God Created Humankind in Africa
THE AFRICAN ORIGINS OF HUMANITY
WHERE DID GOD CREATE MAN, IF NOT IN AFRICA?
God created Man in East Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. From there men moved down the Nile. Around two million years ago, some people migrated out of Africa into what is now Arabia, while others wandered with their livestock across the western grasslands where they found the Niger River. We need to remember that the Sahara has only been desert for around three thousand years.
NATION newspaper Article 167 drafted Oct 06 1600 words with footnotes
Re-numbered 179 and sent 20 Dec 2006
“They have stolen our culture and our vision.”
by Robin Edward Poulton
inspired by a book from Aminata Dramane Traoré and by the ideas of the famous Malian sage Amadou Hampaté BA, co-Founder of UNESCO
Everything is linked. Everything is living. Everything is interdependent.
Every action engenders a reaction. Dependent reaction is a natural part of the universal order of things. Some links are visible, others are invisible, but men and women must accept their responsibilities for these links. We and our actions are part of the whole construct which composes life.
Some Westerners call this form of belief ‘animism’. Rubbish! I dismiss this word as unworthy as a description of African spirituality. ‘Animism’ is a colonial word filled with negative connotations. When a Westerner uses the word ‘animism’ it implies two things: a misunderstanding of Africa, and a deliberate desire to belittle African belief systems. When talking about African ‘religion’, we prefer the word spirituality – for in Mali everything you do has a spiritual sense and content. Human relations are spiritual.
AFRICAN RELIGIONS AS A SOURCE OF CIVILIZED VALUES
Aminata Dramane Traoré writes in her book Le viol de l’imaginaire, (p7), - which I translate as “They have stolen our culture and our vision” – the following, penetrating words about our African way of being: “Spirituality is a part of our humanity. It would protect Africa from its current troubles, if world history had not passed through Africa and evacuated so much of our spirituality.”
The nature of African spirituality is sharing and communal, and should equip Africans to face the world of globalized communications and commerce with a sense of mutual advantage and mutual benefit thanks to the abundance of goods and services, commerce and travel, but also through the enjoyment and celebration of diversity.
Aminata Dramane Traoré writes on p8: “It is a mistake to interpret Africa’s current torpor in terms of conservatism or the refusal of progress. Our capacity to see links between the constituent parts of the universe – including the human race – and to make sense of them is not a recipe for a static society. 500 years ago we had a path to follow, we had a destiny, we were ready to go out to meet the Other – the World - in a dynamic and constructive way. Instead, the West invaded our world and our relations were distorted. Ever since then, we have been searching for a new path. The links were lost, our sense of the world was gone and we were no longer able to reconcile the past, the present and the future.”
The West has never left Africa. Invasion and violence, the domination and repression of the colonial era has given way to continued economic exploitation and cultural domination. We cannot climb out of the poverty trap, because the West has dug the hole deep and turned its edge into a precipice. How can Africa see a future, when it is looking down into a precipice from where we hear expressions like, ‘Poverty-Stricken Africa’, or ‘Africa is a lead weight dragging humanity backwards”?
AFRICA IS THE SOURCE OF HUMAN WISDOM AND RELIGION
In fact I believe that Africa is both the birthplace of humanity, and the fount of human wisdom. The modern world with its globalized greed-and-grab culture is undermining our roots. We need to have our children spend less time watching television and more time listening to their Elders. Bring back the Grandmothers, I cry! Aminata Traore will agree with me (she is a friend of mine and younger than me, so she had better agree with me!) By learning about Africa as it is today and remembering Africa as it was yesterday, by seeking understanding of how Africa works and how our Ancestors made it work, we can drink at the source of our own ancestral wisdom. It is true for Africans of course, but I believe it is true also for Europeans and Americans, for Asians and Australians, for we all came first out of Africa.
From Africa the world received our life force and our social structures (marriage, family, clan, village, town – all these were invented in Africa).
From Africa the world received our first inventions and discoveries: language and the power of the Word; love and family values; hunting and cooking; domesticating animals for milk and meat and eggs; gathering wild cereals and herbs, and later cultivating those same plants to create reserves of food; making bone tools, stone tools, then bronze tools, and finally Iron tools with which Men were able to perfect the art of war.
