African Mother of Everyone a Me

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African Black Mother of EveryoneAfrican Origins and African Migration Paths in Europe.

By Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D.Copyright 2005

1 African Black Mother of Everyone


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Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D.

African Black Mother of EveryoneAfrican Origins and African Migration Paths in Europe.

aConference of La Maison de L'Afrique a Toulouse

Universite de Toulouse Le Mirail.Les Africains et leurs descendants en Europe avant le Xxe siecle

Une equipe international d'historiens.

December 8, 9, 10, 2005

This paper is grounded on the African value of self-knowledge who we are, where we came from, and wherewe are going. In the autumn of 2005 I amassailed by a sense of urgency to tell the story ofeveryone's African black mother because the largely untoldhistory of the United States is that enslavement of

Africans, extermination of native Americans,persecution of people perceived as dark other. Thismentality still characterizes the leaders of the United States,armed with a monopoly of weapons of massdestruction and ignorant of everyone's African origin,leaders who seem hell-bent on global domination ofthe world's other people, whom they perceive asdark. At the end of October 2005, the lies sustaining U.S.

Aggression against dark others at home and abroad may beunraveling. The case of the United States may be the most



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lethal, but the history of people of the dominant cultureswho consider themselves white and their aggressionagainst subaltern dark others is similar. This study will limit

itself to African migrants and their legacy in Europe, but theimplications are large for the rest of the world.

In this dangerous, it is vitally important we know who weare so we can stop the violence of the west, as well as theviolence of others around the world the first step increating a new world of harmonious societies.

As Sicilian American feminist cultural historian, I havebeen deeply influenced by African and Africana studies

notably Cheikh Anta Diop's rescuer of African historyfrom the oblivion and or distortions of western racism,scholarship of Molefi Asante on Afrocentrism, AliceWalker's novels, and Maulana Karenga's recent

research on African culture of Maat, African womandivinity of justice and order. My concern is to stress themutual relevance of African history, Africana studies,feminist cultural studies, and genetics research of L.Cavalli-Sforza and world colleagues who confirm in theDNA the African origins of everyone, archaeologists,e.g., Emmanuel Anati who has documented thatAfrican migrants after 50,000 BCE brought signs of

the African black mother (pubic V and color ochrered) to every continent. Of prime importance to meis Cavalli-Sforza's theme that African migrants broughttheir beliefs with them ....beliefs that circle the Africanblack mother.

The legacy of African migrants brought to all continentsis suggested in Maulana Karenga's study of Maat

wherein she is the moral grounding and humanflourishing of a universe in becoming.....in which she



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keeps the whole in harmony. Maat is the grounding ofhuman communities in justice, propriety, harmony,balance, reciprocity and order. She is truth, justice

and righteousness in communities that care for thevulnerable: the weak, poor, elderly, the hungry,thirsty, and the naked.

In the ethic of Maat, found in African documents 2500years before the common epoch, the response toevil is to do good. The heart is the divine presencein humans and the seat of consciousness and moral

sensitivity. Maat is the ground of communities wherehumans are equal, where there is no radical separationbetween humans and animals, and where wisdom, orknowledge, is an ethical requirement for everyone.In this African ethos, humans, rooted in theircommunities, are a refuge for the wretched, a raftfor the drowning, and a ladder for one who is in theabyss. In the ontological unity of god and humans,

Maat is goodness of being in a dynamic and creativeuniverse which has an open-ended future.

This African legacy, suppressed for 2,000 years bydominant cultures of the world, has been coming to thesurface since world war II. The Gnostic gospels, foundin Africa in a jar near Cairo in 1945, offered a rich andnuanced alternative to the patristic and violent

Christianity established by the holy Roman empire in thefourth century CE, when they banished the Gnosticgospels (e.g., those of James M. Robinson and ElainePagels) do note relate them to African beliefs.Whatever other meanings conveyed by these gospelsfound in Africa they suggest the transition of deepveneration of the African dark woman divinity to herdemotion in the common epoch.: as suggested by the

voice of a divine woman in the gnostic gospels,Thunder, Perfect Mind.



