Religious Studies1

Religious Studies

  I wantt he Journal. By “Journal” I mean a final essay :

– where you articulate the important points you learned from this course, how the course   contributed to your knowledge and your life outlook.

I need Sammury that coverd all subjects in papers in attachments and answers the questions above

1 ATR IN KEY THESES: SUMMARY OF CRITICAL POINTS ON THE STUDY OF AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS “Africans are civilized to the marrow of their bones! The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention.” (Leo Frobenius, German Africanist) “If archaeologists are correct in believing that the first human beings came from Africa, then it stands to reason that the first religions also originated there… It is possible that, as the earliest humans slowly migrated to other continents of the world, they carried with them religious ideas and practices that originated in Africa.” Robert M. Baum, “Indigenous Religious Traditions” in Willard G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, A Concise Introduction to World Religions. (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15-17. “Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt… There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race… My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair… but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times.” Herodotus, History, Book II (paragraphs 50,51,52 and 104)

“Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was taught all the wisdom of the Egyptians and became a man with power both in his speech and his actions.” (The Jerusalem Bible, Acts 7, 17-22). “African wisdom is not merely a convenient expression; it is something that exists. It is a collection of unique precepts that enable the people of traditional Africa to settle as harmoniously as possible the disputes that mar human relationships.” Balandier, Georges and Maquet, Jacques, Dictionary of Black African Civilization. (New York: Leon Amiel, ); p.336. “Undoubtedly prompted by the demon of literature, the ethnographers who tell us of African trances emphasize their brutality. But African mysticism has its nuances, half-tones, and melodic lines. Among the Yoruba and Fon there is an entire civilization of spirituality comparable to that of the wood carvings and bronzes of Benin…”

Zahan, Dominique, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS (BIG PICTURE)

You will find here, in 5 sections, an excellent summary of knowledge pertaining to African traditional religions Here is all that is necessary for a better understanding of African traditional religions

SECTION 1. INTRODUCTION: GENERAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK (WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW, HOW MANY?) Part 0. How many practitioners of ATR? (see section II on the religious landscape) Part 1. Official recognition of indigenous or “pagan” religions in the world

1.1 Recognition by various governments in Europe, Africa and the Americas 1.2. The rise of religious tolerance and the recognition of other religions: some fundamental guiding principles of religious tolerance

Part 2. Why Study Africa? Why does Africa matter to us? 2.0. Summary of the fundamental reasons for studying Africa 2.1. Cradle of humanity

2.2. Implications of “cradle of humanity theory” for civilization and world religions 2.2.1. African contribution to world civilization and religion in general 2.2.2. African contribution to Western Civilization and Spirituality 2.2.2.1. Contribution to the Religions and Spiritual Values of the West or Europe 2.2.2.1.1. Contribution to ancient religions of Greece and Rome 2.2.2.1.2. Contribution to the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity 2.2.2.2. Contribution to Western civilization 2.2.2.2.0. Western civilization in general 2.2.2.2.1. African contribution to the Roman Empire 2.2.2.2.2. Contribution to ancient Greece 2.2.2.2.2. 1. Greek religion (Herodotus) 2.2.2.2.2. 2. Greek Philosophy and Science 2.2.2.2.2. 3. Democracy, Human Rights, and the “Rule of Law” 2.3. The Egyptian Problem and Eurocentrism: Educational Propaganda and Miseducation. 2.3.1.The Egyptian Problem 2.3.2. Foreign Stimulus Ideology and The Zimbabwe Gambling

3 Part 3. How to properly study ATR? 3.1. Overcoming Miseducation and the colonial educational propaganda

of Eurocentric scholarship 3.2. Historical context and Epistemological Framework 3.2.1. Principles of Religious Tolerance and the Recognition of Traditional Religions 3.2.2. The “Cradle of Humanity” theory and its implications for world civilizations

and religions 3.2. 3. Beyond Colonialism: African Renaissance, Multiculturalism and the Revival

of Traditional Religions 3.2. 4. Revisiting the Sources of Knowledge 3.3. Outline of Key points in the study of ATR 3.4. African Moral Values 3.4.1. Major African moral values (Virtues) 3.4.2. Recognition of African moral qualities and spiritual values

SECTION 2. RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF AFRICA AND THE WORLD

Part 1. Practitioners of ATR in Africa and the World Part 2. Religious Landscape of Africa and the World

SECTION 3. AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS IN 80 KEY THESES SECTION 4. CHRONOLOGY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN RELIGIONS Part 1. Chronology and General Bibliography Part 2. Thematic Bibliography

I. General History of Africa II. African Traditional Religions: Important Works III. Sacred Texts of Africa

1. Sacred Texts of African Traditional Religions 2. Sacred Texts of Ancient Egypt 3. African Bibles

IV. Christianity as an African Religion V. The Egyptian Problem VI. Colonialism, Intellectual Racism, and Genocide

SECTION 5. MISCELLANEOUS DATA

4 DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION 1. INTRODUCTION: GENERAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK (WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW, HOW MANY?) Part 0. How many practitioners of ATR? (see section II on the religious landscape) Part 1. Official recognition of indigenous or “pagan” religions in the world 1.1. Recognition by various governments in Europe, Africa and the Americas

1. 2. The rise of religious tolerance and the recognition of other religions: some fundamental guiding principles of religious tolerance

– 1. Impact of the UN declaration of human rights, article 18 – 2. Change of attitude among Western scholars (Durkheim, Huston Smith) – 3. Paradigm shift in Christian Consciousness – 3.1. Biblical Foundation of Religious Pluralism – 3.2. Revolutionary views in the Catholic Church (Councils, Popes, Theologians)

o Jean Danielou o Nostra Aetate (Vatican II) o Pope John-Paul II o Schillebeeckx o Jacque Dupuis o Panikkar PROTESTANTS o Cantwell Smith

– 4. Islamic attitude toward other religions (Koran, Muhammad, Ibn Arabi, Rumi) – 5. Buddhist attitude toward other religions – 6. Hindu vision of other religions – 7. African view of religious tolerance (Wole Soyinka, Abimbola, Bujo, Mazrui,)

5 Part 2. Why Study Africa? Why does Africa matter to us? 2.0. Summary of the fundamental reasons for studying Africa 2.0.1. A message from the Rig Veda 2.0.2. Indigenous religions are the majority of world religions 2.0.3. Terence’s vision 2.0.4. Huston’s Smith’s challenge 2.0.5. George C. Bond (to be human is to be African) 2.0.6. Robert Baum (the message of Archaeology) 2.0.7. African contribution to the World

o African contribution to Humanity o African contribution to Western civilization

(science, philosophy, democracy, indigenous Greek and Roman religions) o African contribution to the Bible, Judaism and Christianity

2. 1. Cradle of humanity Text 1. Jackson Spielvogel Text 2. Robert Fisher (American missionary) Text 3. A summary of the controversy by Stephen Howe Text 4. A summary of the theory by John Reader (Out of Africa) Text 5. Out Of Africa’ Theory Boost (Max Planck Society)

2.2. Implications of “cradle of humanity theory” for civilization and world religions

2.2.1. African contribution to world civilization and religion in general – 1. Robert Baum – 2. Robert Fisher – 3. Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky (Linguistics) – 4. Jared Diamond

2.2.2. African contribution to Western Civilization and Spirituality 2.2.2.1. Contribution to the Religions and Spiritual Values of the West or Europe 2.2.2.1.1. Contribution to ancient religions of Greece and Rome

– 1. Herodotus – 2. Isis

2.2.2.1.2. Contribution to the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity

– 1. Isis in Europe – 2. Egyptian origin of Monotheism (Assmann) – 3. Testimony of the Bible – 4. Testimony of Scholars of world religions – 5. Jared Diamond – 6. Egypt and Israel – 7. Testimony of Pope John Paul II and Pope Paul VI

6 2.2.2.2. Contribution to Western civilization 2.2.2.2.0. Western civilization in general

– 1. Jackson J. Spielvogel, – 2. Guy MacLean Rogers, – 3. M.C.F. Volney, – 4. Egyptian origin of our Calendar

2.2.2.2.1. African contribution to the Roman Empire (African Popes and African Roman Emperors, African intellectuals)

2.2.2.2.2. Contribution to ancient Greece

(Greek miracle mythology and the Egyptian problem): African origin of science, philosophy and democracy

2.2.2.2.2. 1. Greek religion (Herodotus)

2.2.2.2.2. 2. Greek Philosophy and Science – 1.Bertrand Russell (Greek miracle ideology) – 2. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Greek myth, no Greek miracle) – 3. Diané Collinson (Greek myth, no Greek miracle) – 4. Serge Sauneron (Greek myth, no Greek miracle) – 5. The myth of Greek Rationality (Martin Bernal)

2.2.2.2.2. 3. Democracy, Human Rights, and the “Rule of Law”

-1.Human Rights controversy -2. Egyptian origin of Democratic ideals, human rights and the rule of law -3. Women’s Rights in ancient Egypt and the rest of black Africa

2.3. The Egyptian Problem and Eurocentrism: Educational Propaganda and Miseducation. 2.3.1.The Egyptian Problem

– 1.1. Defining the Egyptian problem – 1.2. The Race of ancient Egyptians: Were they really African? – 1.3. The Controversy surrounding the Egyptian problem

2.3.2. Foreign Stimulus Ideology and The Zimbabwe Gambling

7 Part 3. How to properly studey ATR? 3.1. Overcoming Miseducation and the colonial educational propaganda of Eurocentric scholarship Miseducation and Eurocentric educational propaganda 3.1.1. Prejudice 3.1.2. Religious prejudice and patriotic propaganda 3.1.3. Civilization and Greek miracle propaganda 3.1.4. Human Rights ideology (Thomas Pakenham, Arthur Schlesinger) 3.1.5. Feel good education 3.1.6. Chinua Achebe 3.1.7. Max Weber 3.1.8. Karl Marx 3.1.9. Joseph Conrad 3.1.10.1. Jahn Janheinz and “the real Negro” mythology 3.1.10.2. Frobenius 3.1.11. Cheikh Anta Diop 3.1.12. Martin Luther King, Jr. 3.1.13.Malcolm X 3.1.14. Basil Davidson 3.1.15. Connah 3.1.16. Richard Wright 3.1.17. Jean-Paul Sartre 3.1.18. The Miseducation of the Negro and pauperisme anthropologique 3.1.19. Kant 3.1.20. Rene Descartes 3.2. Historical Context and Epistemological Framework 3.2.1. Principles of Religious Tolerance and the Recognition of Traditional Religions (See Introduction, part 1) 3.2.2. The “Cradle of Humanity” theory and its implications for world civilizations and religions (See Introduction, part 2) 3.2. 3. Beyond Colonialism: African Renaissance, Multiculturalism and the Revival of Traditional Religions 3.2. 4. Revisiting the Sources of Knowledge

8 3. 3. Outline of Key points in the study of ATR

I. Misconceptions about ATR (Hegelian Paradigm yesterday and today): colonization of knowledge

II. Persecution of ATR and African Genocide (Slave trade and colonialism) III. Recognition of the spiritual values of ATR (Decolonization of knowledge) IV. Origin and Evolution of ATR V. Sources for a genuine understanding of ATR VI. Major centers of production of academic knowledge about ATR and

Major authors and works (African and Western scholarship) VII. ATR in Africa and the Americas (continent and Diaspora) VIII. Population (how many people and what kind of people practice ATR) IX. Why does ATR matter? (ATR’ contribution to World Spirituality) X. Content of the religion

3.4. African Moral Values 3.4.1. Major African moral values (Virtues) 3.4.2. Recognition of African moral qualities and spiritual values SECTION 2. RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF AFRICA AND THE WORLD Part 1. Practitioners of ATR in Africa and the World Part 2. Religious Landscape of Africa and the World SECTION 3. AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS IN 80 KEY THESES THESIS 1-11: GENERAL INTRODUCTION

We identify societies with their best achievements (guiding principle for research) Recognition of African civilization and its values Africa: origin of humankind, civilization and religion

THESIS 12-32: AFRICA ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND , CIVILIZATION AND RELIGION THESIS 33-49: SPIRITUAL VALUES (holistic approach, religious tolerance,…) THESIS 50-80: HEGELIAN PARADIGM THESES IN DETAIL THESIS 1-11: GENERAL INTRODUCTION Thesis 1: MacGaffey : We identify our society with its best achievement Thesis 2: Robert Baum: If Archaeologists are correct… Thesis 3: African contribution to Judaism and Christianity

– Acts 7:17-22 – Akhenaton and the origin of Monotheism (Assmann)

African Civilization Thesis 4: Leo Frobenius (Africans civilized.. barbaric negro a European invention) Thesis 5: Roger Bastide (an entire civilization of spirituality) Thesis 6; Georges Balandier, Jacques Maquet: African wisdom is not merely a

Convenient expression.

9

Thesis 7: ATR source of the values of African civilization Thesis 8: Africans notoriously religious (John Mbiti) Thesis 9: No opposition between Bible and ATR as God’s will for the salvation

of Africans (Kalilombe) Thesis 10: ATR willed by God (Kofi Opoku) Thesis 11: ATR’s resistance to Christianity THESIS 12-32: AFRICAN ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND , CIVILIZATION AND RELIGION Thesis 12: Cantwell Smith: those who believe in the unity of humankind… Thesis 13: All humans from Africa and European civilization from Egypt (Jackson Spielvogel) Thesis 14: if the foundations of Western civilization were multicultural (MacLean Rogers) Thesis 15: Origin of humankind and language (Bernard Comrie) Thesis 16: Origin of humankind and religion (Robert Fisher, American missionary) Thesis 17: African origin of Modern Humans (Max Planck Society) Thesis 18: Africa and the Bible

– African origin of the languages of the Bible and the Koran (Jared Diamond) – Moses the Egyptian, and African origin of monotheism (Jan Assmann)

Thesis 19: Herodotus (African contribution to the religions of Europe) Thesis 20: Isis (Dr. R.E. Witt) Thesis 21: Testimony of the Bible on Moses (Exodus 1-2; Acts 7) Thesis 22: Egypt and Israel (in The Legacy of Egypt, by J.R. Harris) Thesis 23-25: Views by scholars of world religions on the contribution of Egypt to Judaism and Christianity Thesis 26: Testimony of Pope John-Paul II Thesis 27: Early Christian theology and literature by African writers (Mudimbe) Thesis 28: Christianity has never really been a Western religion (Alister E. McGrath) Thesis 29: Africa more Christian than Europe?

– When Africa evangelizes Europe (Gerrie Ter Haar, How God Became African) – Africa is more Christian than Europe (Niall Ferguson) – Jenkins, Mbiti, J. Peel

Thesis 30-31: Greek miracle Thesis 30: Greek Miracle (Robert C. Solomon) Thesis 31: Serge Sauneron’s Priests of ancient Egypt. and African contribution to Western Art (Picasso,..) Thesis 32: African conception of God and no need for Temple for God THESIS 33-49: SPIRITUAL VALUES (holistic approach, religious tolerance,…) Thesis 33: Testimony of Gerhardus Cornelis Oosthuizen Thesis 34: ATR and religious tolerance Thesis 35: Religious Tolerance (Abimbola) Thesis 36: Abimbola Thesis 37: African Ethics and the centrality of silence, mysticism, and asceticism (p.138) Thesis 39 (Pope John Paul II praises Africans “priceless human qualities”) Thesis 40 Yoruba Ethic (Testimony of Thomas Bowen, American missionary) Thesis 41: Iwa Lesin Thesis 42 Meru Prayer and attitude toward foreigners Thesis 44 Cosmotheandric nature of African Ethic Thesis 45: Incest Thesis 46: Major Moral taboos (Kaoze and Tshiamalenga Ntumba)

10 Thesis 47: Proverbs Thesis 48: Sage King doctrine (pp. 149-154) Thesis 49 African vision of wisdom THESIS 50-80: CHALLENGING THE HEGELIAN PARADIGM Thesis 50-52: on the ideology of idolatry Thesis 53: The Myth of Polytheism (Bowen) Thesis 54: Fisher and AAR on the exclusion of ATR Thesis 55: Jahn Janheinz and the invention of “the Real African” (and Alexis de Tocqueville) Thesis 56: Max Weber Thesis 57: Joseph Conrad Thesis 58: Chinua Achebe Thesis 59: Malcolm X and European educational propaganda Thesis 60: Carter G. Woodson: the Mis-education of the Negro Thesis 61: Richard Wright Thesis 62: Sartre (Colonial education and the manufacturing of a token elite) Thesis 63: the concept of Anthropological pauperization (Pauperisme anthropologique) Thesis 64-65: Basil Davidson Thesis 66: Graham Connah (Precolonial civilization and the foreign-stimulus mythology) Thesis 67: The Egyptian problem and the Zimbabwe Gambling Thesis 68-69: African Rationality (Science and Technology) Thesis 70-71 Overcoming Colonial Christianity Thesis 72: Eboussi Boulaga Thesis 73: V.Y. Mudimbe Thesis 74: Mveng Engelberg Thesis 75: Tissa Balasuriya and Mariology; Dominique Zahan, Robert Baum Thesis 76: Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and the myth of “traditional Africa” Thesis 77: the concept of Primitivism: an obsolete mystification Thesis 78: Beyond Animism, Paganism and Fetishism Thesis 79: Dianne M. Stewart (onVodou and evil sorcery) Thesis 80: Evans-Pritchard reply to the “religion of fear” label SECTION 4. CHRONOLOGY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN RELIGIONS Part 1. Chronology and General Bibliography Part 2. Thematic Bibliography I. General History of Africa II. African Traditional Religions: Important Works III. Sacred Texts of Africa

1. Sacred Texts of African Traditional Religions 2. Sacred Texts of Ancient Egypt 3. African Bibles

IV. Christianity as an African Religion V. The Egyptian Problem VI. Colonialism, Intellectual Racism, and Genocide SECTION 5. MISCELLANEOUS DATA SINCE THIS FILE IS LONG WE BEGIN WITH A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS, THEN WE PROCEED WITH A MORE DETAILED SURVEY OF KEY THESES

