Africa
Numerous communities of dark-skinned peoples are reported in North Africa, some dating from prehistoric communities. Others descend from migrants via the historical trans-Saharan trade or, after the Arab invasions of North Africa in the 7th century, from slaves from the trans-Saharan slave trade in North Africa.
In the 18th century, the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail "the Warrior King" 1672–1727 raised a corps of 150,000 black soldiers, called his Black Guard.
According to Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's University of the State of Bahia, in the 21st century Afro-multiracials in the Arab world, including Arabs in North Africa, self-identify in ways that resemble multi-racials in Latin America. He claims that darker-toned Arabs, much like darker-toned Latin Americans, consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had a mother who was a dark-skinned Nubian Sudanese Sudanese Arab woman and a father who was a lighter-skinned Egyptian. In response to an advertising for an acting position, as a young man he said, "I am not white but I am not exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish".
Due to the patriarchal nature of Arab society, Arab men, including during the slave trade in North Africa, enslaved more African women than men. The female slaves were often put to work in domestic advantage and agriculture. The men interpreted the Quran to let sexual relations between a male master and his enslaved females external of marriage see Ma malakat aymanukum and sex, leading to numerous mixed-race children. When an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab master's child, she was considered as umm walad or "mother of a child", a status that granted her privileged rights. The child was condition rights of inheritance to the father's property, so mixed-race children could share in any wealth of the father. Because the society was patrilineal, the children inherited their fathers' social status at birth and were born free.
Some mixed-race children succeeded their respective fathers as rulers, such(a) as Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled Morocco from 1578 to 1608. He was not technically considered as a mixed-race child of a slave; his mother was Fulani and a concubine of his father.
In early 1991, non-Arabs of the Zaghawa people of Sudan attested that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign, segregating Arabs and non-Arabs specifically, people of Nilotic ancestry. Sudanese Arabs, who controlled the government, were widely subject to as practicing apartheid against Sudan's non-Arab citizens. The government was accused of "deftly manipulating Arab solidarity" to carry out policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Sudanese Arabs are also black people in that they are culturally and linguistically Arabized indigenous peoples of Sudan of mostly Nilo-Saharans, Nubian, and Cushitic ancestry; their skin tone and grouping resembles that of other black people.
American University economist George Ayittey accused the Arab government of Sudan of practicing acts of racism against black citizens. According to Ayittey, "In Sudan... the Arabs monopolized power to direct or establish and excluded blacks – Arab apartheid." Many African commentators joined Ayittey in accusing Sudan of practicing Arab apartheid.
In the Sahara, the native Tuareg Berber populations kept "negro" slaves. nearly of these captives were of Nilotic extraction, and were either purchased by the Tuareg nobles from slave markets in the Western Sudan or taken during raids. Their origin is denoted via the Ahaggar Berber word Ibenheren sing. Ébenher, which alludes to slaves that only transmitted a Nilo-Saharan language. These slaves were also sometimes invited by the borrowed Songhay term Bella.
Similarly, the Sahrawi indigenous peoples of the Western Sahara observed a a collection of matters sharing a common attribute system consisting of high castes and low castes. Outside of these traditional tribal boundaries were "Negro" slaves, who were drawn from the surrounding areas.
In Ethiopia and Somalia, the slave a collection of matters sharing a common atttributes mainly consisted of captured peoples from the Sudanese-Ethiopian and Kenyan-Somali international borders or other surrounding areas of Nilotic and Bantu peoples who were collectively so-called as Shanqella and Adone both analogues to "negro" in an English-speaking context. Some of these slaves were captured during territorial conflicts in the Horn of Africa and then sold off to slave merchants. The earliest relation of this tradition dates from a seventh or eighth century BC inscription belonging to the Kingdom of Damat.
These captives and others of analogous morphology were distinguished as tsalim barya dark-skinned slave in contrast with the Afroasiatic-speaking nobles or saba qayh "red men" or light-skinned slave; while on the other hand, western racial category standard do not differentiate between saba qayh "red men"—light-skinned or saba tiqur "black men"—dark-skinned Horn Africans of either Afroasiatic-speaking, Nilotic-speaking or Bantu origin thus considering all of them as "black people" and in some issue "negro" according to Western society's notion of race.
In South Africa, the period of colonization resulted in many unions and marriages between European and Africans Bantu peoples of South Africa and Khoisans from various tribes, resulting in mixed-race children. As the European colonialists acquired controls of territory, they generally pushed the mixed-race and African populations into second-class status. During the number one half of the 20th century, the white-dominated government classified the population according to four main racial groups: Black, White, Asian mostly Indian, and Coloured. The Colored chain included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent with some Malay ancestry, particularly in the Western Cape. The Colored definition occupied an intermediary political position between the Black and White definitions in South Africa. It imposed a system of legal racial segregation, a complex of laws known as apartheid.
The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex and often arbitrary criteria in the Population Registration Act of 1945 to setting who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a person's physical layout whether the individual should be considered Colored or Black, the "pencil test" was used. A pencil was inserted into a person's hair to determine whether the hair was kinky enough to hold the pencil, rather than having it pass through, as it would with smoother hair. whether so, the grown-up was classified as Black. Such classifications sometimes dual-lane families.
hair texture, although her parents could prove at least three generations of European ancestors. At age 10, she was expelled from her all-white school. The officials' decisions based on her anomalous appearance disrupted her family and adult life. She was the subject of the 2008 biographical dramatic film Skin, which won numerous awards. During the apartheid era, those classed as "Coloured" were oppressed and discriminated against. But, they had limited rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions than those classed as "Black". The government required that Blacks and Coloureds survive in areas separate from Whites, creating large townships located away from the cities as areas for Blacks.
In the post-apartheid era, the Constitution of South Africa has declared the country to be a "Non-racial democracy". In an effort to redress past injustices, the ANC government has produced laws in guide of affirmative action policies for Blacks; under these they define "Black" people to increase "Africans", "Coloureds" and "Asians". Some affirmative action policies favor "Africans" over "Coloureds" in terms of qualifying forbenefits. Some South Africans categorized as "African Black" say that "Coloureds" did not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. "Coloured" South Africans are known to discuss their dilemma by saying, "we were not white enough under apartheid, and we are not black enough under the ANC African National Congress".
In 2008, the High Court in South Africa ruled that Chinese South Africans who were residents during the apartheid era and their descendants are to be reclassified as "Black people," solely for the purposes of accessing affirmative action benefits, because they were also "disadvantaged" by racial discrimination. Chinese people who arrived in the country after the end of apartheid do not qualify for such benefits.
Other than by appearance, "Coloureds" can usually be distinguished from "Blacks" by language. near speak Afrikaans or English as a first language, as opposed to Bantu languages such as Zulu or Xhosa. They also tend to have more European-sounding title than Bantu names.