Taharqa Nubian leader who ascended the throne in Kemet in 689 BC, was betrayed by the mixed-raced Libyan alien feudal lords causing Kemet to become a become an Assyrian province.
There has been a lot of discussion and debate about black-white interracial marriages, much of it divisive and devoid of a historical analysis of the effect of this phenomenon on non-white people. One of the main consequential aspects of such relationships, are the mixed-race offspring that are produced. Throughout history, such mixed- race offspring become “buffers” between the dominant and dominated cultures and have shown that collectively, they aspire to the dominant race’s culture. Thus, under the system of white supremacy, collectively, mixed race people will wittingly and unwittingly aspire to and support the white culture making the white culture the greatest beneficiaries of black-white interracial marriages. Though there are examples of individuals that reject the position and privilege of being closer to the dominant white culture than their non-mixed black counterparts, history shows that overall, these interracial relationships, as a COLLECTIVE PHENOMENON, have had a negative influence on the struggle for black liberation. So I offer examples from this excerpt from Volume 1 of Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain.
My father taught me that if you want to solve a problem, you must go to the root of the problem. So we are going to go to the very beginning of black-white interracial relationships.
The Mulatto Problem
“Greeks unwittingly applied the second name of the City of Menes (Memphis), ‘Aigyptos’ to the whole country. For Memphis was also called Hikuptah, or the “Mansion of the Soul of Ptah,’ the god-protector of the city. From the Greek ‘Aigyptos’ Memphis became Egypt, and Egypt became the name of the ‘Two Lands,’ extending from the Mediterranean to the First Cataract.
There was no ‘Egypt’ before the black king from whose name it was indirectly derived. Before that the country was called Chem or Chemi, another name indicating its black inhabitants, and not the color of the soil . . . It was the whites, not the Blacks, who called Africa the ‘Land of the Blacks’ until Asian and European invasions made it expedient to change this to mean ‘African countries not yet taken over by Caucasians’; and later to ‘Africa South of the Sahara.’
Since the first to be called Egyptians exclusively were half-African and half-Asian, their general hostility to their mothers’ race was a social phenomenon that should not be passed over lightly . . . . Its nature is essentially opportunist, a quest for security, recognition and advancement by identifying with and becoming a part of the new power elite of the conquerors. . . .
Blacks who did not choose to flee south but remained under Asian rule, even if enslaved, worked harder to gain recognition and acceptance than any other group. [Siphiwe note: think of the Civil Rights movement in the United States]. Indeed, so anxious were some of these early Black for ‘integration’ with the Asians that they themselves did most in creating the new breed of Egyptians who were to become their mortal enemies. For in an all-out effort to appease the invaders, they freely gave their daughters and other desirable females as gifts to become concubines, thus speeding up the reproduction processes on an ever-widening scale. . . . The direct result was that more and more Egyptians became lighter and near-white in complexion. In short, they did, in fact, become more Asian in blood than African.
But what has been referred to as a ‘social phenomenon’ was in fact a development among the half-breeds everywhere that ran counter to what would be normally expected, if not contrary to nature itself. This was the outright rejection of one’s mother and her people and a cleaving to the father and his people. . . .
First of all, they were mainly the sons and daughters of white European-Asian fathers. These fathers recognized them as such and, in general, proudly. And since they claimed superiority over the Africans, their half-African offsprings considered themselves to be a superior breed also. These Afro- Asian offsprings were given preferential treatment, positions of authority, wealth according to the status of their patrilineal family, and an education that could draw on Asian cultures as well as the highly advanced African civilization in Upper Egypt and southwards to the ‘Land of the Gods’.
Another situation that was a most potent factor in the half-breed’s attitude towards their mothers’ race was that, more often than not, their mothers were concubinary slaves.
This meant that the half-breed was introduced into the lowest level of African life even from birth. . . . But since most of the ‘new Egyptians’ were originally sons and daughters of slave mothers and ‘upper class’ fathers, they tended to be ashamed of their mothers and sought self-realization on their father’s side. Furthermore, the slave mother had no claim on the children she bore. They belonged to the Asian father who could and generally did consider them as free-born due to their Asian blood.
To prove how truly Asian they were, the mixed Egyptians made hatred of Africans a ritual, and tried to surpass the whites in raiding for the slaves in all-African areas. Various Afro-Eurasians who became Egyptian kings declared ‘eternal warfare’ against the Blacks and vowed to enslave the entire race.
