Where in Africa does Africa start?

[Mike the Jedi]

Look, Charlie, I'm just making some honest, heartfelt observations here and even I don't always take what I say as gospel because a lot of it is speculation. I'm just vocalizing what I'm thinking and feeling. It makes sense to me, or I wouldn't say it. No need to get so defensive, as I agree with you on Africa more than you know (I've long been vocal about the Aethiopoid element in Egypt). But that doesn't mean I'm going to cut you slack on certain issues.

As far as the black internet people goes, I'm sure you've encountered the messageboard types I'm talking about before. The one's who go by "Lord Anubis of Khemet" on the internet but in real life their name is Jarvis Green. lol

And yes, I think blacks who give their kids Arab names are equally as ridiculous. Because the whole motivation behind this phenomenon has something to do with Aframs wanting their kids to have more ethnic sounding names. Why name your kid James when he could be Jamal? I wonder what the frequency of Niger-Kordofanian names versus Arabic ones in the black community is. lol... does the presence of all the Arabic names having something to do with NOI influence, I wonder? I honestly don't know...

I agree that Aframs could pass as Egyptians, but so could many Near Easterners and even southern Europeans. You could be Egyptian, so could I. Because we know the Egyptians varied. Doesn't mean the types we possess would've been dominant.

Anyway, you say a black person is a black person. But how does that jive with your anti-racial sentiments about not dividing people into groups? Because color is incredibly clinal and very much connected to UV. Labelling people on the basis of one phenotypic trait, especially one as superficial as skin color, is pretty silly. It would make equally as much sense to divide the races of man into categories based solely on the nose. You've got the hook nosed race in the Near East, the snub nosed race in the Baltic, the flat nosed race in West Africa, etc. It's kind of dumb to base one's racial identity on one trait, since racial type is about feature combinations.

Also, do you not see the double standard here in your perspective of who can be black versus who can be white?

You seem to have no problem accepting sub-Saharan Africans whose skin varies from darkest pitch to very light brown as "black people":

Even if they are metrically very different as the Nuba are from Selassie.

Yet you'd probably get irate if West Eurasians, whose skin colors range from palest white to medium brown, are described offhand as "white people":

Even if they're metrically very similar.

Also, why is the idea of Meds in Africa so preposterous? Sergi for example believed that the Mediterraneans were essentially an African race to begin with. Maybe it makes you uncomfortable to think that a Caucasoid-featured type could be native to the Dark Continent? Meaning its presence is not necessarily the result of an Asiatic or European migration INTO Africa but rather vice versa... that the presence of Mediterraneans in Europe and Asia are the result of a migration OUT of Africa? Is it really so preposterous for two major types to share the same continent like Mongoloids/Veddoids/Caucasoids share Asia? Also, just because people advance the notion of Mediterraneans in Africa doesn't always mean the African type of Med is going to be identical to that of the northern shores. When someone says Egyptians were Med, you shouldn't automatically think of Andy Garcia. Assuming the Mediterranoid affiliation of the Egyptians is correct, that doesn't mean the Egyptians would've looked southern European anymore than the Arabians.

[Anodyne]

rigaud said:

caucasoidintifada said:

All of Africa is Africa however not all is the same race.

The injection of race is of no importance, so why worry about so called "race"? What relevance does it have in the study of the history, culture and interactions between Africans amongst themselves? It has none.

Why not? The author of the paper you cited mentions race. It's in the title.

rigaud said:

ayndostoy said:

I edited my post:

You contradict yourself. If you say that pheontypes are not a legitimate way to break up people into zones, and then say, you don't equate black with Africa, then that means you agree that there are groups that are not black living in Africa, and therefore you must be accepting of "zones" where people's skin color differs.

Before I made an error. I typed "If you disagree that phenotypes aren't a legitimate way to break up people into zones..."

May God have mercy on my soul.

Moving on...

Look I am not contradicting myself and my statement that I made no equation of black=Africa was a response to the accusation that I did. I don't believe in the western racialist constructs of "Black Negroid" Africa and "White Mediterranean Caucasoid" North Africa", you know, the traditional racialist constructs that are applied to Africa in a divisive way. Take it or leave or interpret it anyway you see fit, but I'm not about argue over some insignificant small thing.

