History's most sordid cover-up.

The history of the former European colonies' mixed-race populations is one of the world's biggest hidden scandals. How did these populations come about? We did not miraculously or biblically produce mixed-race babies from thin air. Most of the black women were raped.

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If only I could slap her face. What did she think she was doing? I suppose she was asleep between 1948 and, say, 1970? Those years just marched right past her. No, I don't feel sorry for her. Was she being loyal to "Daddy"? You've got to be loyal when "Daddy" is running for president. I've got to find out more. There are so many like her. Hidden in the back of memories. Ssh. Can you keep a secret? Won't tell if you don't. But lots of people know or suspect. "I feel as though a tremendous weight has been lifted at last, I feel completely free." She is dressed in red. "My children deserve to know from whom, where and what they have come."

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Her children come from the Thurmond family line because Essie Mae Washington-Williams (below) has unveiled Strom Thurmond, the American senator famous for having been the country's leading segregationist, as her father. Thurmond died last June, aged 100. But in 1948 "Daddy" was very much alive, and kicking out at blacks, coloureds, Negroes, call them what you will. People not as white as he was. People like, as we now know, his daughter.

Back in 1948 Strom Thurmond was running for president as a segregationist "Dixiecrat". His secret daughter, his black daughter, Essie Mae, was 23 years old. If only America had known. If only the country knew about his black secretchild during the decades when Senator Thurmond fought virulently against civil rights. In the turbulent 1960s, Essie Mae was in her 30s and 40s.

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Fourteen months ago, the then Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, praised Strom Thurmond (by then America's longest-serving senator), and bemoaned the lack of votes that had prevented the segregationist becoming president. A lot of "problems", as Lott put it, could have been solved all these years with a Thurmond White House. Wonder what Lott thinks about Strom's big secret.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams is now a 78-year-old retired schoolteacher. Why speak out now that Thurmond is dead and buried and not before? Her lawyer said: "She didn't want to do anything to damage or potentially damage his political career." You what? She didn't want to damage his "political career".

How many black lives and black families did she think "Daddy" damaged and ruined all these years with the poison he and his followers encouraged and spread? That was the moment I wanted to slap her. But then I remembered that she was nearly 80. And I wished she was 40 years younger.

Mixed-race Essie Mae. Biracial. Dual heritage. Call it what you will. Hyphenated blood. Daughter of a white segregationist and a black maid. Yes, Mummy was a maid. 1925: Thurmond is 22, Carrie Butler is 16 years old. Just a maid aged sweet 16 from the black part of Edgefield town, South Carolina.

It flits across my mind when I'm watching Hollywood films of the 1920s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s. I look at the white women dressed up to the nines and having the time of their lives and I think: Who's looking after their home while they're gadding about? Who is doing their washing? Who is doing their cleaning? Who is doing their cooking? And, of course, who's looking after their children? Answer: Black women.

Black maids who freed up white women's time so that they were enabled to pursue "freedom" and "liberation". Black women deprived of time to follow their own intellectual pursuits, but who nevertheless have had it thrown in their face, both subtly and overtly, the stupid notion that white women were "cleverer". But white women were only more time-rich, more leisure-rich, and always assured of regular incomes. You can do a lot if somebody else is doing your housework and caring for your children.

Mammies and maids. Carrie Butler was the Thurmond family's maid. Was the sex with Strom Thurmond consensual? Come on! She was only 16. She was a maid. She was black. It was 1925. His name contained strange abstract nouns that aren't in a dictionary. What do you think?

Thousands of black women like young Carrie would have worried themselves sick over what saying a big, thwacking "No" to white men's advances would do to their jobs during those days when working in white households was probably the only source of income coming into their families.

However, maids and masters are just one part of a story that still struggles so terribly to be told truthfully. Let's peer more closely at this whole area without the routine skating and glossing over.

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For black women, it is a horror subject that is almost blindingly difficult to go near. I'm finding this very difficult to write. I hate what I have to think about. But isn't that why lies prosper, because people find deeply disturbing subjects too hard to discuss honestly? Therefore, the liars and the lies win. And we live our lives in pain without at least knowing what the source is.

Press on. Ask any Westerner whether when they visit North and South America, when they visit Africa--especially Southern Africa--when they visit the Caribbean, whether they think that these regions' huge numbers of mixed-race and very light-skinned people appeared fully formed from nowhere?

Who originally created these populations of light-skinned people? I know you would think from the acres of trees felled to cover stories about the handful of white women who chose to have sexual relationships with black men during empire days that somehow white women are linked to these communities, but, no, the history of former European colonies' mixed-race populations has nothing to do with white females.

How did these populations come about then? Let me make it clear for you. They are with us because black women had babies during the empire days whose fathers were white men. But the black women did not get to choose. They were not volunteers. Let us be precise here. Most of the black women who gave birth to those babies were raped by the white men.

A standard, systematic practice. The mass rape of black women by white men during the empire days is history's greatest sexual shame. And history's biggest, most sordid sexual cover-up. Hundreds of thousands were likely to have been targeted. When I think about it, I get chest pains.

R-a-p-e-d. We were not "impregnated". We did not miraculously or biblically produce mixed-race babies from thin air. Most of us were raped.

Some white people take the nearest emergency exits from this central, shocking truth about their "empire". It is empire's real heart of darkness. Black men cannot bear to--dare not?--confront what happened to their women. They could not protect us. They did not protect us.

What is a man who cannot protect his woman and children from attack from other men? What do women become who are forced to rely only on themselves for protection and support? This guilt, this anger. Underground fuels for existential friction between black men and black women.

And what's this all around me? It's the Western imagination suffocating black women with lies, filth, distortions concocted to remove the stains of truth. Sex crimes of the past must not be the fault of anybody white.

So the Western imagination, with its convoluted narratives about black people, uses films, television, advertising, newspapers and novels to manufacture mythologies which covertly accuse black female sexuality of being responsible for the rape of black women. The message blares out: It was the fault of their bodies. Blame their sexual in-your-faceness.

In those empire days, Western thought considered rape as only really being a crime when it was committed by dark-skinned men against white-skinned women. Any woman who was not white must therefore become complicit in having been raped.

The white men could only have been involved in such acts if mysterious, dark forces were at work over which they had no control. Dark bodies luring, pulling, enticing him into doing bad things. Drawing him into darkness.

Out in the cotton fields, under the baking sun, the black woman's bent, hard-at-work body must have attacked the white man's senses. In the big house, the black woman's servile maid's form attacks his mind. Poor European man: everywhere he goes in his imperial and colonial journeys the bodies of black and brown and yellow and red women leap out to get at him.

And his white wife, his fiancee, his lady friend, she sniffs and seethes at her sexual rejection and pretends she does not see the small, uncannily familiar--those faces--but strangely-coloured children scampering about plantations and colonies.

What are we left with? The liars and the lies pushing black women's bodies as: Ready, Accessible, Available. Open. Black women deemed to possess rampant, aggressive, uncontrollable sex drives. Raunchy. Hot. Temptress. Siren. Dangerously seductive. Red. Hot, baby. Wild. Always "Wild". She's the predator not the prey. It was OK to violate her. How could she not have been raped?

That some black women now "celebrate" being regarded as very "sexually provocative" does not forgive the fact that the depictions were dreamt up for a specific purpose. I hope that most black women realise that what rapper Lil' Kim, for example, is really showing the world is not two nipples but two fingers. She is nobody's access-all-areas maid. We don't have to be that anymore.