(Redirected from Africans)
The term 'African people' can be used in two ways. First, it may refer to all people who live in Africa, see also
demographics of Africa. Second, it is commonly referred to as the term niggers. This includes members of the "
African diaspora" resulting from the
Atlantic slave trade. Many people who live outside Africa with recent African ancestry, such as
African Americans, identify themselves as Africans.
The term
Black people is often used as a synonym for people of recent African ancestry, particularly in the Americas, and Europe, although the two terms are not synonymous in many other countries.
The native population of Africa exhibits greater genetic variation than that of populations in any other continent, including, for instance
L1 and
L2 as well as the more widespread
L3 mtDNA haplogroups.
The people of Africa
Scientists have long argued what constants an African person. Some have argued that it is any person born on the continent of Africa.
The African continent wholly, is today home to many different groups of people with established culture and history in the land over several centuries. A people with distinct physical differences because of their divers ethnicities, as well as several cultural, communal, artistic traits ranging in similarity and distinction depending on their regional closeness. Distinctions within the African continent itself such as the gradient climate transition between the northernmost and southernmost parts of the continent have nurtured diversity in lifestyles amidst its inhabitants within its deserts and jungles, some of the African population living in modern cities across the nation as well.
(Jason Washington)
Prehistoric populations
Family resemblances have probably been apparent and noted during all of human history, but during the second half of the twentieth century, information became available that could link very specific and measurable traits to the genetic inheritance of those who bore those traits. As with a photograph that is being put up random pixel by random pixel, it has often been impossible to guess how later-arriving pixels would modify and complete the picture. Sometime alternating ways of interpolating data have been suggested and the dots have been joined in competing ways. This process of gathering more information, retesting old hypotheses, and sometimes forming new hypotheses continues today. As more and more of the total picture fills in, it becomes less and less likely that radical changes in the general outlines of the picture can occur. Choices of what data to look at, and how to interpret it, have resulted in some contending pictures, but in general the picture has only become clearer as more information has become available.
Study of the Y-Chromosome show that three waves of migration from Africa populated the world with Homo sapiens sapiens
]]
Perhaps it is a function of the number of excavations actually performed in given areas, but it is at least suggestive that the five very earliest out of the twelve of earliest archaeological discoveries of
Homo sapiens sapiens have been in Africa and the adjacent Arabian peninsula. (
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and even more remote members of the genus Homo have their own sites and are not considered here.)
[1]
When genetic information became available, it appeared more and more likely that the earliest population of Homo sapiens sapiens evolved first in Africa and later spread over the globe from that single point of origin. Skeletal information available from these earliest sites does not provide information regarding skin color or other adaptations of features of human beings that interact most directly with the local environment.
As early as 1964, A. W. F. Edwards and others had discovered that three populations in Africa were related but distinguishable on the basis of a relatively small set of genetic information (20
alleles). Those populations were called
Tigre (Ethiopians),
Bantu (in southern Africa), and
Ghanaian (West Africa).
When general
anthropometrics were taken as the criteria for grouping, the African population was split into a different three groups: the more closely related Pygmy (such as the
Mbuti) and
Bushmen (such as the
Khoisan) and the
Bantu.
[2]
By 1988 more genetic details were known, more groups could be distinguished on the basis of genetic information, but the relationships among these groups were accounted as different depending on which was the data was construed. The groups analyzed at this time were Bantu,
Berber and
North African,
Ethiopian, Mbuti Pygmy,
Nilotic, San (Bushman),
West African.
[3]
In 1994, Cavalli-Sforza Menozzi, and Piazza systematized information in their major publication, ''The History and Geography of Human Genes'', Fig. 2.3.5, p. 82. The chart given there mentions much the same list: West African, Nilo-Saharan, Bantu, Mbuti, East African, San and Berber. Note that the list is given in rough sequence, bottom to top, of the lower right quadrant in which they are all graphed. It says nothing about the historical sequences connecting these groups. The San are regarded as being most similar in anthropometric terms to the archaeological information regarding the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens. Other groups may have diverged more and more from the ancestral San types (and their progeny) as a result of moving into more and more different environments. The East Africans and the Berbers are located closest to the land connection to the rest of the world by way of which early Africans must have migrated out into the rest of the world, and through which any travelers from outside Africa may have occasionally returned to their ancestral homeland in the course of their wanderings.
A representation of genetic distances by one analysis
The linguistic differences among these populations correspond closely to their genetic differences except in the case of the Mbuti who appear to have adopted another language for their own.
