Opinion

Alagi Saidy-Barrow: Deciding Who Is Black And Who Belongs To What Tribe

Alagie Saidy-Barrow

Race matters. Ethnicity or tribe or whatever one chooses to call it also matters. However, defining who belongs to what race or what tribe can sometimes be complicated if a person comes from a mixed race or from mixed ethnicities.

Some people, Tiger Woods comes to mind, struggle to identify with one race and so he calls himself a Cablanisian in order to identify with his Asian, African/Black, etc roots.

I’ve seen some people assume ownership of determining who is qualified to be called Black and who isn’t. You go to places like Brazil, some of the people I may identify as Black don’t see themselves as Black. It’s the same in Sudan where some of the folks would be considered Black in most places, but claim to be Arab in Sudan.

Whether that’s because the Black race has been so “dirtied” that it makes one more acceptable to have other races in you or because one simply wants to recognize the other races in them depends on who you ask. For some, I guess race is fluid and for many Africans, ethnicity is also fluid.

I’ve seen similar classifications here in The Gambia too where some think they have a book listing who qualifies for what tribe based on their assessment or based on the person’s surname/last name.

My maternal lineage goes back to Manden and my paternal lineage goes back to Futa Torroh. Due to migration, my folks assimilated and adopted Mandinka language and culture. But does that mean that I have to shed my Futa Torroh lineage and limit myself to the Manden lineage?

What qualifies someone to be labeled Black given that some people you and I may consider Black don’t identify themselves as Black? Do we have the right to force our definition of who is Mandinka or Mansuanka, on others? Are ethnic identities solely based on last names? How does that explain surnames that are found in at least three different ethnicities?

What is one’s place of origin? Is it were you were born or where you were raised? What if you’re like me, given that my mom hails from Sandu Kuraw and my dad hails from Wulli Jahkunda, but I was born in Holy Kiang and raised in Bundung and Basse before spending majority of my life up to now, in the USA. Would I be wrong if I claim any of these places? Well except the USA I would assume!

My point is, I have no right to tell someone what they should identify as because there’s no universal manual that delineates who belongs to what racial or tribal box.

Segregation and Apartheid are outliers but even those idiotic policies were not based on any sound reasoning. So while we debate if Kamala Harris is Black or Indian (not Badibu Indian), perhaps it’s better to go with what she identifies herself with.

While we debate if Alagie Barrow is Mandinka or Fula or Bainunka, perhaps we should let him decide what he wishes to identify as. Choosing one does not make me any less of the other. Critically, you’d be a fool to hear a last name or surname and quickly assign it to a particular tribe.

As they say, Santa daykoot fen! Boxing people in a box you nicely created based on your own assumptions is what they call stereotyping! Let folks be mein!

4 Comments

  1. Very insightful discourse. Quote: ” Boxing people in a box you nicely created based on your own assumptions is what they call stereotyping!”
    Observation: I like this bit above, Alagie, because I think the term “Black” has done exactly what the above quotation says: putting us (Africans and our descendants) into a nicely created little box for easy stereotyping. Perhaps, it’s time we REJECT the term for one that we can coin for ourselves. There is no doubt that we (the African People) have a common heritage, somewhere along the line in the past, and we must find a term that is not denigrating to us. Is it time to discard the BLACK label?

    As for TRIBE, well, we in The Gambia should have left that behind some 50 years ago or at least, reduce its relevance to what constitutes our identity, as a NATION. It is our GAMBIANESS that should have been the most important measure of identity to us today. Gambian FIRST, then whatever you want to call yourself second.

  2. Mwalimu, what’s your take?

  3. @Bax, yes back to familiar territory. lol
    Race is a construct created solely and purposefully to classify the Homo sapiens species into three broad categories. Namely, the negroid, the caucasian and the mongoloid.
    So let’s ask the usual suspect questions in order to clearly establish the discursive grounds that race is founded and built upon.
    Question 1. whose idea was the concept of race based upon?
    Answer 1. non-melanated europeans who were in awe of melanated Afrikkans for their art, music, literature, science etc etc.
    Question 2. Why would they need to do that?
    Answer 2. According to Frances Cress Wesling, for the purpose of genetic preservation, the light skinned Europeans needs to annihilate the dark skinned African to survive a genetic decline and ultimately, a genetic extinction.
    Question 3. When was the construct of race conceptualized?
    Answer 3. There is no known word similar to “race” in any European language before the tenth century. Interestingly enough, when the concept first came to officialdom for official institution of the chattel slavery in Rome, we were depicted as savages without a religion and without a culture. That’s descriptive rather than a noun. More on than another time.
    Question 3 and 4. How and where? The Spaniards and the Portuguese were arch enemies. They butchered and cooked each other for food. These two were making claims to The African continent unbeknown to us. It took a papal bull for adjudication. Pope Nicolas V, gave Portugal the permission to conquer Africa and to consign us to perpetual servitude. This was codified on the 8th June, 1452.
    _______________________
    Now that the above questions have been briefly answered, let’s see how the terminology of racial classification have evolved.
    First we were called pagans, unbelievers, hotten totten, negroes, niggers, blacks, maximum pigmented and now, blacks. No other nationality (race) has gone through such change of terms.
    Essentially, an entire group of people claiming to be scientists, funded by European high society and governments, invented a branch of science dedicated entirely to the study of race, called eugenics. This pseudo science places Africans on the very bottom wrung of the intelligence ladder. It was a means to justify slavery. Go back and read the sentence again. The verb “places” is in present continuous form. That should tell you all you need to know about RACIALIZATION. The suffix
    -IZATION, means made up. Made into a race.
    For all intent and purpose, we know race is a potent political and economic weapon, created to achieve a world order that exists today.
    Okay am going too deep and too far. So let me conclude. Categories are a necessary evil, so long it does not destroy the lives of others for some to benefit from that destruction.
    Race,class, ethnicity, gender, nationality and so on and so forth, form meta critical discourses. They impact all and everything. Understanding them is the basis for understanding the world in which we live.
    Dear BAX, I hope I have honored your invitation on this thread with something that tickles us all. lol

  4. The sum total of language and cultural identities in a nation is a complex matter. It’s like fire. To much immersion with any body part burns the flesh. But the same too much is what is needed to cook food and boil water for us.
    We also consume our languages and cultures, at the same time, we are reproduction agents of those cultures and languages. The danger in a nation lies in claims of superiority and inferior. This is where smart governing is called to play. Every language and every positive cultural act is a national treasure that each and every resident should have access to learn, connect with, perform and reproduce. This is how “tribal” based conflict is averted and or neutralized.
    I put the word tribe in quotation marks because it’s a term that does not befit our realities and for the simple fact that its etymological meaning is insulting to any group of people. Especially those claiming ownership of a nation state.
    Back to poor governance and a visionless leadership that Gambia has ever been saddled with, tensions continue to bubble below a seemingly cohesive society that claims homogeneity and inter-relatedness to highlight peaceful coexistence.

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