African Black Mother of Everyone

African Origins and African Migration Paths in Europe. By Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D. Copyright 2005

1 African Black Mother of Everyone

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D.

African Black Mother of Everyone

African Origins and African Migration Paths in Europe.

a
Conference 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 selfknowledge who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. In the autumn of 2005 I am assailed by a sense of urgency to tell the story of everyone's African black mother because the largely untold history of the United States is that enslavement of Africans, extermination of native Americans, persecution of people perceived as dark other. This mentality still characterizes the leaders of the United States, armed with a monopoly of weapons of mass destruction and ignorant of everyone's African origin, leaders who seem hell-bent on global domination of the world's other people, whom they perceive as dark. At the end of October 2005, the lies sustaining U.S. Aggression against dark others at home and abroad may be unraveling. The case of the United States may be the most 2 African Black Mother of Everyone

lethal, but the history of people of the dominant cultures who consider themselves white and their aggression against subaltern dark others is similar. This study will limit itself to African migrants and their legacy in Europe, but the implications are large for the rest of the world. In this dangerous, it is vitally important we know who we are so we can stop the violence of the west, as well as the violence of others around the world the first step in creating a new world of harmonious societies.

As Sicilian American feminist cultural historian, I have been deeply influenced by African and Africana studies notably Cheikh Anta Diop's rescuer of African history from the oblivion and or distortions of western racism, scholarship of Molefi Asante on Afrocentrism, Alice Walker's novels, and Maulana Karenga's recent research on African culture of Maat, African woman divinity of justice and order. My concern is to stress the mutual relevance of African history, Africana studies, feminist cultural studies, and genetics research of L. Cavalli-Sforza and world colleagues who confirm in the DNA the African origins of everyone, archaeologists, e.g., Emmanuel Anati who has documented that African migrants after 50,000 BCE brought signs of the African black mother (pubic V and color ochre red) to every continent. Of prime importance to me is Cavalli-Sforza's theme that African migrants brought their beliefs with them ....beliefs that circle the African black mother. The legacy of African migrants brought to all continents is suggested in Maulana Karenga's study of Maat wherein she is the moral grounding and human flourishing of a universe in becoming.....in which she 3 African Black Mother of Everyone

keeps the whole in harmony. Maat is the grounding of human communities in justice, propriety, harmony, balance, reciprocity and order. She is truth, justice and righteousness in communities that care for the vulnerable: the weak, poor, elderly, the hungry, thirsty, and the naked. In the ethic of Maat, found in African documents 2500 years before the common epoch, the response to evil is to do good. The heart is the divine presence in humans and the seat of consciousness and moral sensitivity. Maat is the ground of communities where humans are equal, where there is no radical separation between humans and animals, and where wisdom, or knowledge, is an ethical requirement for everyone. In this African ethos, humans, rooted in their communities, are a refuge for the wretched, a raft for the drowning, and a ladder for one who is in the abyss. In the ontological unity of god and humans, Maat is goodness of being in a dynamic and creative universe which has an open-ended future. This African legacy, suppressed for 2,000 years by dominant cultures of the world, has been coming to the surface since world war II. The Gnostic gospels, found in Africa in a jar near Cairo in 1945, offered a rich and nuanced alternative to the patristic and violent Christianity established by the holy Roman empire in the fourth century CE, when they banished the Gnostic gospels (e.g., those of James M. Robinson and Elaine Pagels) do note relate them to African beliefs. Whatever other meanings conveyed by these gospels found in Africa they suggest the transition of deep veneration of the African dark woman divinity to her demotion in the common epoch.: as suggested by the voice of a divine woman in the gnostic gospels, Thunder, Perfect Mind. 4 African Black Mother of Everyone