I never said that you beleive that Africa equals black. And yes you did contradict yourself. I explained how you contradicted yourself. You say you didn't but... you haven't dealt with what I said. I used your own words against you.

This is the point that you're ignoring:

If you agree that not all of Africa is black then what is the other part? If you make a distinction, which you do by saying not all Africa is black, then what you're doing is creating zones. Zones that are based on phenotype, considering skin color is part of a person's phenotype.

Remember you said this:

"And no you cannot divide Africa into zones based on "phenotype","

But yet you make a distinction based on skin color.

So you do believe in zones based on phenotype, or at least one aspect of a person's phenotype.

[Bilaad Binti]

fred said:

mike said:

lol... Cameo will probably have an aneurysm after reading your last post, Droop.

I'll just say this for now: the prevailing consensus is that the Nubians were Ethiop-skinned and that Afro-Asiatic originated in Africa.

I've never heard of a prevailing consensus, but you make your point.

Many would choose to say, however, that it's now popular to assume Afro-Asiatic originated in Africa, because most of the scholars working on it aren't of the highest caliber. They base their assumptions entirely upon a single point, namely that the family reaches a much greater diversity in Africa than it does in the Near East and Levant. But none of these specialists have so far proven clever enough to note that Indo-Iranian, for example, reaches a much greater diversity in South Asia than it does in its original homeland of Central Asia.

The field is generally unimpressed with the work done on Afro-Asiatic.

Seems to me that its you who isnt satisfied with the 'answers' currently on the table vis a vis the origin of Afroasiatic. If not, could you specify why is it the contention of most linguists is wrong in your eyes?

[Bilaad Binti]

drooperdoo said:

Mike,
Yes, but Nubians weren't black--as they're portrayed by Afrocentrists in universities today. Here are Egyptian portrayals of them:





They were originally from out of the Near East, and looked more like Osama Bin Laden than, say, Gary Coleman.

Although--over the centuries--it must be conceded that they were slowly snowed in by negroids and, today, their phenotype is quite squarely in the black camp. But, in ancient times, no--as the portrayals demonstrate--it was different.

As for Cushites---

In point of fact, there were two separate races called "Cushites" by the ancients . . . kind of how we call people from India Indians and people from North America Indians. Two separate peoples with the same name.

In the ancient world, one group of Cushites were Caucasoid, while the other are generally thought to be negroid.

But no matter. You already know all this--and far better than I do.

But my point is basically this: Yes, Egyptians had cultural contacts with blacks to the south. Significantly, however, the Egyptians ranged them as a separate race. They were the black race, as opposed to the red race. The Egyptians conquered them and took their land . . . kind of like how the Portuguese Empire conquered large masses of black Africa later on. Or how Italy took over Ethiopia in the 1930s.
But just as owning Ethiopia didn't magically turn Italians into negroes, conquering portions of black Africa didn't make Egyptians into sub-Saharan Africans, nor did it link their languages to theirs, nor their phenotypes.
If anything Ethiopians and Somalis speak Afro-Asiatic languages today because they were conquered by Caucasoids, not the other way around.
And that's the tragedy of so-called Afrocentrism. They try to imply that the North Africans were shaped by the blacks to the south.
That's akin to a black man in New Jersey speaking English, and claiming that Anglo-Saxons got their language from sub-Saharan Africa.
Putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

Too much of a mishmash of fact+ fantasy to address. Perhaps I should delete this?

From now on, as administrator I'll demand for some points to be followed with citations...

[Cameo]

To an African-American black is black, there is no divding people based on phenotype, thus everyone from Halle Berry to Shemar Moore, Wesley Snipes, Red Fox, Eddie Murphy, Sinbad to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett is black. If a Somali, Ethiopian, Nigerian, or Zimbabwean walked amongst our neighborhoods dressed as we do, they're going to be considered as another black person. So if a AA says AEs were black, they're not stating that AEs must have looked like West Africans or Central African Congo people, a strawman that Brace used in his "Clines and Clusters" study, because "black"[in th American sense as used by AAs] does not denote a monolithic single phenotype. Thats why I said its basically attacking a strawman when you [Mike] compared WA art to AE art.


