The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  62 Illustration to Herbert Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (1890).

  TO TAKE UP the issue of skin colour, it would not now be thought that black Africans or Australian aborigines are survivors from an earlier stage of human evolution than are we ourselves. And though Darwin himself was sceptical about the influence of climate and the sun, he does, in The Descent of Man, touch on what now would be thought the most important factor affecting pigmentation. In an addition to the second edition of 1874, he notes that ‘as Dr Sharpe remarks . . . a tropical sun, which burns and blisters a white skin, does not injure a black one at all’, and goes on, ‘whether the saving of the skin from being thus burnt is of sufficient importance to account for a dark tint having been gradually acquired by man through natural selection, I am unable to judge.’25 It would now be thought that it is precisely because of its protective value that a high concentration of melanin has survived or evolved in those peoples who have lived for many hundreds of millennia under the most intense solar radiation – such as the peoples of equatorial Africa, South Asia and northern Australia. It is clear that in Africans, and in northern Australians, dark-to-black skin has survived or evolved independently, since – in their genetic ancestry – they are more distant from each other than Africans are from Europeans.

  As to race, it would now be said that though movements of populations can yield contrasts, in the long perspective of evolution one cannot draw distinct boundaries between one race and another, since if one had travelled the world at a period when people stayed longer in the same habitat, one would find ‘racial’ features changing very gradually as one progressed from one environment to another. It used to be said that Egyptians were of a mixed ancestry, and their skin colour varied depending whether they had more ancestors from a light-coloured race at the mouth of the Nile, or from the Nubians of the upper Nile. As it now appears, there never were two distinct races. The Nile is the longest river in the world – more than 4,000 miles – and as one travels up its length from the Mediterranean through Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan and into Uganda and Kenya, which span the Equator, one finds a slow gradient of darkening skin colour, together with an increase in other features thought of as African. Nasal passages shorten to breathe a thicker, hotter, more heavily humid air, while bodies grow more elegantly tall and thin because extra-long calves and forearms dissipate body heat quickly. That gradient exists now as it did in the time of the Romans, of the Greeks, of the ancient Egyptians and Nubians, and for very many millennia long before then. The invasions that Egypt has suffered – from the Assyrians, Persians and Greeks, and later from the Mameluks, Turks, French and British – were not invasive enough to leave a visible change. In sum, the simple understanding in the ancient world that skin colour darkened as one went further south because people were burned more black by the sun was nearer to the truth than later, more ‘racial’ explanations.26

  Putting ‘race’ to one side, one might take up the application to Africans of the word and idea of ‘black’, given that ‘black’ is identified, in many cultures, with soiling, accursedness and the threat of death. Simply as a colour description it is not exact, since most Africans are not jet-black. The old colonial literature drew many distinctions, which can have a grotesque sort of connoisseurship: so Stanley said ‘the Wahumba . . . have clear ebon [sic] skins, not coal-black, but of an inky hue’, and noted too that ‘“black” skin could have a tone as light as copper’.27 It is not of course hard to understand why words for ‘black’ might be innocently applied to Africans, and Africans themselves will use such words for one people or another. But manifestly the ‘blacking’ of Africans is not always innocent. Colour-words can be used as a means of othering, of making the Other more ‘other’. When Native North Americans are called ‘red’, or Chinese ‘yellow’, they sound more distinctly as though they come from another race – or another planet. People in the West do not call foreigners ‘brown’ in the same way, because brown is not an exaggeration: foreigners may be brown, as Westerners try to be in the summer.

  In other words, the point of calling people ‘red’, ‘yellow’ or ‘black’ is that no one really is quite those colours, and use of the colour-words intensifies the foreignness. And if ‘red’ and ‘yellow’ can become prejudicial, how much more so will ‘black’, having associations ready to hand with death, misery, malignancy, guilt and supernatural evil? Calling Africans black has made it easier to call them animals, children, idiots, demons, prostitutes, lepers and syphilitics. Words for ‘black’ have assisted in a kind of psychic dumping in which bad things are driven from us and fastened onto Africans. For no other people on Earth has been so continuously, and so diversely, traded, flogged, shackled, branded, mutilated, slaughtered and variously abused as have Africans; and our naming of their dark skin ‘black’ has made it easier for this to happen.

  To see the inner consequences of black-naming one need only look in the North American ‘slave narratives’, where Africans speaking only English take the word ‘black’ to themselves. Distinctions between Nuba, Masai and Kukuyu vanish, ‘red’ Fulanis from the Sudan no longer call ‘Wolofs’ black; rather there is one race, the ‘blacks’. The word ‘black’ is still used generally for any bad thing, such as ‘black hearts’ or ‘the blackest perfidy’, or the question of whether the Devil is ‘as black as he is painted’. And the bad sense of ‘black’ then plays against – but also with – skin colour when the ex-slave ‘Aaron’ remarks in his narrative, ‘No matter if the slaves were as bad as they are black . . . ’, and again when the Right Reverend Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church humbly says, ‘We do not wish to offend: but when an unprovoked attempt is made to make us blacker than we are . . . ’. The black/bad play is recurrent through the slave narratives, adding an extra negativity to a situation that already is colossally disadvantaged, and which is then compounded by the abusive use of ‘black’ by whites. When ‘Aaron’ infuriates a white woman by calling her ‘honey’, she calls him a ‘damned black scoundrel’. She hollers for her husband, who shouts, ‘What have you been doing to my wife, you dam’d black scoundrel, you?’ If Aaron were Chinese, or a Native American, the white couple might or might not call him a damned yellow or red scoundrel, but if they did the abuse would be weaker because ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ have none of the maledictory force of ‘black’.28