11 The fundamental question any student or scholar needs to ask when studying Africa is the question of origin. Who created this knowledge about Africa that we find in our libraries and our textbooks. Who wrote these books and why? In which historical context and from what perspective did these authors build their knowledge about Africa How accurate is this knowledge. Can the authors be trusted? So what extent? It is a fundamental fact that knowledge about Africa is largely produced by outsiders, often scholars from dominant colonial powers in the context of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It is in this colonial context that one has to understand the nature of the kind of knowledge produced on Africa by Western universities, researchers, explorers, and missionaries. In many ways, this is a colonized and colonizing knowledge tailored to serve the economic, political, cultural, intellectual, religious and moral interests of colonial powers. And to Africans much of this knowledge is a machine of alienation and oppression. And most textbooks promote miseducation instead of properly educating students and the large public. Much of what is written on Africa is pseudo-scientific hocus pocus, and emerges as “manufactured barbarism,” sheer invention of otherness, a collection of distortions, absurd reconstructions, unsupportable hypotheses and conjectures, wild speculations, suppositions and assumptions, inappropriate analogies, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations, and, in some cases, just “plain nonsense”. But let us listen to the testimony of a British scholar and a German scholar: The rise of the West to global supremacy by the path of empire and economic pre-eminence is one of the keystones of our historical knowledge. It helps us to order our view of the past. In many standard accounts, it appears all but inevitable. It was the high road of history: all the alternatives were byroads or dead ends. When Europe’s empires dissolved, they were replaced by new post-colonial states, just as Europe itself became a part of the ‘West’ – a world-spanning league under American leadership…. The extraordinary course of the African scramble raises a whole series of questions. Why in the first place did the European governments believe that they had the right to propose rules for the grand larceny of Africa? Much of the answer must lie in their hostile view of African states and cultures… It was widely assumed that the interior states were a chaos of barbarism, where slavery thrived and civilization had stalled. (But was their negative view of Africa based on facts, or on racism or ignorance or a combination of both?). Little was known about the African interior, and most of what was reflected the self-serving bias of the missionaries, explorers and dubious businessmen who had made a career there. A good case can be made that much of what was reported by travelers as fact about the ‘dark continent’ was the imaginary product of minds fuddled by drink, fuelled by drugs (the cocktail of medications to ward off disease) and filled with dreams of glory and gold. (…) The frontier interests were extremely adept at the art of lobbying through their backers at home. They played upon religious and humanitarian feelings, as well as patriotic emotion, and commercial greed. They touched a raw nerve of economic anxiety in an era of falling prices that lasted into the mid-1890s. They exploited to the full the new means of publicity in the popular press (like Le Petit Journal, with its 1 million readers). Since they usually controlled what information there was, their version of events was often hard to challenge. From John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400 – 2000. (London: Bloomsbury Press: 2008); pp.313-314 John Darwin is a university lecturer and a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford (England)

12 “Africans are civilized to the marrow of their bones! The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention.” (Leo Frobenius, German Africanist) Pitfalls in the Study of African Religions (by John Mbiti) It needs to be emphasized that African religions are historically older than both Christianity and Islam. The world has now begun to take African traditional religions and philosophy seriously. It was only around the middle of the twentieth century that these subjects had begun to be studied properly and respectfully as an academic discipline in their own right. During the preceding one hundred years African religions were described by European and American missionaries and by students of anthropology, sociology and comparative religion. It is from these writers that we have most of our written information, although some of them had never been to Africa and only a few had done serious field study of of these religions.In the early part of that period, the academic atmosphere was filled with the theory of evolution which was applied in many fields of study. It is this theory which colours many of the earlier descriptions, interpretations and explanations of African religions. We shall consider briefly some of the early approaches before coming to the present situation. The early Western approaches and attitudes. One of the dominating attitudes in this early period was the assumption that African beliefs, cultural characteristics and even food, were all borrowed from the outside world. German scholars pushed this assumption to the extreme, and have not all abandoned it completely to this day. All kinds of theories and explanations were put forward on how the different religious traits had reached African societies from the Middle East or Europe. It is true that Africa has always had contact with the outside world, but religious and cultural influences from this contact cannot have flowed only one way: there was always a give-and-take process. Furthermore, African soil is not so infertile that it cannot produce its own new ideas. This game of hunting for outside sources is dying out, and there are writers who now argue that in fact it was Africa which exported ideas, cultures and civilization to the outside world. But surely a balance between these two extremes is more reasonable. These earlier descriptions and studies of African religions left us with terms which are inadequate, derogatory and prejudicial. They clearly betray the kind of attitude and interpretation dominant in the mind of those who invented or propagated the different theories about traditional religions. Animism is a word derived from the Latin anima which means breath, breath of life, and hence carries with it the idea of the soul or spirit. This term has become the most popular designation for African religions and is found in many writings even this day. It was invented by the English anthropologist E.B. Tylor, who used it first in an article in 1866 and later in his book, Primitive Culture (1871). For Tylor the basic definition of religion was the ‘belief in spirit beings’. He saw the anima as a shadowy vaporous image animating the object it occupied. He thought that the so-called ‘primitive peoples’ imagined the anima to be capable of leaving the body and entering other men, animals or things; and continuing to live after death. Pursuing the theory further, Tylor went on to say that such

13 ‘primitive’ men considered every object to have its own soul, thus giving rise to countless spirits in the universe. Tylor’s ideas were popularized by his disciples. Since then, the term animism has come to be widely used in describing traditional religions of Africa and other parts of the world. In an atmosphere filled with the theory of evolution, the notion of countless spirits opened the way for the idea of religious evolution. This led on to the theory that single spirits existed over each major department of nature. For example, all the spirits of the rivers would have one major spirit in charge of them, and the same for trees, rocks, lakes and so on. Accordingly, this gave man the idea of many gods (polytheism), which in turn evolved further to the stage of one supreme God over all the other departmental spirits. This type of argument and interpretation places African religions at the bottom of the supposed line of religious evolution. It tells us that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are at the top, since they are monotheistic. The theory fails to take into account the fact that another theory equally argues that man’s religious development began with a monotheism and moved towards polytheism and animism. We need not concern ourselves unduly here with either theory. We can only comment that African peoples are aware of all these elements of religion: God, spirits and divinities are part of the traditional body of beliefs. Christianity and Islam acknowledge the same type of spiritual beings. The theory of religious evolution, in whichever direction, does not satisfactorily explain or interpret African religions. Animism is not an adequate description of these religions and it is better for that term to be abandoned once and for all. In classifying the religions of the world, we hear that ‘redemptive religions’ like Christianity, Judaism and Islam incorporate into their teaching the doctrine of the soul’s redemption in the next world. ‘Morality religions’ like Shintoism and the teachings of Confucius lay a great emphasis on moral considerations. Finally, ‘primitive religions’ are those whose followers are described by some writers as ‘savage’, ‘primitive,’ and lacking in either imagination or emotion. Of course the word ‘primitive’ in its Latin root primus has no bad connotations as such, but the way it is applied to African religions shows a lack of respect and betrays derogatory undertones. It is extraordinary that even in our day, fellow man should continue to be described as ‘savage’ and lacking in emotion or imagination. This approach to the study of African religion will not go far, neither can it qualify as being scientifically or theologically adequate. Some traditional religions are extremely complex and contain elements which shed a lof of light on the study of other religious traditions of the world. In his book, Principles of Sociology (1885), the anthropologist Herbert Spencer used the phrase ancestor worship to describe speculation that ‘savage’ peoples associated the spirit of the dead with certain objects, and in order to keep on good terms with the spirits of their ancestors, people made sacrifices to them. Other writers have borrowed this term and applied it almost to anything that Africans do in the way of religious ceremonies. Many books speak of ‘ancestor worship’ to describe African religions. Certainly it cannot be denied that the departed occupy an important place in African religiosity; but it is wrong to interpret traditional religions simply in terms of ‘worshipping the ancestors’. The departed, whether parents, brothers, sisters or children, form part of the family, and must therefore be kept in touch with their surviving relatives. Libation and the giving of food to the departed are token of fellowship, hospitality and respect; the drink and food so given are symbols of family continuity and contact. ‘Worship’ is the wrong word to apply in this situation, and Africans themselves know very well that they are not ‘worshipping’ the departed members of their

14 family. It is blasphemous, therefore, to describe these acts of family relationships as ‘worship’. Furthermore, African religions do not end at the level of family rites of libation and food offerings. They are deeper and more comprehensive than that. To see them only in terms of ‘ancestor worship’ is to isolate a single element, which in some societies is of little significance, and to be blind to many other aspects of religion. Western missionaries, anthropologists, journalists and scholars who keep harping about ‘ancestor worship’ should look at or consider cemeteries in their home countries, and see how many flowers, candles, and even photographs of the dead are put on the graves of relatives and friends. That is even more extreme than anything we find in Africa and I do not know what form of ‘worship’ to call this beloved custom in the West African people do not feel ashamed to remember their departed members of the family. Remembering them is not worshipping them. Others writers have tried to study or refer to African religions in terms of magic. Some consider magic to have evolved before religion, as man’s attempt to manipulate the unseen world. When man failed to control natural objects and phenomena by means of magic, he then resigned himself to forces beyond him, which in turn led to a belief in God as the Source of all power. As such, magic is considered to be the mother of religion. Since every African society has both magic and religion, it was inevitable to conclude that Africans had not evolved beyond the stage of detaching religion from magic. Some writers even tell us that Africans have no religion at all and only magic. We shall devote a whole chapter to this subject of magic, and there is an increasing amount of good literature on it. We need here only comment briefly. A careful examination of the situation in African societies shows that magic is part of the religious background, and it is not easy to separate the two. Some of the ceremonies, for example in rainmaking and preventing of epidemics, incorporate both religion and magic. So long as magical acts are beneficial to the community involved they are acceptable and people may even pay a great deal of their wealth in order to secure such help. This gives no contradiction to their beliefs. Magic belongs to the religious mentality of African peoples. But religion is not magic, and magic cannot explain religion. Religion is greater than magic, and only an ignorant outsider could imagine that African religions are nothing more than magic. Other terms employed to describe African religions include Dynamism, Totemism, Fetishism and Naturism. We need not go into them here. These and the previous terms show clearly how little the outside world has understood African religions. Some of the terms are being abandoned as more knowledge comes to light. But the fact remains that African religions and philosophy have been subjected to a great deal of misinterpretation, misrepresentation and misunderstanding. They have been despised, mocked and dismissed as primitive and underdeveloped. One needs only to look at the earlier titles and accounts to see the derogatory language used, prejudiced descriptions given and false judgments passed upon these religions. In missionary circles they have been condemned as superstition, satanic, devilish and hellish. In spite of all these attacks, traditional religions have survived, they dominate the background of African peoples, and must be reckoned with even in the middle of modern changes. Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. (Portsmouth,Heinemann, 1990); pp.-10

15 GUIDING PERSPECTIVE OF THIS FILE (20 KEY POINTS) 1. 1.1. A famous British historian, Niall Ferguson, declared the following: “Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.” Ferguson, Niall, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. (New York: Basic Books, 2004); p.134. (First published in 2002 in London) 1.2. The famous British historian and emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of London reminds us that near the end of his life in 1889, Mackay of Uganda remarked perceptively, “In former years the universal aim was to steal the African from Africa. Today the determination of Europe is to steal Africa from the African.” Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950. The Oxford History of the Christian Church (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994) 1.3. “Blacks have a 375-year history on this American continent:

245 involving slavery, 100 involving discrimination,

and only 30 involving anything else” (Roger Wilkins, African American Historian) 2. Graham Connah on Precolonial African civilization Reflecting on the continuing exclusion of Africa from World History, Graham Connah made the following observation: “There were cities and states in tropical Africa long before the colonial ambitions of European peoples transformed that continent. The appearance of such cities and states was one of the most significant developments of tropical Africa’s history prior to the colonial experience. It is also a development that has had relatively little attention from world-wide scholarship, although there does exist a substantial specialist academic literature on the subject. Outside Africa itself there persists, amongst people in general, a deeply ingrained conviction that precolonial tropical Africa consisted only of scattered villages of mud or grass huts, their inhabitants subsisting on shifting cultivation or semi-nomadic pastoralism. What is more surprising, and more disturbing, is that this sort of stereotype seems also to have had some effect upon scholars considering the emergence of cities and states as global phenomena. For example, in 1978 the Wolfson Lectures at the University of Oxford were devoted to the subject ‘The Origins of Civilization’ but in their published version at least, they contained no discussion of African developments other than those in Egypt. At a more popular level, a recent book entitled The Encyclopedia of ancient civilizations(Cotterell, 1983) similarly excludes Africa (except, of course, for Egypt) although it does include West Asia, India, Europe, China, and America. Yet such a coverage is liberal indeed compared with what would have been acceptable thirty or forty years ago. Gordon Childe was perhaps the most important exponent of an academic tradition that saw the origins of civilization as

16 the origins of European culture. Glyn Daniel has described how he once asked Childe why he did not give more attention to the American civilizations. Childe’s answer was characteristically terse and to the point: ‘Never been there – peripheral and highly suspect’. Could it be that the continued exclusion of tropical Africa from general discussions of world civilization represents a survival of this sort of attitude ?… The emergence of urbanism and political centralization in the West African savanna has long been attributed to contact with the Mediterranean world, resulting from long- distance trade. Suspiciously, the origins of that trade have usually been dated to the period of the earliest historical sources that touch on the subject. Archaeology has until recently played a confirmatory, some might even say a subservient, role in the stock historical interpretation. It has been a case of so much historical information being available that archaeologists have failed to ask the sort of questions that they might have asked otherwise. As a result, the quality of the archaeological data available to shed light on the origins of cities and states in the West African savanna is poor. Fortunately, there have in recent years been some exceptions to this general rule. The work at Jenne is a notable example. Reviewing such new evidence, along with the older evidence obtained over the last eighty years or so, leads to questioning the long-accepted external-stimulus explanation.

In addition, it is possible that localized population pressures were stimulating social developments leading to urbanism. Such developments seem to have taken place before the advent of Islam, nevertheless, with the ideological support of a variety of probably animistic religions. Finally, although adequately dated evidence is very limited, it seems most likely that an extensive trading network existed within West Africa before the Arab trade across the Sahara was developed. The savanna towns were indeed ‘ports’ at the edge of the ‘sea of sand’, but they were ports with a vast trading hinterland that was already developed. After all, what ship would ever visit a port unless there was a chance of a cargo to collect?… It was in the second half of the fifteenth century AD that European sailors first set eyes on the southerly coast of West Africa… As the centuries went by, it was this coast that became known as ‘The White Man’s Grace’: a name that to many proved to be no exaggeration. Yet it was neither altruism nor curiosity that tempted most Europeans to such a region, it was profit. The very name that they gave to different parts of this coast indicate their motives: ‘The Grain(Pepper) Coast’, ‘The Ivory Coast’, ‘The Gold Coast’, ‘The Slave Coast’. For Europeans had quickly discovered that behind the coast itself lay a forested hinterland rich in resources, where the inhabitants were able and willing to trade on a considerable scale. Not only that, but those inhabitants lived in highly organized communities, some of which took on a size and density which left the visitors in no doubt about what they were dealing with.

These quotations have been deliberately selected from early in the history of European West African contact. This has been done because state development and urbanization in the West African forest have sometimes been written about as if they were developments resulting from that contact rather than pre-dating it. For instance, this is the impression given by Goody when he discusses what he calls the ‘gun states of the forest’. Although there is no doubt that European seaborne trade did play an important part in the later development of the forest states and their towns and cities, historical sources suggest that some of them at least were in existence before that trade started. Graham Connah, African Civilizations: Precolonial cities and States in tropical Africa: an archaeological perspective , Cambridge University Press, 1987; pp. 6; 119-122

17 3. “African wisdom is not merely a convenient expression; it is something that exists. It is a collection of unique precepts that enable the people of traditional Africa to settle as harmoniously as possible the disputes that mar human relationships.” Balandier, Georges and Maquet, Jacques, Dictionary of Black African Civilization. (New York: Leon Amiel, ); p.336. 4. “Undoubtedly prompted by the demon of literature, the ethnographers who tell us of African trances emphasize their brutality. But African mysticism has its nuances, half-tones, and melodic lines. Among the Yoruba and Fon there is an entire civilization of spirituality comparable to that of the wood carvings and bronzes of Benin…Until recently African religious practices hid from foreigners one of their most subtle and engaging aspects, the one which, by its appearances and motivations, is related to what the “great” religions call mystical life. There have been numerous factors limiting the analysis of religious phenomena and preventing the “noninitiated” from attaining the “sacred.” The African was likened to the gentile for whom Christian revelation was lacking and who, because of this, was devoted to the worship of idols. African religion seemed devoid of nobility, elevation, and grandeur… However, patient and meticulous research has been necessary in order to realize that African spirituality does not cede anything to that of the great religions. In both cases the human being is in search of a sort of deliverance capable of transfiguring fhis terrestrial condition. Like the believer in the so-called superior religions, the African is not only content to implore the pardon or aid of the divinity or do express his gratitude to him. He aspires to have contact with his god, he wishes for the sight of the one he adores, he longs to become the Other through a transformation which he nevertheless wishes not to be radical….Moral life and mystical life, these two aspects of African spirituality, give it its proper dimensions. They constitute, so to speak, the supreme goal of the African soul, the objective towards which the individual strives with all his energy because he feels his perfection can only be completed and consummated if he masters and surpasses himself through divinity, indeed through the mastery of divinity itself…. African morals and ethics belong to a domain which Western researchers have scarcely explored. To be sure, they have not failed to note various aspects of the moral conduct of the Africans: fidelity, hospitality, sense of justice, love and respect for relatives and traditions, modesty surrounding relations between the sexes, unselfishness and self-sacrifice. These qualities of the African soul have also been observed in the vast field of oral literature often used by the people themselves for the education and moral formation of the young. Nevertheless, these observations have most often been buried by the investigators in the mass of conventional acts or else they have been arranged according to the perspective of Western culture, thus losing their African specificity. No one has ever truly concentrated on the ultimate scope of African ethics and morals. Yet it would have been relatively easy to perceive that the African valorizes above all the mastery of the self, making it, in fact, the foundation of his conduct. This “virtue” possesses an essential preliminary which is also the basis of African thought and philosophy.”

Zahan, Dominique, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). 5. “If archaeologists are correct in believing that the first human beings came from Africa, then it stands to reason that the first religions also originated there… It is possible

18 that, as the earliest humans slowly migrated to other continents of the world, they carried with them religious ideas and practices that originated in Africa.” Robert M. Baum, “Indigenous Religious Traditions” in Willard G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, A Concise Introduction to World Religions. (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15-17. 6. “Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt… There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race… My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair… but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times.” Herodotus, History, Book II (paragraphs 50,51,52 and 104)

7.“Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was taught all the wisdom of the Egyptians and became a man with power both in his speech and his actions.” (The Jerusalem Bible, Acts 7, 17-22). 8. “For three millennia, from the first dynasty around 3100 B.C.E. to the first centuries of the Common Era, when Egypt converted to Christianity, the rich and diverse elements of Egyptian religion were practiced. (…)The culture of Egypt attained high developments in religious ideas and also in artistic expression. In their religious interests the ancient Egyptians created a vast literature. Their very large sacred literature included mythological texts, guides for the dead, prayers, hymns, … and philosophical wisdom texts. (…) The wisdom of Egypt influenced the Israelite religion as well as Greek philosophers.”(pp.30-33) Theodore M. Ludwig, The Sacred Paths of the West New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994. 9. THE AFRICAN (EGYPTIAN) ORIGIN OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS,

AND THE RULE OF LAW

With regards to the origin of democracy and human rights, it is also important to recall that in this matter, Egypt served as a teacher of ancient Greeks and Romans as the famous Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledges clearly:

“The concept of Egyptian Law refers to that law that originated with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under King Menes (c.2925B.C.) and grew and developed until the Roman occupation of Egypt (30 B.C The history of Egyptian law is longer than that of any other civilization. Even after the Roman occupation, elements of Egyptian law were retained outside the major urban areas. Although punishment for criminal offenders could be severe-and, in the modern viewpoint, barbaric-Egyptian law nevertheless was admirable in its support of basic human rights. The Pharaoh Bocchoris, for example, promoted individual rights, suppressed imprisonment for debt, and reformed laws relating to the transferal of property. His legal innovations are one example of the far-reaching implications of Egyptian law: the Greek lawgiver Solon (6th century BC.) visited Egypt and adapted aspects of the legal system to his own ideas for

19 Athens. Egyptian law continued to influence Greek law during the Hellenistic period, and its effects on Roman imperial law may still be felt today.” ( “Egyptian law,” in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol.4, Micropaedia; 15th edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1994); p. 392.

