Race and Culture; Myth and Reality.1

Kwesi Kwaa Prah

Cape Town

Keynote Address, presented to the Conference on; Race, Identity and Globalization in Southern Africa and Beyond. Organized by GRER Laboratory and the CREA Laboratory (France) and the University of Botswana, Gaborone – Botswana. 22-23 February 2019.
Introduction
Over the past two centuries, few myths in the history of humanity have been as maleficent in relations between societies and peoples as the myth of race. People have marched off to wars, undertaken genocidal campaigns, ethnic cleansing, razzias and pogroms, enslaved others and installed caste-like structures to exploit labour producers, on the basis of the illusion of race. Philosophically or ideologically, it is associated with the political right, close and inherent to fascism. While much has been experienced and, hopefully, learnt in the last century about the dangers of the glorification of this myth, there is little indication that humanity has as yet abandoned attachment to the myth of race. Harrison notes that, “in quite a few instances they appear to be escalating. All over the world, we observe flagrant forms of racism, including the growth of those human rights offences called ‘hate crimes’, ‘crimes against humanity’ and, ‘state racism.”2 Anti-Semitism and Anti-Black attitudes and crimes continue unabated. Closely related to these are xenophobic practices, communal violence, religious intolerance and intolerances towards LGBTs. We have in Southern Africa history replete with the experience of institutionalized racism; Apartheid and its historically antecedent racism. It was brought to a formal end in the last decade of the 20th century. I add my voice in exposing the bankruptcy of the race idea but would argue that culture is instructively a different kettle of fish, but one that also needs to be treated with caution, in as far as its distorted acknowledgement or intolerant political mobilization and application can be an unconscionable source of conflict between peoples.
We live today, in a world which is steadily globalizing. This is the inexorable process of integration of national or local economies into a global order through procedures of international trade, investment, capital movement, fiscal regimes, labour migration, demographic dynamics and technological unification. The technologies of the era, IT and social media have
1 This paper is a revised version of an earlier paper: Prah, K.K., (2002). Race and Culture; Myth and Reality. Keynote Address: Workshop on “Discourses on Difference and Oppression”, University of Venda, 20th – 22nd July 2000. In, Norman Duncan, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Murray Hofmeyr, Tamara Shefer, Felix Malunga, Mashudu Mashige (eds). (2002). Discourses on Difference and Oppression. Book Series No. 24. CASAS. Cape Town.
2 Harrison, F V. (2000) Subverting the Cultural Logics of Marked and Unmarked Racisms in the Global Era. University of Tennessee. Knoxville. Mimeo.
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authenticated the reality of a globalizing world. It is a process which is leading to the emergence of an increasingly integrated global market-place. Globalization has in practice tended to take economic decision-making away from local control as the integration process moves forward. What is often not readily appreciated in discussions about globalization is that, it is not all new. It is not a phenomenon which has appeared in the last few decades. The roots of globalization can be traced to the economic, political and cultural expansion of the West; to the mercantilist period and what is described in Western scholarship as the age of discovery in the 16th century. Since then slowly by degrees, a world economy has been in the making. Globalization is a historical process, how we shape and make the process are decisions which humanity must on an on-going basis take. In the process the local comes into increasing relation to the international, the global. Respect for the democratic integrity and the rights of the local is important. Integration should not mean the diminution of rights and decision-making in all matters affecting local communities. Integration does not assume assimilation, loss of roots, identity, cultural absorption by hegemonic interests. It means more prominently co-existence, tolerance, the sharing of cultural space; in short, an enlightened multiculturalism permitting numerous groups and identities to co-exist in equality. Wherever two or more cultures are in long and extended contact there is cultural interpenetration, there is some assimilation on both sides, but with the dominant culture bringing more of the population elements of the weaker culture within its cultural fold.
Identity includes social and biological features, religious beliefs and practices, customary habits, education and bildung, values and expressions that provide character to a person or group. It is the nexus of who you think you are and what others think of you. It plays out socially in our social relations and interactions. It varies as we move from one social situation to the other, involving role-play in differing contexts and social circumstances. These roles are points at which different identities are performed. Thus, a person may go through a score of identities in a day. Some identities have more societal significance than others. Identity is almost entirely a cultural reference point. Biological attributes are culturally inert. In themselves they do not contribute to the making of culture or benefiting from culture. However, gendered, racialized, and structured on an economy of growing inequality and impoverishment of mass society, they constitute constraints on the ability of the society to optimize its productive capacity and human capital. In effect, identity is bio-socially determined, meaning that identity is both genetically pre-defined and socially constructed.
Human communities use selected criteria to define in and out-group members, and thereby define collectively shared interests of both material and non-material kinds, on the bases of perceived mutual interests. Notions of the local and the exotic, outsider and insider, kin and stranger, friend or foe, civilized person and barbarian, Jew and Gentile, native and alien, have historically undergirded human conceptions of community and shared interest. Oftentimes, such criteria have economic, political, and social, in short cultural bases; at other times they have been drawn from physical characteristics which are given purported sociological implications. At still other times, these two types of criteria are mixed. Of these two types of criteria, obviously physical differences, i.e. biological features, because of their open visibility are crudely easy to maintain in order to separate in and out-group members. Sometimes cultural characteristics are given expression as external and recognizable adornment ranging from surgically created “tribal”
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markings (scarification and cicatrization), tattoos, appellations or routinized habits of identification so that, for example a Sikh who in all physical-biological respects is no different from a Hindu, can be picked out by reason of the use of a turban (or the bearing of the name Singh). A Muslim Pakistani cannot be physically differentiated from a Hindu Indian, but for clothes and headgear they may utilize or not utilize. Perhaps most confusing and societally hazardous are those cases in which culture is, as it were, biologized; where ethnicity is racialized; those cases in which cultural attributes are ostensibly explained on the bases of biological features or biological features equated with cultural characteristics. Human biological distinctions have no intrinsic bearing whatsoever on cultural attributes and behaviour. Environment relates to culture, but biological constitution does not relate to culture. When the statement is made, as was the case by a radio-caller, that; “I am one of those formerly classified as white, as you can hear”, what the caller is saying is that, “white English-speaking South Africans speak like me”; an attempt is being made to establish parallelism between biology and culture.3 This situation is a classic feature of institutionally racialized societies; where in this case, biologically endowed physical features, skin colour, eye colour and hair texture are ostensibly given cultural meaning and societal implications. Here class and colour coincide. Sometimes, as it is in the case of Jews in Western society, there are no biological/physical markers for Jews, no differences between Jews and other Westerners, so racists make them up and caricature facial features to represent racist stereotypes for Jews.
It is possible to argue that, where an ethno-cultural group occupies, more or less, a specific stratified position(s) in a given class structure, class and ethnic expression, appearing as conflict, tensions and fault lines tend to manifest, as the one reality assumes the sociological contours of the other, with one reinforcing the other. In other words where ethnicity and class are parallel within a given state, we have potentially a recipe for conflict. Thus, in a racialized class structure the struggle to deracialize society becomes at the same time an attempt to reconfigure class hierarchies. Ethnicities coexist best where they tend to be evenly distributed horizontally across the spectrum of the class structure. Under such circumstances, the poor can be found amongst all ethnic groups, and so too the rich. It also appears that wherever a social or religious minority tries to improve its conditions of existence and to attain the same social standing as the rest of larger society, it encounters resistance from the great majority and arouses their animosity.4 The current (9.2.2019) protests in Venezuela tell the story of Venezuela in black and white. The demonstrations display amongst other things the expression of the interests of the whiter better resourced Venezuelans against their socio-economic challenge by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor.

(Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as “white.”)5What is this concept which has been the source of so much conflict and blood-letting? What meanings are attached to this idea of race? Who are its ideologues?

3 Tim Modise Show/ SABC Radio, 9th August 2000
4 Wendt, H., It Began in Babel. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. 1961. P.406.
5 Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor. Greg Palast. In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup. Truthout. Feb 8, 2019.
