HomeHuman Migration, Cultures, and Species of Exit(Page 7)
Human Migration, Cultures, and Species of Exit
The broad story of human history is migration, in which the group with the better organization and technology tends to wipe out and replace those without. These posts look at human history through a genetic and anthropologic lens, especially migration, assimilation, replacement, and attempts at exit.
“In Operation Desert Rock, the military conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Nevada Proving Grounds between 1951 and 1957, exposing thousands of participants – both military and civilian – to high levels of radiation.
“In total, more nearly 400,000 American soldiers and civilians would be classified as ‘atomic veterans.’
“Though roughly half of those veterans were survivors of World War II, serving at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the rest were exposed to nuclear grounds tests which lasted until 1962.”
Sure, we could have tested it on pigs, or monkeys, or cows, but nothing beats marching your own people into an atomic blast to see if it gives them cancer.
Of course it gives them cancer.
The Soviets did similar things to their own soldiers. In 1954, the Soviets dropped a 40,000-ton atomic weapon on 45,000 of their own troops, just north of Totskoye. More on Totskoye, and more. I don’t know for sure if these photos are from those tests, but they’re awfully haunting:
One of my–let us say Uncles–died in Vietnam. He was 17. His mother, who had signed the papers to let him enlist even though he wasn’t 18, who had thought the army would be a good thing for him, sort him out, get his life on track, never recovered.
His name is not on the Vietnam Memorial.
And for what did we die in France’s war to retain its colonies?
I’m not actually against immigration, but I am pro-borders and prefer to live among people I find pleasant, and in this day and age, the two positions are treated as equivalent.
Why borders? Why can’t we all just go wherever we want? Why should a mere accident of birth condemn one person to live in a god-forsaken hellhole, and another to live somewhere peaceful and prosperous?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t like god-forsaken hellholes anymore than the next guy.
So I have a little garden. No trivial undertaking, by the way. Clearing out the brush, pulling up the weeds, digging holes, building rock walls and planting beds, and, of course, watering the darn thing has taken hours or work. Many of the plants are perennials started from seed, so I won’t even get to harvest them for several years.
There’s just one problem: the land isn’t mine. It’s an unattended lot that was a neighborhood eyesore. I’m trying to turn it into something nice, but the owners could come back at any point and mow it all down. For that matter, anyone else in the neighborhood could walk into the garden and take my turnips, pick all my flowers, or knock down my walls. These are problems I have had. And what can I do? Press charges against someone for vandalizing someone else’s property? It doesn’t work that way.
As a result, there are certain improvements that I’m not going to make. Why plant a tree that cold get chopped down? Or buy a pleasant little bench that could get thrown away? For that matter, even a decent lawn mower costs several hundred dollars. Who wants to invest money into something they could lose?
A proper garden requires ownership.
“Why bother at all?” you might be wondering. Because a garden is a lot nicer than as a bunch of dead weeds, and if I get lucky, some of the plants might survive to benefit the neighborhood for years to come.
Each country is a garden. Each country decides what to do with its own resources, how many people they can support, and how they want to conduct their lives. Sometimes countries need more people. Sometimes they need fewer. Sometimes the numbers are just right, but it wouldn’t hurt to switch a few people with another country, to the mutual benefit of everyone.
In no case does a country benefit from allowing in more people than it can feed. California produces a great percentage of America’s food, has had a drought for 1o years, and doesn’t have enough water for all of the crops and people already there. And yet the open-borders advocates want more people to move to California?
If California runs out of water, not only will the local farmers suffer (and no, an orchard someone’s been tending for decades is not something you can just stop watering for a few years,) but so will the rest of the country, especially those whose food budgets are already tight.
In no case does a country benefit from allowing in a bunch of people who are higher crime or lower IQ than the existing population. This should be obvious.
And then there is the more subtle matter of culture. Most people basically like their own cultures, and have little interest in radically changing them (else they would have already.) And culture, as I’ve noted before, is far more than superficial trappings of food and clothing. It’s values. It’s norms of appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
Type-A New Yorkers stuck in Seattle often report being completely miserable because they just can’t cope with the laid-back Seattle attitude. What happens when peoples with radically different values or social norms try to live together? What happens, for example, when French people who believe in freedom of the press and anti-religious values and people who think that drawing pictures of the Prophet Mohammad’s testicles is a blasphemy worthy of death live in the same country?
There is really no solution to this conflict. Either one side has to not print dirty pictures of Mohammad, or the other side has to not kill people for drawing dirty pictures of Mohammad. Better, therefore, to avoid the conflict.
For a country to function, it must be able to select which immigrants it takes in.
For that matter, I believe that a country has a moral obligation to treat its immigrants well; if you cannot guarantee that your fellow countrymen will treat well the immigrants from a certain land, then you should not encourage those immigrants. People deserve to live in places where they are happy, after all.
There’s been a lot of debate recently in the US over Mexican (and more broadly, Hispanic) immigration. Some people would like more Hispanic immigration, perhaps because it appeals to their libertarian instincts, they want cheaper labor, or they love Hispanic people and culture. Others would prefer less immigration, perhaps because they want higher wages, less crime, or just aren’t keen on Hispanic culture.
The Left generally responds to anti-immigrant sentiments by pointing out that previous waves of immigration to the US were total disasters for the people already here. When Europeans arrived in the early 1500s, their diseases exploded through native communities like atomic bombs. The death toll is generally reckoned at 80-90 percent. This was followed, of course, by warfare, enslavement, and genocide.
This seems like approximately the worst argument in favor of immigration ever.
Other waves of immigration, like the 1910 Irish/Italian/Eastern European wave, were accompanied by rising crime; immigration since 1970 has been accompanied by stagnating wages, all of which we have discussed before.
Even Bernie Sanders thinks that full open borders is a capitalist plot to destroy the American worker by forcing wages down to third-world levels.
So why bother making the worst argument in favor of immigration ever?
To imply that whites have no right to their own land. If their land was stolen from someone else, if they are just illegally occupying it, then they have no legal right to it. (And of course, no claim of adverse possession can be made, since the Indians are still around and would prefer their ancestral lands back.) And even if the Indians weren’t around, what sort of precedent does letting people get land by shooting its current owners?
But are the Native Americans the original inhabitants of this land?
No, not in the least.
If you think the Indians arrived here 20,000-40,000 years ago, sat down, and didn’t move until Columbus arrived, you’re delusional.
Humans move around.
Modern Indians are most closely related to the peoples of north east Asia, a point in favor of the Bering Strait hypothesis.
The later invaders, ancestors of today’s Indians, wiped most of them out. Only a few groups with significant Melanesian DNA remain, most of them deep in the rainforest.
Peter Frost reports a similar finding from Mexico:
“Similar findings have emerged from analysis of skulls from Mexico dated to between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago and skulls from Colombia dated to between 7,500 and 8,300:”
“To summarize, analyses of individual skulls against reference samples suggest that the early Mexican fossils studied do not share a common craniofacial morphology with Amerindians or East Asians, as reported elsewhere for South Paleoindians, some North Paleoindian specimens […] and some modern groups like Fuegian-Patagonians and the Pericúes from Baja California.”
I know nothing about the Pericues, but the Fuegian-Patagonians are really interesting. IIRC, they’re a language isolate living in a very cold environment, and when Europeans first arrived, they basically had no clothes. They just carried fires around with them everywhere they went–in their canoes, while hanging out, everywhere. Hence the region’s name, “Land of the Fire.” One imagines they must have been cold a lot, but maybe they were perfectly happy with the temperatures.
