
Mother Africa: Healing Experiences
By
Rev. Dr. L. Rita Dixon
I recently began reading a New York Times bestseller, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Professor Harari, an Oxford-trained historian, is on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem staff. I had previously heard that former President Obama gave this book a thumbs up, so I decided to check it out. On the third page of the first chapter, the last paragraph begins:
Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus, which means “Southern Ape.” About 2 million years ago, some of these archaic men and women left their homeland to journey through and settle in vast areas of North Africa, Europe, and Asia.
These two sentences really got my attention. I had only seen statements that all humans originated in Africa in books written by Black or Afrocentric scholars who usually were not on the New York Times best sellers list. During the late 80’s and 90’s, I was among many who tried to lift up Africa’s historical presence for appreciation to American church audiences. We were constantly faced with racist and negative stereotypes. The question we often confronted was: “Can anything good come out of Africa?”.
This article shares my healing experiences while learning more about our African roots and traveling to Egypt and Ethiopia.
I became a staff member for The Presbyterian Church of the South (PCUS) in 1979, and as a part of my staff responsibilities, I was a member of the ecumenical Black Theology Project (BTP). Four of the main leaders in BTP were Professor James Cone, Rev. Yvonne Delk, Professor Gayraud Wilmore, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I was immersed deeper in African American history and our African heritage. I also learned more about racism and bias against Africa and African Americans in Western literature and scholarship as the norm rather than an exception.
In 1984, I was among a group of Black clergywomen who had engaged in a travel seminar in Egypt. After a thorough educational session, we spent one day exploring the Cairo Museum. As we had been told, many of the statues looked Negroid, like us or our ancestors. We were shocked at the explanation our Arab Egyptian guide gave when she saw that we were identifying with some of the images that had Negroid features. She quickly assured us that the people represented by the images were not Black; they were just painted that way because they admired their neighbors, the Nubians, who they considered strong. She was visibly shaken and disturbed that we were seeing them as our ancestors. We understood that Cairo was 99% Arab at the time and had been colonized by many different Nationalities over the past 2500 years, each invasion adding another layer of culture. We also wanted to believe that some of those ancient Egyptians were in our lineage.
Those ancient people were truly fantastic. They discovered the solar circuit; they gave us the calendar, the pyramids, the duo-decimal system, the wheel, paper and was the first civilization to proclaim monotheism. Their scientific, artistic and manufacturing knowledge was phenomenal.
When I read the above statements in Professor Harari’s book, my mind was flooded with past memories, including the “The Nile Valley Conference” held at Morehouse College Chapel in the Spring of 1986. It was sponsored by The Religious Heritage of the African World (RHAW) of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) under the leadership of Dr. Ndugu T’Ofori-Atta (also known as Rev. Dr. George Thomas). The following excerpt is from an article I wrote around 1990 about that experience, showing the impact the Nile Valley Conference had on me at the time.
I remember sitting for a week in the Nile Valley Conference at Morehouse College in the Spring of 1986. Each day I took my seat and within an hour I would be weeping profusely as African scholars and church leaders presented papers and pictures of Black Pharaohs, queens, spiritual leaders, educators, and others whose contributions are the foundation of our world today. I wept because I and so many others like me had inferiority complexes about our race. We had no idea that our racial group had such a significant role in science, medicine, art, education[RD1] , religion, and other areas of knowledge. I wept because the feeling of being nobody is persistent and painful causing us to seek relief in things that do not heal. I wept because more of us need this transforming view of our race.
I had the opportunity to work with the Religious Heritage of the African World (RHAW) of ITC in taking a diverse ecumenical group of 53 seminarians, pastors, seminary staff and church leaders to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October, 1997 for The 7th General Assembly of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC). A part of this experience involved traveling to Lalibela, Ethiopia, to explore 800-plus-year-old huge stone underground churches chiseled out of the mountain so that the top of the churches were ground level.
The 11 rock-hewn churches were in three distinct groups; each differed widely in size, color of rock, and architecture. They were built in the 12th century and are registered by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a world heritage. They are an important part of the Ethiopian national identity and pride. Some of us went down the many steps carved in the mountains to walk around the base of one group of churches.
