Everyone Is African

by Daniel J. Fairbanks

  European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, reaching their peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among the most overwhelming genetic dispersion events humanity has ever experienced. Many of you reading this book trace at least some of your ancestry to people who either chose or were forced to leave their native lands to live in distant parts of the world as a consequence of these events. I count myself in this group. All of my ancestral lines trace to people who left the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the northern coast of continental Europe at one time or another for the shores of North America.

  To many, the idea that there are no distinct biological races seems counterintuitive. In the United States, for instance, it is not uncommon for people to self-classify as white, black, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, or any other number of racial categories and to have genetic testing with ancestry informative markers confirm those classifications, at least in part. Does this not imply that some sort of racial boundaries exist, perhaps major continental boundaries, such as European, Asian, African, and Native American? In fact, we're about to see why the perception of distinct racial categories is more an artifact of immigration history than a consequence of true biological boundaries. To see how this happened, let's visit three places where the history of modern racism is well known—South Africa, Australia, and the United States—and follow the histories of people now living in these places, from prehistoric times to the present. We'll start with South Africa.

  The first modern humans to settle the southernmost regions of Africa were the ancestors of the San and the Khoikhoi people, sometimes referred to collectively as the Khoisan (“Khoi” and “San” combined). According to DNA analysis, the ancient ancestors of these people diverged from the ancestors of all other people as early as 140,000 years ago.4 The oldest archaeological remains discovered thus far in the southernmost parts of Africa date to about 44,000 years ago and probably belong to the ancient ancestors of the San people (the Khoikhoi arrived in the region more recently). The native languages of the Khoisan constitute a group of African click languages, which have a clicking consonant sound produced by sucking in air through closed lips. The click is sometimes written as !, as in the !Kung language spoken by the !Kung people of the Kalahari.

  The first Europeans to land on the southern tip of Africa were on a Portuguese ship that reached what is now the Cape of Good Hope, near the southern tip of Africa, in 1488. This opened the door to what eventually became a major seafaring trade route from Europe to India around the cape. As the economic importance of this trade route grew over the next century and a half, the Dutch East India Company, headquartered in Amsterdam, came to dominate this trade. It established a resupply post for ships at the cape in 1652 with a small group of Dutch settlers. Some of the settlers moved into the surrounding lands to establish farms that could supply food and other goods for the passing ships. Over time, the settlement grew, eventually becoming the city of Cape Town, and Dutch farms were established around it. Eventually, German, Scandinavian, and French Huguenot immigrants joined the Dutch settlers, creating colonies of northern Europeans.

  The first native people the European colonists encountered were the Khoikhoi, whom they named “Hottentots,” and the San, whom they named “Bushmen” (the terms in quotation marks are now considered pejorative and offensive). The European colonists and the native Khoisan people were from two geographic extremes, northern Europe and southern Africa. Although both groups were unaware of it, they shared common ancestors who, more than 140,000 years earlier, belonged to the same ancient population of people living in Africa.

  Though separated for thousands of generations, and very different culturally, the European immigrants and Khoisan people were not so different genetically, sharing numerous variants dating back to their common ancestry. For instance, among the Europeans, some people had type A and others type O blood, and the same was true of the Khoisan, with type O the most common in both groups.5 Most of the variation in both groups was likewise ancient African and was shared. However, since the time of ancestral separation, newer genetic variants had accumulated independently in both groups, among them variants conferring differences in skin, hair, and eye pigmentation; hair texture; facial features; and body structure. For instance, the Dutch were likely then among the tallest people in the world and the Khoisan among the shortest, as is still the case.

  Although the Khoisan people and European immigrants differed genetically, they also differed for nongenetic characteristics, such as culture, clothing, language, religion, technology, weapons, and how they obtained food—differences that, like the genetic differences, had accumulated over countless generations of geographic separation. The two groups were discontinuous and distinct, for culture and for a minority of their genes. They perceived themselves as separate and distinct races.

  However, going back to the time before European colonization, if we were to trace human genetic diversity along a land route from the Khoisan in southern Africa to the Dutch in northern Europe (passing northward through Africa, across the Sinai into the Middle East, then through what was then the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Balkans into northern Europe), a complex pattern of changing human genetic diversity would have been evident. The transitions would have been gradual, with evidence of admixture and variation along the way, but without boundaries delineating distinct genetic races of people. The reason for the perception of distinct races when European colonists settled southern Africa was the sudden juxtaposition of people from the extremes of that long continuum.

  European merchant ships returning from India to Holland stopped at the Cape Town outpost for resupply. Among the “cargo” these ships carried were people taken as slaves, mostly from India. As some of these slaves were traded or sold to the settlers, another distinct group of people—from south Asia—expanded in this part of Africa. They were physically, culturally, and genetically distinct from the European settlers and the native Khoisan people and were perceived as another separate and distinct race.