Of course, people have been saying that the giant Olmec stone heads look like Africans for approximately forever, and they have a point:
Further north, a third (or fourth, or whatever Nth,) wave of people, the Dorset, survived in the arctic for over 4,000 years, until the Thule (ancestors of today’s Inuit/Eskimo) showed up. It’s unlikely that the Dorset suddenly forgot how to live in the arctic, nor do the Thule show any signs of having intermarried with the Dorset. The Dorset, as they say, were “replaced.” The Thule killed them.
The genetic prehistory of the New World Arctic
Take a look around, and you’ll find conquering everywhere. The Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs created empires by conquering the people around them. The Aztecs marched home their prisoners of war and sacrificed them to their gods, ripping out their still-beating hearts. Lovely people, I’m sure.
Of course, the Americas are not the only places this has happened. The historical occupants of South Africa were the Bushmen, hunter-gatherers who’d been isolated from the rest of humanity for almost 100,000 years before anyone else showed up in the area. South Africa’s dominant group today, the Bantus, are more closely related to Koreans than Bushmen.
Compare:
Distribution of art attributed to the Bushmen vs:
Modern distribution of major African language groups
Bantus are newcomers, having only arrived in northeastern South Africa within the past couple millenia, and having been largely absent from the cape when Europeans settled there. (That is, most of the people in the area of Cape Town were Bushmen, and after them, most of the people in Cape Town and its surrounding area were Dutch. Major Bantu presence in the area came later.)
The Chinese who moved to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War are distinct from the Taiwanese Chinese, who displaced the ethnic Taiwanese, who have legends about the darker (perhaps Melanesian) people they displaced.
Replacement has happened virtually everywhere on Earth.
“There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.” –President Obama, Nov, 2014
Which Native Americans? The ones who wiped out the Dorset? The ones who wiped out the Melanesians? Or maybe the folks in the Amazon rain forest and a few other isolated tribes should get to determine immigration policies for both continents?
Or maybe that sort of thinking is really fucking dumb?
The people who are in France right now have a right to their country and their culture. If they want to let in people from elsewhere, that’s their business. If they decided they don’t like Freedom of Speech anymore and they’d rather make sure no one produces dirty pictures of Mohammad, that’s their business. But if they want to have Freedom of Speech and decide to not let in people who would have an issue with this, that is also their business. If Americans decide they want more Hispanic immigrants to work in their fields and bake enchiladas, that’s their business. If Americans decide they don’t want more Hispanic immigrants, that’s also their business.
Bhutan is one of the hardest countries in the world to visit (much less immigrate to), because the Bhutanese government doesn’t want a bunch of outsiders ruining their way of life. The Andaman islands are even harder to visit, because the islanders have a habit of killing anyone who gets too close. (And well they ought, because after being isolated for so long, any outsiders would most likely be carrying diseases to which the Andamanese have no defenses. Contact with the outside world would probably kill them all.)
The fact that people in the past have waged wars and often lost them does not make me eager to lose a war. The fact that people in the past have been replaced does not make me want to be replaced. The fact that my ancestors might be related to some guys who won a war or might just look kind of like those guys does not mean it makes any sense to suddenly declare that we (by which I mean everyone currently here, regardless of ethnic background) do not have a right to decide where we should go from here.
So how have the 20 yeas since apartheid ended benefited South Africa?
Certainly it has benefited some people. Many black, Indian, or mixed-race people who were shut out of the economic system, land holding, etc., have become wealthy or at least middle class:
1994 = end of apartheid
On the other hand, rising GDP looks like it’s more of a global trend than a specifically SA one.
Tim Stanley, of The Telegraph, weighs in on the “Things have gotten better” side:
“the economy has doubled in real terms and South Africa is now the economic super power of the region. Not only is this proof that an African economy can be run efficiently as part of the global community but it’s also a model that many other countries are following – with enormous success. With booms in minerals and telecommunications, African capitalism is in the ascendant. …
“But crime was always high under Apartheid – it’s just that a media blackout meant that it went unreported. Drugs, drink and gangs were common in the shanties, the product of decades of brutal marginalisation. This historic legacy combined with failed expectations after the end of Apartheid to produce an explosion of violence that exposed the white community, for the first time, to serious crime.” (emphasis added)
According to NPR, Desmond Tutu is more ambivalent:
“‘I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that (Nelson Mandela) is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this,’ a reference to a host of chronic problems such as corruption and poverty.”
Many people attribute the collapse in life expectancy in SA to AIDS, but statistically, the only way that many people are catching AIDS is if the vast majority of people in SA are having unprotected sex with hundreds of other people, which is both incredibly stupid and incredibly easy not to do, so yes, I lay full blame for declining life expectancies on the people engaged in life-shortening behaviors and the government that has failed to stop the epidemic ravaging its own people.
Obviously the crime rate is through the roof.
Graph is labeled incorrectly since apartheid ended in 1994, but you can still see the general trend.
SA has one of the world’s highest murder rates (at least outside of Latin America,) one of if not the highest rape rate, and I hear it has the world’s highest rate of infant rape.
I have heard that there is a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS, so often when a man discovers that he has AIDS, he goes and pays a local family for the right to have sex with one of their daughters. If the AIDS doesn’t clear up, then obviously the daughter wasn’t a virgin, and the family is compelled to offer up someone younger, more likely to be a virgin. If the youngest daughter happens to be a baby, then the youngest daughter happens to be a baby. This process continues until the AIDS goes away or you run out of daughters.
In my research, I have talked to people who live in South Africa and love it there, and people who live in South Africa and are terrified. I have read posts claiming that South Africa is thriving and on the upswing, and posts claiming that the whole place is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
These are photos taken and uploaded by “The Real Realist” during a drive through Yeoburg, formerly one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Johannesburg. Now it is decayed, broken, boarded up, and overflowing with trash.
In other words, it looks like Detroit.
But maybe it always looked like that. Here are pictures Real Realist took of the Johannesburg Jewish Museum:
I bet it didn’t look like that back when it was a museum.
There are hundreds more such photos and stories. Go and look for yourself.
Some more perspectives:
(Pay attention especially around 42 minutes in)
I find this interesting because I first heard about something like this in a Reddit thread I ran across while looking for photos of South Africa. I can’t even find the thread, now, but someone in it described a phenomenon whereby a occupied business building (occupied by people doing business, I mean) would suddenly be invaded by hundreds of people (and their chickens) who had suddenly decided to live there. This of course made it difficult to do business anymore, so all of the business people had to relocate elsewhere. Meanwhile, the squatters, not knowing exactly how the buildings worked, would throw their trash and excrement into the elevator shafts. When the shafts filled up, the people moved on.
The only way to get rid of these squatters was by hiring small armies of men (the police will not do it,) to physically remove them in the middle of the night (being asleep makes it difficult to fight back,) and then the building gets surrounded by barbed wire and crews have to come in to thoroughly clean it before it can become an office building or anything else again.
I wrote this off as “unverifiable rumor” until I found this Christian Science Monitor Slideshow (see #15) with a photo of one of the men tasked with cleaning out these hijacked buildings:
Let’s talk demographics:
Population density map of South Africa (from Wikipedia)
According to Wikipedia, when the Brits arrived in SA, the Cape colony had roughly 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves. However, that data is marked, “citation needed.” If we trust it, though, whites were, at the time, roughly 1/3 (33%) of the population.
If we squint, it looks like whites were just over 1/6th of the population in 1910–probably around 20%. By 1990, they had fallen to about 11%. Today, they’re at 9%.
What happens when you become a tiny minority in the country your ancestors built?
You lose it.
There is no practical way for 9% of the population in a “democratic” country to control the other 91%.
