#sahara
The Sahara is no more an arbitrary boundary than the Atlantic.
Seriously! And maybe I’m not thinking exactly what you’re thinking (edit: they were speaking a bit in the opposite way but not completely objecting to what I’m saying, being that I do mention the Sahara is in fact a boundary in many ways, just not monumentally), but… Too many people, and even scholars, seem to think so when it comes to interactions between so-called “Sub-Saharan” Africans – blacks, Negroes, Sudanese, etc. – and North Africans, and especially the sight of black people above the Sahel (wow!) or even the surprise from black intellectuals of “non-black” people, e.g. Berbers who many simply classify as Mediterranean – in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly Tuaregs, living below the Sahara. A lot of people like to classify them as Arabs also, this is not true.
Really, I’ve seen in contemporary times and learned historically of plenty black people [who were not foreigners, slaves, or of slave-descendant populations] from places like Morocco or even Tunisia, and on the contrary plenty “non-black” people from Mali or Niger where you wouldn’t expect to see anything but Negroes. Whether this be from Greek, Arab, or Maghrebi sources. This I’m saying all in regards to trade, war, slavery, general interaction, and actual habitation; really the regional history in all areas. Some points are barriers by default, but the entirety truly isn’t some monumental boundary between two worlds or two peoples; surely not a skin color boundary for either side, at least not literally everywhere across the Sahara.
That’s something I really plan to discuss when I can in the future: Tuaregs, “Moors” (pre-Islam; think Greek), Islamic Africa, Libyoaethiopes or even with Ancient Egypt’s demographics and all that good stuff. I think I did mention this just a little bit on my blog about Oualata (Walata), Mauritania as well with some writings from Ibn Battuta.
With that in mind, this notion that the Sahara is a “boundary” is typically associated with the ignorant belittling of African history, especially in West Africa. From the moment you learn of Islam in Africa for instance, it should become quite apparent that West Africa or the Swahili Coast (the Sahelian kingdoms – Mali, Ghana, Songhai – Wolof or Hausa states, Kilwa Kisiwani, Warsangali Sultanate, etc.) has a fruitful, interactive history in itself and with other parts of the world that is without argument worthy of praise.
Overall, people should really just study the entire Sahara-Sahel region more intensively. As you can also probably tell I’m most biased in favor of Islamic West Africa and the Maghreb as prime examples. And as someone who most specifically deals with ethnohistory, I’d say exploring the demographics and how race/skin color affected the regional history is a good idea as well. Maybe scholars like UMich Islamic history professor Dr. Rudolph Bilal Ware, or Chicago anthropologist Dr. Dana Reynolds-Marniche (to be quite honest, she is a bit Afrocentric in some areas so keep an open mind and open eyes). Maybe a good book, although it deals more-so with slavery, would be Black Morocco.
@internetnawab, Africans have had boats to traverse bodies of water for thousands of years. Africans have had legs, navigation skills, and the ability to survive in desert climates for millions of years.
Bodies of water are not barriers by default. The indigenous populations of the Pacific islands (which inhabit a stretch of ocean that dwarfs the Atlantic) are clear evidence of this. There are scholars who demonstrate that Africans had similar inclinations to explore the Atlantic rather than be bound by it.
Similarly, deserts are not barriers by default. There are populations that inhabit deserts globally–including the Sahara–and they have done so for thousands of years.
Positing the Sahara–or the Atlantic–as a barrier to Africans without qualification is dangerous. And I don’t often see people saying that of other extreme geographic phenomena that had the potential to influence migration patterns but were ultimately overcome. Why don’t we talk about “sub-Himalayan Asia” or “trans-Pacific Asia” or “sub-Chihuahuan America” or “super-Gobian Asia” or “sub-Caucasian Europe” or “sub-Alpine Europe?” I could go on.
We don’t talk about those regions in those ways because the implications of the term “sub-Saharan Africa” are overly racist in ways that are not applicable to anywhere else in the world.
I’ve addressed this kind of response before, but basically if you have no idea what I’m saying, maybe an ideologically-driven response where you refer to an imaginary history that includes assumptions of “default” states for humanity isn’t a great idea.
Might I say, from talking to @jugurthasrevenge personally about this matter, you honestly do have very little of an idea. She gets what I am saying, and what you are saying, it simply isn’t exactly what’s being said. I slightly misinterpeted the post myself. I won’t disclose private messages, but what I will let you know for sure is that she did in fact agree with me once we cleared things up (even giving the specific example of Hausa and Berber turbans being the same). The misunderstanding and debate is a simple matter of context. Although, her thing is that the Sahara [and Sahel if you want to be extra technical] is a barrier for Sub-Saharan “black” populations to the extent of their knowledge of navigation and their traveling caliber, so to say. And like I said before, the same goes for non-black North Africans; they most definitely aren’t limited to areas above the Sahel. And no black intellectual should be surprised to see a medium-toned person with wavy hair living in, say, Mali or Niger (the diverse Tuareg demographics for instance). And being mad that a certain North African population or some other foreign population was more fit to travel below the Sahara than those Sub-Saharan groups were fit to travel above the Sahara will do you no good. That’s just history. And with that being said, it isn’t fair to belittle someone else’s abilities simply because so & so isn’t on the same level. To say the least, it went either way, just in proper context.
At the same time, things like the Afrocentrist crap about a global Moorish empire or that the Moors built Europe, similarly trying to deny the obvious existance of non-black Africans overall or referring to them as Arabs, that African-Americans are descendants of ancient Egyptians (whether “black” or not–my thing is simply the context), claiming the Greeks and Romans were black simply because you saw a Roman sculpture of a Negro, pre-Colombian contact between Africans and indigenous Americans, or even the horse shit I am in the midst of destroying: the claim that Native Americans were black and the “white man” destroyed the “true history” so the “Injuns” could help take our land from us, etc… All that stuff is ridiculous. Not ridiculous as a possibility (besides the visually obvious things), rather as a serious claim, or even worse, an assertion; this simply because these theories are riddled with pseudo-history, and lack objective evidence. All of this crazy talk coming out of the Black Consciousness community is why this subject can be touchy, if the right scholars respond. Even for ancient Egypt, as I remember now that I mentioned, it’s all about the context with her thoughts on this subject. We agreed that obviously the Nile is a different story. Navigating a shared river valley is much less a hassle compared to navigating the Sahara or the Atlantic.
And honestly, enough with the fallacious mumbo jumbo about “Why is there no sub-[blank] Europe/Asia/etc.?” That’s like telling me the sky is blue, and my response is some speculative bullshit about “Well what if the color blue is actually purple?” Simply asking why something isn’t the way it is (in this case your asking why we don’t use similar terminology for other continents as we do with Africa) is not an argument for why you think otherwise.
Yes, deserts and waterways aren’t defaulted barriers with color lines and signs on either side saying “no [insert color here] allowed.” However, being able to row a boat across the Mediterranean, or to arrive in northeastern Libya by camelback, doesn’t mean such an ability and its outcome was or is an objective reality (specifically not for an Afrocentric revisionist context). I’m a simple man; all I ask for is a lack of bias, not using speculation as an argument, objective evidence, and clear citations.
formalsweatpants-casualtiaras:
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
So, can we all stop making fun of this now?
Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”?
It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to.
The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).
And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.
(Source)
This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr
Tea and linguistics. My two faves.
Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!
Quality linguistic research