Sir, - Unfortunately, a lack of space precludes a full response to Kevin Myers extraordinarily pompous and misinformed Diary of September 18th. However, I must draw your attention to one particularly absurd part of this tirade.
Myers asserts that any objection to the use of the term "Bantu" as a designation for human beings is "ignorant piffle", and assumes that any such objection must arise from political sensitivities to the historical usage of that term by the apartheid regime of South Africa. He goes on to inform us, with all the bombast of a Victorian ethnographer, that the term "Bantu" is in fact "irreplaceable", since it describes what is - according to Myers - one of the two fundamental, enduring and visible racial divisions of Africa: the other one being "Nilotic".
While they may enjoy limited currency in the discourse of certain taxonomic linguists, contrary to what Mr Myers is attempting to pass of as reasoned fact, the terms "Bantu" and "Nilotic" are grossly inadequate as racial descriptions. Attempts to apply such simplistic and broad categories to the complex diversity of African peoples are typical of the high-handed, Eurocentric methods of certain 19th-century sciences, with their denigration and simplification of the history, culture and lives of non-Europeans. Terms such as "Bantu" and "Nilotic" (as racial designations) belong with "Aryan" and "Semite" as part of the vocabulary of the discredited pseudo-science of race.
I would be extremely interested to know the criteria which Kevin Myers uses to racially classify Africans as "Bantu" or "Nilotic". If the differences are so fundamental, enduring and visible, this should not be difficult for him. Until then, I must state that I find his views offensive in the extreme, especially since he dresses them as a form of intellectual honesty in the face of that perennial punchbag of him and his kind, the insidious bugbear they call "political correctness". - Yours, etc.,
Jonathan Kearney,
Glasnevin Avenue,
Dublin 11.