Suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men

European colonisation of South America resulted in a dramatic shift from a native American population to a largely mixed one, a genetic study has shown. It suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men.

But it adds that areas like Mexico City "still preserve the genetic heritage" because these areas had a high number of natives at the time of colonisation.

The findings appear in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

The international team of researchers wrote: "The history of Latin America has entailed a complex process of population mixture between natives and recent immigrants across a vast geographic region.

"Few details are known about this process or about how it shaped the genetic make-up of Latin American populations."

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By Hyde Flippo

Black Germans? Non-Germans may be understandably surprised to learn that there are Afro-Germans (Afrodeutsche), but many Germans themselves are unaware of the concept of a German who is also black (ein Schwarzer). While compared to other minorities, such as the 2 million Turks living in Germany, blacks are definitely a tiny minority among Germany's 82 million people. While EU countries do not keep track of ethnicity, there are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Blacks living in Germany today.

Early History

The history of black people in Germany goes back much further than most people think. One of the first Africans known to have lived in Germany was Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759). Born in what is today's Ghana, Amo came under the protection of the Duke (Herzog) of Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and grew up in the duke's castle.

He was both the first African known to attend a German university (Halle) and the first to obtain a doctorate degree (in 1729). As a professor, under his preferred name of Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer, he taught at two German universities and published several scholarly works, including a Latin treatise entitled De Arte Sobrie et Accurate Philosophandi (1736, "On the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately"). Knowing the level of his achievements, it is all the more surprising to learn that Amo returned to Africa in 1747. Most accounts claim the reason for his return to his native Africa was the racial discrimination he encountered in Germany. Then as now, Africans in Europe were seen as something exotic and foreign.

German writer Ika Hügel-Marshall

Hügel-Marshall is the author of " Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany.” Hügel-Marshall’s book contributes to the ongoing discussion about multicultural issues in Germany and about what it means to be German. This has become particularly important after reunification of West and East Germany and Germany’s search for a new national identity.  Ika Hügel-Marshall is a so-called “war baby,” born just after World War II in a small Bavarian town. Her mother was a white German, her father an African American soldier stationed in Germany. At the age of seven, Ika (Erika at the time) was removed from her mother and placed in a Protestant boarding school hundreds of kilometers away, which proved to be a very traumatic experience.  The book describes her journey to accept herself as a black German who went through different stages to ‘unlearn’ her own internalized self-hatred. In her late 30s, Ika Hügel-Marshall meets other Afro-Germans. It takes another ten years until she gets to know her father in the United States - a life-changing experience for her.

Some historians claim that the first sizeable influx of Africans to Germany came from Germany's African colonies in the 19th century. Some Afro-Germans living in Germany today can claim ancestry going back five generations to that time. Yet Prussia's colonial adventures in Africa were quite limited and brief (1890-1918), far more modest than the British, the Dutch, the French, or other European powers, so there could not have been any great numbers. But Prussia's South West Africa colony was the site of the first mass genocide committed by Germans in the 20th century. In 1904 German colonial troops countered a revolt with the massacre of three-quarters of the Herero population in what is now Namimbia. It took Germany a full century to issue a formal apology to the Herero (in 2004) for that atrocity, which was provoked by a German "extermination order" (Vernichtungsbefehl). But Germany still refuses to pay any compensation to the Herero survivors, although it does provide foreign aid to Namibia.

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By Jamey Keaten

PARIS (AP) - Blacks in France are standing up to be counted, aspiring to become a political factor in presidential and legislative elections later this year.

A small but groundbreaking new poll suggests that blacks face widespread discrimination in France, raising questions about a country long proud of its official colorblindness - and where collecting racial data is banned.

Patrick Lozes

“If you're not counted, you don't count,” said Patrick Lozes, head of the Representative Council of Black Associations, which commissioned the poll that was conducted by telephone. The council has thousands of members, he said.

