‘Black’ before colonial racial theory: a historical analysis of ‘Black’ in precolonial African primary sources and languages

This study examines whether precolonial Africans described themselves and other Africans as ‘Black’ before European colonial contact, directly refuting the unsourced claim that Indigenous African societies did not use ‘Black’ as a racial identity outside Western influence. Integrating historical analysis of primary sources with historical-linguistic reconstruction, it draws evidence from North, West, East, Central, and East-Central Africa. The Old Egyptian adjective km ‘Black’ designates high-ranking officials across the 5th and 6th Dynasties and is extended to Nubians through the 25th Dynasty, continuing into Coptic kēm and the fourth-century Geʼez inscription of King Ezana, whose ṣalīm ‘Black’ is clarified through Ethio-Semitic cognates. Reconstructed Bantu terms dated to roughly 2,500 years before present preserve human-class words for persons of Black complexion. This multi-regional, multilingual evidence establishes that Africans designated themselves and others as Black using indigenous terminology millennia before fifteenth-century European colonial contact.