I am a Sicilian American feminist cultural historian who has written books on Italian feminism, black Madonnas, African origins of the dark Mother, and collected an anthology of womanist/feminist writings in spirituality entitled She is Everywhere! Drawn to studies revisiting the origins of Europe, notably those of the French Annales school of historians who stress the importance of looking beyond present-day national boundaries to large geographical areas (e.g., that of the Mediterranean), I have also learned from the Annales school the significance of the long duration of beliefs, in this case the belief in the black Mother of Africa who has many names throughout the world, whose icons, images, rituals, and stories transmitted African beliefs in justice, harmony, and transformation. My indebtedness to other scholars includes Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist of Sardinia, island museum of Europe, who tapped African beliefs in considering values of justice and equality of subaltern cultures indispensable to the cultural revolution that precedes and accompanies nonviolent political revolution. My work is grounded on my Sicilian genetic and cultural inheritance of the Mediterranean culture that originates in 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 methodologies are suggested in the case of Sicily. Contiguous with African in prehistory, Sicily was early reached by African migrants who after 50,000 BCE left evidence of their beliefs in signs (public V and orche red) in rock art, later in icons of a woman divinity, then in black Madonnas (and other dark women divinities of the world) whose values were conveyed in rituals, stories, and themes of contemporary feminist, 5 African Black Mother of Everyone

ecology, nonviolence and other transformative movements. In antiquity the island's close connection with Africa was evident in the heavy traffic in the Canal of Sicily connecting that island with the mother continent, Africa. Later there were return migrations to Europe of ultimately African west Asians: notably of Anatolians and Semites 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 and Palestine (whom the Greeks called Phoenicians who are today associated with the Semitic Palestinians) after 1500 BCE. Israelites, Semites in diaspora after 70 CE, Muslims, Semites from Africa and 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 a shared suppressed belief in the African black Mother. In prehistory, Sicily was contagious with Africa. In antiquity, Sicily was part of the Mediterranean civilization that originated in Africa and flourished in west Asia, Europe, and Mediterranean islands, notably Sicily, Sardinia, Malta (founded by Sicilians), and the Balearic islands. In the context of conventional history, wherein history is erroneously taught as beginning with civilizations of Greece and Rome, Sicily was a colony of both. In the early common epoch, the African black Mother was represented as a Madonna figure painted in red (one of her signs) in caves. After Christian church fathers tried to destroy evidence of the African black Mother, her memory was transmitted after 500 CE in subaltern cultures in V-shaped (another of her signs) black Madonnas. 6 African Black Mother of Everyone

In Sicily, and elsewhere, not only direct migrations from Africa but return migrations of ultimately African peoples from west Asia deepened the memory of the African black mother. Images of Isis and Tanit figures brought by Africans navigating the African sea that adjoins western Sicily may be found in my ancestral maternal area of Palermo. Images of Cybele, brought by Anatolians are pervasive in my ancestral paternal region in the southeastern part of the island. 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 black Madonnas, in all my ancestral places in Sicily Palermo, Erice, Ragusa, and Siracusa. Nanna, in Sicilian dialect, remembers west Asian Inanna in the word for grandmother. The black Madonna of Tindari, holiest icon of Sicily, is inscribed, Nigra sum sed furmosa (I am black and beautiful). Her values justice and equality are incised on statues of women at the entrance to her sanctuary. Black African origins of the dark Mother of a thousand names in the cultures of the world, as well as erasure of her African origin, are marked in the changing names of my ancestral paternal Sicilian town, Ragusa. The ancient name was Ragusa Ibla (diminutive affectionate for Anatolian Cybele) who was called Ibla Nera or Black Ibla .....until the seventh century BCE when Greeks invaded Sicily and changed her name Ibla Nera (black Ibla) to Ibla Herae thereby erasing her black African origin and marking the decline of her statues under the Greeks, who associated her with Hera, the subordinated wife of Zeus.

7 African Black Mother of Everyone

Christianization whitened her and tried to destroy her gift of vision. This is evident in Santa Lucia of Siracusa who lived in the 4th century CE, major saint of Sicily and south Italy, for whom I am named. In church iconography, Lucia, saint of light and martyred Christian virgin, offers her eyes on a plate to a rapist. In my interpretation, this is the African black Mother turned white sacrificing her gift of vision to the church. This interpretation is verified in popular stories wherein light comes out of darkness, an African belief. Both African Isis and Sicilian Lucia are associated with nurturance (both carry sheafs of wheat) healing, and vision. In the vernacular Christianity of Sicily, Lucia is a saint who nurtures everyone and heals those who have lost their vision. In the middle ages the culture of Sicily was Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. After 1060 CE Sicily was connected with mainland Europe when expanding Normans (Scandinavians based in France) invaded the island and then took Britain in 1066. Afterward, Sicily was ruled by Angevins of France, Swabians of Germany, and monarchs of Spain who brought the inquisition to eradicate heresies, persecuting my Sicilian grandmothers and helping us to understand the almost total success of dominant church and state in stamping out in Europe, and in descendants of Europeans, in the US and elsewhere, deep (ultimately African) beliefs. My hypothesis is that primordial and continuing migrations from Africa, as well as return migrations of ultimately African Semites from west Asia into the region Greeks called Europe, left a cellular and or cultural memory that has persisted in descendants of African migrants everywhere on earth ---- a belief that 8 African Black Mother of Everyone

