A Chinese motorcycle dealer was last month deported from Kenya after a video leaked online showing him making a number of racist comments, igniting outrage across the country. He referred to the Kenyan president and people as ‘monkeys’ In the history of European cultures, the comparison of humans to apes and monkeys was disparaging from its very beginning.
When Plato 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.
In the Middle Ages, Christian discourse recognised monkeys and apes as devilish figures and representatives of lustful and sinful behaviour. In the 11th century, Cardinal Peter Damian gave an account of a monkey that was the lover of a countess from Liguria.
The jealous monkey killed her husband and fathered her child. From then on, the sexist manifestation of monkeys 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. The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies. One good century onwards, the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay, Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills”. 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.
In the following centuries, monkeynization would enter into different sciences and humanities. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields. Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue.
It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. 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.
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.
Why black people are compared to monkeys: A Chinese motorcycle dealer was last month deported from Kenya after a video leaked online showing him making a number of racist comments https://t.co/jtwWmVseGJ
— Breaking News (@News_Kenya) October 13, 2018