This raises an important issue
which we have to discuss. There has been much debate about how the issues of
race, and of racism, are to be confronted in responsible or committed
scholarship. In Europe and North America, the early middle ages in north-west
Europe, and elements of its culture, have been appropriated by Far-Right
nationalists and white supremacists. Indeed they have been for over a
century. Some have suggested that the correct response is to point out
the fact that there were people whom we might now consider as 'black' or as
People of Colour active in places like Britain and elsewhere. This is
certainly true – and it is certainly a valid, pragmatic response in the modern
context – but it is also problematic and, in my view, it isn’t historically or
politically radical enough. It’s been argued that the way to deal with western
racism is to abolish whiteness. This has been wilfully misread as calling for
some sort of race war or extermination of ‘the white race’; it doesn’t mean
that. It means you can only abolish a categorisation by abolishing the notions
that have been placed at its hierarchical centre, against which everything else
is judged. When did the Roman way of organising the world come to an end?
Essentially when the concept of the civic male was removed from its centre, or
abolished if you like.
It is not difficult to populate
the northern shores of the Roman Mediterranean as far as Hadrian’s Wall or the
Rhine-Danube frontier with what modern people might classify as people of
colour. People from North Africa moved all over the Roman World. What’s now
Tunisia was one of the most important and central parts of the Roman world; it
was rich and productive; North African products like the – to late Romanists at
least – famous African Red Slip Ware are found all
across the Mediterranean, east to west, round the coasts of Spain and France
and as far as the Irish Sea. The African church was an intellectual
power-house. Saint Augustine of Hippo was a North African. North Africa and
Egypt were the bread-baskets which provided Rome and Constantinople with most
of the grain to feed their huge populations. Carthage and Alexandria were
possibly the next two biggest cities of the Empire. There were contacts with
sub-Saharan Africa, mostly to East Africa via the Nile valley but also in the
West – even if the latter contacts were not as great as later. You can quibble
about minor issues. Were the numerous late Roman regiments of cavalry called mauri or Moors really recruited from North
African Moors? In my view mostly not, at least by the fourth century, but this doesn’t
affect the main point. Africans were everywhere in the Roman Empire, and
important within it.
There is no doubt that the
general public ought to be made more aware of this. Not just to stop people
claiming or accepting that the Roman Empire was only made up of ‘white’ people
but as a way of stopping people from thinking that Roman history is only for
white people. Historically, western Europe and Africa have not always stood as
opposed continents divided by a great sea, but have, for centuries, perhaps
millennia, also been part of a shared world linked by the Mediterranean. [Indeed before the seventh or eighth century, the Maghreb was much more a part of a shared world with Iberia, Italy and the south of France than part of the same world as sub-Saharan Africa.] This was never truer than during the Roman Empire. This is important.
Nonetheless, were one to do this,
one would still be left – no matter how hard one tried – with the inescapable
fact that the great bulk of the inhabitants of the Empire’s European provinces
were not, by modern European standards, people of colour. They would, in modern
European terms, be white. People of colour would still be a minority. The current
binary – and that sense of majority and minority – would be eternalised
Now, the Romans themselves didn’t
see the inhabitants of North Africa as different from themselves in any
significant somatic sense. They didn’t see North Africans as Aethiopes - dark-skinned Africans. When they
commented on the appearance of the North African Moors, the Mauri, the
ancestors of the modern Berbers, it was their curly hair that they commented
on. Some people have tried to argue that North Africans like Augustine were
’black’ and other people (with rather less justification) have tried to deny
this and claim that he was ‘white’. The truth of the matter is that we have no
idea what he looked like; it’s reasonable to suppose that a modern American
would see him as a person of colour. But it’s also reasonable to suppose that a
modern inhabitant of the Mediterranean regions, especially in North Africa,
wouldn’t. Many, maybe most, modern Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans and
Egyptians do not regard themselves as 'black' and can react quite angrily to
the suggestion that they might be – even if this attitude can sometimes be
grounded in their own, differently racist, attitudes towards sub-Saharan
Africa/ns. Anyone who has visited North Africa knows that, in terms of actual
skin colour there is a range of skin-tones from very dark to very pale (as
there always has been). That spectrum continues, without a break, on the other
side of the sea. People in Spain, Sicily and Italy might now make what they see
as a colour-based distinction between them and their North African neighbours
but this is entirely cultural.