has survived despite the trauma throughout the common epoch of institutional suppression, inquisition torture 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 in dominant cultures of the world (the belief has always been present in subaltern cultures) offering the possibility 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 although black Madonnas and other dark women divinities may be our most palpable evidence of the continuing vernacular belief in the African black Mother, the belief is also evident in signs and in many ways of knowing. Black studies, feminist cultural history, genetics, archeology, anthropology, folklore studies, and ethnic studies, are coming together with other disciplines, notably clinical psychology and other studies of how we can access unconscious or pre-verbal knowledge, with controlled breathing, drumming, et al. A fired professor after 1969 (an assistant professor at the time, I went on strike at San Francisco State supporting students who struck for black studies and against the imperialist war in Vietnam), I went on to become an independent scholar intent on finding my Sicilian grandmothers and my own ancestral beliefs.... a quest that has led me to Africa. My on-site explorations of Italian feminists and black Madonnas of Europe led me to realize the importance of suppressed beliefs. By 2001, when dark Mother African origins and godmothers was first published, I had concluded that the memory of the African dark Mother has persisted for millennia to the present, not only in 9 African Black Mother of Everyone

subaltern cultures, but in unconscious or preconscious levels of memory of everyone, on all continents. The black African Mother has drawn me, particularly since 1988 when I was very moved by the black Madonna in holy week processions at Trapani (in western Sicily on an African migration path), dreamed of my mother as a black Madonna and learned the next day that my mother was dying of cancer. I wrote the book on black Madonnas the year my mother was dying. Black Madonnas, conflated with the memory of my mother, have determined my research ever since. The major reason I wanted to visit France again the summer of 2005 was that my study of African migrations led me to realize that the Auvergne of France, where there is a very high concentration of black Madonnas, was a region early reached by navigating and migrating Africans from the Atlantic Ocean as well as upriver from the Mediterranean. In France (and elsewhere) the continuous presence of signs and after 25,000 BCE of icons of black women divinities, underlined for me the long duration of ultimately African beliefs. Bringing a feminist cultural perspective to archeology, I have reflected that menhirs and dolmens (which we have found all over the Mediterranean) may be markers of African migration paths throughout the world. Menhirs are upright stones; dolmens are two vertical menhirs holding up a horizontal menhir. Menhirs and dolmens characterized our first religious sanctuary created by migrating Africans in the Sinai 40,000 BCE. This first religious sanctuary, located in the place Muslims called Har Karkom and Jews and Christians call Mt. Sinai, is the founding place of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is stunning 10 African Black Mother of Everyone

datum uncovered by Italian archaeologist Emmanuel Anati, a datum whose implications took a while for me to absorb .....Africans created the menhirs and dolmens symbolizing African beliefs in this place which later would become an important religious site for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Jean Clottes, major archaeologist of France, attributes religious significance to menhirs and dolmens. Marija Gimbutas, Lithuanian American archaeologist associated menhirs with 25,000 BCE stone women divinities. In the south of France two significant menhirs are statues of women divinities the Venus of Laussel -- holding a lunar calendar and pointing to her vulva, suggesting menstruation and pregnancy, and the Venus of Lespugue, a woman figure sculpted all in rounds. On site research in Mediterranean places has uncovered some significant patterns. Visiting caves on African migration paths at Altamira in Spain and at Lascaux in France, I visually understood Emmanuel Anati's insight that there is a continuum between prehistoric African art and great modern art. Prehistoric art was created in a cosmology of the African black Mother, a cosmology later remembered on African migration paths in France by ToulousLautrec, Van Gogh, Matisse, et al and in Spain by Picasso, Miro, Dali, Gaudi and others. Not only art but healing rituals and heresies in Christian places have continued to transmit the memory of the African black Mother to this day. Islands and mountain enclaves (where people fled invaders and inquisitors) have preserved the memory more clearly than have mainland cultures. These natural places, also have startling instances of the 11 African Black Mother of Everyone