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In what sort of social context has much of racist theory arisen? What connection, if any, does the idea of race have with the culture concept, or the concept of ethnicity? How does it relate to African realities, particularly in Southern Africa?
The Myth of Race
The term race and much of its semantic elaborations have historically been largely a product of the Western mind. The meaning of the notion varies greatly. This is precisely because of its scientifically tenuous and vague character. It is bandied about with abandon, by all and sundry, on often the basis of crude popular understandings. It has been observed that: “The word race is rarely used in the modern, non-human evolutionary literature because its meaning is so ambiguous. When it is used, it is generally used as a synonym for subspecies, but this concept also has no precise definition.”6
The origin of the term is difficult to pin down. Clearly it entered European languages fairly late in history.7 It is first observed in English and French in the 16th century and in German only during the 18th century. In Joseph Richter’s authoritative Grammatisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 1791, the word is spelt rasze. This may suggest its origin from the Italian razza. It is speculated that it probably entered Italian language from Hebrew or Arabic râs, head, origin.8 Huxley and Haddon indicate that it was originally used to signify descendants of a single person or couple, as is the case in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1570 edition, the first known occurrence in English); the race of Abraham. However, not too long afterwards the term steadily acquired an ambiguous usage.9 The Oxford English Dictionary defines race as “any of the great divisions of mankind with certain inherited physical characteristics in common (e.g. colour of skin and hair, shape of eyes and nose). A number of people related by common descent. A genus, species, breed, or variety of animals or plants; the race or the human race, ….”.10 Such biological diversities invested with invented behavioural qualities imprison the logic of racists in a world of pseudo-scientific falsehood and make-believe. Prejudice is made to sound scientific and fictive mythologies are provided sham historicity.
The bottom line is that there is only one human race. Exteriorized biological features all vary on a continuum. We currently know that the genetic material responsible for the characteristics that are generally viewed as racial, such as hair texture and skin colour, form less than half of one-percent of our genetic make-up and has no cultural or behavioural implications. The concept of race outside the bare crudities of biology is, more importantly, a social construct which evidentially and historically is used to define power relations, economic and social privilege. Thus

6 Templeton, A. R. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective. American Anthropologist. 100(3), 1998. P.632. The author adds that; “The traditional meaning of a subspecies is that of a geographically circumscribed, genetically differentiated population. The problem with this definition from an evolutionary genetic perspective is that many traits and their underlying polymorphic genes show independent patterns of geographical variation. As a result, some combination of characters will distinguish virtually every population from all others. There is no clear limit to the number of races that can be recognized under this concept, and indeed this notion of sub-species quickly becomes indistinguishable from that of a local population.”
7 Huxley, J. S. & Haddon, A. C., We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems. Jonathan Cape. London. 1936. P18.
8 Huxley and Haddon. Ibid.
9 Huxley & Haddon. Ibid. P.19.
10 Huxley and Haddon. Ibid.
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many blacks and whites in the US South, Brazil or Apartheid South Africa would immediately acknowledge its existence, not primarily because of the differing hair textures and colour which they see every day around them, but because of the political, economic and social implications these biological features imply in social life. Fatness and thinness, tallness and shortness have no socio-economic and political implications (except for, possibly, enrolment in the armed forces). Although, like skin colour, they are visible to the eye, they have no significance and are politically and economically pointless. But skin colour and hair texture have historically been developed as instruments for socio-economic measurement and categorization, instruments for the reward of power and privilege. A good example was the “pencil test” in Apartheid South Africa, where whether a pencil stayed in one’s hair without falling out determined, not only your “race” category, but also even more importantly social and economic privileges. Biko observed that; “there is no doubt that the colour question in South African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons. The leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between black and whites so that the whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free to give moral justification for the obvious exploitation that pricked even the hardest of white consciences. However, tradition has it that whenever a group of white people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and to accept it as normal that it alone is entitled to privilege. In order to believe this seriously, it needs to convince itself of all the arguments that support that lie. It is not surprising, therefore, that in South Africa, after generations of exploitation, white people on the whole have to come to believe in the inferiority of the black man, so much so that while the race problem started as an offshoot of the economic greed exhibited by white people, it has now become a serious problem on its own. White people now despise black people, not because they need to reinforce their attitude and so justify their position of privilege but simply because they actually believe that black is inferior and bad. This is the basis upon which whites are working in South Africa, and it is what makes South African society racist.”11
Another striking example of the social construction of race is provided by the contrast between what has been practice in South Africa and North America. In South Africa, under Apartheid, the offspring of an African and a white person (regarded as a product of an illicit relationship) was classified differently from either parent (i.e. as Coloured), and in the socio-economic order and societal hierarchy of Apartheid enjoyed privileges which were less than the white parent, but better than the black parent. In North America what Marvin Harris calls the hypodescent principle applies: “In the United States, all persons with any demonstrable degree of Negro parentage, visible or not, fall into the subordinate caste”.12 In Brazil the colour hierarchy operates as a continuum in which levels of societal preferences shade into different colour tones.13 The “coloured” category as a separate group, as used in Southern Africa as a social construct does not exist in the United States or Brazil, only the categories of blacks and whites.
11 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. London. Pp. 88-89.
12 Harris, M. Patterns of Race in the Americas. Greenwood Press. Connecticut. 1964/1980 edition. P.37. See also; Harris, M. & Kottak, C (1963) The Structural Significance of Brazilian Race Concepts. Sociologia, 25, 203-209.
13 See, Glenn, E.N. Shades of Difference: Why Skin Colour Matters. Stanford University Press. Stanford. 2009. P.7.
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Years ago, Mason announced his discomfiture with the race concept and cautioned that: “Let us use the word ‘race’ sparingly because of its implications, but when we do use it let us confine it to meaning peoples who are biologically distinguishable”.14 Given the relentless racism of our times, to the conscientious cynic, this may sound like “warning alcoholics about the dangers of the excessive consumption of alcohol.” By suggesting that race is applicable to “peoples who are biologically distinguishable” Mason endorses the recognition of external biological attributes as the defining features of a race. He acknowledges the “street-level” understanding of the word and implicitly denies the point that there is only one human race. He nevertheless, elsewhere opens up his definition. He writes that; “it is used sometimes to describe something as broad as the human race; poets in the eighteenth century used to write about the feathered race”.15 Poets and other creative writers have used the term freely with rarely any pejorative connotation. These difficulties are reflected in the numerous attempts to classify so-called human races.
Racial classifications of race theoreticians have been based on a mix of features, like skin colour, hair colour and texture, the shape and size of the body, the shape and size of the skull, the colour of the eyes, the shape of the nose etc. Linnaeus, the father of such classificatory systems identified four “races”. Blumenbach found five, while Buffon identified six. Peschel favoured a figure of seven and Agassiz was convinced about the correctness of eight types. Haeckel identified twelve, and Morton classified twenty-two, while Crawford came up with sixty. Other still more farcical figures on so-called types of human races have been given.16 Till today, for the wide public there remains an appalling confusion between the notions of race, culture and nation. We can say with little fear of contradiction that “race talk” glorifies ignorance and there continues over decades to be an inexcusable manifestation of sloppy and loose thinking on the part of some writers and commentators.17
In our times, colour consciousness has been particularly noticeable in societies where colonialism, especially settler-colonialism and slavery, have been part of the history of the
14 Mason, P. Common Sense About Race. Common Sense Series, No.7. Victor Gollancz. London. 1961. P.15.
15 Mason, P. Ibid. P12.
16 This numbers game is closely allied to the ambiguity of meaning of the concept; a confusion which is captured in Lord Raglan’s (Raglan, Lord, The Riddle of Race. The Listener. London. 3 October 1934) reference to The Riddle of Race. Ashley Montagu (Montagu, A. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press. 1942), described it as Man’s Most Dangerous Myth. For Barzun, (Barzun, J. Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, New York: Harcourt Brace. 1937) the race idea is a “modern superstition”. As far back as 1936, Huxley and Haddon (1936:107) wrote that “the word ‘race’, as applied scientifically to human groupings, has lost any sharpness of meaning. To-day it is hardly definable in scientific terms, except as an abstract concept”. They went on to say that there continues to be loose conjecture on the subject.