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I am a Sicilian American feminist cultural historian whohas written books on Italian feminism, black Madonnas,

African origins of the dark Mother, and collected ananthology of womanist/feminist writings in spirituality entitledShe is Everywhere! Drawn to studies revisiting the originsof Europe, notably those of the French Annales school ofhistorians who stress the importance of looking beyondpresent-day national boundaries to large geographicalareas (e.g., that of the Mediterranean), I have alsolearned from the Annales school the significance of the

long duration of beliefs, in this case the belief in the blackMother of Africa who has many names throughout theworld, whose icons, images, rituals, and stories transmittedAfrican beliefs in justice, harmony, and transformation.

My indebtedness to other scholars includes AntonioGramsci, Marxist theorist of Sardinia, island museumof Europe, who tapped African beliefs in considering values

of justice and equality of subaltern cultures indispensable tothe cultural revolution that precedes and accompaniesnonviolent political revolution.

My work is grounded on my Sicilian genetic and culturalinheritance of the Mediterranean culture that originatesin Africa. In my book-in-progress, The Future has an

Ancient Heart, studying islands of the Mediterranean

as well as regions embraced by that sea (Spain,France and Italy), my premises and methodologiesare suggested in the case of Sicily. Contiguous withAfrican in prehistory, Sicily was early reached byAfrican migrants who after 50,000 BCE left evidenceof their beliefs in signs (public V and orche red) inrock art, later in icons of a woman divinity, then inblack Madonnas (and other dark women divinities

of the world) whose values were conveyed in rituals, stories,and themes of contemporary feminist,



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ecology, nonviolence and other transformativemovements. In antiquity the island's close connectionwith Africa was evident in the heavy traffic in the Canal

of Sicily connecting that island with the mothercontinent, Africa.

Later there were return migrations to Europe ofultimately African west Asians: notably of Anatolians andSemites who venerated women divinities, e.g.,farmer migrations of Anatolians after 10,000 BCE,Danites, Semites from Ur after 23,000 BCE,

Canaanites, Semites from Lebanon, Syria andPalestine (whom the Greeks called Phoenicianswho are today associated with the SemiticPalestinians) after 1500 BCE. Israelites, Semites indiaspora after 70 CE, Muslims, Semites from Africaand the Middle East after 600 CE who left a model,notably in Spain but also in Sicily, of different cultures(in this case Jews, Christians, and Muslims) living

together harmoniously bonding, in my view, by ashared suppressed belief in the African black Mother.

In prehistory, Sicily was contagious with Africa. Inantiquity, Sicily was part of the Mediterraneancivilization that originated in Africa and flourished inwest Asia, Europe, and Mediterranean islands, notablySicily, Sardinia, Malta (founded by Sicilians), and the

Balearic islands. In the context of conventional history,wherein history is erroneously taught as beginning withcivilizations of Greece and Rome, Sicily was a colonyof both. In the early common epoch, the African blackMother was represented as a Madonna figure paintedin red (one of her signs) in caves. After Christianchurch fathers tried to destroy evidence of the Africanblack Mother, her memory was transmitted after 500

CE in subaltern cultures in V-shaped (another of her signs)black Madonnas.



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In Sicily, and elsewhere, not only direct migrationsfrom Africa but return migrations of ultimately African

peoples from west Asia deepened the memory ofthe African black mother. Images of Isis and Tanitfigures brought by Africans navigating the Africansea that adjoins western Sicily may be found in myancestral maternal area of Palermo. Images ofCybele, brought by Anatolians are pervasive in myancestral paternal region in the southeastern part of theisland. Melding of African and Asian images is

suggested in that I have found images of Isis, Cybele,Astarte and Tanit, as well as their images as blackMadonnas, in all my ancestral places in Sicily Palermo, Erice, Ragusa, and Siracusa. Nanna, inSicilian dialect, remembers west Asian Inanna in the wordfor grandmother.

