@Basra
Could the world-beating sprinting prowess of Jamaican athlete Usain Bolt really be down to his West African ancestors’ horrific ordeals at the hands of British slave traders and plantation owners?
Jamaican athletes have certainly made a speciality of dominating sprint races in recent years. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, they won the men and women’s 100m finals, the men and women’s 200m finals — and the men won the 4 x 100m relay. Quite something for an island with a population smaller than Wales.
That supremacy is likely to be reinforced at the London Olympics, thanks perhaps to a new pretender, Yohan Blake, who trounced Bolt, his training partner, in the 200m final at the Jamaican Olympic trials in Kingston last week. Bolt, meanwhile, still holds the world 100m sprint record, with a breathtaking time of 9.58 seconds
Clearly, such dominance cannot be gained without gruelling training regimes, specialised diets and expert coaching. But U.S. sprinter Michael Johnson, who is of West African descent, now believes that athletes like him have another weapon in their armoury: a unique genetic inheritance.
In a TV documentary, Johnson argues that descendants of slaves from West Africa (all Afro-Caribbean people owe their presence in the Caribbean to slavery dating from the 16th century) have a ‘superior athletic gene’. And it’s this that will put black Caribbean sprinters on the podium top spots at the London Games.
Such talk is controversial, alarmingly redolent as it is of the racial-superiority theories propounded by Nazi scientists in the Thirties and used to justify the genocide of millions of people deemed ‘genetically inferior’.
Johnson, however, is unabashed: ‘It is a taboo subject in the States, but it is what it is,’ he says. ‘Why shouldn’t we discuss it?’
Usain Bolt holds similar beliefs. The sprinter was born in Trelawny Parish, a Jamaican area that was formerly the site of several slave plantations.
Asked about his record-breaking 100m performance in 2009, he said: ‘It’s a background from slavery. The guys back in the day were so strong from physical work . . . the genes are really strong.’
The controversial theory supporting these claims goes back to 2003, when Australian scientists discovered that a gene called ACTN3 has variants which may give performance advantage to the muscles of elite athletes.
In effect, it can give sprinters a boost because it gives extra power to muscle cells that are required for fast, forceful actions. Studies show that this ‘sprint’ version of the ACTN3 gene is more common in Jamaicans, for example, and others of West African descent than in people of European ancestry.
The theory speculates that this gene has been concentrated in these athletes because their ancestors journeyed from captivity in West Africa to slavery in the Caribbean under brutal conditions.
Only the toughest survived. During one such voyage in 1732, more than 95 per cent of slaves perished — 170 were herded on to the ship and only six got off alive.
Cruelty on board those ships could compound the effects of disease, insanitary conditions and overcrowding. One notorious case involved the British-owned slave-ship Zong, which lost its bearings while bound for Jamaica in 1782.
After three months, 60 of the 440 slaves on board had already died. Captain Luke Collingwood’s human cargo was perishing and his hopes of profit were being replaced by fears of bankruptcy.
So he decided to pull an insurance scam, and ordered his crew to throw 132 of the weaker slaves overboard to drown.
He told insurers that he had been forced to do it because of dwindling water supplies.
The captain would have succeeded, but for the whistleblowing conscience of the chief mate, James Kelsal, who revealed that there were still 420 gallons of water on board when they had docked at Black River Port in Jamaica a month later.
The ship’s owners were taken to court in London — for insurance fraud rather than murder. No officers or crew were charged over the deliberate killings.
Clearly, those few slaves who survived the crossings were made of extremely tough stuff. For them to survive long enough subsequently to have children involved them being resilient enough to withstand life in slavery on plantations.
Towards the end of the 1700s, another factor came into play: selective breeding.
In this period, the price of imported slaves to Jamaica was rising rapidly, and there was increasing talk of abolishing the barbarous practice of slave-shipping.
Plantation owners began to believe that their most economical answer was to raise their own slaves. They went about it with characteristic inhumanity, breeding the toughest slaves for strength and treating their charges as though they were breeding cattle.
One Jamaican plantation inventory from 1790 listed 408 slaves by occupation, such as cooks, watchmen and field workers. But the largest group listed 62 women who were ‘kept for breeding’. These were called ‘breeding wenches’ or ‘belly women’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2167996/Why-progeny-slaves-strike-gold-Olympics.html
