in total
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:02 Post subject: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
Pure black and pure African are not necessarily the same thing.
Since Africa is a continent, many Africans can be unmixed Africans-all of their ancestry is derived from the continent of Africa-and have non-Bantu African or non-Negroid ancestry.
The berbers are indigenous Africans. They-for the most part-do not look like your Average Yoruba person; they tend to look like your average Arab or even Southern European. The same for the nomadic Tuareg people of Mali and the Sahara. The Copts of Egypt claim they are the true descendants of the Pharoahs. They are not particularly black looking either, despite having roots within the continent of Africa.
There has been mixing among these various indigenous African peoples who are phentypically different from one another for years. Also, there has been mixing of indigenous Africans with people from outside the continent for years.
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:13 Post subject: Re: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
G-Man wrote:
There has been mixing among these various indigenous African peoples who are phentypically different from one another for years.
Yes. As BlackHaze mentioned, there is more genetic (and, to a slightly lesser extent, linguistic) diversity in the triangle formed by Casablanca, Cairo, and Capetown than across the rest of the world combined.
To some extent, the so-called "Negroid" phenotype is a culturally imposed optical illusion. As I wrote (on another topic) in H-South:
"Racial" identity is unrelated to genetics. There are no biological races (varieties, sub-species) among _H. sapiens_ and never have been. Consider "Blacks", for instance. The traits that Americans think of as "Negroid" (dark brown skin tone, kinky hair, steatopygia, broad nose, prognathism, thick lips) vary independently around the globe. The people with the darkest skin are not those with the kinkiest hair, and neither of those two groups are the ones with the widest noses, etc. Every physical feature varies regionally independently of any other physical feature. The only reason that Americans fixate on a particular grouping of features (and call this grouping "Negroid") is because, by coincidence, this particular grouping of features just happened to be common among the folks who were captured and sold in the transatlantic slave trade.
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:17 Post subject: Re: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
G-Man wrote:
Pure black and pure African are not necessarily the same thing.
This statement IS true!
However the people that I talked to believe that Sub-Sahara Africans were the orginal/"real" Africans all over Africa before being pushed out or either mixed in with conquering Islamic fundamentalist (non-Black and probably the desecendants of Romans and Greeks) in Northern and East Africa. So to them (and most people actually) Black= African. Most Non-Black majority countries in Africa, such as those in Northern Africa, are considered part of the Middle East.
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:27 Post subject: Re: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
girlfromthenc wrote:
However the people that I talked to believe that Sub-Sahara Africans were the orginal/"real" Africans all over Africa before being pushed out or either mixed in with conquering Islamic fundamentalist (non-Black and probably the desecendants of Romans and Greeks) in Northern and East Africa.
But this is simply not accurate. My statement above (about genetic diversity) would still apply even if I adjusted the triangle to encompass only sub-Saharan Africa. What most Americans think of as "original/real" Africans are merely the descendants of the Bantu-speaking farmers who expanded over sub-Saharan Africa about 5 kya, driving the prior inhabitants into isolated enclaves.
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:34 Post subject: Re: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
girlfromthenc wrote:
G-Man wrote:
Pure black and pure African are not necessarily the same thing.
This statement IS true!
However the people that I talked to believe that Sub-Sahara Africans were the orginal/"real" Africans all over Africa before being pushed out or either mixed in with conquering Islamic fundamentalist (non-Black and probably the desecendants of Romans and Greeks) in Northern and East Africa. So to them (and most people actually) Black= African. Most Non-Black majority countries in Africa, such as those in Northern Africa, are considered part of the Middle East.
The Arabs were the first imperialists in Africa as quiet as that's kept. But "original" and "real" Africans are not exclusively sub-Saharan Africans or Negroid Africans. Many "Arabs" in places like Morrocco, Algeria, and Libya, are really Arabized Berbers. Even many Nubians in Egypt have been Arabized and see themselves as part of the Middle East.
Additionally, many of today's sub-Saharan peoples displaced earlier (more original?) peoples who are genetically distinct from them. The Khoi and San peoples of Southern Africa were driven from their lands by invading Bantu-speaking peoples from the north. This was long before the Dutch landed in present day South Africa.
Jared Diamond has a chapter in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, on how Africa became black.
Posted: Tue 09 Aug 2005 14:39 Post subject: Re: A Question on the Indigenous people of Sub Saharan Africa?
G-Man wrote:
Pure black and pure African are not necessarily the same thing.
Since Africa is a continent, many Africans can be unmixed Africans-all of their ancestry is derived from the continent of Africa-and have non-Bantu African or non-Negroid ancestry.
