An ad for an upcoming documentary about ‘The First Swedes,’ who were dark-skinned and blue eyed, has sparked off fury, fear and denial on Twitter. The series scheduled to air on Swedish television soon aroused diverse ignorant and racist reactions on social media with disbelief and anger when channel SVT began its promotion.
The documentary will look at DNA technology which has revealed more about how Sweden was populated after the Ice Age and detailing how the first pioneers in the country were dark-skinned with blue eyes and came from the Southern Hemisphere.
The new documentary from SVTÂ about Sweden that makes a very interesting claim: the first Swedes were dark-skinned Black people with blue eyes. Aptly titled The First Swedes, the documentary reveals that the first Swedes were dark-skinned hunters and collectors who moved to Scandinavia from the south towards the end of the Ice Age. Matthias Jakobsson, an Uppsala University genetics professor traces the ancestry of present-day Swedes back to Africa.
“Their look was quite similar to the people that at that time lived in today’s Luxembourg, Spain and Germany. Their look would be quite unusual today, blue eyes with dark skin,” he said.
Upon their arrival to Scandinavia, these dark-skinned Black hunters were met by another population from Russia with paler skin. The two populations are said to have mixed, which led to Nordic people becoming more lighter skinned. Safe to say, the responses that Sweden’s first descendants were dark-skinned Black people did not go over well with some on Twitter.
A journalist, Ingrid Carlsson tweeted: (translated) “The BBC has been doing this for a long time, for homogeneous Sweden to be portrayed as populated by black people is too outlandish to be true.”
Another user tweeted: (translated) “Wow, SVT open with their racism against Swedes. Now, imagine a film about Africa with white people.”