17 See, Huxley & Haddon. Ibid. 1936. A good example of the confusion and ambiguity of meaning is noticeable in a book; The Menace of Colour, written by Professor J.W. Gregory in 1925. The author, with considerable claims to authority, attempted to define race and related terms: “A few terms are explained by the following definitions: – Negro – a member of the Negro Race. In the chapter on the United States the term is used for any person with a slight and sometimes even imperceptible admixture of Negro blood. Coloured, or Person of Colour – a member of the darker sections of mankind, viz. Negro, Mongolian and Dark Caucasian. A ‘coloured person’ is in some places of mixed blood. Race, in reference to mankind – one of the primary divisions of the human family. Hybrid – the offspring of members of distinct species, or in mankind of full-blooded members of two distinct races. A Mulatto, e.g. as strictly defined, is a hybrid, being a half-caste of Negro and White Caucasian. A mongrel is the offspring of different varieties or half-breeds” Gregory, J. W. The Menace of Colour. Seeley, Service & Co. London. 1925. Preface. This forest of obnoxious terminology is typical of the confusion about the race concept.
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peoples. Colour consciousness on the part of the oppressed is neither instinctual nor volitional. It is a condition forced by circumstances on the oppressed. In the Western Hemisphere and Southern Africa this phenomenon has in the past been especially pronounced. To different degrees, “Colourism”, the preference for lighter skin tones and the attendant hierarchies can today be found in the make-up of many societies across the world. Shades of skin colour are used as markers for hierarchy and status in the social order. The lighter and closer to the whites, the higher the social status, “nearer my God to thee”; so that in the parlance of North American slavocracy, the “house Nigger” tended to be lighter than the “field Nigger” and tended to enjoy privileges which the “field Nigger” did not enjoy. These conditions have influenced the mentality of the oppressed. Racial segregation and oppression have a way of affecting the psychology of the oppressed. A syndrome of self-hatred and rejection of people like oneself sets in. In such societies, from North America and South America to South Africa and the rest of Africa and Asia to varying degrees, the victims of colonial racism amongst themselves have tended to prefer liaisons with people with lighter skin colour. Currently, there is a rage among black women about wearing long hair. Hair straightening continues. People go to extraordinary lengths to acquire lighter skin tones. It has been estimated that in Africa the use of skin-lightening creams is very common. 25 percent of women in Bamako/Mali, 35 percent in Pretoria/South Africa, 52 percent in Dakar/Senegal, and 77 percent of female traders in Lagos/Nigeria indulge in skin-lightening.18 In racialized societies where whiteness is at the social apex many of those who after generations of mixing become visibly white, “pass” as “white”.19 Passing happens in both directions of the colour spectrum, but overwhelmingly most of this is in the direction of whiteness; in short power and privilege. This may practically involve cutting ties and relocating away from kinsfolk and friends who may know the person’s roots. In an article by Joy Bennett Kinnon which appeared in the African-American Magazine Ebony, the author reminds the reader that, “the childhood poem that resonated in the 20th century for many African-Americans was not of praise, but of venom. ‘If you’re White, you’re all right. If you’re brown, stick around, but if you’re Black, get back’”. She refers us to the views of the psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, whose assessment is that: “…in American society and European society where Whiteness is held in the greatest esteem, that despite the fact that Blacks very specifically tried very hard – beginning with the Black Consciousness Movement – in their effort to eliminate the colour hang-ups that Black people have themselves, that it does still persist, but not as acutely or severely as it did in years past”.20 In contemporary India, lighter skin colour is held in admiration, while dark skin colour is regarded with contempt or as “low caste”. In many parts of the Arab world colour racism is rife. Not infrequently, Africans are openly cat-called and addressed as “abid” meaning slave. In these societies, whiteness is invoked and utilized to justify privileges which marked off insiders and outsiders on the basis of skin pigmentation. In the settler-colonial societies of Africa, colour has
18 Glenn, E. N. (2009). Consuming Lightness: Segmented Markets and Global Capital in the Skin-Whitening Trade. In, Evelyn Nakano Glenn (ed). Shades of Difference: Why Skin Colour Matters. Stanford University Press. Stanford. P.171.
19 Piper, A. (1992). Passing for White, Passing for Black. Transition. No. 58, Pp. 4-32.
20 Bennett Kinnon, J. Is Skin Colour Still an Issue in Black America? Ebony, April 2000. P.52. The author also presents another view of Alvin Poussaint that, “there is still a tendency to favour lighter skin women”. Poussaint says, “The women on the videos and the foxy ladies on the sitcoms tend to be lighter-skinned. They also tend to have straighter hair. That’s still an advantage in a society where the standards of beauty are connected with looking Caucasian” (Bennett Kinnon 2000: 56).
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been wielded as an instrument to beat Africans into submission. Over the years, some Africans in turn have rhetorically recast colour in negation, as a counterpoint to white racism. For Sartre in the introduction to Senghor’s L’Orphée Noir, it is anti-racist racism. This is part of his critique of Negritude.21 The articulation of race/negro race/black race in the political language of African theorists who have written about Africa, Africans and their future had in earnest emerged in the late 19th century particularly in the work of people like Africanus Horton, Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, Attoh Ahuma, Henry Sylvester Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, O. Faduma, S.M. Molema and Issaka Seme.22 In the course of the 20th century African thinkers came to concentrate conceptually on Pan-Africanism with unity as its central objective. Africans have intellectually weaponized the term “race” or “blackness”, turned it on its head to produce a formulation of a liberatory ideology called Black Consciousness, or Africanism as I prefer to call it. Steve Biko writes that;
… Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their operation – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the “normal” which is white. It is a manifestation of a new realisation that by seeking to run away from themselves and to emulate the white man, blacks are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. Black Consciousness therefore, takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God’s plan in creating black people black. It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life.23
Ultimately, Africanism is not biological i.e. not a skin colour, eye colour or hair texture designation, it is a cultural concept. My argument in the past has been that;
The racial definition of an African is flawed. It is unscientific and hence untenable. No serious mind today would use the race concept in any way except as an instrument for poetic imagery. What l am saying is that no group of people has been ‘pure’ from time immemorial. Notions of purity belong to the language of fascists and the rubbish-bin of science. But before my observations are misunderstood let me take the argument into another direction. Most Africans are black, but not all Africans are black, and not all blacks have African cultural and historical roots. Jews range from blond to black. Another example, Arabs also do. I am not denying the fact that this continent is the cradle of the African and as far as we know today the birthplace of homo sapiens. There are many groups in Africa today which are not African, do not describe themselves as African or wish to be so regarded, peoples whose cultures and histories are linked and derived from extra-African sources. Needless to say, they are full citizens and must
21 Sartre, J-P. Introduction à l’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, de Léopold Sédar Senghor. Paris, PUF, 1948,
22 See, J. Ayo Langley. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa, 1856-1970. Rex Collings. London. 1979.
23 Steve Biko. I write what I like. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. London. 1978. P.49.
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always remain full and equal citizens in all respects to the Africans amongst whom they live …24
This argument needs emphasis in view of the colour/biological fixations of Pan-Negroism. The point is that; “Culture, history, attachment to these and consciousness of identity and not skin colour primarily defines the African. The fact that most Africans or people of African historical and cultural descent are black is only one characteristic, a bonus which generalizes and typifies Africans. And indeed, l dare say, for us, in the absence of a strong unifying religion or single language, colour has become an easy and fortunate identifying attribute of most people who regard themselves as African. Thus while others have used our colour to distinguish us for oppression and denigration, it is at the same time one of the most fortunate coincidences which identifies a people whose cultures have over centuries been woefully shattered by their oppressors.”25
We are reminded that the idea “black is beautiful” is not new. The intrepid and legendary European traveller, Marco Polo, describes some impressions of India in the year 1293 as follows: “In this province [in the South] the natives, although black, are not born of so deep a dye as they afterwards attain by artificial means, esteeming blackness the perfection of beauty. For this purpose, three times every day, they rub the children over with oil of sesame. The images of their deities they represent black, but the devil they paint white, and assert that all the demons are of that colour”.26 The ascendancy of Mogul power marked a turning point in traditional Indian attitudes to colour. The disdain of the conquerors for the darker skinned native Indian people created mythologies of superiority based on “whiteness” and with time cultivated deeply ingrained racial ideologies in the darker skinned Indians ruled by the fairer-skin overlords. Initially by moslem Moguls (AD 712) then for three and a half centuries by European rulers, mainly the Portuguese and the British. Britain ruled over India for almost a century. This shaped the common man’s association of white skin with the ruling class, with power, with desirability, and standards of beauty.27 This has persisted to the present period, long after colonialism was brought to an end.