And no Mike, I don't believe all of those termed "Caucasoids" are all metrically similar to each other, thats a biased assumption. Some are just as merically disimilar from each other as you think a Congolese and a Somali are. People in Africa overlap alot, there are no "discrete phenotype only" populations in Africa.

[Bilaad Binti]

An African American would probably consider these people to be blacks because of over exposure to one dropisms:

-Dark Dravidians from India
-Australian Aborigines
-Papuans and other Melanasians
-Some Polynesians
-Some Arabs (with non-SSA admixture)
-Even some predominately Berid+Saharid influenced European Mediterraneans as well as curly haired gracile meds.

[Cameo]

wadaad said:

An African American would probably consider these people to be blacks because of over exposure to one dropisms:

-Dark Dravidians from India
-Australian Aborigines
-Papuans and other Melanasians
-Some Polynesians
-Some Arabs (with non-SSA admixture)
-Even some predominately Berid+Saharid influenced European Mediterraneans as well as curly haired gracile meds.

The first three I agree, the secoond to last, is questionable, the last one is vague.

[imaginarypallies]

Africa Starts below France.

[Fred]

wadaad said:

fred said:

I've never heard of a prevailing consensus, but you make your point.

Many would choose to say, however, that it's now popular to assume Afro-Asiatic originated in Africa, because most of the scholars working on it aren't of the highest caliber. They base their assumptions entirely upon a single point, namely that the family reaches a much greater diversity in Africa than it does in the Near East and Levant. But none of these specialists have so far proven clever enough to note that Indo-Iranian, for example, reaches a much greater diversity in South Asia than it does in its original homeland of Central Asia.

The field is generally unimpressed with the work done on Afro-Asiatic.

Seems to me that its you who isnt satisfied with the 'answers' currently on the table vis a vis the origin of Afroasiatic. If not, could you specify why is it the contention of most linguists is wrong in your eyes?

I'm qualified enough to make my point, which anyone with a minimum of Indo-European linguistics might make. And see my post following the one you quoted.

"Most linguists" has forever meant nothing, rather like "most mythologists", because there are just so many of them, and many with little classical training. Twenty years ago, "most linguists" were working with Chomskyan syntax (mainly because it's easy), absolutely convinced of its power, but now only one in ten, if that, still use that fundamentally flawed approach.

EDIT: This post, which you've probably read by now, appears ruder than I remember writing it. I don't mean to imply that you're unschooled. Sorry.

To my point, I've really little to add. Hamito-Semitic may have had an African origin, but if so, it will be "proven", as best it can be, with the Comparative Method, the Calculus of historical linguistics. The greater diversity Hamito-Semitic reaches in Africa proves nothing.

[Bilaad Binti]

Oh ok...I agree that relying on greater diversity alone isnt satisfactory for placing origin.

In any case, the original home of Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) whether the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the Levant...or on the shores of the Red Sea...or the base of the Great rift valley does not matter to me.

'Africa' is imaginary as much as its real and tangible. My birthplace of Hargeisa is closer geographically to Sana'a in Asia than it is to Mogadishu. Yet, Im African...and a Mogadishan is a fellow Somali.

[Cameo]

Afro-Asiatic is postulated to hav arisen in Africa based on divergence, not just greater diversity. Cushitic, as I've pointed out, has the branch with the most divergent languages within it. The greate the divergence within a language family the longer and deeper the time depth it must have taken. Because Cushitic has languages within its branches that are the most divergent from each other[along with Chadic and Omotic] its postulated it was pobably the first language to branch off from proto-Afro Asiatic and Cushitic is spoken only in Africa. The evidence for an African origin, based solely on linguistics, is stronger than for an Southwest Asian origin.

[Fred]

Not true at all. Insular Celtic separated very early from the Proto-Indo-European, but is the most conservative of all branches, while Germanic, which separated rather late, is the least - diverging wildly, and continuing to do so, especially within itself.