Love it or hate it, a country belongs to the people in it.
Yes, the whites saw this coming. They knew the demographics. They were even trying to encourage family planning, which was moderately successful:
Source: South African Regional Policy Network
Sorry, Boers. (And Brits.) You ran into a 3,000 year old unstoppable Bantu migration wave and lost. Your buildings will be burned and looted, the wealth your ancestors created, murdered for and died for will be taken by people who have no idea how to maintain it, and your entire country will crumble away. A few of you remain, in walled-off communities supplied by private roads, electricity, water, and police. If you don’t get killed, well, you might have a pretty good life.
One of the things I’ve found interesting about the Boers, during all this research, is how much they remind me of a lot of the NRx/alt-right/Moldbuggian types. The Cape Colony began, after all, as a corporation, founded by the Dutch East India Company. When the British took over the Cape, many of the Dutch, rather than deal with someone telling them what to do, decided to take the exit option and go found a new state. This was no trivial undertaking, and required (among other things,) militarily defeating the Zulus, starting a new country from scratch in the middle of nowhere, and fighting off the British.
They eventually failed because they were numerically overwhelmed by the British, both migrants they had allowed into their country and troops sent from abroad. Exit is useless if you do not or cannot secure your own territory.
There’s a fail state to democracy, which Malema so succinctly identified: long term, you don’t need to wage a war to take over a democratic country. You just have to out-breed your opposition.
Given a finite planet, (which we have,) breeding wars can only end in catastrophe. But the other option–not playing–means losing your country.
Could you get around this by simply not being a democracy? Saudi Arabia doesn’t let women vote, but I don’t see anyone putting pressure on them to change their ways. Singapore also manages to be a pretty decent place, (though it is tiny,) due to what looks like good management. Bring back the old Dutch East India Company. Let those who buy stock be shareholders; let the company buy what it can and manage it for the sake of its owners.
Conclusion: only let people into your country whom you like and would hypothetically be willing to marry and have kids with. Keeping a large population of subjugated people is impractical and cruel. If you don’t want them to be equals, give them their own country to do with as they please.
With a leadership that looks toward Zimbabwe as a model, I expect South Africa to look ever more like Zimbabwe.
(Remember, creatives are psychotic.)
People have been bugging me to write a post on South Africa ever since I started this blog, more or less, so here you go.
I regard South Africa (SA) as one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, so I’m going to start with the history and try to clear up some potential misconceptions.
Disclaimer: I am not a South Africa scholar. This is what I’ve cobbled together by reading first and second hand accounts on the internet, Wikipedia, talking to friends who’ve lived in SA, etc. Since I’ve never been there myself, there’s always a chance that I’ve trusted the wrong people or come to some incorrect conclusions, but as always, I’ve tried to present an accurate picture.
The most common misconception I run across is that whites arrived recently in SA, conquered and oppressed the natives via apartheid and after years of righteous struggle, the native people of South Africa have finally gotten the right to vote and run their own country.
History, as usual, tells a slightly different story.
The dominant group in South Africa today is the Bantus. Nelson Mandela, for example, was a Bantu.
When the first Europeans arrived at the Cape of Good Hope (later site of Cape Town and most of the economic development of the state of South Africa,) most of the people there were Bushmen, (aka San aka KhoiSan,) who were hunter-gatherers. Not Bantus.
Distribution of ancient paintings and engravings attributed to the San
Modern distribution of African languages–Bantus in orange. Note the isolated pocket of KhoiSan speakers up in Tanzania
If you believe that ancestrality determines a person’s right to a country, then the KhoiSan have a right to the Cape, and the Johnny-Come-Latey Bantus do not.
If you haven’t been reading along, you might think that the Bushmen and the Bantus are probably closely related, and that I am merely splitting hairs.
No. The Bantus are more closely related to Koreans, Australian Aborigines, and even Europeans than they are to the Bushmen.
As we’ve discussed before, the Bushmen are one of the world’s most isolated peoples, having split off from the rest of the human population, (or perhaps the rest of the humans split off from them,) 100,000 years or more ago. The Out-of-Africa event only happened 70,000 years ago, so only 70,000 years separates the Bantus from all non-Africans, but 100,000 years separate the Bantus from the San.
So. The original inhabitants of the area, who’d been there for about 100,000 years, were the San. Most of them were hunter-gatherers, which means their population density was really low; much of the area appears to have been uninhabited, given regions with names like “Nomansland”. Some of the Khoi peoples, though, had adopted animal herding.
The Bantus came originally from somewhere up near Nigeria, but by the relevant time period, occupied the north east part of South Africa, which they’d conquered from the San. (The Cape of Good Hope, where the Europeans settled, is in the south west corner. Hardly anyone has ever lived in the north west corner, because it’s desert.)
The first European in the area was Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Dias, (and, obviously, his crew,) way back in 1488. In 1647, the Dutch built a small fort in the area, and in 1652, the Dutch East India Company (which I wrote about recently,) set up a supply station and fortifications on the Cape. By 1659, the Dutch were producing corn, wine, and babies.
Most of the KhoiSan people were probably killed, either outright by warfare or by diseases they had no resistance to, but I have no numbers and am just speculating. There are still KhoiSan people in SA and neighboring places, so they are not all dead.
By 1800, some of the mixed-race children/descendants of the Dutch and the locals, KhoiSan, former slaves*, and the like decided they’d had enough of the Dutch and migrated northward, establishing Griqualand in an apparently uninhabited area. They migrated around a bit, and eventually Griqualand got moved to the region formerly known as Nomansland.
*The slaves were imported from elsewhere in Africa, since the Dutch considered it a bad idea to enslave the locals.
The British took possession of the Cape during the Napoleonic Wars. They promptly set about outlawing slavery and the Dutch language, so a lot of the Dutch decided to leave, too. By the 1830s, they were leaving by the hundreds, a migration known as the “Great Trek.” (There is some debate about whether outlawing slavery was actually a big deal to the Trekkers, as they tended to be the poorer folks who would have been less likely to own slaves in the first place, but I don’t know anywhere near enough history here to weigh in on the debate.)
Paths of the Great Trek–note the locations of the Cape Colony in the south east, and the Zulu kingdom in the north west.
The Dutch population by this point also included a lot of Germans, French, etc., and so would be more accurately called Afrikaners. These Trekkers, or Voortrekkers, or Boers, or Trekboers, or Afrikaners, whatever we want to call them.
These Afrikaners are an interesting people, who endured considerable hardship to go live in the middle of nowhere with nothing but what they could carry in small wagons, their family, faith, and a few guns. They trekked toward the north east, until they ran smack into the southern end of the Great Bantu Migration. The Bantus (Zulus) massacred about 500 Boers–men, women, and children–in the middle of the night. Shortly after, approximately 30,000 Zulu soldiers attacked 460 Boers, at the Battle of Blood River. This time the Boers were awake, and since they had guns and the Zulus had pointy sticks, 3,000 Zulus died and 3 Boers were injured. (December, 1836.)
The British-controlled Cape Colony is in blue; Boer Transvaal in Green; Boer Free Orange State in orange; Zulu state, Natal (aka Natalia,) is in red.
In 1866, diamonds were discovered on the banks of the Orange River. The diamond-rich territory was eventually awarded to Griqualand, which was subsequently annexed by Britain in 1874. In 1886, gold was found in Transvaal. The British had tried to conquer Transvaal in 1877, but did not succeed until the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902, which ended with the annexation of both Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Boers forced to watch their home burned to the ground
Lots of people were killed, but eventually the British got the upper hand and, having decided they were sick of the Boers, herded them into concentration camps and tried to kill them all:
“This was not the first appearance of internment camps. … But the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.
“Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps.
“… 93,940 Boers and 24,457 black Africans were reported to be in “camps of refuge” and the crisis was becoming a catastrophe as the death rates appeared very high, especially among the children.
“A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50 percent of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25 percent) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.
“Improvements [however] were much slower in coming to the black camps.”[51] It is thought that about 12 percent of black African inmates died (about 14,154) but the precise number of deaths of black Africans in concentration camps is unknown as little attempt was made to keep any records of the 107,000 black Africans who were interned.” —Wikipedia
“[Hobhouse] describes Lizzie as “a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care”, who was placed on the lowest rations and, after a month, was moved to the new hospital about 50 kilometres (31 miles) away from the concentration camp, suffering from starvation.
According to Hobhouse, she was treated harshly in the hospital. Unable to speak English, she was labelled an “idiot” by an English-speaking doctor and her nurses, who were unable to understand her. One day she started calling for her mother; a lady went over to comfort her, but “was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance.” Lizzie died in 1901 at 7 years of age.”
As a mother, I look at Lizzie and feel like someone has torn my heart out and stomped on it.
To add insult to murder,
“The photo [of Lizzie] was used as propaganda, author Hélène Opperman Lewis states, to convince the British public that Boer children were neglected by their parents. The image was released with the detail that it was taken when van Zyl and her mother entered the camp. Chamberlain was quoted in The Times on 5 March 1902, saying that Lizzy’s mother was prosecuted for mistreatment.[4]
Hobhouse investigated the case and was unable to find any evidence of the case or prosecution of Lizzie’s mother. She located the photographer, a man named Mr. de Klerk, who confirmed that the photograph was taken two months after Lizzie arrived at the camp.[4]”
And people accuse the Afrikaners of being racist.
I count about 62,000 people dead in this war. Certainly it was no WWII, but then, South Africa didn’t have that many people to start with, so percentage wise, it’s pretty significant.
Now, I want to pause and look at some demographic issues that contributed to the Anglo-Boer War. Note that the Boers had been pretty much going along, minding their own business, running their own country, for several decades before this war started. They’d gone through quite a bit of effort to get away from the British, successfully defeated the Zulus (and other tribes,) and weren’t even the worst people in the area.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Didn’t the Boers have slaves? Or at least Apartheid?”
I actually don’t remember if they had slaves; if they did, they are still better than the Congolese, who are not only enslaving the Pygmies right now, but also literally eat other humans. As for apartheid, do you think the Zulus were letting their conquered subjects vote? (Or live?)
For the most part, the Boers just wanted to be left the fuck alone–they didn’t conquer the Griquas, they abandoned their colony after the British took it over rather than fight for it, and I don’t think they were even messing with Natal. They just had the bad luck to have gold and diamonds, and the British decided they wanted gold and diamonds.
“In 1866 Erasmus Jacobs discovered diamonds at Kimberley, prompting a diamond rush and a massive influx of foreigners to the borders of the Orange Free State. Then in 1886, an Australian discovered gold in the Witwatersrand area of the South African Republic. Gold made the Transvaal the richest and potentially the most powerful nation in southern Africa; however, the country had neither the manpower nor the industrial base to develop the resource on its own. As a result, the Transvaal reluctantly acquiesced to the immigration of uitlanders (foreigners), mainly from Britain, who came to the Boer region in search of fortune and employment. This resulted in the number of uitlanders in the Transvaal potentially exceeding the number of Boers, and precipitated confrontations between the earlier-arrived Boer settlers and the newer, non-Boer arrivals.” —Wikipedia [Bold mine]
The British then demanded voting rights for their citizens in Transvaal, the Boers realized that they were outnumbered and that letting the Brits vote would result in their country becoming part of the British Empire and so refused, and so the war began.
Once you are a demographic minority, there is absolutely nothing to stop the majority from herding you into concentration camps and murdering you and your children, except for how much they pity you.
And nobody pities you, my friend.
At any rate, South Africa was thus forged from the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and Transvaal. (I still don’t know why Lesotho is independent. Perhaps no diamonds, or maybe just the fact that it’s on top of some mountains.) The British instituted the system of apartheid, perhaps because they felt like it, perhaps because they felt like making some concessions to the conquered Afrikaners.
SA became an independent country again in 1960. In 1966, UN resolution 2202 A (XXI) declared apartheid “A Crime Against Humanity.” (Of course, the UN also criticized the Vietnamese for kicking the Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia and decided to let the deposed Khmer Rouge gov’t continue holding its seat in the UN despite being one of the most genocidal regimes the earth has ever seen, so who gives a shit what the UN thinks?)
Deaths under apartheid:
“By mid-1987 the Human Rights Commission knew of at least 140 political assassinations in the country, while about 200 people died at the hands of South African agents in neighbouring states. The exact numbers of all the victims may never be known. …
3,100+ murders attributed to the SA government, and 5,800 murders attributed to the anti-apartheid fighters.
The ANC (African National Congress,) Nelson Mandela’s party, is a communist organization that received direct funding and training by the Soviet Union. (I strongly suspect that the vast majority of anti-colonialist movements were funded by the Soviets, as colonialism has strong capitalist ties, eg, the Dutch East India Company, and so Communism morphed into an anti-colonialist ideology by the 50s or 60s.)
The ANC engaged in a brutal execution method called necklacing:
Necklacing Victim, burned alive
“In 1986 Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, stated “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country. …
The first victim of necklacing, according to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a young girl, Maki Skosana, on 20 July1985.[10]
Moloko said her sister was burned to death with a tire around her neck while attending the funeral of one of the youths. Her body had been scorched by fire and some broken pieces of glass had been inserted into her vagina, Moloko told the committee. Moloko added that a big rock had been thrown on her face after she had been killed.[11]” —wikipedia
As you know, nothing makes your country productive like electing communists who make their points by shoving broken glass into little girls’ vaginas.
Inkatha seems a little more into tribal pride and less communist; they’ve recently lost a bunch of parliamentary seats to the explicitly communist Economic Freedom Fighters. The EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, is a lovely person who admires Mugabe, advocates Mugabe-style seizure of mines and other economic resources in SA, and likes to lead the SA parliament in rousing choruses of “Shoot the Boer,” an old anti-apartheid war song.
You mean you can just print more of these things? Mugabe is brilliant!
SA president Jacob Zuma, a guy who gets 1.2 million pounds per year to support his four wives, is also fond “Shoot the Boer”:
“We are going to shoot them with machine guns, they are going to run… The cabinet will shoot them, with the machine gun… Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run.”
“Cape Town – Social media buzzed on Monday over a picture of a banner allegedly shown at the Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) launch in Marikana.
A picture showing a red banner with the words “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate” was quickly shared on various social networks on Monday.
Another picture shows a banner saying “Honeymoon is over for white people in South Africa”.
“I also saw ‘we need to kill them like they killed us’ banners yesterday,” User Qaanitah Hunter said in a Tweet.”
Gulags are a feature of communism, not bugs
From the second PDF:
“Over 3,000 white farmers have been murdered since the end of apartheid, according to Genocide Watch. Twenty years ago, there were 60,000 farmers. Today there are 30,000.
On August 8, two men were convicted of killing a 77-year-old man and his wife on their farm in Somerset. The husband was hacked to pieces. The wife was tied up, thrown in a freezer, and buried in frozen meat. She suffocated to death.
According to the police, the motivation was robbery.
On August 11, four men broke into 57-year-old Vivien Ponté’s home. She was tied to her bed, raped and lit on fire. Her house was ransacked, but it is unclear if anything was stolen.