The black Madonna of Tindari, holiest icon of Sicily,

is inscribed, Nigra sum sed furmosa (I am blackand beautiful). Her values justice and equality are incised on statues of women at the entrance to hersanctuary.

Black African origins of the dark Mother of a thousandnames in the cultures of the world, as well as erasureof her African origin, are marked in the changing

names of my ancestral paternal Sicilian town, Ragusa.The ancient name was Ragusa Ibla (diminutiveaffectionate for Anatolian Cybele) who was called IblaNera or Black Ibla .....until the seventh century BCE whenGreeks invaded Sicily and changed her nameIbla Nera (black Ibla) to Ibla Herae thereby erasingher black African origin and marking the decline ofher statues under the Greeks, who associated her

with Hera, the subordinated wife of Zeus.



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Christianization whitened her and tried to destroy hergift of vision. This is evident in Santa Lucia ofSiracusa who lived in the 4th century CE, major saint

of Sicily and south Italy, for whom I am named. Inchurch iconography, Lucia, saint of light andmartyred Christian virgin, offers her eyes on a plate toa rapist. In my interpretation, this is the African blackMother turned white sacrificing her gift of vision to thechurch. This interpretation is verified in popularstories wherein light comes out of darkness, anAfrican belief. Both African Isis and Sicilian Lucia

are associated with nurturance (both carry sheafs ofwheat) healing, and vision. In the vernacularChristianity of Sicily, Lucia is a saint whonurtures everyone and heals those who have lost theirvision.

In the middle ages the culture of Sicily was Christian,Jewish, and Muslim. After 1060 CE Sicily was

connected with mainland Europe when expandingNormans (Scandinavians based in France) invaded theisland and then took Britain in 1066. Afterward, Sicilywas ruled by Angevins of France, Swabians ofGermany, and monarchs of Spain who brought theinquisition to eradicate heresies, persecuting mySicilian grandmothers and helping us to understandthe almost total success of dominant church and state

in stamping out in Europe, and in descendants ofEuropeans, in the US and elsewhere, deep (ultimatelyAfrican) beliefs.

My hypothesis is that primordial and continuingmigrations from Africa, as well as return migrations ofultimately African Semites from west Asia into theregion Greeks called Europe, left a cellular and or

cultural memory that has persisted in descendants ofAfrican migrants everywhere on earth ---- a belief that



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has survived despite the trauma throughout thecommon epoch of institutional suppression, inquisitiontorture and killing, slavery, and persecution of dark

others. Today the memory of the African black Mother,and her values, seems to be coming to the surface indominant cultures of the world (the belief has always beenpresent in subaltern cultures) offering thepossibility of world transformation.

Signs preceded images of the black Mother.Contemporary study of dark women divinities of the

world should be preceded by understand that althoughblack Madonnas and other dark women divinities maybe our most palpable evidence of the continuingvernacular belief in the African black Mother, the beliefis also evident in signs and in many ways of knowing.Black studies, feminist cultural history, genetics,archeology, anthropology, folklore studies, and ethnicstudies, are coming together with other disciplines,

notably clinical psychology and other studies of how wecan access unconscious or pre-verbal knowledge, withcontrolled breathing, drumming, et al.

A fired professor after 1969 (an assistant professor atthe time, I went on strike at San Francisco Statesupporting students who struck for black studies and againstthe imperialist war in Vietnam), I went on to become an

independent scholar intent on finding my Siciliangrandmothers and my own ancestral beliefs.... a quest thathas led me to Africa.

My on-site explorations of Italian feminists and blackMadonnas of Europe led me to realize the importanceof suppressed beliefs. By 2001, when dark Mother Africanorigins and godmothers was first published, I had

concluded that the memory of the African darkMother has persisted for millennia to the present, not only in



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subaltern cultures, but in unconscious orpreconscious levels of memory of everyone, on allcontinents.

