The star host of the TFM Pape Cheikh Diallo equates blacks with monkeys during his program “Yewuleen”. A racist and incomprehensible verbal slip-up from a black man’s mouth. These are shocking remarks at a time when blacks around the world are asking for a little respect from them. Thierno Bocoumb of the action movement answers!

My brother Pope Sheikh, you cannot say that,… even jokingly

It is obvious that the talented animator of Tfm Pape Cheikh Diallo wanted to laugh at everything while declaring on television that we blacks look like monkeys. He ended by saying, “We have to laugh at everything”.
Beware, Baaye Sheikh, we can laugh at everything, but certainly not with everyone. And especially not with that.

When in 2018, H&M chose to make a black boy wear a sweatshirt flanked by the inscription “The coolest monkey in the jungle”, reactions against such an act shook the Swedish company and chain of ready-to-wear stores. Its stores have been ransacked, its advertising spots torn apart, calls for boycott have been launched around the world, broken collaborations, especially with the Canadian singer The Weeknd. H&M had finally withdrawn its advertising and apologized.

All this surge not to let pass the inscription «The coolest monkey of the jungle» is due to a story: to resemble the black monkey is a racist approach that has been theorized and maintained for centuries.

It is in the eighteenth century that we begin to explicitly compare Blacks and monkeys. In 1775, a German, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, seeking to define the notion of race, had explained that black skin humans embody a racial degeneration. In France, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) will be the one who will explicitly compare blacks and monkeys in order to demonstrate the supposed racial inferiority of blacks. Then a new science was created by so-called scientists in the 18th century: anthropology or the “science of races” which had authorized deprecative representations of the black race.

These learned transformists, who defend the idea of a transformation of living beings had demonstrated their thesis through the question of the missing link: the black populations will be the populations supposed to be intermediaries between the monkey and the Man, white, civilized. They took hold of the anatomy of the Blacks, measuring them in all directions, to try to scientifically demonstrate that their characteristics, for example their jaws, their limbs, remained at an intermediate stage, between the monkey and the Man, white.

Even the valiant Senegalese tirailleurs who had fought in the various wars were not spared by mockery referring to monkeys: the Germans did not fail to present our grandparents as chimpanzees and, They mocked the French officers, saying, “They are thinking of training the monkeys to become combatants of civilization.” The image of the gorilla-soldier had been widespread.

Even the valiant Senegalese tirailleurs who had fought in the various wars were not spared by mockery referring to monkeys: the Germans did not fail to present our grandparents as chimpanzees and, They mocked the French officers, saying, “They are thinking of training the monkeys to become combatants of civilization.” The image of the gorilla-soldier had been widespread.

Among racists, the reference to the monkey remains omnipresent when it comes to insulting black people. And it is those who live with them who suffer and suffer racism in their flesh.

To say that blacks look too much like monkeys is a language disaster. To laugh about it is even more serious. Those who make this comparison laugh. But their victims suffer enormously.

Christiane Taubira, a former French Seal Keeper, was in pain when an elected official compared her to “a monkey who wants to eat a banana”. It was not funny. Complaints followed that statement.

In 2006 when Samuel Eto’o, Cameroonian striker from Barcelona, was the target of monkey calls from Racing Santander fans during a Spanish Liga match, it wasn’t funny.

Comparing black people to monkeys is an unacceptable racist insult. And when the insult comes out of the mouth of a black, it is a whole racist theory of several generations that is thus perpetuated, reinforced. But it is also pure mockery against all the battles waged against this racist theory based on the supposed inferiority of the black race.

Thierno Bocoum
President of the AGIR movement