Herstoricity

“Afrika”, “herstory”, “Latinx”, “womon”, “womxn”, “womyn”: all of these words have been celebrated and irritated. Two of them have ethnic significance and all but one are clearly linked to feminism. Even “Afrika” could be linked to feminism, but that’s a longer conversation, which may nonetheless take place here. Hence this post partly belongs in the Other Place, but I’m putting it here due to its ambiguity.

I’ll go through them one by one.

“Afrika” originates from Haki R. Madhubuti, a poet of the Afrikan diaspora born in Arkansas, apparently first used in 1973. He explains the spelling thus:

I have talked about AfriKa before on here but can’t find the post. Apart from the odd spelling of “germain” in this passage, the first thing which strikes me about it is its apparent historical inaccuracy, and this is possibly one of the more important points I’d like to address here.

There are a number of theories regarding the origin of the word “Africa”. One of these is that it’s linked to “April” and “apricity”, as in “the sunny place”. It’s probably worth noting that being a whole continent, not all of Afrika is in fact sunny. Lesotho, for example, decidedly isn’t. It may also be Ancient Egyptian in origin, from “Afru-Ika”, meaning “motherland”. If this last is true, it is at least arguably accurate since until recently the consensus scientific view was that we originated on that continent and the actual species Homo sapiens is from there although the other species with which we interbred weren’t always Afrikan. It also has the merit of being a word from an Afrikan language. However, it’s also clear that if “Afru-Ika” is indeed Egyptian, it wouldn’t’ve been written with a K because the language never used Latin script, although Coptic does use an adapted Greek alphabet with some demotic Egyptian letters so if it ever did get written in Coptic, it would’ve used a Kappa. Although I thought Afrika was referred to in the Book of Acts, I can’t find any such reference, but in that same book and elsewhere, Ethiopians are mentioned, which has been one way Afrika was mentioned in Europe in the past. In Ge`ez, “the Ethiopian eunuch” is called ” ኢትዮጵያዊው ጃንደረባ”, and there’s definitely no K in that, which gives rise to one of my puzzles about this issue: Afrikan languages use all sorts of non-Latin scripts which have nothing which looks like the letter K in them. To give a very incomplete list, there are the multiple West Afrikan scripts such as Vai, the Berber script Tamazight, the Arabic abjad, the Ethiopian abugida and the various Ancient Egyptian scripts. The Coptic alphabet does include a K. It is true that the letter C is often a bit of an oddity in languages written with the Latin script because its pronunciation varies more, but it’s also the case that the idea that “Afrika” is spelt with a K edges into “not even wrong” territory because many of the scripts used for Afrikan languages aren’t even alphabets and don’t have letters in the Latin sense, so they don’t have an equivalent for K as an isolated sound.

However, maybe this is not the point, and I could of course launch into a further tirade on the history of the word’s spelling, noting that in particular “Afrika” is the German and Afrikaans spelling, and I’m guessing also the Flemish one, which opens a horrifying chapter in Afrikan colonial history. It’s factually incorrect that no European language other than Dutch and German has the hard C sound, so this inaccuracy bothers me. I’m also far from convinced that most Afrikan languages spell it with a K, and if they do whether those are widely spoken or otherwise used languages, although majority languages do have issues of their own. These are, though, not the only points Madhubuti raises. The K can symbolise Afrikans “coming back together again” without there needing to be an historical (very aware of that word too right now) justification. After all, the uses of the X in “Latinx” and “womxn” are not historical and that may not matter.

The third reason given feels like something I’m not qualified to comment on since I’m neither Afrikan nor part of the Afrikan diaspora. It comes from a Pan-Africanist approach, significantly a global movement which stresses common ground and mutual support by all people of Afrikan heritage within and outwith the Afrikan continent, focussing on the latter via the slave trade. The four words used have different sources, being respectively from (ki?)Swahili, Akan (actually Nkrumah), Swahili again and West Afrika. Now I recognise that because all of these cultures are Black, they may be unified by the effect of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, but I’m also not sure as the world’s Whitest person whether unifying those concepts under the same heading is positive or negative. Madhubati then builds on that by saying that using the K is a sign of an Afrikan lingua franka, an interesting subversion of Latin which introduces a K into a language which rarely uses it. I feel also that I should point out that a basically nullifying version of the idea of the Afrikan diaspora would include me in two senses as part of it. One of these is the trivial and probably annoying observation that all living humans have Afrikan heritage because our species is from Afrika. The other is the slightly less trivial but still quite appropriative fact that I actually do have recent Afrikan ancestry, but this has little to no bearing on my Whiteness because nowadays I am practically universally perceived as White, which does in fact make me White, and in fact very White indeed.

On the subject of Latin, the word “Africa” itself was initially used by the Romans to refer to a province of the Empire on the southern Mediterranean coast. This was in a sense another form of colonialism, so the use of the C there is equally colonialist except that it was imposing on the Phoenician script used there at the time. There is a bit of a side-issue about whether Roman imperialism was similar to the later European version, and the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire is also different to that of the Atlantic slave trade, but I’ve already gone on about this a fair bit so I’ll stop at this point and move on to another.

The main issue here may be that it isn’t the history that matters. When we use words in everyday life, we usually don’t pay much attention to their etymology or shift in meaning. The word “nice”, as I’ve said, is one of several words which change their meaning regularly, along with “silly” and “gay”. These all have overlapping meanings from time to time, and a fourth associate member of this group is “blessed”. We do tend to focus on these more than most others because they’re unusually fluid, but on the whole we don’t. Likewise, the word “necklace”, with many others, has an obvious form which can be broken down to reveal an older meaning, but we seldom consider this. This is because, on the whole, words interact with each other and are used in a contemporary way and their etymology is not the central issue. “Afrika” with a K may or may not have historicity.

Or herstoricity? What would that even mean? To state a very obvious and widely known fact, “history” is etymologically from the Latin word “historia”, itself from the Greek ἱστορία, and is linked to the word “story”. The Latin third person feminine and masculine possessive adjective (their analogue to our “her” and “his”) is “sua”, which varies according to the possessed thing and not the gender of the possessor. Hence there is very clearly no etymological link between the word “history” and “his”. However, this is almost irrelevant because to someone who knows English, it sounds like “his story” and an informative play on words can emphasise that history is written by the winners, i.e. men. That said, the Romance languages assign their word for “history” to the feminine, as “historia” is a feminine noun ending in A in the singular nominative.

“Herstory” first seems to have been used in 1970 by Robin Morgan. It’s been criticised by Richard Dawkins along the lines of its etymology, which as I’ve said is irrelevant because language is rarely used that way. Others regard it as a falsification of history because it allegedly emphasises certain things unrealistically and distorts the story. There have also been women historians before the twentieth century, whose expressed views tend to be those of men historians. It could also be criticised as insufficiently intersectional: is it perhaps the herstory of White women, for example? How much herstory is seen from a Latinx perspective?

“Latinx” is mainly a New World-centred concept. The X is there because some Romance languages tend to gender the adjective and adjectival noun “Latina”/”Latino” for women and girls on the one hand and men and boys on the other. In general, over most extensive texts or speeches, a person referring to themselves in such a language will reveal their gender because this is how they work grammatically. There seems also to be a weaker tendency than in some other languages with grammatical gender to ascribe genders inconsistently, as used to happen in English with “woman” being masculine and “wife” neuter. Hence the X. However, there’s a separate issue here which might also come into play with the issue of pan-Africanism. It seems to this White person typing this, whose ethnicity might mean that pan-Africanism glosses over important cultural and other differences among Afrikans which might be important, and “Latinx” seems to do the same.

“Latinx” is a term coined in the early 21st century CE. The idea is partly to avoid the forced self-gendering of using the equivalent words ending in A and O, and I think to an extent to be gender-neutral when referring to someone. It is, however, rather controversial for a couple of reasons. One is that it could be culturally imperialist because it seems to have been coined by Anglophones and doesn’t work in the actual languages themselves. Another is that it refers to a whole swathe of people who may not see themselves as similar at all and seems to exclude other people whom one might think are included such as Spaniards, Portuguese, the French, Swiss and Walloons, people from Angola and Mozambique, Cajuns and Quebecois. Within the “Hispanic” community there are also native Americans, Sephardic Jews and people of mainly European descent. This is parallel in some ways to the “Afrika with a K” situation, since Afrika is the second largest continent with a host of ethnicities and nations and the idea seems to have started outside it. The majority of “Latinx” people in the US dislike the term and possibly consider it racist. I’m not sure what womyn think about it.

