Scapegoating model Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina for choosing to represent South Africa in an international competition shows our shallowness and the noxious nature of our politics.
Apart from about 8% of the population, those who “don’t see race” or believe that legal apartheid is over and we have to “move on”, South Africans have a right to remember and to remind ourselves of how racism has structured state and society, and continues to do so.
What sets back and poisons these necessary reminders and the memory of racism is a maddening blur of race, ethnicity, nationalism – national origins – and even “blood”, as definitive markers of who we are and where, or in which community, we belong.
We reach, at the most twisted and perverse end, to admixture, to the way we speak to define blackness and belonging – or simply discredit and insult. It’s not unusual, for example, to hear that someone “is not black” or “not African” because they don’t speak like “a black” or “an African”. In the same vein you are either a “real black” or a “clever black”.
Elsewhere on the spectrum of bewildering identifications and statements about belonging, we would insist that the French national football team that won the 1998 and 2018 World Cup were African.
This is fine, if you are wedded to a belief that human beings belong somewhere, or are tied to a group based on pigmentation or purely observable characteristics. You are African if you look African.
Except, of course, in South Africa the ethno-nationalist EFF and African nationalist ANC would claim the right to determine who is, and who is not African, and therefore have a right to remain… the other lot don’t see colour so they are not part of this discussion, and should not find succour in it or gloat.
The legacies and legatees of empires
Before we get to the science of race there are a few things that have to be stressed and which require (at least) some humility and honesty. Of the more than 200 countries in the world, very few indeed can claim that their citizens are pure anything.
We are, all of us, mixed in some way or another, and very many of us (South Africans) are legatees of European colonisation. I am, and so are the people who don’t see colour. Our privileges are the outcomes of decades and centuries of vertically segmented power (and privilege), and we carry these privileges with us, always.
It is inconceivable that any empire can have a presence in a territory without leaving genetic traces. Most people in England carry somewhere in their DNA traces of people who travelled and settled there during the Roman Empire – over more than 300 years.
People in North Africa are a “blend” of indigenous Africans and Phoenicians who settled Carthage in about 656 BCE – and stayed for 500 years.
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The Songhai Empire (1460 – 1591 CE) and the Mali Empire (1240 – 1645 CE) reached beyond what are today national states in West Africa. The Srivijaya Empire stretched across the Malay archipelago from the seventh to the 11th century. The Qing dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China, and lasted from about 1644 to 1912.
One empire I find most intriguing was that of the Ottomans, who stretched from Western Asia to North Africa, the Arab world, Eastern Europe to the gates of Vienna – over more than 600 years. The Ottomans, who came to rest, as it were, in what is today Türkiye, have carried, in persons, DNA from Mongolia and quite likely northwestern Asia and the Korean Peninsula. These are just the facts, and do not explain the social impacts of empires.
Almost all white people in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa carry traces of European empires. Almost all “brown” people around the world are a mixture of indigenous people and those very empires.
What all the aforementioned tell us is that almost all the people in the world are genetically mixed, and notions of purity or exceptionalism are just nonsense. This idea is fed into the mixers and blenders that gave us the “scientific” racism that was born in the European world, and emboldened colonialism and “civilising missions”.
Out of Africa is more than a cartographic reference
We believe in race because we look at groups or individuals and we see different skin colours and hair types, and then we act upon it. Most of the time we act on the basis of acquired (distinctly racist) views handed down culturally and politically.
A racist, overt or subtle, would rather believe that her “origins” are from Europe than accept that she shares a genetic heritage that began in Africa. This, anyway, is the state of science at the moment.
Religious beliefs give rise to the denial of scientific evidence, and the racist would imagine his family, his ancestors, and his “people” were placed on earth by the god of the Abrahamic people. The racial or ethnic purists, like communities around the world, truly believe that they are God’s chosen people – and act out this divinity. This dovetails with the belief that humans sprang from the Earth in discrete valleys and plains around the world.
What is certainly true is that Homo sapiens moved from Africa more or less 60,000 years ago, and settled in places from North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean into Asia and Europe, then onward to north-east Russia to what is Alaska today and then south across the Americas.
Along the way, over tens of thousands of years, we built settlements, and stayed (built families and left offspring); travellers or “nomadic” people had contact with “sedentary” people and built families and communities.
The evidence of this interaction is in our DNA. Never mind that some people refuse to accept that they have African origins, and ethno-nationalists would insist others are “not-African” (it gets quite messy in the bowels of South African politics), we are all mixed and as diverse as we possibly can be – until science tells us something different.
This brings us back to the pong that envelops South African politics of the bowels.
African countries and African people
In a recent flood of social media and other criticisms, a South African model, Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina, who is taking part in a beauty pageant as a South African, has been told to “go back to Nigeria” – never mind the fact that she was born and raised in South Africa. See this report by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting.
While the worst of the negative responses are rooted in xenophobia, they also point to a pitiful understanding of the states that were created on the continent (mainly after World War 2), and the very origins of the state system (in Europe, after they killed one another for 30 years) about 500 years ago.
There was probably no “South Africa” nor a “Nigeria” all those centuries ago. This ignorance and xenophobia rubbishes (our) claims of pan-Africanism. We perform pan-Africanism (like the EFF perform working-class sensibilities with their red overalls), but we really are a terrible blend of ethno-nationalists and African nationalists – never mind that there are only fractional genetic differences among us.
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It is probably too much to expect, but until we acknowledge at least two or three things, we will probably never get rid of the smells that swirl around in our politics of the bowels. First, very many of us are legatees of European colonialism and settler colonialism.
We know that those people who do not see colour would probably deny this, and believe that they “sprung from the soil”. I can’t help thinking that this is a perverse blend of polygenism and multiregionalism, and a lot like that god-chose-us thousands of years ago… I should state, then, that I am a direct outcome of European colonialism in South Africa. I also carry a DNA that, in many ways, reflects the passage of European expansion across the world.
Secondly, we have to acknowledge that South Africa belongs to everyone and is home to everyone who lives here, and in this case, there can be no preferential treatment – without denying any historical injustices!
Thirdly, the places where we were born are not our destiny. If we believe that “an African team” can win the World Cup for France (forgetting that most of the players were born in France and chose to play for France), then surely a Nigerian, or a woman from any other part of the world, and who was born and raised in South Africa, can represent the country.
Above all, we have to acknowledge that we share a common ancestor and that differences in our appearances are, actually, quite meaningless, unless some of us claim to be unique, exceptional, “chosen”, untouchable and eternally innocent. In this sense, innocence is so very overrated. DM
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