Before I post one last excerpt from Françoise Ugochukwu's "The Devil's Colors: A Comparative Study of French and Nigerian Folktales" book, I want to call particular attention to this sentence "On the other hand,Igbo language does not restrict the term "white" to Europeans but extends it to fair-skinned Igbo and even albinos although in Nigerian English, these last two groups are more likely to be called "yellow".

Could this explain the coinage & use among 19th century and earlier African American of the color referent "high yellow" (high yella)?. It appears to me that most light skinned Black people don't have a yellow tinge to their complexion, so why was the term "high yellow" used instead of "near white" or some other color referent?

Ugochukwu's statement provides the clue that we should study the use of color language in West Africa to explain that African American referent.