The lecture we were privileged to listen to two weeks ago¹ left me feeling quite worried. It was, in spite of the apologies offered by the lecturer, a scholarly presentation -- a credit to the speaker, to the Museum Committee, to the Academy. But it worried me because it set a precedent difficult to follow up in a discussion of Africa, a continent whose ancient history, excepting perhaps that of the Egyptians, is shrouded in mystery, being less documented than that of the Incas and as puzzling as the relics of Stonehenge. Ancient history in sub-Sahara Africa is unwritten, save in stone and symbol; forgotten, save in oral legend and tribal custom.

        One vitally appropriate question asked and answered by the last speaker was: What use would it serve if we were to find the Ancient Word? And the answer:   It may help us to understand that state in the individual man's development corresponding to the Ancient Church period. We will surely arrive at the same kind of introspection in relation to the subject at hand : What use could it serve for us to know who is (or was) the African referred to in the Newest Word, who was said, in the words of Swedenborg, to be receiving an interior revelation "at this day." Is there any possibility of even approaching a discovery of the book he is said to have possessed? Where is it? "In a certain region of Africa." ² We are encouraged to look for it, however, as is the case with the Ancient Word of Greater Tartary.

        Let us begin by reviewing a few of the key passages found in the Writings about the Africans:

        The Africans are they who on our earth are of the genius in which are the angels of the celestial kingdom. (SD 5518)

 

        They also possess a book which is the Word to them, but it is not like ours. It is written in like manner by correspondences. It was written through enlightened men: these are in Africa. (SD 5809)

        The best and wisest are in the interior of Africa, those who are not good are near the Mediterranean Sea, near Egypt and the Cape of Good Hope. (LJ post. 124)

        Since the Africans are such, even in the world, therefore a revelation is taking place with them at this day which, beginning from the middle, goes round about, but not as far as the sea. (CLJ 76)

        [From the Ancient and afterwards the Israelitic Word,] religious things emanated to the Indias and their islands; and through Egypt and Ethiopia into the kingdoms of Africa. (SS 117) [Special mention is made of the paradise, the flood, the sacred fire, the four ages from the first golden to the last iron.]

        The Africans are more receptive of the Heavenly Doctrines than most others on this earth, because they readily accept the Doctrine of the Lord. They have it as it were implanted in them that the Lord will appear altogether as a Man. They are in the faculty of receiving truths of faith and especially its goods, because they are of a celestial genius. (LJ post. 118)

        There are of course many, many passages on the Africans, of which these are only a fairly representative selection.

        With a subject as immense and baffling as Africa, one can only aspire in a short lecture to touch on some of the questions that stir our minds on hearing the name of that tremendous fragment of the earth's crust.

        When flying from the Cape to Kinshasa, one may look down from time to time and see—scattered as if by Nature herself over the warm, smiling, rolling landscape—circles, and circles within circles: rondovals inside of round, hedged enclosures on the slopes of round hills. Of all my experiences with Africa, this first impression stands out the most, as an uneraseable vision of the African character in contrast with that of the European. For in flying from South Africa to Holland, descending over the Maas City and the polders to Amsterdam, there lay below a totally different picture: neat, square, flat fields; straight roads, streets, canals and ditches; flawlessly lined-up houses, with scarcely a curve to be seen anywhere.

        Africa is a land without age; it defies historical analysis, evades geographical delineation by its sheer vastness. Every attempt to formulate the intriguing fascination, the elusive differentness of this unfathomable continent, leaves one with a feeling of inadequacy. Those who have remained but a few years, like those who have lived there all their lives, invariably become deeply attached to it.

