Everyone Is African (19 page)

Political and cultural change over the past quarter century in South Africa has been rapid. Nonetheless, the legacy of racial tensions that trace their foundations to the historic juxtaposition of distinct groups of people persists. For instance, income inequality in South Africa is among the highest in the world, most of it divided along the apartheid-era racial classifications, with the highest income concentrated in the white class.
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This same sort of income stratification is evident in most nations where European colonization brought together people of distant geographic origins, one of which is where we turn next.

The southeast coast of Australia, where the city of Sydney now stands, is the first place on that continent colonized by Europeans. The people who occupied Australia before European colonization were descended from a very ancient ancestral lineage. According to DNA analysis, some of the first people to split away from the descendants of those who left Africa more than sixty thousand years ago and migrated into the Middle East were the ancestors of Australian Aborigines. They diverged from the main population, migrating eastward,
between sixty-two thousand and seventy-five thousand years ago.
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Their descendants crossed southern Asia to southeastern Asia over a period of thousands of years. Along the way, there was limited mating in central Asia between these migrants and Denisovans, a now-extinct humanlike group closely related to Neanderthals that we know only from a few bones and DNA. By then, the migrants already carried a small proportion of Neanderthal DNA from limited mating between their ancestors and Neanderthals in the Middle East. DNA variants inherited from Denisovans are now present in people who have Aboriginal Australian, Papuan, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island ancestry.

At the time, sea levels were much lower than they are now. A large peninsula called Sunda connected what are now the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java with the Asian continent as a single landmass (
figure 7.3
). Some of these people crossed the narrow straits of water between Sunda and the continent of Sahul (now Australia and the islands of Papua and Tasmania) as early as fifty thousand years ago.
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As sea levels rose when the ice age ended, the current islands in the region were formed.

After sea levels rose, the descendants of ancient immigrants remained mostly isolated in Australia for tens of thousands of years. By the time European colonists reached Australia, growth of Australian Aboriginal populations had been rising, and hunter-gatherer tribes occupied much of the continent, having populated it long ago.
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Though they had not developed cultivated agriculture or advanced weaponry, they had rich and varied artistic and musical traditions. Magnificent rock art, sculpture, and some of the world's oldest known musical instruments are the legacies of these people and their cultures.

British colonization of Australia began at Sydney in the late eighteenth century, initially as a penal colony but later as free settlements promoted by subsidies given to British people who chose to immigrate to Australia. The discovery of gold in 1851 coincided with an economic depression in Britain, resulting in large-scale immigration from Britain, other parts of Europe, and North America. Workers from China and the Pacific Islands were brought to Australia to labor in mines, farms, and plantations.

The result in Australia was similar to that in South Africa, where distinct groups of people with different genetic and cultural histories were juxtaposed, living with stark social inequality. During the earliest years of European immigration,
large numbers of Aboriginal Australians died of infectious disease brought by the settlers, especially smallpox.

Figure 7.3. The ancient peninsula of Sunda and continent of Sahul during the most recent glacial maximum (ice age), when sea levels were much lower. The approximate locations of ancient shorelines are indicated by dashed lines and the modern shorelines by solid lines.

 

A conflict named the Black War on the island of Tasmania has been referred to as “the most intense conflict in Australia's history” and “a clash between the most culturally and technologically dissimilar humans to have ever come into contact.”
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A penal colony was established in Tasmania in
1803 and initially remained confined to a small portion of the island. The first conflict was in 1804. By 1820, large numbers of settlers had arrived and encroached on Aboriginal lands as they expanded into the interior. Accounts of what happened vary and are told entirely from the settlers' point of view, and historians continue to dispute what actually happened. It is clear that British colonists considered the Aboriginal people as savages and committed unspeakable violence against them. In response, the Aboriginal attacks on British colonists increased dramatically. Several hundred people lost their lives on both sides. Moreover, infectious disease carried by the colonists took the lives of large numbers of Aboriginal people. In 1828, Governor George Arthur declared martial law, permitting patrols to kill any Aboriginal people who resisted them. After a failed attempt by Arthur in 1830 to round up all Aboriginal people and confine them on a peninsula, George Augustus Robinson, a clergyman and builder, was appointed to be a conciliator and convince the remaining Aboriginal people to relocate to Flinders Island. Robinson succeeded in winning their trust, and, over time, the few hundred people who remained out of what had originally been a population estimated at more than five thousand moved to the island. In spite of Robinson's promises of a good and prosperous life there, living conditions were so poor that most died of malnutrition and disease. The final survivor of the island population (which by then had been moved back to the mainland) died in 1876, and the Tasmanian government announced the extinction of the population. In fact, others had survived elsewhere, and descendants with Aboriginal Tasmanian and European ancestry remain today. Nonetheless, the language, culture, and vast majority of members of an entire people had been annihilated.