Officially, France doesn't know how many blacks it has because of its Republican tradition that doesn't distinguish by race or religion. Collecting ethnic data is generally banned - one reason why a poll like Wednesday's had not been done before.

Among more than 15,000 people contacted by the Sofres polling agency to establish a pool, 581 said they felt they had black roots - and that subgroup was questioned in the poll. No margin of error was provided.

Fifty-six percent said they felt some form of discrimination in their daily lives, and 12 percent said they did so “often.” Of those who said they discrimination, 62 percent said the incidents were most often in public or on public transportation, and 42 percent at work.

Sixty-one percent said they had experienced discrimination in the last year.

Based on the poll data, Lozes estimated there are 1.8 million voting-age blacks in France - out of a total population of some 60 million - and about four-fifths of them are French citizens.

France, like many other European countries, has been struggling with how to integrate its ethnic minorities. Nationwide riots in fall 2005 raged through housing projects in France's poor neighborhoods with large minority populations. They were often fueled by broad feelings of discrimination, unemployment and a sense of alienation from society.

“The sectarianism that I denounce is that of the current minority in power - that's to say white men, aged over 50, who are bourgeois and heterosexual,” Lozes said. “They're the minority, but a majority in the National Assembly.”

By Lisa Bryant

More than half of blacks living in France say they face racial discrimination, according to the first-ever survey on the country's black population. The findings are troubling for a country that has long prided itself on its human rights record, and its ostensibly color-blind integration model.

According to a survey conducted by the TNS-Sofres polling agency, 61 percent of blacks living in France say they have experienced at least one racist incident within the past year.

More than one in 10 of the 13,000 respondents said they were frequently the target of racism that ranged from verbal aggression to difficulty finding housing or jobs.

Patrick Lozes

Patrick Lozes The French advocacy group The Representative Council of Black Associations commissioned the survey. Its president, Patrick Lozes, says these are troubling statistics.

Lozes predicts the poll will change things in France. Until now, he says, blacks have never been counted. And a population that is not counted, does not count.

Blacks are not counted because census and other official surveys are barred from compiling statistics based on religion or race. But some experts estimate there are about five million blacks living in France.

The head of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, Mouloud Aounit, says he is not surprised by the survey's findings.

Aounit says racism exits in French daily life. Look at the Senate, the National Assembly, regional councils, he says. Ethnic representation is totally absent.

By Ron Nixon and Sandra Jamison

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., whose PBS special “African American Lives” explores the ancestry of famous African-Americans using DNA testing, has done more than anyone to help popularize such tests and companies that offer them. But recently this Harvard professor has become one of the industry’s critics.

Mr. Gates says his concerns date back to 2000, when a company told him his maternal ancestry could most likely be traced back to Egypt, probably to the Nubian ethnic group. Five years later, however, a test by a second company startled him. It concluded that his maternal ancestors were not Nubian or even African, but most likely European.

Why the completely different results? Mr. Gates said the first company never told him he had multiple genetic matches, most of them in Europe. “They told me what they thought I wanted to hear,” Mr. Gates said.

An estimated 460,000 people have taken genetic tests to determine their ancestry or to expand their known family trees, according to Science magazine. Census records, birth and death certificates, ship manifests, slave narratives and other documents have become easier to find through the Internet, making the hunt for family history less daunting than in years past.

Pio Pico's ancestry is said to have included a mixture of ethnicities, including African, Indian, Spanish and Italian.

Pio Pico was the last governor of Mexican California. He was of African, Indian and Spanish ancestry. He was born in San Gabriel in 1801 and resided there until his father’s death in 1819; he then moved to San Diego. It is not clear how he became California’s governor in 1845.

Some accounts state that he took over Governor Manuel Micheltorena’s position in 1845 “following a revolt that ended with a bloodless artillery duel near Cahuenga Pass that forced out Governor Manuel Micheltorena.” As governor, Pico participated in the final process of the secularization of the California missions.