        Half hidden in the shadow projected almost horizontally by the ancient cliffs of the grand Rift Valley, as they block the last effulgence of the retreating ball of fire that has rolled daily for aeons across this immense orange-brown and dusty-green sameness—stands the solitary, waiting figure of the African tribesman. His eyes are shining from the golden glow in which he pauses silently to sensate the deepest pulse of creation's secret undercurrent. In speaking, he will tell us nothing about it: only in dancing or drumming at the bidding of a voice we cannot hear—that voice which tells him to turn every straight line into a curve—every square house into a rondoval, every thought into a smile, every minute into an hour, every human emotion into carefree laughter. Welling up from the depths of the earth's volcanic core, it compels him to convey to the world, through his stamping feet and hearty laugh, that when man was formed from the dust of the earth, he was there, and has lived to tell the story that has no words . . .

        But who is the African, and what is Africa?

        Alongside of this profoundly beautiful, happy image, one may see Shaka murdering a multitude of men and women out of grief at his mother's death. One may witness thousands of Tutsis slaughtered by the Bahutu, floating down the river until the crocodiles devour them. One may read of nuns raped and beaten senseless as 25,000 whites flee the Congo in the months following independence. Or one may think of the cannibalism practiced this very day in the darkness of the Kivu forests.

        We see in every natural society a blend of states, bound together only by common genius. In the most ideal society of this earth, there are both good and evil. This must have been true even in the most exalted periods of human existence.

        Nevertheless, groups, societies and nations can and do at given times become collectively the carriers or representatives of good or evil. What is taught about wars indicates that in the eyes of heaven, every war embodies a struggle between good and evil.³   So our own country may have represented good in one phase, and evil in another.

        Human history is almost completely definable in terms of a constant series of wars, struggles, between groups, tribes, nations, societies. Certainly this is true of Africa. And speaking thus from the point of view of representation, we can discern some of the issues, in hindsight, that have lain at the heart of movement of peoples we call history.

        Indeed, Africa has been for countless ages, and is today, a stage of interaction between many, many ethnic, racial, tribal and national groups. Its own mythologies and legends bear witness to this. Prehistoric man in his earliest form Australopithecus, was African. Almost the whole of the continent bears the prints of the "little man"—the Pygmy, Hottentot, Bushman, Sahara dweller, whose migrations follow a course from northeast toward west and southwest, doubtlessly all relatives of the neolithic man of the Spanish Levant and perhaps of the Atlas mountains and early Egypt. (cf. Plate 1, p. 261)      

        Then followed wave upon wave of a people now called Bantu, dark as the Edomite and traced by anthropologists to the cradle of civilization, the Fertile Crescent. Hamitic and Semitic tribes swarmed along after them, some also dark, darker than the Bantu such as Nilots, Masai, Tutsis. Berbers, Tuaregs, Arabs, they came; and finally, arriving by sea routes from Europe, the Dutch boers—farmers from the southern provinces of the Netherlands---and English and French and Spanish explorers, exploiters; Portuguese and Belgian colonizers and even American negro repatriates.

        So who is the African, and what is Africa?

        At the time of the writing of the most exhaustive Spiritual Diary passages about the Africans⁴ most of these groups were already present on the Dark Continent. The Cape Colony had rooted itself so firmly and laid such inhesive claim to African soil that its descendents today face an all-out struggle with the earlier occupants of southern Africa, the Bantu people, many now citizens of modern, independent African states.

        At that very time, the Xhosa, having pressed southward as far as the Great Fish River, confronted Dutch voortrekkers. Already, much earlier, the Xhosa had driven the Bushmen and Hottentots westward and southward, into the Karoo and Cape; and in the Drakensberg slopes and what later was to become the Orange Free State, had miscegenated with them to form the Basuto people. In the Cape, Riebeek made raids upon Bushmen and Hottentots, whose concept of property and ownership differed diametrically from that of the European, and boasted thousands of victims on each encounter.