African content of submerged beliefs of Europe, not only images of the black African Mother, but African solar motifs in rock art, and African healing water rituals. On our study tour to Sardinia in 2004 we visually understood the connection between African migration paths, the African dark Mother, and African water rituals when we saw Santa Cristian's well a well shaped in the form of Carthaginian woman divinity Tanit. The well is constructed so that one descends into her womb fluids. Mary Saracino, who participated in our Sardinian tour, advices that there was a Semitic version of African water rituals remembered in the water god Maimone. I was reminded of the similarity of the water god Maimone to the name of the great Jewish philosopher of Spain, Maimonides, in the golden age of harmony between Jews, Christians and Muslims before 1492. I also recalled African water rituals in communities surrounding nuraghi in Sardinia. Nuraghi are the thousands of cone-shaped structures of Sardinia that resemble those of Zimbabwe in Africa, suggesting that contrary to the dominant belief of archaeologists, nuraghi of Sardinia are not fortresses but sanctuaries....or, they were sanctuaries before they became fortresses (although there are no weapons). Perhaps the most significant, ultimately African, water ritual we found this summer in the south of France, on an African migration path, in an area of many menhirs and dolmens, is located at the second place (after Rome) of Christianity, at Lourdes, which annually draws three and a half million people ---- the sick and desperate of the world who come for healing. Pilgrimages at Lourdes feature Mary, Jewish mother of Jesus, whom we study in women's spirituality 12 African Black Mother of Everyone

programs as the major Christian manifestation of the African dark Mother (other manifestations can be found in certain saints). Springs, grottoes, peasants, particularly young people, are associated with apparitions of the dark Mother as the virgin Mary. In the case of Lourdes, the story is that May appeared in a grotto to a young girl, Bernadette Soubirous. Mary told the girl to bathe in the water of a spring in the grotto. Grottos and springs, in Italian, French, and other folklore, are regarded as wombs of the dark Mother. At Lourdes the thousands of the afflicted of the world who pour into the town participate in nightly torchlight processions ....people singing, most in wheelchairs, who are taken to the grotto to be washed in the healing waters of the spring. A vernacular, or people's, ritual, everyone in processions at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees sings Ave Maria. Mary is also invoked in the writing around the cupola of the church built over the grotto. Popular beliefs in Mary are periodically denounced as mariolatry by the papacy whose canon denigrates women and leaves the Mother of Jesus out of the trinity. Like other cases of European popular Christianity that I have studied, the veneration of Mary at Lourdes edges heresy. Underneath one of her statues in the church built above the grotto is the inscription, All that is better in us may be attributed to Mary ---an involution of Biblical attribution of original sin to Eve and to all humans, and a popular revision of the canonical doctrine that Mary, due to immaculate conception, is uniquely different from other women. Although subsequently whitened by church fathers, the mother of Jesus was first depicted in ochre red (one of the signs of the African black Mother); see image in 13 African Black Mother of Everyone

Priscilla catacombs of Rome. At Le Puy, where we saw the statue of Notre Dame de France presiding atop a hill of the city, she is sculpted in red stone. Simone Weil (who may be the most significant woman philosopher of the twentieth century), during world war II fasted herself to death in witness against the rising violence of the world. At Le Puy she worked on the left politically while she meditated on the African origins of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Townspeople called her the red virgin. Inside the church at Le Puy, a major pilgrimage place in France, we noted that this is very popular icon of the Madonna is black. Church fathers by the 5th century CE had destroyed or lightened most icons of the African black Mother, but most people in subaltern cultures of Europe persisted in painting her black. In paintings of the V shaped black Madonnas, almost always, there is, somewhere in the image, the color red. Heresy pulled me to France this summer, notably the major 13th century Cathar heresy. Cathars, lived on an African migration path in the Pyrenees and called themselves good Christians. Cathars did not care for the church of Rome. Like Jews and Muslims, they did not consider Jesus divine, although they lived by his values. Bypassing popes and priests, Cathars regarded their own clergy, parfaites and parfs (women and men) as intermediaries with the divine. Cathars did not eat meat, and did not believe in the church sacrament of marriage. They lived nonviolently with the values of Jesus' sermon on the mount, values that Simone Weil, Maulana Karenga, and others, have pointed out, may be found in African documents at least 2500 years before the common epoch. The ultimate objects of the Cathar belief, in my view, may be glimpsed in their pilgrimages to black Madonna of Le Puy in France and of 14 African Black Mother of Everyone