10. “All humans today, whether they are Europeans, Australian Aborigenes, or Africans, belong to the same subspecies of human being. The first anatomically modern humans, known as Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared in Africa between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. They began to spread outside Africa around 100,000 years ago… By 10,000 B.C., members of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species could be found throughout the world… Western civilization can be traced back to the ancient Near East, where people in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed organized societies and created the ideas and institutions that we associate with civilization. The later Greeks and Romans, who played such a crucial role in the development of Western Civilization, where themselves nourished and influenced by these older societies in the Near East. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin our story of Western civilization in the ancient Near East with the early civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt.” Jackson J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization. Volume 1: to 1715. (Thomson Wadsworth, 2003), pp.2-3. 11. The authors of the Bible and the Koran spoke languages of African origin “We’re taught that Western civilization originated in the Near East, was brought to brilliant heights in Europe by the Greeks and Romans, and produced three of the world’s great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Those religions arose among people speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively. We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, Greenberg determined that Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (New York/London: W.W. Norton & company, 1999), p.383.

20 12. AFRICAN ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND AND RELIGION (by Robert Fisher, American missionary) Reflecting on the discoveries of linguistics, genetics, paleontology, and history of art, the American missionary Robert Fischer comes to the logical conclusion on the significant role played by Africa in the origin of world religions and their basic symbols and rituals, and religious language:

The scientists, whose job is to look for fossil remains and to dig for archeological evidence of human origins, have probably demonstrated quite well for us that the earliest human life forms appeared in East Africa over a million years ago. These paleoanthropologists maintain that the first humans evolved in Africa and migrated to Europe and Asia. These earliest human life are referred to as Homo erectus. The evolution from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens is explained in various ways. Some believing in the “multiregional hypothesis” claimed that some Homo Sapiens developed in Africa, another in Europe and another in Asia. But other scholars maintain that all humans that inhabit the earth today came out of the Homo Sapiens that evolved in Africa (“Out of Africa” theory).Scientists at Berkeley, California, and at Emory, in Atlanta, by looking at patterns of genetic variation of mitochondrial DNA among human populations, determined that Africans, of all existing populations, have the deepest genetic roots. Since only women are the bearers of a type of “genetic time-clock,” the African woman stands out as the model of a kind of “Mitochondrial Eve.” Thus genetic evidence point to the origin of humankind from a “Black Eve.” All humanity descends from a Black African woman. The fundamental belief among many scientists is that the transformation of an archaic human form to a modern form of Homo Sapiens occurred first in Africa about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. From Africa this most recent ancestor migrated to spread over the face of the earth. All human beings therefore descended from Africans. This implies that not only humanity, but also language, culture, civilization and religion were born in Africa… Until about 1950 it was assumed that the Afroasiatic language family had been introduced into Africa from neighboring Asia, but now it is widely held that it originated in Africa west of the Red Sea. It includes the Semitic languages of southwestern Asia, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and ancient Aramaic, and the ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages of northern and northeastern Africa… The point we make here is that since the cradle of humanity was probably Africa – or, at least, one important segment of the species Homo Sapiens evolved out of an early genetic pool in Africa – one could claim that dance, ritual, and ceremony are the dramatic elements of the religious traditions that are still extant today all over sub-Saharan Africa and have spread from there over the face of the earth. The African is a person of dance. The Africans were the first human beings to dance and reflect on their humanity in terms of a world beyond the physical, the spiritual order of gods and ancestors. The Africans were the messengers of art and of the good news about a world beyond the mere mundane earth.” Robert B. Fisher, West African Religious Traditions: Focus on the Akan of Ghana. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), pp.13-15; 30.

13. The testimony of Pope In 1994, during the first African Synod of Bishops held in Rome, Pope John-Paul II declared the following:

21 “Although Africa is very rich in natural resources, it remains economically poor. At the same time, it is endowed with a wealth of cultural values and priceless human qualities which it can offer to the Churches and to humanity as a whole…Africans have a profound religious sense, a sense of the sacred, of the existence of God the Creator and of a spiritual world. The reality of sin in its individual and social forms is very much present in the consciousness of these peoples, as is also the need for rites of purification and expiation.” Maura Browne, ed., The African Synod: Documents, Reflections, Perspectives. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996); p. 245. 14. An African Universal Prayer (A Model of African Spirituality):

Kirinyaga (God), owner of all things, I pray to Thee, give me what I need, Because I am suffering, and also my children, And all the things that are in this country of mine. I beg Thee, the good one, for life, Healthy people with no disease. May they bear healthy children. And also to women who suffer Because they are barren, open the way By which they may see children. Give goats, cattle, food, honey, And also the trouble of the other lands That I do not know, remove.

(A Meru Prayer, Kenya) 15. The Essence of African Traditional Religion Iwà lesin (Good Character is the essence of Religion) Where did you see Iwa? Tell me!

Iwà, iwà is the one I am looking for. “A man may be very, very handsome Handsome as a fish within the water But if he has no character He is no more than a wooden doll.”

Iwà, iwà is the one I am looking for.

If you have money, But if you do not have good character, The money belongs to someone else. Iwà, iwà is the one we are searching for. If one has children,

22 But if one lacks good character, The children belong to someone else. Iwà, iwà is the one we are searching for. If one has a house But if one lacks good character, The house belongs to someone else. Iwà, iwà is what we are searching for. If one has clothes, But if one lacks good character, The clothes belong to someone else. Iwà, iwà is what we are looking for. All the good things of life that a man has, If you have money, If he lacks good character, They belong to someone else. Iwà, iwà is what we are searching for.

Each individual must use his own hands To improve on his own character Anger does not produce a good result for any man Patience is the father of good character If there is an old man who is endowed with patience He will be endowed with all good things It is honesty which I have in me, I do not have any wickedness Iwà lèsin, Good character is the essence of religion. (Yoruba Religion) 16. CHINUA ACHEBE: “Colonization may indeed be a very complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honor. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself and his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold or diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the real sense of the word – that he and they just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally, if worse comes to the worst, you will be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human.” Chinua Achebe in African Commentary, vol.1, n0.2, Nov.1989.

23 17. Malcolm X “Now what effect does the struggle in Africa have on us? Why should the Black man in America concern himself since he’s been away from the African continent for three or four hundred years? Why should we concern ourselves? What impact does what happens to them have upon us? Number one, you have to realize that up until 1959 Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. Having complete control over Africa, the colonial powers of Europe projected the image of Africa negatively. They always projected Africa in a negative light: jungle savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. it was so negative that it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn’t want anybody telling us anything about Africa, much less calling us Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself. (Malcolm X, February 1965: The final Speeches. New York; Pathfinder, 1992. p.93) 18. Jahn Janheinz and the invention of the “Real Negro” mythology

Those who expect to see in their fellow men fools, blockheads or devils, will find evidence to confirm their prejudices. If we are convinced the other fellow cannot sing, we have only to call his song “a hellish row” in order to justify our claim. Simply by applying a certain vocabulary one can easily turn Gods into idols, faces into grimaces, votive images into fetishes, discussions into palavers and distort real objects and matters of fact through bigotry and prejudice. Prejudice has created types in the mind of the public. Only the most highly cultivated person, humane, cosmopolitan, enlightened, progressive, counts as a “real European.” A “real African,” on the other hand, lives in the bush, carves “primitive” scriptures, can neither read nor write, goes naked, lives carefree and happy from day to day and tells fairy stories about the crocodile and the elephant. The more “primitive,” the more “really African.” But an African who is enlightened and cosmopolitan, who presides in the most cultivated fashion over congresses, who makes political speeches or write novels, no longer counts as a “real” African. Janheinz, Jahn, Muntu: African culture and the Western World (New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p.20

19. Basil Davidson “Old views (views of Victorian evolutionists) about Africa are worth recalling because, though vanished from serious discussion, they still retain a kind of underground existence. The stercoraceous sediment of Burton’s opinions, and of others such as Burton, has settled like a layer of dust and ashes on the minds of large numbers of otherwise thoughtful people, and is constantly being swirled about. What this leads to, despite all factual evidence to the contrary, are endless suspicions that writers such as Lothrop Stoddard were or are just possibly right when they wrote or write about the ‘natural and inherent inferiority’ of Africans; that ‘in the Negro, we are in the presence of a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from (other) human types’; or that ‘the Negro… has contributed virtually nothing’ to the civilization of the world. However scientifically mistaken, these notions apparently remain part of our culture. Often it is the aggressive violence of such opinions that most surprises… When our Grand children reflect on the middle and later years of the twentieth century, above all on the years lying between about

24 1950 and 1980, and think about us writers of African history, of the history of the black peoples, I think that they will see us as emerging from a time of ignorance and misunderstanding. For these were the liberating years when accounts began at last to be squared with the malice and mystification of racism. And by racism I do not mean, of course, that phalanx of old superstitions, fears and fantasies associated with ancient white ideas about blackness, or not less ancient black ideas about whiteness, the ideas of an old world in which distance always induced distortion. By racism I mean the conscious and systematic weapon of domination, of exploitation (…) , which first saw its demonic rise with the onset of the trans-Atlantic trade in African captives sold into slavery, and which, later, led on to the imperialist colonialism of our yesterdays. This racism was not a “mistake,” a “misunderstanding” or a “grievous deviation from the proper norms of behavior.” It was not an accident of human error. It was not an unthinking reversion to barbarism. This racism was conceived as the moral justification – the necessary justification, as it was seen by those in the white man’s world who were neither thieves nor moral monsters – for doing to black people what church and state no longer thought it permissible to do to white people: the justification for enslaving black people, that is, when it was no longer permissible to enslave white people. This weapon of exploitation has its own history, developing new uses in new situations, as many of us know or remember or even now may still experience. But this has been a history, nonetheless, which began to come to an end in the middle and later years of the twentieth century. One of the reasons why it began to come to an end has been the emergence of the Africans from their colonialist subjection.” Basil Davidson, The African Genius.. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,1969); p.25. Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited from Antiquity to Modern time. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1991);pp.3-4. 20. Basil Davidson “Having taken possession of Africa in the 1880s and soon after, the dispossessors were bound to assure themselves, if only for their own peace of mind, that they had also acted for the benefit and eventual welfare of the peoples they had dispossessed. Left to their pre-industrial and pre-scientific primitivism, said the colonialists, Africans could never have modernized their communities, their ideas and beliefs, their ways of self-government. Colonialism might be a rough and though business; never mind, foreign rule was what Africa needed if any real progress were to become possible. The Africa of a century ago, it was said, was lost in the futile ties of a bygone age, unable to help itself….The Negro, many have believed, is a man without a past. Black Africa-Africa south of the Sahara desert-is on this view a continent where men by their own efforts have never raised themselves much above the level of the beasts. “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences,” commented David Hume. “No approach to the civilization of his white fellow creatures who he imitates as a monkey does a man,” added Trollope…Africans, on this view, had never evolved civilization of their own; if they possessed a history, it could be scarcely worth the telling. And this belief that Africans had lived in universal chaos or stagnation until the coming of Europeans seemed not only to find its justification in a thousand tales of savage misery and benigned ignorance; it was also, of course, exceedingly convenient in high imperial times. For it could be argued (and it was; indeed, it still is) that these peoples, history-less, were naturally inferior or else they were ‘children who had still to grow up’; in either case they were manifestly in need of government by others who had grown up….It is an old and true saying that you cannot develop other people, you can only develop yourself. Other people either develop themselves, or they do not at all. Peoples in Africa, before the long colonial

25 interruption, had developed themselves. From this self-development had come a rich variety of social and political systems: self-governing communities, complex patterns of trade and of production for trade, valuable techniques like the skills of tropical agriculture, metal- working, textile weaving and so on. History also shows that this self-development, in all its complexity, had derived from indispensable principles of statecraft. Communities which upheld these principles had been able to succeed and prosper. Communities which ignored or denied these principles had failed and fallen into confusion. These pre-colonial principles were concerned with preventing the abuse of executive power; with ensuring that power was shared across the community in question; and, to safeguard this participation, with upholding the rule of law. Every successful community in old Africa had operated in one way or another on these principles of statecraft; and such communities had been many. These were the truths that the colonial powers, and their ideologists, had always denied. Colonial ideologists had said that black people had never known how best to govern themselves: white people must do it for them. Such was the ideological basis of colonialism. And the same idea, however muted, was also the basis of…new-colonialism.” Davidson, Basil, Modern Africa: A Social and Political History. (London: Longman, 1995); pp.265-269; and Davidson, Basil, The Lost Cities of Africa. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959); p.ix. A BRIEF HISTORY OF MULTICULTURALISM IN THE US MULTICULTURALISM AND THE RECOGNITION OF OTHER RELIGIONS “PAGANISM” AS A WORLD RELIGION

313-1945: Persecution of indigenous people and pagan religions

(by Christianity and later on Islam) 1850-1950: beginning of revival of pagan religions 1950-2050: Neo-pagan religions officially accepted and respected along other world religions. 1945-1965: The UN AND VATICAN II acknowledge and promote the rights of indigenous religions and freedom of religion in general. 1948: UN declaration of human rights 1950-1970: Decolonization

26 In 1951: the last law against Witchcraft was repealed in England. 3 years later a book was published, written by Gerald Brousseau Gardner, who professed to

be an actual witch. Raymond Buchkland, The Witch Book: The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-paganism (Detroit: Visible Ink Press; 2002);p.xii.

1965: Council Vatican II 1973-2003 (especially 1970s and 1990s): The UN promotes the protection and celebration of indigenous people, languages, cultures

and religions. 1973-2003 (especially 1970s and 1990s): The UN promotes the protection and celebration of indigenous people, languages, cultures and religions. Pagan religions officially recognized by various governments in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. 1970-2000: Decline of Christianity in Europe and rise of Neo-Pagan religions in Europe

(where they also become officially recognized). End of European colonialism and rise of indigenous religions 1970-2010 (the process of recognition took almost 40 years): 1973: the government of Iceland officially recognizes Neo-pagan religions. 1978: Native American religion becomes legal in the U.S. when the Freedom of Religion Act was passed by the US Congress 1986 and 1990: Pope John Paul II recognizes officially that the Spirit of the one true God works also outside Christianity, in individuals, societies and other religions 1992: A Supreme Court decision recognizes the right of Santeria to perform animal sacrifices in Florida (USA) 1993: proclaimed by the United Nations “International Year of the World’s Indigenous People” by the United Nations (UN Resolution 45/164). 1993-2003: Decade of Indigenous people (9 August proclaimed in 1994 “International Day of the World’s Indigenous People” ) 1994: Pope John-Paul II officially recognizes the values and dignity of African traditional religions (during the African Synod held in Rome) 1996: Official recognition of Voodoo in Benin 1996: Official recognition of Neo-pagan religions in Norway (in 1996 and in1999) 2003: Official recognition of Voodoo in Haiti and of Neo-pagan religions in Denmark 2010: Druidism officially recognized in England (UK) The transformation of the American society and the impact of 3 major wars: World War I (1914-1918), WWII (1917-1946), Vietnam War (1950-1970) MULTICULTURALISM AND US CITIZENSHIP 1917:Puerto Ricans granted US citizenship

27 1920: Women gain the right to vote 1923: US citizenship granted to Asian Indians 1924: full citizenship granted to all Native Americans, but many Western states refuse to allow them to vote (=>1978: the Religious Freedom Act promises to protect and preserve for Native Americans freedom to believe, express, and exercise traditional religions, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonial and traditional rites) (=> 2004: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian opens in Washington, DC) 1943: Chinese Exclusion Act repealed, making immigrants of Chinese ancestry eligible for citizenship 1946: Filipinos eligible for citizenship 1954-1974: struggle for the inclusion of African Americans 1957: the US Congress passes the Voting Rights Act for African Americans FROM SLAVERY TO MULTICULTURALISM: A BRIEF HISTORY SLAVE TRADE (17th-19th century): Almost 300 YEARS(Colonialism: 100 years) 1441: The first African slaves are transported to Portugal. c. 1517 Black plantation slavery begins in the New World when Spaniards begin importing slaves from Africa to replace Native Americans who died from harsh working conditions and exposure to Old World diseases to which they had no immunity. 1562: Three hundred slaves are obtained by the British and taken to Hispaniola (later Haiti and the Dominican Republic). 1565: The Spanish take slaves to St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement in what would later be the state of Florida. IN THE US 1607: English colony established in Virginia 1618/1619: First enslaved Africans (20 people) brought to America (in Jamestown, in Virginia) aboard a Dutch ship. 1638: First African slaves arrive in Massachusetts 1660-1700: Africans begin to replace Native American slaves and White indentured servants From the 1660s: laws regulate slavery, and establish that children born from slaves are slaves for life. 1664: Black-White marriages outlawed 1665-1865: 200 years of intensive African slavery in the US 1707 A South African census lists 1,779 Dutch settlers owning 1,107 slaves. 1735 Carolus Linnaeus begins his classification of all then-known animal forms, ultimately including humans with primates and providing a model for modern racial classification. 1859: Darwin publishes “The origin of species” 1865-1965: Slavery abolished in 1865, but replaced by Segregation laws or institutionalized racism or “White Supremacy” (Jim Crow: “Separate but Equal”) 1950-1980 / 1980-2010: African Renaissance (last 30 years)

28

ABOLITION AND COLONIALISM 1776: the very year in which he wrote the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson also formulated a proposal for the African colonization of American blacks. Although he deplored slavery, Jefferson remained a slaveholder who believed in the absolute inferiority of blacks. Hence he maintained that once emancipated, black Americans had to be returned back to Africa leaving the US to whites only. Abraham Lincoln himself embraced this idea and was for years a “colonizationist.” (Most of the Founding Fathers were large-scale slaveholders as were 8 of the first 12 Presidents of the United States!) 1816: a group of Presbyterian ministered founded in Washington, DC, the “American colonization Society” (ACS) with a goal to encourage free blacks to immigrate to Africa. 1821: ACS purchased a colony christened LIBERIA, and during the 19th century the ACS sent an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 African Americans to Africa. 1846: Frederick Douglass launches his abolitionist newspaper. 1849:Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad. 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel,Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published. It becomes one of the most influential works to stir anti-slavery sentiments. 1857: The Dred Scott case holds that Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore, that slaves are not citizens. 1863: A century after the Independence of the US, President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation (issued in 1862, but to take effect in 1863) declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” 1865: The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishes slavery. The same year Nathan B. Forrest (a former Confederate general) organizes the Ku Klux Klan 1866: The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the citizenship of anyone born in the US, including African Americans 1870: The 15th Amendment prohibits federal and state governments from infringing on a citizen’s right to vote based on “race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” HISTORY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 1883: the US Supreme Court declares the “Civil Rights Act of 1875” unconstitutional 1896 – 1954: 1896: Supreme Court upholds “Separate but equal” doctrine in “Plessy versus Ferguson.” Hence the Court sanctioned segregation as the law of the land by affirming the constitutionality and hence establishing the legitimacy of the Louisiana’s Jim Crow Law. Jim Crow Law established the principle of “equal but separate accommodations for whites and colored races” in public facilities. Jim Crow’s segregation law remained in force and governed the US for 58 years until 1954. 1954-1974: Civil Rights Movement

29 1954: “Separate but equal” doctrine rejected as invalid by the US Supreme Court decision in “Brown versus Topeka Board of Education.” (Schools must be integrated) 1955: Bus boycott after the Rosa Park incident 1956: the Supreme Court rules that segregation on public buses is illegal 1957: the US Congress passes the Voting Rights Act. This was the first civil rights legislation to pass Congress since the end of Reconstruction. It was aimed at ending the barriers created to stop Blacks from voting, in the South. 1961 (March 6): Pdt John F. Kennedy issued the executive order 10925 which inaugurated the Government’s policy to redress racial inequities in employment opportunities. 1963: Congress passes the Equal Pay Act, making it illegal for employers to pay a woman less than what a man would receive for the same job The same year (1963): Martin Luther King’s March on Washington (“I have a Dream” Speech) 1964: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex. It also establishes the Equal Employment opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate complaints and impose penalties 1965 (September 24): Affirmative Action: Noting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination, Pdt Lyndon Johnson issued his Executive Order 11246 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, and national origin, but not sex. This Order enforced affirmative action for the first time. (Malcolm X assassinated the same year; Martin Luther King will be assassinated in 1968, and in 1986 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday becomes a national holiday in the United States) 1967: the Supreme Court rules that prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional. 16 states that still banned interracial marriage at that time are forced to revise their laws.

