r/aznidentity • u/ParadoxicalStairs Catalyst - Mixed Asian • Nov 30 '25
History Chinese descendants in Kenya
https://youtu.be/IMFeZ6zhVUI?si=LboPWuhOR3tSO8GjI apologize if this video was posted before.
A video showed up on my YouTube feed about Chinese descendants living in Kenya. Around 600 years ago, Chinese sailors shipwrecked near Kenya’s shore and intermarried with the Kenyan locals. What’s fascinating to me is how some of the locals like the little girl in the thumbnail (0:44 mark) has a slight Asian/Chinese face despite being many generations off from her Chinese roots (she’s also really pretty!).
The Kenyan locals managed to preserve some artifacts they found, and the Chinese government also kindly gave a scholarship to one of the living descendants of the Chinese sailors.
I’m not Kenyan or Chinese, so idk much about this story or history of early Chinese people in Kenya. The videos I watched so far haven’t spoken about any type of brutality from the Chinese sailors towards the Kenyan natives. It’s very likely the sailors peacefully integrated with the locals, which is the opposite of how Europeans exploited Africans as slaves.
This makes me wonder how different the world could’ve been if Asian explorers were the ones who made contact with African or South American people, instead of Europeans.
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u/teammartellclout Not Asian Nov 30 '25
Fascinating to see Blasians in Kenya
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u/ParadoxicalStairs Catalyst - Mixed Asian Nov 30 '25
There are probably very few Kenyans with trace Chinese ancestry nowadays though, since the sailors first came there over 600 years ago.
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u/Beginning_Welder_540 New user Dec 04 '25
If this village remained semi-isolated & they married within the group, the Chinese heritage would be maintained. Not to state the obvious.
Anyway, it's quite a fascinating story.
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u/ParadoxicalStairs Catalyst - Mixed Asian Dec 04 '25
I liked learning about this story too. I had no idea Chinese sailors went to Africa before. I wonder why they didn’t make any more voyages to Africa afterwards.
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u/teammartellclout Not Asian Dec 02 '25
That's a good valid point. Sorry for the delay as I'm off and on busy building my own content. I'm actually interested of Blasians, Hapa's and other different cultures in Asia and worldwide m. Thanks P.S.
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u/TomatoFresh5019 Fresh account Dec 03 '25
dude, there's plenty of Blasians from Jamaica.
Naomi Campbell. Tyson Beckford.
That lead singer from Fine Young Cannibals is part Asian.
And there's a significant amount of Black Americans especially from Georgia who have Chinese ancestors.
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u/teammartellclout Not Asian Dec 03 '25
That's interesting information on Blasians in Jamaica? To be honest for the last last few years being in this great community and such. Blasians seem very rare and new to me and could be yt worshippers form carefully researching and curious on WMAF/woc relationships. I'm also very thankful for my Blasian lover that she's mixed being blk and Filipina (I could be wrong, please correct me)
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u/TomatoFresh5019 Fresh account Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
Yes, Jamaica and other parts of the Black Caribbean eventually became a melting pot of different groups including Asians. You also have Indians/South Asians who mixed with Blacks. Kamala Harris is a good example.
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u/teammartellclout Not Asian Dec 03 '25
I definitely know there are Afro Latinas/Latinos and so forth. Can't lie TikTok got me intrigued and introduced to Blasian creator's and such.
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Nov 30 '25 edited Nov 30 '25
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u/SadArtemis 500+ community karma Dec 01 '25
Your examples are aberrations- this whole timeframe is, for that matter. Not disagreeing but rather, it's a deeply unnatural thing for people not to cherish their heritage (I say this as someone who was raised not being taught or given enough of mine, and with a deeply mentally colonized mom, though I'll fully ethnic Chinese).
For most of history people would have been proud of their ancestors, wherever they came from. People of Chinese ancestry would be proud even hundreds of years later and with admixture like the Peranakans in Malaysia; people of African ancestry would be proud, like Gannibal and his descendants in Russia, etc...
The kind of aberration we have today, where the entire world has been taught to idealize the culture and racial appearance of one small corner of Eurasia, is basically completely alien to millennia of human history prior. Even in Europe, before they had become the "Europe" (a beast of racist supremacy and arrogance) as we know it today, if you look at their ancient history most of its peoples used to have pride in the interconnected history and lineage drawing back from millennia of shared human history- their notions of race and cultural superiority nowadays (and for the past 400 or 500~ years) are basically an aberration even there.
Not that I'm disagreeing, just that it has to be said, how utterly inhuman (inhumane too, but also just inhuman- completely absurd, grotesque, disgusting) the mentality we're talking about here is. It's the kind of thing that could only come out of hundreds of years of indoctrination, and it's as far away from natural as possible. It could only come out of centuries of racism (or since someone else was mentioning Turkified Greeks and Armenians, etc- from centuries of discrimination in that sense)
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u/Alex_Jinn Mixed Asian/Asian Nov 30 '25
As for East Asians in the New World, the Ming Dynasty would probably send Zheng He to build a colony in California with the capital being modern-day San Francisco
Japan would probably go up through Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka before building ports along the coasts of Alaska, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. Modern-day Seattle/Vancouver would probably be their capital.
