Dear Editor,

Historically, many battles have been fought to settle once and for all the question: Who are the chosen people?

The claimants of this special title are as numerous as are the ethnicities that have evolved spiritual systems that have captured the imagination of large swathes of the human family. The chosen people status was reflected in the Jews dividing the world into Jews and goyim or gentiles. In ancient Greece, you were a Greek or you were considered a Barbarian. The Brahmin in India considered themselves to be a special class set aside to rule all the other castes.

Notwithstanding the breaking down of the middle wall concept advanced by the first Christian apologist Paul of Tarsus, Christians ran with the concept of being the new chosen people and fought many wars to prove the veracity of this claim. Once Europeans embraced Christianity and applied the chosen people concept to European civilisation, the world was made to tremble under Christian Europe.

Not to be outdone, the religion introduced by Muhammad asserted that both Jews and Christians had deviated from the straight path and Muslims were the honest to goodness chosen ones of Allah. It was this competing claim, made by all three of the Abrahamic faiths, that led to rivers of blood in the Middle East, Europe, and wherever these three faiths encountered each other.

In recent times a number of black communities of faith have been flirting with the concept that some people of African ancestry are the real chosen people. Groups like the Black Hebrew Israelites, the Nation of Islam, and a number of independent ministries have all embraced some variant of the chosen people concept in relation to people of African ancestry.

I am currently exploring the thinking of the late Stephen Darby on the subject of Negroes as the true heirs of the biblical heritage. According to Darby, when the Jewish nation was scattered by the Romans in the early centuries, many Jews settled in West Africa in a place called Negroland located in today’s Nigeria. Darby makes a distinction between these Jewish migrants who settled in Negroland and the surrounding African ethnic groups. As a matter of fact, Darby contends that it was the Jews of Negroland who were sold as slaves to the Europeans.

Darby’s views dovetails with the theology of the Black Hebrew Israelites who identify the Israel of the Bible with black and indigenous people in the Caribbean and the Americas. Black Americans are the tribe of Judah. West Indians are the tribe of Benjamin. Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans are, respectively, the tribes of Levi, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon. In the theological smorgasbord of Black Hebrew Israelites and others of this ilk, non-melanated Jews are pseudo-Israelites.

As a firm believer in religious freedom I respect the right of every man and woman to embrace whatever religion they think works for them. I also support the right of individuals not to embrace any religion at all. However, as an Afrocentric freethinker I sometimes wonder why people of African ancestry have so little confidence in their own religious traditions. I further wonder why we so easily imbibe the scorn and disdain displayed by others for our own spiritual traditions.

If the historians, scientists, and geneticists are correct about Africa being the birthplace of the enterprise we call humanity, then it stands to reason that the first religious systems embraced by humanity were created by Africans. It also stands to reason that the first deities and spirit entities would also have been fashioned in the image of Africans. Ancient African spirituality, therefore, ought to be a fruitful field of study for people of African ancestry today.

African people embracing religious systems that elevate the history, ancestors, and divinities of other ethnic communities hardly seems like a recipe for the successful re-emergence of black civilisation in the contemporary context. As the originators of the human enterprise, people of African ancestry have a unique spiritual contribution to make in the marketplace of religious ideologies. African divinities and semi-divinities antedate those of all other cultures.

A majority of African people have forsaken their divinities, their ancestors, and the myths that were foundational in the building of the great African civilisations of antiquity. The religions of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others have displaced traditional African spirituality among people of African ancestry.

Regrettably none of these new religions are reversing our economic plight or our standing in the international arena. At least Jews, Christians, and Muslims can see what their claim of being the chosen people is doing for them. The numerous and perplexing problems facing the global black collective seem to be suggesting, however, that people of African ancestry are the least chosen of all the races.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

Founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center

rodneynimrod2@gmail.com