(1664: Black-White marriages outlawed; for 300 years!) 1973: Affirmative Action for women: Pdt Richard Nixon, in his Executive Order 11375 amended Johnson’s order by including sex as a protected class. The same year (1973): as a result of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court establishes a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion, overriding the anti-abortion laws of many states.(1960: the Pill enters the market and shapes the life of women) 1974: The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in consumer credit practices on the basis of sex, race, marital status, religion, national origin, age, or receipt of public assistance. PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND THE RECOGNITION OF OTHER RELIGIONS (INCLUDING ATR) The understanding of the spiritual values of “other religions” is largely hindered by exclusivist doctrines, especially the ideology of idolatry promoted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However even within these religions, there are trends of openness to other religions.

30 Here is a sample of new ideas that promote religious tolerance 1. The crucial role of the UN in fostering religious freedom Article 18 (UN, Universal declaration of Human Rights) Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. 2. Change of attitude among Western intellectuals EMILE DURKHEIM: “In reality, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence. They respond to the same needs, they play the same role, they depend upon the same causes. All are religions equally, just as all living beings are equally alive, from the most humble plastids up to man.” HUSTON SMITH: “It is not morally possible actually to go out into the world and say to devout, intelligent, fellow human beings: ‘We are saved and you are damned’; or, ‘We believe that we know God, and we are right; you believe that you know God, and you are totally wrong.’” Huston Smith, The Faith of Other Men(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972); pp.130-31. Biblical Foundation of Religious Pluralism The Book of Wisdom 11, 22 – 12,1: Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth. But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent. For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? But you spare all things, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, For your imperishable spirit is in all things! “Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’” Acts of the Apostles 10:34-35 From Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2001)

31 AFTER THIS SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS, WE NOW PROCEED WITH THE MORE DETAILED VERSION OF THE FILE TABLE OF CONTENTS (BIG PICTURE)

You will find here, in 5 sections, an excellent summary of knowledge pertaining to African traditional religions Here is all that is necessary for a better understanding of African traditional religions

SECTION 1. INTRODUCTION: GENERAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK (WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW, HOW MANY?) Part 0. How many practitioners of ATR? (see section II on the religious landscape) Part 1. Official recognition of indigenous or “pagan” religions in the world

1.1 Recognition by various governments in Europe, Africa and the Americas 1.2. The rise of religious tolerance and the recognition of other religions: some fundamental guiding principles of religious tolerance

Part 2. Why Study Africa? Why does Africa matter to us? 2.0. Summary of the fundamental reasons for studying Africa 2.1. Cradle of humanity

2.2. Implications of “cradle of humanity theory” for civilization and world religions 2.2.1. African contribution to world civilization and religion in general 2.2.2. African contribution to Western Civilization and Spirituality 2.2.2.1. Contribution to the Religions and Spiritual Values of the West or Europe 2.2.2.1.1. Contribution to ancient religions of Greece and Rome 2.2.2.1.2. Contribution to the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity 2.2.2.2. Contribution to Western civilization 2.2.2.2.0. Western civilization in general 2.2.2.2.1. African contribution to the Roman Empire 2.2.2.2.2. Contribution to ancient Greece 2.2.2.2.2. 1. Greek religion (Herodotus) 2.2.2.2.2. 2. Greek Philosophy and Science 2.2.2.2.2. 3. Democracy, Human Rights, and the “Rule of Law”

32 2.3. The Egyptian Problem and Eurocentrism: Educational Propaganda and Miseducation. 2.3.1.The Egyptian Problem 2.3.2. Foreign Stimulus Ideology and The Zimbabwe Gambling

Part 3. How to properly study ATR? 3.1. Overcoming Miseducation and the colonial educational propaganda

of Eurocentric scholarship 3.2. Historical context and Epistemological Framework 3.2.1. Principles of Religious Tolerance and the Recognition of Traditional Religions 3.2.2. The “Cradle of Humanity” theory and its implications for world civilizations

and religions 3.2. 3. Beyond Colonialism: African Renaissance, Multiculturalism and the Revival

of Traditional Religions 3.2. 4. Revisiting the Sources of Knowledge 3.3. Outline of Key points in the study of ATR 3.4. African Moral Values 3.4.1. Major African moral values (Virtues) 3.4.2. Recognition of African moral qualities and spiritual values

SECTION 2. RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF AFRICA AND THE WORLD

Part 1. Practitioners of ATR in Africa and the World Part 2. Religious Landscape of Africa and the World

SECTION 3. AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS IN 80 KEY THESES SECTION 4. CHRONOLOGY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN RELIGIONS Part 1. Chronology and General Bibliography Part 2. Thematic Bibliography

VII. General History of Africa VIII. African Traditional Religions: Important Works IX. Sacred Texts of Africa

1. Sacred Texts of African Traditional Religions 2. Sacred Texts of Ancient Egypt 3. African Bibles

X. Christianity as an African Religion

33 XI. The Egyptian Problem XII. Colonialism, Intellectual Racism, and Genocide

SECTION 5. MISCELLANEOUS DATA SECTION 1. INTRODUCTION Part 1. OFFICIAL RECOGNITION OF PAGAN RELIGIONS IN THE WORLD

1. RECOGNITION BY CHRISTIANITY AND BY VARIOUS GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE, AFRICA AND AMERICA

“PAGANISM” AS A WORLD RELIGION

313-1945: Persecution of indigenous people and pagan religions

(by Christianity and later on Islam) 1850-1950: beginning of revival of pagan religions 1950-2050: Neo-pagan religions officially accepted and respected along other world religions. 1945-1965: The UN AND VATICAN II acknowledge and promote the rights of indigenous religions and freedom of religion in general. 1948: UN declaration of human rights 1950-1970: Decolonization In 1951: the last law against Witchcraft was repealed in England. 3 years later a book was published, written by Gerald Brousseau Gardner, who professed to

be an actual witch. Raymond Buchkland, The Witch Book: The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-paganism (Detroit: Visible Ink Press; 2002);p.xii.

1965: Council Vatican II 1973-2003 (especially 1970s and 1990s): The UN promotes the protection and celebration of indigenous people, languages, cultures

and religions.

34 1973-2003 (especially 1970s and 1990s): The UN promotes the protection and celebration of indigenous people, languages, cultures and religions. Pagan religions officially recognized by various governments in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. 1970-2000: Decline of Christianity in Europe and rise of Neo-Pagan religions in Europe

(where they also become officially recognized). End of European colonialism and rise of indigenous religions 1970-2010 (the process of recognition took almost 40 years): 1973: the government of Iceland officially recognizes Neopagan religions. 1978: Native American religion becomes legal in the U.S. when the Freedom of Religion Act was passed (in 1978) 1993: A Supreme Court decision recognizes the right of Santeria to perform animal sacrifices in Florida (USA) 1993 also proclaimed the “International Year of the World’s Indigenous People” (by the UN) 1994: Pope John-Paul II officially recognizes the values and dignity of African traditional religions (during the African Synod held in Rome) 1996: Official recognition of Voodoo in Benin and of Neopagan religions in Norway (1996 and 1999) 2003: Official recognition of Voodoo in Haiti

and of Neopagan religions in Denmark 2010: Druidism officially recognized in England 2. PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND THE RECOGNITION OF OTHER RELIGIONS (INCLUDING ATR) The understanding of the spiritual values of “other religions” is largely hindered by exclusivist doctrines, especially the ideology of idolatry promoted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However even within these religions, there are trends of openness to other religions. Here is a sample of new ideas that promote religious tolerance 1. The crucial role of the UN in fostering religious freedom Article 18 (UN, Universal declaration of Human Rights) Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. 2. Change of attitude among Western intellectuals

35 EMILE DURKHEIM: “In reality, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence. They respond to the same needs, they play the same role, they depend upon the same causes. All are religions equally, just as all living beings are equally alive, from the most humble plastids up to man.” HUSTON SMITH: “It is not morally possible actually to go out into the world and say to devout, intelligent, fellow human beings: ‘We are saved and you are damned’; or, ‘We believe that we know God, and we are right; you believe that you know God, and you are totally wrong.’” Huston Smith, The Faith of Other Men(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972); pp.130-31. 3. Paradigm Shift in Christian Consciousness (Openess to other religions) 3.1. Biblical Foundation of Religious Pluralism The Book of Wisdom 11, 22 – 12,1: Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth. But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent. For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? But you spare all things, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, For your imperishable spirit is in all things! “Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’” Acts of the Apostles 10:34-35 From Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2001) 3. 2. Revolutionary views of the Catholic Church (Council, Popes and Theologians) and of Protestant theologians. Jean Danielou (1956; Catholic theologian and Cardinal)

36 “Holiness in the order of cosmic religion consists in responding to God’s call through conscience. It is true holiness. For the Bible there exists no profane morality… Only the will of a person who deserves absolute homage can make absolute claims. To obey the moral law is to recognize God’s infinitely loving will; it is to love God. Moral life is already worship. This is why conscience is a revelation of God and there exists no a-religious morality.” Jean Danielou, Les saints “paiens” de l’Ancien Testament. (Paris: Seuil, 1956), p.166 English version: Jean Danielou, Holy Pagans in the Old Testament. (London: Longmans, Greean and Co., 1957) Cited by Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.

Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; p.37 Nostra Aetate (Vatican II Council, in 1965): We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8). No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned. The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men,(14) so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven. 1986: in the encyclical on the Holy Spirit “Dominum et Vivificantem” (18 May 1986), pope John Paul II articulated explicitly the doctrine of “universal activity of the Holy Spirit before the time of Christian dispensation and today outside the Church.”

Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; p.176

1986: in a discourse to the members of the Roman Curia (December 22), in explaining the meaning of the Assisi meeting with members of different religions for the WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR PEACE (21 October 1986) as a continuation of the spirit of Vatican II, the Pope spoke more clearly than any of the Vatican II council documents on the active presence of the Holy Spirit in the religious life of the members of other religious traditions. Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.

Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; p.175 1990: Pope John-Paul II explicitly proclaims that the Spirit of God works not only within Christianity or the Catholic Church, but also outside, in individuals, cultures and other religious traditions (Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, 7 December 1990):

“The Spirit manifests himself in a special way in the Church and her members. Nevertheless, his presence and activity are universal, limited neither by space nor time… The Spirit… is at the very source of the human person’s existential and religious questioning which is occasioned not only by contingent situations but by the very structure of its being.

37 The Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions.” Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; pp.176-177

REDEMPTORIS MISSIO (The Mission of Christ the Redeemer) ON THE PERMANENT VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH’S MISSIONARY MANDATE By Pope John Paul II, December 7, 1990 Given in Rome, at St. Peter’s, on December 7, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Conciliar Decree Ad Gentes, in the year 1990, the thirteenth of my Pontificate. JOHN PAUL II http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0219/_INDEX.HTM THE TEXT OF THE ENCYCLICAL CHAPTER III – THE HOLY SPIRIT: THE PRINCIPAL AGENT OF MISSION The Spirit Is Present and Active in Every Time and Place 28. The Spirit manifests himself in a special way in the Church and in her members. Nevertheless, his presence and activity are universal, limited neither by space nor time. The Second Vatican Council recalls that the Spirit is at work in the heart of every person, through the “seeds of the Word,” to be found in human initiatives-including religious ones-and in mankind’s efforts to attain truth, goodness and God himself. The Spirit offers the human race” the light and strength to respond to its highest calling”; through the Spirit, “mankind attains in faith to the contemplation and savoring of the mystery of God’s design”; indeed, “we are obliged to hold that the Holy Spirit offers everyone the possibility of sharing in the Paschal Mystery in a manner known to God.” The Church “is aware that humanity is being continually stirred by the Spirit of God and can therefore never be completely indifferent to the problems of religion” and that “people will always…want to know what meaning to give their life, their activity and their death.” The Spirit, therefore, is at the very source of man’s existential and religious questioning, a questioning which is occasioned not only by contingent situations but by the very structure of his being. The Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only the individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions. Indeed, the Spirit is at the origin of the noble ideals and undertakings which benefit humanity on its journey through history: “The Spirit of God with marvelous foresight directs the course of the ages and renews the face of the earth.” The risen Christ “is now at work in human hearts through the strength of his Spirit, not only instilling a desire for the world to come but also thereby animating, purifying and reinforcing the noble aspirations which drive the human family to make its life one that is more human and to direct the whole earth to this end.” Again, it is the Spirit who sows the “seeds of the Word” present in various customs and cultures, preparing them for full maturity in Christ. 29. Thus the Spirit, who “blows where he wills” (cf. Jn 3:8), who “was already at work in the world before Christ was glorified,” and who “has filled the world,…holds all things together

38 [and] knows what is said” (Wis 1:7), leads us to broaden our vision in order to ponder his activity in every time and place. I have repeatedly called this fact to mind, and it has guided me in my meetings with a wide variety of peoples. The Church’s relationship with other religions is dictated by a twofold respect: “Respect for man in his quest for answers to the deepest questions of his life, and respect for the action of the Spirit in man.” Excluding any mistaken interpretation, the interreligious meeting held in Assisi was meant to confirm my conviction that “every authentic prayer is prompted by the Holy Spirit, who is mysteriously present in every human heart.” This is the same Spirit who was at work in the Incarnation and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and who is at work in the Church. He is therefore not an alternative to Christ, nor does he fill a sort of void which is sometimes suggested as existing between Christ and the Logos. Whatever the Spirit brings about in human hearts and in the history of peoples, in cultures and religions serves as a preparation for the Gospel and can only be understood in reference to Christ, the Word who took flesh by the power of the Spirit” so that as perfectly human he would save all human beings and sum up all things.” Moreover, the universal activity of the Spirit is not to be separated from his particular activity within the body of Christ, which is the Church. Indeed, it is always the Spirit who is at work, both when he gives life to the Church and impels her to proclaim Christ, and when he implants and develops his gifts in all individuals and peoples, guiding the Church to discover these gifts, to foster them and to receive them through dialogue. Every form of the Spirit’s presence is to be welcomed with respect and gratitude, but the discernment of this presence is the responsibility of the Church, to which Christ gave his Spirit in order to guide her into all the truth (cf. Jn 16:13).

1990: the Catholic theologian Schillebeeckx proclaims: “even in the Christian self-understanding the multiplicity of religions is not an evil which needs to be removed, but rather a wealth which is to be welcomed and enjoyed by all… The unity, identity and uniqueness of Christianity over against the other religions… lies in the fact that Christianity is a religion which associates relationship to God with a historical and thus a very specific and therefore limited particularity: Jesus of Nazareth. This is the uniqueness and identity of Christianity, but at the same time its unavoidable historical limitation. It becomes clear here that … the God of Jesus is a symbol of openness, not of closedness. Here Christianity has a positive relationship to other religions, but at the same time its uniqueness is nevertheless maintained, and ultimately at the same time the loyal Christian affirmation of the positive nature of other world religions is honoured.” Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God (London: SCM Press, 1990), p.167

Cited in Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; pp.386-387. 1997: Jacques Dupuis (Catholic, Jesuit theologian) proclaims: “On what foundation, then, can the affirmation of a religious pluralism ‘of principle,’ or de jure, be made to rest? I did affirm that the faith in a plurality of persons in the one God is in itself no sufficient foundation for religious pluralism…. If, however, religion has its original source in a divine self-manifestation to human beings, as we have shown, the principle of plurality will be made to rest primarily on the superabundant richness and diversity of God’s self-manifestations to humankind. The divine plan for humanity is one, but multifaceted. That God spoke ‘in many and various ways’ before speaking through his son (Heb 1:1) is not incidental; nor is the plural character of God’s self-manifestation merely a thing of the past. For the decisiveness of the Son’s advent in the flesh in Jesus Christ does not cancel the

39 universal presence and action of the Word and the Spirit. Religious pluralism in principle rests on the immensity of a God who is love.”

Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001; p.387. (I quote the edition of 2001, but the book was first published in 1997) 6. “To be a Christian as a member of Christianity amounts to belonging to one religion among many. It may be more or less pure than others. It would, however, represent not only an abuse of language but an abusive language to denounce other religions as false or incomplete.” (Raimundo Panikkar). 7. Christianity as a form of idolatry and atheism Christianity has accustomed itself to viewing other religions as “idolatry” and itself as the true religion founded by God himself. However, as important Christian theologians such as Karl Barth and Cantwell Smith have confessed, it has increasingly become clear to many that such a view is pure arrogance. History shows that Christianity is not the perfect divine religion it claims to be. Indeed various forms of idolatry are found within Christianity itself. These include, among others, Christian view of Jesus, the Bible, the Church and Christianity itself as a religion, the truth of Christian theologies, the way Christians view themselves, and Christian arrogant and distorted view of other religions. Indeed many Christian thinkers are now aware that Christianity like many other world religions is man-made, and as such it stands in opposition to the Will of God. Man-made Christianity is a form of idolatry, even Atheism. A of the most outspoken exponent of this form of criticism is the famous theologian Karl Barth who pointed out the utter inadequacy of Christianity as an expression of that which it ought to express. In fact Karl Barth made the following observation: “We must insist, therefore, that at the beginning of a knowledge of the truth of the Christian religion, there stands the recognition that this religion, too, stands under the judgment that religion is unbelief… Concretely this judgment affects the whole practice of our faith: our Christian worship, our forms of Christian fellowship and order, our Christian morals, poetry and art, our attempts to give individual and social form to the Christian life, our Christian strategy and tactics in the interest of our Christian cause,

40 in short our Christianity, to the extent that it is our Christianity, the human work which we undertake and adjust to all kinds of near and remote aims and which as such is seen to be on the same level as the human work in other religions. This judgment means that all this Christianity of ours, and all the details of it, are not as such what they ought to be and pretend to be… What we have here is in its own way – a different way from that of other religions, but no less seriously – UNBELIEF, I.e. , opposition to the divine revelation, and therefore ACTIVE IDOLATRY and self-righteousness.” Cited by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); p.304 8. Deconstructing Christianity as a form of idolatry (by Cantwell Smith): “Much though I admire some of Bishop Heber’s other hymns, such as his widely used “Holy, Holy, Holy,” yet I have certainly objected to the lines that run, “The heathen in his blindness bows down to the wood and stone,” ever since I came to recognize that in that situation it was the missionary, rather, that was blind. Of course, I have not been alone among Christians in feeling restless with the attitude set forth in that type of wording…Christians have often been accused of being, and have come to recognize themselves as indeed having been arrogant and disdainful in their fundamental metaphysical view of other religious practitioners. For centuries it was Jews who paid the chief price for this profound Christian error, and the Church has fortunately become repentant, to a considerable degree, about its resulting horrendous treatment of the Jews over the ages…Much of the (Christian) Church now recognizes that its former attitude to other religious communities was wrong. It has been slowly wrestling with the question of what will be involved in setting it right; what new attitude may legitimately replace that old one… Idolatry is not a notion that clarifies other religious practices or other outlooks than one’s own. Idolatry denigrates one’s neighbour by leaving out the transcendence of his or her position…The word idolatry or “idol-worship” (as applied by Christians to non-Christian religions) must be rejected because the conception that it usually communicate is one that distorts what it purports to name… No one has ever worshipped an idol. Some have worshipped God in the form of an idol: that is what the idols are for. The important issue for our purposes here remains that of whether one applies the notion of idolatry to the religious life of all communities, or instead endeavours to exempt one’s own giving it a privileged status or supposing that God has given it that. We would do well, on the other hand, to recognize that we Christians have substantially been idolaters,

41 insofar as we have mistaken for God, or as universally final, the particular forms of Christian life or thought. Christianity – for some, Christian theology – has been our idol. For Christians to see Christ as divine is a perception (put in conceptual terms), a perception that their own personal experience, and two thousand years of Church history, elicit and confirm. It is, however, impossible to perceive him as the sole such mediator; although one can hold this as a theological proposition… One cannot perceive the non-divinity of Krishna, or of the Qur’an. To believe that other groups’ forms are not divine is purely doctrinal construct. To hold that Buddhist, or post-Biblical Jewish, life is not the locus of God’s salvific activity, fully comparable to God’s activity in Christian life, is a sheer man-made hypothesis. The position has – inescapably – no direct grounding in reality. The doctrine of the divinity of Christ is a conceptual form of Christians’ knowledge of God. The doctrine of other religious patterns’ non-divinity is an intellectual formulation of ignorance: an ignorance of the life of those for whom those patterns are rich. For Christians to think that Christianity is true, or final, or salvific, is a form of idolatry. For Christians to imagine that God has constructed Christianity, or the Church, rather than that He has inspired us to construct it, as He has inspired Muslims to construct what the world knows as Islam, or Hindus what is miscalled Hinduism, or inspired Bach to write the B Minor Mass – that is idolatry…Exclusive or final claims for one’s own (religion, theology) is idolatry in the pejorative sense… Christian theologies are ‘idols.’ Theologies are conceptual images of God. But they are not God. God does not reveal theologies, but himself. Every theology is finite, human and mundane (not divine). Every theology is a human construct, and conveys a very limited truth.Theologies are always approximations to truth. Our knowledge of God and our theologies can never be complete, nor final. So to absolutize one’s own theology is idolatry. It is wrong for our intellects to absolutize their own handiwork.” Cantwell Smith, Idolatry in Comparative Perspective. And Cantwell Smith, Towards A World Theology, p.180 4. An Islamic Attitude toward other Religions 4.1. Ibn Arabi (1165-1240, a Sufi) proclaimed the following: “My heart has opened unto every form. It is the pasture for gazelles, A cloister for Christian monks, A temple for idols, The Ka’ba of the pilgrim, The tablets of the Torah and the book of the Koran. I practice the religion of Love; in whatsoever directions its caravans advance, the religion of Love shall be my religion and my faith.” 4.2. Persian mystic al-Rumi, 1207-1273 RUMI proclaimed in some of his poems the following “The man of God is beyond infidelity and religion The man of God is not learned from book…

42 I am neither Muslim nor Christian Jew nor Zoroastrian; I am neither of earth nor of the heavens, I am neither eastern nor western Neither heavenly nor earthly, I am neither of the natural elements nor of the rotating spheres. I am neither from India nor China, From neither Bulgaria nor Tabriz, From neither the country of Iraq nor the land of Khurasan. My sign is without sign, my locus is without locus, It is neither body nor soul for I am myself the Soul of souls. Since I expelled all duality, I see the two worlds as one. I see the One, I seek the One, I know the One, I call upon the One. 4.3. “Difference of opinion within my community is a sign of the bounty of Allah.” (The Prophet Muhammad) 4.4. “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:257) 4.5. “No Man is a true believer unless he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself… Noblest Religion is this – that you should like for others what you like for yourself; and what you feel painful for yourself, hold that as painful for all others too.” (The Prophet Muhammed) 5. BUDDHIST ATTITUDE TOWARD OTHER RELIGIONS Buddhism believes that when a person advances far enough in the Spiritual Path of Dharma she will find herself beyond what people usually call faith, religion, gods and spiritual beings. While standing beyond gods, and believing in the power of the Dharmic Truth, Buddhism profoundly tolerates and respects other religions and their practices. One important consideration for the spread of Buddhist Dharma is the flexibility Buddhism allows in matters that religions traditionally focus on. There is plenty of room in the Buddhist cosmology for gods and goddesses, demons and devils, ancestors, nats, shen, gui, kami, and whatever other spritual beings people believe they have to deal with to live a happy live. As Buddhism spread from people to people, it left many of the traditional religious practices intact – for finally they have little importance, positively or negatively, for the Buddhist path of liberation. Let the nat wives, the shamanesses, the exorcists, and the ritualists ply their trade and deal with the supernatural world for the material welfare of the people. The path of liberation is a different matter, and when one advances far enough in the Dharma she will find herself beyond these gods and spiritual beings. The life and Teaching of King Ashoka illustrate well Buddhist attitude toward other religions As the British Lord Acton recognized, the Buddhist king Ashoka was the first sovereign in history to enact religious toleration in 250 B.C.E. He is one of the first rulers in human

43 history to exalt the virtues of tolerance and civility, 250 years before the birth of Jesus, and almost two thousand years before the US first amendment, the US and UN bills of Rights and before the French declaration of human rights. Ashoka’s 12th edict was a positive and powerful plea for toleration among the various religions and sects of the day. Toleration was not passive sufferance but an active search for dialogue and concord, based upon the notion that in the honoring of other sects lies the welfare and honor of one’s own. An individual or a group is enhanced by the display of active tolerance and genuine fellow-feeling. Concord was regarded as meritorious and it was required that all sects should listen to and profit from each other. The 12th Major Rock Edict says: “On each occasion one should honour another man’s sect (religion), for by doing so one increases the influence of one’s own sect and benefits that of the other man… Whosoever honours his own sect or disparages that of another man, wholly out of devotion to his own, with a view to showing it in a favourable light, harms his own sect even more seriously. Therefore, concord is to be commended, so that men may hear one another’s principles and obey them. Theodore M. Ludwig, The Sacred Paths of the East; p.127): Raghavan Iyer, The moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford University Press, 1973; pp.245-246.

6. HINDU VISION OF OTHER RELIGIONS

6.1. The Vedas maintained that the various religions are but different languages through which God speaks to the human heart: “Truth is one; sages call it by different names.” “Religions are like music or painting, their beauty comes from the difference and variety of colors and sounds.” 6.2. Swami Vivekananda proclaimed: “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal tolerance, but we accept all religions as true. As different streams having different sources all mingle their waters in the sea, so different paths which men take through different tendencies various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to God.” Cited by Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Religions of the World. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2004; p.72 6.3. Ramakrishna (19th century A.D.) After seeking God successively through the person of Christ, the teaching of the Koran, and a variety of Hindu God-embodiments, RamaKrishna, a Hindu saint, declared that in each instance the result was the same: the same God was revealed, now incarnate in Christ, now speaking through the Prophet Muhammad, now in the guise of Vishnu the Preserver or Shiva the Completer. From his experience, Ramakrishna articulated a set of teachings on the essential unity of the great religions:

44 “People partition off their lands by means of boundaries, but no one can partition off the all-embracing sky overhead. The indivisible sky surrounds all and includes all. So people in ignorance say, “My religion is the only one, my religion is the best.” But when a heart is illuminated by true knowledge, it knows that above all these wars of sects and sectarians presides the one indivisible, eternal, all-knowing bliss. There was a man who worshipped Shiva but hated all other deities. One day Shiva appeared to him and said, “I shall never be pleased with you so long as you hate the other gods.” But the man was inexorable. After a few days Shiva again appeared to him and said, “I shall never be pleased with you so long as you hate.” The man kept silent. After a few days Shiva again appeared to him. This time one side of his body was that of Shiva, and the other side that of Vishnu. The man was half pleased and half displeased. He laid his offerings on the side representing Shiva, and did not offer anything to the side representing Vishnu. Then Shiva said, “Your bigotry is unconquerable. I, by assuming this dual aspect, tried to convince you that all gods and goddesses are but various aspects of the one Absolute Brahman.” As a mother, in nursing her sick children, gives rice and curry to one, and sago arrowroot to another, and bread and butter to a third, so the Lord has laid out different paths for different people suitable for their natures. God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion. One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way. As one and the same material, water, is called by different names by different peoples, one calling it water, another eau, a third aqua, and another pani, so the one Everlasting-Intelligent-Bliss is invoked by some as God, by some as Allah, by some as Jehovah, and by others as Brahman. Everyone should follow one’s own religion. A Christian should follow Christianity, a Muslim should follow Islam, and so on. For the Hindus the ancient path, the path of the Aryan sages, is the best. As one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways and means to approach God, and every religion in the world shows one of these ways.” 7. African view of Religious Tolerance 7.1. African traditional religion is one of the ways in which Africans have experienced God’s salvific activity in their history, which is an affirmation of God’s presence with African people. This should come as no surprise since God is the God of all humankind and he is not so unkind as to withhold his presence from others. God’s divine truth and salvation have not been confined to a favoured few; on the contrary, God is God because he is accessible to all, and his revelation does not lead to the denial of his presence in certain areas of the world and an affirmation of his presence elsewhere … The good elements in African traditional religions were put there by God and this clearly demonstrates that God has no favourites and that he shares his truth with all, but does not hide it from others and share it only with those whom he favours. The African religious experience helps to give us a broader and much deeper understanding of God, and rescues us from the limitations which partial human appropriation of God’s activity and revelation tend to place on God… The practitioner’s own view of his religion is important for a wholesome and unjaundiced understanding of African traditional religion. The labels which have been applied to it have all been from the observer’s point of view, for it is quite certain that if the practitioner pouring libation at the foot of a tree were

45 asked to explain what he was doing, he would not say that he was practicing ‘paganism’ or ‘worshipping nature,’ as observers are wont to describe such acts. African traditional religion represents the serious effort of the culture of our forebears in which the “spirit of God was an active agent,” for clearly and unequivocally, we can affirm that God has not been absent from all our serious efforts to make sense of our own life and destiny from the days of our earliest forebears up to our own time.” Opoku, Kofi Asare, “African Traditional religion: An enduring heritage” in Olupona, Jacob K. and Nyang, Sulayman S., eds., Religious Plurality in Africa. (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993); pp. 69-70. 7.2. Contrary to the dogmatic doctrines of idolatry found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, African traditional religions are fundamentally tolerant vis-à-vis other religions. In this the African spirit is similar to that of Hinduism. This spirit of tolerance is grounded in creation myths which teach that God created all humans and all nations. As the father of all, God does not discriminate in religious matters. He reveals the truth to all. Subsequently other religions are viewed as different manifestations of the same Truth revealed by God. According to the Yoruba creation myth, the Yoruba God as father of the whole universe created black and white people, albinos and hunchbaks, the Yoruba people, and all other nations as well. Consequently the Yoruba regard all human beings as kin, so much so that most prayers and invocations offered in Ile-Ife are deemed incomplete until prayers are offered for the people of the entire universe (agbala aye gbogbo), who are regarded as having had their origin in Ile- Ife. The Yoruba religion is not an exception in this regard. When we move from West Africa to East Africa, thousands of miles away, we find the same theology in Kenya where a “Meru Prayer” explicitly links prayer for one’s family and country to prayer for “the trouble of other nations”:

Kirinyaga (God), owner of all things, I pray to Thee, give me what I need,… And also the trouble of the other lands That I do not know, remove.

It is worth noting that this prayer ends with the astonishing invocation for “unknown nations.” This is quite remarkable, especially when compared to the biblical psalms and prayers of “revealed religions” or to the fundamental prayer of civil religion: “God Bless America” or “God Save the Queen.” In Yoruba religion, the High God Orinsala, the molder of human bodies, is praised as “the husband of hunchback”(Oko abuké), “the husband of lame” (Oko aro), and “the husband of dwarf with a big fat head”( Oko arara bori pèté). The Dogon maintain that God created all human beings, and all the races, but used the light of the moon “to cook the bodies of white people” while he used the light of the sun for those of black peoples. Other myths maintain that God used clay of different colors. In sum, God is the universal creator, father and mother of all human beings, of the poor and the rich, the fortunate and the unfortunate, and of members of all different religions. African traditional religions have been from time immemorial characterized by a profound spirit of religious tolerance, which derives from the ancestral belief in the unity and diversity of truth. In her History of Christianity in Africa since antiquity, Elizabeth Isichei reports a story which illustrates well this tradition. The event took place at the beginning of missionary Evangelization of Africa in the 19th century. After reaching San Salvador, the capital of ancient Kongo empire, in 1879, the first Baptist missionaries were soon joined by French

46 Spiritans and, immediately, a bitter competition started, thus introducing in Central Africa the kind of religious war Protestants and Catholics were used to in Europe. The fact that the Evangelization of the Kongo by Portuguese Catholics during the 15th century was in decline, appeared to Protestants as the evidence of the intrinsic spiritual inadequancies of Roman Catholicism. On their part, Spiritans considered the Kongo Kingdom a private property of Roman Catholic mission which first introduced Christianity there in the 15th century. In order to claim what they regarded as their “right” Spiritans went to brief the Kongolese King, Pedro V, Henrique’s successor, on the “heresiarchs and chief Heretics” of Protestantism. Amazed by this new vision of religion, the King rejected their plead, declaring explicitly:

You white men, you perplex me with your different teachings. I do not know how to choose between you… I shall keep both these palavers in my heart, and when I appear before God, He must decide and judge both.

As many other scholars have pointed out for decades, it is basically in the field of religious liberty that Africa brings a major contribution to the world. According to the Catholic theologian, Benezet Bujo, religious wars were unknown in African traditional society. Summarizing the Islamic view, Ali Mazrui, a muslim scholar, is more explicit :

Of the three principal religious legacies of Africa (indigenous, Islamic, and Christian), the most tolerant on record must be the indigenous tradition. One might even argue that Africa did not have religious wars before Christianity and Islam arrived, for indigenous religions were neither universalist (seeking to convert the whole of the human race) nor competitive (in bitter rivalry against other creeds)… Like Hinduism and modern Judaism-and unlike Christianity and Islam- indigenous African traditions have not sought to convert the whole of humanity. The Yoruba do not seek to convert the Ibo to the Yoruba religion-or vice versa-and neither the Yoruba nor the Ibo compete with each other for the souls of a third group, such as the Hausa. Because they are not proselytizing religions, indigenous African creeds have not fought with each other. Over the centuries, Africans have waged many kinds of wars with each other, but they were rarely religious ones before the universalist creeds arrived.

Writing from the perspective of the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, Abimbola observed that religious tolerance comes from creation myths which maintain the idea of a universal common descent of all human beings from the same God creator, Obatala:

In the African primal traditions there is a continuing witness against violence, brute force and intolerance of each other’s beliefs. The African point of view is one in which there is respect for all the religious traditions of humankind. While we hold steadfastly to our own beliefs, we respect the right of others to practice their own religions in their own ways, provided they do not infringe on the right of other people. Furthermore, we believe that religious freedom is a condition precedent to world peace and individual freedom. We believe that we all can live together in peace if we are prepared to respect one another’s point of view.

