The Bible: The African Diaspora

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The narrative of Africa in the context of World history tends to center around the issue of slavery and the slave trade and it has been hard-fought to invalidate this notion. With what was presumed as a lack of any notable contributions to global history, Africa has unfortunately garnered an image of inferiority, whereas this typecast could not be farther from the truth. When exploring questions concerning the African experience, the answer does not begin with the African American experience and the Atlantic slave trade, that is perhaps most familiar to observers today. Rather, it is necessary to delve deeper into African antiquity and explore the culture and development of Africa before such notions of race, religion, and slavery became prevalent.…show more content…
The role of the Bible and biblical stories is perhaps the most significant authoritative document that had a profound impact on Africans and their descendants. The Bible, usually a piece of religious text, in this case, can be explored as an authoritative piece of history in discussing the African Diaspora. Gomez continues that there are two spheres of influence that the bible covers concerning Africa: 1) the roles and experiences of Africans in the Bible; 2) the ways in which these roles and experiences have influenced Africans living in postbiblical times (Gomez 18). The Bible acts a critical component of examining how we receive African history in modern times. For instance, it is not commonly challenged that the Bible has to do with characters of non-African ethnicity, though there is evidence that the Garden of Eden has connection to somewhere in East Africa. The dangers of not considering the fact that the characters mentioned in the Bible could be Africans, challenges our ability to adopting others’ history, without challenge. The Old Testament, makes mention of Egyptian women playing prominent roles in the lives of prophets such as Abraham, who fathered a son by Hagar, an Egyptian woman. The son, Ishmael, in turn, married an Egyptian woman.…show more content…
When Africans began to enter Islamic societies, it is evident that some similarities and differences arise from their America counterparts. By 656, Muslim armies, and consequently Islam, marched into areas of North Africa and Egypt. This, along with merchant communities that spread Islam through their trade routes, led to a gradual conversion of the encountered lands to Arabic ideals and by the 15th century, Islam become the religion of the courts. (Gomez 29) Eventually, this led to entire communities dedicated to Islamic culture and religion. For instance, the Western Sudan began to be increasingly
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