I’m going to consider the three “wom*n” terms together. “Womon” and “womyn” are older and linked. The idea behind these is to remove the morphemes “man” and “men” from the word for women, for want of a better word. The first is singular, the other plural. “Wimmin” is also used for the plural, and “womban” is found sometimes. Etymologically this is naïve because the etymology of “woman” is “wifman”, i.e. “person who is a woman” and there are cis women born without wombs, cis women with more than one womb and cis women who have had hysterectomies, so “wombman” could be seen as reducing “women” to their reproductive systems and is quite tactless as well. However, the latter is more important than the former, as it’s clear that etymology is not particularly important most of the time. There are also a couple of extinct words for men which are formed in a similar way, namely “ƿerman” (“person who is a man”) and “ƿæpman” (“person whose role is to bear a weapon”). These died out because of the sexist assumption that “man” is the default. I have to admit that recently I’ve watched quite a few programmes with werewolves in them and noticed that whereas I definitely think of the word “werewolf” as masculine, most people seem not to notice the incongruity of using it for women, when a better word might be “wifewolf” or the apparently gender-neutral “lycanthrope”. This etymological thicket is, though, more interesting than influential.

The word “wimmin” is older and not deliberately coined. It’s been used as part of spelling reform, as “women” is an accurate depiction of neither the morphemes nor the etymology of the word, and is also used in a mocking way to indicate that the speaker or writer is uneducated. For instance, it gets used in Popeye comic strips. As such it’s unlike the others, which originated in 1976 in connection with the now-controversial Michigan Womyn’s Festival. It tends to be associated with lesbian separatism, a movement which has now become unpopular because it’s seen as faking lesbianism, and because of this is now rather an obscure pair of words. I don’t know if this has ever been done, but a back-formation would be possible using the words “mon” and “myn” for men. “Mon” already existed in Anglo-Saxon times and is of course also found, with no direct historical connection, in Afro-Caribbean English. There’s potential for “mon” and “myn” to mean something like “person with a penis”, unlike “womxn”.

“Womxn”, the final of many, though perhaps less prominent, examples of this mentioned here, has an intention which might be seen as athwart “womon”, although when it was invented in the 1970s the two were similar. However, it didn’t become at all popular until the late ‘teens, by which time it was in opposition to “womon” in attempting to include both cis and trans women. Since I try to avoid discussing gender identity issues on here, that’s all I’m going to say about it.

To conclude, I’ll try to extract some common themes, using bullet points:

• Etymology is largely irrelevant to these neologisms.
• There is often resistance to them.
• It can be a futile exercise to change language, but it can also succeed. The word “quiz” is a possible example of a word introduced deliberately, but I don’t think it was already given a meaning.
• These linguistic elements can have a slacktivist tendency, serving as substitutes for something which takes deeper thought, effort and dialogue.
• Sometimes these coinages are imposed from without and have an appropriative flavour.

To be honest, I don’t know what I think, and that’s probably because of my privilege. If I were on the other side of some of these moves, I might be able to judge them more fairly. As it is, in most ways my identity is that of the oppressor. Also, viewing a group from a distance and without fully authentic and lived experience can lead to an apparent homogenisation, as seems to be reflected in “Afrika” and “Latinx”, and perhaps others.

Racism And Astronomy

I am of course incredibly White, so the immediate question here is why a White non-astronomer is qualified to talk about racism in astronomy. Well, strictly speaking of course I can’t really, or rather, I am unlikely to be able to wade into it in enough depth to swim knowledgeably. Nonetheless I can give a kind of overview of it and comment on some of the active racism involved.

Photo by Faik Akmd on Pexels.com

This is a time lapse picture of the night sky. The main reason we can know it was taken here on Earth, apart from the fact that astronomical pictures taken from other celestial bodies are rare and poor quality (in fact I only know of one body they have been taken from, and that’s Mars) is the colour of the sky and the presence of liquid and solid on the surface at the bottom of the picture. It also seems to have been taken from the northern hemisphere because of the relatively stable and bright streak at the centre, which is presumably Polaris. Had it been taken from the south, the much dimmer Sigma Octantis would be at the centre of the swirl.

The sky seems non-specific and impassive to us, and also very little influenced by conflict or politics going on here on Earth among humans, and that is one reason I’m so keen on astronomy. Contemplating the Universe makes the problems we have here seem less important and seems to put them in perspective. I would personally say the stars are something to aspire to. I so want there to be humans out there among them one day. Of course, we are already among the stars but apparently only one of them hosts us. Nevertheless, there are cultural dominances and biasses in how we view the Universe and also very clear and overt racism exists among the astronomical community.

This sounds like an accusation, as the words “racism”, “sexism”, “ableism” and others often do, but that would imply that people are consciously and deliberately reserving much of the academic world to White people. That may happen as well, but it’s more important to look at the issue as a structural thing. As a White person, I have the privilege of firstly being unaware of racial bias among astronomers and secondly of being able to contemplate astronomy in a meaningful way. There are other ways in which I am trivially disadvantaged to do with my situation. For instance, I can’t see objects in the night sky very easily because of my poor eyesight, so the best I can usually manage to do is to view maybe first magnitude stars such as Antares, and basically nothing else. This is more on the disability side than ethnicity of course, but there is another set of issues which is fairly obvious to me regarding gender, namely that a man may feel much more confident to go out at night to a park or remote area to look at the sky in a place without light pollution than a woman might, and beyond that the kind of systemic biasses which prefer able-bodied middle-aged WASP men work against women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. Hence in the richer parts of the world, Black people are likely to live in places with more light pollution and less likely to be able to afford a good telescope. Ironically, much of Afrika, for example, would be very suitable indeed for telescopic astronomy. Here’s a map of the continent showing lighting at night:

(would’ve been better without the labels). And here’s Europe:

This means that treating every location as equally likely, which is not so because of lack of population, one stands a much better chance of seeing the night sky well in Afrika than in Europe. Also, along the Equator one can see both celestial hemispheres, so one can see more of it in Afrika than Europe.

There will inevitably be systemic racism in who becomes an astronomer in Europe and North America, although I’m guessing this isn’t any worse than who becomes a palaeontologist. The latter presents a rather different problem as there are issues regarding the plunder of resources by colonialists and the treatment of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the field, which may not be so big a problem with astronomy. However, there can be problems with the siting of observatories in a similar sense, the most well-known one at the moment being the positioning of the Thirty Metre Array in Hawai’i, which was to be situated on Mauna Kea, a sacred site to the people of that archipelago. The issue here is that the planned observatory is one of several near that site, and in the past the excavation of the site has desecrated the graves of ancient high chiefs. In the past, promises regarding the building of telescopes have been broken, with insistence that this would be the last development, followed by more of the same. The northern hemisphere is low in such observatories, and a possible alternate site in La Palma in the Canary Islands is less suitable for infrared astronomy due to the warmer climate and lower elevation. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain on Earth measured from its base, so there’s less atmosphere to look through. There is a peaceful protest ongoing there. Some of the indigenous people view the idea of looking for other habitable planets as encouraging an attitude that Earth is disposable. Despite losing their case in the courts, the actions taken to build the observatory seem to meet the legal definition of desecration. Elders in their seventies and eighties have been arrested for peaceful protests, and because the site is sacred all protestors are committed to non-violence. This has also divided the community as the police officers are sometimes related to the protestors. Beyond that is the issue of how the United States government acquired the islands in the first place, on the grounds that the White businessmen were more fit to run the island than the recently independent natives. The federal government also had no legal jurisdiction over the country.

This story makes me wonder about whether there are other observatories with similar histories. There is also a separate issue regarding the Arecibo Telescope, which is an enormous radio telescope built in a basin in Puerto Rico. This was used to send the first message into interstellar space for detection by aliens, although it was only a semi-serious attempt for publicity purposes. In 2020 CE, the telescope collapsed, primarily due to lack of funding making maintenance unaffordable. Like Hawai’i, part of the rhetoric for siting the telescope there is that it brings money into the local economy, but that money is no longer forthcoming. Elsewhere on the planet, the Karoo Square Kilometre Array in South Africa requires a 13 000 hectare “quiet zone” which minimises electromagnetic transmissions to enable the telescopes to detect signals from the sky more easily. The San used to live in this region and were forced to move north by the colonial government in the century before last, and there’s the issue of purchase of the land from White farmers to prevent radio interference. Employment is low and deprivation high in the area, and it’s possible that building the extra telescopes may lead to jobs. The San were, however, displaced when the government brought Black farmers to the area some time ago. The SKA is situated where it is thanks to a government bidding process which brought it into the area.

Then there’s the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. This was afflicted in 2013 by a workers’ contract dispute between the Washington CD-based organisation which runs the facility and the four-fifths of employees at the site who are Chilean. All of these things taken together look like a process where scientific institutions in the wealthy and light-polluted (and also electromagnetic radiation more generally) North of the planet uses places with colonial histories to site its astronomical facilities, without much respect being paid to the people who actually live there. As I say, I don’t know much about these things but it seems to be a clear example of racism in astronomy. The Polynesian people and the San do of course also have their own astronomical traditions. Western astronomers were not the first.