Just another robbery gone bad.
On August 15, an 83-year-old Volksrust woman was assaulted, raped and left for dead, lying naked on the floor.
The list of “robberies” goes on. …
Beginning in 2003, the government began disbanding the rural commando units used to protect the remote farming communities that did not have police protection. The government said the commandos were unconstitutional and promised special police units to replace them. In 2008, the last commando unit was disbanded.
To this day, the special police forces still haven’t arrived.
Then in 2010, the government passed gun-control laws mandating that all guns be re-registered. In the process of registration, more than half the applicants were turned down and their weapons were seized.”
Various sources estimate the murder rate of SA farmers at about 100 per 100,000.
But you know, the Afrikaners are the racists.
Oh, let me include a bit from the Wikipedia page on Malema:
“Malema visited Zimbabwe in October 2012… “He said the youths in South Africa were calling for whites to surrender land and minerals resources they hold because when they came from Europe they did not carry any land into South Africa.”
“‘What we are asking is for them to surrender our minerals because they did not come with any minerals. We want that land and those minerals for free because they never paid for those minerals.’
“Malema told the youth he was in Zimbabwe to gain inspiration and wisdom, so that when he returned home he could “double the spirit of fighting against imperialist forces”.[77]He called on black South Africans to have as many children as possible so as to increase dominance of ‘our ideas’ in the world at large and help catalyze world revolution.[78][79]
“‘We want to see many kids, why? Because we must reproduce ourselves. For our ideas to be sustainable, we have to reproduce ourselves. In the whole of Africa, we are not more than one billion and the world has seven billion people. In Africa we have not more than one billion people… facing more than six billion. We have to be half of that so that our ideas can dominate. I know that in some instances size does not matter… but when it comes to a revolution, size matters.[79]‘” (bold mine)
Malema is descended from Bantus, so he is no more entitled to the mines than anyone else is, and certainly no one was mining those minerals before the Boers and English got there. If they were precious to Malema’s people, they would have been mining them, but they weren’t.
This is getting long, so I am going to continue with Part 2 tomorrow.
“Yes, I know, objectively, that there are things wrong with my country. But I was born here; my country is like my mother, and for that, I love her and do not count her faults.” — a friend from one of the ‘Stans.
Someone recently referred to my blog as “the high mountains of Turdistan,” and I thought, “Gosh, that’s awfully unfair to the ‘Stans. What did they ever do to warrant the comparison?”
So this is a post about the ‘Stans.
1. Kazakhstan:
Yeah, I bet you didn’t know that Kazakhstan is also Middle Earth.
The Kazakhs have some beautiful cities:
Scenes of Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital
And understand the art of dramatic lighting:
Almaty, Kazakhastan’s biggest city
Even the Kazakh flag is awesome:
2. Kyrgyzstan:
Kyrgyzstan has got to be one of the most obscure countries in the world. It’s also one of the most isolated–it’s landlocked, the furthest landlocked country from the sea, and its rivers don’t even empty into the sea.
What it lacks in navigable rivers, it makes up for in mountains:
Also, the Kyrgyz people have some great yurts (I am a yurt fan):
Unique mosque architecture:
And they hunt with eagles:
Tajikistan:
Tajikistan appears to be a country on the upswing. Their homicide rate has fallen from 7.6 (per 100,000) in 1997 to a mere 1.6 in 2011. The US’s was 4.7 in 2012. (Though I hear getting enough food is still an issue.)
They have some nice architecture and monuments, though they may be overspending on them:
And yes, of course, they have mountains:
Turkmenistan:
The Door to Hell.
Uzbekistan:
Uzbekistan has high-speed rail networks with shinkansen:
And they have some of the world’s loveliest subway and train stations:
Pakistan:
All right, I’ll admit it: people who know better than I do claim that Pakistan is a “failed state.” Or as a friend put it, “You think you have issues with the Taliban? We have to live next door to them!”
Still, I hope things work out for the Pakistanis. Especially since they have nukes.
Plus, they have some nice university architecture:
Islamia College University in Peshawar, Pakistan
Afghanistan:
Yes, the Afghan people know the problems their country face. They’ve been invaded by the Soviets, taken over by the Taliban, then invaded by the Americans, etc. etc. It’s still their country, and chances are they aren’t getting a new one, so they’ll take their pride where they can get it.
Of course, Afghanistan is the kind of place that historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists love. The area has a history going back perhaps 50,000 years, was part of the Indus Valley civilization–one of the first civilizations in the world–and has been a major cultural meeting point along the Silk Road for thousands of years.
Buddhist Stupa in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan
The ruins at Mes Aynak go back at least 5,000 years, making the complex one of the most valuable currently-being-excavated locations in the world. Unfortunately, the whole place is slated for destruction via mining–if you’re interested in saving Mes Aynak, go here.
Worldwide distribution of B006, (from Yotova et al. “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Mol. Biol. Evol. 28 (7), 2011).SNP PCA from Skoglund & Jakobsson’s “Archaic Human Ancestry in East Asia” (2011)
(Please note that Africans do not have chimpanzee admixture, despite the labeling on the graph–no human group has chimp admixture, because chimps and humans have different #s of chromosomes, so even if you could get a successful cross, the resulting child would be infertile, like a mule. I assume the point of the chimp node is just to represent that which has neither Neanderthal nor Denisovan admixture, though of course there is the possibility of some other form of archaic hominin admixture in Africans.)
So, Native Americans appear to have a ton of Neanderthal DNA. (Relatively speaking.)
Possibilities:
It’s all measurement error/convergent evolution/something else other than archaic admixture.
As much as I hate to say it, I still consider this very likely. There is just a ton of stuff that we don’t about the Americas–like how and when people first got here. I’m sticking here with what I think are the most scientifically-supported theories, but a lot of this is still quite disputed. In particular, all of this genetic admixture business is still kind of speculative, and when people start talking about finding admixture in the admixture, either life is totally awesome, or we’re trying too hard.
2. Survival at the Fringes theory
A lot of people seem to look at this data and respond with something like, “But Neanderthals are from Europe, not America!” But this is not a big issue; the Indians are descended from people who passed through Neanderthal-inhabited regions (the Middle East), just like everyone else with Neanderthal DNA. The migration to the Americas took place long after they acquired Neanderthal admixture.
But this doesn’t explain why they have so much of it.
My “concentration on the edge” theory states that when one population is displaced by another population, you end up with a “fringe” of the original population’s traits. Sometimes this fringe results in isolated groups, as the invading population completely surrounds or cuts off a remnant population from their former range.
The Ainu, for example, resemble certain other Oceanin groups, but not their neighbors, the Japanese. I’m speculating here, so don’t take my word for it.
But I have a much better case with the distribution of red hair:
(So far I have found nothing explaining that dot over in Russia.)
Red hair is highly associated with the so-called Celtic fringe. It looks like it’s highly concentrated in Wales, Scotland, and parts of Ireland, but since I know a little history, and I know these aren’t areas of concentration, but just the areas that managed to escape being displaced by Anglo-Saxon invaders, just by virtue of being further away from the south-east coast of Britain.
One can imagine that the isolated dot in the middle of Russia might, at one time, have been connected with the other red-haired regions before other peoples invaded the lands between them and cut them off.
Compare to the map of blond hair:
Blond hair looks like it has been spreading steadily outward from a central source.
So what does this have to do with Neanderthal admixture in Native Americans?
It means that I think the Native Americans may have closer to original levels of Neanderthal admixture, while people in Europe and Asia have lower admixture because they mixed with later waves of people who came from Africa and had no Neanderthal admixture.
