The Making of Blackness

by Paul Chuks

Oladimeji Odunsi

The Portuguese sauntered into Congo via the great Congo river in 1488 with the aim of making their state a vast African-Indian empire. Africa was not invaded earlier on due to a long held belief in the Western world that Earth was flat. After it was sufficiently debunked by Copernicus, Gil Eanes, sponsored by Prince Henry, dared in 1434 to sail beyond the area where the Atlantic ocean supposedly ended. It was the first successful voyage southward around the globe. Afterward came the Sub-Saharan Africa slavery-colonial story.

Historians use Congo as the classic case of Portugal’s first manifestation of racial inequality — “the very first Africans to be Westernized,” wrote Chancellor Williams. Portugal’s object for this mission was Christianity. They presented it as a “higher civilization” to lower, savage Africans. “Christian civilization” was the spell word in the Portuguese’s magic artillery that hypnotized both themselves and their victims. Africans believed they were being introduced to a better life; the white men convinced themselves even the enslaved people were better off under white standard of civilization — beside which was not existent prior to their adventure. The court in Lisbon planned well. Smart as they were to know that their imperialistic endeavor was incomplete without capturing the minds of their victims, they launched the concept of racial hierarchy using Christianity as fodder. The missionaries started with the chiefs and kings. Their first mission was to change them into Christians which sardonically turned them to the white man’s image. The outcome caused blacks to hate themselves, their culture and religion. To become Christian, one needed to be baptized, given a Christian name which was always Western. The first Congolese convert was Nzinga Kuwu in 1492, taking the Portuguese name Joao I. Thousands of other blacks followed suit. The council of elders who without them, the Portuguese couldn’t penetrate the King, was replaced by the Jesuit fathers. The age of absolutism arose — African kings began to rule disregarding their subjects and the due process they initially adhered to. The idea of divine kingship was advanced through the anointment and crowning of kings by Portuguese bishops. Kings ruled as sons of the church. In addition to the widespread Portuguese names in Congo, a new class of princes, dukes and infantes emerged, hitherto never applied in Africa due to the absence of Europe’s conception of royalty. Africans became “black Portuguese,” “black Frenchmen,” “black Englishmen.”

Interestingly, centuries before invasion, Africans conceived of whiteness as evil. When some Congolese fishermen encountered the Portuguese at the riverbank for the first time, they fled thinking an evil spirit from their ancestral plane had slinked into earth to torture them for their misgivings. Some, bold enough, drew closer to the white men, rubbed their cheeks vigorously, as if to clean the whiteness like it was paint. Onward in the 19th century the notion waned. Blackness replaced it. It became the badge of evil in their collective unconsciousness. It stood for sin, darkness, immorality. In Roget’s Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms of white/whiteness come with positive meaning. For black/blackness, 120 of them are negative. To make a white man look evil, he had to be donned in black apparel. The righteous events like baptism, weddings, etc. required white girdle. God himself being white had cursed the blacks and made them servants of man — man being white. The French philosopher Charles De Montesqueiu in 1748 said: “it is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men because by allowing them to be men, a suspicion will follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” Ergo, to worship God was to worship the white man. These psychological shticks, clustered together, fostered black inferiority.

Dating back to antiquity, the characterizations of Africa were equally brutal and inaccurate. Herodotus referred to blacks as “barbarians” and characterized Libyans as “people whose speech resembled the screeching of bats rather than the language of men.” The Babylonians in their Talmud wrote of Africans as the descendants of Ham who were cursed by their god to have black skin and kinky hair. Evidently, the Portuguese policy of racial inequality was an artery from the heart of a civilization that had long denigrated blackness. But racism had not been articulated at that point — or better put, didn’t shape the world — until Gomez De Zurara in 1453 wrote The chronicle of the discovery and conquest of Guinea, a book that pioneered the first racist ideas. He lumped all of Africa into one description, “savage,” as though he were divinely mandated to do so. He, alongside Hegel, claimed black people didn’t have any history until they came in contact with Europe. They claimed Africa was a dark and undiscovered continent with people living beastly, sisters among brothers like they were couples. Meanwhile, according to data provided by McEvedy, Jones and Chandler, African nations were urbanized to the tune of 15 percent, some 12 percent. Paralleling Northern Europe, these were the highest rates in the world.

In the second episode of the television series, American Gods, a kidnapped slave supplicates to his God for freedom. Another black man who has bought his freedom interferes, telling him he was not going to heal and “the moment those white motherfuckers get in here, you become black. You think you are people, let me be the first to tell you, you are all black.” This is meant in the way of Africans’ personhood being collapsed on an idea so polluted, it is rooted in the maxim that in all of its chroma, blackness is the one color for evil. It is from there they relate to and are related with by the world. Whiteness becomes the ontological unit of goodness — it is cast in all Godly forms. The civilization is founded on this dogma and white people are barely swallowed into a negative stereotype. For them, the die is cast. Blacks are not blacks until they are around whites. This is because inside the concept of whiteness exists a black Sisyphus heaving whiteness up to glory.

In most of Africa, people are aware that their skin is black. But they are not aware of the politics the rest of the world has reserved for them due to the color of their skin. Those in the Western annex of Africa, like South Africa, sing the same song of racism as Black Americans. According to the country’s population and land audit, white people consist of only 8% of the entire population but own 72% of the arable land.

Consequently, the majority of the world is ruled by the Western empire. The existence of China and Russia’s unyielding charge towards world power makes it a multi-polar world. The days of the Soviet Union was understood as a bipolar world, where only two giants struggled for the world stage. Today, the three struggle, with the United States leading the pack. Their globalization scheme continues. The imperial assignments the British left unfinished, they have continued. It is easy in Africa because they are drunk from eurocentrism. Their names are either European or Arabian. Their language, vernacular. Their gods, idols. Their intonation, local. Their artists, unless they have chorused a song with Ed Sheeran or been nominated for the Grammys (or the likes thereof), local. They believe neo-colonialism is a concept theorized and purveyed by cynics still angry about the past. They believe it is time to “move on” and “hold our leaders” (who were fixed by electioneering, military coup, election rigging under the command and supervision of Western leaders) responsible for Africa’s predicament. Because in the concept of whiteness, a black Sisyphus is beneath, doing the heavy-lifting, Africa has to suffer. According to Mail & Guardian, France’s former African colonies paid a colonial tax adding up to $500 billion annually until 2023 when it was halted. Yet a portion of the colonies’ budget trickles down to the French central bank under various names and programs. This still sees France having the grasp of 85% of the colonies’ annual income. Since 1963, France has assassinated 22 African presidents, all of whom were promising and replaced with their puppets.

Today, a man stands at the front of a supermarket in London, Berlin or New York. A white boy, only a few years into taking his first steps, lends him a gaze and points to his mother saying, “Mummy! Mummy! There, a black man.” Then and there, he is otherized.