In 2017, only nine percent of US STEM academics were POC. The Black population of the US is 13.6%. As for Black women, only sixty-six of them got doctorates in physics compared to 27 000 White men. This is not about problematising STEM departments or the scientific community in particular, but in a racist society this kind of disparity can be expected if nothing is done to address it. In general, diversity is an asset because new perspectives can be brought to bear on research, so this is not simply about justice for ethnic minorities but about having a well-functioning scientific discipline. Problems encountered in physics and astronomy for POC include microaggressions from White students, not feeling welcomed or included, imposter syndrome, a lack of role models, financial struggles and an absence of academic support. There is a second problem with examining racism specifically in astronomy caused by the tendency for physics and astronomy to be lumped together, perhaps because physics is perceived as a more “useful” subject, and it may also be that astronomers are less aware of the need to combat racism in their discipline than physicists. Researchers into the issue have not managed to visit astronomy departments as easily as physics ones, meaning that no firm conclusions can be drawn about the relative differences.

The White Florida emeritus astronomy professor Haywood Smith has state

d that he does not believe systemic racism exists at a time when only two percent of American astronomers are Black. His own department had had one Black employee, in admin, hired in the early 1990s. On the positive side, Black students report that the environment in the department is generally very positive and supportive. However, I can’t help but be reminded of Patrick Moore, who was chair of the right wing United Country Party, which opposed immigration. He was also an admirer of Enoch Powell, condemned the Race Relations Act and regarded the absolute monarchy of Liechtenstein as the “best political system in the world”. This last point is more complex, mainly because Liechtenstein is a microstate, but it still means that, like Britain, Liechtenstein’s head of state is very likely always to be White.

It would be unfair to use both of these astronomers as typical of their profession. Even so, it does remind me of the interesting phenomenon of right wing animal liberationists. There are people whom I might describe as “animal lovers” who look at the world very differently than I do, and whose veganism, if that’s an accurate description, is also very different to mine. For instance, there are some animal liberationists who are anti-abortion and see that as consistent, and there’s also an attitude that whereas humans are terrible, and behave terribly towards each other, other species do not perpetrate deliberate cruelty but simply try to survive and thrive, and take care of their offspring. For such people, other species seem to constitute a similar escape from the woeful interaction of human beings with each other as astronomy does for me. Maybe actively racist White astronomers are similar. I don’t feel I’ve exactly captured the issue, but I can see the sense in this apparently incongruous juxtaposition.

The way it might work for White astronomers is that they want to rise above this morass of apparent nonsense that infests the world, but their nonsense is not the same as my nonsense. Mine is the endless grind of global capitalism, greed and hatred between groups to ensure divided opposition to oppression. Theirs is a reflection of the privilege which enabled them to become astronomers in the first place. It could also be a kind of innocence. They may be so focussed on the stars that they’re oblivious of what’s happening on the ground. But it’s been said that not taking a position in a dispute about oppression is taking the side of the oppressor. Some might also say that there’s an issue with even having astronomy departments “when the world’s in such a mess”. I completely disagree with this though, because awareness of the existence of the rest of the cosmos has a function similar to spirituality and art in allowing one to continue and cope in order to continue fighting for a better world. Being a science, astronomy also has the usual function of science in training people in critical thinking. This is how astronomy graduates will be coming out the other end of the degree machine, whether or not they use their qualification vocationally. Astronomy is also just plain useful, for instance in detecting asteroids hurtling towards the planet and wiping out all life as we know it.

Another aspect of astronomy and racism is the question of sky cultures and names for objects. I’ve already mentioned the Square Kilometre Array and the observatories on Mauna Kea. Both of these are unsurprisingly both associated with indigenous communities, namely the San and Polynesians respectively. A sky culture is how a particular culture sees the sky. There are several Polynesian sky cultures just as there are many Polyesian languages. It could be expected that a set of people who have settled in various places across the Pacific and Indian Oceans would have a highly disparate set of cultures. The Austronesian language family had the largest geographical range of any language family before colonialism: Hawai’i and Madagascar both speak Austronesian languages and are 17 000 kilometres apart. Their broad distribution is a factor in their astronomy, as it was important to have some understanding of constellations in order to navigate. In order to record the positions of the stars, some Polynesians used “stick charts”, made from palm fronds, cowries and plant cordage:

By Sterilgutassistentin – This file has been extracted from another file, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51775534

Curved links indicate ocean currents and winds and the charts are effectively maps of the ocean. Pacific Islands tend to be around one to three hundred kilometres apart with the exception of such outliers as Hawai’i. The information was memorised and navigators were also spiritual and political leaders, navigation being a spiritual and religious act. Astronomy was part of this. Guiding stars were used when low in the sky, with imaginary vertical lines projected onto the horizon to indicate direction, but these move as the night goes on due to the rotation of the planet. The direction indicated by the star is maintained until another star rises. The paths between these stars are referred to as “kavenga” – “star paths” – named after the brightest star and all stars are referred to by the name of the brightest. However, these are not applicable all year round, so the year is divided into four unequal seasons with different kavenga. These are Ke Ka O Makali’i (the northern winter – Hawai’i has no seasons of course), Ka Iwikuamo’o (northern spring), Manaiakalani (northern summer) and the overlapping Ka Lupu O Kawelo (northern autumn into winter, including some of Ke Ka O Makali’i). Kavenga could also be kept on one side or other of the boat, or the boat could be aimed between two kavenga. There is also the star compass, which uses the presence of Polaris and Crux Australis, as we in the West call them, and the stars around them as they rise and set, to locate the north and south celestial poles. They also picked out a number of other asterisms (star patterns), including what we call Orion’s Belt, Scorpio, and the Pleiades, and used their rising and setting to mark another six points on the horizon and construct the directions in which other stars were since their positions would then be known. This enables the navigator to find out where the boat is when the sky is partly cloudy. There are also, unsurprisingly, stories associated with the star paths and asterisms. Apart from being meaningful in other ways, these serve as mnemonics for the location of the star paths.

There isn’t time to cover all Polynesian sky cultures here, so I will now move on to the San. Although it must be remembered that the biological construction of ethnicity as race is distinctly dubious, politically speaking, it’s also worth noting the identity of the San, whose genetic profiles are highly unusual. The San appear to be the group genetically closest to the earliest examples of Homo sapiens. Both their Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA branched off early from the rest of the species and they seem to have diverged from about two hundred millennia in the past. They’re also the most diverse group of humans genetically. Two San can be as different generically from each other as two randomly chosen people from anywhere on Earth. Besides this, albinos are unusually common among them. I mention all this to indicate that they are very much not simply Black people even though Europeans might lump all Afrikans who are not fair-skinned together. They have a very distinct identity. Afrikans generally are more genetically diverse than the rest of the human race, so as I’ve said previously, if you want a construction of race based on genetics, and I don’t really know why you would, it makes sense to see Afrika as including about ten ethnicities and the rest of the world about fourteen, but with entire continents in some cases only having a couple, so the human race basically consists of a series of genetic groups which often vary in skin tone and other features within those groups plus a large number of mainly dark-skinned groups all of whom originate recently from Afrika. The idea of skin tone as a major feature distinguishing ethnicities makes no genetic sense, and of course people don’t just “breed” within their own hermetically sealed racial units.

One tantalising possibility exists regarding San sky lore, which is that it may be directly descended from early human mythology. On the other hand, behavioural modernity seems to have appeared after the split between them and the rest of the species, so maybe not. One difficulty with recovering it is that Christian missionaries have obscured and suppressed the content, but one story is that a woman was baking a root vegetable on a fire and wouldn’t let her daughter eat it, so the daughter kicked at the fire and scattered the ashes across the night sky, forming the Milky Way, and the red embers formed the red stars in the sky. Kham (the Moon, Cynthia) is a man who has angered the Sun, gains weight each month and then is cut away by the Sun until only the backbone is left, and he pleads that this crescent he has become be left for his children, who then repeat the cycle. The Sun, in a possibly different tribal tradition, becomes a rhino at sunset, is eaten by a different tribe who then throw her scapula over to the east, where it becomes a new animal and rises again. The celestial bodies are the elder race and all personified. The Sun, and again this seems to be a different tradition, is a man with luminous armpits, armpits being considered a source of sweat which contains supernatural power, who refused to share his light to dry out the termites for eating, so the first San threw him into the sky so that his armpits could illuminate the world. The “Moon”, is the shoe of a male trickster deity, /kaggen, the name literally meaning “mantis”, who threw it into the sky, and an alternate theory is that it’s an ostrich feather also throw into the sky by /kaggen, who commanded it to become that celestial body. All of /kaggen his possessions are magically intelligent and the “Moon” alone speaks using a retroflex click. Like many other cultures, there is an association between a lagomorph, this time a hare, and this luminary. The spirits of the dead are carried by the dark side, so the full phase is considered good luck for hunting, as is a blood moon. The stars are named after various animals such as lions, antelopes and tortoises, and a stone used for digging. For them, the sky was a stone dome with holes in it through which the Sun shone. The three stars of Orion’s belt are zebras, the Pleiades the daughters of the deity of the dawn and sky, Tsui. Her unnamed husband is Aldebaran. Betelgeuse is a lion who is also stalking the zebras, so Aldebaran can’t get them without getting killed, so he’s slowly starving to death.