  The situation is more harsh again because slaves and ex-slaves inherit the picture of their oppressors as ‘white’. Slave-owners did not have to be called white: Olaudah Equiano claimed that when he first saw the slave-traders, he was struck by their ‘red faces’. But white, with black, has been internalized, so ‘Aaron’ says his heart is white, and William J. Anderson (‘twenty-four years a slave . . . whipped three hundred times!!!’) says the hearts of the white masters ‘must be far blacker than the negro’s skin’. Thus the relation of slave to slave-owner is continually re-described by using the most extreme colour contrast with which humanity has agreed to name its best and worst values.29

  To take a testimony nearer to our time: in his first book, Black Skins, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952), the black Algerian psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon speaks of a ‘neurotic society’, of a communal ‘inferiority complex’: ‘the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority, alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation’. Nowadays, he says, ‘the first encounter with a white man oppresses [the Negro] with the whole weight of his blackness.’ In a prose that is also a poetry of anguish he speaks of

  All this whiteness that burns me . . . I walk on white nails . . . So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put it together again . . . A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence . . . I feel in myself . . . a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers.30

  He is speaking not of slavery but of colonial coexistence, which ‘has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analysing it to destroy it.’ Destruction is difficult, however, because o
f the totality of the equation of the African with all black and bad things not only in the workaday world but in all the realms of mental and cultural life:

  In Europe the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul. In the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis, the Negro – or, if one prefers, the colour black – symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine.

  Even return to a purely African life is miserable. If ‘the educated Negro . . . wants to belong to his people . . . it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss’.31

  IN AFRICA, BEFORE white people came, black had a double value comparable to its value in other societies as the colour of elegance, and of death. The old practices have been recorded, and in part continue. Certainly black was and is associated with sickness and death. A medicine man may suck a small black pellet from the body of his patient, and show it moving mysteriously in the palm of his hand. It may in fact be black beeswax and move because of fine hairs projecting from it, but also it is the sickness – the pain and the curse – there for all to see. In the lower Congo mourners would smear their bodies liberally with a greasy black pomade made of burned peanuts and charcoal, and also rub black ashes into their bodies and their clothes, and sometimes roll in black ashes so as to be black everywhere. Such usages may be the ultimate origin of mourning black, which later became black clothes.32

  As to how blackness came into the world, it was said in the lower Congo that when the son of the first woman died, she was commanded not to look on him until he was revived by God. She could not wait, and looked, and as a result her son stayed dead; thus death came, and her descendants, in punishment, were stained black. The myth offers a parallel not only to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also to Genesis, where again the first wrong is blamed on the first woman, who brings in death with the colour black.

  But though black could be bad, it could also be good, even curative. Medicinal charms might be black, like the ‘Black Stone’, which is now sponsored by the Belgian missionary society, the White Fathers. In alternative accounts it is actually an animal bone, or is cooked from herbs: it is credited with the unique ability to absorb snake venom. And black is often also beautiful. There is a Xhosa proverb, ‘It is the seed of the umya’, said of any person who is thought extremely beautiful. The seed of the umya – a species of wild hemp – is like a small, jet-black bead. Traditional practices, which continue today, include the cosmetic use, in Sudan and the Congo, of black pomades and body paint. The whole body or one side of it, or the head and some limbs, may be painted with black, geometric patterns, not as war-paint but with a ceremonial, magical or festive purpose. Nuba women in Sudan have used hara (pounded specularite) to make themselves ‘surpassingly beautiful with the hara’s blackness’, and among the Ndembu in Zambia young women might enhance their beauty again by blackening their vulvas with the soot of burned tree-bark. Among the Ndembu, women with very black skin have been considered the most desirable, and Victor Turner reports that black is also associated with a good marriage. If the bride is pleased with the frequent intercourse on the bridal night, she gives a secret signal to her ritual instructress, who collects malowa, black alluvial mud, and scatters a little of it on the threshold of every hut in the village.33

  More at large, black stones and black glass have been used for beads. Black haematite and soapstone have long been used for sculpture, and for many centuries ebony has been carved into figurines and masks, often with that extraordinary freedom of stylization which was to be inspirational for twentieth-century sculptors like Henry Moore. Black paint was used prominently, decoratively, on shields, boats and fabrics made from tree-bark. Jet-black cattle were valued – and highly prized – because of their beauty.

