e imperial Egypt, which was linked with and well known to Europe before the first millennium, there were empires of Kush in the Sudan, of Ethiopia, and of Nubia (Davidson, 1966, pp. 39-41). Bernal takes the view that classical Greek civilization originated in Africa, notably with the Egyptians and Phoenicians, whom he classes not as Mediterranean/Arab peoples but as black Africans (Bernal, tk). This view has been forcefully challenged by various scholars in the absence of supporting archaeological evidence (Lefkowitz, 1996; Griffin, 1996). Typically, black Africa is typically associated with the continent's Sub-Saharan region (Walker, 1993).
The religious environment of pre-encounter Africa was multifaceted, and remains so to the present day. Davidson says that African religion was as varied "in almost as many ways as there were African peoples. . . . [P]eople living in he rain forests of the Congo, scarcely ever seeing the sky, came to have very different ideas about the origin and operation of the world from people living in the sky-enclosing plains of the open grasslands" (Davidson, 1966, p. 123). On the other hand, running through most specific religions was a persistent belief in a "High God," which was associated with a foundational life force, plus lesser gods "who acted as intermediaries and also presided over the physical workings of the universe" (p. 124). Africans' account of the Fall is associated with the arrival of woman, who among the Dinka in the Sudan in East Africa was greedy and among the Ashanti in Ghana in West Africa was an aggressively domesticating force.
By and large, the peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa had no monumental religious architecture on the scale of Egypt. Further, strong religious affinity between Africa and the West is evidenced by the long history of Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas (49ff). In East Africa, the site of Asian-African trade centers, Islam made religious and cultural inroads (David...