There are different interpretations of this measure by the Mexican government: one asserts that it was part of the liberal discourse of the post-independence movement in Mexico; another asserts that it was a desperate measure intended to obtain revenue by selling the missions for the impending conflict with the United States over California.

by Steve Sailer

The nearly complete absorption of Mexico's identifiably African people offers an intriguing contrast to the persistence of a rather distinct black race in the United State.

Most Americans, and even many Mexicans, don't realize that a significant fraction of the Mexican population once looked markedly African. At least 200,000 black slaves were imported into Mexico from Africa. By 1810, Mexicans who were considered at least part-African numbered around a half million, or more than 10 percent of the population.

Mexican music, for example, has deep roots in West Africa. "La Bamba," the famous Mexican folk song that was given a rock beat by Ritchie Valens and a classic interpretation by Los Lobos, has been traced back to the Bamba district of Angola.

What's especially ironic about Mexico's "racial amnesia" -- a term coined by African-American historian Ted Vincent -- is that during Mexico's first century of independence, more than a few of its most famous leaders were visibly part black.

Emiliano Zapata was perhaps the noblest figure in 20th century Mexican politics, a peasant revolutionary still beloved as a martyred man of the people.

Although Marlon Brando played him in the 1952 movie "Viva Zapata!" the best-known photograph of the illiterate idealist shows him with clearly part-African hair.

His village had long been home to many descendents of freed slaves.




Similarly, Vicente Guerrero, a leading general in the Mexican War of Independence and the new nation's second president, appears from his portraits and his nickname to have been part black.

Perhaps African-Mexicans were so often leading the revolutionary vanguard because they were even more oppressed by law than Mexico's Indians.

Back in the 16th century, the great Spanish Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, the first modern human rights activist, in the sense of battling for justice for another race, persuaded the King of Spain to ban the enslavement of Indians, at least nominally. Yet, bondage for Africans remained legal until "El Negro Guerrero" officially abolished it in 1829. It had largely withered out before then, however.

The apparent assimilation of Mexico's ex-slaves into the overall gene pool is in marked contrast to America's experience, where the black race has remained relatively distinct. In the average self-declared white American's family tree, there is only the equivalent of one black out of every 128 ancestors, according to the ongoing research of molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver of Penn State University and his colleagues.

In fact, Mexico even differs from the rest of Latin America, where distinct black populations remain genetically unassimilated. "Mexico is unique in this regard," commented population geneticist Ricardo M. Cerda-Flores of the Mexico's Autonomous University in Nuevo Leon.

By Boby Vaughn

The Costa Chica is one of two regions in Mexico with significant black population today, the other being the state of Veracruz on the Gulf coast. The Costa Chica is a 200-mile long coastal region beginning just southeast of Acapulco, Guerrero and ending at Huatulco in the state of Oaxaca.

 

The climate is very hot most of the year, and the summer rains can make transportation somewhat difficult, as the roads don't generally hold up that well. There are few major tourist attractions in the parts of the Costa Chica where most blacks live, although there are a few pleasant local beaches: Playa Ventura and Punta Maldonado in Guerrero and the beach at Corralero in Oaxaca. I should also mention the wildlife reserve in Chacahua, Oaxaca located near the black town of the same name.

While the Costa Chica is home to many blacks, there are also many indigenous groups, as well. I have spent very little time learning about these people, and can't speak with very much confidence about them. What I do know is that there are two major indigenous ethnic groups in the region: the Amuzgos and the coastal Mixtecs, (and to a lesser extent, Tlapanecos and Chatinos). What is also clear to me is that there is very little social interaction between blacks and indigenous people. Part of this is the issue of the language barrier, but I believe the issue is much more complex than that. There has been a long history of hostility between the two groups, and while today there is no open hostility, negative stereotypes abound on both parts.

Most of the homes in the region were round mud huts, whose roots have been traced back to what is now Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Now, the norm is a one-room or two-room house with wall of adobe or cement cinder block.
 

