W. E. B. DuBois once remarked that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line; and even in the closing years of this century there is little doubt that the impact of skin colour continues to be profound, whether at the macro-level of global politics or the microlevel of a person-to-person transaction. Like three other exceedingly small entities – the atom, the ovum and the AIDS virus – the melanosome still has a place on the agenda of human catastrophe. It would therefore be a glaring omission in a book such as this to overlook the immense interaction between skin pigmentation and the psychosocial dimensions of human behaviour.

Legends, symbolism and culture

The colour of the skin, hair and eyes has intrigued people from time immemorial, as it has also engendered curiosity about the reasons for colour differences between human populations. In prescientific eras much of the thinking on the subject was based on mythology or primitive religious concepts. The well-known scriptural interpretation from Genesis blamed blackness on a curse delivered by Noah to his son Ham as a punishment for having gazed on him when he lay naked and drunk in his tent. The Ancient Greeks narrated that Phaeton, the son of Helios (god of the Sun), successfully coaxed his father to allow him to drive the fiery chariot of the Sun for one day. His maladroitness caused him to lose control of the reins so that the chariot came too close to the earth in one region (Ethiopia), burning the people there black, and was too far from the earth in other regions, turning the inhabitants there pale from cold.