Magazine Puts Diversity in Vogue With All-Black Issue

“I don’t know about your 8% figure; it may or may not be correct, but I won’t quibble over percentages. Still, you call a mere 8% “the blackest”? Surely there is some slight admixture, and the Portuguese are somewhat darker than Spaniards, on the whole. But that infusion of blacks came in much AFTER the Moorish period. The Portuguese, who were the earliest Europeans to go exploring (well, excepting the Vikings), began venturing down the coast of Africa in the early 1400’s and brought back slaves, starting the African slave trade with Europe. Lisbon became a center of that commerce (until the Jews were expelled in the 1500s). Portugal ultimately controlled, for a time, virtually the entire coast of Africa (outside the Mediterreanean), an incredible span of empire, and it still retained its colonies in Angola and Mozambique up until very recently (1975). Even after Angola/Mozambique attained independence, there was a large backwash of refugees (many of them black or mixed-blood) into the mother country. Portugal was the first European colonizer of Africa, and also the last. This is where any black infusion came from. They were brought in as slaves, not as Moorish conquerors.

Incidentally, there were virtually no blacks in Morocco either during the time of Moorish rule in Spain. As with Portugal, they were not imported from south of the Sahara until centuries later (the 1400-1600’s).”

You are absolutely right. Not only were the Moors who invaded southern Europe via North Africa Mediterranean Caucasoid Arabs and Berbers, but the fact of the matter is that the genetic composition of North African populations has changed somewhat since medieval times. This is due to a combination of the trans-Saharan slave trade (which brought many black Africans to North Africa) and the free migration of Saharans (racially mixed but culturally Berber peoples such as the Tuaregs) to the coastal North African lands over the course of centuries.

Sub-Saharan admixture in modern North Africans is one of the major reasons why North African immigrants stick out like sore thumbs in places as close by as Sicily and Spain. Of course, Sicilians and Spaniards (areas ruled by medieval Moors) are also primarily descended from the people who were living in those lands prior to the Moorish conquests, and in the case of Sicily, of people who came after the Moors were expelled, such as the Normans, immigrants from mainland Italy and France who Latinized the island, etc.

Medieval Moors, or Saracens as some prefer to call them, were simply dark as compared to the Europeans they encountered, hence the term “Moor,” which means “dark” or “black.” They certainly were not black as we understand the term to mean today, which is sub-Saharan African. The Moors who invaded Spain encountered a much larger Hispano-Roman and Visigothic population that descended from a mixture of indigenous Iberians, Celts, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, and Visigoths.

Likewise, Moors in Sicily encountered a much larger Greek-speaking population that was descended from a mixture of indigenous Sicels, Sicans, Elymi, and of course Greeks and Romans. In both lands, Moorish residents and/or Muslims were expelled, though some did convert and assimilate into the general populations, hence a strain of North African ancestry in those areas, but to call Sicilians or Iberians “Arabs” or the like is simply genetically, as well as culturally, inaccurate.

Being of Sicilian descent and having visited the island, I can say with full certainty that North African immigrants are for the most part easily distinguished from the natives.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still many North Africans who are of exclusive Arab and/or Berber descent and hence lighter-skinned and Mediterranean Caucasoid (a few coastal Berbers are even blond), but many others, perhaps a majority, have darker complexions and display a mix of Arab/Berber/sub-Saharan characteristics.