The black African Mother has drawn me, particularlysince 1988 when I was very moved by the blackMadonna in holy week processions at Trapani (inwestern Sicily on an African migration path), dreamedof my mother as a black Madonna and learned the nextday that my mother was dying of cancer. I wrote the bookon black Madonnas the year my mother was dying. Black

Madonnas, conflated with the memory of my mother, havedetermined my research ever since. The major reason Iwanted to visit France again the summer of 2005 wasthat my study of African migrations led me to realize thatthe Auvergne of France, where there is a very highconcentration of black Madonnas, was a region earlyreached by navigating and migrating Africans from theAtlantic Ocean as well as upriver from the Mediterranean.

In France (and elsewhere) the continuous presence ofsigns and after 25,000 BCE of icons of black womendivinities, underlined for me the long duration ofultimately African beliefs. Bringing a feminist culturalperspective to archeology, I have reflected that menhirsand dolmens (which we have found all over theMediterranean) may be markers of African migration paths

throughout the world. Menhirs are uprightstones; dolmens are two vertical menhirs holdingup a horizontal menhir.

Menhirs and dolmens characterized our first religioussanctuary created by migrating Africans in the Sinai40,000 BCE. This first religious sanctuary, located inthe place Muslims called Har Karkom and Jews and

Christians call Mt. Sinai, is the founding place ofJudaism, Christianity and Islam. This is stunning



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datum uncovered by Italian archaeologist Emmanuel Anati, adatum whose implications took a while for me toabsorb .....Africans created the menhirs and dolmens

symbolizing African beliefs in this place which laterwould become an important religious site for Judaism,Christianity and Islam.

Jean Clottes, major archaeologist of France, attributesreligious significance to menhirs and dolmens. MarijaGimbutas, Lithuanian American archaeologistassociated menhirs with 25,000 BCE stone women

divinities. In the south of France two significantmenhirs are statues of women divinities the Venusof Laussel -- holding a lunar calendar and pointingto her vulva, suggesting menstruation and pregnancy,and the Venus of Lespugue, a woman figuresculpted all in rounds.

On site research in Mediterranean places has

uncovered some significant patterns. Visiting caves onAfrican migration paths at Altamira in Spain and atLascaux in France, I visually understood EmmanuelAnati's insight that there is a continuum betweenprehistoric African art and great modern art.Prehistoric art was created in a cosmology of theAfrican black Mother, a cosmology later rememberedon African migration paths in France by Toulous-

Lautrec, Van Gogh, Matisse, et al and in Spain byPicasso, Miro, Dali, Gaudi and others.

Not only art but healing rituals and heresies inChristian places have continued to transmit thememory of the African black Mother to this day.Islands and mountain enclaves (where people fledinvaders and inquisitors) have preserved the memory

more clearly than have mainland cultures. Thesenatural places, also have startling instances of the



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African content of submerged beliefs of Europe, notonly images of the black African Mother, but Africansolar motifs in rock art, and African healing water

rituals.

On our study tour to Sardinia in 2004 we visuallyunderstood the connection between African migrationpaths, the African dark Mother, and African waterrituals when we saw Santa Cristian's well a wellshaped in the form of Carthaginian woman divinityTanit. The well is constructed so that one descends

into her womb fluids. Mary Saracino, who participatedin our Sardinian tour, advices that there was a Semiticversion of African water rituals remembered in thewater god Maimone. I was reminded of the similarityof the water god Maimone to the name of the greatJewish philosopher of Spain, Maimonides, in thegolden age of harmony between Jews, Christians andMuslims before 1492. I also recalled African water

rituals in communities surrounding nuraghi in Sardinia.Nuraghi are the thousands of cone-shaped structuresof Sardinia that resemble those of Zimbabwe inAfrica, suggesting that contrary to the dominantbelief of archaeologists, nuraghi of Sardinia are notfortresses but sanctuaries....or, they weresanctuaries before they became fortresses(although there are no weapons).