        

        I was also instructed where the best of them are, namely, at the sides toward the sea, more than half of the region, with almost this form:

namely, that the best of them are in the whole tract DE, but that the worse are toward the Mediterranean Sea, H, also at the Cape of Good Hope F; so that the kingdoms of the best are DE: but that they who are toward DB, which is toward Asia, are not wise, and are infested by those who come thence, because they speak things they do not perceive: similarly almost to C; and those who are still worse are toward A, where Egypt is. They said that in that large tract DE, all worship the Lord, and that they are instructed by many who communicate with the angels of heaven; that the communication is not by speech from angels but through interior perception; that these are their instructors, whom they very well distinguish from others. They also said that those from Europe are not admitted to them; and that if they come thither and are not willing to serve, they are sent away from there by a way at B, and are sold by them; thus they are safe from infestations. When any come there from the Papal region, they claim that they are holy, but soon they are examined and they perceive that they do not know, still less perceive, anything of truth; wherefore, they are either not admitted, or they are sent toward Asia, like the rest. Next they received the Word and read it, and when they read, they at first perceived nothing holy, afterwards something more and more holy, and then they gave it to their instructors, who said that they had it, but had not divulged the fact. The latter said that they had dictated it to men in Africa with whom they have communication, according as the Lord leads.

        Judging from the map of the world published by Swedenborg in 1734 in the Principia, on which the shape of Africa is represented in a form very close to that which we now know it to possess, does it not seem strange that the Diary map, drawn more than twenty years later, appears so sketchy and undeciferable? What could be the reason for this? Had he forgotten the geography he had known well twenty years earlier? Or was his hand and pen obeying the dictation of a higher, deeper inspiration? Is the distortion of Africa Swedenborg's, or is our scientific image of Africa distorted? Is it possible that this sketch has a dimension no scientific or purely natural idea can comprehend or encompass?

        Spiritual thought so transcends natural thinking that, although there is a correspondence, yet the natural can never comprehend the spiritual. So neither can we comprehend the Spiritual Diary from natural thought alone.

        Hear what spirits said to Swedenborg while he was writing:

 

       Natural thought on Diary number 5946 with its shape of the African continent does strongly suspect inaccuracy. I would interpose the suggestion that into just that ultimate form and no other can purer, better and more interior things be infused. This map must express a deep truth about Africa that a conventional map could not possibly reflect.

PLATE I

 

        The Diary map, like a kind of caricature, accentuates certain features, ignoring the conventional conception, making important aspects more visible for those who are able to recognize from that outline the circumscribed personality—yes, even like ancient cave paintings of human and animal figures, which portray, beyond the form, the inner beauty of the affections they represent: their life, movement and character.⁵ So one may see only from inspired vision what the real message in this drawing is: a spiritual representation. Wine is added to the water--sacred wine--that seems to distort the scientific, but in reality brings it into true focus and perspective.

          What is said of those in Africa who have or had revelation from perception—notwithstanding the mediation of spiritual instructors and a form of the Word whose very existence was admitted only with apparent reluctance—would indicate a state even more primitive than that of the Ancient Church, when books became books as we now understand the term.

        The state of the late Most Ancient or early Ancient Church people would correspond in the series of the individual to a state verging from infancy to childhood. A child, or rather an infant, in this stage is learning from the senses that have become operative. In linguistics, it is recognized that already at this point the incipient human is absorbing his environment with a celerity that is simply unbelievable. He learns, without knowing any words, the whole level of semantic intonation of his mother tongue. He is also deeply affected by every type of visual symbol such as the smile, the frown; colors, patterns, odors, rhythms, are being imbibed as bases for future thought.

        The indications regarding those people of Africa we are considering are that they retain something of the heavenly genius possessed by the Most Ancients (see SD 5518) ; for the Ancients did not have perception, but conscience (AC 371, 573).

        To return to the SpIritual Diary number, an intensive study of this map and the related teachings arouses many questions and profers virtually no answers.

        The J.F. Buss interpretation of the Diary map seems to me to be justified in the light of the geographical references stated in the number. This would indicate the region DE as extending roughly from the Kalahari Desert, through into the eastern Congo or western side of the Rift Valley. This region is said to be occupied by the best. A (Egypt), H (toward the Mediterranean) and F (at the Cape) are unfavorably qualified. DB, and almost to C, are the not wise, infested by those who come from Asia.

