Talk:African people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject African diaspora. This WikiProject aims to improve the quality of articles related to topics concerning persons of African descent and their cultures. If you would like to participate in the project, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the Wikipedia:WikiProject African diaspora for more information. (See: Category:WikiProject African diaspora for more pages in this project.)
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale.
Top This article has been rated as Top-Importance within African diaspora.

Contents

[edit] Definition

"African people" is not a synonym of "Black people".

Consider on the one hand:

  • lighter-skinned North Africans, both Arab and of indigenous African ancestry, such as the Berbers
  • Egyptians
  • White South Africans and other European-descended Africans

and on the other:

  • indigenous peoples of Latin America and their descendants
  • Australian aborigines
  • lower-caste Indians who identify themselves as "Black" for political reasons

-- The Anome 18:53, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow you work really fast. I skimmed it but it looks like a great start. I do not know if you have seen it, but there is an Egyptian statue that shows two of the Egyptian elite next to each other, one dark skinned one light skinned. It is a great statue. We have the picture here on Wikipedia. I love it and would love to see it included. I am not sure that you should include the Dalits or darker skinned Indians who are calling themselves black except maybe as a parenthetical remark, since they are not really more African than white Europeans, or the Chinese probably (although they might share the darker skin color of course). --Filll 19:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I should mention that much of this article is adapted from the "Demographics" section of the Africa article; the proportion of this article taken from that source should diminish as more is added on African culture and identity.
The Dalits definitely don't belong in this article, since they self-identify as Black, not as African, and don't live in Africa either; they need a mention at Black people, of course, because of their self-identification as Black people. -- The Anome 19:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Template

What if we had a template for black and african people articles that looked like [1]? Comments?--Filll 20:43, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is there such thing as a single "African people".

I'm pondering nominating this for deletion as per WP:NOT, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV.

This article seems to bea about an specific POV on what African people(s) are (a unity) and that's not supported by anything except surely some political ideas. It's not encyclopedic by definition. The relevant content should be merged with Africa and Black people (as it seems what is about mostly).

I can see no specific reason to consider all African peoples as a single unity. I think it is clearly the personal POV of the author. --Sugaar 21:19, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