On mainland Australia, European immigrants and their descendants viewed Aboriginal Australians and nonwhite, mostly Chinese, immigrants as inferior races. Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, fears that the numbers of nonwhite immigrants were becoming too large resulted in what is historically known as the White Australia Policy, a series of laws and political movements aimed at promoting immigration of people recognized as “white” and limiting or excluding immigration of other groups of people. In one of the most famous declarations supporting the White Australia Policy, near the beginning of World War II, Australian
prime minister John Curtin stated, “This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.”
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A complex set of discrimination laws and social inequities ensued, including laws governing voting rights, land ownership, antimiscegenation, segregation, and child custody. Among the most infamous is known as the “Stolen Generations.” Children with mixed Australian Aboriginal and European ancestry were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal families and placed in institutions or adopted by white families under the assertion that they would lead better lives apart from their families. The practice persisted for a century (1869 through 1970) and affected thousands of children.

Australia's proximity to Japan and the Pacific battles of World War II made it the destination for thousands of Japanese refugees. Some married Australian citizens, and others wished to remain in Australia after the war. Protests over deportation efforts ultimately began to break down the White Australia Policy, resulting in revised laws, such as the Migration Act of 1958, and new policies removing race as a criterion for immigration.
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Although much has changed in Australia to overcome past racism, social and economic oppression remain as a legacy of historical racism.

We now turn our attention to North and South America, which were the most recent continents to be populated by humans. Toward the end of the last major ice age, when sea levels were still low, a broad land bridge known as Beringia connected Asia and North America (
figure 7.4
). Though Beringia's climate was cold, much of the coastline was free of ice, providing passage by foot for migrating people. The ancient ancestors of Native Americans entered North America across Beringia about fifteen thousand years ago. According to DNA analysis, they most probably were descendants of populations that resided in central Asia.
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Over time, as global temperatures rose and polar ice melted, sea levels climbed, and Beringia was inundated by a frigid and treacherous stretch of seawater. The newly formed Bering Strait separated the Asian and North American continents, effectively isolating human populations in the Americas for thousands of years.

European colonization of the Americas began at the close of the fifteenth century. Settlers from England, France, Sweden, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, other parts of Europe arrived in large numbers over a relatively short period. The Spanish rapidly conquered the vast empires of the Inca, Maya, and Aztec, and the Portuguese established colonies in what is now Brazil. Along the northeast coast of what is now the United States, European (mostly British, Dutch, and German) settlers encountered tribes of Native Americans who lived as both agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.

Figure 7.4. The approximate migration route for the ancestors of Native Americans toward the end of the last major ice age, about fifteen thousand years ago.

 

The stark juxtaposition of European settlers with culturally and genetically different native people that we've seen in the examples of South Africa and Australia was repeated in North America. Native Americans and European immigrants shared common ancestry dating to tens of thousands of years ago, when their ancestors belonged to the same population of people living in the Caucasus region near the Caspian and Black Seas. Their ancestral lines had separated more than thirty thousand years ago, geographically and reproductively, when the ancient ancestors of Europeans migrated westward and the ancient ancestors of Native Americans eastward. They shared common African as well as some postdiaspora variants. Newer variants that differed between them had arisen and accumulated independently since their ancestral separation. The Europeans perceived Native Americans as a separate and inferior race.

As in South Africa and Australia, infectious diseases devastated Native American populations in a series of outbreaks. Though most were inadvertent,
at least one was intentional. In an infamous case of germ warfare, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, general commander of the British military during the French and Indian War, mandated that blankets exposed to smallpox victims be given to Native Americans during the conflict known as Pontiac's Rebellion. In Amherst's words from a letter to one of his officers, “You will do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”
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By the eighteenth century, massive transatlantic African slave importation supported the expansion of plantation agriculture in the Americas. Most African slaves were taken from the Atlantic coast of west Africa, extending into the central part of the continent. Because they came mostly from a limited region, the people imported as slaves represented a subset of the human genetic diversity in Africa, mostly from west African Bantu populations. They, too, shared common ancestry with the European and Native Americans, separated by more than sixty thousand years. African slaves constituted some of the largest numbers of immigrants to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numbering nearly four hundred thousand, and more than ten million for all of the Americas.
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Without freedom or human rights, their descendants lost most of their African cultures, languages, and religions, especially in North America, where they were forced to adopt those of their European American masters.