₦airaland Forum

A couple of things. As a geoscientist I noticed that the map you show of Africa overlain by other countries looks to be Mercator projections of the other countries, so the map is only showing a distortion over distortions. Try doing the same exercise with the Peters Map Projection. Africa is large but so is China and South America. You are only perpetuating misleading information.

As to the Phenotypes of Africa. I had an ancestor, a great grand mother who was probably a Quadroon, or even a Mulatto. My fraternal twin grand father showed traits of his African ancestry as did his sister but none of his other siblings did. While my father and I am "swarthy" we exhibit no obvious African traits.

Now doing about 5 minutes worth of research I was able to find out that only about 1 million slaves were imported into the United States during the period of slavery. They all came from the West coast nations of Africa. Central and East African peoples were enslaved in Egypt and the Middle East.

So if any of that is true, and I believe it is, the phenotypes that were enslaved and imported into the US were all of West Africa, countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo-Benin Ivory Coast, Sierra Leon, Guinea, Congo and Angola, all what would be called the Niger-Congo linguistic group.

Your arguments about African Diversity start to fall apart when you take into consideration the facts above. I take it your argument is primarily you want to downplay the role admixing of Caucasian blood might play in the diversity of appearance in Black Americans. The easiest way is to do a DNA test.

Admixing in North America was a fact in at least the early colonies like New Orleans. Due to the dearth of women, there were a lot of mulatto children being born and the colonial men were chasing after Native American women causing poor relations between the two groups. The solution was to import French women from the prisons throughout France and send the to New Orleans. There were still too few and Mulatto kids continued to be born, and with it their mothers and they were freed through manumission resulting in a relatively large free black population. The Code Noire was written to keep the mulattos from marrying full blooded African Blacks, reserving the coffee colored mulattos, Quadroons and Octaroons for the Creole men who continued to have kids by them. There were even Quadroon Balls, with the same purpose, to march out the young mixed race women so they could be selected to be a mistress to one of the wealthy Creole (it means native...as in original colonist) men, who would then support her and her kids for life and place them in a home up on Rampart street in the north French Quarter. So you can imagine after several hundred years of this, starting in the early 1700's, there was a lot of admixing going on. Beyoncé, Halley Barry, Vanessa Williams and too many other beautiful "black" women are really products of this kind of admixing of racial groups. The mass migration after the Civil War and the Great Depression of southern blacks to northern cities, just mixed it even more. I have been to rural areas of southern Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana where the blacks were indistinguishable from those you see in the Congo or north East Africa. The only real way to determine if the variability you see in American black "phenotypes" is to do a DNA profile. That would show for certain that most Americans of African Ancestry are really Americans of mixed African and European ancestry. My daughter now knows that she has Native American and English from her mother, and German, Scottish and African from her father. There is a reason Black Americans and White Americans look so distinct when compared to the groups from which they supposedly came.