  Given all that black Africans have suffered, following their contact both with Arabs and with Europeans, there was a need for the ancient and present beauty of blackness to be reasserted – and by Africans. That reassertion has come in the twentieth century, with increasing force in the last many decades, and it would be fatuous for me to rehearse this great change. I shall refer to an early stage, the Négritude movement which was founded in the 1930s by francophone Africans living in Paris. The key figures were the dramatist Aimé Césaire from Martinique and the Senegalese poet – and later president – Léopold Sédar Senghor. The politics of the group were Marxist, but its central thrust lay in its assertion of African values, and in the work of Senghor in a celebration of black beauty. As in ‘Black Woman’ (‘Femme noire’):

  Femme nue, femme noire

  Vêtue de ta couleur qui est vie . . .

  . . .

  Fruit mûr à la chair ferme, sombres extases du vin noir . . .

  . . .

  . . . les perles sont étoiles sur la nuit de ta peau . . .

  (Naked woman, black woman

  Clothed in your colour which is life . . .

  . . .

  Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark ecstasies of black wine . . .

  . . .

  . . . pearls are stars on the night of your skin . . .)

  Curiously he treats her colour as clothing, though that perhaps is a way of distinguishing her beauty from an essential self that is not colour-bound. In any case her clothing is as alive as she is, since the word vetue concentrates into vie, as her perles, shining like stars on her skin, slide into the word for the skin itself, peau, and again the fruit mur – the ripe fruit of her beauty – contracts to ferme, her firm flesh. The ‘black wine’ he mentions might be red wine, though since he speaks elsewhere of black milk and black blood, the wine may be black, and a direct metaphor for African life and ecstasy. I do not know that I can better illustrate the theme (in realist art) than with the tender etching Rembrandt had made of an evidently tall and slender negress 300 years before, in 1658 (illus. 63). Within the context of Western art her posture and her exposure together make her a reclining Venus. More immediately from daily life, and from Africa, a beautiful photograph taken around 1900 shows a Swahili woman fixing the hair of another, with the aid of a comb of black African hardwood (illus. 64).

  63 Rembrandt van Rijn, Reclining Negress, 1658, etching.

  64 A Swahili woman fixing another’s hair, c. 890–1920.

  Wine is, however, a French much more than an African product, and the poem is in French – the colonial language. Later generations of African and Afro-European writers have criticized Senghor for cooperating with the colonial culture: indeed the whole drive of Négritude, in asserting ‘black’ values, has been seen as too simple a reversal, an inversion, of white takes on black. Fanon in his later classic, The Wretched of the Earth, scarcely uses the word ‘black’, and speaks of the need of the ex-colonies to ‘turn over a new leaf . . . work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. The set of mind that makes an issue of colour, black or white, positive or negative, he casts behind him when he writes, ‘We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged.’34

  Even so, Négritude was an important moment, and had passion as well as an idea. Senghor’s remark that ‘Emotion is black as reason is Greek’ is often quoted, but perhaps simplifies his larger argument that black culture reflects deep and beautiful parts of a common heritage with which European culture has lost touch. Perhaps all a white writer in an ex-colonial country can do is to recognize the retort that Africa gave to its colonists when it chose to speak its own values in its own voice, but in their language (which, by the way, is the language of England’s own colonial invaders, whom, unlike the Africans, we never expelled). Nor is Senghor’s asserted Négritude a simple quantity: he is not thinking of mixed parentage or now-fashionable hybridity when he writes,

  J’ai vu le soleil se coucher dans les yeux bleus d’une négresse blonde

  (I have seen the sun set in the blue eyes of a blond black girl)

  A blonde black girl with blue eyes could not exist in actuality (hair
dyed blonde notwithstanding), but in language she can – in the volatility of contradiction. Her black, then, is a mental colour, like the black of sin that is also crimson. The contradiction does not cancel itself, since it works a paradoxical magic, equating beloveds both black and blonde. It is not for her colour that the beloved is loved, beautiful as she is, both black and blonde. And to assert black as a colour is to assert other colours too, for if there were only black, black would not be a colour.

  White still is a negative in his black-white play. Paris in the winter snow is ‘la mort blanche’, and the white sun (‘le soleil blanc’) shines over the cemetery that was colonial Senegal. He calls his own books ‘blancs comme ennui’, white like boredom. These dark plays with white contrast with other paradoxes where blackness is brightness – as in ‘l’éclat sombre de ta gorge’ (the dark brightness of your throat), or in his lover’s ‘peau de nuit diamantine’ (skin of diamantine night), or again in ‘Nuit d’Afrique, ma nuit noire, mystique et claire, noire et brillante’ (Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and shining). So his opposites equate, and open distances, depths. Like Fanon, he speaks of a black abyss, though the darkness of it must also be hot, potent and dangerous since he speaks ‘aux mines d’uranium de mon coeur dans les abîmes de ma Négritude’ – ‘from the uranium mines of my heart in the abysses of my Négritude’.35