  This is most probably the reason why in almost all the autochthonous African languages (here I exclude African languages, like Hausa and Swahili, that have borrowed a substantial number of Arabic words) there is really no word for ‘race.’ There are, instead, the words ‘person’, ‘human being’, and ‘people.’ So that, where others would speak in terms of ‘the black race’ or ‘the white race’, Africans would say, ‘black people’, ‘white people’, and so on. And, instead of ‘people of mixed race’, they would say, ‘people of mixed blood.’ The latter expression, however, is somewhat vague, since it also describes people of dual ethnic parentage in African societies. But, in terms of the African perception of humanity, the important point is that the offspring of any ‘blood mixing’ is a human being and therefore belongs to the one human ‘race’ of which we are all a part. Thus, even though the African people traditionally live in small communities and are divided into different ethnic or cultural groups and into clans and lineages with complex networks of relationships, nevertheless, they perceive humanity to embrace all other peoples beyond their narrow geographic or spatial confines, to constitute all human beings into one universal family of humankind. Even though this family is fragmented into a multiplicity of peoples and cultures, nevertheless, it is a shared family—a shared humanity—the relationships among whose members ought to feature a certain kind of morality: the morality of a shared humanity