Montserrat in Spain. Cathars lived on an African migration path in southwestern France where the earth is red and the Aude river turns red after a heavy rain. Considering the red earth moistened by rain water healing, people make medical poultices after it rains. I think of Cathar country as a land of the dark Mother, whose values, found in the folklore and political struggles, are justice and equality with compassion, or healing. The Catholic papacy aligned with the French monarchy considered the Cathars very threatening in this period when both church and state were intent on killing dark others notably Muslims, Jews and dissenting Christians. Cathars were singled out for killing while pope and state were forming the inquisition to eradicate heresy. For Europe, black Madonnas (and dark women divinities elsewhere) may be considered our most palpable evidence not only of the black African mother but of heresies that transmitted her values on submerged levels. Cultural resistance, at the height of the inquisition, is suggested in the great number of black Madonnas all over France, evident in a map of 1530. The 13th century domestic crusade against the Cathars was accompanied by earlier and continuing European crusades to wrest the holy land from the Muslims. Christian church and state killed Muslims in the holy lands while at home they killed nonviolent Cathar heretics. Christian church killing of people who lived as good Christians strikes me as hypocrisy similar to 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 sending young US soldiers to die in a war based on lies. 15 African Black Mother of Everyone

Cathars, for me, recall young heretics of the 1960's all over the world who protested the US imperialist war in Vietnam, who in the US insisted on civil rights of African Americans, then on equal rights of all the vulnerable, reached for democratic forms of communalism, and lived in the primitive Christian manner of the Cathars. In an article I wrote at the time, I called them the unkempt prophets of Berkeley. They began in nonviolence, considered love, rather than the church sacrament of marriage the significant bond, and tapped deep levels of consciousness. A Berkeley bumper sticker advised, God is black and is the she pissed. My hypothesis regarding Cathars is that they were Christian heretics on an African migration path in the French (also the Spanish) Pyrenees who tapped ancient African matrisitic beliefs which they shared the Basques in the same region. Blood type confirms that Basques live in an African enclave in Europe who have kept matricentric beliefs and have defied those who would wrest them away from Romans to fascists of the twentieth century. Similarly, in the Balkans on another African migration path in eastern Europe, where Marija Gumbutas found many icons of the pre-Christian woman divinity (and where I have noted that Byzantine Madonnas are dark) an earlier Bogomil heresy is said to have influenced Cathar heretics in southwest France. With the lens of the African origins of everyone and the hypothesis of the persistence of African beliefs in places reached by African migrants, the Bogomil heresy, like the Cathar heresy, both on African migration paths, in my view, tapped African beliefs. What happened to Cathars who fled the burnings? 16 African Black Mother of Everyone

Several went to Lombardy, in northern Italy where I have found a pattern of beliefs connecting black Madonnas, heretics and feminists. Heresy, regarded as resistance to the dominant culture, can be traced in France from early Christian evangelization when people's stories differed from accounts in the canonical gospel. Cultural resistance became political with the French revolution of 1789 and subsequent 19th century uprisings. In the 20th century Catalonians on an African migration path in Spain (near the immensely popular black Madonna of Montserrat) courageously fought the fascists in the civil war that preceded world war II. During the twentieth century, the Maqui, in southern France in the resistance during world war II, saved Jews from extermination camps and valiantly fought the Nazis. In early and continuing heretical interpretation of Christianity, the French, particularly in the south, looked to other Marys. They considered Mary Magdalene, who had seen the risen Jesus, an apostle. Male apostles did not believe her, the church denigrated her, but French legends recount that Magdalene came to the south of France where she spread the gospel until she died. Some of the other Marys in this region suggest that people identified the mother of Jesus 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 inclusive woman divinity the beliefs subversive to the Christian canon. Stories and rituals connect this black Madonna with Sara of Hebrew scriptures, with Kali, fierce Hindu woman divinity of India, and with black Maria, beloved Madonna of the Roma -gypsies of the world. Radical cultural beliefs are evident in heretical legends that French peasants, for two millennia, have 17 African Black Mother of Everyone