The economic base of the Costa Chica, not unlike most of the rest of the countryside, is agricultural. These campesinos, or peasant farmers, concentrate most of their efforts in the cultivation of corn, almost exclusively in order to make tortillas for their own consumption. Other common crops are coconut, mango, sesame, and some watermelon.

By Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales

In Mexico, various Indian peoples still play ancient instruments. And their songs and dances -- which tell of uprisings against their masters -- pay tribute to their ancestors.

These Mexicans play African "hand pianos" and perform "the dance of the black people." Mexican "corridos" -- or song-stories -- tell of slave uprisings. And the marimbas of Mexico, as well as those of Central America and Ecuador, all have their origins in Africa.

All are examples of the still thriving African legacy in Mexico.

Since 1492, the history of the Americas has been forged by three cultures: indigenous, European, and African - the third root of the Americas, according to the late University of Veracruz professor, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, who was considered Mexico's foremost expert on the African influence on Mexican culture.

The early African presence in the Americas is normally associated with the slave trade in the United States, the Caribbean, Brazil, Central America, Colombia and Peru. Not generally taught in history textbooks is that Mexico was also a key port of entry for slave ships and consequently had a large African population.

In fact, during the colonial era, there were more Africans than Europeans in Mexico, according to Aguirre Beltrán's pioneering 1946 book, "The Black Population in Mexico." And he said they didn't disappear, but in fact took part in forging the great racial mixture that is today Mexico.

"Because of race mixture, much of the African presence is no longer discernible except in a few places such as Veracruz and the Costa Chica in Guerrero and Oaxaca," wrote Aguirre Beltrán.

By Deng M. Koch

Australia is a country inhabited by a very diverse group of people; almost all cultures found on the face of earth are represented in the country’s social stratum. Nevertheless majority people come from Anglo-Sexon countries and Asia, as well as from Italo-Spanish speaking countries. Since it is a country that acknowledges and boasts about its multicultural heritage, many people in Australia are friendly, generous and welcoming to the new arrivals. The Sudanese, Liberians, Siera-Leoneans, Congolese and many other Africans are the most recently arrived groups of people, in addition to those from Middle Eastern countries.

However, the Sudanese stands out among the other Africans! First of all they are the majority (about 25000 individuals) and secondly their physical structure – they are mostly strikingly tall and black. In addition to their physical traits, the Sudanese have their own various cultures and ways of life, of which they are always proud to emphasize, hence putting them at odd with some circles in the mainstream society.

Sydney - Australia has slashed the number of African refugees admitted into the country partly because many have problems settling into the community, the government said on Tuesday.

Over the past two years the intake of Africans has been cut from 70 percent of the total of 13 000 refugees to just 30 percent, Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews told reporters.

The revelation was immediately condemned as bordering on racism by refugee rights groups.

"It's not on a basis of a race as such," Andrews said.

"It's simply on the basis of whether or not people can settle in Australia. I don't see much point, if you are having problems, then adding to those problems by continuing to bring more people in."

Bounce back

By Timothy Kalyegira

Last week, although this column focused on the breakdown of order in eastern DR Congo, this is a general pattern unfolding across much of Africa. As we watch these countries head toward collapse, there is a rise in migration to the West of Africa's best-educated lot and thousands of other semi-skilled young people.

We are granted political asylum there. Ousted African heads of state or persecuted opposition leaders often find refuge in the American, British, or French embassy in their capitals.

A degree or diploma earned from a western college or university has replaced degrees from national universities as the most important point of academic reference.

The Western Union and MoneyGram money wire transfer services in African towns and cities have become vital supply routes back home from the West.

There is a new breed of internationally mobile, young people of African descent making their mark on the world. They are neither Africans nor Americans or Europeans for that matter but children of many worlds. Afropolitans they are, writes TAIYE TUAKLI-WOSORNU

Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu
Nairobi

Artiste Akon Thiam: A true Afropolitan, he was born in the US, brought up in Senegal and lives in the US.