        It is interesting to compare this sketch with an earlier portrayal of Africa by Sylvannus drawn in A.D. 1511. He places the sources of the Nile and Mountains of the Moon very low down, at a position close to that corresponding with D on Swedenborg's map:

Since DB is toward Asia, D must indeed be about central in the modern chart of southern Africa but southerly in respect to the great lakes. C, though it may seem to be placed in the sea off East Africa, apparently refers to the region near the Horn.

        One important question arises here: Does the line A-B to the right (originally on top) represent the eastern coast, or is it the Nile? This is a fair speculation, since (1) there is no continuous line from the Cape eastward and northward; (2) the line in question commences at Egypt A, the location of the Nile Delta; (3) the line A-B has two forks roughly corresponding with those of the Nile shown on the Sylvannus map; and (4) C appears to be placed in the ocean, while the passage refers to C as a region. All this serves to illustrate the difficulty of forming positive conclusions about this part of the map.

        Whichever way this peripheral question is answered, the fact remains that DE must stretch from central southern to central Africa. “Ad latus versus mare” could refer to the Kalahari, very possibly indicated by the area shaded by Swedenborg's quill: for this is toward the south, and it is toward the sea, and it is more than half of the region. The "sides toward the sea" has often been interpreted to mean the side toward the Indian Ocean, where the Zulu nation was located when the Natal region was settled by the English; but in view of it being said that the tract DB is "toward Asia," that interpretation becomes dubious.

        It is a striking thing that the DE tract, which must constitute a large part of the interior of Africa, extends from the Bushman country through to the Pygmy rain forest, though the whole area is also occupied by Bantu tribes, right across into West Africa. The pygmoid peoples were driven into the fastnesses of regions most difficult to penetrate and have proven to be the most elusive and hard to contact of all African groups.

        What is said of those from the Papal region who come into the tract DE being rejected, reminds me of a staternent of Jean-Pierre Hallet in Pygmy Kitabu:

        The Pygmies deplore as superstitious nonsense the negroes' magico-religious figurines and other so-called fetishes. They would take an equally dim view of churchly huts adorned with doll-like statues of Jesus and Mary. This would be regarded as idol-worship by the Ituri forest Pygmies, who believe that the divine power of the universe cannot be confined within material bounds. (p. 15)

        It is almost as hard to convey the impressions and thoughts evoked by personal contact with the Pygmies of the Ituri forest, as it is to obtain those experiences in the first place. To travel from Bafwasendi to Beni is an adventure by itself, for the route is like a river of mud most times of the year; and on numberless occasions, one depends on the surprising but certain appearance of local inhabitants of the forest to be drawn out of the mire. Yet on this journey one might not see a single Pygmy. Few villages are near enough to the roadway, and if a village does happen to be within view, it might not be seen; for it blends in with the forest foliage as if it were part of nature. The low, round huts look like heaps of large, green leaves.

        On arriving at Hoysha during such a trip, we encountered a Pygmy woman who had come up to the little one-room Catholic mission station for medical help. We asked her in a combination of sign-language, French and Lingala, whether we might accompany her to her village. The Sister was anything but helpful, trying in various ways to prevent us from going. However, it was not long before a line of nine people was jogging along a forest path, straining to keep up with the tiny guide, who was carrying an infant to boot. The hike took us through about three miles of increasingly dense and high growth, over a stream by way of a fallen tree, onto a vast slope canopied by a host of tremendous trees. It felt like being in a huge temple; the foliage seemed to hover a mile over our heads, crackling and echoing with the sounds of a thousand monkeys.

        The little woman kept up a steady jaunt, especially difficult to imitate on one stretch, where our path was crossed intermittently by colony after colony of soldier ants, to whose stinging bites several of us, especially myself, fell victim. In fact so many had found their way up my legs that the first hospitality shown me on coming into the village, was the removal of my trousers by friendly, laughing little people, who gathered around me, jabbering with excitement, and commenced to pick off ants from my body as though I were a dog infested with fleas.