It might be, but we need to make sure it includes the diversity of African people. This is just a start I think and we can build on it. Clearly there is a tremendous diversity of people living in Africa.--Filll 21:43, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Fill. This article has a large amount of content that has yet to be added to it. There is a lot of diversity in the African ethnic group. Consequently, this article will most likely speak volumes about the diverse cultures of the African ethnic group.--DarkTea 21:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
There is no intention to present the people of Africa as a single "unity" -- indeed, I agree completely with the earlier poster: the population of Africa is extremely diverse, and this article should reflect Africa's many and varied cultures and ethnic groups. At the moment, there's rather too much about relatively recent settlers, and not enough about the indigenous peoples of Africa. Let's fix it! -- The Anome 01:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Then I strongly suggest it to be renamed/merged to either:
The use of singular clearly suggest an ethnologic unity that they most probably don't have.
--Sugaar 10:49, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Logically, the article should be called "Africal peoples" or "Peoples of Africa." Unfortunately the conformity police insist on not having article entitles "Spiders" or "Races." "Demographics" is likely to be misunderstood because that term is generally applied to the current populations of a region. (Or am I wrong?) The article has to be more fundamental than "cultures" (why would you want a singular term here anyway?), and, depending on how we arrange our canopy articles, the culture part should probably fall under an article on the ethnicities present in Africa.
The issue that looms over all these articles, of course, is that we are all humans and all largely the same. We divide ourselves as though we are all born into the world bearing labels that not only declare us, e.g., Ainu, but also grade us ab initio on intelligence, morality, ethical impulses, musical ability, etc., etc. We we try to deconstruct a social construction such as race or ethnicity we need to be fairly clear on the 3% of fact on which the other 97% of the ideological system is built.
I haven't had time to go beyond the basic information on the founding population and the three genetic departures from this origin, L1, L2, and L3. But there is a great deal of information on how the present-day populations relate to these original three lines. The story is bound to be muddied because people tend to marry across group boundaries, so nobody is pure anything, but the fact remains that there are obvious surface differences that differentiate, e.g., the Khoisan from the groups whose members average over 6' tall and are much darker. These kinds of differences in traits are often mirrored by differences in language families and in differences in culture. Both language and culture are highly conservative across time and they both tend to reinforce group boundaries.
If the conformity police will let us have "peoples" I'm all for it. But if the first thing somebody reads about "African people" is that there are three major divisions among them that go back to the earliest days of Homo sapiens sapiens, then I don't think the lack of an "s" in the title will cause any big problems. (If "Race" is acceptable, then anything is acceptable IMHO.) P0M 06:30, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Race in my opinion is only acceptable in some very specific cases (classical anthropometry and cultural articles on areas where racialism/racism is strong, specially the Americas). Genetics is most interesting (all non-African lineages are L3 "Africans", for instance) but it's not my main concern. I think the cultural diversity is what makes African peoples strongly plural.
The naming convention does suggest that articles should be named when possible in singular but obviously this is not the case when it causes more confusion than anything else. Many ethnicity articles (see Franks, Celts, etc.) are named in plural and the singular is always discouraged in such cases (though "Foo people" is more common). Using "people" is correct when the article refers to a single ethnicity/nationality but it's obviously wrong when it's not the case as here.
WP:TITLE clearly allows it in some cases refering to this archived talk section. When the singular is patently wrong, plural must be used (and don't forget WP:IAR!!)
One good option could be to use Africans but African peoples looks even better to me. --Sugaar 16:28, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Filll and I have been trying to get some top-down planning involved in all these articles that have grown up and have overlapped each other. The top level would include articles like Race and Social construction. There is no need to hash out all of the issues regarding that rather grungy concept once again. When I started with Wikipedia, there was a pretty strong bias toward saying that "race is real." Since that time many changes have been made, and the last time I looked I got about halfway through without finding anything major to complain about. (I still need time to go back and fix the English here and there.) For the most part we can have a summary on the general topic, direct readers to the main article (Race), and then look at the [races] of Africa, or, more properly, the genetic history of the land.
I haven't studied the Social construction article yet, but that article would also give us the material that we need to summarize before trying to set out what "African people" are.
We also need to summarize Culture (I'm assuming there is such an article.) Cultural differences are some of the most power forces in convince individuals that "Those people are something else!"
Another thing we need to summarize is Music. Music may have been functioning in human societies even before language, and it is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the various peoples of Africa.
After we summarize all of these things we can bring in the specific features of Africa and its populations. I don't know how clear the genetic history of the Africans is after the main L1, L2, L3 differentiations. I do know that there is a long chapter on these differences in Cavalli-Sforza's big book. He also has correlated the genetic groups with the linguistic groups. I don't know about cultural groups. It's easier to learn to use chopsticks rather than to learn to speak Chinese, for instance, so some cultural features, particularly if they really improve the lives of people, may get transferred to other groups.
I think that what we do not want is a long list of randomly arranged groups. (One of the interesting things about news coverage of Afghanistan is that the names of ethnic groups are often listed, but no notice is paid to the fact that one group appears to be the remnants of Mongolian or other invaders from north of China who were left behind. They have a strikingly different appearance, and I wonder whether they are the subject of negative attention from the other groups.) We need to prepare readers to see connections and relationships. P0M 19:01, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Well the Hazara are actually looked upon with some racism by the rest of Afghans (guess I could find something about that if needed). But I really don't understand what all this discourse of you has to do with the conceptualiation of the article and specially its title.
Do you agree that it should be better named African peoples or Peoples of Africa? --Sugaar 22:45, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
My point that a list of names doesn't tell people much. A list of names with links would be better. A way to see how a group of these names relate to another group of names can be even more valuable.
African peoples would be o.k. with me. P0M 00:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


This is made to look that "African" is a synonym for "Negroid". In fact, original usage of "African" meant Berbers and Berber-like people, none of who would be classified as "African", under this article's usage. This article originally was created by someone after a heated discussion on the mulatto talk page, over what the description of a "mulatto" is was. Somebody disputed the "half-European, half-African" tag, since someone who is say half-French, half-Algerian would not fit that description. So this page was created. This whole article is, in my opinion, POV soapboxing. The creator of this article wants "African people" to mean one thing, so he/she creates a wikipedia page to that effect! Is there such a thing as a single "African people" using either of the definitions in the article? Of course not! I was tempted to create an article with the title "Africanism" showing how people attempt to generalise about deny the individuality of different peoples to fit racist political and social agendas, but didn't, as no such term is widely accepted. Same thing with "African people". No such thing exists with regard to the way this article presents it. I strongly feel that this article should be deleted, as it has no place in an encyclopedia. Dr Rgne (talk) 10:22, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Africans

Why "african peoples" and not "africans" or "peoples of africa"? Mbisanz 03:34, 16 September 2007 (UTC)