African Roots PDF

# Chapter 1: African Roots All black history begins in Africa. In one way or another, Africa became part of the self-understanding of American blacks throughout the nineteenth century. The black Catholic community in America was no exception. It sought its roots in the religious experience of Afri...

# Chapter 1: African Roots All black history begins in Africa. In one way or another, Africa became part of the self-understanding of American blacks throughout the nineteenth century. The black Catholic community in America was no exception. It sought its roots in the religious experience of Africa and its self-definition in the African saints of the early church. American blacks, both Protestant and Catholic, found their roots in the black Africans who appeared in the pages of the Scriptures, both in the Old Testament and the New, and most particularly in the many references to Ethiopia in the Psalms and the Prophets. Origen, the great Alexandrian church father of the third century, paved the way with his famous commentary on verse 5 of chapter 1 in the Song of Songs ("I am very dark, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem"). For Origen the bride in the Song of Songs was the church. Famous for his spiritual interpretation of Scripture, Origen believed (as most did in his day) that the great love poem of the Old Testament was a composition by King Solomon, in which was set forth the love songs between Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Origen followed the traditional belief of the time in seeing the queen of Sheba as an Ethiopian queen, a beautiful woman with black skin. The Septuagint version of the Scriptures in fact uses the wording: "I am black and beautiful." Commenting on this verse, Origen wrote in his commentary on the Song of Songs: *Let us look at the passage which we quoted... about the queen of Sheba, who also was an Ethiopian; and concerning whom the Lord bears witness in the Gospels that in the day of judgement she shall come together with the men of this faithless generation, and shall condemn them....* This queen came, then, and, in fulfilment of her type, the Church comes also from the Gentiles to hear the wisdom of the true Solomon, and of the true Peace-Lover, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Solomon is a type of Christ, and just as the queen of Sheba came to Solomon to consult him because he was wise, so the church comes to Christ who is Wisdom himself. As a result, since the queen of Sheba is black, so must the church be black and beautiful. Her very blackness is the symbol of her universality; all nations are present in from her. "She came to Jerusalem, then, to the Vision of Peace, with a single following and in great array; for she came not with a single nation, as did the Synagogue before her that had the Hebrews only, but with the races of the whole world, offering moreover worthy gifts to Christ." Origen looks to the Old Testament for examples of blackness that foreshadow the mystery of the church. For him, there are two: the wife of Moses and Ebed-Melech, the Kushite who saved the life of Jeremiah when the latter had been abandoned in an empty cistern. In the Old Testament, the land of Kush usually meant Nubia, the land south of Egypt from the first cataract of the Nile to the point south of the sixth cataract, now the modern city of Khartoum, where the Blue and White Nile come together as one river flowing northward. In other words, it is the northern part of the country now known as the Sudan. The black-skinned people of Nubia were the earliest beneficiaries of Egyptian civilization. They in turn were the corridor between Egypt and the interior of Africa, a corridor that brought the civilization of Egypt to sub-Saharan Africa and the riches of Africa to Egypt. The Nubians, on the other hand, were not only a colony of Egypt that received from it its culture but a people who took that culture and made it an integral part of their own. Nubia was a black African nation with its own pharaohs. The people built their own pyramids, constructed their own majestic temples with their own style of architecture, developed their own writing-in fact, founded their own empire. By the eighth century before Christ, the former colony of Egypt became the dominant power. Shortly before the middle of the century, the Nubian king Kashta assumed power in the region of Upper Egypt.