First, most of their myths reflect a nonliterate or oral tradition that was not recorded until fairly recently, in most cases. The very survival of these myths is a testament to the deep human desire and ability to hold on to what is sacred. When these mythic accounts were recorded, it was after the introduction of Christianity-as was true in the Celtic and Norse worlds. That does not mean we can't "know" these myths, but we must take into account the prejudices that may have been involved in preserving them, as well as a native desire to conceal and protect their most sacred stories and rituals.*

A second feature often found in many African, Native American, and Pacific Creation stories is a deity who gives shape to the cosmos and then retreats to the background. The African, American, and Pacific-island stories also share a fascination with mischievous animal "tricksters," and animals often play a larger role in these myths than in many other traditions. All of these cultures have many stories involving twins. And, in worlds filled with spirits, the shaman or "medicine man" is often highly revered as the most significant person in the society.

But finally, we come back to the most important parallel of all. Running through the history of all these cultures is the common theme of destruction. The "discovery" of Africa, the Americas, and the world of the Pacific is pervaded by an overwhelming central tragedy-the concerted effort to replace ancient ideas and languages with the conquerors' version of god, truth, and civilization. That effort largely-although not completely-succeeded.

In spite of that dark history, the myths of these places and people are not lost, dead stories. As elsewhere, ancient folkways and faiths die hard. And there are vivid reminders of these mythic traditions alive today. One example can be seen in the religions that grew up in the Americas. Both voodoo and Santeria, for instance, remain powerful vestiges of the arrival of ancient African myths and deities in the Caribbean and the Americas, brought by millions of Africans who carried their gods, if nothing else, when they were forced into the holds of slave ships. In Latin America, the sacred remains of ancient myths and beliefs poke their heads through "official" Christianity, like some relentless rain-forest flower breaking through the concrete of a modern street.

Museums around the world are also helping to keep ancient myths alive, increasingly recognizing the rich artistic traditions of all these places and people, as well as their impact on art during the past century. Among others, Picasso and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo were profoundly influenced by the imagery of ancient myths. Hollywood, which is often content to ignore such traditions, has also opened eyes with the infrequent big-budget success, such as Kevin Costner's paean to the Sioux, Dances With Wolves, while smaller, independent foreign filmmakers have contributed The Gods Must Be Crazy, set among the San of the Kalahari, and The Whale Rider, which lyrically captured a sense of the disappearing traditions of the Maori. A generation of scholars in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Brazil, among many countries, has also expanded an ambitious effort to recognize and revitalize the study of Native American, African, and other indigenous traditions, expressed in such forms as the increasingly popular celebration of the African harvest festival known by its Swahili name "Kwanzaa," which means "first fruits."

The fact is that myths-like the human soul they often reflect-can be enduring, tenacious, and transcendent. Myths never die. That basic truth is nowhere clearer than in the very ancient places called the "new worlds."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

OUT OF AFRICA.

The Myths of Sub-Saharan Africa In the time when Dendid created all things, He created the sun, And the sun is born, and dies, and comes again.

He created man, And man is born, and dies, and does not come again.

-old African song You who dive down as if under water to steal, Though no earthly king may have seen you, The King of Heaven sees.

-traditional proverb of the Yoruba (Nigeria) Caller-forth of the branching trees: You bring forth the shoots That they stand erect.

You have filled the land with mankind, The dust rises on high, O Lord!

Wonderful One, you live In the midst of the sheltering rocks.

You give rain to mankind.

-from a traditional prayer of the Shona (Zimbabwe) We come upon a curious fact. The pre-colonial history of African societies-and I refer to both Euro-Christian and Arab-Islamic colonization-indicates very clearly that African societies never at any time of their existence went to war with another over the issue of their religion. That is, at no time did the black race attempt to subjugate or forcibly convert others with any holier-than-thou evangelizing zeal. Economic and political motives, yes. But not religion.

-WOLE SOYINKA, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 1986) Is there an "African" mythology?

What role did myth play in African villages?

Is there an African Creation myth?

Who's Who of African Deities How did a suicidal king become a god and end up in the Supreme Court?

MYTHICAL MILESTONES.

Africa 2.5 million years before present The first known stone tools are used by early ancestors of modern man, Homo habilis.

1.7 million years before present Hominids begin to move out of Africa, adapting to a range of environments in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

150,000 years before present Migration of early modern humans begins from East Africa.

100,000 years before present Anatomically modern humans with superior "tool kit" emerge in southern Africa.

70,000 years before present Evidence of human burials in southern Africa.

