Sambo

Sambo reveals in its various tones the power of cultural and racial stereotyping. It is commonly derived from zambo , a Latin American term for a person of mixed Negro and Indian parentage. As with all similar words, such as half-breed, half-caste, chichi , and so on, what was originally a racial designation has become a term of insult. Commenting on the gradations of color and their parallel status, Captain Frederick Marryat observed in 1833: “A quadroon looks down on a mulatto, while a mulatto looks down on a sambo, that is, half mulatto and half negro” ( Peter Simple , chapter xxxi). (These gradations are also covered in the entry for Caribbean. ) In Spanish the word also referred to a yellow monkey.

In the United States, sambo became “known to most colonists as a common Black male name by 1700” (Flexner 1976, 33). The first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Boston News Letter: “There is a Negro man … calls himself Sambo” (2 October, 1704, 2). This popularity led to the hypothesis that the word may be African in origin, possibly from a Hausa word meaning “second son” or “name of the spirit,” alternatively from Foulah, meaning “uncle.” The inferiority of status was obviously reinforced during the period of slavery, generating some sociological controversy about “The ‘Sambo’ stereotype of the loyal, lazy, affectionate and child-like slave” ( Times Literary Supplement , March 2, 1973, 230-32). Similar stereotypical discussion concerns “the development of a ‘Sambo’ response of the Negro slave to his environment, which may help explain the paucity of slave revolts in America” ( New York Review of Books , March 13, 1969). Stanley Elkins has asked the key question: “What then of the
‘reality’ of Sambo? Did the Sambo role really become part of the slave’s ‘true’ personality?” (1959, 227).

In the course of the twentieth century, as racial sensitivities sharpened, the term acquired more of an insulting edge. As Hugh Rawson observed, “A notable casualty of this period [post World War II] was the much loved folk tale The Story of Little Black Sambo (Helen Bannerman, 1923, about an East Indian child actually), which is now difficult to find on library shelves” (1991, 334). The demise of the title was no doubt accelerated by the use of “little black sambo” as a paternalistic, colonialist stereotype in British English. Like wog , it was used of any foreigner of color, and in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (1982), “Now only used as a term of abuse.” It is now largely extinct, and was never borrowed into the other global varieties of English, such as South African or Australian English.

Revealingly, in Japan the term is quite neutral, probably because it arrived there before the end of the nineteenth century from the Philippines, then a Spanish possession. The feminine form zamba is also applied to a popular ethnic dance, now anglicized to samba .