In his recent book,
[4] Spencer Wells traces the migration of the early Africans beyond their own continent by noting the appearance of new genetic markers on the
Y-chromosome as the migrations progressed.
Studies of mitochondrial DNA conducted within the continent of Africa have shown that the indigenous population has diverged into three diverent main lines of descent.
A number of other scholars such as Alan Templeton hold that support is found for traditional racial categories only because many studies use the pre-defined categories to begin with, and subsequently insert data into those categories rather than let the data speak for themselves.
[5] Tempeton uses modern DNA analysis to argue that human "races" were never "pure", and that human evolution is based on "many locally differentiated populations coexisting at any given time" - a single lineage with many locally gradated variants, all sharing a common fate. Likewise Tishkoff and Kidd maintain that while there are very broad geographical clusterings of populations, slicing these up into racial zones or classifications do not adequately describe the distribution of genetic variation in humans or their evolution. The broad pattern is indicative of genetic drift from African origins of mankind, followed by expansion out of Africa and across the rest of the globe.
[6]
Researchers such as
Richard Lewontin maintain that most of the variation (80-85%) within human population is found ''within'' local geographic groups and differences attributable to traditional "race" groups are a minor part of human genetic variability (1-15%). (Richard Lewontin, "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," Evolutionary Biology, vol. 6 (1972) pp. 391-398).
[7] Several other researchers (Barbajuni, Latter, Dean, et. al) have replicated Lewontin's results.
[8] According to a study by researcher L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza:
::"It is often taken for granted that the human species is divided in rather homogeneous groups or races, among which biological differences are large. Studies of allele frequencies do not support this view, but they have not been sufficient to rule it out either. We analyzed human molecular diversity at 109 DNA markers, namely 30 microsatellite loci and 79 polymorphic restriction sites (restriction fragment length polymorphism loci) in 16 populations of the world. By partitioning genetic variances at three hierarchical levels of population subdivision, we found that differences between members of the same population account for 84.4% of the total, which is in excellent agreement with estimates based on allele frequencies of classic, protein polymorphisms. Genetic variation remains high even within small population groups. On the average, microsatellite and restriction fragment length polymorphism loci yield identical estimates. Differences among continents represent roughly 1/10 of human molecular diversity, which does not suggest that the racial subdivision of our species reflects any major discontinuity in our genome."
[9]
In the wake of this research, a number of writers question the classification of African peoples like Ethiopians into "Caucasian" groups, holding that given the minor proportion of human genetic diversity attributable to "race", grouping of such African peoples is arbitrary and flawed, and that DNA analysis points to a range or gradation of types rather than distinct racial categories. Rather than arbitrarily allocating such African groups to a European "race", the range of physical characteristics like skin color, hair or facial features are more than adequately covered by the 80-85% of differentiation ''within'' local geographic groupings. In addition, they argue, African peoples show a wide range of human variation, but that racial models often depend on definition of African peoples as a stereotypical "true type" south of the Sahara- allowing certain northeast African groups to be assigned elsewhere - while making no attempt to follow the same approach with European peoples.
[10]
Indigenous peoples and ancient settlers
Speakers of
Bantu languages (part of the
Niger-Congo language family) are the majority in southern, central and east Africa proper. But there are also several
Nilotic groups in East Africa, and a few remaining
indigenous Khoisan ('
San' or '
Bushmen') and
Pygmy peoples in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon and southern Somalia. In the
Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "
Hottentots") have long been present. The San are physically distinct from other Africans and are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of central Africa.
The peoples of
North Africa comprise two main groups;
Berber and
Arabic-speaking peoples in the west, and
Egyptians in the east. The
Arabs who arrived in the seventh century introduced the
Arabic language and
Islam to North Africa. The Semitic
Phoenicians and
Jews, the Iranian
Alans, and the European
Greeks,
Romans and
Vandals settled in North Africa as well. Berbers still make up the majority in
Morocco, while they are a significant minority within
Algeria. They are also present in
Tunisia and
Libya. The
Tuareg and other often-nomadic peoples are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa.
Nubians are a
Nilo-Saharan-speaking group (though many also speak Arabic), who developed an ancient civilization in northeast Africa.
Some
Ethiopian and
Eritrean groups (like the
Amhara and
Tigrayans, collectively known as "
Habesha") speak
Semitic languages. The
Oromo and
Somali peoples speak
Cushitic languages, but some Somali clans trace their founding to legendary Arab founders.
