[:en]Prince Harry to marry a girl of African ancestry – so what?[:]

[:en] 

Prince Harry falls in love with a person of African ancestry – so what?

Prince Harry is to marry Meghan Markle and many people think it marks some kind of breakthrough or major step for the British Royal Family.  There was even an article in This Day, Lagos, suggesting that Meghan would represent a major step for the British Royal Family.

Actually the British Royal Family has plenty of African blood from many generations.

However to focus on more recent history: the family of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of the Queen and father of Prince Charles has African ancestry. George Battenberg, the uncle of Philip, married Nadejda Torby, the descendant of Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet,  was a descendent of an African of noble parentage and later a  protege of Tsar Peter the Great called Abram Gannibal (see picture & note 7) . Gannibal was a military engineer and mathematician of considerable achievement.

 

When George and Nadejda married the British gutter press fantasised that the British Royal Family would soon produce Black babies!

 

The Pushkin descendants apart from the Royal family includes Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, one of the richest aristocrats in Britain, whose father  married Natalya Ayesha in 1978. The Grosvenor family wealth is in billions.

 

Even more recently in Joy Elias Rilwan ( Nigerian – Yoruba) married James Lascelles 57th in line to the English throne.

 

Why should anyone be surprised? Huge chunks of Western culture have an African ancestry from ancient Egypt, and African royals have been around Europe for centuries as have large populations of Africans. Apart from Pushkin, Beethoven, Alexandre Dumas,  many other famous artists had African ancestry. In Alexandre Dumas case his grand father, a French aristocrat, fell in love with his mother and paid exorbitantly for her freedom. He returned to France to claim his inheritance but before he could bring his love to France Napoleon banned Africans from France. Dumas pere became a great general in Napoleon’s army and his son Alexandre, became the author of Three Musketeers and the toast of Paris.

 

But does any of this  really matter? Does any of this affect the price of yams in Lagos? So I say it is good to get one’s history right, but other than that – so what if Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle. I wish them well and every happiness but how does this affect the price of yams in Lagos?

 

References:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Grosvenor,_Duchess_of_Westminster
  3. https://www.rbth.com/politics_and_society/2016/08/12/descendant-of-pushkin-and-the-romanovs-becomes-worlds-youngest-billionaire_620511
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lascelles
  5. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/pushkingenealogy.html
  6. image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9KDZT26BgY
  7. image: wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Петровское._Бюст_А.П._Ганнибала.jpg

 

23 Dec 2017[:]