Nonetheless, while the myth of Irish slaves has been readily advanced—often in pursuit of White Supremacist agendas and despite the fact that some Irish people were brutally exploited as indentured laborers in the early days of the colony of Barbados—the Irish were involved in the Atlantic slave economy in other ways too. The reality is that many Irish made their livings, and indeed some their fortunes, as sailors, merchants, and plantation owners. But this story is far less familiar to us.
Despite these Atlantic-world connections, there has not been much of a visible black Irish population until very recently. However, seemingly no one was going to let the absence of actual black people get in the way of racist taunts. One early source of this in Ireland was the American minstrel show.
Minstrels fulfilled an important role in American society. To some extent they sated white demand and desire for the consumption of black performance—while continuing the work of debasing black people as the “other,” and positioning them as vastly inferior to white, a process that has been so central to the construction of white-American identity. To understand the extent to which the idea of black inferiority is encoded into the DNA of modernity, it is worth considering that the American minstrel show was the nation’s first truly homegrown popular entertainment form.
While we might be aware of minstrelsy’s popularity in the US, it comes as more of a surprise that it was highly regarded in Ireland, too. The Irish historian Liam Hogan argues that:
Blackface performers were immensely popular in Ireland . . . This famously raised the ire of Frederick Douglass during his sojourn in Ireland in 1845, when he noticed that an Irish actor was lampooning the Negro for money, remarking that he was “sorry to find one of these apes of the Negro had been recently encouraged in Limerick.”1
On the other side of the Atlantic, the scholar Robert Nowatski claims that this “in turn shaped how Irish-Americans saw themselves as they distanced themselves from African Americans through denigration and differentiation.”2
In some ways things didn’t seem to have changed all that much by the time I was growing up, well over one hundred years later. I was constantly confronted with one-dimensional caricatures of black people. I remember watching Menace II Society, and the guys I was watching it with struggled to get their heads around why I didn’t sound like I was from South Central LA, even though they had known me for years and knew I was from around the corner to them. In school I was expected to have certain characteristics, whereas other abilities were very much not assumed. I was put on the basketball team (and swiftly removed because I was rubbish).
I was a good dancer—no surprises there—but the attention my dancing received eventually made me so self-conscious that I became awkward. “Are you a singer?” was another frequent question; my response: “No, why?” “You just look like you would be.” I vowed never to sing.
It is important to challenge the idea that math is the exclusive heritage of other races and that black people can only excel in the performing arts. While I heard nonsense phrases like “Show us your Michael Jackson!” far more times than I should have, there was never any expectation that I might have some inherent mathematical capabilities. No one assumed that counting and coding were embedded somewhere deep within my DNA in the way that my ability to entertain or to use my body in an athletic way was supposed.
The story of indigenous African mathematical prowess isn’t widely known. It doesn’t fit the narrative of black primitivism. Yet math is everywhere in Africa. Ron Eglash has done groundbreaking work on indigenous mathematical systems as well as the way they can be utilized to teach math to American children, particularly those of African descent.
While the evidence of Africa’s mathematical history is scattered, there’s enough to suggest the existence of a lively and advanced mathematical culture existing across the entire continent. Observers from Claudia Zaslavsky to Ron Eglash have referenced age-grade systems as key institutions for social cohesion throughout traditional African societies and as places where complex mathematical systems are part of everyday procedures: “with an age-grade system . . . the little kids learn this one, and then the older kids learn this one, then the next age-grade initiation, you learn this one. And with each iteration of that algorithm, you learn the iterations of the myth. You learn the next level of knowledge . . .”3
The same exists in games:
All over Africa, you see this board game. It’s called Owari in Ghana . . . it’s called Mancala here on the East Coast, Bao in Kenya, Sogo elsewhere. Well, you see self-organizing patterns that spontaneously occur in this board game. And the folks in Ghana knew about these self-organizing patterns and would use them strategically. So this is very conscious knowledge.4
Eglash argues that, while binary coding is recognized as the foundation of modern computing, its African origins have, in typical fashion, been almost entirely obscured: “The most complex example of an algorithmic approach to fractals that I found was actually not in geometry, it was in a symbolic code, and this was Bamana sand divination.” He goes on to explain that this type of divination is popular throughout the continent, from east to west:
often the symbols are very well preserved, so each of these symbols has four bits—it’s a four-bit binary word—you draw these lines in the sand randomly, and then you count off, and if it’s an odd number, you put down one stroke, and if it’s an even number, you put down two strokes. And they did this very rapidly . . . And it turns out it’s a pseudo-random number generator using deterministic chaos. When you have a four-bit symbol, you then put it together with another one sideways. So even plus odd gives you odd. Odd plus even gives you odd. Even plus even gives you even. Odd plus odd gives you even. It’s addition modulo 2, just like in the parity bit check on your computer. And then you take this symbol, and you put it back in so it’s a self-generating diversity of symbols. They’re truly using a kind of deterministic chaos in doing this.
Now, because it’s a binary code, you can actually implement this in hardware—what a fantastic teaching tool that should be in African engineering schools . . . And the most interesting thing I found out about it was historical. In the twelfth century, Hugo of Santalla brought it from Islamic mystics into Spain. And there it entered into the alchemy community as geomancy: divination through the earth.
Leibniz, the German mathematician, talked about geomancy in his dissertation called “De Combinatoria.” And he said, “Well, instead of using one stroke and two strokes, let’s use a one and a zero, and we can count by powers of two.” Right? Ones and zeros, the binary code. George Boole took Leibniz’s binary code and created Boolean algebra, and John von Neumann took Boolean algebra and created the digital computer. So all these little PDAs and laptops—every digital circuit in the world—started in Africa.5
Despite the origin of these systems in Africa, Eglash made a pertinent point about this fact in a recent email exchange we had:
Ever since my TED talk, I have been getting a lot of questions about the use of binary codes in Africa and their significance in the history of Western computing. The temptation is to dive into the competition over “who discovered it first.” But that kind of competition is a framework created for intellectual property rights, for the “solitary genius” view of history.