Perhaps the most significant, ultimately African, waterritual we found this summer in the south of France, onan African migration path, in an area of many menhirsand dolmens, is located at the second place (afterRome) of Christianity, at Lourdes, which annuallydraws three and a half million people ---- the sick anddesperate of the world who come for healing.

Pilgrimages at Lourdes feature Mary, Jewish motherof Jesus, whom we study in women's spirituality



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programs as the major Christian manifestation ofthe African dark Mother (other manifestations canbe found in certain saints).

Springs, grottoes, peasants, particularly young people,are associated with apparitions of the dark Mother asthe virgin Mary. In the case of Lourdes, the story isthat May appeared in a grotto to a young girl,Bernadette Soubirous. Mary told the girl to bathe inthe water of a spring in the grotto. Grottos andsprings, in Italian, French, and other folklore, are

regarded as wombs of the dark Mother. At Lourdesthe thousands of the afflicted of the world who pourinto the town participate in nightly torchlightprocessions ....people singing, most in wheelchairs,who are taken to the grotto to be washed in the healingwaters of the spring.

A vernacular, or people's, ritual, everyone in

processions at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees singsAve Maria. Mary is also invoked in the writing aroundthe cupola of the church built over the grotto. Popularbeliefs in Mary are periodically denounced as mariolatryby the papacy whose canon denigrates women and leavesthe Mother of Jesus out of the trinity. Like other cases ofEuropean popular Christianity that I have studied, theveneration of Mary at Lourdes edges heresy. Underneath

one of her statues in the church built above the grotto is theinscription, All that is better in us may be attributed toMary ---an involution of Biblical attribution of originalsin to Eve and to all humans, and a popular revisionof the canonical doctrine that Mary, due to immaculateconception, is uniquely different from other women.

Although subsequently whitened by church fathers, the

mother of Jesus was first depicted in ochre red (one ofthe signs of the African black Mother); see image in



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Priscilla catacombs of Rome. At Le Puy, where wesaw the statue of Notre Dame de France presidingatop a hill of the city, she is sculpted in red stone.

Simone Weil (who may be the most significant womanphilosopher of the twentieth century), during worldwar II fasted herself to death in witness against therising violence of the world. At Le Puy she workedon the left politically while she meditated on the Africanorigins of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Townspeople calledherthe red virgin. Inside the church at Le Puy, amajor pilgrimage place in France, we noted that this

is very popular icon of the Madonna is black. Churchfathers by the 5th century CE had destroyed orlightened most icons of the African black Mother, but mostpeople in subaltern cultures of Europe persistedin painting her black. In paintings of the V shapedblack Madonnas, almost always, there is,somewhere in the image, the color red.

Heresy pulled me to France this summer, notably themajor 13th century Cathar heresy. Cathars, lived on anAfrican migration path in the Pyrenees and calledthemselves goodChristians. Cathars did not care forthe church of Rome. Like Jews and Muslims, they didnot consider Jesus divine, although they lived by hisvalues. Bypassing popes and priests, Catharsregarded their own clergy, parfaites and parfs

(women and men) as intermediaries with the divine.Cathars did not eat meat, and did not believe in thechurch sacrament of marriage. They livednonviolently with the values of Jesus' sermon on themount, values that Simone Weil, Maulana Karenga,and others, have pointed out, may be found in Africandocuments at least 2500 years before the commonepoch. The ultimate objects of the Cathar belief, in

my view, may be glimpsed in their pilgrimages toblack Madonna of Le Puy in France and of



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Montserrat in Spain.

Cathars lived on an African migration path in

southwestern France where the earth is red and theAude river turns red after a heavy rain. Consideringthe red earth moistened by rain water healing, peoplemake medical poultices after it rains. I think ofCathar country as a land of the dark Mother,whose values, found in the folklore and politicalstruggles, are justice and equality with compassion,or healing.