I knew as I touched the outside walls of the ancient churches that racism would never be my problem again and it was actually the problem of the racist. I also knew without any doubt the history of Black people did not begin with slavery.
The church leaders and members gave us a welcome celebration that I still remember. “Welcome home” they chanted, sang and shouted in every imaginable way, always accompanied by dancing, music and clapping. Even the Priests in their colorful dress were dancing. There were people everywhere, some young ones even hanging out in trees. This was a very affirming, heartwarming and transformational experience.
We also went to Axum, the most ancient city in Ethiopia and said to be Queen Sheba’s capital city. We visited her tomb and the ancient ruins of her palace. We explored the site of the most famous monuments of Axum, the stelae. One was a tall block of granite decorated with carvings along its length. The tallest was 33 meters high and is estimated to have been 520 tons in weight. It then lay broken in 3 pieces on the ground. One was still standing, estimated to weigh about 150 tons and almost 21 meters high. It is not known how these astonishing monuments were built without modern equipment. People come from all over the world to visit them. The Washington Monument in the District of Columbia, U.S.A. resembles a stela.
In Ethiopia we were also introduced to what was said to be the bones of Lucy, the 3.5-million-year-old female skeletal remains known in Ethiopia as “Dinkinesh” meaning “thou art wonderful”. I still do not believe that what we saw were the actual bones of Lucy. However, I did pick up a small tourist book, The Beauty of Historic Ethiopia (Camerapix Publishers International of Nairobi, Kenya, 1994). The second paragraph of the introduction begins with the following sentences:
Recent discoveries indicate that Ethiopia is the ancestral home in which homo sapiens took its first faltering footsteps away from the apes and towards its own unique identity. The cradle of mankind lies in the sere north-east of the country close to the banks of the Awash River---where the Great Rift Valley forms a wide low-lying triangle. There the fossilized remains of the oldest direct human ancestor, Australopithecus, dating back 3.5 million years…The initial finds in 1974 took the form of an almost complete female skeleton. Nicknamed Lucy by paleontologist Dr. Donald Johnson of the US Institute of Human Origins, this fossil is better known to the Ethiopians as Dinquinesh---meaning “thou art wonderful”.
I retired from my work with the Presbyterian Church at the end of 2004 and began another chapter of my life. Reading the statement in Harari’s book that humans first evolved in Africa sent me on a deep search for articles I had written for the churches, books on ancient Africa that I had collected, and materials from leaders of workshops I had sponsored. I even bought two new books by Dr. Charles S. Finch III, “Echoes of the Old Darkland, Themes From The African Eden” copyright in 1991, eighth printing 2011 and “Nile Valley Civilization, A 10,000-Year History” copyright in 2021, first printing in 2023. In both books he states that humanity began in Africa or Africa is the homeland of all humankind.
Dr. Finch, a medical doctor, who has been engaged in private research into African antiquities, comparative myth and religion, and anthropology since 1971; lectured more than 250 times in the United States, England and Egypt and traveled frequently to Africa. He did a training workshop for African American Presbyterian Pastors on “Africentric Foundations” in the early part of the 1990’s.
As I was finishing this article, I had a conversation about Harari’s book with Rev. Dr. Will Coleman, a retired Presbyterian pastor and author of Tribal Talk, Black Theology, Hermeneutics and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story”, published in 2000 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. He recently retired from teaching pastors at ITC. When I shared my surprise about finding a New York Times bestseller with the statement that human origins began in Africa, he said something like, “Everybody knows that now except church folks, and they should ask their pastor why they were not told. Anyone who walks on two legs, including Trump, has African ancestry.” We had a good laugh!
My purpose in lifting up these healing experiences from Ancient Africa at this time is hopefully to promote healing when there is so much turmoil in America and other countries over what I discern to be some issues related to white supremacy and equitable multi-cultural democracy. Just maybe some of angst will dissipate if we can internalize that we all emerged from the same source in the same family. In addition, I think it is time for more of us to celebrate God’s gifts of our beautiful, diverse family through Mother Africa.
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