AFRICANS – BEASTS or
HUMANS?
Anonymous
(Investigator 111, 2006
November)
BRIEF
HISTORY OF RACISM
Classified with
orang-utangs, hunted as vermin
and kidnapped for slavery. Was such treatment of Black Africans right?
The book The Race War
says, "At the
start of the slave trading era in the early days of the sixteenth
century,
Africa was on the whole culturally no more backward – or advanced –
than
Europe…" (Segal 1967)
Despite approximate
cultural equality, many
Europeans regarded Negroes as semi human. This was a by-product of the
slave trade since it gave European slave traders a rationale to blunt
their
conscience.
The orthodox, biblical,
European view in
the 16th century was that all people worldwide had a common
origin:
God created man, a
single pair, at a finite
time in the not-very-distant past. Scientific versions of this belief
in
a single creation came to be known as 'monogenesis'.
(Baxter & Sansom
1972, p. 135)
However, many European
intellectuals adopted
"polygenesis" – the idea that God created several inferior races prior
to Adam and Eve and Africans descended from one such inferior race. One
popular book on this theme was Prae Adamitae (1655) by Isaac
La-Peyrere.
Polygenesis was attractive
to 18th-century
philosophers seeking to give a systematic explanation of the world:
Both Voltaire and
Rousseau suggested that
Negroes were naturally inferior to Europeans in their mental ability.
David
Hume argued that, "There never was a civilized nation of any other
complexion
than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or
speculation.
No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences… Such a
uniform
and constant difference could not have happened, in so many countries
and
ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these
breeds
of men." (Baxter & Sansom, pp 135-136)
A popular book that gave
polygenesis an apparent
scientific basis was History of Jamaica (1774) by Edward Long.
Long
called Africans "brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody,
thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people" with "a covering of
wool,
like a bestial fleece, instead of hair" and inferior in "faculties of
mind".
He claimed that Europeans and Negroes belonged to different species.
Some writers classed
Negroes with orang-utangs
and chimps:
As early as 1713
naturalists began looking
for a 'missing link' between men and apes and speculated on the
possibility
that Hottentots and orang-outangs might be side by side in the 'scale
of
life,' separated only by the fact that orang-outangs could not speak.
(Baxter
& Sansom, p. 136)
Referring to the Bushmen of
South West Africa,
The Weekend Australian Magazine said:
In Cape Province, until
the 1870s the British
hunting fraternity found them more exotic quarry than fox. A Bushman
died
in the Primate section of London Zoo at the turn of this century and
the
last permit to shoot Bushmen as vermin was issued in British
Bechuanaland
(Botswana) as recently as 1953. (Dec. 19-20, 1987, p. 4)
Racial prejudice against
Black Africans continues
widely today. For example, The White Man’s Bible of the "Church
of the Creator" (founded in 1973) claims: "We of the Church Of The
Creator
believe he [the black African] does not deserve the "human"
classification…"
(p. 167)
And, more generally,
racial prejudice against
dark-skinned people still occurs worldwide. For example:
NOUMEA:–Three New
Caledonians have been
charged with inciting murder and racial hatred after allegedly
producing
a musical tape urging European-born settlers in the French Pacific
territory
to "exterminate" the indigenous Melanesian Kanaks. (The Advertiser,
September
7, 1988, p. 7)
THE
BIBLE
The Bible mentions the
African nations of
Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya and includes them with humans, not with
beasts.
The Old Testament mentions
Ethiopians some
twenty times. Moses married one. (Numbers 12:1) Another rescued the
prophet
Jeremiah and also put his "trust in God". (Jeremiah 38:7-13; 39:15-18)
Skin color was so
irrelevant the Bible mentions
it but twice. Jeremiah 13:23 asks, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin?"
And the girl in The Song of Solomon calls herself "dark" or
"black".
(1:5)
In the New Testament Jesus
commanded his
followers to make "disciples of all nations", and Acts Chapter 8
records
how the first Ethiopian was converted. (Acts 8)
The Bible further declares
that all people
have a common ancestor, the "mother of all". (Genesis 3:20) Acts 17:26
says:
And he [God] made from
one, every nation
of men to live on all the face of the earth…
If true, it follows that all
humans are in basic
ways the same. Racism and the sort of nationalism that assumes an
innate
national superiority would be based on false assumptions.
Scientific proof of
humanity's common origin
came with DNA analysis in the 20th century. Negroes and
Europeans
are of one and the same human race. The genetic variation within any
supposed race is greater than the variation between supposed
races.
In other words the supposed "races" are just that – "supposed".
Bamshed & Olsen (2003)
expressed it:
The outward signs on
which most definitions
of race are based – such as skin color and hair texture – are dictated
by a
handful of genes. But the other genes of two people of the same "race"
can be very different. Conversely, two people of different "races" can
share more genetic similarity than two individuals of the same race.
Slave traders and scientists
who lumped beasts
and Negroes in one category were mistaken.
The race myth is an
example of people rejecting
the Bible and being proved wrong. This has happened in many other areas
of study from "A" for astronomy to "Z" for zoology. From such
accumulating
evidence we can rationally infer that, "Every word of God proves true."
(Proverbs 30:5)
In 1990 the Parliament of
South Africa repealed
the Groups Areas and Land Acts (laws that prescribed where
various
"races" may live and work) and the Population Registration Act
which
classified South Africans according to race.
The Bible, however,
opposed such distinctions
1,900 years earlier:
Here, there cannot be
Greek and Jew, circumcised
and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is
all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)
REFERENCES
Bamshed, M. J. and Olson,
S. E. Does Race
Exist, Scientific American, December 2003, pp 50-57.
Baxter, P & Sansom, B
(editors) 1972
Race, Penguin.
Segal, R 1967 The Race
War, Penguin,
p. 46.