The Catholic papacy aligned with the French monarchyconsidered the Cathars very threatening in this periodwhen both church and state were intent on killing darkothers notably Muslims, Jews and dissentingChristians. Cathars were singled out for killing while popeand state were forming the inquisition toeradicate heresy. For Europe, black Madonnas (and dark

women divinities elsewhere) may be considered our mostpalpable evidence not only of the black African motherbut of heresies that transmitted her values on submergedlevels. Cultural resistance, at the height of the inquisition,is suggested in the great number of black Madonnas allover France, evident in a map of 1530.

The 13th century domestic crusade against the Cathars

was accompanied by earlier and continuing Europeancrusades to wrest the holy land from the Muslims.Christian church and state killed Muslims in the holylands while at home they killed nonviolent Catharheretics. Christian church killing of people who livedas good Christians strikes me as hypocrisy similarto the lethal hypocrisy of contemporary United States,avatar of freedom, killing thousands of innocent dark people

(most of them under the age of fifteen) in Iraq and sendingyoung US soldiers to die in a war based on lies.



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Cathars, for me, recall young heretics of the 1960's allover the world who protested the US imperialist war in

Vietnam, who in the US insisted on civil rights ofAfrican Americans, then on equal rights of all thevulnerable, reached for democratic forms ofcommunalism, and lived in the primitive Christianmanner of the Cathars. In an article I wrote at thetime, I called them the unkempt prophets ofBerkeley. They began in nonviolence, consideredlove, rather than the church sacrament of marriage

the significant bond, and tapped deep levels ofconsciousness. A Berkeley bumper sticker advised, God isblack and is the she pissed.

My hypothesis regarding Cathars is that they wereChristian heretics on an African migration path in the French(also the Spanish) Pyrenees who tappedancient African matrisitic beliefs which they shared the

Basques in the same region. Blood type confirms thatBasques live in an African enclave in Europe whohave kept matricentric beliefs and have defied those whowould wrest them away from Romans tofascists of the twentieth century. Similarly, in theBalkans on another African migration path in easternEurope, where Marija Gumbutas found many iconsof the pre-Christian woman divinity (and where I have

noted that Byzantine Madonnas are dark) an earlierBogomil heresy is said to have influenced Catharheretics in southwest France. With the lens of theAfrican origins of everyone and the hypothesis of thepersistence of African beliefs in places reached byAfrican migrants, the Bogomil heresy, like theCathar heresy, both on African migration paths, inmy view, tapped African beliefs.

What happened to Cathars who fled the burnings?



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Several went to Lombardy, in northern Italy where Ihave found a pattern of beliefs connecting blackMadonnas, heretics and feminists. Heresy, regarded

as resistance to the dominant culture, can be tracedin France from early Christian evangelization whenpeople's stories differed from accounts in the canonicalgospel. Cultural resistance became political with the Frenchrevolution of 1789 and subsequent 19th centuryuprisings. In the 20th century Catalonians on anAfrican migration path in Spain (near the immenselypopular black Madonna of Montserrat) courageously fought

the fascists in the civil war that preceded world war II.During the twentieth century, the Maqui, insouthern France in the resistance during world war II,saved Jews from extermination camps and valiantlyfought the Nazis.

In early and continuing heretical interpretation ofChristianity, the French, particularly in the south,

looked to other Marys. They considered MaryMagdalene, who had seen the risen Jesus, anapostle. Male apostles did not believe her, the churchdenigrated her, but French legends recount thatMagdalene came to the south of France where shespread the gospel until she died. Some of the other Marysin this region suggest that people identified the mother ofJesus with the black Madonna of Saintes Maries de la Mer.