There’s quite a contrast, then, between the sky cultures of the Polynesians and those of the San, and of course there are plenty of others, but the dominant one, used by Western astronomers, is of course the Greco-Roman and more widely European eighty-eight classical constellations with stars named using Greek letters, numbers and often Arabic names. The presence of Arabic in this system demonstrates how the Arab world didn’t go into the Dark Ages like Christendom and for a long time their astronomy was more advanced than ours. There is a clear division in the names of the constellations between north and south because of what was visible from the Med at the time, so the zodiacal and the more prominent northern constellations were given names by the Greeks and Romans, but there are also fainter northern constellations with newer names and the southern names, also given by Westerners, tend to be very different. Some are neutral and uncontroversial, such as Crux Australis and Triangulum Australe, and the southern polar constellation is called Octans due to its obvious association with navigation. Several others have nautical or navigational names, such as Sextans, Quadrans (which is obsolete), Pyxis (the Compass), and some more are named after birds such as Tucana and Apus. The rather dim Indus was named by a Dutch astronomer and is clearly supposed to represent an individual of non-European origin, but their exact ethnicity is unclear due to the practice of referring to native Americans as “Indians”. There are also some obsolete constellations, one of which, Quandrans, has already been mentioned. Unfortunately one of these is Antinous, the homosexual lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. There was also a pangolin, and some others whose names seem perfectly normal and acceptable, such as the Cat, the Bee and the Sundial. Others used to be nationalistic or partisan, such as Sobieskii’s Shield, now known simply as the Shield, and Charles’s Oak. Also, in the seventeenth century, an attempt was made by one astronomer to give all the constellations Christian designations, replacing the northern constellations with New Testament names, the southern with Old Testament ones and the zodiac with the twelve apostles. This is a diffeent kind of cultural bias.

I’m sure there’s plenty more to be said about racism and astronomy, but I want to finish by mentioning the recent renaming of certain celestial objects such as NGC 2392, formerly known as “The Eskimo Nebula”. The name “Esquimau” is considered racist because it isn’t what the Inuit call themselves and it was widely believed to mean “eater of raw flesh”. In fact, it may not do but instead may be derived from “Ayeshkimu”, meaning “netters of snow shoes”. However, whatever its origin it’s considered as a colonial term with a racist origin by the Inuit, so the colloquial name has now been replaced by the New General Catalogue number. Similarly NGC 4567 and 4568, twin galaxies, were formerly referred to as the “Siamese Twin Galaxies”, which has again now been dropped. NASA also has an Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity which addresses issues affecting marginalised groups.

As I said at the start of this post, I am not really the right person to be talking about racism in astronomy as I am White and not an astronomer, but I hope I’ve been able to provide some kind of sketchy survey of some of the issues involved. There’s bound to be a lot more.

Stripy Horses Or Plain Zebras?

Yes, I know what’s happening in the Ukraine. This is what’s stopped me from blogging. Before I get going on this subject, I want to explain why I haven’t said much about it. The truth is that my limited knowledge of the matter leads me to fear saying anything which might turn out to be ill-judged or crass. We all know it’s happening. My response to it, like many other issues, is to engage in what I hope is a helpful manner but also to recognise that there is a lot else going on in the world at all times, and there’s a rôle for escape. For what it’s worth, I’m thinking about Putin’s odd association between a country with a Jewish leader and Nazism, and the psychological influence being a long-term leader has on the person in that position. Even so, I am going to talk about zebras.

There’s a saying in medicine that if you hear the sound of hooves, you should conclude it’s horses and not zebras, which obviously makes more sense in Europe than in certain parts of Afrika. One of the shortcomings of my cognitive style is that I will tend to think of zebras more than horses and then wonder why everyone else hasn’t thought of that. In the context of medical diagnosis, this might mean I’m more likely to think someone has Lewy Body Dementia than Alzheimers or Paget’s Disease of Bone than arthritis. This is, however, self-correcting and doesn’t constitute a huge problem, because in herbalism one can address more than one possible diagnosis at once without necessarily doing harm. Also, it isn’t my job to diagnose, which is a responsibility legally enshrined in particular offices, none of which are mine. That said, I do need to have a firm grasp of disease processes to address them.

But this is not the other blog, so I’ll broaden that to something which is in fact relevant to the current Eurasian situation. If a first-language reader of a language with a Latin script such as English sees a page of Cyrillic text and is mindful of the adage that if you hear hooves, expect horses, they’re quite likely to presume that the passage is Russian rather than, say, Ossetian. However, Cyrillic has been used to write a wide variety of languages and it may not be Russian. This, of course, would arise in the case of the Ukrainian language, since a cursory glance from someone unfamiliar with the details of the differences might think the text was Russian. This is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:

Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.

And this is the same in Russian:

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.

For the record, in English this reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Since I’m much more familiar with Russian than Ukrainian, having abortively attempted to learn it in the late 1970s and early ’80s CE, the first text looks foreign to me, and in particular its use of the letter “i” seems very incongruous. The two languages are quite similar, and I wonder if the differences would be perceived as a little like those between Scots and English. That is, is there a tendency for Russian speakers to regard Ukrainian as merely a dialect of Russian? Historically there has been. This might sound quite abstruse in the setting of the conflict, and I’m aware too that many Russians won’t consider this war as done in their name, but it does impinge on English media in one particular aspect: the name of the capital city.

I’ve long considered the name of the capital of the Ukraine to be «Киев», but in fact that is the Russian version. The Ukrainian, and therefore correct, name of the city is «Київ», and at this point I’m also wondering about Ukrainian punctuation – do they use guillemets like Russian or something more like inverted commas? The Romanisation of the name is now “Kyiv” in English, whereas it has formerly been written “Kiev”, the Russian pronunciation. Is it important to focus on this with all the other stuff going on? Well, probably. The spelling and pronunciation of placenames in the Ukraine has remained stubbornly Russian in the international news media even though the country became independent from Russia in 1991 and the name of the capital was officially changed in 1995. This politicises the name. It once again reminds me of Scottish placenames, which in that case is further complicated by the presence of the Gàidhlig language and its nationwide promotion by the Scottish government. Speaking of which, when I laboriously ploughed through a Russian tweet yesterday (not “labourious” – there’s another one), I found myself, as I often am, reminded of Q-Celtic languages in the dual pronunciation of many of the consonants, leading me to feel very much, once again, that they could really benefit from being written in Cyrillic script. But it ain’t gonna happen is it? Another illustration of the politics of scripts.

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about the Ukraine but horses, asses and zebras. Note that I put horses first in that list. Conceptually, we often have a tendency to separate marked from unmarked concepts in our language and thought, so I clearly regard horses as the unmarked concept in that list. Also, asses are apparently less exotic than zebras to me. There is some justification for that because a zebra, visually speaking, is literally marked, but there are other aspects to this. For instance, in Western Eurasia, where I live, horses are more familiar and widespread than zebras, and this is basically down to human exploitation of them. Historically, the exploitation of horses is vastly important and the domestication of the horse is a necessary pre-requisite to that. I feel unqualified to comment on the issue of veganism and horses because I’m aware of disparate views and my own encounters with them are somewhat limited, though also a lot more extensive than the average contemporary Western urbanite because I grew up in the country, used to hunt sab and have been on a lot of demos with mounted police present. It’s odd to think that up until a little over a century ago, these animals would’ve been an everyday part of life for most people in these isles regardless of where they lived.

I’m aware also that I’m thinking rather in terms of a binary opposition between zebras and horses rather than a ternary one between horses, asses and zebras. I can’t help thinking, though, that zebras and asses have a lot in common compared to zebras and horses, such as their tails and manes being more similar. I don’t have a firm impression of how large zebras are either, and I’m aware that there are three species of them and just talking about “zebras” generically is fairly vague.