  The consequences of these differences were devastating. Consistent with their worldview and religious convictions, the European settlers saw themselves as intellectually, culturally, and genetically superior, with a divinely appointed destiny. Though they were fewer in number than the Khoisan peoples, their weaponry was far more powerful, and they quickly overcame any resistance. More devastating than weapons, however, were the strains of infectious diseases the Europeans brought, to which they were more resistant than the Khoisan were because ongoing exposure had stimulated their immune systems. One of the most tragic consequences of early European immigration into southern Africa was the number of people who died of infectious disease carried by the Europeans, especially smallpox. In 1713, smallpox-causing viruses from the contaminated laundry of a passing ship first infected the south Asian slaves working in the laundry and, shortly thereafter, infected the European settlers. Though some from both those groups died of smallpox, the most severe outbreak was among the Khoikhoi. They had never been exposed to smallpox, so their immune systems had never had a chance to produce protective antibodies against the disease-causing virus. This epidemic, followed by two subsequent smallpox epidemics, devastated Khoikhoi populations. In the end, the Khoikhoi people and their culture were essentially annihilated in southern Africa. Jared Diamond's title for his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, aptly summarizes in three words why European colonists overwhelmed native people in Africa and other continents, with germs initially the most devastating of the three.

  As the number of Europeans increased in southern Africa, those who were farmers and herders began migrating northward and eastward, establishing farms and ranches. Tensions arose when the British seized control of the cape and drove the non-British European farmers and ranchers, known as Voortrekkers (meaning “forward-trekkers” or “pioneers”), even farther north and east into parts of what are now South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The British e
ventually established their own settlements in these lands as well.

  The expanding northeastward settlement and land use encroached into the lands of Bantu people. The Bantu had originated tens of thousands of years earlier, far to the northwest in what are now Cameroon and Nigeria. About 3,500 years ago, they transitioned from a hunter-gatherer society to an agriculturalist society, with food production focused on yams, a nutritious and high-energy food. This transition allowed Bantu population sizes to increase well beyond what hunter-gatherer populations could sustain.

  This was the beginning of the Bantu expansion, one of the most overwhelming genetic upheavals in the history of Africa. Some Bantu populations migrated eastward, over many generations, through the Sahel region, a grassland between the Sahara Desert and the rain forests of central Africa, well suited to expanding yam cultivation. Other Bantu groups migrated southward along and near the Atlantic coastline. As they migrated, the Bantu overtook the hunter-gatherer and herder-farmer societies they encountered. Whether the assimilation of other populations was peaceful or violent, or some combination of the two, is unknown. What is known is that DNA variants that originated in the Bantu became a major part of the genetic structure of native populations along the way. By about 1000 CE, the Bantu expansion along the southeast part of the African continent had reached the southern parts, driving the Khoisan people westward into more arid regions near the cape, where the Europeans first encountered them.

  Among the Bantu people the Voortrekkers confronted were the Xhosa and the Zulu, both of whom were militarily powerful. A series of wars ensued, enflamed by broken treaties and massacres, resulting in deaths on both sides. One of the most famous events was the Battle of Blood River between the Voortrekkers and the Zulu. Following the execution of a Voortrekker negotiating group carried out by the Zulu leader, both sides prepared for battle. As the time approached, the Voortrekkers made a vow to God that they would build a chapel in commemoration if they were victorious. The Zulu warriors outnumbered the Voortrekkers by more than sixty to one. The Zulu spears and shields, however, were no match for the muskets and cannons of the Voortrekkers, who fought from a defensive position behind a fortified wall of wagons. The Zulu defeat was catastrophic. More than three thousand Zulu warriors died, whereas only three Voortrekkers were wounded. At the height of the battle, Zulu blood stained the river red, hence the battle's name. The Voortrekkers viewed the victory as a divine affirmation of their destiny in the land.6

  This was one of countless events during European colonialism that fueled the conviction of divinely appointed destiny in nearly every place in the world where European colonies existed. In southern Africa, battles between Europeans and native Africans fanned the flames of intense racial hatred on both sides. Over time, a legal system of racial suppression arose, culminating during the latter half of the twentieth century in what is famously known as apartheid. The historic superimposition of distinct immigrant cultures—European, south Asian, and Bantu—into a region occupied by the Khoisan led to the perception of distinct races that persisted for generations.

  Apartheid officially began in 1948 and lasted until 1994. People were legally classified as belonging to one of four racial categories: White, Black, Indian, or Coloured. Descendants of European colonists were categorized as White; Bantu as Black; south Asian as Indian; and Khoisan, along with people of mixed ancestry, as Coloured. Segregation and antimiscegenation laws separated people into their respective racial categorizations, with political and economic power concentrated in the White class. Those categorized into one of the three nonwhite classes were forced to move into racially segregated communities when the areas where they lived were officially declared as White.

  The period of apartheid was long and oppressive. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for twenty-seven years for leading nonviolent opposition and was released in 1990 as political and economic pressure throughout the world was growing against apartheid. For the next several years, Mandela negotiated the end of apartheid with then-president Frederik Willem de Klerk. In 1993, Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the following year, he was elected president in the first elections to allow nonwhite voting. News of his passing reached me as I was writing this chapter.

