“Megara from Hercules is probably Black” by Matthew S. Robinson

That’s right, Herc’s soulmate from the Disney film “Hercules” probably has some strong African roots. And I’ve got science & history to back it up.

There’s really no way to confirm this obviously, because Meg is in fact a cartoon character and not real in any way; but looking at Greek’s history it actually makes a fair amount of sense.

Gert Muller wrote about the African origins of Greece and Crete in his book “Black Origins of Ancient Greek Civilization” about how Crete and Greece (Hellas) were actually first populated and formed by people who were ethnically mostly from Africa. Many ancient artifacts and depictions of Greeks show them with hair, bone features and facial structures akin to African populations at the time. Overtime Greeks however began to form more into how we would imagine them today.

It’s not just Megara either however, most Greeks have some percentage of African ancestry in their genes. While technically all human life came out of the African region Greeks share a much more notable percentage than most European nations; due to their proximity to the continent. Several scientific journals have posted various results on this but one statistically sound average is that the “average” Greek has 5% African genes. Megara probably had more.

While Megara’s physical features can be more credited to just artistic stylings (her body was designed to look like a Greek vase/hourglass) there is an important distinction that’s a little harder to overlook: Meg has violet eyes.

Meg’s eyes were originally supposed to be blue, but deep into production her eyes were changed to violet. This change even caused some alteration of the script as Danny Devito (voice of Phil) had to come back in and re-dub his lines once more so that he said “goo goo eyes” instead of “big blue eyes”. You can catch this fairly obvious edit in any version of the film.

Why is that important? Well violet eyes are a form of albinism. No, that doesn’t mean Megara is albino, but it does mean that she had that gene in her system. Violet eyes are an extremely rare genetic mutation that stems from almost having blue eyes, but the color being slightly mutated.

Albinism according to genetic scientists most likely originated in East Africa (which is VERY close to Greece, just saying) and was the result of evolutionary changes in skin’s melanin. Melanin protects Africans and people in warmer climates from harmful UV rays which can cause sunburn and skin cancer. Albinism was a genetic evolutionary trait and or possible mutation that arose from varying degrees of melanin being passed down as recessive genes. Mutations like these are significantly rare in European people as the recessive genes were mostly eliminated within them overtime. In Layman’s terms sub-Saharan Africans find cases of albinism in 1 in 5,000 people while with Europeans its more around 1 in 20,000. It’s statistically unlikely that Meg can have albinism traits without sharing significant African ancestry.

What’s more it’s fairly well documented that Greeks communicated with Africans often, made artwork depicting them and even at some points traded with them. Greeks were unsure about Africa’s geography mostly relegating all Africans to be either Egyptian or Ethiopian in nation. Nevertheless Greeks adopted many of Africa’s decor tastes including the famed doric columns. The Greeks marveled at Egypt’s architecture and adopted the columns, the Egyptians however had little use for doric columns and preferred to the use the triangles which were considered more structurally sound. Thus the concept of Africans in Greece is far from foreign; no pun intended.

If you’re still not convinced consider this: most white supremacists don’t consider Greeks to be “true whites” as their genealogy is too mixed up with African and Arab/Asian roots. This racist view of Greeks has popped up even as recently as the Greek financial crisis with a German publication claiming Greeks should basically be kicked out of the EU because they’re “not white and destroyed the world order.”

So there you have it, Megara is most likely part African. You can make up your mind for yourself, but it’s certainly something to consider next time you watch the film.

The only thing white in this picture is that flower.