transmitted about Mary Magdalene, who is today the national saint of France. Perhaps recalling Africa whose female divinities married male divinities, a heretical legend in France is that Mary Magdalene married Jesus. The gospel of Mary Magdalene (not recognized in the official catholic canon) also emphasizes a belief implicit in African rituals - - - self knowledge is necessary for transformation. A major belief of contemporary feminist and nonviolence movements is that self-knowledge is necessary for the transformation. I would add that self-knowledge includes an understanding of the genetic origin of everyone in Africa and African origin of cultural beliefs in justice and equality with compassion (or healing) - - along African migration paths that can transform the world. The black woman divinity of Africa and her manifestations along African migration paths throughout the world may be central to the contemporary cultural revolution. In this context, Magdalene stories may be considered a heretical challenge to the canon that has denigrated the redhaired woman who anointed Jesus. Her task, a woman taking the mother's values to the people, was implicitly remembered by Dacia Maraini, major cultural and political feminist of Italy in the 1970's, who founded an experimental theatre that enacted feminist issues in the streets. Recalling the woman apostle, Dacia called this theatre, La Maddalena. In Magdalene churches, as well as churches with black Madonnas, that we visited this summer in the south of France, other doctrinally discounted figures like St. Joseph are also honored. St. Joseph, in the folklore of Italy, France, and elsewhere, is considered a worker and a nurturing father who brought up Jesus 18 African Black Mother of Everyone

even though the church said Jesus was not his son. Male communities of Italy identify with saint Joseph. In beliefs of submerged cultures, people regarded the holy family as human (not otherworldly). In my childhood in Kansas City, Missouri Sicilian American bypassed the church trinity of father, son, and holy ghost, looking to Mary and her son celebrating St. Joseph (the earthly father) at the spring equinox with a table of food for the poor. It is my hypothesis that the memory of the beautiful black African Mother implies nonviolent revolution. In 1789 in France, revolutionaries wore the Phrygian cap of followers of the Anatolian dark Mother Cybele and raised the banner, Liberte,' Egalite,' Fraternite,'. The woman who personified this first great revolution of our time was named Marianne - - for Mary, Jewish mother of Jesus, and Anne, his pagan grandmother, goddess of the harvests, whose veneration in Brittany recalls the Anu of Africa. The French revolutionary triad of values is compatible with values of African Mother, except that justice by guillotine negates the mother's value of compassion/healing and fraternite' leaves out women. This summer in France in the town square of Salon de Provence we saw an icon of a very old black Madonna in a niche, and then a statue of 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, we saw a tail of a bomber in which a mother duck has been sculpted, sitting on her nest. This seems to me a nonviolent and ecological response to war. The unfulfilled aims of the French revolution are remembered today in the south of France in a strong ecology movement that seeks to fulfill revolutionary aims of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite with a life style 19 African Black Mother of Everyone

that respects the earth and all its creatures. The unfulfilled aims of the French revolution are also remember in the contemporary feminist movement in France, and elsewhere, honoring prehistoric women divinities who preceded the male divinities of the \ world's dominant religions. Scores of black Madonnas in France remind us of our African origins and the values of our African dark Mother. Antecedents of todays' French feminists are the strong peasant women 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 modern western Feminism. Luce Irigaray (whose name is Basque) is today the major feminist theorist of France, Spain and Italy. Luce Irigaray's feminism is grounded in women's bodies and on remembering ancient values in our work for the future. A similar ancient/future pattern of feminism may be found not only in France but in Spain, and Italy. In Italy, notably in Tuscany, there is a pattern of African migration paths, primordial woman divinities (e.g., 26,000 BCE Venus of Savignano), and 20th century heretical movements pointing to a better world - -democratic and nonviolent communism, feminism, and ecology. In Bologna, a city where buildings and politics are both red, feminists and communists climb through many porticoes to pray in the hillside sanctuary of the protectress of the city - ---a black Madonna. In The Future has an Ancient Heart, I shall explore L. Luca Cavalli Sforza's hypothesis that he can predict how a geographical region votes based on his knowledge of African migration paths. His premise is that places whose culture is centered on the Mother 20 African Black Mother of Everyone