This traditional spirit of religious tolerance epitomized by the extraordinary harmonious

47 coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Senegal, and some other countries constitute in this era of rising fundamentalism one of most important contributions of Africa to the liberation of the world from religious extremism and “sacred” violence. It is however fitting to conclude this exploration with the view of a brilliant mind, the Nigerian writer and philosopher, Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize laureate):

Tolerance means humility, not daring to presume that one has found the ultimate answer to Truth or daring to claim that only through one’s intuitions will be found the sole gateway to Truth. All the major religions, the so-called world religions that are built on such claims, have inflicted competitive agonies on humanity since the beginning of time. It is time that we call such religions to their own altars of repentance. There are religions in the world that point the way to the harmonization of faiths; it is the loss of the world that many of them are little known, their unassuming, ancient wisdoms being superstructurally dwarfed by the – admittedly – often awe-inspiring monuments on the world’s landscape – cathedrals, mosques, temples, and shrines, and indeed by the challenging paradoxes of their exegeses – I say “paradoxes” because they are no more than intellectual constructs on foundations of the unproven and unprovable. The disquisitions – just to take one singe but mesmerizing aspect of Christian theology – on Transubstantiation alone since the textualization of Christianity will fill an average university library… Before Islam or Christianity invaded and subverted our worldviews, before the experience of enslavement at the hands of both Arabs and Europeans, the African world did evolve its own spiritual accommodation with the unknown, did evolve its own socio-economic systems, its cohering systems of social relationships, and reproduced its own material existence within an integrated worldview, that those systems are still very much with us and have indeed affected both liturgy and practice of alien religions even to the extent of rendering them docile and domesticated. Thus, whenever, in contemporary times, the aggressive face of one or the other of these world religions is manifested, our recourse is primarily to the strengths of those unextinguished virtues of our antecedent faiths, the loftiest of which will be found to be expressed in such attitudes of tolerance – the genuine, not the nominal, rhetorical, or selective kind, not tolerance as an academic exercise of exterior comparisons, but one that is demonstrable by the very histories of our deities…, as recorded in their mythologies… A periodic visitation to the world of the Yoruba – or indeed to any of the “invisible” worldviews – must be deemed a contemporary necessity for millions of Africans, including the non-Yoruba, the non-Christian, the non-moslem, as well as Christians and Moslems, for whom this will surely serve as a catalyst for a systematic assessment of their own cultures and values. The gods are paradigms of existence. Monotheism is thus only an attempted summation of such paradigms… We find, therefore, that Revelation as Infallibility is a repugnant concept in Yoruba religion – how can you reveal as infallible the aspects of what are in themselves only the projected ideal of human strivings! If the source of such striving

48 – the mortal vessel – is fallible, then its vision, its revelation of ultimate possibilities, must be constantly open to question, to testing, by the elected human receptacle and other human vessels to which such revelations are transmitted. By the same proceeding, the notion of ‘apostasy’ is inconceivable in Yoruba religion, that alleged crime of mortal damnation – in the eye of some acclaimed world religions – where the only guaranteed cure is execution, preferably by the supposedly Salvationist means of stoning to death. It was an unfortunate accident that Religion and Theology were ever linked with philosophy, a paradoxical coupling, since philosophy means a love of – and, consequently, a search for, indeed a passion for –truth. I say paradoxical because the experience of our world has been the very opposite. The dominant religions of the world and their theologies as perceived in present day have meant not the search for or the love of, but the sanctification and consolidation – at whatever cost, including massacres and mayhem – of mere propositions of Truth, declared Immutable Revelation. It has meant the manipulation of Truth, the elevation of mere Texts to Dogma and Absolutes, be those Texts named Scriptures or Catechism. This failure to see transmitted Texts, with all their all-too- human adumbrations, as no more than signposts, as parables that may lead the mind toward deeper quarrying into the human condition, its contradictions and bouts of illumination, a reexamination of the phenomena of Nature, of human history and human strivings, of building of Community – it is this failure that has led to the substitution of dogma for a living, dynamic spirituality. And this is where the Yoruba deities have an important message to transmit to the world. There is an urgency about this, as the world is increasingly taken over by the most virulent manifestations of dogmatic adhesion, the nurturing terrain of which even tends to undermine my earlier attribution of such eruptions to Textual or Scriptural authority. In many of these instances, the defenders of the Text have never even seen the Test or are incapable of reading them, yet they swear by them and indeed presume to act on them.

References Soyinka, Wole, “The Tolerant Gods,” in Olupona, Jacob K. and Terry Rey, eds., Orisha Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) Wande Abimbola, “Ifa: A West African Cosmological System.” in Thomas D. Blakely, et al., eds., Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. (London and Portsmouth: James Currey and Heinemann, 1994); p.111. Isichei, Elizabeth,A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995); p.186. Bujo, Bénézet, African Theology in Its Social Context (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992), p.55 Mazrui, Ali, “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counterconquest” in Harbeson, John W. and Rothchild, Donald, eds., Africa in World Politics: Post-Cold War Challenges. (Boulder, San Francisco: Westview Press, 1995), p.77

49 Abimbola, Wande, “The Attitude of Yoruba Religion Toward Non-Yoruba Religion” in Swidler, Leonard and Mojzes, Paul, eds., Attitudes of Religions and Ideologies Toward the Outsider (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990); p.145. A. Shorter, ed., The Word That Lives: An Anthology of African Prayers, mimeo, n.d., p.32. cited by Laurenti Magesa, African Religin; the Moral Traditions of Abundant Life. (New York, Maryknoll: Orbis books, 1997); pp.197-198. Part 2. WHY STUDY AFRICA? WHY DOES AFRICA MATTER TO US? (Are we all African?) => Africa is a microcosm of world spirituality: today is a melting pot of world religions: There Christians, Muslims, Jews, and practitioners of Asian religions, interact with practioners of ancient Ancestral religions. => ATR is the foundation that, in part, gave birth to the Bible, Judaism and Christianity. The contribution of Africa to the Bible, to religious ideas and language of Judaism and Christianity is now well proven by scholars of world religions. => If scientists are correct in believing that Africa is the cradle of humanity, then it logically follows that Africans were the first people to invent religion or to worship God and that Africa is the birth place of world religions, world spirituality and world’s ideas of morality. => To understand ourselves, and understand humanity as such, we need to understand Africa. => ATR is one of the foundations of African Christian theology. => ATR is the foundation of African civilization, African Spirituality, Morality, African names and identity, and African understanding of what it means to be a genuine human being, a good father, a good mother, a good ruler, etc Introductory remark “The root problem that indigenous nations and peoples face is that they are still being deemed irrelevant by nation-states, based on having been historically nullified under Christian international law… As a result, the laws and policies of the dominant society treat Indigenous homelands and environments as a readily available supply of ‘natural resources’ and ‘commodities’ that are simply waiting for ‘development.’”

50 Cited by Graham Harvey, ed., Indigenous Religions. A Companion (London, New York:Cassell, 2000), p.45. It is still common to hear people refer to African religion in terms that are pejorative and negative… But this is changing rapidly as many African intellectuals and practitioners of African religion are expressing in powerful terms their own commitments to certain moral principles and ethical values of African religion… In many respects it has been the revival of African philosophy and ideas in the minds of Africans in the Diaspora that has caused a transformation in the way we view African religion. If African religion is gaining increasing adherents it is through the acceptance of the ideas and values of African religion by Africans in the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and the Caribbean. It is as if those who are the descendents of Africans who were brought to the Americas centuries ago have demonstrated an intense interest in the recovery and promotion of the African religion. Having seen the inadequacies of the religions of the West, many Africans in the Americas are looking to traditional rituals, texts, proverbs, and oral histories to provide new ways of viewing life. Molefi Asante and Emeka Nwadiora, Spear Moasters: An Introduction to African Religion. New York: University Press of America, 2007, p.vii (Preface) WHY STUDY AFRICA AND AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS? 1. “Truth is one; sages call it by various names” (Rig Veda) Cited in Mary Pat Fisher, Living Religions, 8th edition, New York: Prentice Hall, 2011; p.74 2. “Indigenous religions are the majority of world religions; they constitute the majority of the total religious experience of humankind. “It is important to study basic religions (that is indigenous religions) because they represent the majority of the total religious experience of humankind. (Humans have been active on planet Earth for more than 100,000 years. And yet Judaism, Christianity, Islam and even the Major Asian religions, occupy a very short period in this long history: 4000 years only!.)” Adapted from Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Religions of the World, p.14. => In other words, the survival of old indigenous religions is a major asset for world spirituality. 3. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a man and nothing human is alien to me). Terence (Famous African playwright in the Roman empire) 4. “The change that the new situation (of the global village) requires of us all – we who have been suddenly catapulted from town and country onto a world stage is staggering. Twenty- five hundred years ago it took an exceptional man like Diogenes to exclaim, “I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world,” Today we must all be struggling to make those words our own. We have come to the point in history when anyone who is only Japanese or American, only Oriental or Occidental, is only half human. The other half that beats with the pulse of all humanity has yet to be born.”

51 (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991; p.7) 5. “There is every reason for us to know something about Africa and to understand its past and the way of life of its peoples. Africa is a rich continent that has for centuries provided the world with art, culture, labor, wealth, and natural resources. It has vast mineral deposits, fossil fuels, and commercial crops. But perhaps most important is the fact that fossil evidence indicates that human beings originated in Africa. The earliest traces of human beings and their tools are almost two million years old. Their descendants have migrated throughout the world. To be human is to be of African descent. The experiences of the peoples who stayed in Africa are as rich and as diverse as of those who established themselves elsewhere.” George C. Bond, PhD., Director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, New York. He made this statement in the “Introduction” to the book Luba (by Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts; New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 1997); p.6 6. “If archaeologists are correct in believing that the first human beings came from Africa, then it stands to reason that the first religions also originated there… It is possible that, as the earliest humans slowly migrated to other continents of the world, they carried with them religious ideas and practices that originated in Africa.” Robert M. Baum, “Indigenous Religious Traditions” in Willard G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, A Concise Introduction to World Religions. (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15-17. 7. AFRICAN ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND AND RELIGION (by Robert Fisher, American missionary) The fundamental belief among many scientists is that the transformation of an archaic human form to a modern form of Homo Sapiens occurred first in Africa about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. From Africa this most recent ancestor migrated to spread over the face of the earth. All human beings therefore descended from Africans…. The Africans were the first human beings to dance and reflect on their humanity in terms of a world beyond the physical, the spiritual order of gods and ancestors. The Africans were the messengers of art and of the good news about a world beyond the mere mundane earth.” Robert B. Fisher, West African Religious Traditions: Focus on the Akan of Ghana. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), pp.13-15; 30.

We shall now develop these 7 theses in various points in the following pages Part 2.1. The “Cradle of Humanity” theory and its implications for world civilizations and religions Genesis of the Earth: 4.6 Billion B.P. Origin of life (single-celled creatures): 3.6 Billion B.P. Origin of pre-Humans: 5-1million years ago

Development of hominid “ancestors” of humankind (Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus)

52 Origin of Humanity: 100, 000 years ago (homo sapiens sapiens)

300,000-100,000: Emergence of anatomically modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens in Africa

100,000 some humans leave Africa to populate other continents 100,000: Africans in the Middle East Between 50,000 and 15,000: Europe, Asia, Americas 40,000: Africans well established in Europe 35,000: Africans in Australia 30,000: Africans in China (between 35,000 and 30,000) 30,000-15,000: Africans in the Americas 12,000: Africans reach the tip of South America.

Origin of History and Civilizations: 10,000 B.C.

Slow development of civilization: farming, metallurgy, urban life or villages, art and music.

Origin of major religions and civilizations: 5000- 2000 B.C.

Great historical civilizations emerge in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, and China Origin of current major world religions (2000 BC-1600 CE):

Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam 26, 000 BC: first evidence of ATR on rock painting in Namibia

African traditional religions originated more than 28,000 years ago in the Bantu area that spans roughly from Nigeria to South Africa. The oldest evidence of African religious expression is found on rock painting in southern Namibia in the Apollo XI cave dated some 28,000 years ago.

=>See Maret, Pierre de, Archaeological and other prehistoric evidence of traditional African religious expression in Blakely, Thomas D., et al., Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression (Portsmouth: Heinemann,1994); p.186. AFRICA AS THE CRADLE OF HUMANITY: Key texts summarizing the theory regarding the cradle of humanity

Text 1.AFRICA THE CRADLE OF HUMANKIND AND CIVILIZATION

Jackson J. Spielvogel (Professor at the Pennsylvania State University) opens his textbook on “Western Civilization” with chapter one on “The Ancient Near East: the First civilizations” in which he boldly states the following: “All humans today, whether they are Europeans, Australian Aborigenes, or Africans, belong to the same subspecies of human being. The first anatomically modern humans, known as Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared in Africa between 200,000 and 150,000 years

53 ago. They began to spread outside Africa around 100,000 years ago… By 10,000 B.C., members of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species could be found throughout the world… Western civilization can be traced back to the ancient Near East, where people in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed organized societies and created the ideas and institutions that we associate with civilization. The later Greeks and Romans, who played such a crucial role in the development of Western Civilization, where themselves nourished and influenced by these older societies in the Near East. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin our story of Western civilization in the ancient Near East with the early civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt.” Jackson J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization. Volume 1: to 1715. (Thomson Wadsworth, 2003), pp.2-3.

Text 2. AFRICAN ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND AND RELIGION (by Robert Fisher, American missionary) Reflecting on the discoveries of linguistics, genetics, paleontology, and history of art, the American missionary Robert Fischer comes to the logical conclusion on the significant role played by Africa in the origin of world religions and their basic symbols and rituals, and religious language:

The scientists, whose job is to look for fossil remains and to dig for archeological evidence of human origins, have probably demonstrated quite well for us that the earliest human life forms appeared in East Africa over a million years ago. These paleoanthropologists maintain that the first humans evolved in Africa and migrated to Europe and Asia. These earliest human life are referred to as Homo erectus. The evolution from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens is explained in various ways. Some believing in the “multiregional hypothesis” claimed that some Homo Sapiens developed in Africa, another in Europe and another in Asia. But other scholars maintain that all humans that inhabit the earth today came out of the Homo Sapiens that evolved in Africa (“Out of Africa” theory).Scientists at Berkeley, California, and at Emory, in Atlanta, by looking at patterns of genetic variation of mitochondrial DNA among human populations, determined that Africans, of all existing populations, have the deepest genetic roots. Since only women are the bearers of a type of “genetic time-clock,” the African woman stands out as the model of a kind of “Mitochondrial Eve.” Thus genetic evidence point to the origin of humankind from a “Black Eve.” All humanity descends from a Black African woman. The fundamental belief among many scientists is that the transformation of an archaic human form to a modern form of Homo Sapiens occurred first in Africa about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. From Africa this most recent ancestor migrated to spread over the face of the earth. All human beings therefore descended from Africans. This implies that not only humanity, but also language, culture, civilization and religion were born in Africa… Until about 1950 it was assumed that the Afroasiatic language family had been introduced into Africa from neighboring Asia, but now it is widely held that it originated in Africa west of the Red Sea. It includes the Semitic languages of southwestern Asia, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and ancient Aramaic, and the ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic,

54 and Omotic languages of northern and northeastern Africa… The point we make here is that since the cradle of humanity was probably Africa – or, at least, one important segment of the species Homo Sapiens evolved out of an early genetic pool in Africa – one could claim that dance, ritual, and ceremony are the dramatic elements of the religious traditions that are still extant today all over sub-Saharan Africa and have spread from there over the face of the earth. The African is a person of dance. The Africans were the first human beings to dance and reflect on their humanity in terms of a world beyond the physical, the spiritual order of gods and ancestors. The Africans were the messengers of art and of the good news about a world beyond the mere mundane earth.” Robert B. Fisher, West African Religious Traditions: Focus on the Akan of Ghana. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), pp.13-15; 30.

Text 3. A summary of the controversy (by Stephen Howe) The study of human origins is inherently laden with ideology and emotion – more so than almost any other kind of intellectual inquiry. Certainly palaeoanthropology, the science of humanity’s biological emergence and development, has been marked by a history of bitter and often highly personalized confrontations, as Roger Lewin’s, or Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman’s, fine popular histories of the subject show. Most recently, the fierce antagonisms between Donald Johansen and Timothy White, leading rival research teams in Ethiopia, or between Milford Wolpoff and Chris Stringer, have hit the world’s media headlines (e.g. Fitzgerald 1995). Indeed, a degree of emotional intensity unmatched in any other ‘exact’ science is imparted to the discipline by the very questions it asks. Where did we come from? How, and why, did our species turn into what it is? That emotional resonance around the history of human physical emergence is equaled or exceeded in the case of the origins of civilization – or rather, of the bundle of attributes to some or all of which the title civilization is conventionally given: the births of agriculture, urbanization, literacy, large-scale political forms, ethical and religious beliefs, technologies, systems of abstract or speculative thought, and so on. In fact the emotional stakes are, if anything, higher for this latter question, because it interrelates more closely and evidently with contemporary political concerns. These include issues of race, nationalism and political geography – relating above all to the places of Europe on the one hand, Africa on the other, in the story. Archaeology has thus become even more intensely politicized than palaeoanthropology, on issues ranging from the relevance to the ancient past of modern theories of imperialism, through the agonizings of South African archaeologists about their work’s political implications, to the demands of Native American and other indigenous peoples for control over and reburial of their ancestors’ skeletal remains. Most generally of all, there is unending dispute in many different contexts between ‘diffusionists’ and isolationists’: those who are keen to identify the patterns by which ideas, cultures or technologies spread from some places to others, and those who want to find independent – sometimes multiple – local roots for them. As we shall see, some proponents of each approach accuse the champions of the other of racism; and, perplexingly, both are sometimes right.

55 So far as human physical origins are concerned, it has long been widely accepted that the earliest directly traceable ancestors of Homo Sapiens appeared in eastern Africa. The major controversies of recent years have been over where in East Africa the first identifiably direct proto-human was witnessed; such as those between Richard Leakey, whose discoveries were in Tanzania and Kenya, and Donald Johansen, who worked in Ethiopia. The honour of being the cradle of humanity was, almost without doubt, Africa’s… On the issue of the birthplace of the earliest hominids, then, first Johansen’s ‘Lucy’, then Timothy White’s 1994 discovery of considerably older hominid remains, also in Ethiopia, seemed to give the Africanists a decisive upper hand. However, there is still argument between those who think that modern humanity developed from several distinct hominid population groups, in several different regions, around the same time, and those who propose that not only did early hominids emerge in Africa, but modern humans also all share a much more recent common African ancestor. Ideas about race are deeply involved in the background of this controversy, and became overt especially in the bitter exchanges over Carleton Coon’s championing of the ‘multiple origins’ viewpoint, which he linked to claims that many thought overtly racist. Both sides in the dispute call on genetic as well as fossil evidence. This has been most dramatically deployed on the Africanists’ side, with the 1987 claim by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson that all modern humans could be traced, on the basis of a worldwide DNA survey, to a single African woman who lived about 200,000- years ago. Inevitably, popular coverage of the scientific claim dubbed this putative universal ancestress ‘Eve.’ Eve, even more than Lucy, has evident utility for antiracists and universalists, as well as for those predisposed to claims of African priority. She is apparently powerful evidence for close human familyhood: we all have a relatively recent common ancestor. And she was African – though the fact that she was female reflects only the fact that mitochondrial DNA tests allow scientists to trace maternal, but not paternal, lineages far back in time; and of course they do not tell us her skin colour. There are strong arguments from fossil and other evidence, as well as genetic research, for believing that well after the first diffusion of hominids from Africa, a second dispersal of clearly modern human beings – our more immediate and direct ancestors – sallied forth out of Africa to populate the globe, replacing prior Neanderthal and other populations in Eurasia. It is argued that this second group were the descendants of ‘Eve.’ But the case was still not proven: critics have claimed to find serious methodological flaws in Cann and al.’s work. Alternative readings of the evidence might, it was suggested, propose non-African or, indeed, multiple sites of origin. In 1997, however, dramatic and in many eyes decisive new evidence appeared to support the Africanists’ case. Scientists at Munich University succeeded in extracting and analyzing DNA from Neanderthal bones, and found genetic variation so great that it appeared impossible for Neanderthals and modern humans to have shared a common ancestry. The ideas of multiple origins for modern humanity proposed first by Franz Weidenreich and then updated by Carleton Coon – they even have some echoes of pre- Darwinian ‘polygenist’ theories of human origins, which said that different races were separate species – are given far greater scientific rigour in Milford Wolpoff’s work. Wolpoff and his co-thinkers, it must be emphasized, do not attempt and would not desire to link arguments about early human origins to contemporary racialized thought in the ways Weidenreich and Coon did(though some other contemporary theorists, like Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, certainly do proclaim such links). Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman suggest

56 that the earlier storms had scared scholars away from addressing these issues. Carleton Coon’s critics had exhibited ‘outspoken moralizing and merciless judgemental quality… stony undertones of political correctness’ in attacking his alleged racism. They go on:

The public attacks on Coon impressed an entire generation of anthropologists with the notion that any discussion or even acknowledgment of racial differences would call similar censure down on their heads… Race was not only not a fit subject to study: it didn’t even exist… race went underground. By becoming unseeable, unknowable, and intangible, race became a threatening and all-powerful issue.