The attribution of the black/white imagery to positive and negative ideas and impressions is particularly noticeable in Western languages. Generally white represents purity, cleanliness, and acceptability. Black represents the opposite of all that is white. In an article, which amongst other things, attempts to sanitize, through the gimmickry of literary criticism, the sexual perversions of the Marquis de Sade, Jean-François Revel writes that, “with Rabelais laughter is deliberately sought whereas with Sade it is only perceptible in the chinks. I am speaking of his ‘white’ humour. For however surprising it may appear, there is no humeur noire in Sade. In Sade black is black, and humour is humour. But as Plato says in his Philebus, ‘a little very pure white is worth
24 Prah, K. K. The Cause of Our Times: Pan-Africanism Revisited (16.11.1989). In, Beyond the Colour Line. Vivlia. Jo’burg. 1997. Africa World Press. Trenton. N.J. 1998. P.36.
25 Prah, K. K. Ibid. P.38.
26 Lasky, M. J., Africa for Beginners, Encounter, Vol. XV1. 1. February 1962. P.14.
27 Mishra, N. India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances. Issue 4, Global Perspectives on Colorism. Washington Univ. Global Studies Law Review. 2015. Vol.13. P.732.
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much more than a lot of white mixed with black’.”28 I invite the reader to read between the lines. The message is not too far below the surface and it is a superb confidence trick to summon the wisdom of Plato in order to service the antics of Revel’s mind by employing dubious and insensitively loaded imagery. Humeur noire, bête noire, mariage blanc, black comedy or if you prefer, Blake’s “but oh, my soul is white”29 are significations which, provoke and diminish the sensibilities of blacks in white society, and negatively interfere with the self-image of blacks who use these languages. The degree and type of mixture has also been often given differing social significations.30
Closely allied to the notion of race is the idea of “blood”. We are reminded that Nazi race theories are replete with notions of “low-grade people, degenerate types, untermenschen, ubermenschen, tainted-blood, pure-blood, half-blood or half-breed, blood-consciousness etc”. The symbolism and mystique of “blood” both literally and metaphorically is not confined to the obsessions of Nazis and socio-race theorists.31 In Steve Jones refreshing text, In The Blood; the author reminds us that, “blood feuds, blood-brothers, blue blood, cold blood, bad blood – all have shifted from the orbit of science into that of metaphor. But change the language a little, replace ‘blood’ with ‘gene’. And suddenly we are in the modern world. There is a new era of belief in the power of biology and a new fear of what we may find out about ourselves”.32 True enough, but be that as it may, we can as anthropologists or sociologists say that, insofar as culture and behaviour are concerned, if a Chinese baby is brought up to adulthood in an African village, much as he or she may look “Chinese”, in culture, including values, beliefs, attitudes, gestures and tastes, in sum, in as far as the person as a social being is concerned, he or she will be totally African. That is the point. We must not attribute to biology, social and cultural expression. We must not confuse nature and nurture.
Imperialism and Racist Ideology
For 19th century imperial ideologues like Walter Bagehot the overlordship of British imperialism over “unfit men and beaten races” was eminently justified. Britannia ruled the waves and waived the rules of morality. Kipling’s “white man’s burden” was a task accomplished by fire, sword and the blessings of the Church of England with the monarch as its head. The point needs to be made that, the ideas of racial superiority and trusteeship which emerged in Europe in the era of imperialism were formulated and articulated in terms which accommodated the economic and
28 Revel, J-F., A Letter to a Certain Paris Literary Critic, Encounter, 32(6). 1969. P.68.
29 William Blake’s poem; The Little Black Boy. Poetry Foundation. Chicago. Accessed 10.2.2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43671/the-little-black-boy
30 Burns, A., Colour Prejudice. George Allen & Unwin. London 1948. P.22. Burns has drawn attention to some of the nuances of colour gradations amongst people in the Western Hemisphere. “The Mulatto (through the Spanish and Portuguese mulato, diminutive of mulo, from the Latin mulus, a mule, used as denoting a hybrid origin) is a person one of whose parents is of the white race and other of a Negro. The first use of the word in English, as recorded by the Oxford Dictionary, was in 1595, when the word was spelt ‘Mulutow’. The word is now often, but incorrectly, used to describe any light-coloured person with Negro blood, although there are words to describe most of the degrees of crossing between whites and blacks. Thus the ‘Quadroon’ is the offspring of a white and a Mulatto and the ‘Octoroon’ the offspring of a Quadroon and a white; other words are ‘Mustee’, ‘Terceron’ and ‘Quintroon’. The ‘Sambo’ is the offspring of Negro and Mulatto, while the ‘Mestizo’ is the child of white and Indian.”
31 Coetzee, J. M., Blood, flaw, taint, degeneration: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin. In C. Malan (ed.), Race and Literature (26-48). Owen Burgess Publishers. Pinetown. 1987. P.26.
32 Jones, S., In the blood. Flamingo. London. 1994/1997. P.4.
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social aims of empire. The native was conceived as a lazy and slothful being, needful of Western tutelage, exploitation and supervision.33 The substance of imperial ideology allowed for racist perspectives. Justification was sought through the biblical myth of Ham. This made possible the pursuit of objectives which otherwise morality and sound conscience would not allow.
In the introduction to his text, Colour Prejudice, Alan Burns wrote that “there is a popular belief among the British that their vast colonial empire is kept intact by the British genius for governing inferior races”.34 Burns confidently acknowledged that “… I am admittedly prejudiced in the matter, [but] I believe also that, with all its defects, British colonial administration is better than that of any other Power for, and more acceptable to, a large proportion of the inhabitants of our tropical dependencies”. Burns invokes in support the views of the American Negley Farson that; “it is under the Englishman that I think the black man has the best chance to progress”.35 Lord Cromer’s view was also called into evidence for good measure. Cromer’s contention was that; “my own experience certainly leads me to the conclusion that the British generally … possess in a very high degree the power of acquiring the sympathy and confidence of any primitive races with which they are brought in contact”.36 It was very easy for such ideologues and proconsuls to forget the fact that the higher truth was captured in the memorable well-known verse of Hilaire Belloc: “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun and they have not.” The conquered and vanquished “the wretched of the earth”, thanks to the Maxim gun, were subjugated and placed under the white man’s burden of trusteeship and protectorate, ready for exploitation as an army of wage labour in mines and plantations. The feeling and conviction of effortless superiority and grandiose imperial attitudes grew and profoundly distorted the thinking of many Westerners during the colonial era. The assumed inferiority and servile status of non-Westerners became deeply registered in their mode of appreciation of the world.37 In the 18th century the erstwhile African slave child, later pastor, Johannes Eliza Jacobus Capitein (1717-1747) wrote an academic thesis entitled: Dissertatio Politico-Theologica de Servitute libertati Christiane non contraria (1742), a politico-theological dissertation that slavery is not contrary to Christianity.38 Some years later another pastor, Thomas Thompson, published a pamphlet (1772) arguing that, “the African Trade for Negro Slaves … [is] consistent with the principles of Humanity and with the Laws of Revealed Religion”. Another theological apologist for racism, Rev. Josiah Priest in 1852 published A Bible Defence of Slavery. Barely five decades later, Carroll (1900) published his, The Negro a Beast or in the Image of God? In this infamous text, he devoted a full chapter to Convincing Biblical and Scientific Evidence that the Negro is not of the Human Family. Burns has remarked that “even Herr Hitler did not go so far as this as he considered the Negro to be only a ‘half-ape’ ”.39 This was during the high tide of imperialism; soon after the partition of Africa; fifteen years after the Berlin Conference.