3. The Bering Strait selected for Neanderthal admixture
4. Western diseases selected for Western immune responses
One of the interesting things about the Neanderthal DNA hanging around in people is that it appears to code for certain immune responses. West Hunter recently had a great post (TLRs, PAMPs, and Alley Oop) detailing how they work, but for our purposes, “provide immunity” is sufficient. Austin Whittall suggests that back when smallpox, influenza, measles, and all of the other Western diseases tore through the Native Americans, killing about 90% of them, the guys who had more Neanderthal DNA were more likely to survive because they were more likely to be immune to the same stuff as Europeans. By contrast, those Indians with less Neanderthal DNA may have had less immunity to the European diseases, and so been more likely to die, leaving behind a population of high-Neanderthal DNA people.
A couple of papers in Science and Nature recently proposed that Melanesian-related people somehow made it to the rain forest long after the other Indians got to the area. West Hunter helpfully summarizes them.
West Hunter suggests that the Melanesian-related people with their high-Denisovan DNA got to the Americas first, and were then replaced throughout the continents by later invaders, the ancestors of current Indians. The one place the Melanesian-related people managed to survive was in the depths of the rainforest, a very difficult place to conquer. Even today, there are “uncontacted tribes” living in the Amazon rainforest; if anywhere were a good spot for a group of humans to avoid getting conquered, the depths of the rainforest is a good one.
7. The low-Neanderthal and low-Denisovan area along the Baja gulf in Mexico.
So what’s up with that? As far as I know, the only people who don’t have any Neanderthal or Denisovan are Africans. (And even there, there’s a little, just due to back-migration from the rest of the world.)
Are these people descended from a totally different group that came directly from Africa?
There’s a tiny ethnic group in the area, called the Seri:
Dona Ramona of the Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico
According to the Wikipedia, the Seri speak a language isolate–that is, their language, like Basque, doesn’t appear to be related to any other language on Earth–and they are not culturally connected with any of their neighbors. They’ve also held out significantly against Spanish and Mexican assimilation. In other words, they might very well be a totally isolated population that is not related at all to any of their neighbors.
The two different “real” maps how different things because they come from different scientists who came up with different data, but the overall picture is similar–if you look closely, both maps show a hotspot in Israel, for example. The second map looks less detailed, (hence their miss of several Middle Eastern hotspots,) but has a wider global range, which is obviously useful for our purposes. They also help show the importance of not putting too much stock in any single study about the distribution of a particular gene or allele or whathaveyou; different scientists come up with different numbers.
At any rate, while this could be just a totally random coincidence, if it isn’t, it’s awfully interesting, isn’t it? I know the Egyptians circumnavigated Africa; the Carthaginians and Phoenicians were also noted sea-farers. Or perhaps some other group I know nothing about from the region, before folks started keeping good records. Who knows?
8. Other people’s theories: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and H erectus made it to America before we did, and H Sapiens intermixed with them after they arrived; humans evolved in American, and then migrated to the rest of the world from there.
As I’ve mentioned before, the famous Out of Africa (OoA) migration was likely preceded by an Into Africa migration, or at least, a Moving Through Africa migration.
Near as we can tell, based on the science at our disposal, H sapiens (humans, us,) evolved in Africa and then spread out from there.
But genetics (and other evidence) suggests that the oldest human split lies not between Africans and non-Africans, but between the San (aka Bushmen or KhoiSan) people of southern Africa and pretty much everyone else in the world.
But hold on. One frequently sees comments to the effect of “All modern humans descended from the San” or “The San are the most ancestral population alive today.” Bollocks. Look, you and your cousin are both descended from your grandparents. Your cousin is not ancestral to you, your grandparents are ancestral to both of you. You did not descend from the San because the San are living right now in southern Africa. They are not an ancient people known only from the architectural record, like the Yamnaya or Minoans. (Unless, of course, your parents actually are San. Then of course you are descended from the San.)
So what does this mean?
Humans–H Sapiens–arose around 200,000 years ago, somewhere or other in Africa. Around 100,000 years ago, the San split off from everyone else, and stayed isolated for almost 100,000 years.
The San look like this:
Some anthropologists refer to Bushmen as “gracile,” which means they are a little shorter than average Europeans and not stockily built
And their homeland is down in the green:
Modern distribution of major African language groups
Their historic range was probably much larger than it currently is–note the little green dot over in Tanzania.
Here’s a different map’s opinion on the subject:
And here’s a map showing the locations of art attributed to the San / their ancestors:
Whether the San started in southern Africa, and everyone else left for northern Africa, leaving them behind, or the San started in northern Africa and then left for the south, leaving everyone else behind, I have no idea. Either way, one group left the other, and the split persisted, more or less, for almost a hundred thousand years.
I’ve mentioned before that the San are notably lighter-skinned than Africans from closer to the equator, like the Bantus:
Bantu mother and child
Probably because the sun is just really harsh at the equator. You can see the current distribution of Bantus in orange on the brightly-colored map above.
Now, back to the story. Shortly after, the Pygmies split off, which I’m not going on to natter on about here because you can read the post I wrote about it. Around 70,000 years ago, some guys left Africa to explore the rest of the world. Around 40,000 years ago, some of those guys split, more or less, into Asians, Europeans, and their descendants.
Among other things, this means that the Batus are more closely related to Koreans, Australian Aborigines, and Native Americans than to the KhoiSan peoples. This is because the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of everyone-not-from-Africa split up around 70,000 years ago, whereas the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of the KhoiSan split 100,000 years ago.
If this is confusing, think about it like this: you and your brother are closely related, because you are only one generation away from your common ancestor, your parents. (In this case, Europeans and Asians are like siblings.) You are related to your cousins, but less closely–you share half your DNA with a sibling, but only 12.5% with a cousin. You and your cousin are two generations away from your common ancestor, your grandparents. In this case, Bantus are cousins to siblings Europeans and Asians. Your second-cousins are descended from your great-grandparents. (If you have cousins, and you both have kids, those kids are second-cousins.) Second cousins share only a quarter as much DNA again–3.13%. The San are like your second-cousins. They are also second-cousins to your brother, and also second cousins to your cousins. All of the siblings are more closely related to each other than to their cousins; all of the cousins are more closely related to each other than to their second cousins; Bantus are more closely related to Koreans than to the San.
Please note that this is all a massive, massive over-simplification–obviously there are lots of groups in Africa other than the Bantus and the San–like the Yoruba. But “everyone in Africa other than the San and the Pygmies and people who’ve had Arab and other admixture” gets really clunky.
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that the green and orange regions on the map above look awfully close together. How have the San been so isolated for so long if they’re living right next to the Bantus?
About 3,500 years ago–96,500 after they split–the Bantus did this:
Paths of the great Bantu Migration
1 = 2000–1500 BC origin 2 = ca.1500 BC first migrations 2.a = Eastern Bantu, 2.b = Western Bantu 3 = 1000–500 BC Urewe nucleus of Eastern Bantu 4–7 = southward advance 9 = 500 BC–0 Congo nucleus 10 = 0–1000 AD last phase (from Wikipedia)
The Great Bantu Migration.
Why? I don’t know.
With their larger builds, superior weapons, and more complex social systems, the Bantus appear to have dominated the shit out of everyone they met, until they massacred the wrong guys:
Yes, they ran right into the Afrikaneer (Dutch) Boers, trekking northward from Cape Town, South Africa. And the Boers had guns.
Never bring a spear to a gun fight.
In the end, though, the Bantus won. They have the overwhelming numbers, after all.
Nelson Mandela
The San are still around, but their territory has dwindled severely; some managed to survive in the Kalahari desert, a place just too harsh for anyone else, but even this has not protected them, as farmers and ranchers have moved in and they’ve been forced into more sedentary lifestyles.
