{"id":65073,"date":"2016-02-29T10:47:54","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T08:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/comparing-black-people-to-monkeys-has-a-long-dark-simian-history-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2016-02-29T10:47:54","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T08:47:54","slug":"comparing-black-people-to-monkeys-has-a-long-dark-simian-history-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/comparing-black-people-to-monkeys-has-a-long-dark-simian-history-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing black people to monkeys has a long, dark simian history | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"
The climax of popular simianisation was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood\u2019s horror factory, King Kong.<\/span> Shutterstock<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This article is a foundation essay. These are longer than usual and take a wider look at a key issue affecting society.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the history of European cultures, the comparison of humans to apes and monkeys was disparaging from its very beginning.<\/p>\n

When Plato \u2013 by quoting Heraclitus \u2013 declared apes ugly in relation to humans and men apish in relation to gods, this was cold comfort for the apes. It transcendentally disconnected them from their human co-primates. The Fathers of the Church went one step further: Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Isidore of Seville compared pagans to monkeys.<\/p>\n

In the Middle Ages, Christian discourse recognised simians as devilish figures and representatives of lustful and sinful behaviour. As women were subject to an analogous defamation, things proceeded as one would expect. In the 11th century, Cardinal Peter Damian gave an account of a monkey that was the lover of a countess from Liguria. The jealous simian killed her husband and fathered her child.<\/p>\n

Hotbed of monsters<\/h2>\n

Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosis even let one of Adam\u2019s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair. She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.<\/p>\n

From then on, the sexist manifestation of simianisation was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. He characterised the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals.<\/p>\n

The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. In the story\u2019s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.<\/p>\n

A good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe\u2019s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that \u201cwomen have conceived by drills\u201d. His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.<\/p>\n

In the following centuries, simianisation would enter into different sciences and humanities. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields.<\/p>\n

King Kong\u2019s reel racism<\/h2>\n

Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue. It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. The climax was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood\u2019s horror factory, King Kong.<\/p>\n

At the time of King Kong\u2019s production the public in the US was riveted by a rape trial. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. \u2018Scottsboro Alabama\u2019 carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses.<\/p>\n

One of the 56 images showed the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline \u201cGuilty Rape\u201d. The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless white girl.<\/p>\n

The artists fully understood the interplay of racist ideology, reactionary reporting and southern injustice. They recognised that the white public had been thoroughly conditioned by the dehumanising violence of animal comparisons and simianised representations, as in the reel racism of King Kong.<\/p>\n

Labelled with disease<\/h2>\n

Animalisation and even bacterialisation are widespread elements of racist dehumanisation. They are closely related to the labelling of others with the language of contamination and disease. Images that put men on a level with rats carrying epidemic plagues were part of the ideological escort of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese racism.<\/p>\n

Africa is labelled as a contagious continent incubating pestilences of all sorts in hot muggy jungles, spread by reckless and sexually unrestrained people. AIDS in particular is said to have its origin in the careless dealings of Africans with simians, which they eat or whose blood they use as an aphrodisiac.<\/p>\n

This is just the latest chapter in a long and ugly line of stereotypes directed against different people like the Irish or Japanese, and Africans and African Americans in particular. To throw bananas in front of black sportspeople is a common racist provocation even today.<\/p>\n

Why are blacks abused?<\/h2>\n

What explains this disastrous association of black people defamed as simian? A combination of factors might be the cause:<\/p>\n