This is the heart of the issue.
If one takes a colour chart and defines people within a certain part of that
spectrum as ‘people of colour’ according to modern, especially according to
modern American, categories, you are naturalising, eternalising and
essentialising a categorisation that is social and contingent. Because not
everyone sees the world now – let alone in the past – according to that schema,
you are colonising the past every bit as much as old Europeans did when they
made everyone in antiquity white, and scrubbed statues and so on to prove their
point. You’re still imposing a modern, western view (even if it’s a different
one from before) on the Mediterranean as a whole and North Africa in
particular. This isn’t decolonising the past. We need a more radical solution.
The issue is not about who was white and who was black or ‘of colour’; these
are all modern categories that didn’t apply in the Roman world. I don’t want to
use that point just to sweep the issue under the carpet, though. We can use it
much more creatively.
Here I return to phenomenology
and my critique of materialisms. People don’t engage with other people in their
unmediated materiality, any more than they interact with anything else like
that. People are categorised, as we’ve seen, in all sorts of ways, and
categories work as signs. When a modern racist sees a black person, he sees a
sign with a particular signified; when he sees a white person, he sees a
different one. A Roman presented with people who looked exactly like both of
those people didn’t see either of those things. A Roman saw a pale-skinned
northerner and a North African with, perhaps, a slightly darker skin than his
or her own as signifying very different things. Very different indeed,
and with very different relationships to his or her way of ordering the world,
its cultural capital and its power relations. They saw people differently; in
phenomenological terms, people were presented in entirely different form. Recognising
that the northern half of the Empire contained many people who wouldn’t now be
seen as ‘white’ doesn’t change – in a way – the balance of power or the fact
that people are still implicitly being contrasted with ‘whiteness’. But
‘whiteness’ can safely be abolished from the Roman world. The Romans didn’t see
themselves as white (certainly not as ‘pale-skinned’). How Romans saw self and
other was entirely different: if you went back in time and showed a Roman man a
picture of, say, David Lammy in a toga, or Naga Munchetty in traditional Roman
dress, and me with a top-knot wearing trousers and asked who he thought looked
the most different or ‘other’, compared to himself, he’d say me, and if he said
Naga it would be because she’s a woman. When Hadrian, an African abbot who
lived in southern Italy, accompanied the new Archbishop Theodore (who himself
came from Tarsus in modern Turkey) to Canterbury about a generation after the
close of our period (it was Hadrian’s 3rd trip to England, by the
way) no one remarked upon their skin colour. Whatever it might have looked like
to us, they didn’t see it. It was much more a sign of worrying otherness that
Theodore spoke Greek and might introduce Greek church customs!
Late Antique people didn’t look
like us in either sense – in the way they looked out and saw their fellow
people, or in the way they looked to the people looking at them. We need to
embrace the radical possibilities that this permits. What kinds of modern
people portray the people of late antiquity can’t be a question of
historical accuracy. The past is other. As I said it looked different, and it looked
differently. If I were casting a film set in the late Antique west I
would like to have all sorts of people play the parts in a way that underlined
the difference, but also the categories that late antique people have – have
Gauls played by south Asians, Spaniards by East Asians, Barbarians by white
people, Italians by African-Caribbean actors. It’d possibly make the Daily Mail
self-combust but that’d only be a side-benefit. It’d bring home the idea that
the late antique European/Mediterranean past doesn’t belong to any modern group
any more than any other. It’s open to everyone. I’d really like to see that one
day.
