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By Root 1103 0

happened between the time of those fossilized remains from millions of years ago and last week’s headlines remains sketchy at best. By all accounts from the worlds of archaeology, anthropology, and history, a series of migrations took place over hundreds of thousands of years, eventually leading to pockets of very different people dotting the map of Africa. By the time of the Common Era, Africa was not the home of a few scattered tribes living in primitive isolation from the world and each other. Instead, it was a place of many people, hundreds of tribal groups (many of them nomadic, others in thousands of villages), sophisticated cities, and small kingdoms, all with different languages, beliefs, and rituals. These many people included the early Christian kingdoms of Kush and Axum, neighboring Egypt, which claimed to possess the biblical Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments; the great center of Islamic learning at Timbuktu in Mali; the diminutive Pygmies of the equatorial rain forests; the towering Masai herdsmen of Kenya and Tanzania; the San of the Kalahari Desert;† the cattle-herding Khoi of southern Africa; and the proud Zulu, who challenged the might of the British Empire in nineteenth-century South Africa. This variety of people clearly underscores the fact that Africa is not one monolithic “dark continent,” but an extraordinary, rainbow-colored cloth woven through with the threads of many beliefs.

Africa’s diversity was both transformed and diminished by powerful outsiders—Islamic Arabs, starting in the seventh century, and European Christians in the fifteenth century. In the wake of their arrival, Africa’s rich array of native myths and beliefs was nearly eradicated by missionary zeal and then given short shrift by generations of academics and historians. When the African mythic legacy was finally recognized in the twentieth century,* it was brought to life in a panoramic picture of all-seeing deities; mischievous tricksters; tales of death and mortality; powerful ancestors and spirits; the importance of family, friends, and community; and the dominating presence of the African healers, priests, and shamans, once derided as mere “witch doctors.”

Along with the revived interest in the role of traditional healers and shamans came the rediscovery of the rich oral history preserved by people like the griot—the musician-storytellers of western Africa who gained notoriety as the inspiration for Alex Haley’s Roots. Like the village shamans, the griot did not practice their art in a Parthenon, palace, or pyramid. Their sacred stories were expressed as a sort of performance art in song, drumming, and dance—a communal experience still alive today in African village life. Just as the songs of Homer and Hesiod were once sung in Greek villages, the musical tales of the griot captivated African villagers. Encompassing the themes of rain and drought, love and sex, morality and mortality—the same themes that course through all myths and legends—their tales were powerful accompaniments to the belief that all nature was sacred and that spirits inhabited every living thing.

Last but not least, ancient Africa was a preliterate place that produced few texts by which their myths can be studied. There is no ancient Odyssey or Ramayana written in African tongues. Neither is there a guide to the afterlife or a native encyclopedia of the gods to help us grasp what the ancient Africans thought.

Fortunately, an extraordinary oral tradition has been maintained throughout Africa to this day. And recent scholarship and a dedication to restoring some of the “lost” African past has cast a bright new light on the dazzling mythology of what was once considered the “Dark Continent.”

MYTHIC VOICES

The sun shines and sends its burning rays down upon us,

The moon rises in its glory.

Rain will come and again the sun will shine,

And over it all passes the eye of God.

Nothing is hidden from Him.

Whether you be in your home, whether you be on the water,

Whether you rest in the shade of a tree in the open,

Here