The black Madonna on the Mediterranean coast of France,who recalls the black mother of Africa, points to an inclusivewoman divinity the beliefs subversive to the Christian canon.Stories and rituals connect this black Madonna with Sara ofHebrew scriptures, with Kali, fierce Hindu womandivinity of India, and with black Maria, belovedMadonna of the Roma -gypsies of the world.

Radical cultural beliefs are evident in heretical legendsthat French peasants, for two millennia, have



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transmitted about Mary Magdalene, who is today thenational saint of France. Perhaps recalling Africawhose female divinities married male divinities, a

heretical legend in France is that Mary Magdalenemarried Jesus. The gospel of Mary Magdalene (notrecognized in the official catholic canon) alsoemphasizes a belief implicit in African rituals - - - selfknowledge is necessary for transformation. A majorbelief of contemporary feminist and nonviolencemovements is that self-knowledge is necessary for thetransformation. I would add that self-knowledge

includes an understanding of the genetic origin ofeveryone in Africa and African origin of cultural beliefsin justice and equality with compassion (or healing)- - along African migration paths that can transformthe world.

The black woman divinity of Africa and hermanifestations along African migration paths

throughout the world may be central to thecontemporary cultural revolution. In this context,Magdalene stories may be considered a hereticalchallenge to the canon that has denigrated the red-haired woman who anointed Jesus. Her task, awoman taking the mother's values to the people, wasimplicitly remembered by Dacia Maraini, major culturaland political feminist of Italy in the 1970's, who

founded an experimental theatre that enacted feministissues in the streets. Recalling the woman apostle,Dacia called this theatre, La Maddalena.

In Magdalene churches, as well as churches withblack Madonnas, that we visited this summer in thesouth of France, other doctrinally discounted figureslike St. Joseph are also honored. St. Joseph, in the

folklore of Italy, France, and elsewhere, is considereda worker and a nurturing father who brought up Jesus



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even though the church said Jesus was not his son. Malecommunities of Italy identify with saint Joseph.In beliefs of submerged cultures, people regarded the

holy family as human (not otherworldly). In mychildhood in Kansas City, Missouri Sicilian Americanbypassed the church trinity of father, son, and holyghost, looking to Mary and her son celebrating St.Joseph (the earthly father) at the spring equinoxwith a table of food for the poor.

It is my hypothesis that the memory of the beautiful

black African Mother implies nonviolent revolution. In1789 in France, revolutionaries wore the Phrygian capof followers of the Anatolian dark Mother Cybele and raisedthe banner, Liberte,' Egalite,' Fraternite,'. The woman whopersonified this first great revolution of our time wasnamed Marianne - - for Mary, Jewishmother of Jesus, and Anne, his pagan grandmother,goddess of the harvests, whose veneration in Brittany

recalls the Anu of Africa. The French revolutionarytriad of values is compatible with values of AfricanMother, except that justice by guillotine negates themother's value of compassion/healing and fraternite' leavesout women. This summer in France in the town squareof Salon de Provence we saw an icon of avery old black Madonna in a niche, and then a statueof Marianne, symbol of the French revolution, honoring

the twentieth century third world revolution in Vietnam.In a park of this city that used to build bombers, wesaw a tail of a bomber in which a mother duck hasbeen sculpted, sitting on her nest. This seems tome a nonviolent and ecological response to war.

The unfulfilled aims of the French revolution areremembered today in the south of France in a strong

ecology movement that seeks to fulfill revolutionaryaims of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite with a life style



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that respects the earth and all its creatures. Theunfulfilled aims of the French revolution are alsoremember in the contemporary feminist movement in

France, and elsewhere, honoring prehistoric womendivinities who preceded the male divinities of the \world's dominant religions. Scores of black Madonnasin France remind us of our African origins and thevalues of our African dark Mother. Antecedents oftodays' French feminists are the strong peasantwomen around Lyons in the early modern era,studied by Natalie Zemon Davis and the iconoclastic

French women of the 19th

century (George Sand,Flora Tristan) who spun the first spiral of modernwestern Feminism. Luce Irigaray (whose name isBasque) is today the major feminist theorist of France,Spain and Italy. Luce Irigaray's feminism is groundedin women's bodies and on remembering ancientvalues in our work for the future.