33 Alatas, S. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. Frank Cass. London. 1977.
34 Burns, A. Op cit. P.9.
35 Farson, N., Behind God’s Back. Victor Gollancz. London. 1940.
36 Cromer, Lord. (Evelyn Baring). Ancient and Modern Imperialism. Murray. London. 1910. P.75.
37 Burns, A. Op cit. P.22.
38 Prah, K. K., Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein. 1717-1747. A Critical Study of an Eighteenth Century African. Africa World Press. Trenton. 1989/1992.
39 Burns, A. Op cit. P.22. (Footnotes)
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Imperialism and racism have always been bed-fellows. In order to conquer, brutalize and exploit “the Other”, it was necessary to ideologically reduce “the Other” to inferiority. David Maughan Brown provides a comment drawn from The Times of London about the San during an exhibition at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1847: “In appearance they are little above the monkey tribe, and scarcely better than mere brutes of the field … They are sullen, silent and savage – mere animals in propensity and worse than animals in appearance”.40 Charles Dickens’ reaction to the San is even more revealing about Western attitudes to those they considered to be their biological and cultural inferiors.41 And it is particularly so, in view of the high regard in which he is held on account of what is seen to be his empathy for the plight of the wretched of Victorian England. His reaction to an exhibition of “Bushmen” was that, “I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage … I call a savage – cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails and beastly customs….”.42 Dickens was revolted by what he considered to be the San’s “filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand”.43 We are informed that, in similar mould of mind, R.M. Ballantyne and Alexander Trollope, whose work many of us as youngsters in British colonial Africa read with innocent relish, had equally warped views about African humanity. R. M. Ballantyne asserted in 1876 that “‘the highest type of monkey suggests – thanks [to], or rather, blame Darwin – the lowest type of man in Africa. This is the Bushman’. And two years later Trollope was to show himself a worthy counterpart to Dickens with remarks that; ‘The Bosjeman, or Bushman, was of lower order (than the Hottentot), smaller in stature, more degraded in appearance, filthier in habits, occasionally a cannibal, eating his own children when driven by hunger, cruel and useless’.”44
In a good number of the novels of nineteenth century England the running assumption that class differences are tied to heredity: “all is race”, a character in one of Disraeli’s novels announces. For Walter Scott, as well as Charles Kingsley and Disraeli “race”, whatever it meant to them, distinguished the pure-blooded aristocrats with their Norman conquering descent from the baser and lesser folk of Saxon extraction.45 Some of these sentiments linger on to our present times and are shared by more mainstream race theoreticians. References to “blue blood” continue to adorn journalistic writing. While clearly some references to blood or race can be construed as innocent poetics, the enlarged and spacious view of poets and novelists, the historical baggage of racist usage of the term makes its discriminative usage often too close to call. Russell tersely observes that “belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism”.46 It is also true for racism in general. It took a tragedy of the proportions of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis, with eugenics, the Nuremberg Decrees of 1936, gas chambers and all, for the Western world to wake up to its heritage of entrenched racism. Coetzee, pointing to the discourse of racism before 1945, writes that;
40 Maughan Brown, D. The Rehabilitation of the San in Popular Fiction. In C. Malan (ed.), Race and Literature. Owen Burgess Publishers. Pinetown. 1987. P.117.
41 Maughan Brown. Ibid.
42 Maughan Brown Ibid.
43 Maughan Brown Ibid.
44 Maughan Brown. Ibid. Pp. 117-8.
45 Mason, P. Common Sense About Race. Common Sense Series, No.7. Victor Gollancz London. 1961. P.658.
46 Russell, B. History of Western Philosophy. George Allen & Unwin. London. 1961. P.658.
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If we return to the discourse of racism before 1945, what strikes us first about it is its nakedness, its shamelessness. ‘The old predatory instinct [has] subserved civilization … by clearing the earth of inferior races of men’, wrote Herbert Spencer in 1851. ‘No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important ‘history’, wrote Ernst Haeckel in 1873. Missionaries ‘turn healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings into a rotten brood of bastards’, wrote Adolf Hitler in 1924. ‘The Griqua type of half-caste … is lower than the Kaffir’, wrote Sarah Gertrude Millin in 1926. We no longer come across ideas like these expressed in public, even in South Africa (who is in a position to judge to what extent they live on in the private realm?).47
In Coetzee’s (1987) analysis of the work of Millin and her fixation with blood-taint and miscegenation, “white blood”, is, in the universal scheme of things, the basis of purity and excellence; everything else stands against it at various levels of inferiority. Coetzee succeeds in demonstrating how the fixation with and imagery of blood runs through the works of both Millin and Emile Zola. An attendant feature of the imagery and poetics of blood is the notion of degeneracy and/or decadence represented in the reaction against the European romantic movement and the philosophical nihilism of the period. Rousseau’s le bon sauvage had been previously the exotic ideal of the Western mind; the reaction against the romantic movement saw Western civilization under threat from types and versions of venality, psychosis and license which needed in their view, to be checked. If figures like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Byron, De Quincey and nearer our times Colin Wilson and Camus, had glorified the outsider, outcast, rebel and deviant, with or without a cause, for Max Nordau and his philosophical ilk, decadence and degeneracy was reflected by the degenerate elements of civilization: “neuraesthetes, morbid depressives, hysterics, epileptics, syphilitics, sexual inverts, people of criminal disposition, alcoholics, drug addicts”48 For the Nazis, these types were to be eliminated without fail because they were regarded as demons haunting the peace and threatening the prospective flowering of the “Aryan race”.49
It would be misleading to give the impression that racist attitudes and practice are the historical monopoly of Westerners applied against non-Westerners. It is more correct to indicate that such notions are universal and racism is a global scourge. This is not to deny the fact that the Western legacy of racist theory and practice has been more overwhelming and systematically genocidal than any, in the human experience. Examples of racism and prejudice pertaining to relations between non-Westerners are not difficult to find and can be historically found in all parts of the world. Between Japanese and Chinese, between Malay, Indian and Chinese, between Africans and Arabs, etc. Recently, an observer of Africa-China relations wrote that; “Reports of Chinese racism against Africans first surfaced, not surprisingly, in China as Chinese came in contact with students from Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal. But as increasing numbers of Chinese have decamped to Africa as part of an effort by Chinese officials to alleviate a serious labour glut, the attitudes and prejudices incubated back home often surface in relations with local Africans. This manifests itself not just in the shocking rants of a Chinese boss in Kenya comparing Africans to monkeys, but in a string
47 Coetzee, J.M. Op cit. P.27.
48 Coetzee, J.M. Ibid.
49Antonovsky, A. M., Aryan Analysts in Nazi Germany: Questions of Adaptation, Desymbolization, and Betrayal. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 11. 1988. 213-231. See also, Bergman, J., Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 44, 1992. Pp.109-123.