Relying wholly on the emerging concept of innate superiority of Europeans and Asians, these people everywhere created a class system that made their bastard offsprings superior to all Blacks, and in status next below themselves.”
Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
My sons, this very same problem will repeat itself again 4,500 years later when the Portuguese come to the west coast of Africa where our Balanta ancestors lived. According to A History of The Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800 by Walter Rodney,
“The lancado was almost invariably a Portuguese, but he is best regarded as a phenomenon – the private European trader living among African tribesmen – and as such he could be of any nationality. Allied to the lancado was the grumete, another Portuguese term best left untranslated, being loosely applied to a large category of African helpers of European traders. Some were purchased as slaves, some were paid what amounted to a wage, and others were virtually affined relatives of the white merchants. The grumete were at all times a significant part of the resident trading community led by the lancados. The main business of the lancados and grumetes was slaving.
Following Rodney, Boubacar Barry writes in Senegambia and The Atlantic Slave Trade,
“Miscegenation soon produced a category of Afro-Portuguese known as Lancados or Tangomaos, who carved out a niche for themselves in Senegambia’s interregional trade as indispensable middle men between European traders and the Senegambian kingdoms. . . . The lancados, like Afro-Europeans at all European trading posts in the area, henceforth made up a class of compradors in this proto-colonial situation. They exploited the Senegambian population to the maximum for their personal profit, their key role being to serve the major interests of European commercial capitalism.
Apart from the effective control exercised by French and British chartered companies in the Senegal and Gambia River valleys, the remainder of Senegambia was dominated by a disparate crowd of slaving privateers who crisscrossed the seaboard from north to south. Worse still, around the forts and at most of the trading posts full-scale trading communities sprang into being, made up of Europeans from various national backgrounds, with even larger numbers of new Euro-Africans adding to the numbers of Afro-Europeans left behind from the heyday of Portuguese commerce.
What came into being was nothing less than a diaspora of European or Afro-European traders of French, British and Portuguese origin. They were later joined by Americans…. The Euro-Africans thus ended up creating their own trading diaspora along the coast from the forts of Saint-Louis, Goree and Fort Saint James all the way to the Southern Rivers as well as along the Senegal and Gambia River valleys. This complex network of European or Euro-African traders, some linked to chartered companies, others tied directly to European trading houses, teamed up with the Soninke, Manding and Peul network of Juula traders coming from the Senegambian hinterland. . . . It was the Euro-African families of LeJuge, Blondin, Pellegrin, or Charles Cornier (1780-90) who dominated political and commercial life . . . . The rise of this powerful class of Euro-Africans was greatly facilitated by marriage arrangements in vogue in the region at the time. This was the system that produced the famed signares. These were wives of company personnel who accumulated colossal personal fortunes and rose to play important roles in the economic and social lives of such colonial enclaves. . . . In the Southern Rivers area, particularly in Rio Cacheu and Bissao, it was the old Lancados and Tangomaos of Portuguese descent who, from the sixteenth century onward, dominated trading circuits from Casamance to Rio Grande. They were active as far as Gambia in the north and Rio Pongo in the south. Throughout their history these Euro-Africans maintained close social and economic ties with the Cape Verde islands. The Afro-Portuguese frequently employed members of the local Papel, Beafada, and Bainuk communities . . . . Despite the hostility of the Joola, Balanta, and Bisago, the Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese had a much greater impact on the societies of the Southern Rivers area of Guinea Bissao than did the Manding of Kaabu and the Peul of Futa Jallon, isolated in their hinterland homelands and reduced to supplying slaves for the coastal slave trade.”
My sons, you now understand the problem that we have with the descendants of Baba Amuntu Abamhlope (“human beings who are white”) and the mixed breed, mulatto children that are produced when we marry and have children with them. This led to our mass migration from our homeland in Ta-Nihisi and it has been a problem ever since and resulted in our enslavement in America 4,500 years later. I’ll discuss the Euro-African more in Volume III.
