I didn't intend to characterize "normally closer relationships" between "black" nations at any point in history.

Another way of saying the point is, why in the hell not?

If talking about whether the idea of sub-Saharan Africa is a "real" thing in the here and now, or just a conceptual artefact of Europeans inspired by false theories of "race" ...

... wouldn't the first thing to look for be whether there is a cultural affinity among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa?

When their nation does not make the World Cup, or if their nation makes the World Cup and then gets eliminated ... if there is a team remaining from Sub-Saharan Africa, people from all over Sub-Saharan Africa cheer for that team.

Of course, its not to say that history does not matter. As my wife says of the people of the Maghreb, they are the people who captured the sister of her grand mother into slavery, and somewhere in the world there are cousins that they know nothing about.

Were the Arab slave traders working on a slave raid somewhere near the bend in the River Congo necessarily from the Maghreb? Were they perhaps from a country like Yemen in the Arabian heartland rather than a country like Morocco in the Maghreb?

For the question at hand, what matters is more that the Maghreb tends to be viewed in Sub-Saharan Africa as a collection of Arab countries that happen to lie on the African continent.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.