The berbers are indigenous Africans. They-for the most part-do not look like your Average Yoruba person; they tend to look like your average Arab or even Southern European. The same for the nomadic Tuareg people of Mali and the Sahara. The Copts of Egypt claim they are the true descendants of the Pharoahs. They are not particularly black looking either, despite having roots within the continent of Africa.
There has been mixing among these various indigenous African peoples who are phentypically different from one another for years. Also, there has been mixing of indigenous Africans with people from outside the continent for years.
Good points G-Man, But I would also say that because most people have been taught that 'Black-Africans' are Negro or Negroid. That anything outside of that must be mixed or European or something else. the racial concepts being 'naturally' wrong, would automatically put say the Fulani with more or less 'non-negroid' features as non-Black.
Most of the time when you hear a description of North Africa it's said to populated by 'whites'
I've heard more than one statement that say Blacks Black-Africans are very dark skinned, tightly curled hair, wide noses, very thick lips. Period. And that Whites come in all colors, and a variety of hair textures and facial features. It's my opinion that it's just a way of claiming history/past civilizations as white. Egypt a 'Black' people...oh my. the movie the 10 Commandments is ethnically unnatural to what I see in Egyptian artwork. How is it that a British person can claim 'the Arabian Nights' as a part of their heritage. Many people have a problem with the idea that we all came out of Africa, so make these people non-Black and it might be easier to deal with.
are east africans more closesly related to middle easterners than they are to west africans?
Yes, I suppose you could say that. The beige-colored Ethiopians and Khosian are the last surviving remnants of the original pre-agricultural people of Africa from whom all the rest of us descend.
Some of them migrated east into Asia and eventually became the Arabs (and Melanesians, Chinese, Native Americans, Europeans, Australian Aborigines, Polynesians and everyone else on earth outside of Africa).
Others of the original people migrated west and eventually became the very dark people whom we think of as "black" Africans. These Bantu-speaking people then invented agriculture and spread back eastwards and southwards throughout Africa, driving the Ethiopians and Khoisan (their distant ancestors and ours) nearly to extinction.
Ethiopians are definitely descendants of those people, but they are mixed with other populations as well.
are east africans more closesly related to middle easterners than they are to west africans?
Yes, I suppose you could say that. The beige-colored Ethiopians and Khosian are the last surviving remnants of the original pre-agricultural people of Africa from whom all the rest of us descend.
Some of them migrated east into Asia and eventually became the Arabs (and Melanesians, Chinese, Native Americans, Europeans, Australian Aborigines, Polynesians and everyone else on earth outside of Africa).
Others of the original people migrated west and eventually became the very dark people whom we think of as "black" Africans. These Bantu-speaking people then invented agriculture and spread back eastwards and southwards throughout Africa, driving the Ethiopians and Khoisan (their distant ancestors and ours) nearly to extinction.
You are COMPLETELY off. About the Ethiopians anyways. Most Ethiopians are dark skinned and belong to Cushitic groups. The original pre-historic human beings were racially and linguistically related to the Khoi-San peoples of southern Africa and Tanzania (Sandawe and Hadza ). The Bantu never drove Ethiopians to extinction either, you don't find Bantu groups (some Nilote groups though ) in Ethiopia or Eritrea. The Bantu did displace the indiginous Khoi-San of southern Africa though. The only Ethiopians who have Middle Eastern ancestry, by the way, are the Amhara and Tigray (or 'Habesha').
-This is the Ethiopian dictator Haile Mengistu Mariam. He was Amhara and looked like a typical Cushite because the Sabaen migrants that the Habesha are descended from mixed with indiginous Cushites.
Modern day East Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania ) is predominated by Bantu, Nilotic and Cushitic peoples. The Bantu originated in the eastern Nigeria/Cameroonian region 4000 years ago before they started expanding into southern, central and east Africa. Before then, southern and eastern Africa was inhabited by the Khoi-San peoples . Bantu, Nilotic and Cushitic groups (the latter two orginated in Sudan and southern Ethiopia ) didn't exist in pre-hisoric times, only 'Capoid' (Khoi-San) peoples.
African Eve lived about 150 000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia or Tanzania. The Sandawe (Khoi-San group), Burunge, Gorowaa and Datog people of Tanzania have the world's oldest dna. Many White supremacists like to claim the Khoi-San aren't Black. The White South Africans are the first ones to claim this during apartheid so as to justify their oppression of Bantu speaking Black South Africans (they didn't look at them as indiginous people and claimed they had more of a right to that land then us ). Many White supremacists also claim the original people were CAUCASIAN or that modern racial phenotypes didn't exist then, this is also false because these were anatomically modern human beings we could reproduce with, were they baldheaded with no skin(phenotype is only skin, hair and features)? The ones who migrated had to adapt to new EurAsian environments.
-This Khoi-San boy of the Kalahari is clearly a Black child
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