For now, my sons, the easiest way to explain how it all started, in my own words, is this: some of our family, descendants of Baba Amuntu Abansundu left Ta-Nihisi and went to the north, northwest and northeast. The further north they went, the more difficult it was to survive because of the weather. To eat, these ancestors had to do more hunting. To stay warm, these ancestors had to wear animal skins and live in caves. Nothing was easy for them, and they did not have the ability to grow food and pursue intellectual pursuits. It’s like they stopped going to school and stopped learning for tens of thousands of years. This caused them to change physically, mentally and spiritually, becoming Baba Amuntu Abamhlope. They became the Caucasoid white people and the yellow people that are called Semites.
Cheik Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism
Meanwhile, the rest of our ancestors stayed home in Ta-Nihisi and Ta-Meri. Our family known as the Anu during this period of history, was the earliest to develop a sedentary lifestyle and never stopped learning and so they created what is called civilization – they had a calendar, writing, science, math, astronomy, astrology, arts and crafts, music and social institutions, and because of their Great Belief, they lacked any abnormal aggression. Our family built Nekhen, the first city, and others. The descendants of Baba Amuntu Abamhlope (“human beings who are white”) began to settle in our cities. Then, one day, around 2500 BC or 1600 BC depending on which chronology you refer to, after tens of thousands of years, a group of descendants of Baba Amuntu Abamhlope called “Semites” came back into the land of Ta-Meri. When they saw the civilization that we built, they were in awe. We welcomed them back home and allowed them to live with us. Our accomplishments caused them to feel inferior and insecure and they became envious and jealous. Because they had become a vicious people, a people without our original Great Belief, they became violent and this caused the original conflict. [See Michael Bradley’s The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistotic Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexim and Aggression.]
According to Diop,
“The history of humanity will remain confused as long as we fail to distinguish between the two early cradles in which Nature fashioned the instincts, temperament, habits, and ethical concepts of the two subdivisions before they met each other after a long separation dating back to prehistoric times. The first of those cradles . . . is the valley of the Nile, from the Great Lakes to the Delta, across the so-called ‘Anglo-Egyptian’ Sudan. The abundance of vital resources, its sedentary, agricultural character, the specific conditions of the valley, will engender in man, that is, in the Negro, a gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature, endowed with a spirit of justice and gaiety. All these virtues were more or less indispensable for daily coexistence. . . .
By contrast, the ferocity of nature in the Eurasian steppes, the barrenness of those regions, the overall circumstances of material conditions, were to create instincts necessary for survival in such an environment. Here, Nature left no illusion of kindliness: it was implacable and permitted no negligence; man must obtain his bread by the sweat of his brow. Above all, in the course of a long, painful existence, he must learn to rely on himself alone, on his own possibilities. He could not indulge in the luxury of believing in a beneficent God who would shower down abundant means of gaining a livelihood; instead, he would conjure up deities maleficent and cruel, jealous and spiteful: Zeus, Yahweh, among others.
In the unrewarding activity that the physical environment imposed on man, there was already implied materialism, anthropomorphism (which is but one of its aspects), and the secular spirit. This is how the environment gradually molded these instincts in the men of that region, the Indo-Europeans in particular. All the peoples of the area, whether white or yellow, were instinctively to love conquest, because of a desire to escape from those hostile surroundings. The milieu chased them away; they had to leave it or succumb, try to conquer a place in the sun in a more clement nature. Invasions would not cease, once an initial contact with the Black world to the south had taught them the existence of a land where the living was easy, riches abundant, technique flourishing. Thus, from 1450 B.C. until Hitler, from the Barbarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to Ghenghis Khan and the Turks, those invasions from east to west or from north to south continued uninterrupted.
Man in those regions remained a nomad. He was cruel. . . . “
A group of Semites, called Hyksos, attacked Ta-Meri, but by this time, the civilization that we created had become corrupt because some, like the Mesintu, abandoned our Great Belief and created kings and Pharaohs. Our Balanta ancestors had already started leaving Ta-Nihisi and TaMeri long before this, and the last phase of our ancestral migrations started in the XVIIIth Egyptian Dynasty.
