Letters from Africa

Africans in European Painting

In European art, Africans are referred to as Negroes, Moors and Mulattoes, all of them intentionally demeaning or worse. I have assembled a selection of famous "African" images, along with a few "Americans." The selection is idiosyncratic of course - these are the ones I find

Letters from Africa

Bahia in Brazil

Slavery in Brazil was big business. Because of the high mortality rate, millions more slaves were shipped there from Africa than to anywhere else, including the United States, and Brazil was the last country to free its slaves, in 1888. Today the state of Bahia and its capital city Salvador

Letters from Africa

Balkis, Queen of Sheba

Balkis was actually the Queen of Sheba. She is known in Islam as Balkis (or Bilqis or Bilquis or Bilikisu Sungbo in Nigeria), as Malkat Shva in Israel, and in Ethiopia she is known as Queen Makeda. Ethiopia and Yemen both lay claim to ancient Sheba and say they have

Letters from Africa

'Berber Woman' ('Portrait d'une Kabyle')

She's a French Orientalist painting from 1870, by Émile Vernet-Lecomte. She is sometimes described as "Dihya Berber Queen of the Aurès" or Al-Kahina, and the painter may have had her in mind, referring to a Berber queen who led resistance to the Muslim conquest of the

Letters from Africa

Bilikisu Sungbo

Portrait d'une négresse by Marie-Guillemine Benoist, from 1800. Not Queen Bilikisu Sungbo but an unknown woman. Benoist (1768 - 1826) was one of a small group of women painters in late 18th century France. She studied under Jacques-Louis David and received commissions from Napoleon. This was her most

Letters from Africa

Borat

I am a Borat fan but I think Sacha Baron Cohen unwittingly strayed into the very thing he criticizes. Whether he likes it or not, his use of Kazakhstan was racist and Kazakhs got upset (as did Roma, the Gypsies). Maybe that doesn't bother you but Cohen professed

Letters from Africa

Ceddo

“Ceddo is not a tribe, it is a state of mind” - director Ousmane Sembène The following is excerpted from a Michael Dembrow article on the 1977 film: "Sembène wants us to look at the past only to the extent that this will help us to analyze the present.

Letters from Africa

Code Noir

The Code Noir was a decree passed by Louis XIV of France in 1685, affecting all the French colonies, such as Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) that were involved in the sugar trade. Like other European "slave codes," it essentially codified slavery, eliminating slaves’ rights and defining them as property,

Letters from Africa

Eldad Hadani and Prester John

The legends of Prester John are well accounted for elsewhere. Less so for Eldad Hadani (ha-Dani). Hadani (literally “Eldad the Dan-ite”) was said to be a 9th century Jewish merchant and traveler who claimed to be from an independent Jewish kingdom in Ethiopia, although he seemed to know nothing about

Letters from Africa

Ezekiel

Angels and Wheels over Zion Is there a sexier book in the Tanakh or Old Testament? Of the Jewish prophets, Ezekiel has long been the one to make people (Jews and Christians) uncomfortable with his sexually explicit references, especially in chapters 16 and 23: (23) 19 Yet she became more

Letters from Africa

Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest

As the Danish Mohammed cartoon contest brouhaha unfolded in 2006, the most witty cartoon was actually this one, from some Israelis in Tel Aviv. This was their logo when they announced the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves! “We’ll show the

Letters from Africa

Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'

You would think that such a devastating satire would have had an enormous impact when it was published in Dublin in 1729, but in fact it didn't. Swift's Anglo-Irish contemporaries saw it for what it was, a scathing Tory attack on Whig policies in Ireland, and

Letters from Africa

Juliet Was Black?

It turns out that Othello wasn't Shakespeare's only African or Moorish character. This is the official Juliet statue in Verona. Tourists love to rub her breast for some reason, which is why it is shiny. It led to accusations that the statue is being sexually harassed.

Letters from Africa

Kahina and Xena, Warrior Princesses

You cannot be more highly honored than to be in a Xena episode, in this instance "Legacy" (Season 6 in 2000). After a dramatic sandstorm, Xena and Gabrielle help two warring Berber tribes, one of which is led by Kahina (above), to put aside their differences and take

Letters from Africa

Marc Chagall's Fiddlers

Black and Jewish - note the prayer shawl and the white hand in the painting above. Chagall painted several of these fiddlers and this one is from 1923-24, shortly after Chagall and his wife Bella returned to Paris from Russia. The Guggenheim prefers to call him "The Green Violinist,

Letters from Africa

Mark Twain and George Washington Cable

Twain and Cable became friends on a promotional book tour together in November of 1884 that reached 80 cities by February of 1885 when Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published. Twain had invited Cable, famous for Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880), to join him and, for obvious

Letters from Africa

Poe - 'The Raven' and Slavery

Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven (1845) channels slavery and this was recognized even at the time, as can be seen in the cartoon below (from 1863), where a disheveled Confederate slave owner is haunted by a "Negro" raven sitting atop the head of Horace Greeley,

Letters from Africa

Protesting Palestinian Women

Except that the women at the front are Israelis - of course - the Hebrew words say "I sleep with Palestinian women." Their statement: "Kvisa Shchora” (Black Laundry) is a direct action group of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and others against the occupation and for social justice.

Letters from Africa

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

This is a bizarre image in a bizarre story. Here King Solomon greets the Queen of Sheba but Solomon looks like a medieval rabbi in gold and the Queen of Sheba and the court have strayed out of a medieval Italian pageant. The painting is from an interesting series of

Letters from Africa

The Bride Market of Imilchil

Over three days in September, in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, some of the local Berber communities (the Ait Haddidou) come together at Imilchil to let their young people find a marriage partner or get a divorce before the snows close in again. This marriage moussem (“pilgrimage”) was devised to

Letters from Africa

The DNA Wars

The past is indeed an unknown country. A frenzy has developed in the current vogue for DNA analysis in ancestry-tracing. It reached a low point with DNA testing of the Beta Israel and we still see articles like this: "Are Ethiopian Jews descendants of the ancient Israelites?" Here

Letters from Africa

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling American novel of the 19th century after the Bible. It was no fault of the novel that the Reconstruction era parodied it in tacky burlesques or that Black American critics like James Baldwin raged at its paternalism. Uncle Tom was not a cliché

Letters from Africa

Was King Tut Black?

Back in 2005, scientists modeled Tutankhamun's features based on CT scans of his mummy. Predicting skin color is impossible though and what they produced (above) infuriated Afrocentrists who thought the Boy Prince had been turned into Boy George. They may have a point when you look at the