By Lenrod Nzulu Baraka
The further back we go in history the more glaringly evident it is that humanity at its most primal stage of development had a proclivity for a plurality of gods and goddesses. Africans, long regarded as the oldest civilizational group on earth, evolved religious systems which had at their heart, the existence of a great creator spirit who was the source of all things including the lesser deities.
Black people who have drunk deeply from the cup of Western Caucasian wisdom are often surprised to learn that most if not all traditional African religions believe in a creator who is the first cause of all that is. The African concept of the first cause is as sophisticated as the god concept in any of the major world religions. The first cause of the Africans is however far removed from creation in the African scheme of things.
Unlike the creator of the monotheistic faiths, the great creator of the Africans is not involved in the daily affairs of humanity. A second tier of deities were created by the first cause to oversee the smooth functioning of creation. The Yoruba in Nigeria call this second tier of divinities orishas. In Benin they are called vodun while the Haitians call them loa or lwa. Since it is this secondary tier of divinities and the ancestors who are intimately involved in the day-to-day affairs of Africans, most prayers and sacrifices are made to these two sources of help.
Africans and other ethnic groups that embraced the concept of a plurality of divinities were more prone to practice religious toleration than were the practitioners of monotheistic faiths. Each divinity had his or her own specialty and worshipers knew which shrine to go to based on their needs. The existence of female divinities with powers to match any male divinity most naturally fed into the concept of the equality of the sexes.
In some societies that embraced a plurality of deities, one particular deity was elevated but not to the exclusion of all the other deities who still had their followers and shrines. Invariably, when conflict broke out between followers of various deities, it was usually the greed and avarice of the priests that led to the escalation of tension. Religious toleration was such a well-established principle in societies classified as polytheistic that even in victory the victors often allowed the vanquished to maintain the worship of their own gods. Victors in war would sometime also embrace some of the gods of the vanquished.
Religious toleration and the notion of equality of the sexes vanished like the morning dew when kissed by the first rays of the sun wherever monotheism triumphed. In ancient Egypt, the monotheistic reforms of Akhenaten led to some friction between Akhenaten and the followers of the many other gods in Egypt. After his death, the Egyptians gave the monotheism or probably henotheism of Akhenaten the thumbs down and reverted to the accustomed African plurality of deities.
Judaism, after being birthed in Africa, would seek to introduce Jehovah/Yahweh to Africans, as the one true god. Regrettably the tribal god of the Jews seemed to have an anger management problem that resulted in the Jews engaging in some off the charts genocide and ethnic cleansing. The plagues on Egypt and the so-called Hamitic curse seemed to suggest that the god of the Jews was not very partial to Africans who were among the groups that Jews could enslave according to the Old Testament.
Islam would be the next force that would attempt to introduce monotheism to the African continent. Islamic hordes swarmed from the Arabian Peninsula into the Maghreb occupying Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. Large swathes of African territory were both Islamized and Arabized. Like the Europeans who would follow them centuries later, the Arabs just could not resist the temptation to get some free labor from the impressively built Africans. The Trans-Saharan and the Trans-Indian Ocean slave trade preceded the transatlantic slave trade by centuries and was responsible for the involuntary removal of millions of Africans from the continent.
The coming of the Europeans in the fifteenth century was the latest attempt to get Africans on board the monotheistic train even if it meant shipping twelve million of them to the New World to work as slaves while learning about Caucasian Jesus and his heaven. The Africans who were allowed to remain on the continent were also forced fed a rich diet of Christianity which encouraged them to love their enemies and to pray for the very people that were persecuting and exploiting them.
Monotheism, whether it is the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim brand, had a very negative impact on the ancient spirituality practiced by Africans. Monotheism attacked African spirituality at its core describing it as demonic and devilish. Africans were told that they needed to abandon their traditional concept of deity in favor of the deity concept advanced by the Abrahamic faiths. Orishas and loas were out while Jewish, Caucasian and Arab angels were in. Mother-gods were outlawed while the father-god concept was enthroned as absolute truth.
Religion by definition is a very subjective field of practice. Jews, Europeans, and Arabs cannot definitively prove that their conceptions about deity and the nature of spiritual reality are the all-time absolute truth that all must embrace. Africans are therefore under no obligation to jettison the spiritual traditions of their ancestors in favor of a set of spiritual traditions handed to them by the same people who enslaved, colonized and exploited African people since time immemorial. Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of Oreos, Coconuts and Negropeans: Rediscovering Our African Identity.