42,000 years before present Ocher, a kind of earth which is ground to a fine powder and used as a pigment, is mined and possibly used for body decoration.

26,000 years before present Evidence of earliest African rock art.

20,000 years before present Evidence of terra-cotta figurines in Algeria (northern Africa).

12,00010,000 years before present End of the last Ice Age.

Before the Common Era (BCE) c. 8500 Saharan rock art depicts wide array of elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and other animals long since extinct in this region. Finely crafted stone arrowheads and other tools are used in the Sahara region.

c. 7500 "Wavy-line pottery," made by dragging fish bones through wet clay, produced in Sahara and its southern fringes.

c. 6500 Domestication of cattle in the Sahara region.

c. 6000 Agriculture begins along the Nile River.

c. 5000 Desertification of Sahara region begins; populations expand south and east.

c. 4100 Sorghum and rice are cultivated in the Sudan and West Africa.

c. 3100 Beginnings of united Egypt (see Mythical Milestones, chapter 2).

c. 1965 Nubia conquered by Egypt.

c. 900 Nubian kingdom of Kush (also spelled Cush) rises along the Nile River in what is now northeastern Sudan. Its founding date is not known, but it existed as early as 2000 BCE. Egypt conquers Kush in the 1500s BCE, and the Kushites adopt elements of Egyptian art, language, and religion.

814 Carthage founded by Phoenicians in northern Africa.

747 Kushites invade and rule Egypt.

c. 600 Capital of Kush moved to Meroe. Kush probably fell about 350 CE after armies from the African kingdom of Axum destroyed Meroe.

c. 500 Daamat, first kingdom in Ethiopian highlands, is founded. Nok culture begins in northern Nigeria; first known iron working in the sub-Saharan region.

332 Alexander conquers Egypt.

30 Egypt becomes a Roman province.

Common Era c. 150 Nigerian Nok culture reaches its height.

c. 200 Ghana gains wealth and power through its trade with Berbers of northern Africa.

350 Meroe, capital of Kush kingdom, is destroyed by Ethiopian forces.

c. 451 Ethiopian kingdom of Axum reaches its height.

c. 540570 Spread of Christianity in Nubia and Ethiopia.

c. 600 Kingdom of Ghana founded.

c. 625 Beginning of Islamic expansion into Africa.

641 Arabs invade Egypt.

c. 700 Kingdom of Ghana grows more powerful and controls trans-Saharan trade routes.

c. 800 Emergence of trading towns on East African coast; trade grows with Arabs and Persians.

c. 850 The construction of the citadel of Great Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, is begun.

c. 1000 Spread of Islam into sub-Saharan Africa, driven by overland trade.

c. 1076 King of Ghana converts to Islam.

c. 1100 Empire in Zimbabwe rises to power in southern Africa, centered in the massive stone-built city of Great Zimbabwe.

c. 1140 Igbo culture flourishes on Niger River.

1150 Yoruba culture flourishes in West Africa, based in capital city of Ilfe.

c. 1240 Rise of empires of Mali in West Africa and Benin.

1350 Mali becomes an Islamic state.

1415 Portuguese capture Ceuta (Morocco), which marks the beginning of Portugal's overseas empire and involvement in Africa.

1431 Chinese admiral Zheng He travels to East Africa.

1441 First shipment of African slaves sent to Portugal.

1485 Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias reaches the Cape of Good Hope.

Four Portuguese Catholic missionaries arrive in Congo.

1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope en route to India.

1502 First African slaves are taken to the New World by the Spanish.

S.

till in the dark about the Dark Continent? Say "Africa," and the immediate association might be "jungle" or "safari." Or cartoonish images of missionaries in large stew pots. Or a man in a pith helmet, asking, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" If you grew up in a certain era, your views of Africa were probably shaped by Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller surrounded by dutiful natives in loincloths saying things like "bwana." Or old issues of National Geographic once eagerly perused for pictures of African women with bare breasts. A younger group might identify with the lovable Lion King immortalized in the idyllic animated Disney movie and Broadway musical.

Let's face it. The generally woeful state of American knowledge about the rest of the world is at its nadir when sub-Saharan Africa* is the subject. And the media doesn't help matters. In recent years, Africa has only shown up on the American radar when some catastrophe strikes-an embassy bombing or a Black Hawk down. In the late 1960s, it took a civil war and starving Biafran refugees to make us aware of Nigeria. A rock-and-roll "feel-good" moment like "We Are the World" in 1985 briefly raised consciousness about the troubles confronting Africa. And, of course, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, we were very much aware of the peaceful revolution he launched, which removed South Africa's apartheid government.