There are, I think, better reasons than Trinkaus and Shipman suggest for extreme skepticism about using the language of race. Their implication that race was not a ‘threatening and all- powerful issue’ when its presence was extremely overt, and that it became so only when it ‘went underground’, is quite evidently false. But they are certainly right to suggest that its banishment from the surface of scientific, discourse has not necessarily weakened its power. As we shall discover, it continues to raise its head in almost every imaginable context: often with the ironic or tragic twist that it is African and Afro-American intellectuals who have most vehemently insisted on the reality and centrality of race to human history. Moreover, hypotheses of a recent, common ancestor for all human groups do not necessarily buttress antiracist beliefs. Palaeoanthropologist William Howells and biochemist Vincent Sarich suggest that differentiation into the races identified today begun only well after Eve, let alone Lucy. It came about 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. This is a claim that can be used – as it is, in highly polemical and controversial form, by Sarich – to argue that racial distinctions are extremely important. For such allegedly very large differences, both physical and cultural, among human groups as are shown throughout recorded history to have emerged so very quickly indicates that they resulted from intense pressures of natural selection. It is quite reasonable, then, to think that these also produced dramatic differences in the psychological nature of races: for instance, in intelligence or emotional make-up. The serviceability of such ideas, even if they are true, to racial theory, and especially claims of African inferiority, may, however, be doubtful. One reason for doubt is that it can be argued that Sarich makes a radically false inference: it is more plausible to think that rapid emergence of diversity reflects not just environmental selective pressures but intelligent adaptation to those pressures, indicating the shared high intelligence of all human groups. As we shall see later in relation to arguments over civilizational origins, both environmental determinism, and diffusionism as opposed to theories of multiple origins, can be deployed by all sides of modern historico-political debates. Certainly it is hard to mount arguments based on human physical diversity which would mark off Africans from ‘the rest’ as a preliminary to asserting mental or behavioural differences. Africa is the most diverse of the continents in physical types with, for instance, both the tallest and the shortest people. Nor is it easy to use environmental determinism to such ends, unless the simple fact of warm temperatures is to be the yardstick – which, as we

57 shall see, it has often and crudely been… Beyond the basic fact that most of Africa is warmer, most of the time, than most of Eurasia, there are few environmental factors common to the whole continent – common to rainforest and desert, swamp and savannah, ecosystems rich in edible plants and animals and those extremely poor in them. In any case, noting Africa’s probable primacy in humanity’s biological emergence provides no answer to the characteristic European sneers that ‘humanity may have first developed in Africa, but has long ceased to continue developing there.’ The struggle for the claim to have originated ‘civilization’ is even more important to present-day racial and other ideologies. On one level, it might be said that there is no great argument here, certainly less than there is over the physical location of the earliest hominids – few scholars doubt that most, at least, of the major components of ‘civilization’ came together first in Mesopotamia, in the region of what is now Iraq. Any dispute on the lines of ‘Which came first, Africa or Europe?’ might appear to be a red herring, for the evident answer is: neither. But things are not so straightforward as that. Certainly such major features of ‘civilization’ as literacy and urbanization appeared in Egypt very soon after they did in southwest Asia – and it remains possible that some did so a touch earlier. It is also by no means sure that if such features did first occur in Mesopotamia, they necessarily spread from there to Egypt. The developments may well have been parallel and independent of one another, just as some archaeologists believe that the crystallization of urban, literate cultures just a little later still in the Indus Valley, and then in China, were autonomous rather than being products of diffusion. In other words, even if Egypt was not quite first, its culture may have been substantially original and indigenous – or as much so as any culture ever is. There is also an intriguing possibility – it can at present be put no higher than that – that sophisticated toolmaking, and a recorded number system, emerged in tropical Africa much earlier than anywhere else. Archaeologists Alison Brooks and John Yellen have uncovered at Katanda in former Zaire bone harpoons and other implements which have been dated at c.90,000 years old, and are more advanced than any Eurasian finds of more than half that age. However, this remains an isolated find, the dating is controversial, and the significance for claims about African culture primarily is regarded with great skepticism by many other scholars. Earlier in the same region, Belgian colonial geologist Jean de Heinzelin found what he believed to be evidence of a counting system, etched on bones, which he thought must have been communicated to ancient Egypt. This idea has been treated even more skeptically than have Brooks’s and Yellen’s find… It might also be suggested that wherever in West Asia or North Africa the major features of ‘civilization’ originated, the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures interacted so closely from – at the latest – 1500 BCE onwards that in important ways they formed a single civilizational complex. Howe, Stephen, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. (London: Verso, 1999); pp.28-33.

58 Text 4. A summary by John Reader OUT OF AFRICA Several strands of evidence – fossil, genetic, and linguistic – point persuasively to the conclusion that every person alive today is descended from a population of anatomically modern humans that existed only in Africa until about 100,000 years ago, when some migrated from the continent and progressively populated the entire globe… Humans dominate the Earth and have been to the moon. We see visions of the future in the mind’s eye, and turn them to reality with the aptitudes and talents which evolution bestowed – in Africa. The first fossil evidence of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, ever found is one of the most famous discoveries in palaeoanthropology: Cro-Magnon Man, found in 1868. Cro-Magnon Man had occupied a rock-shelter in the Dordogne region of southern France around 30,000 years ago, but of course his ancestors had evolved in Africa, with highly developed brains and elaborate cooling systems. The oldest known fossil evidence of their existence has come from caves in the mountains of Zululand; from cliff-shelters on the Indian Ocean shoreline of South Africa; and from the savanna environments of the Rift Valley basins in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Beyond Africa, the fossil remains of anatomically modern humans have also been found in the Middle East, China, Borneo, Java, and Australia, as well as in Europe. The African fossils are up to 100,000 years old, while their non-African counterparts are all significantly younger. This implies that anatomically modern humans from Africa were ancestral to all non-African populations and their modern descendants. The German anthropologist Günter Bräuer investigated this question, and published his “Afro-European sapiens hypothesis” in 1984. Bräuer reviewed the fossil evidence in detail, looking not only at specimens of anatomically modern humans but also at Homo erectus and archaic Homo Sapiens. The African fossils he examined came from sites in Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa. The specimens were numerous and dated from between 500,000 and 30,000 years ago. Some possessed features of an archaic nature, others were entirely modern. Noting a trend of evolutionary development, Bräuer concluded that anatomically modern humans had evolved in East Africa from the pre-existing hominid stock not less than 150,000 years ago. Thereafter they spread rapidly throughout the length and breadth of the continent. From among those who exploited the resources of the Nile Valley and reached the Delta, small numbers migrated along the shores of the Mediterranean into the Middle East, and thence into Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the Far East. The fossil evidence shows that modern humans were present in the Middle East by around 100,000 years ago; populations that turned north from that point were well established in Europe by 40,000 years ago. Those that turned east has reached Australia by 35,000 years ago at the latest, and were in China before 30,000 years ago. From Asia, groups of modern humans crossed the Bering Straits into North America between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, when sea levels were low, and had dispersed down to the tip of South America by 12,000 years ago. Bräuer has constructed his model of how modern humans had populated the world from the evidence of the past: fossils. Meanwhile, scientists in the United States were reconstructing the past history of human populations from evidence of the present: genes. A group of geneticists at the University of California at Berkeley analysed the mitochondrial DNA (abbreviation: mtDNA) of different groups of people around the world, and found that more mutations had occurred among Africans than among or between any other groups.

59 The mitochondria are discrete parts of the cell which play a vital role in the energy production systems of living organisms. In effect, mitochondria are the “powerhouses” of the cell, and such a fundamental function has endowed them with a very stable structure. Furthermore, the mtDNA molecules are identical in every cell of an individual; mitochondria themselves reproduce by cloning, that is, asexually, by division, but are inherited only from the female parent because the mitochondria in sperm cells disintegrate at fertilization. Clonal reproduction and female inheritance leave mtDNA unaffected by the recombination of genes that occurs in the reproduction of nuclear DNA. Mutations pass intact from generation to generation. Each mtDNA molecule carries in its sequence the history of its lineage, which makes it a wonderful tool for determining the evolutionary distance between closely related species and populations. The Berkeley geneticists counted up and compared mtDNA mutations in 147 women from different populations around the world. The greatest degree of variation was found among indigenous people in Africa, and significantly less among non-Africans. In fact, the mtDNA of an individual born in England and another born in New Guinea was more alike than the mtDNA of two individuals from Nigeria. These findings showed that a greater time-depth of mutation was preserved among people in Africa, while everyone else shared a predominance of mutations which had accumulated in the relatively recent past. Setting these measures of difference against calculations of the rate at which mutations occur, the geneticists concluded that the entire population of the modern world was descended from a relatively small group of people that left Africa about 100,000 years ago. Extrapolating still further from the present into the past, they claimed that the distinctive form of modern humans had evolved between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago, in Africa. Furthermore, the geneticists concluded that every human being alive today carries the mtDNA of just one African woman who lived more than 10,000 generations ago. This does not mean that she was the only woman alive at that time, simply that her mtDNA steadily became dominant as some maternal lineages disappeared with each succeeding generation (not every mother produces a daughter to whom the mtDNA is passed on). After about 10,000 generations all but one of the founding maternal lineages would have become extinct, so that all living progeny carried the mtDNA of a single founding female line. The geneticists referred to this ancestor as “our common mother,” but she quickly became more popularly known as “the African Eve.” The genetic research convincingly supported the “Afro-European sapiens hypothesis” which Brauer had formulated on the basis of the fossil evidence. The results were disputed by statisticians, who identified inaccuracies in the computing procedures by which the single African origin of human populations had been derived. However, while these objections drew attention to inadequacies of statistical method they did not invalidate the evidence. The greater genetic diversity of African lineages remained unchallenged. Indeed, the significance of these findings was reinforced in 1991 by the results of another worldwide study conducted by a team of geneticists from Stanford and Yale universities headed by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza and his team analysed an entirely different set of DNA data, but also concluded that the “result is exactly what one would expect if the African separation was the

60 first and oldest in the human family tree.” Furthermore, they found that the distribution of genes among human populations correlates surprisingly well with that of languages. A genetic tree showing the evolutionary origins of forty-two populations from around the world closely matches their linguistic affiliations: the most recent language differences, such as have arisen among the Pacific islanders, for instance, replicate the extent of their genetic differences. And in both the genetic and the linguistic evidence, the largest and therefore oldest differences occur between group and the rest of the world population. So the evidence from fossils, genes, and languages all points to an African origin of modern humans in the relatively recent past. Reader, John, Africa: A Biography of the Continent. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); pp.91-95 Text 5 Out Of Africa’ Theory Boost: Skull Dating Suggests Modern Humans Evolved In Africa http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070112104129.htm January 12, 2007 (Source: Max Planck Society) Science Daily — Reliably dated fossils are critical to understanding the course of human evolution. A human skull discovered over fifty years ago near the town of Hofmeyr, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, is one such fossil. A study by an international team of scientists led by Frederick Grine of the Departments of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York published in Science magazine has dated the skull to 36,000 years ago. This skull provides critical corroboration of genetic evidence indicating that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa and migrated about this time to colonize the Old World. (Science January 12, 2007) The Hofmeyr Skull. Scientists have now dated the skull as being 36,000 years old. The great similarity of this skull to skulls of the same age from Eurasian finds confirms the “Out of Africa”-hypothesis. Modern humans broke out of their place of origin around 40,000 years ago – from Africa south of the Sahara – and populated the world. “The Hofmeyr skull gives us the first insights into the morphology of such a sub-Saharan African population, which means the most recent common ancestor of all of us – wherever we come from,” said Grine. Although the skull was found over half a century ago, its significance became apparent only recently. A new approach to dating developed by Grine team member Richard Bailey and his colleagues at Oxford University allowed them to determined its age at just over 36,000 years ago by measuring the amount of radiation that had been absorbed by sand grains that filled the inside of the skull’s braincase. At this age, the skull fills a significant void in the human fossil record of sub-Saharan Africa from the period between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago. During this critical period, the archaeological tradition known as the Later Stone Age, with its sophisticated stone and bone tools and artwork appears in sub-Saharan Africa, and anatomically modern people appear for the first time in Europe and western Asia with the equally complex Upper Paleolithic archeological tradition.

61 In order to establish the affinities of the Hofmeyr fossil, team member Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used 3- dimensional measurements of the skull known to differentiate recent human populations according to their geographic distributions and genetic relationships. She compared the Hofmeyr skull with contemporaneous Upper Paleolithic skulls from Europe and with the skulls of living humans from Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa, including the Khoe-San (Bushmen). Because the Khoe-San are represented in the recent archeological record of South Africa, they were expected to have close resemblances to the South African fossil. Instead, the Hofmeyr skull is quite distinct from recent sub-Saharan Africans, including the Khoe- San, and has a very close affinity with the European Upper Paleolithic specimens. The field of paleoanthropology is known for its hotly contested debates, and one that has raged for years concerns the evolutionary origin of modern people. A number of genetic studies (especially those on the mitochondrial DNA) of living people indicate that modern humans evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then left between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago to colonize the Old World. However, other genetic studies (generally on nuclear DNA) argue against this African origin and exodus model. Instead, they suggest that archaic non-African groups, such as the Neanderthals, made significant contributions to the genomes of modern humans in Eurasia. Until now, the lack of human fossils of appropriate antiquity from sub- Saharan Africa has meant that these competing genetic models of human evolution could not be tested by paleontological evidence. The skull from Hofmeyr has changed that. The surprising similarity between a fossil skull from the southernmost tip of Africa and similarly ancient skulls from Europe is in agreement with the genetics-based “Out of Africa” theory, which predicts that humans like those that inhabited Eurasia in the Upper Paleolithic should be found in sub-Saharan Africa around 36,000 years ago. The skull from South Africa provides the first fossil evidence in support of this prediction. Reference: F.E. Grine, R.M. Bailey, K. Harvati, R.P. Nathan, A.G. Morris, G.M. Henderson, I. Ribot, A.W.G. Pike. Late Pleistocene Human Skull from Hofmeyr, South Africa and Modern Human Origins. Science, 12. January 2007. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Max Planck Society. Part 2.2. IMPLICATIONS OF THE CRADLE OF HUMANITY’S THEORY: Africa: Cradle of humanity, origin of language and civilization, and origin of religion. IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION A DAUGHTER OF AFRICAN CIVILIZATION? AFRICAN CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD, AND SPECIFICALLY TO WESTERN

62 CIVILIZATION The Gift of Humanity itself

(Africa the mother or cradle of Humankind) Contribution to human languages Contribution to Religion and spirituality

• Contribution to Greek and Roman religions • Contribution to the Bible • Contribution to Judaism • Contribution to Christianity and its theology

Contribution to Greek Philosophy and Greek science Contribution to World Politics (Law, Democracy, Human Rights). Contribution to World Economy Contribution to Art

A. African contribution to world civilization and religion in general

– 1. Robert Baum – 2. Robert Fisher – 3. Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky (Linguistics) – 4. Jared Diamond

1. “If archaeologists are correct in believing that the first human beings came from Africa, then it stands to reason that the first religions also originated there… It is possible that, as the earliest humans slowly migrated to other continents of the world, they carried with them religious ideas and practices that originated in Africa.” Robert M. Baum, “Indigenous Religious Traditions” in Willard G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, A Concise Introduction to World Religions. (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15-17. 2. Satement by Robert Fisher An American Christian missionary Reflecting on the discoveries of linguistics, genetics, paleontology, and history of art, the American missionary Robert Fischer comes to the logical conclusion on the significant role played by Africa in the origin of world religions and their basic symbols and rituals, and religious language:

“The Africans were the first human beings to dance and reflect on their humanity in terms of a world beyond the physical, the spiritual order of gods and ancestors. The Africans were the messengers of art and of the good news about a world beyond the mere mundane earth…The scientists, whose job is to look for fossil remains and to dig for archeological evidence of human origins, have probably demonstrated quite well for us that the earliest human life forms appeared in East Africa over a million years ago. These paleoanthropologists maintain that the first humans evolved in Africa and migrated to Europe and Asia. These earliest forms of human life are referred to as Homo erectus. The evolution from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens is explained in various ways. Some believing in the “multiregional hypothesis” claimed that some Homo Sapiens developed in Africa, another in Europe and another in Asia. But other scholars maintain that all humans that inhabit the earth today came out of the Homo Sapiens that evolved in Africa (“Out of Africa” theory).Scientists at Berkeley, California, and at Emory, in Atlanta, by looking at patterns of genetic variation of mitochondrial DNA among human populations, determined that Africans,

63 of all existing populations, have the deepest genetic roots. Since only women are the bearers of a type of “genetic time-clock,” the African woman stands out as the model of a kind of “Mitochondrial Eve.” Thus genetic evidence point to the origin of humankind from a “Black Eve.” All humanity descends from a Black African woman. The fundamental belief among many scientists is that the transformation of an archaic human form to a modern form of Homo Sapiens occurred first in Africa about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. From Africa this most recent ancestor migrated to spread over the face of the earth. All human beings therefore descended from Africans. This implies that not only humanity, but also language, culture, civilization and religion were born in Africa… Until about 1950 it was assumed that the Afroasiatic language family had been introduced into Africa from neighboring Asia, but now it is widely held that it originated in Africa west of the Red Sea. It includes the Semitic languages of southwestern Asia, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and ancient Aramaic, and the ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages of northern and northeastern Africa… The point we make here is that since the cradle of humanity was probably Africa – or, at least, one important segment of the species Homo Sapiens evolved out of an early genetic pool in Africa – one could claim that dance, ritual, and ceremony are the dramatic elements of the religious traditions that are still extant today all over sub- Saharan Africa and have spread from there over the face of the earth. Robert B. Fisher, West African Religious Traditions: Focus on the Akan of Ghana. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), pp.13-15; 30.

3. “Many scholars also now believe that mankind originated in Africa, and that all living humans must trace descent from an original African population… The origin of language may lie in sub-Saharan Africa with the emergence of modern humans.”

Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky, eds., The Atlas of Languages. The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout The World. (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1996); pp.72 and 74.

4. “We’re taught that Western civilization originated in the Near East, was brought to brilliant heights in Europe by the Greeks and Romans, and produced three of the world’s great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Those religions arose among people speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively. We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, Greenberg determined that Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to

64 Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (New York/London: W.W. Norton & company, 1999), p.383.

