Friday 20 August 2004

Pic of the day: The truth is, they are people. Or in this case, Sims.

Truth and black people

I have mentioned in the past that I tend to see the world of knowledge as a vast dome, not a house with different rooms separated by walls. The various facts and sciences form a continuity, where each is related to the others. It can even be hard to say where one field of knowledge ends and another begins.

This is all very nifty, and I would not trade it for another worldview. But it also has a drawback, at least when practiced by a lazy person such as I. When I pick up some new piece of information, I tend to check it and see if it fits into the pattern. If it does, I just slot it in without taking much notice of where I found it.

This makes it pretty much hopeless to go back and prove anything. When people debate, they tend to go "prove it! prove it!", which is unnatural to me. Since truth is a continuity, it will often be enough that it makes sense. It certainly is more important to me than the title of whoever claimed it. (This, incidentally, also applies to my spiritual life - I am perfectly willing to learn from hypocrites, if they have picked up some pearl of great value. But enough about that for now.)

Sometimes a theory makes sense but is not necessarily true, and then I guess I may be fooled. Then again, perhaps less than people tend to believe. Things that make sense have a very strong tendency to be true, especially if there are no other facts that gainsay them. Back when I was a kid, I noticed how the outlines of Africa and America fit together. I'm certainly not the only one to notice that, but it would still be several years before I read that plate tectonics were now becoming an accepted theory. These days it is mostly considered a fact, and it is not my doing either. I'm just amazed it took this long before people realized it, surely it must have shown on maps for centuries.

Now let's look at the theory that the blackest of black Africans are fairly late arrivals to the continent, having lived before that time on boats on the open ocean. Other people who have had this lifestyle for a really long time tend to have darker skin than their neighbors, because the sunlight is reflected from the water and there are no trees to seek shadow under when the sun is at its highest. Africans who live in the depth of the jungle are far less colored, for instace the pygmies are almost pale.

But some people find this thought alarming. I suppose they think like this: "If these people arrived only a few thousand years ago, they could get thrown out." Yeah, I suppose so. But the white people are not being thrown out of America or Australia, even though they came only a few generations ago. Actually people of many different colors are still coming there, and to Europe as well, and as long as they make themselves useful there is not much incentive to throw them out. I don't see why it should be different just because people are black. Black is a pretty decorative color on humans, I'd say, although they are more prone to frost bite. Not that this is likely to be much of a problem in Africa. And anyway they've been there for millennia already.

I suppose because there has been so much irrational prejudice concerning black people, people continue to think irrationally about them. Including the black people themselves, of course. But they're just people adapted to lots of sunshine. There's nothing mysterious about them, and no reason to have any extra taboos.

Take another theory that I read some years ago, that the black people arrived in the current South Africa around the same time as the white people. I've tried to look up this lately and it seems to have been erased as if no one ever mentioned it. Probably because the current government in South Africa finds it distasteful, and nobody except the earlier government found it interesting at all. But actually it makes a lot of sense. If the blacks had been there for a really long time, the aboriginal Khoisan peoples would have been much diminished before the whites came. The black peoples, being agricultural, have no room for the hunter-gatherer culture of the "bushmen", and they now live almost exclusively in the Kalahari desert. If there had been a strong black presence through thousands of years, they would not have been so widespread when the white people first met them.

That said, there are artifacts of black settlements in parts of the country going back a long time, just not in all of it. Of course, the very idea that "South Africa" is some kind of unified territory is pretty new in itself, and definitely came with the white people. Neither the blacks nor the indigenous Khoisan had any idea that they lived in Africa at all. They just lived in the world. Which may not be a bad thing ... the mixing in of politics (which is just a game humans play) tends to distort facts (which were facts always and will be when we are all forgotten).