Sudan and
Mauritania are divided between a mostly Arabized north and a native African south (although the "Arabs" of Sudan clearly have a predominantly native African ancestry themselves). Some areas of East Africa, particularly the island of
Zanzibar and the Kenyan
island of Lamu, received
Arab Muslim and
Southwest Asian settlers and merchants throughout the
Middle Ages and in antiquity.
Modern Colonisation
European
Beginning in the
sixteenth century, Europeans such as the
Portuguese and
Dutch began to establish
trading posts and
forts along the coasts of western and southern Africa. Eventually, a large number of Dutch augmented by French
Huguenots and
Germans settled in what is today
South Africa. Their descendants, the
Afrikaners and the
Coloureds, are the largest European-descended groups in Africa today. In the nineteenth century, a second phase of colonization brought a large number of French and
British settlers to Africa. The Portuguese settled mainly in Angola, but also in Mozambique.The
Italians settled in
Libya,
Eritrea,
Ethiopia, and
Somalia. The French settled in large numbers in
Algeria where they became known collectively as ''
pieds-noirs'', and on a smaller scale in other areas of North and West Africa as well as in Madagascar. The British settled chiefly in South Africa as well as the colony of
Rhodesia, and in the highlands of what is now
Kenya. Germans settled in what is now
Tanzania and
Namibia, and there is still a population of German-speaking white Namibians. Smaller numbers of European soldiers, businessmen, and officials also established themselves in administrative centers such as
Nairobi and
Dakar. Decolonization during the 1960s often resulted in the mass emigration of European-descended settlers out of Africa — especially from Algeria, Angola, Kenya and Rhodesia. However, in South Africa and Namibia, the white minority remained politically dominant after independence from Europe, and a significant population of Europeans remained in these two countries even after
democracy was finally instituted at the end of the
Cold War. South Africa has also become the preferred destination of white Anglo-Zimbabweans, and of migrants from all over southern Africa.
Indian
European colonization also brought sizable groups of
Asians, particularly people from the
Indian subcontinent, to British colonies. Large
Indian communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya, Tanzania, and some other southern and east African countries. The large Indian community in
Uganda was expelled by the dictator
Idi Amin in 1972, though many have since returned. The islands in the
Indian Ocean are also populated primarily by people of Asian origin, often mixed with Africans and Europeans. The
Malagasy people of
Madagascar are a
Austronesian people, but those along the coast are generally mixed with Bantu, Arab, Indian and European origins. Malay and Indian ancestries are also important components in the group of people known in South Africa as
Cape Coloureds (people with origins in two or more races and continents).
Others
During the past century or so, small but economically important colonies of
Lebanese and
Chinese have also developed in the larger coastal cities of
West and
East Africa, respectively.
Contemporary Demographics
Main articles: Demographics of Africa
Total population of Africa is estimated at 888 million as of 2006, projected to reach 1 billion by 2015.
The demographics of Africa is characterized by high
population growth, high
infant mortality, low
life expectancy (partly due to
malnutrition and
HIV) and
poverty (low
Human development index).
These characteristics mostly apply to Central and sub-Saharan Africa, with the Mediterranean (
Arabic) North and
South Africa showing different patterns.
African-descended people outside Africa
Main articles: African diaspora
Recently, the idea of an
African diaspora, encompassing all people of African identity regardless of where they live, has emerged. There are substantial newcomer populations of people descended from indigenous Africans outside Africa, most notably in the
United States and the
Caribbean, as a result of the forcible removal of their ancestors from Africa through
slavery and the historical
Atlantic slave trade. There are also large populations of people of African descent in many South and Central American countries such as:
Brazil,
Suriname,
Guyana,
Panama, and
Belize. Brazil received one of the largest amounts of African slaves out of all of the countries in the Americas and today has the largest population of people of African descent of any country outside of Africa.
There are also substantial minority populations in
Europe of African-descended people who
emigrated to Europe, and Europe is a popular destination for recent migrants from Africa.
African identity
The term "African" has been used to describe people in a wide variety of contexts.
African Americans
In particular, people who identify themselves as
African American acknowledge the fact that they are of African descent, although in many cases they and their ancestors have lived outside Africa for hundreds of years and even though they may have significant non-African ancestry.
Back to Africa movement
The
Black nationalist Marcus Garvey was an important proponent of the
Back-to-Africa movement, which encouraged those of African descent to return to their ancestral
homelands. This movement would eventually inspire other movements ranging from the
Nation of Islam to the
Rastafari movement, which proclaimed him a prophet. Garvey said he wanted those of
African ancestry to ""
Africa and for the
European colonial powers to leave it.
See also
★ for a list of articles about the ethnic groups of Africa
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