TV was rammed down my throat this past weekend. Our new Internet Service Provider insists that we can not get our beloved surfing without the accompanying cable. The system is free, advanced and flows through fiber optics we are told. The screen was there for movies anyway so, viola, there I was soaking in cable TV all my own for the first time in my life.

The History Channel on HD is incredibly colorful and absorbing. After a whole day of gazing I progressed to listening to the contents of the programming. Before long I realized why I had avoided television for so long. The fact that all the programming is focused on religion can be excused by the timing of my surrender to cable. However, the History Channel’s attempt to do serious investigation of biblical history was horrifying in its lack of realism.

Yes reality is in the eye of the powerful. The biblical programming is probably regurgitating most of the propagandist history papers that are published in US theological and history departments. However, there should be basic, commonly agreed20to objective methods of historical investigation that any programmer of such documentaries must follow – or maybe not. For instance, when discussing the early Christian canonizing process, the programmer finds it impossible to even offer the possibility that many of the books were conceived and authored in Africa when the evidence so clearly points to it.

The book of Henock [Enoch, for those who persist in mispronouncing it] is known to exist in full only in Ge’ez, had significant influence on almost all New Testament authors and yet is proposed as authored somewhere in the ‘Middle East’ – an absurdity in any scientific investigation. The same arguments are presented for more recent non-canonical texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, that were discovered all over southern Egypt and northern Sudan.

Maybe the quasi historians working on TV programming find it hard to accept African authorship, despite overwhelming archeological evidence, because of the perceived lack of cultural and literate abilities in the continent. This is of course a case of the king believing his own propaganda. African contributions in the area of religion are endless and rooted in some very basic facts. Abrahamic frameworks – providing the ideological foundation for all modern thoughts – a re basically of Afro Asiatic and particularly Semitic conception and transmission. To start off, despite the deceptive naming, a simple glance at the diversity and distribution of these language families places them solidly in Africa.

The first technological breakthrough that allowed for the transmission of ideas between diverse peoples is alphabetical writing. The Wadi el-Hol script [from 2000 BCE and re-classified as Proto-Sinaitic to misplace it geographically] was only one of many attempts along the entire Nile basin to give the gift of alphabets to the doctrinaire world. The evolution and use of this system in Africa is evidenced by inscriptions in Eritrea [from 900 BCE and again re-named the South Arabian alphabet to avoid Africa]. Most modern discourse of course focuses on much latter discoveries of these systems in Babylon and Mediterranean inscriptions.

Around the same period, [1300 BCE] a rebel named Moses determined that he would escape an overbearing African empire and cross the Red sea, into Arabia. He also determined that he would pacify his characteristically restless Semitic flock by giving them a new constitution enforced by a WMD in the form of the Ark. More recent canonic Mediterranean authorities of the Torah, living a thousand years after Moses, received much of their=0 Aliterature from Babylonian Hebrew groups of 500 BCE and determined that he must have lived on the Mediterranean. That they neglected to add a footnote explaining why one would need to cross the Red sea, to travel from Egypt to Palestine can only be explained by their desperate need to legitimize themselves as natives in a foreign land.

This concept is of course not new. Africans have been migrating to Arabia and north into the Fertile Crescent, heading east and west from there for thousands of years. All the modern families from Estonia to Singapore and the Maghreb who can recall the Yemeni village from which their ancestors migrated attest to this. In fact it is common knowledge amongst all Arabs of the Middle East that their roots lie in Yemen. This has been shown to be true linguistically as well. Not only is Arabic traced back to Yemen, but so is Babylonian Hebrew. And all the evidence we have is of African mass migrations and invasions of Yemen and not the other way around.

African Christian Orthodox literature has always indicated that before Babylon, the Hebrews lived in high concentrations on both sides of the Red Sea much further south than is acknowledged in modern discourse. This corresponds fully with modern archeological evidence. The stories of Solo mon, for instance, and his temple are covered in African literature as local events. This raises serious questions about modern interpretations of the origin of all the Hebrew books. It raises significantly more serious questions than those superficial ones being raised by the History Channel programmers. Is it possible that the entire modern Abrahamic faithful is seeing the world through the perspective of ancient African scribes?

The story of African origins for almost all major western religious innovations and methods of transmission continued through time. Apart from illiterate Mohamed’s candid gratitude for the wisdom of his closest scribes and advisors who were African, examples abound. Greco/Roman Christianity would not be what it is today without the confessions of the Berber St. Augustine of Hippo. Moreover, most refuse to acknowledge that medieval western renaissance and secular thinking would have no foundations without the writings of Ibn Rushd of Marrakech [yet again renamed Averroes to de-Africanize him].

The modern age has seen almost no archeological digging occur in Africa outside of Egypt’s Mediterranean periphery. Of course the History Channel programmers need not spend much money digging. Much of the evidence is actually still above the surface. Christian history can20only legitimately be studied in the Nile basin as this is the only area in the world where it remained resistant to change during the past two thousand years of immense revolution. In other words, the only libraries that can be trusted to carry the original story are those that were integrated into people’s living and culture – and this can only be found between Alexandria and Axum. It is no coincidence that Copts, Nubians and Ethiopians today protect their literature so dearly, and why almost all original biblical ‘discoveries’ are made from their depositories.

I learnt this past weekend that there will be a show on the Lalibela churches at 9pm tonight. I will probably watch it but will not expect serious discussion on the engineers and architects who built it; nor on what inspired them. It is even likely that the possibility of space-alien or European construction teams will be raised. I will have to read about the intricacies of Axumite-Zagwe rivalry on my own. History is in the eye of the powerful so I will be sure to be critical of the Axumite historians as I read. After all they are the ones who claimed that greatness and the Solomonic dynasty had arisen when the Zagwe collapsed, even though their decline spelled the end of urbanization and sophistication for the region that lasts to this day.

Happy Holidays and don’t get dazzled by the shiny lights.