By the time this column is published, tens of thousands of people globally, black and white, young and old, would have made their way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for February’s Black History Month celebrations, which are to be punctuated by an outdoor concert, symposiums, exhibitions, markets and tours.
Some historians may pointedly muse that, as many before them, these pilgrims have probably gone in search of the biblical, long since unsighted Ark of the Covenant, the winged, gilded statue of the Lady of Zion, whose naked radiating element is rumoured to be lethal and command powers beyond description.
An Ethiopian manuscript, the Kebra Nagast, first translated from the Coptic into Arabic — then into several European languages — and studied by select scholars and theologians worldwide; once held in the British Museum and returned to Ethiopia in 1872, claims more boldly than any other manuscript that the Ark was secretly moved from Israel to Ethiopia by King Menyelik I, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He is said to have laid the Ark to rest in Aksum, Ethiopia’s erstwhile capital, where it is still under 24-hour guard by warrior priests, as it was in the Temple of Jerusalem. The relocation of the Ark, which Solomon stated he owed much of his powers to, was to establish Africa, and specifically Ethiopia, as God’s spiritual home on earth.
Now, who doesn’t love a bountiful mythical allegory? Well, it turns out, not too many characters in the hall of global repute. These controversial claims were first made in the Spanish version of the manuscript in 1528 by Enrique Cornelio Agrippa and corroborated by Credo Mutwa in his seminal 1969 book, My People, which claims that the ”Bronze Idol of Zima-Mbje” holding within it the glowing, putrefying ”Eye of Odu” emerged and then disappeared from the Zimbabwe Ruins around a similar period, spawning the eternal riddle of ”Who has the Ark?” and a long chain of influential persons paying Ethiopia a visit. Either they went in search of the Ark (truly), went to research Ethiopia’s role in the embattled establishment of Christianity and Islam on the African continent, or went to marvel at the only African country never to have been colonised, boasting, to this day, the greatest number of foreign embassies, on its soil, in the world.
Others went there to establish and inaugurate the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. In modern times, Queen Elizabeth, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and many others have paid historic visits to the country, with some of them meeting the then head of state and 1935’s Time magazine Man of the Year, Emperor Haile Selassie I.
Several years ago, my grandmother, trade unionist Emma Mashinini, found it prudent to present me with the gift of a silver pendant of the Star of David, also referred to as the Ethiopian Cross, to hang in my car as a good-luck charm.
And now this: hip, self-sponsored South Africans from different professional backgrounds with some change to spare grabbed the excuse of a lifetime to participate in a cultural expedition so far from home, to meet with other Africans, be entertained, learn about another country and, as I enjoy suspecting, find the Ark of the Covenant in 2005. What will they find, I wonder?
Ethiopia’s economic decline, the one that the pilgrims will find, began in the seventh century AD with the expansion of Christianity in the West, enforcing the centralisation of spirituality into accredited church temples and limiting the everyday use of associated products in homes and informal gatherings. The Kebra Nagast and the Bible, however, hail the exceeding wealth of the Queen of Ethiopia, largely credited to the global export of indigenous incense and myrrh BC; describe a time when the worshipping of the sun was really actually quite a happy one; and invoke a sense of the realised African Renaissance. Much later, Ethiopia could not push back the frontiers of natural disasters, the colonisation of the rest of the continent and foreign debt. The pilgrims may ask themselves whether the African Renaissance is possible under such extreme conditions. They may also come to debate whether the African Renaissance, as in the Holy Grail-inspired European Renaissance and Mediterranean cultural movement, concerns itself in economic terms, with the open, decentralised and affordable access and use of indigenous resources, mineral and non-mineral.
Either way, the sweet pot in Addis Ababa must, I imagine, have inadvertently given the pilgrims a clue to the African Renaissance, at least partially manifest.