A similar ancient/future pattern of feminism may befound not only in France but in Spain, and Italy.In Italy, notably in Tuscany, there is a pattern ofAfrican migration paths, primordial woman divinities(e.g., 26,000 BCE Venus of Savignano), and 20thcentury heretical movements pointing to a betterworld - -democratic and nonviolent communism,feminism, and ecology. In Bologna, a city where

buildings and politics are both red, feminists andcommunists climb through many porticoes to prayin the hillside sanctuary of the protectress of thecity - ---a black Madonna.

In The Future has an Ancient Heart, I shall explore L.Luca Cavalli Sforza's hypothesis that he can predicthow a geographical region votes based on his

knowledge of African migration paths. His premiseis that places whose culture is centered on the Mother



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(on African migration paths) tend to be politically onthe left. I find this dramatically true, for example, inBologna in Italy, center of the partisan resistance in

Italy which saved scores of Jews from exterminationcamps, fought the Nazis, and has been redsince1945.

In my thinking, places whose culture is centered on thefather reflect the successful suppression of the ancientbelief in the African dark Mother, and will tend to haveright wing cultural and political beliefs, notably male

dominance, violence, and ultimately, fascism. In thetwentieth century, the conflict between the two world viewswere bitterly fought out in the Spanish civil war,a rehearsal for world war II. Picasso's paintingGernica in the Basque region of Spain remains todaythe most powerful anti-war painting of our time...Nazisbombing a peaceful Basque market town.

Cavalli-Sforza's theory that beliefs brought by ancientAfrican migrations have left their imprint in left politics,is borne out in the south of France, a region ofresistance to fascism and work for socialist ideals.This left pattern also prevails in the Basque region of Spainwhich, at Mondragon, has the most successfulcooperatives in the world, and in Italy in the Salentoregion of Puglia. All are on African migration paths. The

Salento has many menhirs and dolmens, andmany black Madonnas to whom peasant communistspray. Recently, women in Bari (in Puglia) founded thecontemporary Permanent Convention of Womenagainst War in whose 2003 conference I participated.

In the 1970s the symbol of African Tanit, an ankh cross with an oval head - - in one of those periodic

upsurges of deep beliefs, become the symbol ofinternational feminism. Molefi Asante, scholar who



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today is rescuing the African matrix of a future ofharmonious world cultures, has named his researchcenter the Ankh Institute. African Tanit, in her image

as African black Mother and as a feminist ankh, hasbeen proposed as a world symbol of contemporaryworld movements of justice, equality, healing andtransformation.

In a phenomenon that characterizes my writing, therealization did not arrive until I was writing the book,The Future has an Ancient Heart, that my study of the

legacy of African migration paths in Europe, is a studyof nonviolent revolution for a harmonious world. Thisharmony may, perhaps, be best understood listening toAfrican American jazz....different riffs but a constantbass tone that remembers the black African Mother.



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iUniverse reprint, 2000.

5. She is Everywhere! An Anthology is womanist and feminist writings inspirituality (New York, Chicago, Lincoln, Shanghai, iUniverse, 2005)

6. Emmanuel Anati, Il Museo Immaginario delia Preistoria. L'arteRupestre nel Mundo (Milan, editoriale Jaca BookApA, 1995).

7. Simon Weil Reader, ed., G.A. Panichas (Mt. Kisco, New York, MoyerBell Ltd, 1977).

8. Cassagnes Brouquet, Sophie Vierges Noires. Regard et Fascination(Passage de Macons, Editions du Rossergue, 1990).

9. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France.Eight Essays (Stanford, Ca, Stanford University Press, 1965)



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Documents

African Mother of Everyone a Me