Lessons From The African/Edenic Heritage Museum - The Redemption Of The Black Race

I'm sorry to have disappeared for some time. In effect, the cybercafé from where I work had closed down and I had to look for another one to suit my temperament. And I found it, nearby!

So, enjoy this article for adults.

Did you know that Black people are natives of the State of Israel; that the Garden of Eden was in Africa; that Ethiopia was Christian long before Europe; that the lost tribes of Israel migrated into Africa; that Black people originally inhabited the biblical Holy Lands and the whole of North Africa; that the sufferings of Africans had been prophesied in the Bible; that Jesus and the other biblical personages were Black people; that the end of the world is simply the fall of the actual unrighteous civilization and the rise of the messianic one; that a group called the African Hebrew Israelites in Israel has experimented living according to the laws of God and is reaping the miraculous results? If you did not know these things, then a visit to the African/Edenic Heritage Museum is a must.

            The African/Edenic Heritage Museum is a travelling photographic and research exhibition developed and operated by the Information Exchange-South of Washington, DC in the United States of America under the directorship of Dr Ahmadiel Ben-Yehuda, an African Hebrew Israelite historian resident in their community of Dimona in Israel.

            The museum seeks to make known to the public the historical, cultural and spiritual links of Black peoples to the land of Israel.

            The first thing that catches the eyes of the visitor as he approaches the museum is a black signpost above the panel of photos bearing the inscriptions: THE AFRICAN EDENIC HERITAGE MUSEUM, The Truth About AFRICA and the BIBLE, “Exploring the African Presence in the Promised Land.” On both ends of the signpost are two maps of Africa, with the land of Israel as an integral part.

Section one of the exhibition is called AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: “THE HIDDEN ONES.” This section features pictures of clearly African faces in the Promised Land. These black people are found from the Golan Heights in the north through the length of Israel to as far south as Ras Muhammad. These people and their ancestors have never known any other land except Israel. This is in stark contrast to the images that the major media have accustomed us to of Israel’s inhabitants. Yet these black people claim that their forefathers were even intimately linked to the history of the Bible as Israelites. The question which may cross the visitor’s mind is: Why are they ignored? The answer becomes clear as one progresses around the museum.

The next section of the exhibition answers the question that most of us who have heard the story of the creation of the earth in Genesis often ask: Where on earth today was the biblical Garden of Eden located?

The viewer’s guide to the museum is emphatic: “The continent of ‘Africa’ was named after the Roman general Africanus. Its biblical name was Eden.” Why? The exhibition supplies archaeological, geographical, historical, biblical and cultural evidence to prove that biblical Eden was indeed located in Africa.

Archaeologists agree that early man originated in East Africa. This is supported by the findings of Dr Leakey. If early man originated in Africa, then it is logical to argue that the first man created by God was placed in East Africa. But since this argument may not satisfy some Christians and sceptics, the exhibition quotes Genesis 2:8 which reads: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” But seeing that that is not enough evidence, Genesis 2:10-14 is called in to help and we read: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

“The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

“And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

“And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

“And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.”

It is these four rivers therefore which serve to pinpoint the present geographical location of the Garden of Eden. Whilst the Euphrates is still called by that name, on the contrary the name Hiddekel has disappeared; but it is generally believed to be the Tigris we know today. However, many do not agree on the contemporary identities of the Pison and the Gihon rivers. The museum again delves into the Bible to prove that these rivers are indeed the actual White and Blue Niles in Africa. It quotes Genesis 2:11-12 which relates the Pison (Pishon) River to the land of Havilah. And in Genesis 10:7, Havilah is said to be a son of Cush (Ethiopia), thus placing the Pison River firmly in Africa as the White Nile River. Further, Genesis 2:12 cites the same minerals of the Garden of Eden (gold, bdellium and onyx stone) as those of Havilah. These minerals were common in ancient Cush and Punt. As for the Gihon River, the exhibition proves that it is undoubtedly the Blue Nile, as Genesis 2:13 states that it “encompasseth the land of Ethiopia.”

The museum further gives historical evidence too numerous to document here of Africa being the location of the Garden of Eden. Maybe just a few citations will suffice for our purpose:

“In the authorized version of the old Testament, the term Cush, when referring to a land or country, has been translated, except in Genesis, as Ethiopia … Ethiopia, or Aethiopia, was for the early Greeks roughly equivalent to ‘the land of sun-burned or black-faced men,’” writes William Leo Hunsberry in African History Notebook Vol. II, Africa and Africans as seen by Classical Writers, ed. By Joseph Harris, pp 13.24. Cush therefore could not have been anywhere else except in Africa.

