There Were Kings and Queens in Africa

May 17, 2020

There Were Kings and Queens in Africa

I remember watching a series documentary on the History Channel called Battles B.C.. The episode was called Hannibal: The Annihilator and it featured actor Alex Castro playing the role of Hannibal (click here to see how he was portrayed). I remember liking the episode for re-enacting the battles that occurred during the Second Punic War. The whole show was very informative, too. Apparently, I had no idea that there was some small controversy about the racial appearance of Hannibal. In Battles B.C., he was portrayed as a light-brown skinned man who did not have Caucasian features. I thought that it made sense that he would look somewhat similar to that in real-life. There is a head-statue of Hannibal, but it is generally regarded as an anachronistic work of art. I would later search for an image of how Hannibal Barca of Carthage may have looked and I found a poster of him that was used to advertise Anheuser-Busch Beer.

Technically, Hannibal was a military leader, not a king. He never ruled over Carthage. He, more than likely, did not appear to have Sub-Saharan features and probably looked more like a "Middle-Eastern" man, since the Carthaginians were originally from the Levant.

In 1975, the beer company Anheuser-Busch commissioned several artists to create works of art in the form of posters that portrayed historical individuals from Africa. For more than thirty years, the artwork was often used to promote awareness of African history, not just for drinking more beer. Hannibal was the first one that I found and I would eventually find most, if not all of them. The Chicago Tribune wrote a news article in 1995 about the reception it received at the time. The San Diego Union-Tribune did a similar article in 2011. The most recent bit of news about the posters is that the Anheuser-Busch donated the entire collection of posters to the United Negro College fund in 2012.

The posters were easily found on the Internet since the first decade of the 21st Century. Now, they are not available. Perhaps the posters are strongly protected from being disseminated into the public. However, I was able to find as much as I could of the works of art from older websites. Some of these websites are now defunct, but I can post them on this blog for you to see.

In the world of Lion's Blood, it is very possible that these historical men and women from Africa would be emphasized and well-known to the educated elite in Bilalistan. Some of them would appear in paintings to appear more African than what they were.

Images were found originally on playahata.com, now defunct.