‘Black’ is a visual and metaphorical idea about Africans and the Diasporas identity. The term has historically adopted negative associations – black magic, chaos, dirt, the 'unknown'– blackness is an uneasy phenomenon; but since society demands that skins darkly coloured, be defined, black people have been labelled by a term that tries to describe how they look literally, but also how they are assumed to be integrally – As Aesop warned: “What’s bred in the bone, sticks to the flesh!”

As early as the Middle Ages black - a colour much surrounded in folklore and mysticism - was seen as a judgement on the African race. Many assumptions about the black identity come from inherent associations negatively assigned to the colour. Historically black and white have been placed as opposites, representing spiritual, emotional and intellectual extremes.

In 1757, the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote on the subject of beauty and the sublime that: “The colours of beautiful bodies must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair”.

Therefore before race was categorised and assigned attributes, black already had a complex relationship with darkness - a state that represented the feared and unknown. Stories from travellers about the strange and incomprehensible cultures in Africa and the East, earned Africa it's position as the Dark continent.

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