So how did Africa become black?

Black history month.  So, kids, if you want to stump your public school teachers ask , “How did Africa get to be black?”

            Black is a stupid label since you never see anyone the color of india ink.  Nor do you see anyone the color of snow yet we talk ‘white’ nonsense too.  All humans are some shade of brown.  If you look at a map of Africa you find Hamitic peoples north of Sahara who are Caucasians. It is believed all human races came originally from Africa (DNA and language group tracing). You find a mélange south of N. Africa which has previously been labeled Negroid. But consider, there are the dominant Bantus with dark brown skin and wide,flat noses throughout Africa, but there are also enclaves of pygmies who are reddish brown, rather like Native Americans, but only 4 feet tall.  There are Watusis who are well over six feet tall in South Africa.  Clearly these are not the same race.  There are San-Khoi (Hottentots and Bushmen) in SW Africa who have tightly coiled hair, small noses and yellowish-brown skin whose women tend to very large buttocks.  That’s clearly another race. Nilo-Saharans are an interesting dark brown skin but with facial features much like Europeans—Swedes with dark-skinned cousins in Sudan of strikingly similar DNA. Madagascar Island has natives closely related to Indonesians.  Each race has a distinct language group as well.  For example, the North Africans belong to the same language group as Semitics who wrote the Bible and practically invented commerce in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.

            But the Bantus dominate.  Most Afro-Americans came from a small area of West Africa which kept many slaves and traded them to Europeans who had just about eliminated slavery by the end of the Middle Ages.  Slavery had a re-emergence in the Americas. And the people traded were almost entirely Bantus.  So why did Bantus come to dominate Africa and lend their ‘blackness’ to the continent.  The answer is agriculture.

            The Sahel region of sparse grass and rivers is just south of Sahara.  Here, we know that the natives learned to do agriculture.  In order for a hunter-gatherer to start doing agriculture, they have to see an advantage to raising things and staying in one place, rather than hunting and gathering.  Hunter-gatherers can only support a sparse population, never more than 4 to a square mile. The Sahel farmers found they could raise African sorghum, watermelon, cow peas, pearl millet, cattle, and guinea fowl. It beats the heck out of running around trying to spear dangerous water buffalos. The husbandry of birds like chickens and guineas breeds diseases that spread to humans.  Agriculture allows denser poplations and specialized skills, like warriors and weapon-makers.  In short, the Bantus spread their agriculture south through the rest of Africa, killing off many of the other races by war or by diseases they brought.  The same thing happened when Western Europeans met the natives of the Americas, or when the Chinese spread into SE Asia and Indonesia.

            Thus Africa was overrun by Bantu “black” leaving the other races as small enclaves of race and language in certain remote, desert or jungle or highland places. And this happened about 2000 years ago, rather recently historically, and is strongly marked by language and culture.  Ironic, given our politics of today: a Superior Black Race took over Africa, killed off and subjugated the others.  The best lesson to be learned is that these kinds of racial genocides have happened throughout human history.  Indeed until the American Experiment and British Enlightenment gradually changed people to be of a more accepting heart for others, this supplanting was completely common. Thank Christianity for the change.

            Ask your school teacher if they knew this.