I've been twiddling my thumbs for some time on what topic to write about and every time I sit down and write a myTake I end up deleting it before posting. There are a lot of diffrent topics I want to write about from politics to skin care tips, but I've realized that not a lot of people on this website know anything about the Horn of Africa. Everyone thinks that everyone in sub-Saharan Africa looks the same. When you imagine someone from sub-Saharan Africa, you immediately think of people who look like this
and in most of the continent they do look like that. However if I ever tell people where I'm from they immediately ask if I'm mixed with white or arab, because they can't seem to wrap their head around someone from sub-Saharan Africa looking like me. I'm from an ethnic group in the Horn of Africa (I will not reveal which group for privacy reasons).
The Horn on Africa, sometimes referred to as East Africa consists of the countries Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. The two major ethnic groups that reside here are the Habesha (Ethiopia and Eritrea) and Somali ( Somalia and parts of Djibouti), although the Habesha are broken up into smaller tribes (Oromo, Amhara, etc.) with differences in language, culture, and genotype, while the Somali are one homogeneous ethnicity/tribe that break up into clans. However, the one thing they share is a similar (sometimes called Cushitic) phenotype that differs from the rest of the continent.
COMPARED to other sub-Sahran Africans like the Bantu and West Africans, the Habesha and Somali have narrower noses and features, straighter hair, lighter skin, and thinner lips, but compared to Europeans and Arabs (Middle East and North Africa) we still have dark skin and full lips. For this reason, many people assume we are the love-children of Caucasian or Arab and Bantu, but we're not. We're are own ethnic group and although many us have some percentage of Arab (North Africa and Middle East) DNA it's only natural due to our proximity/relations to the region and we also share a similar haplogroup with North Africans.
However, we do not always have light skin and straight hair , there are tons of us who have darker skin or curly hair. It's actually an even split between straight hair and curly hair and another even split between darker skin and lighter skin.
It's super easy to tell a black American/black Caribbean apart from a Habesha/Somalia. During the Atlantic Slave Trade, Africans were taken from West and Central Africa, but not from the Horn of Africa, so black people who can trace their ancestry to slavery are actually a majority West/Central African with some European. Even if they have naturally straight hair, a narrow nose, and light skin, they will not look like a Habesha/Somali.
There are certain traits like Habesha eyes or a Somali forehead, that they will lack. Another dead giveaway would be the nose, since West African noses are are very different from a Horn of African nose. The uniqueness of the Habesha and Somali is so strong that with a trained eye, you could easily differentiate between the two.
Can you tell if someone is Habesha/Somali ? Do any of you come from a misrepresented or unknown ethnic group?
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