  Political and cultural change over the past quarter century in South Africa has been rapid. Nonetheless, the legacy of racial tensions that trace their foundations to the historic juxtaposition of distinct groups of people persists. For instance, income inequality in South Africa is among the highest in the world, most of it divided along the apartheid-era racial classifications, with the highest income concentrated in the white class.7 This same sort of income stratification is evident in most nations where European colonization brought together people of distant geographic origins, one of which is where we turn next.

  The southeast coast of Australia, where the city of Sydney now stands, is the first place on that continent colonized by Europeans. The people who occupied Australia before European colonization were descended from a very ancient ancestral lineage. According to DNA analysis, some of the first people to split away from the descendants of those who left Africa more than sixty thousand years ago and migrated into the Middle East were the ancestors of Australian Aborigines. They diverged from the main population, migrating eastward, between sixty-two thousand and seventy-five thousand years ago.8 Their descendants crossed southern Asia to southeastern Asia over a period of thousands of years. Along the way, there was limited mating in central Asia between these migrants and Denisovans, a now-extinct humanlike group closely related to Neanderthals that we know only from a few bones and DNA. By then, the migrants already carried a small proportion of Neanderthal DNA from limited mating between their ancestors and Neanderthals in the Middle East. DNA variants inherited from Denisovans are now present in people who have Aboriginal Australian, Papuan, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island ancestry.

  At the time, sea levels were much lower than they are now. A large peninsula called Sunda connected what are now the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java with the Asian continent as a single landmass (figure 7.3). Some of these people crossed the narrow straits of water between Sunda and the continent of Sahul (now Australia and the islands of Papua and Tasmania) as early as fifty thousand years ago.9 As sea levels rose when the ice age ended, the current islands in the region were formed.

  After sea levels rose, the descendants of ancient immigrants remained mostly isolated in Australia for tens of thousands of years. By the time European colonists reached Australia, growth of Australian Aboriginal populations had been rising, and hunter-gatherer tribes occupied much of the continent, having populated it long ago.10 Though they had not developed cultivated agriculture or advanced weaponry, they had rich and varied artistic and musical traditions. Magnificent rock art, sculpture, and some of the world's oldest known musical instruments are the legacies of these people and their cultures.

  British colonization of Australia began at Sydney in the late eighteenth century, initially as a penal colony but later as free settlements promoted by subsidies given to British people who chose to immigrate to Australia. The discovery of gold in 1851 coincided with an economic depression in Britain, resulting in large-scale immigration from Britain, other parts of Europe, and North America. Workers from China and the Pacific Islands were brought to Australia to labor in mines, farms, and plantations.

  The result in Australia was similar to that in South Africa, where distinct groups of people with different genetic and cultural histories were juxtaposed, living with stark social inequality. During the earliest years of European immigration, large numbers of Aboriginal Australians died of infectious disease brought by the settlers, especially smallpox.

  Figure 7.3. The ancient peninsula of Sunda and continent of Sahul during the most recent glacial maximum (ice age), when sea levels were much lower. The approximate locations of ancient shorelines are indicated by dashed lines and the modern shorelines by solid lines.

  A conflict named the
Black War on the island of Tasmania has been referred to as “the most intense conflict in Australia's history” and “a clash between the most culturally and technologically dissimilar humans to have ever come into contact.”11 A penal colony was established in Tasmania in 1803 and initially remained confined to a small portion of the island. The first conflict was in 1804. By 1820, large numbers of settlers had arrived and encroached on Aboriginal lands as they expanded into the interior. Accounts of what happened vary and are told entirely from the settlers’ point of view, and historians continue to dispute what actually happened. It is clear that British colonists considered the Aboriginal people as savages and committed unspeakable violence against them. In response, the Aboriginal attacks on British colonists increased dramatically. Several hundred people lost their lives on both sides. Moreover, infectious disease carried by the colonists took the lives of large numbers of Aboriginal people. In 1828, Governor George Arthur declared martial law, permitting patrols to kill any Aboriginal people who resisted them. After a failed attempt by Arthur in 1830 to round up all Aboriginal people and confine them on a peninsula, George Augustus Robinson, a clergyman and builder, was appointed to be a conciliator and convince the remaining Aboriginal people to relocate to Flinders Island. Robinson succeeded in winning their trust, and, over time, the few hundred people who remained out of what had originally been a population estimated at more than five thousand moved to the island. In spite of Robinson's promises of a good and prosperous life there, living conditions were so poor that most died of malnutrition and disease. The final survivor of the island population (which by then had been moved back to the mainland) died in 1876, and the Tasmanian government announced the extinction of the population. In fact, others had survived elsewhere, and descendants with Aboriginal Tasmanian and European ancestry remain today. Nonetheless, the language, culture, and vast majority of members of an entire people had been annihilated.