From Africa the world received our culture, our civilization and our African laws that different peoples transformed to create their own societies. The first and greatest ancient civilization was that of Ancient Egypt, an African civilization (the first civis or ‘towns’ were created along the banks of the river Nile maybe 30,000 years ago) and perhaps the banks of the Nile were the first ‘Garden of Eden’ where weary hunters and herders came to rest and drink and eat fruit thousands of years before Abraham, his contemporaries and successors wrote down the stories of the Torah and the Old Testament.
From Africa we received our religions: Abraham found God in Africa, which is and has forever been monotheistic. God is One. Men have made Him into Many, and used God to create wars and class domination.
Aminata sees the loss of African spirituality as a theft. Worse than theft, she speaks of viol – which means ‘rape’. Africa has been raped, and the violation is repeated on a daily basis through the economic, the cultural and the spiritual degradation of the continent by Western interests.
Le viol de l’imaginaire, the title of Aminata’s latest book, I translate as “They have stolen our culture and our vision.” She argues that Africa’s vision of itself has been taken away. In place of a continent rich in 1000 languages (and 1000 different names for God the Creator) we find a spiritual wasteland where the values of the ancestors (the world’s ancestors as well as OUR African ancestors) have been replaced systematically by foreign values and ideas alien to African culture. Our pockets have been picked and our spirituality has been raped.
A good example is provided by the work of French experts and philosophers who – like white men and other colors the world over – always read the lives of others through their own cultural mirror. Thus Madame Tal Tamari (who is far more intelligent than me and a researcher at the prestigious CNRS) concludes that the Dogon and Manding creation myths are neo-Platonic ideas transmitted through Muslim mystics. This is how she explains ‘osmosis’ between Islamic and Traditional Ancestral African beliefs, using her field research in Mali, Guinea, Gambia and Senegal as well as the classic writings of Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, Solange de Ganay, Dominique Zahan, and more recent publications by Youssouf Cissé and Sory Camara (or so she says in her article).
She published this conclusion in the Journal des Africanistes, an erudite journal that I deplore for its smell of Empire! I see the world through a different lens. I confess to my limits as an academic. I am no expert on African philosophy, nor any other philosophy. I am an African, not a scholarly Africaniste. I see the ‘religious osmosis’ as a process of assimilation and transformation of Islam by West Africans. Islamic theology and religion has been taught in Mali and in Nigeria since the 700s, after the Christian Berber chief Kusayla died on the battlefield in modern Algeria in 689, and the Tuaregs became Muslims. Very soon the camel caravans were led by Muslim traders bringing salt and silk, dates and preachers. But these preachers used the spoken word. No one in Mali or Nigeria understood Arabic, so none could read the Holy Koran. Islam was spread through oral education, by poorly educated men of faith who carried inside them the parallel practices and convictions of Traditional Ancestral African belief systems. For me, the religious osmosis is not caused by neo-Platonic ideas arriving from outside, but from the meeting of Islam with the Traditional Ancestral African beliefs that inspired Plato and the ancient Greeks. Unlike Christianity, Islam was not a religion of conquest and colonization in West Africa (although Islam was certainly a conquering religion as it moved across North Africa and across Asia). Nigerians met Islam in the market places of Kano, Sokoto and Maidaguri.
Amadou Hampaté Ba emphasizes the convergence between beliefs – unlike Muslim scholars such as Almamy Maliki Yattara of Timbuktu who places his emphasis on the differences between Islam and Africa. AHB finds in the mystical practices and beliefs of the sufi Tijaniya brotherhood the same forms of reflection he found among the Masters of Malian pre-Islamic initiation societies. AHB believes that African religions can also lead men to God, echoing the ideas of sufi masters like the Andalusian mystic Muhyî ‘d-dîn Ibn cArabî (1165-1240). I have found myself that mystics the world over reach much the same conclusion, whether we give them the labels of Muslim or Pagan, Hindu or Buddhist or Zoroastrian or Christian (whether Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Methodist, Mormon …) They look inward and find God, through their meditation, in the place where He is most accessible: inside them!
Look inside yourself, Dear Reader, and search for your African spirituality during the New Year 2007. Finding your African ancestral spirituality will make you a richer and better person.
Aminata Dramane Traoré : Le viol de l’imaginaire, Editions Actes Sud, Fayard Paris 2006.
Amadou Hampaté BA: “Les religions africaines comme sources de valeur de civilization”
Communication, Colloque de COTONOU, 16-22 August 1970
Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bocar, le Sage de Bandiagoura (Eds Seuil)