The book’s epilogue describes efforts to force the Bushmen onto reservations, where they have been encouraged to take up farming and herding. The account is depressing; the Bushmen seem to have been perfectly happy with their lives before, and ill-suited to agricultural toil. Alcoholism is rampant, as it is among everyone whose ancestors haven’t been distilling alcohol for thousands of years, and violent crime appears to be taking more lives.
Whether the San will continue existing or be completely absorbed by the unstoppable Bantu migration remains to be seen.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at people demanding that we teach the history of Africa and other non-Western locales. But I support such a move, so long as the history is honest.
Of course it wouldn’t be honest; we are a society of liars.
Madam Tinubu was a wealthy and powerful chieftess of the Egba clan (Youruba people, Nigeria.) She made her money through the slave trade, and resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.
Tinubu Square in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is named in her honor.
Cosmic Yoruba has some interesting things to say about the next chieftess of the Egba, Efunsetan Aniwura:
“…she was a WSW [note: woman who has sex with women] who never married, never had any children and was referred to as lakiriboto [a woman with no vaginal opening] …
“Efunsetan Aniwura rose to become a very powerful and wealthy trader in the 19th century, she is one of the few Yoruba women that has withstood the test of history. Oral tradition states that she had three large farms, and that no less than 100 slaves worked in each at a time. Apparently she owned over 2,000 slaves in her lifetime.
“Like other Yoruba women traders, Efunsetan travelled across the land trading with all sorts of people. Her speciality was in arms and ammunition, she would lend these to warriors when they were going on military expeditions and it seems she also went to war a few times herself.”
“I wonder if this is a classic example of history erasing a woman’s achievements. I will never get tired of pointing out how our current ideas on how our female ancestors lived are very different from the reality. We believe that they all married, lived “under” their husbands, never divorced, spent their lives in the kitchen while the men went out to work, never enjoyed sex, were all straight and so on. Powerful women like Efunsetan, who may have never married or had children and may have even been queer will have their stories snipped and trimmed, molded to become a warning for other women…so as to discourage them from craving power perhaps.”
Cosmic Yoruba has done a lot more research about traditional Nigerian life than I have, so I am inclined to trust her. Besides, her accounts line up with most other accounts I have read.
Cosmic Yoruba ends with songs praising Efunestan:
“The woman, who instils fear in others,
the fearsome one, who slaughters slaves to celebrate Id-el-Kabir.
Efunsetan is one force, Ibadan is another.
The valiant that challenges the Almighty God,
if the most high does not answer her on time,
Efunsetan leaves the earth to go and meet him in Heaven…”
Have you heard the story that Africa was a developed, thriving place full of wealthy economies and fabulous cities, until evil Europeans showed up, enslaved a bunch of people and colonized the rest?
Cities did exist in Sub-Saharan Africa, but they were few and far between. They were in the sorts of places you would expect them to, like the intersections of major trade routes or major ports. There were a few major trade items, like gold, ivory, and human beings. There were empires with wealthy individuals.
But the overall level of economic development throughout the sub-continent was very low. Those who claim that Europeans are responsible for the current levels of African development need to explain why African development was so low before the Europeans got there.
Edited to add: hey, look, we have a new graph! It is far superior to the old one, though it covers a different time range, so well still have to use both:
I really hope I can find a better graphwith special thanks to commentator “With the thoughts you’d be thinkin” and Wikimedia Commons
Back in the year one, most of the world was engaged in hunter-gathering, small-scale agriculture, or herding. The GDP of most of the world reflects this. Africa at least has gold to export, unlike the steppe. Africa is still less developed than Western Europe (and this is including northern Africa, which is quite different from Sub-Saharan Africa.)
By 1300-1400, various estimates put British per cap GDP around $1,000, with the average for Western Europe as a whole a little lower, but still more than the current per capita GDP of many modern Sub-Saharan countries. And it’s more than SSA had in 1400, well before European colonialism began. If anything, Africa’s GDP only took off after colonialsim; there is no sign that colonialism caused economic collapse.
According to Peter Frost, “In sub-Saharan Africa, high polygyny rates are associated with ‘female farming’ societies, and such societies began to spread outward from a point of origin near the Niger’s headwaters some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (Murdock, 1959, pp. 44, 64-68).”
In The African Outlier, Frost quotes Draper, 1989 (PDF): “Much of rural African subsistence is based on the work of women in their gardens; men make only modest contributions. Typically, rights in land are held by men by virtue of their membership in kinship or village units. A man who wishes to add another wife is under few constraints (provided his kinship group has the land and bridewealth), since women, in effect, pay their own way. They produce food, and they rear children. In rural areas, when a man marries an additional wife, he is awarded additional fields for this woman and her children (Bryson 1981). The importance of male labor to support such households is reduced. In former times, before colonially imposed peace, the male role in defense was important. But since central governments have been present, men who remain in rural villages spend their time in leisure, in management of household labor, or in local political affairs…”
And in The Beginnings of Black Slavery and The Beginnings of Black Slavery II, Frost argues that, “… It looks like black slaves began to enter the Middle East in growing numbers some time before 0 AD, the result being a slow but steady increase in the region’s black population throughout the early Christian era and into the Islamic era.”
He goes on to argue that polygamy basically drove the slave trade. Do the math; if one man has 5 wives, then four men have no wives. What do you do with your extra men? Attack the next village over, capture their women and sell all of their extra men into slavery.
There are other possible explanations, but I happen to find Frost’s convincing.
The idea that things were going swimmingly until Europeans showed up and started enslaving everyone is pure a-historical baloney. In fact, did you catch this little bit above: “Madam Tinubu … resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.”
According to the Wikipedia page on Colonial Nigeria, “British influence began with prohibition of slave trade to British subjects in 1807. The resulting collapse of African slave trade led to the decline and eventual collapse of the Edo Empire. ”
So Nigerian heroes were actively resisting British influence in Nigeria because the British were trying to stop them from enslaving people, and the slave trade is supposed to be the fault of the colonizers?
Overall: Recommended if you like Neanderthals or human ancestry. Probably not useful if you are already an expert in the field.
Pros: interesting discussion of flint-knapping, gluey pitch production, and Neanderthal burials.
Flint knapping is one of my occasional interests. It is surprisingly difficult to just pick up a rock and produce a useful tool. Without a good teacher, you quickly degenerate to banging the rock on the ground as hard as you can like a retarded monkey. If Kanzi the bonobo saw me trying to make stone tools, he’d probably bring me some fruit out of pity. “Poor hairless idiot ape,” Kanzi would think. “Can’t even make tools. If I don’t feed it, it’ll starve.”
Amusing digression time: Once I was walking through the city, in a semi-developed/semi-overgrown lot, and saw a bit of shiny rocks lying around on the ground. Unusual for the area, because the local geographic history hasn’t led to a lot of rocks on the surface, and most of those are of the duller sedimentary sorts (or, obviously, landscaping materials.) So I picked up this bit of flint, then another bit of flint, and then a larger one with obvious convex areas from being struck with another piece. And a few feet away, here was a piece that fit comfortably into my hand, perfect for knocking chips off the other chunk. Some of the pieces I even managed to fit back together, reassembling the rock that once was.
I came back with a small box and picked up all the bits of flint before development began on the lot. One piece does look like an arrowhead, but given that I found it alongside a bunch of chips that are more or less flint-knapping trash, the arrowhead’s creator probably thought there was something wrong with it.