        I think this opening was a good one, for we were now all in a high state of amusement among these sweet, child-like fellow human beings, who had known of our coming at least a half hour ahead of time.

        In return for their friendly reception and offering of all kinds of gifts, like arrows and bows, a drum, a smoke from the pipe of peace, and dancing and singing in the most primitive and spontaneous fashion, our main contribution was smiles and cigarettes. Our women held their babies, and they all babbled together in their own languages as though there had never been a Babel.

        We had been followed by two hangers-on, not Pygmy, who were along for what they could get out of it, but they did prove useful in helping to communicate.

        We were, and I think fortunately, not, on this occasion, looking for anything specific. We were totally unrehearsed and unscientific in our approach to these Pygmies. I think that the outstanding thing that we experienced was the simple, exquisitely perceptive lovingness in which they live their earthly lives; the unity of feeling and thought, the harmony of their minds with the Creator, with each other, and with Nature, which they look upon and treat with the greatest reverence. From little things, one could see that they were quite unburdened by cupidities of greed or distrust such as one finds rampant in those round about.

        'Kitabu' is a coined word but rich in meaning. It could be interpreted in one sense as the sum of all oral tradition with special reference to what is religious. Ki- is a non-class prefix, the same used variantly in Bantu languages for words indicating a language, e.g. kiSwahili, ciLuba, seSuto, isiZulu. Tabu, a Polynesian word, comes into English as “taboo,” defined in one dictionary as "a religious prohibition . . . by which persons and things were rendered sacred and inviolable." Thus kiTabu is the "Book of Knowledge" of any primitive society.

        Although forms of writing as we know it are conspicuously absent among these forest people, the Efé Pygmy legends, which are passed down orally in a most specific religious language, are said "to offer almost inconceivably archaic patterns or archetypes for all the major Hamitic, Semitic and Indo-European stories of the Lost Paradise" (Pelle, in Hallet p. 70). Recall the mention of the "sacred fire" as one of the religious things that passed from the

Ancients into the kingdoms of Africa (SS 117). The Pygmies derive all their fire from a sacred source, and it burns perpetually. Traditionally, they never light a fire.

        There is evidence of linguistic affinity of Pygmy speech to Indo-European language, which, however, has not been proven, simply through lack of study; or, as Hallet puts it: "The anthropololgists . . . debate the matter from their armchairs" (p. 67). Indirectly, there are strong reasons to suppose that the Pygmies were an early branching-off from the same stream of steatopygous little men that forged their way as far as the southern deserts in the evening of neolithic times.⁶

        We read in Last Judgment Posthumous that

 

        In a certain region of Africa there has been from ancient times a book written by correspondences in a similar way to that in which the Word is written with us, and which they regard as holy. (121)

        Nota bene that the number previously quoted (SD 5809) stated that their Word "is not like ours."

        In the case of the Pygmies, there is abundant evidence that they have received indelibly the essentials of monotheistic theology including the anthropomorphic idea of God (the "Ancient of Days," with a white beard) and spiritual-moral precepts of life far superior to those of any other group in Africa. Of all sins against the Divine order, cruelty toward children, needless killing of man, animal, or plant, adultery, and even pollution, are most abhorrent to them. What applies to the Pygmies seems to be true also of the Bushmen.

        Observers of both Pygmy and Bushmen culture have noted the absence of the acquisitive instincts innate in the other races of Africa and Europe. Hallet quotes Efé friends as saying:

 

        If you give a piece of your heart to things you own, you cannot love people with all of your heart. You become the slaves of the things that you own. The negroes and the white man think we are poor. Let them think what they please. (p. 102)

 

And Van Der Post in The Lost World of the Kalahari complains:

 

We were humiliated by the realization of how little we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions. . . . They had no sense of possession. (pp. 253–4)

PLATE III

        Researchers of both groups attest to amazing instances of communication with spirits, conceived as nothing but departed members of their society, and also of telepathic powers beyond any on earth. But what of a written Word, revealed through spiritual instructors ?

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