But the question I’m working up to is this (actually there are two): Is a horse a plain zebra, or a zebra a stripy horse? It could equally well be, is a donkey a plain zebra or a zebra a stripy donkey? I should probably also explain why I’ve been calling them asses. The reason for this is that donkeys to me seems to refer to the domesticated species, but there are two other species of ass who are wild. I’m not being frivolous here, incidentally. My question is, are the extinct ancestors of today’s equines primitively stripy or primitively plain? Or did they have a different appearance than either of these? It seems to me that we assume in many pictures of prehistoric equines that they were primarily plain, although some have stripy portions of their coats. When we do this, are we being “horse-centric” or is it based in science? Are zebras the unusual ones? How could we find out?

The other question also sounds nonsensical but isn’t: is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? This doesn’t seem to make sense until you see one of the unusual individual zebras who are the other way round than usual, and at that point you realise that it is in fact normally a particular way round. Right now, I can’t remember which. But this is a secondary point.

Equines are members of a declining clade, that of odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls. This order’s heyday was back in the earlier part of the Cenozoic and includes the largest land mammal ever, the Indricotherium, which shows convergent evolution with the giant sauropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Nowadays there are the relatively widespread equines, the rhinos and the tapirs, and so we’re in the peculiar position of having a small order with one or two extremely populous species, namely the donkey and horse, a couple in the middle and a relatively large number of species who are largely recently extinct because of us, or severely endangered for the same reason. However bad the domestication of the horse and donkey may have been for individual members of those species, it’s turned out to be good for their survival as species.

Domestic zebras don’t happen. This is because they don’t meet six criteria making a species suitable for this, which incidentally humans may have done themselves – we may ourselves be domesticated. These criteria are that they must:

• Eat food that’s easily available where humans live.
• Reach maturity quickly.
• Don’t panic easily when startled.
• Be docile.
• Breed easily in captivity.
• Have a social hierarchy.

Zebras only conform to some of these. For instance, they do graze like horses but they’re quite aggressive. They’re unpredictable and have been known to attack humans. The same is true of horses but to a much lesser degree. This seems like a good adaptation for resisting being dominated by other species, such as ourselves, but ironically it seems to have led to them becoming much rarer than horses, or perhaps staying at a similar level of population for longer. Remarkably, one of the effects of domestication is often that the animals resulting have black and/or white patches, so the fact that zebras aren’t but are still black and white is interesting.

One problem with working out whether they were primitively striped or not is that fossil horses are of course just bones and teeth on the whole. I’m not aware of either frozen or tar pit equines, although they may exist, so the problem is they tend to be fossilised in such a way as not to preserve skin or hair. There’s another issue too. It may not be a question of stripes versus plain so much as the distribution of the stripes or the presence of other patterns. There are melanistic zebra foals with white spots on a black background, as it were. It seems there could be several ways of working out what happened when.

Zebras are stripy for a reason and the question arises of what selective factors might have led to this. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be connected to protection from large predators. They can be smelt by lions and other carnivores from further off than the stripes would make a noticeable difference to their appearance. It’s thought that the real reason is to confuse biting insects, which is also the cause of their tail anatomy, which acts as a fly swatter. Asses have the same kind of tails. Therefore, is it possible that the stripiness or otherwise of an equine could be related to their tail anatomy? Not entirely, since asses are not striped, but horses are the ones with divergent tails and zebras and asses both have the original in that respect. However, these are only two of a dozen and a half theories about this.

Just to answer the question of whether zebras are black with white stripes or the other way round, zebra skin is black and it’s an adaptation for some of their coat to appear white, so they are black with white stripes rather than the other way round. This becomes evident when you see a zebra who is striped as a “negative” of the common type, because they actually look like white animals with black stripes. There are also three living species of zebras with slightly different skin patterns: Grévy’s, Mountain and the Plains Zebra. They’re in a subgenus referred to as Hippotigris, and there are two others, the asses in the unsurprisingly named Asinus – these have three living species, two of whom are Eurasian and one Afrikan. Finally, there’s the horse itself, presumably in a subgenus called Equus, and although there are two subspecies of these, namely the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse, the latter has a different number of chromosomes, so I don’t understand why it’s considered the same species. European horses, now extinct, were also a separate species, and some of these were piebald, as can be seen in cave paintings. Przewalski’s horse and the ancestors of modern domesticated horses diverged during the last Ice Age, roughly in Crô-Magnon times. It may be that the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse are the same species and horses a separate one.

There used to be a fourth subgenus: Amerihippus. Unsurprisingly, these are American, and in fact horses originally evolved in North America although they died out before Columbus. Once again, the presence of horses and their possible domestication in America might have made a huge difference to the course of history, but of course nobody knows if their temperament was more like zebras or horses and asses, and of course whether they were striped, plain or something else. There are Pre-Columbian native figurines of horses. It used to be thought that American horses were wiped out during the last Ice Age, but in fact they seem to have survived it. Genetic studies have shown that there were horses unrelated to those introduced by Spanish settlers in North America, and only two years after Cortez arrived, there were people on horseback in the Carolinas, even though meticulous paperwork recorded that none of the horses brought by the Conquistadores had escaped or been otherwise lost. There is a political element in the idea that American horses died out in the Ice Age, because it makes it seem that anything worthwhile was introduced by the Europeans. However, this does still raise the question of why horses seem to be so much more important in Eurasian cultures than Native American, and also makes me wonder if their ancestors had always been in America. Native American dog breeds are remarkable in that although they are still of the same appearance and behaviour as the breeds present before the Europeans, they are actually now entirely descended from Old World dogs. How this happened is a mystery. Native American horses today can have curly or very long manes compared to Old World horses. They are also sometimes piebald. More remarkably, some of them have slightly stripy legs! This, I think, is a clue.

The other hypotheses regarding zebra stripes include the idea that they create cooling convection currents by forming alternating hot and cold strips of air, that they help zebras recognise each other and that they’re warning colouration for what are apparently quite aggressive animals. If these situations apply to North America at the time the ancestors of today’s Afrikan zebras left, it’s feasible that they were already striped.

It’s said that the reason for the long manes and hairy tails of horses is connected to the North American climate. If this is so, it would be expected that their ancestors wouldn’t have had these before it became quite so harsh. It seems that the cold of the Ice Ages led to horses evolving these features, and in fact Przewalski’s horses have spikier manes than the more familiar horses, although their tails are still similar. As mentioned previously, the Palæarctic and Nearctic zoögeographical realms are sometimes united into a single Holarctic realm, consisting of North America and Eurasia, and the mammalian and other fauna of this vast region, comprising fifteen percent of the planet’s land surface excluding Antarctica, is shared between the two continents, such as wolves, bears, formerly woolly mammoths, beavers and so forth. However, of course there are differences – coyotes spring to mind very close to being wolves but not quite – and the question arises of whether the North American horses are the same species as Eurasian horses. I presume that if they couldn’t breed true, this would’ve been noticed by now, so the alternatives seem to be that native North American horses are either hybrids with Eurasian horses with some North American horse DNA, just as some Homo sapiens have Denisovan and/or Neanderthal DNA, or that the horses in question have always been two subspecies. The former possibility is particularly interesting because of the presence of faintly striped legs among them. If this is from a separate species of native North American horse hybridised with Eurasian horses, maybe that species was more obviously striped.

I’ve largely ignored asses in all this, which is probably a mistake. I do have the impression, and it’s just a hunch, that asses and zebras are closer to each other than zebras and horses. One reason I think this is that there are native Afrikan asses but no native Afrikan horses. Zebras are smaller than horses at around a dozen hands and weigh from 250 to 450 kilos. Adult plains zebras can be as little as ten hands and Afrikan wild asses actually slightly larger. It’s easy to get hypnotised by the apparently central, “standard” equines we’re familiar with in Europe and ignore a possible alternate route of zebra ancestry.

So, to conclude, this is what I think, and this isn’t based on genetics. It’s scientifically established that equines are essentially American animals. Incidentally, there also used to be native South American horses which I’ve ignored for the purposes of this post. The original members of Equus had coats of various colours and patterns, including piebald, black and different shades of brown. Some of these had faint stripes, and these traits were widely distributed through the first species of the genus, Equus simplicidens, also known as the American zebra and found in Idaho, Texas and presumably other places. They’re supposed to have looked like this (the one on the left):

I don’t know what the reasoning behind the idea that the American zebra was striped is. I do know that the apparently most basal population of humans, the San, has considerable genetic variation in skin tone so my conclusion is that the American zebra was probably quite variable but had a brown and fawn striped variety. I also wonder if the South American horses were a lot more like zebras due to living in similar climates to today’s Afrika south of the Sahara.