Sure, the whole little box may be filled with little more than ancient trash, there is something I love about picking up these rocks and being able to see in their shapes the actions of some other humans, the angle they held that rock at, the way they smacked it with another rock to produce these flakes. To feel this connection between myself and some other human who walked here before me, and the traces of their life that no one else walking through that place had noticed.
Anyway, turns out the Neanderthals had a pretty interesting/unique way of making flint tools, that involved first shaping a large block of flint into a specific shape by flaking bits off the sides, and then, with one good hit, knocking off one large slice. This is a more complicated process than merely picking up a rock and whacking bits off of it it until you get an edge.
The gluey pitch seems to have been derived (distilled?) from birch bark. Some scientists demonstrated the process by burning a roll of birch bark in a pit, but they obviously did not use enough bark, and only got a smudge of goo. It’s a bit frustrating watching someone do something obviously wrong–since you’re filming this for TV, why not use a great big bunch of birch bark so you can get enough pitch to actually show us?
Anyway, looks like Neanderthals distilled this gluey stuff and then used it to help secure the flint tips to their spears, before thrusting them into the sides of enormous shaggy elephants, which are quite formidable animals. So the pitch (and bindings) had to be pretty darn good.
Neanderthals also seem to have buried their dead, though the show notes that their potential grave-goods pale in comparison to similar human burials.
The parts about Neanderthal DNA will be of interest to you if you don’t know about the Neanderthal/human DNA admixture business already, or you’ve heard about it but are still a little unclear on the details. The scientists interviewed claimed that it looks like there were a lot of interbreeding incidents rather than just a few, but “a lot” in this case does not necessarily mean “thousands”.
Cons: For a program that goes into depth on how inaccurate depictions of Neanderthals happened (ages ago, someone found a skeleton with arthritis and concluded that all Neanderthals were stooped,) their depiction of the homo Sapiens who first encountered the Neanderthals was also inaccurate.
The first encounters between humans and Neanderthals probably happened in the Middle East, shortly after h Sapiens left Africa, but before they had split into Asian and European branches. In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, whites did not yet exist. We’re not sure exactly when white skin evolved, but it probably wasn’t before h Sapiens got to Europe.
(Of course, it could be the other way around, and it’s the Bushmen who’ve changed since they split off.)
Either way, it’s pretty easy to assume things that are probably wrong, and the h Sapiens who first encountered h Neanderthals were probably more similar in appearance to modern Africans or Middle Easterners than Europeans.
A second issue occurred during a dramatization of the Neanderthal and h Sapiens DNA. Neanderthal DNA was depicted as red, and h Sapiens as blue. (Erm, I think. Unless I’ve got it backwards.) They then showed a “combined” DNA strand with blue and red pieces.
While this is a fine way to visualize what’s going on, I would just like to clarify that DNA isn’t actually blue or red, nor are there folks running around with mosaic red/blue variants.
You may be laughing (I burst out laughing at the sight of it,) but I know people who would very sincerely and devoutly insist that “Humans have different colored DNA from Neanderthals. I saw this program on PBS all about it, and I know PBS is accurate. You should watch the program!”
You can imagine how talking to these people makes me feel.
Finally, my last complaint is that there was no discussion of Neanderthal DNA in Native Americans!
Worldwide distribution of B006, (from Yotova et al. “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Mol. Biol. Evol. 28 (7), 2011).SNP PCA from Skoglund & Jakobsson’s “Archaic Human Ancestry in East Asia” (2011)
Right, so what’s up with Native Americans? You may have noticed that during the discussion with the map, no jellybeans were placed on the Americas at all. What a pity, when there’s still so much about the peopling of the Americas that we don’t know.
In the future, I’m hoping for similar documentaries about the Denisovans and their DNA admixture in modern humans.
While researching the previous post, I came across a claim that the Pygmies are retarded due to having IQs around 55.
No, the Pygmies are not retarded.
If you’ve already read Two Kinds of Dumb, you already know why, and don’t need to continue on. But if you’ve just wandered in, here’s the quick and dirty version:
An actual diagnosis of mental retardation requires not only a low IQ score (I think the bar is 75 but could be 70, I forget,) but also major life impairments. That is, the person must be unable to do, unsupervised, the normal things people do to function, like hold down a job, get dressed, or feed themselves.
While I don’t know the exact IQs of the pygmies, all of the evidence I’ve seen suggest that the average is probably pretty low. For starters, books are heavy, so hunter-gatherers tend not to carry them around, which has a real impact on the average hunter-gather’s ability to read. Second, hunter-gatherers tend not to conduct much trade, so they tend not to need much in the way of mathematics. Some groups don’t even have words for numbers over three. Such groups tend to score lousily on math tests.
I’ve searched high and low for whether or not Pygmy languages contain words for numbers over 3, and come up with nada. But I think Pymies tend to use a lot of words from other languages/be multi-lingual, so if the Pygmies are speaking some other language they picked up from an agricultural tribe, the language could easily have a full suite of number words whether the Pygmies had any interest in numbers or not.
Third, given neither books nor maths in Pygmy history, it’s unlikely that there’s been any selective pressure on the Pygmies to adapt to readin’ and ‘rithmetic.
Fourth, there is a pretty strong correlation between IQ scores and technological complexity. You don’t have to think of IQ as “intelligence” if you don’t want to, but whatever it is, it is necessary for building technologically complex societies. If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is your thing, then you don’t need much in the way of IQ.
And fifth, their heads are kind of small. Unfortunately, brains have to go somewhere, and this poses a limit on grey matter.
That said, Pygmies are perfectly functional in their environment. They can hunt and gather their own food, carry on some trade with their neighbors, build their own houses, make their own clothes, get dressed, cook, take care of their children (one Wikipedia article claims that one Pygmy group has some of the highest level of fatherly involvement in child-rearing in the world,) are bi- and tri-lingual, and otherwise conduct their lives.
If you and I got dropped in the rainforest, we’d probably die within three or four days.
To over-simplify, mental retardation is generally caused by some form of traumatic brain injury, say, by getting dropped on your head as a child, eating lead, or being born with an extra chromosome. These injuries change your IQ from what it should have been, and cause a general loss of brain functioning.
If you live in a society where the average IQ is 100, then the average person you meet with a 50 IQ is most likely someone who suffered a traumatic injury.
However, if you live in a society where the average IQ is 50, this is the normal, um-injured IQ of people in your society. It just means that people in your society are bad at reading and math, not that they were all dropped on their heads as infants and cannot care for themselves.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “what if Pygmy low IQ is caused by malnutrition? After all, they ARE pretty short.”
Doubtful. There’s no reason to think that Pygmies would have been more malnourished than all of their neighbors for thousands of years (we have records going back that far.) Also, their height is genetic (see studies on Pygmy genetics,) not due to malnutrition. According to Westhunter, an average-heighted person would have to starve to death twice before mere malnourishment would make them as short as a pygmy.
Are Pygmies human?
I’ve also come across this question during my research, so I think it bears addressing.
Look, the term “human” is a social construct. So is the whole concept of “species.” You can come up with a personal definition of “human,” if you feel like it, that doesn’t include the Pygmies. Certainly their neighbors, who rape, murder, eat, and enslave the Pygmies (and sometimes evict them to make more room for gorillas,) do not regard the Pygmies as human. Personally, I look down on the Pygmies’ neighbors for their despicable behavior toward the Pygmies, rather than look down on the Pygmies for their stature and lifestyle.
Practically speaking, people only declare other groups of people “not humans” in order to justify killing them. I have no desire to kill the Pygmies; it seems more pleasant to me to live in a world where Pygmies exist, while still recognizing them as one of the most genetically distinct groups on Earth.
