User talk:Tom Bailey

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Welcome!

Hello Tom Bailey, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  Pamri • Talk • Reply 13:24, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Hannibal's ethnicity

Hello Tom Bailey. I´ve deleted the paragraph you had added to the article on Hannibal (and that you have on your User Page). I did this because what you've written is clearly Racialist POV (not explicitly Racist, though). You see, the racial categories you work with have no meaning at all for many people around the world (look up the Race article and connected pages). Hannibal was probably similiar to other North Africans (past and present), and this in a time well before major Sub-Saharan influences. For many those populations are White or Caucasoid (see also Caucasian race)! The same can be said of the Phoenicians, from whom the Carthaginians were derived. How can you say he was "an African of the purist type with rings in his ears" - can you tell someone's "pure type" (whatever that is!) by their earings? If you want to use the information on the fact that you do not know exactly how he looked like (following Hennebert, who wrotte in 1870 - are you sure he is the "the leading authority on Hannibal"? 135 years of academic work have passed since then...), I think that that could be interesting and relevant, but saying he was a Black African using as source a book from 1936 that uses the category of Negro is obviously POV. You say "Above all, let us remember that he was an African", by that meaning he was not white. Well, he was a North African and in that article it is stated that "North Africa is often set apart from the sub-Saharan African region, as the desert serves more of an obstacle to communication than the sea itself. It is principally inhabited by Berbers and Arabs, who are scarcely distinguishable physically, along with minorities of other ethnic groups. The Berbers are the indigenous people in the Maghreb, and are believed to have come from the east. The Berber peoples range from very fair to quite dark. The majority of people in North Africa are ultimately of Berber descent, but, outside of most of Morocco and parts of Algeria, most identify themselves as Arabs." Of course, in Hannibal's time the Arabs weren't around in North Africa, but the Berbers are of Upper Paleolithic origin, that is to say they represent the main populational group in North Africa well before Hannibal's time! And we would be speaking of Mediterranean North African populations (look up the genetics and phenotypical sections on the Berber article), not the deep desert ones... I hope you understand my reasons for the removal of you paragraph. The Ogre 15:02, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Hello Tom Bailey. I believe you are making some confusions. Of course Hannibal had to look like something! But the fact is that we do not have an acceptable likeness of his image, even if there are some coins (and of course we all would like to see them!). And I must note that coins say nothing about his colour... And of course I agree with you that European Racism has, over the centuries, tried to portrait Hannibal as White, whatever that means! And of course there were people in Antiquity most people in the Western world today would classify as Black (but maybe not in other areas of the world - look up the civil war in Sudan, namely in Darfur, between "Arabs" and "Blacks"; to an European eye thay are all Black Africans, but not for themselves...). And of course there has been a lot of withewash on the participation of people we could consider Black in World History. However, and that is why I said you should look up the makeup of Mediterranean North African populations (looking up the genetics and phenotypical sections on the Berber article), even if "it is historically clear that mankind went north from southern Africa" (in fact, not "from southern Africa", but more a less from East Central Africa), they did not do so in a straight line (why don't you look up the The Genographic Project home page and look at the early migration routes routes of human populations- there you can see that North Africans mostly came from the Middle East, as well, obviously, as from other places, including Sub-Saharan Africa; also look at the world distribution of haplogroups, Mitochondrial and Y chromosome). And this is not all. The question is not only that people in Antiquity did not have the same concept and categories of Race as people in Modern times have. The question is that we, today, do not all have the some concepts and categories of race! Someone that you may find Black, I may not, or vice-versa. Racial categories are social definitions based, among other things, in different cultural appropriations of physical appearance. Furthermore, even if Eurocentric narratives and images of Hannibal are clearly Racialist POV, bluntly and definitively stating that Hannibal was "Black" is also an extreme statement of the same type, not only because we have no reliable sources, but also because the category itself is problematic. Nevertheless one could say that there is a polemic about such an issue as Hannibal's Ethnicity or Race (and also because Ethnicity and Race are polemic...) and explain it. That would not be POV. Once again, I hope you understand my reasoning. Please Tom Bailey (and others) properly sign your comments on talk pages using four tildes (4 time the symbol ~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. By the way, it's The Ogre, not The Org. The Ogre 15:25, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mago Barca the explorer

If you want to find out more about Hannibal's possible Black African origins, make a research of Mago Barca the explorer (not to confuse with Hannibal's brother Mago Barca), who crossed the Sahara several times and prided himself not to need any drinking on his way. He is the strongest link between the Barca family and Sub-Saharan Africa. But I know nothing about him marrying a woman from there. Wandalstouring 18:22, 3 September 2006 (UTC)