Out Of Afrika x 4

In Northeastern Niger, now deep in the desert, there is a life-size rock carving of two giraffes, the largest piece of rock art in the world. Dating from Neolithic times, they and many other carvings strongly suggest that the Sahara region at the time was not a desert at all, but more like the Serengeti. There are many other carvings throughout the Sahara of bovids, including a genus called Pelorovis. Later rock art includes drawings of horses and chariots. All of this indicates that quite recently, perhaps into historical times, the Sahara was not a desert. This is the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, and is considered important to a number of aspects of human history.

The vast desert that now exists all across North Afrika would seem to present a considerable barrier to the exit of humans from the continent. Controversially, we may have evolved on an island in the Gulf of Aden, spread into the Horn of Afrika southward. The earliest known representatives of the genus Homo known date from Ethiopia 2.8 million years ago. Homo habilis is found in East and South Afrika from about 2.3 million years ago although they may not be directly ancestral to us. Homo erectus, on the other hand, is found not only in Afrika but also all the way across Eurasia, including “Java Man”, found in 1891, and “Peking Man”, in 1926. These people must have managed to get out of Afrika somehow. It’s been suggested that they did it by moving along the Nile Valley, but if the whole of North Afrika fluctuated between desert and more humid conditions, their movement is not so unusual. After all, if there used to be giraffes and other typical savannah fauna in the Sahara, why should that not include humans? Moreover, considering that there used to be hippos in the Thames, isn’t it likely that they would’ve got there because there wasn’t a desert in the way?

I feel quite strongly that White people tend to use the Sahara Desert as a way of marking off the more southerly portion of the continent as a kind of “Darkest Africa” (with a C of course) where all the Black people come from. Perhaps we like to imagine there’s always been a line in the sand, as it were, between us and the majority of human genetic diversity found south of it, a view which the Tuareg, for example, do not consider significant. I can’t speak for the Tuareg of course, but those who live in Mali compared to those who live in Libya are considerably darker-skinned but all of them consider themselves as part of the same ethnicity, because they are. However, this is not the main focus of my post today.

The Sahara Pump Hypothesis is generally known as the Sahara Pump Theory, and whereas it certainly rings true to me it is apparently not currently considered rigorous enough to be regarded as one. This raises the Kuhnian view of scientific change in my mind. Thomas Kuhn claimed that the social dynamics of academia were the most significant factor in the acceptance and rejection of theories, so that it was only when the younger people who came up with new theories reached positions of influence that their theories became accepted by the discipline concerned. There may also be other factors. I, for example, believe hominins had an amphibious phase, living in or near beaches, hence my belief that we may have evolved in the Gulf of Aden, which is Elaine Morgan’s belief, not widely accepted by palæontologists, possibly because its emphasis includes the evolution of women rather than focussing solely on men. Hence “Sahara Pump Hypothesis“, even though to an outsider it looks pretty convincing.

There are said to have been a number of phases. The earliest was in the Plio-Pleistocene, a concept used in palæoanthropology to demarcate a period between about five million to twelve thousand years ago which focusses on the evolution and ecology of large vertebrates and the cooling trend which marks this stretch of time, even though it doesn’t work well for more broadly-based palæontology. As far as hominins are concerned, however, there is no firm shift in our history with the onset of the Pleistocene more significant than other events in our story. There are two phases considered here. The first is around 3.2 million years ago, and the other a two hundred millennium period starting about half a million years later. Both of these are well before the start of the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials. One event that happened at this time was that goats spread from Afrika into Eurasia. Another primate than humans, the macaques, also increased their range around then. Geladas, on the other hand, found their range reduced.

Later on there were two waves of Homo erectus migration. The first got all the way to the Far East but the second only reached as far as South Asia. This can be determined by the kind of tools used at the time. There are also signs in the caves, where the likes of stalagmites and stalactites grew during certain periods and halted at others, because water wasn’t entering the systems. Later on, Homo heidelbergensis also managed to spread out of Afrika, and finally Homo sapiens, followed by three more events, one associated with the 8.2 kiloyear event which I’m planning to cover in more detail below, another with the 5.9 kiloyear event and the most recent with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and ensuing Dark Age.

Ice ages generally increase the sizes of hot deserts because a lot of water is locked up in the ice. Consequently, in general during the last few ice ages the Sahara has been both a desert and larger than it is now. The immediate cause of the shrinkage of the desert is increase in the strength of the monsoons in West Afrika, which leads to more water arriving from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the western coast of the Sahara. This is driven by the gradual shifts in the orientation of this planet’s orbit such that we end up closest to the Sun in different seasons. Currently, the Northern summer is when we’re furthest from the Sun, but that very gradually shifts and when the perihelion is in the summer, this triggers more evaporation from the North Atlantic and higher rainfall. Another factor is that the doldrums, the belts of latitude where there is little wind, shift away from the Equator due to warmer temperate regions and this pushes the monsoon region north in the Northern Hemisphere. There are many other factors.

The sea bed off the West Afrikan coast is currently rich in dust from the Sahara and also preserves pollen. Samples at various depths below that sea bed show fluctuations in the levels of dust and pollen types. When there is less dust, there’s also less Ephedra pollen, which prefers drier conditions and more sedge and grass pollen, which need more rain, and this reverses when there’s more. There have in fact been two hundred and thirty periods over the past eight million years when the Sahara was more humid, although when you get to that time scale continental drift becomes significant and Afrika as a whole was in a different position. When there’s more vegetation in the Sahara, it holds on to more water and also reduces the amount of sunlight reflected compared to sand or bare rock, so there’s a feedback effect. In the Sahara during these periods, there were larger lakes and/or more wetlands. These lakes were also linked by a more extensive river network and the rivers which are still there would have carried more water, particularly the Nile and the Niger. The shorelines of these lakes, and in one case, Lake Tchad, a sea, can be plotted using the contours of the land, and are further supported by the presence of rock art only above these levels, piles of fish bones and also the prevalence of fish hooks. Lake Tchad, sometimes referred to today in that prehistoric state as Megalake Chad, had an estimated area of 340 000 square kilometres and a depth of up to a hundred and sixty metres, which is about the size of the Caspian Sea. Other “megalakes” included the Megafezzan, Ahnet and, just barely cut off from the Mediterranean, the Chotta. This last has an interesting history as there was once a French plan to reflood the area by digging a canal from the sea to the basin. The Romans undertook an expedition in search of spices to the Tchad, where they encountered hippopotami. Also in these lakes were turtles, Nile perch and crocodiles. The presence of the rivers would also have eased movement into and out of the area. Just outside Afrika was the famed “Arabia Felix”, the south of the Arabian peninsula which is now uncontroversially desert but back then was perceived by the Romans as a fertile and lush environment where many spices originated. Although this is in the realm of “travellers’ tales”, there certainly would’ve been a time when the Arabian peninsula was like this.

The words for “hippo” in widely separated North Afrikan languages tend to be similar. In Aiki, spoken in Tchad, the word is bùngùr, in Songhoyboro Ciine, spoken in Niger, it’s bàŋà, and in the Nara language of Eritrea it’s àbà. That doesn’t sound that close to me, but there is also a theory which seeks to explain the distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages in terms of the Sahara Pump. The current spread of these languages looks like this:

By Noahedits – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86724098

Hearing the word “Afro-Asiatic” may make them sound rather more obscure to Europeans than they in fact are. These are in fact what used to be called the Hamitic-Semitic-Kushitic language family, and includes the liturgical languages Ge`ez and Coptic as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and the Berber tongues, as well as Amharic, an important language of Ethiopia, the significant Hausa language of West Afrika, and Ancient Egyptian. There are 350 surviving Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by a total of five hundred million people, Arabic being of course the most successful. Usually, when an attempt is made to reconstruct a parental language from a language family, such as Indo-European, it seems to date to some time in the Bronze Age. Not Afro-Asiatic though, I presume partly due to the fact that Ancient Egyptian is so, well, ancient, being over 5 500 years old. The other written language recorded at this time, Sumerian, and also the slightly more recent Elamite, are difficult or impossible to relate to any other known languages because they’re so ancient the chances are their relatives are all long-since extinct. By contrast, Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have been spoken between 18 000 and 12 000 years ago, which is pre-Neolithic, probably in Northeastern Afrika.

These languages occupy a special place in linguistics. Because of Biblical literalism and the importance of the Abrahamic faiths, Europeans used to believe that all languages were descended from Hebrew. After all, if you take Genesis literally, all of the speech quoted in it, including what Eve and Adam said, is in Hebrew, and if the Bible is literally true that implies that the first language was Hebrew. Also, the vast majority of modern scripts derives from Phœnician, even including the South and Southeast Asian ones, some exceptions being the Far Eastern, West Afrikan and Native American forms of writing, so these are the people who invented writing and their languages were some of the first to be written. Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic and Ge`ez are also liturgical, so are considered special within their faith communities.

