Visible differences between humans have always been observed. However, the conception of these differences in a notion of race is more or less recent in terms of formulation. It has appeared in the era of modern science and derived from the practice of classification into species and sub-species, which was first concerned only with the vegetal, and animal. The discourse of race began in the xix century with regard to the human specie. Its corollary-Racism is an ensemble of ‘scientific’ theories considering the existence of different human races within the human specie generally corresponding to large continental ensembles of ethnic groups through a constructed hierarchy. Racism is also a political doctrine advocating the domination by a race said (pure or superior) of others said (impure or inferior). Other meanings include xenophobia and ethnocentrism in the sense of an attitude of contempt and hostility that can lead to violence towards individuals belonging to a different ethnic group.

While racism in the theoretical and attitudinal sense is still present in practice and policy, recent scientific works have discredited its scientific foundation. The works of Joseph Graves in the Human Genome Project¹ have dismantled the last remnants of its scientific credibility. However, this has not erased the discourse on race and race-base practice at the social, political, and academic levels. We see the discourse migrating from anthropology to other disciplines of the humanities hence the justification for this contribution.

Historical and contemporary discourses on race and racism in Africa have mostly been articulated from Arabo-European paradigms locating the African at the periphery as either victim or receptor of an epistemology in which his identity is erased. Two central problematics shape these discourses: Calls for the de-linking of race from Africanity by the Arabs and other western descendent groups in Africa on the one hand, and the othering of Africans by Europeans in the process of subjugation. As such, discourses on race within the continent continue to be explored in norms and terminologies making it impossible for African populations to have a clear understanding of the reality in an epistemological framework within their grasp.

The Arab Yoke: From Thebes to Darfour

The situation in Southern Sudan and the Darfour region in particular, the past events in Mauritania and the recent dumping of Africans refoulés- expelled illegal immigrants from France  in the middle of the desert by the Moroccan government make it all the more necessary to  re-open the discourse on race, and racism in Africa. However, some clarifications are required here as tenets of the divide and conquer doctrine always quick to drive a wedge between third world peoples, could see this re-opening as a validation of their Machiavellian strategy of postmodern imperialism. This is to say that while acknowledging Arab historical and contemporary racist practice in Africa, we are mindful of our necessary solidarity with Arab masses in their struggle against both internal and external oppressions.   

An analysis of race and racism with regard to Arab practice in Africa requires a going back in time to African prehistory at least 3500 years. In this process, a look at the map of Africa would reveal the position of the Arabs on the African continent, which in itself reveals the historical strangling of African peoples and their cutting off from the sea thus from world exchanges at least towards Asia. The fact that Egypt was the eastern region of Ethiopia is no longer subject to debate nor is the race of Egyptians of antiquity. (Williams 1976). Secondly, there is no longer any doubt about the first inhabitants of what is today North Africa or the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Libya, I mean before the advent of the leucoderm ‘peoples of the sea’ in these areas (Diop 1997).

Similarly, a heartland of the black covering the six cataracts of the Nile, constituting the watermarks in the heartland of the blacks, is also no longer in doubt. The creation of Egypt -through the unification of the two lower and Upper lands - by Menes, which gave rise to the Egyptian Civilization has also been established. From these historical and geographical positions, we can enter the ‘race’ discourse still locating ourselves in these times to explore the population of these African regions. Beginning with Menes and the first dynasty, we trek forward to identify various black dynasties and the racial dynamic that emerged with the in-between dynasties of what Williams called the Afro-Asians. This is a central point in the discourse because as Egypt turned from black to Brown due to the interbreeding of the races, which began around the northern perimeter, the half brothers of the Africans that were the outcome of the melting pot set out to distinguish themselves from the race of their mothers - African. They bitterly objected to being identified as African and usurped old appellations of Africans such as Egyptians, Moors, Carthaginians etc. To crown their new identity, a doubtful physical anthropology provided the space by artificially creating first a “Black Africa” and later a “Sub-Saharan Africa.” 

However, ancient Greeks, the Bible, and the Koran have testified to the fact that black Africans populated these areas (Diop 1997). Diop and Williams’ works are important in that they allow us a more complex reading of contemporary events that may appear unconnected to race. Marc Lavergne’s statement, “The militias could be qualified as Arabs because they have been ‘Arabicized.’ They have been so since longtime, longer than the Massalits, Arawa tribes called Africans but the latter have also been Arabicized …” in Le conflit du Darfour n’est pas racial (The Darfour conflict is not racial),² is a classical example of contemporary readings of historical problems.

“Slaves? Nouba! Do you have a God? Break your fast! Even we with light skin do not observe the fast. And you who are black and Ugly pretend….We are your God! Your God is Omar Bechir. You have disfigured the country! We have come to burn you… We will kill your husband and your sons and we will sleep with you! You are our women”³     -- A Janjawid

What Laverne fails to realize is the impact of the waxing and waning of time that makes historical phenomena so obliterated that their origin is sometimes forgotten and may appear contemporary. The reality is that this conflict is racial. It covers many centuries back into prehistory and is similar to what took place in Zanzibar, Mauritania, and Chad. It has never stopped since five thousand years - that is since Menes. The fact that the two parties seem to be of the same color is just illusory. Fanon described this form of cultural alienation in which a dominated people ends up making its representations supplied by the oppressor in a dominator/dominated dialectic.  

The raiding and raping of black women as announced by this Janjawid is not new in this part of the continent. Modern Africanists have ignored the most damaging developments from the Arab impact on Black peoples. From the earliest times, to the seven and actual centuries Arab and Muslim onslaughts of Africans have been going on. What happened was that European imperialism in Africa eclipsed Arab imperialism, blurring historical facts as oppressed peoples of the earth attempt to unite. 