B. African contribution to Western Civilization I. Contribution to the Religions and Spiritual Values of the West or Europe 1. Contribution to ancient religions of Greece and Rome

– 1.1. Herodotus – 1.2. Isis

1.1. Herodotus (484-425 B.C., Father of Western History)

History, Book II (paragraphs 50,51,52 and 104): “Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt. My inquiries prove that they were all derived from a foreign source, and my opinion is that Egypt furnished the greater number. For with the exception of Neptune and the Dioscuri, whom I mentioned above, and Juno, Vesta, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, the other gods have been known from time immemorial in Egypt. This I assert on the authority of the Egyptians themselves. The gods, with whose names they profess themselves unacquainted, the Greeks received, I believe, from the Pelasgi, except Neptune. Of him they got their knowledge from the Libyans, by whom he has been always honoured, and who were anciently the only people that had a god of the name. The Egyptians differ from the Greeks also in paying no divine honours to heroes. Besides these which have been here mentioned, there are many other practices whereof I shall speak hereafter, which the Greeks have borrowed from Egypt… In early times the Pelasgi, as I know by information which I got at Dodona, offered sacrifices of all kinds, and prayed to the gods, but had no distinct names or appellations for them, since they had never heard of any. They called them gods (Theoi, disposers), because they disposed and arranged all things in such a beautiful order. After a long lapse of time the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt, and the Pelasgi learnt them, only as yet they knew nothing of Bacchus, of whom

65 they first heard at a much later date. Not long after the arrival of the names they sent to consult the oracle at Dodona about them. This is the most ancient oracle in Greece, and at that time there was no other. To their question, “Whether they should adopt the names that had been imported from the foreigners?” the oracle replied by recommending their use. Thenceforth in their sacrifices the Pelasgi made use of the names of the gods, and from them the names passed afterwards to the Greeks…There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race. Before I heard any mention of the fact from others, I had remarked it myself. After the thought had struck me, I made inquiries on the subject both in Colchis and in Egypt, and I found that the Colchians had a more distinct recollection of the Egyptians, than the Egyptians had of them. Still the Egyptians said that they believed the Colchians to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves confess that they learnt the custom of the Egyptians; and the Syrians who dwell about the rivers Thermodon and Parthenius, as well as their neighbours the Macronians, say that they have recently adopted it from the Colchians. Now these are the only nations who use circumcision, and it is plain that they all imitate herein the Egyptians. With respect to the Ethiopians, indeed, I cannot decide whether they learnt the practice of the Egyptians, or the Egyptians of them- it is undoubtedly of very ancient date in Ethiopia- but that the others derived their knowledge of it from Egypt is clear to me from the fact that the Phoenicians, when they come to have commerce with the Greeks, cease to follow the Egyptians in this custom, and allow their children to remain uncircumcised. I will add a further proof to the identity of the Egyptians and the Colchians. These two nations weave their linen in exactly the same way, and this is a way entirely unknown to the rest of the world; they also in their whole mode of life and in their language resemble one another.” Herodotus, History, Book II. 1.2. Isis “The movement among Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples to worship the gods under their Egyptian names began well before Alexander’s conquests and the syncretism of Hellenistic times. In the tradition of Homer, Herodotus wrote in his book “Histories” (book II) published in about 450 BC that the names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. Early in the 5th century BC the poet Pindar wrote a “Hymn to Ammon,” which opened “Ammon king of Olympos.” By the 4th century Ammon was being worshipped in Athens, and one of its sacred triremes was dedicated to him. Alexander the great clearly considered himself to be a son of Ammon and he was portrayed on the coins as a horned Ammon. In the last year of his life Alexander dressed himself and demanded worship in the guise of a number of gods and goddesses and he even desired people to bow to the earth before him, from the idea that Ammon was his father rather than Philipp. Ptolemy and his successors, right up to the Kleopatra made great use of Egyptian religion. Plutarch spelled out in detail the general image of Egyptian religion that appears to have been common among cultivated Greeks, at least since the 4th century BC. The Egyptian mother goddess Isis had been worshipped in Athens since the 5th century BC, not merely by resident Egyptians but by native Athenians. By the 2nd century BC there was a temple of Isis near the Acropolis and Athens was officially encouraging its dependencies to take up Egyptian cults. Even on Delos, especially sanctified to Apollo, cults of Isis and Anubis were made

66 official in a move that was in no way connected to the Ptolemaic kingdom which had lost control of the island by that time. By the 2nd century AD Pausanias reported that Egyptian temples or shrines in Athens, Corinth, Thebes and many places in the Argolid, Messenia, Achaia and Phokis. It should be stressed that Greece had experienced only part of a wave that had spread throughout the Roman Empire. For instance, the most important shrines discovered at Pompeii from 79 AD-when it was overwhelmed by the eruption of Venuvius- were “Egyptian.” Tiberius had banished Egyptian -and Jewish- religion from Rome itself. But the cults were soon restored and later emperors, particularly Domitian and Hadrian, were passionately devoted to the Egyptian gods. Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Diocletian and other emperors visited Egypt and all reports emphasized how respectful they were towards Egyptian religion and culture.” Martin Bernal, Black Athena. Vol. 1: The fabrication of Ancient Greece (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); pp.98-99;114-117) 2. Contribution to the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity

– 2.1. Isis in Europe – 2.2. Egyptian origin of Monotheism (Assmann) – 2.3. Testimony of the Bible – 2.4. Testimony of Scholars of world religion – 2.5. Jared Diamond (African origin of the languages of the Bible and the Koran) – 2.6. Egypt and Israel – 2.7. Testimony of Pope John Paul II and Pope Paul VI

2.1. The influence of the Egyptian Isis religion in Europe (According to Dr. R.E. Witt of the University of London) To us in Western Europe today the Egypt of the Pharaohs is a strangely remote and lost land. The temples and pyramids, the creeds and cults of the Nile elude our understanding. A modern mind is easily baffled by the apparent confusions and illogicalities of Egyptian religion. For our western world to appreciate the civilization of the Nile is hard… Its culture and its gods, we tell ourselves, belong to a past we have long outgrown. Of course, our Occidental society today is firmly founded on long Christian and Graeco-Roman tradition. But this in turn did not arise in vacuo. If we look beneath the surface we can find links between our present-day modes of thinking and the wisdom of Egypt… Our Western world’s Graeco-Roman and Christian civilization has emerged and taken shape out of the cultural melting pot of the Near East. Historians however have not always acknowledged how potent a factor in this process was the religion of Egypt. From Memphis and Alexandria the cult of Isis and her Temple Associates shed an incalculable influence on other rival faiths, including even Christianity… Plato’s fellow Greek, Herodotus, had earlier stayed in Egypt and had written about its religion; he concluded that its gods had been appropriated by the cities of

67 Greece. A full-scale investigation in a field which appears neglected is long overdue…Worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis dates as far back as 2500 B.C. and extended at least until the fifth century A.D. throughout the Roman world. The importance of her cult is attested to in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and evidence of its influence has been found in places as far apart as Afganistan and Portugal, the Black Sea and northern England… In the Graeco- Roman world Isis came to win the unswerving love and loyalty of countless men and women of every rank. Her names were infinite and her wisdom immeasurable. She did not allow room for any quarrel between science and religion, for racial discrimination and segregation according to the colour of one’s skin. For Plutarch, ‘wise and wisdom-loving’ Isis was a ‘philosophic’ divinity, sharing in the love of the Good and the Beautiful and imbued with the purest principles. She taught her followers to pursue penitence, pardon and peace. Elsewhere she is characterized as being the inventress of all, as having divided earth from heaven, as making the universe spin round and as being triumphant over Fate, Fortune and the Stars. She was tender-hearted as a mother. On the whole human race she could be thought to bestow her love, being its never-absent redeemer and its haven of rest and safety, the Holy One – sancta et humani generis sospitatrix perpetua. The friend of slaves and sinners, of the artisans and the downtrodden, at the same time she heard the prayers of the wealthy, the unblemished maiden, and the aristocrat and the emperor. For her sake women could both fast and make merry. She prevailed through the force of love, pity, compassion, and her personal concern for sorrows such as she had herself known… For countless numbers of men and women in the Graeco-Roman world Isis remained what she had been in the Black Land of the Pharaohs: Mother of the God, Mistress of the Word in the beginning, Mistress of Eternity, Source of grace and truth, Source of Resurrection and Life, The Supreme Deity as maker of Monarchs Many centuries before the Christian Era Isis had been revered in the Nile Valley as the Unique and Incomparable. So she for long remained, creating as she had always done, her own beauty and perfection. Lady of the House of Life, Shelter of the Living and of the Dead, We do well, therefore, to see her steadily and to see her whole – Isis, the great ruler of the Graeco-Roman world, ever active and magical with her gifts of knowledge, power and wisdom, the eternal mainspring of men’s deepest faith, hope and love. In the capital of the world empire established by Augustus the religion so ardently professed by the Nile’s final sovereign had for long been familiar. During the Republican period its career had been chequered. When the Empire emerged the cult of Isis became a thriving influence, which no political pressure could stop…. Isis was indeed the darling goddess of many Roman Emperors… The emperor Commodus was so much addicted to the faith of Isis that, besides shaving his head and carrying an image of Anubis, he ‘fulfilled all the pauses’. The pause in its literal sense meant a stop at stated intervals for the singing of hymns to the goddess. Isis and her cult appear on Greek Imperial and Roman coins. Otho is recorded to have taken part openly in the rites of Isis only half a century after the death of Augustus…The roman emperor Gaius followed the example of the Pharaohs by marrying his own sister Drusilla and listened in true Isiac style to an Egyptian soothsayer who forecast the emperor’s death on the very day it happened. Gaius first gave the Isiac cult state recognition, and had an Egyptian obelisk brought to Italy… Offerings to Isis were made by people of importance during the reign of emperor Claudius and a military tribune who served under

68 him in Britain held an Egyptian life priesthood and a priest of Isis dedicated a marble tablet for the Empress Agrippina…. To hold that the Egyptian goddess Isis was the forerunner of Catholicism’s Mary, Mother of God, is to raise the question of the uniqueness of Christianity… Giordano Bruno, the unfrocked monk, perished on 16 February 1600, for his intransigent denial that Christianity was unique. He was convinced that the wisdom and magic-born religion of ancient Egypt excelled the fanatical theology that burnt dissident thinkers as heretics….For Bruno the most acceptable theology was what had arisen in ancient Egypt, Bruno’s was an Egyptianizing religion. Our Western world today needs such a critical mind for a comparative study of the faiths of Isis and Jesus. Certainly the resemblances exist… The ritual of the Christian Church owes a considerable and unacknowledged debt to the Egyptian religion that preceded it in the Graeco-Roman world… The triad of Christian virtues, Faith, Hope and Love, so eloquently praised in Corinthians, is introduced in such a way as to suggest that the writer of what is obviously an aretalogy is taking a close look at contemporary cults. He mentions the gift of tongues, a gift on which much stress is laid in the New Testament. The followers of Isis held that she controlled the various tongues, ‘dialects’, that prevailed in the world…The virtue of Faith in Christian context is inseparable from Love. Religious belief of this kind was not unknown to the followers of Isis. The ‘Love’ (agape) which is the crowning virtue is apparently not restricted to Christianity. According to the received text of the Oxyrhynchus Litany, agape is a cult name for Isis, who in Egyptian tradition as old as the Pyramid Texts personifies tenderness, compassion and divine love….. The time has come for Christian churches to acknowledge that the roots of the ‘new’ religion they exist to uphold were abundantly watered not just by the Jordan but also by the Nile, and that one of their holy cities long ago was Alexandria…. Today, the debt to a civilization long ago Christianized must be readily granted by those who deal with religious origins… Our theories need to be modified… We need the intellectual colloquy of Athens and Alexandria, and nowhere more urgently than in the field of religious experience. What the western world today upholds as the inveterate tradition of its own formative Christianity gains in value when correlated with even earlier tradition. A principle in all our thinking must be the conviction that theological speculations have never arisen in vacuo. It is a platitude that the pantheon of Greece and Rome did not suddenly fall down flat like the walls of Jericho. What is not so well understood is how this classical polytheism before it was finally assaulted by the Church had undergone a manifold foreign infiltration in which one of the strongest influences was Egyptian… Even when the cause of the monks and the bishops had triumphed the distinction between ANKH and cross was blurred, and the Sanctus bell still tinkled like the Isiac sistrum. Holy aspersions were practiced as in the past…The church uneasily accommodated the ‘Horus- born’ theologian Origen as well as sixteen Serapions. From Isis herself stem such Christian names as Ision and Paesis, to say nothing of over forty Isidores. Clearly the Pauline view of Isiacism was penetratingly critical. Paul’s world was a patriarchy, his is religion was Christological and monotheistic, and God was found in fashion as a man. Isis was female, Isis was the champion of Idolatry, and Isis was the lover of the Nile menagerie. And yet the Pauline and the Isiac faith had at least one common characteristic.

69 Each swept aside racial and social distinctions. “There is neither Greek nor Jew…Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” Change Christ to Isis – and the words are still true….

R.E.Witt, Isis in the Ancient World. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; First edition in 1971). Dr. R.E. Witt (1903-1980) taught at Queen Mary’s College, University of London. His book is the first study to document the extent and complexity of the Isis cult’s influence on Graeco-Roman and early Christian culture. 2.2. Akhenaton and the origins of Monotheism in ancient Egypt King Amenophis IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten or Akhan-yati (“Beneficial for the Aten”) and ruled Egypt for seventeen years in the middle of the fourteenth century B.C.E., is the first founder of a monotheistic counter-religion in human history. Freud was correct in stressing this point… The Amarna religion (Akhenaton’s reformation of ancient Egyptian religion) has some similarities to Biblical monotheism in its later stages. It is not merely antipolytheistic, but also rationalistic. I agree with Freud that the Amarna religion exhibits tendencies toward what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world” in its rejection of magical practices, sacramental symbolism (“idolatry”), and mythological imagery… The story of Moses the Egyptian is a story of religious confrontation and the overcoming of it. The name of Moses is associated with a counter-religion that defined its identity in contradistinction to Egyptian “idolatry.” Making Moses an Egyptian amounts to abolishing this defining opposition. Tracing Moses and his message back to Egypt means leaving the realm of “revealed” or “positive” religion and entering the realm of lumen naturale: experience, reason, tradition, and wisdom. Starting in Hellenism and continuing through modernity up to Freud, the Mosaic project was interpreted as the claim for unity: there is but one God, the invisible source of all. The counter-religious antagonism was always constructed in terms of unity and plurality. Moses and the One against Egypt and the Many. The discourse on Moses the Egyptian aimed at dismantling this barrier. It traced the idea of unity back to Egypt (i.e the idea of the unity or oneness of God was first born in Egypt, under Akhanaton, and Moses may have borrowed this idea from Egypt). This notion of Egyptian monotheism is not the figment of scholars’s imagination. It is clearly stated in various Egyptian texts that define God as “the One Alone who created what is,” “the One who is All,” “the One who makes himself into millions.” Some texts clearly state that God is the million into which he has transformed himself. Million is said to be his body, his limbs, and even his name: “million of millions is his name.” However by transforming himself into the millionfold reality, God has not ceased to be one. He is the many in that mysterious way, hidden and present at the same time in all gods, humans, and nature. Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); pp.168-169; 206. 2.3. Testimony of the Bible “As the time drew near for God to fulfill the promise he had solemnly made to Abraham, our nation in Egypt grew larger and larger, until a new king came to power in Egypt who knew nothing of Joseph. He exploited our race, and ill-treated our ancestors, forcing them to expose

70 their babies to prevent their surviving. It was in this period that Moses was born, a fine child and favored by God. He was looked after for three months in his father’s house, and after he had been exposed, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was taught all the wisdom of the Egyptians and became a man with power both in his speech and his actions.” (Acts 7, 17-22, Stephen’s Speech. From The Jerusalem Bible). 2.4. Testimony of scholars of world religions 2.4.1. “As far as Christianity is concerned it may now be argued that, supported by the broader historical background, it had fiery Hebrew religion as its father. Egypt was its mother; Mesopotamia stood as godparent; Hellenism served as midwife. Throughout her life of almost two millennia, this Christian daughter born of Mother Egypt has remained relatively well informed about her ancient Hebrew paternal tradition-being reminded of it constantly by the Hebrew origins of its early layer of sacred scriptures. At the same time the mature daughter, Christendom, to this day has not been told about the identity of her deceased mother religion-whose theological and soteriological temperament she closely resembles. The ancient Egyptian civilization and its concomitant religiosity provided Hebrew religious tradition with its raison d’être. Egyptian theology furnished Greek philosophers, beginning with the Ionians and concluding with the Neoplatonists, with their ontological presuppositions. And Hebrew and Egyptian religion, assisted by Neoplatonism, contributed content and structure to orthodox Christian theology.” Karl W. Luckert, Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 27-29). 2.4.2. “During the second millenium B.C.E., respect for Egyptian achievements in the arts, sciences, and religion spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The Hebrew Bible refers to the “wisdom of Egypt,” and early Greek philosophers like Thales and Pythagoras reportedly studied geometry in Egypt. Osiris and Isis were numbered among the official gods of the Roman Empire, and the promise of immortality in the Osiris myth may have influenced the Orphic mysteries of ancient Greece and prepared the way for Christianity. Furthermore, the Egyptian concept of Mayet ( Maat), or world order, may have influenced the philosophy of Stoics, as well as the Logos of Saint John’s gospel. Egyptian influences have survived to the present, Statues of Isis with the infant Horus in here arms are thought to have inspired the Madonna and child motif of the Christian tradition. Masonic ritual still keeps alive the memory of Egypt, as does the popular belief in spells, oracles, and astrological lore. In addition, the idea that divine wisdom or revelation should be written down and collected and that written books (scrolls) have greater prestige than oral traditions does seem to be largely and Egyptian invention. It was a popular assumption among the Greeks and Romans that books of revelation came from Egypt.”(p.53) Religions of the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, Third edition). This important textbook is written by several scholars from important American universities: Norvin Hein (Yale University), Frank E. Reynolds (University of Chicago), Laura Grillo (University of Chicago), Niels C. Nielsen, Jr.(Rice University),….

71 2.4.3. “For three millennia, from the first dynasty around 3100 B.C.E. to the first centuries of the Common Era, when Egypt converted to Christianity, the rich and diverse elements of Egyptian religion were practiced. (…)The culture of Egypt attained high developments in religious ideas and also in artistic expression. In their religious interests the ancient Egyptians created a vast literature. Their very large sacred literature included mythological texts, guides for the dead, prayers, hymns, … and philosophical wisdom texts. (…) The wisdom of Egypt influenced the Israelite religion as well as Greek philosophers.”(pp.30-33) Theodore M. Ludwig, The Sacred Paths of the West New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994. 2.5. The authors of the Bible and the Koran spoke languages of African origin “We’re taught that Western civilization originated in the Near East, was brought to brilliant heights in Europe by the Greeks and Romans, and produced three of the world’s great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Those religions arose among people speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively. We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, Greenberg determined that Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”