According to the museum, the Garden of Eden placed Eastwards of Eden was in fact planted in North-eastern Africa which “extends all the way from the Nile River of Egypt to the banks of the Euphrates River. These constitute the biblical boundaries of the Promised Land.” And that it was a natural cataclysm and European ruse which “decided that Africa ended at the Red Sea and not at the gulf which separated Arabia from Iran (or Persia). Before this cataclysm 5 million years ago or more, Israel and the surrounding lands were part of the African continent. And before the Suez Canal was built, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were one land. But people capitalize on this man-made ditch to dissociate Africa from the Holy Land. This prompted Prince Asiel Ben Israel, an African Hebrew Israelite, not to mince words when he noted in Black World of May 1975, p. 68 concerning the Suez Canal: “They’re using a man-made ditch to divide a continent … and the reason they did that is because if Black people at this point really knew that the children of Israel or the children of God were truly an African people, it would change the whole face of history.”

“Many scholars of history today believe that the ancient Hebrew people, like the ancient Egyptians, were dark-skinned,” in John Henrik Clarke, in Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, p. viii.

The third section of the exhibition is labelled THE ETHIOPIAN CONNECTION. If nothing at all, Ethiopia alone firmly links the African continent to biblical history. “In the Bible there is no single mentioning of either England or Germany; … The Old Testament alone cites Ethiopia over 40 times,” says Cain Hope Felder, The BISC (Bible Institute for Social Change) quarterly, Vol. 3, N° 1, p. 2. A quote from Psalm 68:31 shows that Ethiopia long had something to do with the Bible before the first European set foot in Africa. The Psalm reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”

Many of us know the biblical Queen of Sheba (whose real name however is Queen Makeda) as being Ethiopian but the exhibition shows what most of us never learned: that the domain of the kingdom of Sheba included both banks of the Red Sea – going right into the south-western Arabian Peninsula. The present Yemen was Queen Makeda’s economic capital and Ethiopia the political one.

Queen Sheba/Makeda is noted to be black but how many of us know that she was from the family line of Ham and Shem, a descendant of Abraham and his wife Keturah? The union between Queen Sheba and Israel’s King Solomon resulted in a son named Menelek. And Emperor Haile Selassie is said to be the 225^th reigning monarch in the lineage of that union.

With the use of maps, the next section of the exhibition traces the path not only of the “Lost Tribes” of Israel from the Nile to the Niger and beyond, but also of their dispersion in the Diaspora. It opens with two prophetic verses from the Bible:

First, Leviticus 26:33 states: “And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.”

Then, Deuteronomy 28:64: “And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.” And the prophecies came to pass.

In 70 AD, the Romans attacked the Israelite nation. Historians and theologians have all the time argued that the fleeing Israelites went north into Lithuania, Poland, and Germany and into other parts of Europe. But common sense, logic, historical and anthropological research used in the exhibition prove otherwise. Logically, if your enemies came from the north seeking to kill you, you did not flee where they were coming from but away from them. It is this common sense logic which makes the exhibitors argue that “the majority of Israelites and other north-eastern African tribes people fled further into the interior of Africa, away from the approaching Roman presence and armies.” But the evidence of this forced migration does not stop here.

For 1000 to 1400 years that the migration lasted, the Israelites became scattered throughout Africa. This is attested by what the exhibitors call “Hebrewisms,” that is, the traces of Hebrew customs and language found in East, Central and above all, West Africa. Some of them are the circumcision of the male child on the eighth day of birth, the separation of the woman from everybody during her menstrual period and linguistic parallels such as the Hebrew a mi bra for I am coming which is mii ba among the Akans of Ghana. According to Ben Ammi, the anointed spiritual leader of the African Hebrew Israelites, in his book God the Black Man and Truth, p. 14: “Many scholars believe the ancestors of the Fulani, Ashanti, Ewe, Yoruba, Bantu and other peoples were in fact early Hebrew Israelites.”

Oral tradition further offers evidence that some of the West African ethnic groups came from the Promised Land. The Ashantis claim to have first migrated from Mesopotamia; the Ewes said they came from Ka Na (Canaan) and Akame (Egypt); the Ga and the Ga Adangbe are also emphatic about their origin in the Holy Land. And so do the Yoruba and other Bantu tribes.

The arrival of the migrating Hebrews in West Africa coincided with the Great Atlantic Slave Trade and many Hebrews were therefore carried to the Western Hemisphere as slaves. No wonder the songs the slaves sang in the fields, which are today known as Negro Spirituals, did not sing of the Niger or Gambia Rivers, but of the Jordan; not of West African empires or States of Ghana, Timbuktu, Ashanti, Songhai but of Jericho, Jerusalem and Canaan’s Land.

How come today people of white origin occupy the Holy Land and the whole of north of Africa and not predominantly Black people who were the original inhabitants? The next group of panels which constitute Section five of the exhibition answers the question under the banner THE GREAT INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS CONSPIRACY.