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of reports about Chinese men impregnating women in West Africa and then abandoning the children to return to China.”50
The Universality of Prejudice
Carl Linnaeus considered that, “The American is reddish, choleric, erect; the European, white, sanguine, fleshy; the Asiatic, yellow, melancholy, tough; the African, black, phlegmatic, slack. The American is obstinate, contented, free; the European, mobile, keen, inventive; the Asiatic cruel, splendour-loving, miserly; the African, sly, lazy, indifferent. The American is covered with tattooing, he rules by habit; the European is covered with close-fitting garments and rules by law; the Asiatic is enclosed in flowing garments and rules by opinion; the African is anointed with grease and rules by whim.”51 The obvious confusion of biology and culture in these views cannot miss the eye of the reader. The fact that a biologist of his stature could make such crude statements is something which can only partly be attributed to the paucity of knowledge in his times. In an article which appeared in Encounter some years ago, the editor, Melvin Lasky wrote: “But what’s the colour of white? I remember hearing from Hindus that it was the colour of cold, of alcoholism, of cruelty, of ghostliness, of a disfiguring leprous paleness. It was also the colour of murder for the Christian converts of San Domingo who (as Heine tells the story) took racial revenge in the name of the Lord because “it was the whites who crucified Christ” And at least at one moment of history, I am relieved to know, it was taken to be the colour of stupidity, of mental and physical sluggishness.”52 Here, the tables are turned. It is the oriental or the African, the usual “Other” of the Western mind, who has “Otherized” the Westerner. The subject has become the object, and the story goes on. Lasky draws attention to Arab records, of the opinion of an 8th century Toledan judge, on the subject of Europeans: “… their temperaments have become cold and their humours rude, while their bodies have become large, their complexion light and their hair long. They lack withal sharpness of wit and penetration of intellect, while stupidity and folly prevail among them …”.53
Like racism, prejudice and xenophobia are in differing degrees of intensity found in all parts of the world and include practically all societies. Much of what is described as tribalism, falls in place here. Instigated largely by elite contestation over resources. The extent to which they are manifested depends on historical circumstances, on socio-economic, political and other societal pressures. In Kenya, some years ago, I picked up a popular nasty joke about Kikuyus amongst some non-Kikuyus in Nairobi. The economic success of Kikuyus, which can be explained on purely historical and rational grounds, was explained thus by a non-Kikuyu taxi driver to me: “If a Kikuyu is dead and you put a pot of gold next to him, he will resurrect”. In some parts of Accra, Ghana, during the 1950s, if a chicken was lost out of somebody’s backyard whispers would go round that one should “look for the nearest Ewe, check his/her kitchen, the chicken may be in a pot”. In the South Sudan I was often warned by non-Dinka to “watch them, they are not
50 Cannon, Brendon J., Is China Undermining Its Own Success in Africa? Negative interactions with Chinese companies and individuals are hurting the country’s image in many African countries. The Diplomat. February 08, 2019. Accessed, 13th February 2019. https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/is-china-undermining-its-own-success-in-africa/
51 Quoted here from Nationalism and Culture (http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/race.htm)
52 Lasky, Melvin J. Op Cit. P.14.
53 Lasky, Melvin J. Ibid.
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trustworthy”. In Nigeria, popular legend has it that Ibos are superior merchants and traders and also miserly; that Yorubas will always take the line of least resistance; and that Hausas are feeble-minded, but with strong group instincts. In Botswana, I recollect loaded references to Batswakwa (foreigners, outsiders, strangers) which frequently carried pejorative connotations. It was a reference which applied equally to even Tswana-speaking South Africans. It is more linguistically cultivated and less xenophobically dismissive than Bakwerekwere (speakers of an unintelligible tongue – kwerekwere). In South Africa, the Zulus are often described as particularly fearless and likely to take and implement orders without sober reflection. Such cheap stereotypes and unedifying views abound in all parts of the world and are particularly lurid between neighbours. In research I undertook in Kgatleng District in 1977-78, a Tswana informant expressed Tswana-San relations thus; “we used to rear them.”54 Such views are so absurd that one would be inclined to laugh at them, were it not for the fact that so much pain and suffering is caused by one group to the other on the basis of such arrant nonsense. During the early 1990s, Africa and the world saw an instance of genocide by Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda on a scale which has not been seen on this continent since the early stages of colonialism; the Nama/Damara and Herero genocide at the hands of German colonialists. “Ethnic cleansing” (the term alone strikes terror and revulsion) and genocide have become political instruments in the Balkans, the Sudan, Kenya, Liberia and many other points of the compass.
Prejudice ranges from laughable impressions, flippant and relatively inconsequential judgement about other people, which in anthropological parlance could be a sign of “joking relations” to pernicious convictions which are intensely xenophobic or racist in foundation and consequence. Stripped of power and economic wherewithal, prejudice is societally impotent, it is simply inane and ultimately laughable. It is where prejudice is backed by institutionalized power, material benefit and privilege that its manifestation becomes patently and societally racialized. The Irish, England’s first colonial subjects share the same skin colour nonetheless the consequences of colonial power and privilege has through the centuries spawned persistent mythologies and prejudices of Irishness and Englishness which are used on both sides to rationalize the status quo.
Race Theories
The fatherhood of modern racist theory is generally attributed to the diplomat and prolific writer, Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau. He is regarded as the founder of the “Nordic school” of racist theory. In his Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines, which appeared first in 1855, he argued that the French Revolution of 1789 represented the insurgency of the Celto-Romanic race which had for ages been subservient to Franco-Norman dominance. This latter group, for Gobineau, were constituted by the historical Nordic, tall, blue-eyed, intellectually superior invaders who had conquered France in earlier times. Arguing against the anthropo-geography of thinkers like Montesquieu and the Abbé Du Bois, he asserted “the doctrine that the different races of humankind are innately unequal in talent, worth and ability to absorb and create culture, and change their innate character only through the crossing with alien strains. The genius of a race depends but little on conditions of climate, surroundings and period; it is therefore absurd to
54 Prah, K.K., Notes and Comments on Aspects of Tswana Feudalism in the Pre-Colonial Period. Paper read to the Botswana Society. 1977. Working Paper No. 15. National Institute for Research and Documentation in African Studies. NIR. Botswana. 1977.
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maintain that all men are capable of an equal degree of perfection. Only the white races are creative of culture”.55 A variant of racist theory emerged in the work of the phrenologists, particularly those associated with the early Italian School of Criminology. These thinkers were convinced that features such as cranium size and shape, as well as other physical expressions, were clues to criminal or non-criminal disposition. The idea of the “born criminal” is attributable to this school. Principal amongst these thinkers were Lombroso and Becarria. However, the principal intellectual progeny of Gobineau, it appears, was the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. More than anybody else, it was Chamberlain who laid the immediate foundations of the Herrenvolk idea of the Nazis.56
In the United States, two figures in this tradition of philosophy spring to mind, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1917) affirmed the pre-eminence of the “Nordic” race. The “Nordics”, in this ideology, were the great race blessed by providence and instinct to dominate lesser breeds. For Stoddard, between the three European races, i.e. the Alpines, Mediterraneans, and the Nordics, the “Nordics” were “far and away the most valuable type, standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus”.57
We can say that nearer our times, racist ideologies became most rampant and influential during the 1930s. This is in hindsight not surprising since it was the time of the rise of fascism in the Western world. The epithet, “race”, was loosely applied to nation-states, regional geographical groups, ethnic groups, tribes, and skin pigmentation. On the basis of the biological attribute of skin colour, cultural characteristics were imputed and notions of genetical superiority or inferiority were further constructed. In the ideological construction which racist theory built, social fears about demographic numbers, sexuality, lebensraum were implicit factors in the ideological architecture.
55 It is suggested that Gobineau’s idea was not altogether original. “Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658 – 1722), author of an historical work which was not published until after his death, maintained that the French nobles of the ruling caste were descended from the Germanic conquerors, while the great mass of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry was to be regarded as the progeny of the conquered Celts and Romans. Boulainvilliers tried on the basis of this thesis to justify all the privileges of the nobles, in opposition to both the people and the king, and demanded for his class the right to keep the government of the country always in their hands.” (http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/race.htm) (See Burns 1948: 23-4).