The period during which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken is pre-Holocene and during one of the more humid Saharan ages. There are a number of theories about where it originated, including one popular among Egyptologists that it was along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This of course places it outside of Afrika already, and therefore presumes that it spread into the continent. It’s associated with the idea that languages spread with agriculture. The idea that it originated in the Horn of Afrika is based on the greater diversity found there, since more diverse languages tend to be found near their origins. An English example is the wide range of English accents found in this country in a relatively small area compared to the relative uniformity of North America and Australasia. The other two theories, which could involve the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, are that it originated in North Afrika and that it started in the southern Sahara and northern Sahel. DNA evidence among speakers of these languages suggests either the Horn of Afrika followed by an early spread into Asia followed by a return to the original region from Arabia, or the Middle East, the problem there being that the DNA in question arose by mutation after the spread had already happened. Also, linguistic and genetic histories can be completely different. One of the subgroups, though, is very high in both Tchad and Semitic language speakers, over ninety percent in fact, suggesting that both have an intermediate origin, perhaps over a very wide area of North Afrika, also known as the Sahara!

Hence I prefer to think of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages to be somewhere in the Green Sahara in the late Palæolithic. Whereas I don’t want to set too much store in the idea that ancient mythologies are inerrantly reliable sources, the Tanakh puts the origin of the whole human race in the Garden of Eden in Western Asia. If this is related to the idea of an Afro-Asiatic homeland it could mean that the Levantine theory is the correct one. However, if it isn’t, it kind of means that the Garden of Eden might in fact be the Sahara in a more humid phase, and that the stories told in Genesis relate to this area. Is it possible that the perception that land would become more hostile to growing crops because of what Christians think of as the Fall is actually due to the increasing harshness of the climate in that region. However, the clemency of the climate probably shouldn’t be overstressed since it still wasn’t exactly like France or some other “perfect” location. Placing the original land in North Afrika would also mean there was a movement of the people similar to the Exodus, but at a much earlier date which had nothing to do with the Ancient Egyptians.

The Afro-Asiatic languages as a group are largely uncontroversial except for the Omotic languages, which may not be related but simply have borrowed a lot of features from nearby languages which were genuinely Afro-Asiatic. These are written in the Ge`ez script like Amharic, or sometimes Latin, and are found in Ethiopia. They’re agglutinative – they inflect by adding separate morphemes to the stem – and also tonal, like most Afrikan languages spoken south of the Sahara. They’re the least like the other members of the family, and share vocabulary related to honey but not to bovids (“unto a land flowing with milk and honey” – “אֶל-אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ”), suggesting that any split which may have occurred preceded pastoralism. If they are related, they’re closest to Cushitic, which is of course the group spoken in Kush, as mentioned in the Tanakh.

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Maltese are all clearly closely related to each other, as anyone with a smattering of any of them can tell. Maltese is unusual as a Semitic language spoken in Europe today, and used to have a wider range as Siculo-Arabic, spoken in Sicily until the thirteenth Christian century. Uniquely for a Semitic language, it’s written using Latin script and has borrowed a lot of Italian vocabulary, but is still thoroughly Semitic in grammar. As well as being spoken all across the Maghreb and into the Middle East and being used as a liturgical and technical language over an even wider region, Arabic was, as I’m sure you know, spoken in Iberia and Arabic words have even made their way into French as a result. The importance of Arabic cannot be overestimated. Hebrew is of course the language of the Bible and Israel, and I’ve talked about it copiously elsewhere. Aramaic is still spoken as well, and is also used here and there in the Bible. It was the language of Jesus and its script was adopted all across Asia, even forming the basis of the cursive Mongolian script. It’s still spoken today and has an uninterrupted history of three millennia.

The Berber languages are spoken in the Sahara and have their own script, called Tamazight, which I learned a couple of years ago and used to write a long plan I mentioned which I didn’t want anyone else to read at the time. Berber language and culture has been adversely affected by Arab hegemony in the Maghreb because the countries involved pursued Arabisation on independence from France, not enabling the Berbers to have much influence. As can be seen from the map, whereas the Berber-speaking communities in the northeast of the continent are fairly scattered, they form a pretty continuous area over most of Mali, much of southern Algeria and some of Niger.

The Berber language Tawellemmet, the largest Tuareg language, is spoken in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and overlaps in territory with the not very closely related Hausa. Hausa is important. It’s a Chadic language spoken by a total of 75 million people, often as a second language, and due to the rapid growth in the population of Nigeria this is likely to be a considerable underestimate. It’s used as an auxiliary language in the country. It’s spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, Tchad, Ghana and Cameroun. Some of Hausa is tonal, some not, depending on the dialect. Nowadays Hausa is written in Latin script although it previously used Arabic, like many other Afrikan languages such as Kiswahili and even Afrikaans. It also has at least three other scripts. It has implosive as well as plosive consonants, pronounced with an influx of air rather than an egress from the lungs. There are a couple of dozen ways to pluralise nouns.

Related closely to Hausa are the other Chadic languages, spoken of course in Tchad but also Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. There are about a gross of these, whose speakers are thought to be descended from the people who dwelt on the shores of Lake Tchad when it was a sea in the mid-Holocene seven thousand years ago. Although Hausa is by far the most widely spoken, another eight languages have at least 200 000 speakers, which is more than Gàidhlig by far. They’re all tonal and lack consonant clusters, and suffix agglutinatively. Ngas is the second most widely-spoken Chadic language, found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.

The southernmost Afro-Asiatic languages are the Kushitic ones spoken in the Rift Valley in Tanzania, including Iraqw which is currently expanding through absorbing nearby groups. Along this southern border of the family’s native area there are many Niger-Congo languages spoken too, which don’t mix with the Afro-Asiatic ones. For instance, in the Jos Plateau, there is a language completely surrounded by Ngas which is not under threat.

It would be a bit of an omission not to mention Ancient Egyptian. This is not entirely extinct because of being adopted by the Coptic church early in the Christian Era. By this point it was written in a modified Greek alphabet with a line over some letters for a certain vowel and the use of several demotic characters to represent sounds not in Greek. It must surely be the oldest surviving language in the world, being at least five and a half thousand years old. Very early on, it adopted signs standing for individual sounds in its hieroglyphics, although a wide range of different signs were used representing several consonants together, whole concepts, gender and status. The number of signs used actually increased as time went by and as technology changed the appearance of signs standing for tools also altered to make them more like the contemporary instruments. Although like most other Semitic languages Egyptian didn’t write vowels, some of them can be worked out from the fact that Coptic, using as it does the Greek alphabet, does. Hieroglyphics became hieratics when written on papyrus and were slightly more sketchy, and eventually the cursive demotic, which is basically a handwritten script like many others but retaining many of the conceptual features of hieroglyphics. Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have a lot in common with other Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from Coptic, Arabic or Hebrew, most Afro-Asiatic languages are tonal. Their scripts tend to relegate vowels to a secondary importance relative to consonants, which reflects the fact that they use a “root and pattern” system, where the consonants carry the basic meaning of the words and the vowels inflect it. This happens with English strong verbs and mutation plurals so it isn’t as foreign as might at first appear. They usually have two genders, feminine and masculine, which include human beings, and the genders of each noun tend to remain the same in most of the languages. They also usually distinguish gender in second person pronouns as well as third, though not in first. One of the mysterious things about them is that they share many grammatical features with today’s Celtic languages, which are completely unrelated, and nobody knows why.

I realise I’ve gone off on one regarding language here, but to finish I want to return to the basic thought that the Sahara is not always a desert. If human influence on the climate is sufficiently weak, at some time, probably about thirteen millennia from now, the Sahara will once again cease to be a desert for thousands of years, the megalakes and river network will return and vegetation will once again cover the region. During the Roman period, the focus and concept of Europe was in some ways subservient to the idea of a Mediterranean region which consisted of that sea and its hinterland. This also erodes the concept of Afrika as a separate set of regions, and removes the geographical barrier which White Europeans are so keen on as a way of separating the “Blacks” from the “Whites”. It’s a mere accident of time and geography that we happen to be living at this point where they are separate. Not only is it thought that darker-skinned people than currently inhabit the region lived all the way up to the Mediterranean, including Ancient Egypt to some extent, but the Western Hunter-Gatherer population was not fair-skinned and nor were Caucasians in general up until a few thousand years ago. The presence of hippos in the Thames and straight-tusked elephants in the Thames Valley brings home the point that Europe, Britain included, and Afrika are geographically continuous, and if they were connected back then, how much more connected are they in this age of globalism?

Cassava

Like many schoolchildren of the 1970s, I had my run-ins with tapioca pudding and didn’t like it. However, I had a choice. It wasn’t the only major source of calories in my diet. Moreover, as an adult I occasionally used to eat cassava chips and liked them. Again, I had a choice. As a twentieth century European with mainly Northwestern European heritage, my main sources of polysaccharides were wheat and potatoes. Not everyone gets them from those.