In the year 1093, Peter (the Hermit) made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land which was then under Muslim control. On his return to France, he claimed that he saw Christians beaten and killed. This aroused revolt in the European peoples who then descended on the region as Crusader warriors. Two years later, Pope Urban II also made a speech at Clermont, France, calling on European Crusaders to “wrestle the land from the wicked race.” Who was the wicked race the Pope was referring to? Pictures from an encyclopaedia show that they were Moorish (or African Ishmaelite) inhabitants of Jerusalem and the Holy land. The Crusaders attacked the Moors and over the course of three centuries finally succeeded in defeating them. The European conquerors settled in the region, and even intermingled with the remnants of the original inhabitants. According to the Viewer’s Guide, “The descendants of these European Crusader ‘transplants’ can be seen today throughout North Africa and Arabia, and are mistakenly considered the indigenous peoples of the region.”

As if that wrong done Black people was not enough, Europeans later hatched plots to further partition African/Edenic lands and peoples in the forms of “The scramble for Africa” and Theodor Hertzl, the “father of Zionism’s” search for a Jewish homeland. At a conference table in Berlin in 1884-1885, Europeans carved up Africa amongst themselves; and in the early 1900, Theodor Hertzl took a ship for Israel in search of a land for Europe’s Jews. But the persecution of African Israelites did not end there.

Conscious that some of the migrating Israelites who had settled in West Africa had been taken principally to America, “schemes against the Israelites remnants continued with the destruction of every positive African American movement at the hands of the FBI and other U.S. government agencies,” the Viewer’s Guide notes. “From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panthers, Elijah Mohammad to Malcolm X, every positive Black leader and organization was the focus of an unprecedented domestic campaign of deception, violence and terror.

“Africa continues to play a critical role in providing the Western world with crucial raw materials and dependent markets. Efforts subtle and not-so-subtle to maintain this control and to disrupt the lives of the African world persist up to this day. The defusing of any concerted redemptive involvement of African Americans in the affairs of Africa is a prime focus of this continuing strategy.”

It is in this vein that the next section asks the pertinent question: THE PLIGHT OF THE AFRICAN WORLD: PATHETIC OR PROPHETIC? The exhibitors believe that this plight is prophetic and even cites Deuteronomy 28:1-14 and 15-68 to prove their point. Whilst the first 14 verses detail the blessings which will come upon Edenic peoples if they obeyed their Creator, the other verses highlights the curses which will be their lot should they forsake God. A few citations may suffice to convince us these curses concerned Africans.

Deuteronomy 28:29 states: “And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.” This has come to pass in the lives of Africans.

Deuteronomy 28:33: “The fruit of thy land, and all they labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed away.” This also has come to pass.

Deuteronomy 28:41: “Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.” This also has come to pass.

Deuteronomy 28:49-50: “The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;

A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young.” This prophecy also has come to pass.

Deuteronomy 28:68: “And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee. Thou shalt see it no more again: and there shall ye be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.” No other race, except the Black one, has been deported in ships. Hence the prophesy is fulfilled.

Genesis 15:13: “And he said unto Abram, know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;” African slaves were strangers in the New Lands and what is more interesting, the Atlantic Slave Trade lasted four centuries! Besides, in J. A. Rogers, Sex Race, Vol. I, p. 60, we read: “The Chaldeans for instance, the Land from which Abraham, ancestor of the Jews, came were Negroes, according to Godfrey Higgins and others.”

This moving section of the exhibition is highlighted with photos showing U. S. President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Isaac in 1845 looking as sad as a bereaved person;

African slaves chained by the neck and by the foot prior to their transportation to the Western Hemisphere; the lynching and the burning of Blacks in America; the “Door of no return” on Goree Island in Senegal through which slaves were shipped; the Elmina slave castle in Ghana; Abraham Lincoln whom Blacks regard as the Great Emancipator, but who is on record for having affirmed that he was not for the equality of the Black and White races; and a drawing of the inhuman stowage of slaves on a slave ship.

            Section seven, CASTING DOWN DECEPTION/“GRAVEN IMAGES,” brims with colour photos of a white Jesus, the white Virgin Mary, white Angels with wings on their backs, Black Madonna, a Black Jesus and members of the Sierra Leonean supreme court in full garb, not to forget their wigs which depict the long hair and the hairstyle of Europeans of a bygone era. The exhibitors draw a parallel between those images and Africans’ aping of whites.

            The exhibition calls upon the viewer to regard any biblical personage painted as a white person to be “a graven and a fraudulent image since they served to ‘de-Africanize’ the biblical story. Not only was Jesus a Blackman, but his mother Mary also certainly was! “The veneration of more than 400 ‘Black Virgins’ throughout Europe – the subject of worship by hundreds of thousands, including Pope John Paul II – confirms the deliberate intent to deceive,” the Viewer’s Guide says.