56 Donner, W., A Silence is Broken in Bayreuth: Winifred, Wahnfried, Wagner. Encounter, XLV (6), 1975. P.33. The racist theories of Chamberlain were elaborately propounded in his two books The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and The Aryan Philosophy of Life. Chamberlain argued that all great men had been Germans – not only Goethe, Kant and Wagner, but even Marco Polo, Dante, Michelangelo, Columbus, Louis XIV, and even Jesus Christ. The upshot was therefore that the German was homo superbus, and Germany could claim without challenge to be the leader of the world, Deutschland uber alles. Since there were many Germans who were of Celtic or Slav extraction, and because Chamberlain was fully aware of this because of his grounding in Gobineau, in order not to provoke these Germans, he included them in his “Aryan master-race”. To this Herrenvolk, he promised the rule of humanity (Wendt 1961). Chamberlain wormed his way into the heart of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who granted patronage for his work. The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was particularly popular with the Prussian landed Junker class. Chamberlain won many acolytes like Woltmann, Wirth, Clauss and Gunther who followed his footsteps with minor adjustments. Chamberlain was an unabashed disciple of Gobineau. He became a fervent devotee of Richard Wagner and his music, and settled in Germany, lived in Bayreuth, and there married Wagner’s daughter Eva. Chamberlain settled in a Germany flourishing with Gobineau Societies and became an ideological high-priest of the Bayreuth Wagnerian festivals, which in Hitler’s time, in the words of Thomas Mann, became “Hitler’s court theatre”.
57 Burns, A. Op cit. P.24.
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The confusion of biology and culture, the blurring of the borders of these two distinct realities is discernible in Darwinian theory and those of some of the other contemporary naturalists. Victorian ideas about the superiority of the Westerner easily coexisted with unilinear evolutionism; the idea that all human societies and cultures are following socio-culturally a single-track evolution. Along this single-track, the Westerner was conceived to be at the summit while the rest of us were considered to be at rungs below, in the trajectory. Darwin’s idea of the “survival of the fittest” in the words of Hobsbawm, “could not prove that men were superior to earthworms, since both survived successfully”.58 Evolutionary transformation, which often implied scientific and technological advancement, did not confine groups and societies which were less successful to backwardness in perpetuity. The important point was that societies were comparable and technologically differentially developed. They were different but by no means inherently or determinedly inferior. This point became universally accepted by early 20th century anthropologists of the “cultural relativism school”, in reaction to the unilinear evolutionism of the Victorian era. Social Darwinism and racist anthropology or biology, were not part of the considerable scientific achievements of 19th century science, they were more emphatically part of 19th century politics.59 While most contemporary evolutionists are careful to point out Darwin’s errors in evolutionary biology, similar errors today imply that those who do not survive are by definition weak and expendable and appear to support important cornerstones of laissez-faire capitalism, which, in turn, help to justify economic competition, profits, and capital accumulation.60
The idea of “pure race” is pure fiction or better still, poppy-cock. Nothing like it has ever existed, and nothing like it will ever exist. All human groups which are currently identified as races are results of interminable mixtures going back into the depths of time and the misty origins of humanity. In the face of the emerging global village, in the next two centuries, in my estimation, what are considered to be “race mixtures” today may be overwhelmingly the normative majority.
There are no groups which from Adam have existed in some untouched” or pristine condition of purity.61 Race as a concept has no credible scientific usage today, in Southern Africa or anywhere else. But, on the basis of this bio-social invention, class, power and privilege in South Africa have been socially reproduced over the years. The limits of a racialized economic structure were set when the Apartheid state was compelled by circumstances to designate Japanese and later Chinese as “honorary whites”. Any attempt to negate this legacy of class, colour and cultural privilege in the post-Apartheid era cannot be achieved by ignoring its persistent and residual realities in the contemporary period and very importantly, an economy closely tied to the racist social order. The ghosts of the past continue to haunt us and the earlier we complete the exorcism of these ghosts the better for us all. In its wake (Apartheid racism) we are faced with a combination of subliminal racism and the rear-guard action, camouflaged racism in defence of privilege and economic hegemony.
58 Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. 1975/1976. P.268.
59 Hobsbawm, E.J. Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Prah K. K., Beyond the Colour Line. Africa World Press. Trenton. 1998. P36.
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Culture and Ethnicity
While the idea of race is conceptually spurious, the concept of ethnicity lies in the central area of anthropology and is undergirded by the more primary concept of culture. Culture is the tangible and intangible sum total of all that has resulted, and results, from human creativity. It is transferred in constantly modified form from generation to generation. The notion of ethnicity actually diverges sharply from the race concept. While ethnicity is based on socialization, race in its hard biological sense refers exclusively to biological considerations or phenotypes. Ethnicity in a serious sense has no reference to physical appearance. Strictly speaking it refers to the cultural attributes of groups which have commonality in language, customary practices, religion, sometimes geographical locality and history, with mythology which often imposes a subjective reference point for those who share the specific cultural attributes in question. In no instance are the contributing qualities or features which give character to a specific ethnicity duplicated in exactly the same respect or degree for other ethnicities. Indeed, the details and substantial cultural components which define the character of a specific ethnic group vary in intensity and composition within the group. In spite of geographical distance, an Ndebele from Matabeleland is culturally much closer to a Zulu from Kwazulu-Natal, than the Zulu is to a Sotho from the much nearer Lesotho or the Free State in South Africa. In similar fashion, a black Afrikaans-speaking Dutch-reformed farm-hand is ethno-culturally possibly closer to the white Dutch-reformed Afrikaner farmer than literally and metaphorically meets the eye. These two are culturally and ethnically closer than a white Anglican English-speaking urbanite is to a white Dutch-reformed Afrikaner farmer.62
The term ethnicity has tended to be used in reference to actual or supposed precapitalist social formations. More correctly it should refer to all historico-cultural units, independent of the mode of production in which they are structured. When the term ethnicity has been used to describe pre-industrial historico-cultural units, it has frequently borne a derogatory connotation; an implication that it is less than Western socio-structural analogues. In South Africa under Apartheid, “‘ethnic’ became a word referring to the African, where the speaker/thinker wished to avoid making a direct reference. Derived from this came, ‘ethnic colours’, ‘ethnic food’ and ‘ethnic music’, all referring to cultural categories which were non-Western”.63 Generally, in the non-Western context, ethnicities become, in the language of Western social science, the depreciatory appellation “tribes”, where within the Western context such groups are variously designated as simply “people”, “nationalities” or “nations”. Thus, the Catalans, Basques, Welsh, Friesians or Bretons are not tribes, but the Ovimbundu, Ovambo, Igbo, or Baganda are supposed to be tribes, with or without rulers.
A number of factors have caused scholars to also treat the concept of ethnicity with a great deal of caution. Sometimes these factors are viewed in such a serious light that some dismiss its
62 I was happy to note a similar conclusion reached by the writer Jan Rabie (Rabie, J., Minder Europa, meer Afrika. In C. Malan (ed.), Race and Literature (Pp.239-245). Owen Burgess Publishers. Pinetown 1987. Rabie writes that “Vroeg in 1955 land ek toe weer in the Kaapse hawe. Toe ek die dokwerkers hoor jil en praat in my geboortetaal, het dit warm geword om my hart. Een ding het onmiddellik vir my baie duidelik geword: dat ek eerder Afrikaans as witman is, dat the bruinman wat my taal so glimlaggend met my praat, veel nader aan my is as the Engelssprekende blanke wat (gewoonlik) verwag dat ons sý lingua franca met mekaar moet praat”. P.239.
63 Prah, K, K., Producing and Reproducing Knowledge in Racist South Africa. In K.K. Prah (ed.), Knowledge in Black and White (1-15) (Cape Town: CASAS). 1999. P.7.