It is just midnight on a Thursday night at Medicine Bar in London. Zak, boy-genius DJ, is playing a Fela Kuti remix. The little downstairs dance floor swells with smiling, sweating men and women fusing hip-hop dance moves with a funky sort of djembe.

Maria Lamadrid is the president of Africa Vive, the Afro-Latin Americanorganization based in Argentina. She refutes the common held belief that Afro-Argentines vanished. Maria calculated the first Black cencus in a long time and determined that there are approximately 2,000,000 people of African descent living in Argentina ranging in skin tones from "high yellow" to "jet black".



By HISHAM AIDI

When songstress Josephine Baker visited Argentina in the 1950s she asked the biracial minister of public health Ramon Carillo, "Where are the Negroes?" to which Carillo responded laughing, "There are only two — you and I."

Scholars have long pondered the "disappearance" of people of African descent from Argentina, long considered South America's "whitest" nation. A 1973 article in Ebony asked, "what happened to Argentina's involuntary immigrants, those African slaves and their mulatto descendants who once outnumbered whites five to one, and who were for 250 years 'an important element' in the total population, which is now 97 percent white?"

Meanwhile Asian and Hispanic Populations Grew

According to a recently released Census Bureau report, the population of New York City increased by over 200,000 people between 2000 and 2006 but the African American component of that population actually dropped by more than 40,000. The decline was a historic first.

While the Black population was declining in the nation's largest city, both the Hispanic and Asian populations grew by better than 90,000 during the 2000 to 2006 period.

Public officials and demographers attribute the Black population decline to soaring housing costs and an ever increasing number of Blacks returning to family roots in the South.

It was a mixed picture for whites. The number of whites living in the Bronx dropped by 11 percent while the number living in Manhattan increased by 9 percent. The Hispanic population increased in most parts of the metropolitan area but Asians were the only ethnic group to increase their presence in all five New York City boroughs as well as in the metropolitan area which includes parts of Connecticut and New Jersey.

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur36140.cfm

By Silvia Salek

Neguinho da Beija-Flor's stage-name indicates his skin colour; in Portuguese, Neguinho means Little Black.

In this year's Rio Carnival competition, he sang a song celebrating Brazil's African roots in a performance that won his samba school the title.

But having learned to be proud of his African ancestry, he was shocked to find out that about 67% of his genes are European and only 31% African, according to an estimate based on an analysis of his DNA.

"People will think I'm joking if I tell them this", said the singer, who knew very little about his African ancestors but nothing at all about his European ones.

"43 percent of Africans in the U.S. have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Compared to African-Americans, the immigrants' average household income is higher and their jobless rate lower"


WASHINGTON—They range from surgeons and scholars to illiterate refugees from some of the world's worst hellholes—a dizzyingly varied stream of African immigrants to the United States. More than 1 million strong and growing, they are enlivening America's cities and altering how the nation confronts its racial identity.

From Aaron, a former slave without a last name, through Paul BurgessZuber, a 20th century lawyer and professor, the recently publishedAfrican American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the most extensive and inclusive collection of biographical informationabout African American lives ever published.

The African American National Biography (AANB), co-edited by HenryLouis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham, is an eight-volume series thatincludes biographies of more than 4,000 African Americans throughout500 years, dating back to the arrival of Esteban, the first recordedAfrican explorer to set foot in North America.

Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor in the Faculty ofArts and Sciences and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, andHigginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African andAfrican American Studies and chair of the Department of African andAfrican American Studies, have included the famous and the infamous, aswell as hitherto obscure individuals.

The series includes national heroes and historical figures such asMartin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. But the biographies alsoinclude Sissieretta Joyner Jones, a 19th century opera singer; RichardPotter, a magician, sword swallower, and ventriloquist who owned 175acres in New Hampshire and died in 1835; and the pistol-packing,fist-fighting Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, of the late19th century.

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