Potatoes in themselves are members of the Solanaceæ, which also includes deadly nightshade, henbane, bittersweet, Datura and various other rather poisonous plants, some of which I use in my practice (wrong blog, but still). We might reasonably ponder the remarkable fact that we eat of a family with such deadly members, although to be fair aubergine, peppers and tomatoes are also in there. Potatoes are of course from the Inca Empire, modern-day Perú. There is of course another macronutrient tuber from that region: that thing up there. Not as familiar to most White people as the other one of course.

Cassava, also known as tapioca, yuca and manioc, and of course Manihot esculenta, also known as M. utilissima because it is indeed very useful, is kind of similar to potato in a way. Like potatoes, it originated in South America. Also like potatoes, it belongs to a family which has a large number of poisonous species in it: the Euphorbiaceæ. This includes the notorious and irritating (physically and also just annoying) sun spurge, also the carcinogenic Croton and the also fairly nasty dog’s mercury. It isn’t particularly unusual for edible plants to be in the same family as highly toxic ones though. Another good example would be the umbellifers (“Apiaceæ” according to the newer and not very good botanical classification system), which include parsley, parsnip, carrots, fennel, celery and various culinary herbs, and also hemlock, water dropwort and other nasties. The Euphorbiaceæ is also interesting in including cactus-like succulents, a case of convergent evolution. The case of cassava is somewhat different from other poisonous plants because its very toxicity makes it useful as human food. It keeps itself free of weeds, isn’t attacked by locusts and can be left in the ground for two years after maturity (eight months to two years) without decomposing. However, they tend to become tough and bitter over this period, and they also decompose rapidly after harvesting, so for sale they tend to be coated in wax to preserve them, which of course also happens with lemons. In drier regions of the tropics, millet is more likely to be used as a go-to food when there are shortages.

Like many other plants, including everything in the rose family such as apples, cherries and almonds, cassava contains cyanide-producing compounds, which in its case need to be removed before eating. There are sweeter and more bitter varieties, the latter of which are higher in these. They are extremely poisonous when raw. To deal with this, they can be boiled for a long time or repeatedly, or ground into flour, mixed with water and left in a thin layer in sunlight for a few hours. This causes an enzyme to convert the cyanide to hydrogen cyanide gas, which escapes to the atmosphere. There is said to be an antidote to the poisoning involving cayenne pepper in rum, which makes sense, but since this is the wrong blog for that I won’t comment further.

I don’t know why this is, but I always used to think of cassava as “manioc”, which is another name for it which is, however, not used much here in Britain as far as I know. I rarely see the tuber myself right now, but I’m living in a mainly White town and I wonder if it’s exported for people who have a different heritage. I have seen it on sale in Leicester and Brittany. It’s used as a staple calorie-rich crop in wet tropical regions and is apparently not popular or easy to grow elsewhere, although in the tropics it is, and can be easily propagated from cuttings. Nor does it need canes or trellises to grow and the quality of the soil can be poor. Although it originated in the Amazon, cassava is also grown in Afrika, where it tends to be hampered by cassava mosaic virus, apparently also known as CBSD or Cassava Brown Streak Disease, and Southest Asia. The cyanide content varies according to soil and climatic conditions and is not solely down to the strain grown. As well as the tubers, the leaves can be boiled and eaten as a vegetable. The most common thing to do with the root is to peel, boil and mash it although in Brazil it’s grated to produce a flour. In West Afrika, this is called garri, at least in the Hausa language, and looks like this:

By Joel Abroad – Individual plate of garri to eat by hand with fish and greens, Baba1, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37587028

Juice from bitter manioc is sometimes boiled down to make a sauce called cassareep, which has the colour and texture of molasses and can be used as an antiseptic to preserve cooked food. The flour is also used in biscuits and confectionery in temperate parts of the world. Manioc can also be fermented and used to make an alcoholic drink, kasiri, which is sometimes prepared using saliva, whose ptyalin converts the starch to sugar which then turns to alcohol. The starch is also used in laundry.

There seem to be basically two big issues with cassava, one older than the other. The older one is that it’s not good to have to rely on it as the main source of carbohydrate in the diet because for a root crop it’s unusually low in protein and other nutrients and also contains anti-nutrients, which are substances which effectively remove nutrients from the body. For instance, it’s high in condensed tannins which impair absorption of a wide range of nutrients. Consequently it’s implicated in protein-energy malnutrition, where the body gets enough calories but not enough protein, which causes the well-known bloated abdomen and emaciated body because there’s insufficient protein in the blood to exert osmotic pressure to pull water out into the blood vessels and it tends to pool in the abdomen. The worst-affected Afrikan countries in this respect are Mali, Ethiopia and Angola, and in the last case this is particularly scandalous as it has severe economic inequality and a long coastline. There is a genetically modified version of the plant which is high in iron and provitamin A, and also more resistant to insects such as the cassava mealybug, and the virus.

200 million people in Afrika rely on cassava as their main source of energy nutrition, and also another 400 million elsewhere in the tropics. The mealybug is only a problem in Afrika because in the country of origin, Paraguay, other insects predate them. There is a species of wasp unlikely to disrupt the ecosystem in other ways who is able to predate mealybug, meaning that the genetic modification isn’t really necessary. Publicising GMO cassava is of concern to people working on control via the wasp because it may lead to cuts in funding. This is particularly an issue in Kenya, where US-based biotechnology companies are vigorously pushing the use of the GM manioc in a similar manner to Bt cotton, which I mentioned here. The technique used is known as RNAi – RNA interference – and is not well-corroborated as to its efficacy. It’s also unclear what human exposure is likely to do and there are said to be no safety studies or studies in the field. It’s also likely that viruses will evolve to circumvent the resistance. The application made in Kenya for use of this crop was oriented around online access and therefore excluded many people who were unable to do that, which is of course a general, global trend disproportionately affecting the poor. The farmers in particular cannot access this and are therefore poorly informed and unable to object via the usual channels. Manioc is also very much about food resilience, grown in areas where it can be hard to grow other crops and tends to be grown by women. If the GM manioc fails in the same way as Bt cotton did, which was serious enough, it will disproportionately disadvantage female subsistence farmers and likely cause a famine. The South African government has rejected GM cassava for trials because it wasn’t established that the genome was stable. There are also non-GM (i.e. there are cisgenic) varieties of manioc in South America.

Another significant issue with cassava is that it’s the basis of biofuel. Nigeria is to build an ethanol refinery based around cassava in the state known as Plateau, and in Zambia 1 700 farmers will be supplying manioc for ethanol for a company called Sunbird. In Nigeria, cassava-based ethanol could be bigger than the oil industry there. Unsurprisingly, plastic can also be manufactured from the starch, involving reacting it with ozone. The peel is combined with chitosan and sorbitol, meaning of course that it isn’t vegan, although it could be because fungal cell walls also contain it, but once again I wonder about landlocked states because I don’t know if freshwater crustacea are able to provide that in enough bulk. It isn’t clear to me whether the ozone process and the chitosan process are the same. Biofuels are ethically complex. On the one hand, they could increase income for farmers who wouldn’t get as much for cassava sold as food, but on the other they force up the price of crops used as biofuels which are sold for food. The same seems likely to apply to plastic, although making plastic in this way does at first seem to be less environmentally damaging. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t. For instance it might lead to soil erosion, but this is speculation on my part.

Unlike the root, the leaves are high in protein, B vitamins, vitamin C and carotenoids (provitamin A), phosphorus, magnesium and calcium and are used to make saka-saka, also known as pondu, a soup or stew consumed in central Afrika. Like the roots, they contain cyanogenic compounds, which can be removed by processing but the problem is doing this without also degrading the nutritional value. I’m guessing this is the reason for the soup being simmered for several hours. It usually involves peanuts and spinach can be added. The only form in which I’ve both eaten and enjoyed cassava is in the form of crisps, referred to as cassava “chips”. Actual cassava chips also exist, in the British sense. These are boiled and then roasted, and are popular in South America and East Afrika. It appears that most of what can be done with potatoes can also be done with yuca.

To conclude, although yuca could easily be demonised because of its low micronutrient and protein content, the same is true of many refined carbohydrate foods eaten in the developed world. It lives up to one of its Latin names, utilissima, but this could be to the disadvantage of those who use it. Just eating white rice could lead to similar nutritional problems though. The notable aspect of the plant for me here in England is that it seems to be almost exclusively eaten by non-White people except in the form of tapioca pudding, and I’ve never cooked with it in any form, and in fact I’ve only eaten it a couple of times.

Then there’s taro, but that’s another story.