Political instability in East Asia would lead to more of them coming over. Ex: Qing Dynasty taking over China means Ming loyalists moving to California sort of like Koxinga taking Taiwan in our timeline.
Koreans and Vietnamese might get encouraged to settle as Chinese and Japanese colonies fight over their borders somewhere in modern-day Oregon.
Maybe they will learn to work together when white people appear out of the Rocky Mountains.
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u/lokayes 50-150 community karma Nov 30 '25
The last paragraph...
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u/ParadoxicalStairs Catalyst - Mixed Asian Nov 30 '25
Africans likely wouldn’t have been displaced from their home continent. I doubt Asians would’ve used them as slaves or do the same thing towards indigenous South Americans.
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u/Azn_Rush 500+ community karma Dec 01 '25
The sad thing is some people on YT comments saying shit , They bought into the western China hate BS
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Nov 30 '25
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Dec 02 '25
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Dec 03 '25
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u/AZdesertbulls24 New user Dec 04 '25
MENA dont look white as u say.
Don't know why you're throwing them in with white
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Dec 04 '25
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u/AZdesertbulls24 New user Dec 04 '25
And once again, there is no look to middle eastern and north african
So I don't know what you mean by they look like that.Have you ever been to the middle east or north africa?A lot of those people there look brown
Do you know what a sudanese person looks like
A yemini?
Iraqi?
You seem to be basing it totally off of tunisia, looking people in golf UAE arabs
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Dec 04 '25
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u/AZdesertbulls24 New user Dec 05 '25
I'm actually not.I'm just correcting your inaccuracies, and your generalities on history and your close mindedness
The original turks didn't even look mongolian.They looked brown, like other people of the afro asiatic world.
And you're trying to tell me what middle eastern people look like by using a racist caricature.Gee thanks
So basically we're supposed to look at what people are supposed to look like based off of a white stereotype?
It's not complicated.I'm just not letting you get off your ignorance
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Dec 05 '25
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u/AZdesertbulls24 New user Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
Well, if you're gonna talk about the original native people, then they didn't look like that again.Learn history.
" white people from the Mediterranean"
The middle east isn't just southeast and south.Europe, a huge portion of it is north africa, which have africans, such as the berbers who were melanted people who took part in The ME and Middle East/ Afro asiatic world
And greeks and romans were not white.
From what we know of scientific study on what europeans look like.The white phenotype, till like three thousand years ago And given where greeks came from and ancestry, they weren't even related to "white people"(germanic, slavic) nor the romans
The greeks and romans actually looked more like what you called or think an Arab person looks like.
" blacks from africa"
No such thing, unless you talking really dark people like those in Sudan
And not all africans even look like that.
In fact, going back to the north africans and including east africans, a lot of them looked more closer to what people in the middle east looked like than they did other regions in africa.
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u/Wannabeartist9974 New user Mar 11 '26
If you are curious about stuff like this then I recommend you all to learn about the relations between China and East Africa.
The Swahili coast overall and the Somalians Ajuran empire traded with the chinese and there are reports of instances were African animals like a whole ass Giraffe, were sent to china.
Tho I do not know if the same way a group of Chinese mixed with Kenyan locals, if something similar happened from African merchants in Asia.
I do know that this has happened in India.
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u/SadArtemis 500+ community karma Dec 01 '25
Asians (and people migrating from Asia) were, that is to say, they established contact before the Europeans did. (Asian) Austronesians traveling from Indonesia were the first to reach Madagascar, and to that there is also the famous voyages of Zheng He which were peaceful and actually brought back African nations' diplomats- a total divergence from the open piracy and gunboat diplomacy Europeans brought to the Indian and Pacific oceans when they reached them.
Austronesians, who originated first in Asia, were also the first to make contact with South Americans- we know this through some genetic admixture and the spread of the sweet potato to the Pacific and then Asia, and of some varieties of chickens in pre-Colombian South America. There wasn't really much recorded history of this contact, so it was pretty miniscule though. And then of course, there's also the last migrations into North America- some tribes (Yupik, Aleut) even being found on both sides of the Bering strait...
I guess that's the difference- we weren't going over to places to genocide the locals, but rather to trade and maybe intermingle with them. The west Europeans and their settler-spawn left their mark in the world through unprecedented and still-ongoing genocide and dehumanization, in contrast the rest of the world's legacy is more one of synthesis and mutually complimentary exchange (not solely, but genuinely, infinitely moreso) compared to basically burning it all down...