It doesn't take a political correctness course to know that it's not appropriate to call people of different skin color "niggers". Many Westerners also avoid talking about "blacks" or "Negroes". Yesterday, when translating a certain book, I instinctively replaced Africa with "Black Continent". But if sometimes this term has not come to be associated with racism? If we avoid talking about "black" more and more often then maybe "Black Land" should be deleted from the dictionary?
A short search proves that there is no such need. Contrary to popular belief, the term "Black Land" does not refer to the skin color of most of the inhabitants of the African continent.
As Mirosław Bańko explains in Dictionary of periphrases or omnipresent expressions , the names "Black Land" and "Black Continent" come from the title of the book of the English traveler Henry Morton Stanley ( Through the Dark Continent published in 1878) ). Stanley wrote about the black, literally "dark" continent, meaning not so much indigenous peoples as uncharted and unmapped (and therefore "dark") territories.
Is it racist to call Africa the Black Continent? None of these things. The illustration shows a map of Africa from colonial times.
Already several thousand years earlier, the ancient Egyptians used the same name for their country. In their language, "Kemet" was just "Black Land". Once again, however, it had nothing to do with the color of the skin. It was about the color of the fertile soil on the Nile, contrasted with the neighboring desert, that is, the "Red Land".
It was thanks to the book "Through the Dark Continent" that the Dark Continent became the Dark Continent.
Paradoxically, the "Black Land" came to the European language not thanks to the ancient name of Egypt and specialists exploring the ancient language, but thanks to a traveler who made an expedition into the Congo for money New York Herald and Daily Telegraph .
As usual, the adventurous and suicidal (only Stanley of the participating Europeans) expedition was much more memorable for readers than scientific deliberations.
Anyway. If someone cares about political correctness, then in the case of "Africa", he does not have to worry about anything. Turns out no one meant "black people" when they came up with "The Dark Continent".