Creating The Blackness Of Africa Goes To Cinema

Following the selection of “creating the blackness of Africa” at the 31st African film festival of Verona and its showing this 16th Wednesday 2011, I have received many comments from different people saying that they are curious about the documentary.

Well, their curiosity could be due to the general perception of many people that it is both conclusive and convincing to call an African a black man and a European a white man. But the issue is much deeper than that; it has very little to do with skin colour than it does with the psycho/political and cultural deformation of a people.

The concept of skin colour or better still the classification of people on the bases of their skin colours would have been no subject of debate if people were to be classified based on their true skin colours.

It may be important to note that the only two people who are still hanging on their colour dilemma are the Europeans and the Africans and when extended, it will quickly reveal the European dominion or acclaimed superiority over the Africans, the true reason that the black and white (people) classification had existed at all.

Generally, the black colour has been interpreted to mean the opposite of white colour and when translated to mean the identity of a people, like the so-called black Africans, its significance will become even much stronger. This is true of when some Europeans talk of their white civilisation and talk of Africans as black people of the Dark Continent. And quite sadly, it has become almost a law even for some Africans that they should be represented with the black colour as though it were a symbol of their beauty or has any historical relevance to them.

Over the years, many people have written these rules on the stone, as if there was anything in a European man that actually made him a white person. The same is true of the Africans and their purported blackness, a false identity that is not scientific, genetic or cultural proven except within the brouhahas of politics.

Chinese, the one-time yellow people are now out of the colour game and it's purely due to the recent Chinese's economic breakthrough. Otherwise the Chinese people never really had a much different skin colour than the French or the Italians. We can even look at it much closely.

Taking a cue from the United States, one might argue that the predominant classification of people into Red Indians, Black people or White people has nothing wrong with it. After all, the colour attachment only serves to identify the different people who are living together in the same community.

This has been demonstrated many times, especially through Hollywood's detective films where the police or a secret agent, tracking a person would say things like: “the subject is by the corner, he is tall 'black' or 'white”, as the case may be.

While the above may sound intelligent enough to justify the usage of skin colour to identify a person, there is one question that has not be answered: “does the black or white colour actually described the skin tone of the people in question?” The answer is No, because if the skin colour of an average African American is reproduced in a paper and given to a child in an elementary school to identify, the child will most certainly fail if he identifies the colour as black.

To get this argument from a narrower perspective, we must accept the truth about the black and white saga. It's all about the European quest for racial superiority. Only that it becomes funnier to see that even the skin colour of an average European does not fit into the invented “white person”; not even the Nazis human experiment could prove this. Yet many people are still dreaming.

This perhaps is one of the simplest equations to prove the folly of men. We have all seen birds of different colours and no one has yet said that just because a bird is green, red or yellow in colour, it is a better bird than the others, but when we come into the human species, we are easily shrouded in our arrogances and claiming what we do not know, giving names and deforming the history of a people, so they can be exploited.

Please do me a favour, take a look at some old documents about Africa and pinpoint the places where the word “Negroid” was used, as a description of African physical characteristics and compare it to some of the recent studies about Africa. You will most likely see another word in its place as “ Afro/Afroide”.

By the time you separately examine these two words, you will realise that while one word “ Afro/Afroide” directly links you to Africa and Africans, the other, “Negroid” is merely a fantasy and if anything more, a reminiscent of the African slavery. So, if we cannot invent a people how then can we invent their identity?

Ewanfoh Obehi Peter