A Facebook poster from LA, in an epic sleight of hand, repurposed the story of Calafia (yes, it’s spelled that way) to fit his own modern socio-political needs, wrote, “The state of California was named after the mythical Black(Moorish) Queen Califia. (Khalifa).” Ok. The story of Calafia stems from a series of medieval stories translated into Spanish from the Portuguese. The term in Spanish and Portuguese, that means dark or black, but not white—is a case of what gets lost in translation. This idea that Amazon warrior queen Calafia was a Black African is a modern American binary interpretation.
Then the poster went on to say, “It is well documented that of the 44 people who founded the City of Los Angeles, 26 were of Afrikan (Moorish) descent. What is amazing and not taught in California schools is that the majority of the founders of San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego were of Afrikan (Moorish) descent, or that Orange County, Beverly Hills and Malibu were once owned by people of Afrikan (Moorish) descent. According to the story, California was an island where only Black (Moorish) women lived, gold was the only metal and pearls were as common as rocks. The women were the most powerful women in the world. When Cortez arrived in California, searching for this mythical queen, her influence on him was so severe, he paid tribute to this powerful Black (Moorish) Woman Queen Califia by naming California after her. California literally means, “the land where Black (Moorish) women live." History has been hidden for a long time.”
Sigh. Of course he provided no references for that last bit of repurposed history. Whereas it is true that Hernán Córtez named the long peninsula Baja California Sur, thinking it was an island, after Calafia. But we seem to be mixing apples with oranges. Calafia was an Amazon from the Hyperborean north, beyond the realm civilized (Classical) Mediterranean world. She was other, therefore exotic. And the term negra could mean swarthy, or dark, but not African. And certainly not a Moor. This is like saying Cleopatra, a Ptolemaic Greek, was black.
Also the term, Moor is not synonymous with Black. If anything, it’s the opposite. A Moor can be anyone from Arabia to Iberia to North África—Egypt, Alexandria, Morocco Mauritania—which probably means homeland the Moors—regardless of skin color, and the Berbers of North Africa were all called Moors— because they converted to Islam, and spoke Arabic—and literally shoehorned their own culture into Arabic ideals in order to be considered part of the elite ruling classes.
The term Moorish refers more to religion and the Arabic language/culture rather than to skin color. Also, for centuries, the Arabs were the undisputed ruling class, so to self-identify as a Moor was to be part of the ruling elite, or not be a slave (Black). The matrilineal Berbers were in a fix and they had to wholesale invent patrilineal Semitic genealogies in order to fit into an Arabized world.
The Habesha Ethiopians, Eritreans (Abyssinians), and Tuareg—who self-identify as Berbers, though dark-skinned, do not consider themselves as Black, but Semitic, though some are also Christian. And for the record, sub-Saharan and Sahel Africans, the Arabized Maghreb Berbers, aka Moors, during the 15th c., are light-skinned.
Sadly when the Berbers began to identify with the ruling class Arabs they gave up their matrilineal society and had to construct a patrilineal Arabian lineage which create it all kinds of havoc—especially for the Berber women who lost most of their freedoms in a Moorish world.
Moorish means more than anything else—meant non-Christian, therefore, in European eyes, exotic. Shakespeare’s Othello was a Moor. You see where this leads to. Let’s just say, it’s complicated. And if you actually read the novella from which the name comes,
Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) penned or collected by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in the late 15th c., Calafia is referred to as an Amazonian warrior woman who lived in the far north—beyond civilization.
So here we have a strong woman, with warrior superpowers, from a post-Moorish subjugated world, call it Iberia, where women collectively had few personal rights. Perhaps the model for Calafia was a Sub-Saharan Greek, or a Maghreb woman.
Note the use of the terms Moor and Arabic in this quote, taken from references of 14th c. Arabic scholars….
“In contemporary Hassaniyya Arabic, the language spoken by the Moors (Arabs) of Mauritania and Northern Mali, the terms ‘Whites’/‘Blacks’ (b ̄ıda ̄ n/su ̄ da ̄ n) are used to distinguish between Moors who are, in status, freemen, and those who have a slave past. A different Arabic word for ‘Blacks’ (kwa ̄r) is used to identify non-Moorish Africans. In contemporary Tuareg discourse, colour-based terminology is used to distinguish internal social status and to denote those who are termed ‘Blacks’ (koualnin), whether people of servile origin within Tuareg society, or to refer to non-Tuareg ‘Blacks’…. In the pre-colonial Arabic literature of the area, the term ‘su ̄da ̄n’ is most often used to refer to ‘Blacks’ who are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Moors…” THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES
But
Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), a novela redacted by
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in the early 15th century, is a sequel to a popular 14th c. chivalric romance novela,
Amadís de Gaula. While the novela suffers from a lack of literary style, it achieved notability “in 1862, when Edward Everett Hale concluded that the novel was the origin of the name California.”
“Sabed que ala diestra mano de las Indias ouo una Isla llamada California mucho llegada ala parte del paraiso terrenal la qual sue poblada de mugeres negras sin que algun uaro entre ellas ouiesse: que casi como las amazonas …”
OK, not only do we have Amazons from somewhere beyond the Black Sea, but also a mythical knight from Gaul. A far cry from Africa. Here’s the thing, the Spanish term negra/o is also used to refer to any people with swarthy or dark-colored skin (both native and foreign). Including the Moors who were considered freemen vs. slaves.
