It is ironic that the land that gave birth to man on this planet is most often the site of intense conversions; a notion that implicitly suggests that a divine source, however he or she may be denominated, somehow erred in the act of creation, and that these first beings were perhaps flawed in form, or perception. Africa, widely seen by archeologists as a cradle of humanity, has in the last 500 years, at least, been perceived and projected as the archetypal land of darkness, whose benighted inhabitants needed salvation. This salvation was as much spiritual as temporal and justified European colonial expansion, exploitation, and conquest of Africans for centuries.
For parts of North Africa, Christianity has been a communal reality since the second and third centuries, with its early Egyptian Gnostic and Coptic traditions. Indeed, Coptic liturgy sings of the flight into Egypt of the infant Jesus and his parents, saying, “Be glad and rejoice, o Egypt and her sons and all her borders, for there has come to thee the Lord of man.” Similarly, Ethiopia has been the seat of Christianity from antiquity, and this late royal house traced its descent from the union of Israel’s King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Solomonic tradition became the core symbol of Christian Ethiopia, the cornerstone of its sense of national identity.
It was first recorded in the Kebra Nagast, The Glory of Kings, written early in the 14th century, but it has lived in Ethiopian hearts long before. The Coptic chronicle of the life of the Alexandrian patriarch, Cosmos, born circa 920 AD, refers to “Abyssinia, which is a vast country, namely the kingdom of Saba, from which the Queen of the South came to Solomon.” The Solomonic legend, as related in the Kebra Nagast, tells how the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, and after her return home, bore his child, who grew up to become Menelik the First, of Oxon. When he grew up, he went to Jerusalem, and took the Ark of the Covenant back to his people. From then on, the Ethiopians considered themselves, rather than the Jews, to be the chosen people of God. That’s according to Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave, published in 1968.
Not surprisingly, this ancient and thoroughly Africanized Christian church, which lay claim to Solomonic dynasty, never became a sustained European mission field. Portuguese, enthralled by the legend of a Black Christian kingdom in Ethiopia, attempted to convert the nation to the Roman practice of Catholicism, but this attempt led to serious conflict and failure. They, and the Jesuits, were expelled in 1633. Spain and Portugal hoped this remote kingdom in Africa would become an ally of theirs against the expanding force of Islam and the rising power of the Ottoman Empire. Given the expansion of Islam in the northern African regions in the 10th century, Ethiopia became increasingly isolated, as did the Coptic communities in Egypt and elsewhere. Christian efforts at conversion, therefore, were focused on West, Central, and Southern Africa. You’ve been listening to Faith of Our Fathers. From death row this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