But the typical and widespread American attitude toward Africa-even during the recent horrific episodes of butchery and genocide-is more like "out of sight, out of mind."

This is historically misguided, because Africa is the place where humanity was born, as well as the fountainhead of a vast and rich tradition of myth, magic, and music. The second largest and second most-populous continent after Asia, Africa is where most evidence of the earliest human ancestors has been found, leaving little doubt that we are all "out of Africa."* From the many discoveries of bones, stones, and fossils at sites in eastern Africa, there is wide agreement that the earliest human beings lived more than 2 million years ago in eastern Africa, in an area spanning modern Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Evidence of emerging "modern" humans from the past 100,000 years, including improved stone tools, artwork on rocks, signs of body decoration, and burials, also appear first at various sites in Africa.

But a clear picture of what happened between the time of those fossilized remains from millions of years ago and last week's headlines remains sketchy at best. By all accounts from the worlds of archaeology, anthropology, and history, a series of migrations took place over hundreds of thousands of years, eventually leading to pockets of very different people dotting the map of Africa. By the time of the Common Era, Africa was not the home of a few scattered tribes living in primitive isolation from the world and each other. Instead, it was a place of many people, hundreds of tribal groups (many of them nomadic, others in thousands of villages), sophisticated cities, and small kingdoms, all with different languages, beliefs, and rituals. These many people included the early Christian kingdoms of Kush and Axum, neighboring Egypt, which claimed to possess the biblical Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments; the great center of Islamic learning at Timbuktu in Mali; the diminutive Pygmies of the equatorial rain forests; the towering Masai herdsmen of Kenya and Tanzania; the San of the Kalahari Desert; the cattle-herding Khoi of southern Africa; and the proud Zulu, who challenged the might of the British Empire in nineteenth-century South Africa. This variety of people clearly underscores the fact that Africa is not one monolithic "dark continent," but an extraordinary, rainbow-colored cloth woven through with the threads of many beliefs.

Africa's diversity was both transformed and diminished by powerful outsiders-Islamic Arabs, starting in the seventh century, and European Christians in the fifteenth century. In the wake of their arrival, Africa's rich array of native myths and beliefs was nearly eradicated by missionary zeal and then given short shrift by generations of academics and historians. When the African mythic legacy was finally recognized in the twentieth century,* it was brought to life in a panoramic picture of all-seeing deities; mischievous tricksters; tales of death and mortality; powerful ancestors and spirits; the importance of family, friends, and community; and the dominating presence of the African healers, priests, and shamans, once derided as mere "witch doctors."

Along with the revived interest in the role of traditional healers and shamans came the rediscovery of the rich oral history preserved by people like the griot-the musician-storytellers of western Africa who gained notoriety as the inspiration for Alex Haley's Roots. Like the village shamans, the griot did not practice their art in a Parthenon, palace, or pyramid. Their sacred stories were expressed as a sort of performance art in song, drumming, and dance-a communal experience still alive today in African village life. Just as the songs of Homer and Hesiod were once sung in Greek villages, the musical tales of the griot captivated African villagers. Encompassing the themes of rain and drought, love and sex, morality and mortality-the same themes that course through all myths and legends-their tales were powerful accompaniments to the belief that all nature was sacred and that spirits inhabited every living thing.

Last but not least, ancient Africa was a preliterate place that produced few texts by which their myths can be studied. There is no ancient Odyssey or Ramayana written in African tongues. Neither is there a guide to the afterlife or a native encyclopedia of the gods to help us grasp what the ancient Africans thought.

Fortunately, an extraordinary oral tradition has been maintained throughout Africa to this day. And recent scholarship and a dedication to restoring some of the "lost" African past has cast a bright new light on the dazzling mythology of what was once considered the "Dark Continent."

MYTHIC VOICES.

The sun shines and sends its burning rays down upon us, The moon rises in its glory.

Rain will come and again the sun will shine, And over it all passes the eye of God.

Nothing is hidden from Him.

Whether you be in your home, whether you be on the water, Whether you rest in the shade of a tree in the open, Here is your Master.

-from a traditional Yoruba song The night is black, the sky is blotted out, We have left the village of our fathers, The Maker is angry with us...

The light becomes dark, the night and again night, The day with hunger tomorrow- The Maker is angry with us.

The Old Ones have passed away, Their homes are far off, below, Their spirits are wandering- Where are their spirits wandering?

Perhaps the passing wind knows Their bones are far off below.

-a song of the Pygmies of Gabon Is there an "African" mythology?