            According to the exhibitors, anytime they argued that Jesus (whose real name anyway was Yeshua Ben Joseph) was Black, people answered that they didn’t need to know the colour of the Messiah’s skin before believing in him or in God his father. So a part of the exhibition asks “So what colour was Jesus (Yeshua) … And Why Does It Matter?” For the exhibitors it matters for several reasons.

            First, the physical description of Jesus is given in Revelation 1:14-15, including the colour of his skin: “His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were like a flame of fire;

            “And his feet like fine bronze, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice like the sound of many waters.” So do “feet like fine bronze, as if they burned in a furnace” describe a white or a black person?

            So does it matter that Jesus (Yeshua) was Black? The exhibition says yes it matters because John 8:32 says “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” So it is important to know the truth about Jesus in order to be free.

            “Immediately some persons will suggest that the racial background of the biblical characters doesn’t matter … Apparently it has mattered enough until now to comprehensively exclude all people of colour, particularly in the light of the last four hundred years of racialist history,” notes Lawrence Livingstone in the Biblical Institute for Social Change’s Quarterly Newspaper, Vol. 4, N° 3, p. 1.

 To complete this section, one comes across the question “What is the Bible? … and who wrote it?” For the answer, let us turn to the Viewer’s Guide.

            “Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible is not ‘a white man’s book.’ Europeans were neither greatly involved in the biblical story, nor were they its authors. However the translation, printing and interpretation of the Bible is an entirely different matter. Under the influence of Europe, the role and relevance of biblical culture has clearly moved from a highly-disciplined and all-encompassing spiritual lifestyle to a casual, even optional, observance of religious ritual. In this light, the Bible takes on a new meaning as an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle of the African world.” In short, the Bible is man’s “instruction manual” written by Black people.

            Section eight of the exhibition concerns THE FALL OF THE CIVILIZATION OF THE UNRIGHTEOUS … AND THE RISE OF THE MESSIANIC CIVILIZATION. What is it all about? For the best answers, let us again turn to the Viewer’s Guide.

“The ‘end of the world’ is generally seen as a single event, involving the destruction of the entire planet. It is an incredulous scenario … However there are other signs that demand our serious attention and consideration. The voices of the prophets of old ring of a common concern and cry for a world that has obviously gone astray.

            “The prophetic record, as well as the overwhelming historical evidence available, point to a transitory phase or process. It is this period – or ‘the rise of right and the fall of wrong’ – which precedes the final cataclysmic destruction of the existing world order. We are clearly living in the prophetic ‘old days’ … the last days of those whose governmental, economic and social systems, doctrines, policies and standards currently hold sway over the affairs of the planet.

            “A review of world history yields the simple truth that there is a limit to a civilization whose values and standards are in opposition to the Creator and Creation. The inability to solve the problems which face the planet, even on the part of supposed ‘experts,’ testifies of the Western World having reached that limit. The so-called ‘Third World’ nations would do well to abandon their blind pursuit of development strategies that are based on these failed models.

            “The Hebrew prophet Daniel, in his interpretation of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, foretells of the evolution of unrighteous dominions all the way up to its current and final form: the European Union … and also advises of the establishment of the Kingdom of God at that very point in history (‘and in the days of these kings’ – Daniel 2:44).”

            Section nine talks about THE AFRICAN HEBREW ISRAELITE COMMUNITY: The Kingdom of God on Earth.

            In 1967, Ben Ammi, the spiritual leader, had a vision in America to lead a group pf African Americans out of captivity. They first went to Liberia in West Africa to purify themselves before returning to Israel in 1969. The community, living as a government of men and women governed by God, soon chalked enormous successes in holistic health care, organic agriculture, education, music and entertainment, fashion design and manufacturing, and others. Many social ills – theft, prostitution, drugs, rape, murder, etc. – and diseases – high blood pressure, lung cancer, etc. – have been eliminated from the community. This is why an Israeli Hebrew-language magazine referred to them as “an Island of Sanity.”

            The concluding group of seven panels is labelled THE FACES OF NORTHEAST AFRICA, THE CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN PRESENCE IN THE PROMISED LAND.

            There are no texts here but 60 portrait photographs of indigenous Africans in Israel who are neither migrants nor people brought there as slaves. They can be found in Jerusalem to Jericho, Segev Shalom to Rahat. They are so strikingly African that one could recognize a neighbour or a relative among them. This makes real the connection of peoples of African origin to the biblical lands and biblical history.

            Now that you know the truth about Africa and the Bible and about African presence in the Promised Land, it is hoped that the African/Edenic Heritage Museum has goaded your search for Truth which, as the Apostle John said, “shall make you free.” Shalom! Peace!

(Written 22^nd April 1999)