Ham and the rationale for colonization

European Christian nations used the Hamitic myth as a rationale for slavery and the colonial endeavors of various empires. In the 15th century the Portuguese began a regular program of slave-raids. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, a scholar in the court of Prince Henri the Navigator, references the curse of Ham in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, a travel narrative that glorifies the nation of Portugal and the colonization of Africa:

Black were Moors like the others, though their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [sic], cursing him in this way: that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. And from this race these blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Rodric of Toledo and Joesphus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Wlter, with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out on the Ark.

George Best, a chronicler of travel narratives, also used the curse theory to define racial difference. These texts were hugely influential in early modern England, and helped create British society’s understanding of a larger world they had never seen. George Best, in A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie. . . (1578) wrote:

Blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, all still polluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shal not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus blacke.

Best then goes on to recount what had become a common argument, that God cursed Ham’s son, Chus [sic], and his descendants with Blackness. He thus concludes,

And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa... the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.

In her 1969 article, “The Hamitic hypothesis; its origin and function in time perspective,” Edith Sanders writes, “It becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology.” This story lingers in the minds of Europeans, moving outward, adapted as needed, while the colonial occupation of most of the world continues—like a virus, it spreads.

Chouki El Hamel writes in Black Morocco:

Not until the Western European Enlightenment and the rise of empirical science did the religious account of the origins of race start to crumble, only to give rise, unfortunately, to racist pseudoscientific concepts of human classifications based on the unfortunate distortion of Darwin’s theory, namely social Darwinism. But even the conceptual revolution of the Enlightenment did not prevent the 19th century European travelers to Africa from referring to the Hamitic theory in their travel accounts. As contemporary historian William McKee Eans concluded: ‘By studying the shifting ethnic identifications of the ‘sons of Ham,’ by following their journey in myth from the land of Canaan to the land of Guinea, we can perhaps learn something about the historical pressures that shaped modern white racial attitudes.'

Just as spices travel so does the sinful idea of the Hamitic curse. The Hamitic myth and its racist connotations were used in the religious and cultural history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Ham, chattel slavery, and the Americas

The curse of Ham mythology, a mainstay of early modern European thought around race and national identity, was a primary tool of propaganda in early America to condone and ensure the longevity of chattel slavery. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning gives some brief examples of this transfer of thought from Europe to America and its weaponization in the infant nation:

In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, ‘shall be lord over’ the ‘cursed race of Cham’—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or ‘the Southern man,’ a ‘black deformed elf,’ and 'the Northern white, like unto God himself.’ Five years later, Clergyman released the gargantuan four-volume Hakluytus Posthumus of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the ‘filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.’ These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.

Frederick Douglass, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1849, writes of the curse of Ham’s fragility, and the unstable border between white and Black, in a specifically American context:

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.

This passage from Douglass is significant because it showcases how the instability of race is not only a contemporary concern. These constructions have been built upon shaky ground.

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Benjamin Palmer, the “founding father” of the Southern Presbyterian church, a famous orator, and the founder of Rhodes College, frequently leaned on the curse of Ham mythology to persuade the public of his secessionist politics. A vehement supporter of segregation, and in particular, the enslavement of Black Africans, the mythology of Ham became his primary means of the moral and religious justification for slavery in his many sermons.

One of the many examples of these speeches is Palmer’s “National Responsibility before God,” delivered June 13, 1861. Stephen R. Haynes, in his book Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, notes:

“In ‘National Responsibility before God,’ Palmer relied on Noah's curse to explain the historical position of the African, to confirm the dependency of the American Negro, and to provide a theological justification for slavery. He established the importance of Genesis 9 by noting that ‘if we ascend the stream of history to its source, we find in Noah's prophetic utterances to his three sons, the fortunes of mankind presented in perfect outline.’ The benediction given to Shem, Palmer writes, marks him for a ‘destiny predominantly religious,’ and the divine trust of the Hebrew Semites until the time of Christ was to ‘testify for the unity of God against the idolatry of mankind.’ Turning to the descendants of Noah's son Japheth, Palmer contends that the ‘enlargement’ promised him in Noah's blessing can be seen in ‘the hardy and aggressive families of this stock [that] have spread over the larger portion of the earth's surface, fulfilling their mission as the organ of human civilization.’ According to Palmer, the task of civilizing the world, assigned first to Greeks and Romans and later to the various nations of Europe, has been realized through Japhetic achievements in the scientific, artistic, and public realms. Finally, Palmer delineates the fortunes of Ham as indicated in Noah's prophecy:

‘Upon Ham was pronounced the doom of perpetual servitude—proclaimed with double emphasis, as it is twice repeated that he shall be the servant of Japheth and the servant of Shem. Accordingly, history records not a single example of any member of this group lifting itself, by any process of self‐development, above the savage condition. From first to last their mental and moral characteristics, together with the guidance of Providence, have marked them for servitude; while their comparative advance in civilization and their participation in the blessings of salvation, have ever been suspended upon this decreed connexion with Japhet and with Shem.’”

Ham in our contemporary culture

The curse of Ham mythology is also still a part of our artistic and cultural development, alluded to over and over again in literature, television, and art. Many Black artists, writers, and entertainment creators have used it strategically in their art-making, developing a critical frame in which viewers and readers can question the implications of racial difference, and creating counter narratives to reclaim the story as one of their own. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Sula alludes to the Hamitic myth from the consciousness of a white bargeman who finds Chicken Little’s drowned body. This is a moment in which Black people’s deaths are not mourned, but are merely an inconvenience to white people:

“A bargeman, poling away from the shore, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way n—s did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.”

The Malediction of Cham 

Visual and performance artist Marielle Plaisir’s series The Malediction of Cham, reimagines Blackness—the black in the paintings is created through the layering of many colors, rather than using black paint straight from the tube. Plaisir shows the multitudes that exist in Blackness and questions the history that has pushed Black people into a realm of difference. 

‍Black and holy

Nina Peton, an anthropologist who did field work in Morocco in the 1950’s, collected a narrative on the Blackness of the Harratin in the Draa valley: 

“The Harratin relate that they are the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, and that once upon a time they used to be white. One day, however, Ham protected his head during a heavy rain-storm by carrying the Koran on top of it. The rain was so heavy that it washed all the characters of the holy book on to Ham’s skin; these characters, being sacred, were inedible, and so they turned Ham and his offspring black forever!”

This is the power of bringing truth to the stories we are given. In this counter narrative, Blackness is no curse, it is a sacred gift.

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Works cited

Best, George. A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Forbisher Generall: Divided into three Bookes. London, England: The Argonaut Press, 1938.  

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849.  

Eannes de Azurara, Gomes. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London, England: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896.  

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.  

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.  

Sanders, Edith R. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 521–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179896.

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