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usefulness. One of these factors is the issue of the colonial role in the invention or identification of ethnic groups. Throughout the colonial period, colonial administrators and missionaries, sometimes through considerations of administrative expediency, at other times through evangelical zeal and biblical translations in particular, elevated small dialect groups and narrow historically localized groups to the status of “tribes” or ethnicities. Some ethnologists have also been inordinately keen “to discover” their own tribes, and in this drive “tribes” have been “discovered” which are more appropriately subunits of much larger groups. Thus, the Mondari, Fajelu, Kakwa, Kuku, Bari, Nyangbara have been identified as ethnically separate groups when in fact they represent sub-sets of one ethno-linguistic and cultural formation. The Bahurutshe, Bakaa, Bakgatla, Bakwena, Bamalete, Bangwaketse, Bamangwato, Barolong (Seleka and Tshidi), Batawana, Batlhaping, Batlharo, and Batlokwa are technically sub-sets of one ethnic formation. The same can for example be said of the Akan sub-ethnicities, Akyem, Fanti, Asante, Akwapim, Kwahu, Nzema, Baule, Agni and Brong. In Southern Africa beyond administrative conventions and practice, ethnolinguistically it is hardly justified to in a serious anthropological sense technically treat Tswana, Sotho, Pedi, Lozi as different ethnolinguistic groups. We can also point out that the Nguni set of ethnolinguistic groups, Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati share fundamental ethnolinguistic unities with a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Cultures have never firm and clearly demarcated boundaries, certainly, ethnicities universally overlap and inter-penetrate. Indeed, this is the case for all ethno-cultural formations wherever they may be in the world. However, for most groups that can be designated as ethnicities, cultural features such as language, customary usages, belief systems, modes of livelihood, myths of origin and value systems are to a considerable degree shared. Sometimes, geographical boundaries are relevant, at other times not. It is clear, though, that none of the component features of ethno-cultural groups always appear to the same degree or have equal relevance. Last, but not least, is the element of subjectivity. People identify with groups to which they think they belong and acknowledge their shared affinities with other members of the group.
Regarding recent perspectives on the concept of ethnicity in South Africa, James Ellis has written a succinct summary in a paper dealing with the state of anthropology in South Africa. Under Apartheid much was made of ethnicity.64 Indeed, the idea of ethnicity was first elevated to the status of nations, so that all the so-called ethnic groups of South Africa became separate nations. The Zulu, the Xhosa, the Pedi, the Sotho, the Tswana, the Venda, the Tsonga, the Ndebele, the English, and the Afrikaners, etc. became separate and distinct nations. The intention of this strategy was not only advised by purely racist considerations and the plan to keep economic and political privilege in the exclusive hands of whites, but also very importantly, by the wish to ensure that the myth of a non-African majority could be maintained. As long as all the separate so-called nations amongst the Africans could be argued and maintained by force of law and arms, the possibility for the conceptualization of an African majority was postponed, in the view of the Apartheid architects, forever.
64 Ellis, J. H. P. Anthropology in South Africa and the Resurgence of Ethnicity. In K.K. Prah (ed,), Knowledge in Black and White. CASAS. Cape Town. 1999. Pp.69-93.
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In reaction to this, some social scientists, disenchanted with the concept, literally wished away the reality of ethnicity; so that, in effect, whilst throwing away the dirty bathwater, they also threw the baby away. It appears to me that the tendency of some Southern African social scientists to totally, or almost totally, shy away from the conceptual possibilities of ethnicity is not only misguided but obscurantist. Like the proverbial ostrich, reality does not cease to exist simply because we put our heads in the sand and dismiss its existence. The misuse of ethnic solidarities and characteristics by the Apartheid regime cannot mean that in reaction we can simply wish away the existence of ethnicity. The solution lies in more rigorous scientific usage of the term along lines which rhyme with current universal usages. There is no science which is only true or only untrue for Southern Africa. In addition, I would agree that if Apartheid social science, by exaggerating the realities of the ethnic map of South Africa, denied the existence of an African majority, the total denial of the existence of ethnicities achieves in effect the same object.
There has also in the past been a wish to cultivate the idea that in South Africa and much of Africa everybody is a “foreigner”, but more importantly that the Bantu-speaking peoples came into Southern Africa around the same time that the Europeans did. I have elsewhere drawn attention to a good example of such gross mythology peddled as history to young students.
The Bushmen, little yellow-skinned people barely 153 cm in height … the second inhabitants of South Africa, probably having been compelled to migrate from central Southern Asia … According to one theory, one section, going south-east, occupied the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines and Australia; another section travelling west, entered Spain; while a third found its way into Africa, where they were gradually pushed south by the stronger Hamites occupying the Nile region. In succession other races entered Africa from the east … The Hottentots, a people a little bigger and little darker than the Bushmen, probably originated in Somaliland as a result of admixture between Bushmen and Hamites. According to the generally accepted theory, they migrated south-west to the region of the Great Lakes, where they remained for several centuries, then following the Atlantic coast, they eventually crossed the Orange River. By the 16th century they were to be found along the banks of the Orange … The Europeans at the Cape did not come into close contact with the Bantu-speaking Africans until well into the 18th century, for they, like the Europeans, were comparative newcomers to Southern Africa. In all probability their original home was Central Asia. They are believed to have entered Africa in large numbers.65
I have called this sort of history, “sucked-out-of-the-thumb historiography”.66 It has in the past enjoyed currency and popularity even among scholars who should have known better, with a little more reading. I was surprised to find an apostle of this sort of historiography in no less a figure
65 Geen, M. S., The Making of South Africa. Maskew Miller. Cape Town. 1958/1971. P.8. Another example of this type of historiography appears as “People of African origins migrated to southern Africa many centuries ago – first, the Sans from further north about 8000 years ago; then the Khoikhois also from further north about 2000 – 3000
years ago; and finally, the bantu speaking people probably from east and central Africa between AD
300 and 900 and possibly earlier,” See, Hiroyuki Hino, Murray Leibbrandt, Ratjomose Machema, Muna Shifa and Crain Soudien. (2018). Identity, inequality and social contestation in the Post-Apartheid South Africa. Saldru Working Paper 233. University of Cape Town. This argument is drawn from; Nattrass, G. (2017) A Short History of South Africa. South Africa. Jonathan Ball Publishers.
66 Prah, K.K., 1999. Op Cit. P.7.
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than the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead. In an interesting conversation with the African-American writer James Baldwin, Mead made the following observations, justifying settlerism and terra nullius in South Africa;
But you know, I want to go back to talk about the Republic of South Africa, because the South Africans are the only white people who belong to the African continent. And they belong there. They were driven out of France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew; they were made homeless. They went to Holland and learned Dutch but were abominably treated by the Dutch, so Dutch isn’t their mother tongue either. They’ve been displaced and displaced. They went to Africa, and it was an almost empty country. There was hardly anybody there at all, neither black nor white, just a very few nomadic people. Most of the blacks moved down later.67
Till today, such historical explanations persist.
Closing Remarks
The real problem we face in Southern Africa in the post-Apartheid era is that of finding solutions for the development of democratic multi-culturalism, which tolerates the co-existence of a variety of ethno-cultural groups in an open system in which people mix and move freely with ease across ethnic and cultural frames. Tolerance is requisite for this and diversity should be celebrated as an enriching and democratizing quality. However, for this to be possible, the legacy of gross socio-economic inequities constructed before and during Apartheid would need to be completely dismantled. At the cultural, indeed the societally developmental level, the language question constitutes the most consequential issue. If we are to developmentally transform African society we need to recentre our languages in our social, educational and cultural lives. Only by intellectualizing our languages will we break through the legacies of under-development and cultural subservience. Our cultures, not colour, should lie at the centre of our development efforts.
Racism is in the long-run doomed. It cannot ultimately hold the tide against “waves of emancipation”, global struggles for empowerment and human rights. As democracy is deepened and strengthened, so will the premise of inequality be questioned and slowly discarded.
Strikingly, xenophobic and prejudiced practices have attracted attention to many parts of Africa. I have in the past argued that, extremely violent xenophobia which appears ever-so often in newspaper headlines, is not exclusive to South Africa. We have seen horrendous expressions of xenophobia in Rwanda, Cameroon, Sudan and Central African Republic in recent times. The need to keep our eyes “peeled” and uphold human rights will be crucial in the historical struggles against racism in African and the world.
67 Baldwin, J. & Mead, M. A Rap on Race. Corgi Books. London. 1971. P.50
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