(on African migration paths) tend to be politically on the left. I find this dramatically true, for example, in Bologna in Italy, center of the partisan resistance in Italy which saved scores of Jews from extermination camps, fought the Nazis, and has been red since 1945. In my thinking, places whose culture is centered on the father reflect the successful suppression of the ancient belief in the African dark Mother, and will tend to have right wing cultural and political beliefs, notably male dominance, violence, and ultimately, fascism. In the twentieth century, the conflict between the two world views were bitterly fought out in the Spanish civil war, a rehearsal for world war II. Picasso's painting Gernica in the Basque region of Spain remains today the most powerful anti-war painting of our time...Nazis bombing a peaceful Basque market town. Cavalli-Sforza's theory that beliefs brought by ancient African migrations have left their imprint in left politics, is borne out in the south of France, a region of resistance to fascism and work for socialist ideals. This left pattern also prevails in the Basque region of Spain which, at Mondragon, has the most successful cooperatives in the world, and in Italy in the Salento region of Puglia. All are on African migration paths. The Salento has many menhirs and dolmens, and many black Madonnas to whom peasant communists pray. Recently, women in Bari (in Puglia) founded the contemporary Permanent Convention of Women against 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 of international feminism. Molefi Asante, scholar who 21 African Black Mother of Everyone

today is rescuing the African matrix of a future of harmonious world cultures, has named his research center the Ankh Institute. African Tanit, in her image as African black Mother and as a feminist ankh, has been proposed as a world symbol of contemporary world movements of justice, equality, healing and transformation. In a phenomenon that characterizes my writing, the realization 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 study of nonviolent revolution for a harmonious world. This harmony may, perhaps, be best understood listening to African American jazz....different riffs but a constant bass tone that remembers the black African Mother.

22 African Black Mother of Everyone

Author
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Women's Spirituality California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California Berkeley, California October 30, 2005 eMail: lucia@darkmother.net Website: www.darkmother.net

This paper is an adaptation of the essay , The Future has an Ancient Heart transformation, African origins and African migration paths in Europe. I presented it at the 17th annual Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference, African Explorations: Theories and Models of Creativity and Discovery for a Resurgent African World. September 30 October 1, 2000 Philadelphia. For downcasing see Notes on Style in my dark mother, african origins and godmothers (see below) 1. L.Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Paola Mernozzi, Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princetown University Press, 1994) 2. Maulana Karenga, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Studyin Classical African Ethics (New York and London, Routledge. 2004) 3. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother. African origins and godmothers (New York, Chicago, Lincoln Shanghai, iUniverse, 2001: Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Woman Centered Literature, 2002; italian edition, la madred o-scura (Cosenza, Italia, Media Meditarranea, 2004). Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum 4. Black Madonnas, Feminism, Politics and Religion in Italy (Boston, MA., Northeastern University Press, 1993; Italian edition, Black Madonnas. Feminismo Religione e politica in italia (Bari , Italia, Palomar Editrice, 1997, Premio Internazionale di Saggistica, Salerno, Italia 1998;

23 African Black Mother of Everyone

iUniverse reprint, 2000.

5. She is Everywhere! An Anthology is womanist and feminist writings in

spirituality (New York, Chicago, Rupestre nel Mundo ApA, 1995). Lincoln, Shanghai, iUniverse, 2005) (Milan, editoriale Jaca Book

6. Emmanuel Anati, Il Museo Immaginario delia Preistoria. L'arte

7. Simon Weil Reader, ed., G.A. Panichas (Mt. Kisco, New York, Moyer Bell 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)

24 African Black Mother of Everyone

25 African Black Mother of Everyone