Concepts of Africans

 


"ADORATION OF THE MAGI," painted in 1510 by Hieronymus Bosch, is an example of postmedieval conceptions of the races of man. By the Middle Ages legends that were based on the mention in the New Testament of "three wise men from the east" who had brought gifts to the new born King of the Jews had promoted the Magi into kings who ruled the three divisions of mankind: the Asians, the Africans and the Europeans. Long before Bosch artists had begun to portray the supposed King of the Moors, Gaspar, as being dark-skinned and even, as Bosch has done (left), with plainly Negroid features. White-haired Balthasar (kneeling in foreground) is the king who is usually held to be the ruler of the Europeans. Melchior, with his offering of Arabian frankincense, is supposedly the ruler of the Asians. Some artists have portrayed Melchior with Oriental features rather than as a Middle Easterner. The half-naked man standing in the doorway is an allegorical figure who is evidently intended to represent the Antichrist. (Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., "The Genetics of Human Populations" Scientific American, Sept 1974. )

 

What Cavalli-Sforza writes agrees with the perspective historian Basil Davidson offers in his film series, but others have taken a more mixed view Ignacy Sachs (1976) points to European perceptions of blackness as having two contrasting images during the Middle Ages. The devil was often presented in popular folklore as black (usually in the guise of an black Ethiopian). While at the same time there were a number of North African saints who also were black, such as St. Maurice, St. Zeno and St. Cassius. There were paintings of a black Madonna, and during the 14th century one of the Magi was depicted as being black. Quite clearly, at this period when there was little knowledge of Africa in Europe, blackness was articulated in an ambiguity whereby the colour black could be equally perceived by Europeans in terms of devil or saint.  (Sachs, Ignacy 1976 The Discovery of the Third World. MIT Press, Cambridge.)