Themehu: Libya
My sons, around 1500 B.C., descendants of Baba Amuntu Abamhlope (human beings who are white), mostly Greeks, started to migrate from the North (Europe) into Ta-Meri and the lands west of Ta-Meri which the Bible called “Put” and today is called Libya. In Introduction to African Civilizations, John Jackson writes,
“These Libyans are referred to in ancient (Indo-European) records often by the names of their various tribes, such as Atalantans, Getulians, Maurusians, Nasamonians, and Tehennu. . . . Herodotus. . . The Father of History first tells us that ‘the Nasamonians are a Libyan race’; . . . . The coast of Libya along the sea which washes it to the north, throughout its entire length from Egypt to Cape Soloeis, which is its furthest point, is inhabited by Libyans of many distinct tribes who possess the whole tract except certain portions which belong to the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Above the coast line and the country inhabited by the maritime tribes, Libya is full of wild beasts; while beyond the wild beast region there is a tract which is wholly sand, very scant of water, and utterly and entirely a dessert.’ . . . The ancient Libyan inhabitants of this region, originally a branch of the western Ethiopians, became intermixed with the Phoenician, Greek, and Roman immigrants. . . . the various ethnic groups intermarried freely. . . .The Romans called the indigenous dwellers of North Africa Barbari (barbarians), from whence we get the name ‘Berber’. So, in medieval and even modern times the North Africans have generally been known as Berbers. The Romans dubbed these Africans ‘barbarians’, not because of any cultural inferiority, but merely because they had certain social customs that were different form those of the Romans. The Libyans or Berbers possessed a matriarchal type of social organization, which was common to all African societies, but which seemed quite odd and strange to the Romans of Europe.”
Cheikh Ana Diop also explains in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality:
“Fontanes next considers the claim that Egypt was probably civilized by Berbers or Libyans coming from Europe, via the west:
‘. . . . It is to the influence of the European race, to the immigration of the ‘men of the north’, that we should attribute this description of the Tamhou, Libyans of the Nineteenth Dynasty, ‘with pale face, white or russet, and blue eyes’! These Whites, hired as mercenaries by the Pharaohs, strongly hybridized the Egyptian and also the Libyan. . . . according to this theory, the African Berber from the west, the brown Libyan, settled in the valley of the new Nile; but almost immediately, or shortly afterwards, an invasion of Europeans hybridized the North African Libyan. This Libyan mixed-blood ‘with white skin and blue eyes’ may have modified the early Egyptian. By his European blood, this Egyptian could be related to the Indo-European race and to the Aryan.’
Now consider Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, who further describes our conflict with white people in her book, The Isis Papers: The Keys To The Colors:
“Impressed that the concept of a ‘system’ of white domination over the world’s ‘non-white’ peoples could explain the seeming predicament and dilemma of ‘non-white’ social reality, I tended to focus, as a psychiatrist, on what possible motivational force, operative at both the individual and group levels, could account for the evolution of these patterns of social behavioral practice that apparently function in all areas of human activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war). . . .
The Color-Confrontation theory states that the white or color-deficient Europeans responded psychologically, with a profound sense of numerical inadequacy and color inferiority, in their confrontations with the majority of the world’s people – all of whom possessed varying degrees of color-producing capacity. This psychological response, whether conscious or unconscious, revealed an inadequacy based on the most obvious and fundamental part of their being, their external appearance. As might be anticipated in terms of modern psychological theories, whites defensively developed an uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression. This attitude has continued to manifest itself throughout the history of mass confrontations between whites and people of color. . . .
The experience of numerical inadequacy and genetic color inferiority led whites to implement a number of interesting, although devastating (to non-white peoples), psychological defense mechanisms. The initial psychological defense maneuver was the repression of the initial painful awareness of inadequacy. This primary ego defense was reinforced by a host of other defense mechanisms.”
If it is legitimate to study the motivational force operating at the individual and group level when it comes to white people, it is equally legitimate to study the same when it comes to ALL people, including mixed-race people as a group, and specific mixed races such as European-African or white-black. Again, such an analysis shows that under a system of white supremacy, the collective behavior expresses itself as a desire or ambition to attain the privilege and power of the dominant white culture at the expense of the non-dominant black culture. This poses serious conflicts of interest for people in black-white interracial relationships who want to simultaneously maintain those relationships and not betray their black ancestors. The only possible outcomes are 1) maintain the relationship with the cumulative benefit accruing to the dominant white culture; 2) achieve such a high level of black nationalist and Pan African achievement that the results outweigh the benefit to the white culture (for example, Bob Marley); or 3) terminate the relationship in order to preserve the cumulative benefit accruing to the non-dominant black culture.
Dr John Henrik Clarke - The African World Under Seige start video at 27:00 mark