The European Yoke: Taking Over in the Nineteenth Century

In the western world, with regard to Africa, the notion of race, and its practice - racism emerged as a “modern” smoke screen in Europe’s ‘civilizing’ ‘humanist’ argument. The discourse of inferiorization of the other [African], by a superior race [European] was presented as justification for all kinds of domination and oppression. The result was seen in genocides such as those of the Herero in Namibia by the Germans, of massacres of tens of millions of Africans in the Congo by Belgium resulting in the reduction by half of that population, in the massacre of Africans whose only fault was to fight for the defense of a Republic at the banks of the River Seine.⁴ Europe’s racial discourse and practice on Africa was then of a genocidal character.

European discourse on race seems to be a legitimization of crimes against humanity, a historical stain in the heart of human “modernity” to justify domination after the enslavement of Africans. Hannah Arendt is right: “racism as the principal ideological weapon of imperialistic policies is so evident that a number of scholars give the impression to prefer to avoid the rehashed paths of truism.”⁵

The eugenic scientific discourse of Sir Francis Galton in 1865, and the work of his cousin Charles Darwin reinforced the idea of an inferior race in an evolutionist perspective. Physico-racial anthropology integrated the notion of inferior races at the end of the XIX century, at the height of European colonial expansion, constituting the ideological basis on which entire generations of scholars were trained. At the beginning, and in the middle of the xx century, modern anthropology recognized a “tropical tropism,” a “traditional” but also a “Neolithic vestige” to the Other, and took care to silence the ethnic and territorial piecing undertaken by European colonizers hence contributing to the “falsification of history.” (Diop) This was a way of constructing an ‘other’ for their convenience.

Hence, we must be cautious in our acceptance of notions and concepts that may appear to exclusively refer to an African reality. A more critical attention to the lexicography would yield many surprises - that is Europe’s reproduction of its own internal contradictions, which it attempted to transpose to Africa. Just as the concept of voodoo dolls is so tied to Haitian traditional religion while it is a known fact that the French exported the concept to Saint Domingue (Ferere 2000). Europe’s gaze on Africa then reproduced its own internal model as reflected in the colonial geographic apportionment of Africa at the Berlin conference. What followed was a thinking of the other [African] in terms of Europe’s own internal realities.

Consequently, we saw the Wallon/Flamand ethnic reality reproduced in Belgium’s territorial “share” from the Berlin raping of Africa. The Hutu/Tutsi dynamic is a reproduction of the Belgian model above mentioned; yet, a historical dimension of this magnitude is barely mentioned in academic discourse. We now know the consequences of this model’s reproduction in the case of Rwanda.  

Africans never recognized this European internal dynamic as a founding element of their heritage and culture. Most wars fought between African states after independence were due to these transposed European realities. The Cote d’Ivoire conflict is another classic example of the unraveling of the French ethnic reality. The colonizer has thus segmented in ethnic terms intersocietal relationships between different local groups. In Senegal, this reproduction led to a class differentiation between the indigenous and the ‘citizens’. As such, my mother from Rufisque acceded to a constructed ‘Frenchness’ that her sister could not afford simply because she lives two hundred miles from the constructed ‘identity’ site. These were/are the phantasmagorical morphologic characteristics formulated by the colonial power in its racial deliriums.

Europe’s notion of race was thus constituted by archaic and fictive representations inseminated in Africa for ends of domination. The notion of ethnic group is a European notion. The ethnic reading grid of the conqueror was thus applied to conquered populations in a model pushing the colonized to identify with the discourse of the oppressor.  The consequences are still visible in a neocolonial “African writing of Self.”⁶

Dispatch from the African Tower

Relocating to Africa, we hear the re-emergence of the discourse on race smelling from a petrified ecthyma gangrenosum of Dispatches of White Africa⁷ in a post Apartheid South African expanding to the continent and resulting in the Council for the Development of Research in Social Science (CODERIA) dedicating its bulletin number 1 & 2 of 2004 to the issue. The wondering of an existence of a “deep malaise anchored in the African psyche that would impeach Blacks to self-govern themselves in an environment of modern democracy” come to us from a white ‘African,’ Graham Boyton, whose autobiographical work, Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches from White Africa, laments the loss of happy white days of Apartheid in a eulogy to Ian Smith and the “old convinced conservators.”⁸

Boyton’s “nostalgia of colonialism,” not of the “violent oppression of Apartheid” he quickly points out, is even more problematic in its hope for Africans to cede them the center of the narrative of our own experience in the hands of their fathers. This is the ecthyma gangrenosum  that smells from the discourse. However, we need to be aware of the contagious nature of this ‘gangrenosum’. It has already invaded former healthy bodies in Africa and sucked all the ‘red cells’ of reason leading some to believe that: “History shows that the notion of race is not a ‘logical’ or scientific problem…”.⁹ It is the cloth that the monk is distinguished and the argument according to which it is Africans’ responsibility to construct a ‘non-racial center” in which whites and other non-black inhabitants of Africa could feel comfortable - that is a center in which “Africanity is reduced to a diversity consisting of that of individuals and not of the groups…” We heed the injunction by Lansana Keita on the problem between “Africanity’ and the “Black race,”¹⁰ by seeking a lexicographical clarification, not only in the Webster’s Ninth New Collegial Dictionary, but also in the Wolof of Senegal: Xeet - race is defined here as a group of people with a common origin. Consequently, when a band of joyful young white men yelled Niggers at my friend Neuville Guarik and me on the River Front of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they certainly did not know that he was Jamaican and I was Senegalese.