# Historicizing meanings of blackness  
What if blackness is the name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire? Basically, that is precisely what I think blackness is. I want it to be my constant study. I listen for it everywhere (Moten, 2013, p. 778).  
It is often quite a surprise to Africans in the diaspora when continental Africans say that, before coming to the United States of America or Europe, they never saw themselves as 'black'. Indeed, identities in various continental African locations were often constructed on their particular familial or kinship group, or ethnic or national identification. However, this was clearly not uniform, given the vastness of the continent, its varying ethnicities and political histories that included military operations, such as the Boer Wars, that were taking place in southern Africa as early as the nineteenth century. ${ }^{1}$ Although many continental  
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[^0]:    1 Relatedly, the display in Europe of Sara Baartman (c.1790-1815), a southern African Khoisan woman, beginning in 1810 is one of the most glaring examples of racialized gender oppression.  
Africans did not have close daily interactions with Europeans that could produce daily racial subordination, the structural elements of enslavement, from the fifteenth century onwards, and succeeding colonialism were already racialized. Works such as Jemima Pierre's 2012 book on racialization, decolonization, and the African postcolony, in this case dealing specifically with Ghana, indicate a high degree of racialization already taking place on the continent with the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent colonialism. Her chapter 'Of natives and Europeans: colonialism and the ethnicization of racial dominance' addresses this issue and develops the argument by exploring skin bleaching and popular racial and colour coding in the contemporary period.