Mark the Moses Gene

The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (2009) by Tudor Parfitt. HarperCollins, New York
What do Arab historians see as the defining cultural dynamics of Africa south of the Sahara? It is fair to say that contemporary Arabs do not extravagantly appreciate African history.
Of all its cultural diversity and historical depth, Africa is to most Arabs a cultural backwater not worthy of research or investigation of any kind. Even the parts of Africa south of the Sahara that have been tremendously influenced by Islam and Arab cultural penetration have not been seriously considered as fruitful fields of research and study. The Israelis, however, have taken a keen interest in Africa.
Israel, in sharp contrast, has made great strides in the past decades to prop up African potentates, interfere in internecine African warfare, and now as this fetching works reveals, in genetic similarities.
Contemporary Arabs have ignored Africa thereby terribly compromising their own interests in the continent that they share with the non-Arabs of Africa south of the Sahara. Israelis, Africans contend, are far more serious about getting to know and understand Africa. How valid are these African complaints? Trevor Parfitt's intriguing tome on the African origins of the biblical "Ark of the Covenant" is a remarkable reminder of the raising of lavish sums and the incessant devotion of earnest academic research into the historical links between the Jews and Africans south of the Sahara.
The reader can plainly see and clearly trace the African origins of the Jewish religion. The most astonishing bombshell, of course, being the corroborative "mysterious anomaly" of the "Moses gene" among a particular ethnic group in southern Africa. Yet if Arabs are unpopular in Africa south of the Sahara, it is not because of the scholarly activism of Israeli-inspired academics in Africa. It is because Arabs have done too few things that Africans admire, and too many things that they do not like.
Parfitt's treatise makes for essential reading to Arab academics and intellectuals seriously interested in understanding Africa. It is an absorbing read in any case.
Viewed from an Arab perspective, Parfitt's The Lost Ark of the Covenant is a pleasantly puzzling affirmation that Africans, Arabs and Jews have a tremendous cultural heritage, a shared historical legacy. The author has proven without doubt that the Lemba people of South Africa and Zimbabwe are of Hebraic origin. There are plenty of other potential candidates for the dubious honour in Africa south of the Sahara.
What explains this puzzle? The author and his Israeli benefactor have a relentless drive. But so have the Africans he encounters. Whatever the cultural implications, there is bound to be some political impact. The interesting question is not whether Africans and Jews share a collective memory genetic and otherwise from the distant past, but why this particular thesis is arousing much interest in Africa at this historical juncture.
The author has a way with words. Parfitt writes with clarity and vigour. His passion is palpable, communicable and contagious. His jaunty informality conjures up critically consequential questions. His extraordinary findings challenge conventional assumptions, stimulate curious minds and entertain. "The silence was broken by the chief calling out the names of his four wives. They were singularly different from each other in age, size and beauty." Any Arab who does not believe there are lessons to be learned from darkest Africa should start here.
"A long antelope horn was thrust through the opening into the hut and a triumphant blast silenced the shrill sound of the women." For his part, Parfitt often appears just as sexist as the subjects he studies, the people -- tribal chieftains, priests and witch-doctors -- he comes across. It is a subject that becomes rather tiresome.
Sexism, however, in a most convoluted manner proves to be perhaps of the most spectacular vindication of his thesis. But more of that later. "The man blowing the horn was tall and well built. He was wearing a skirt made of strips of black fur and around his head he had a strip of leopard skin. He was the witch doctor. His name was Sadiki -- one of the Lemba clan names -- an unmistakably Semitic name whose presence in central Africa was a mysterious anomaly."
I lived and worked in Zimbabwe between 1986 and 1990. I became acquainted with southern Africa and did some research work concerning the Muslim minorities in southern Africa. Naturally enough, I came across the Lemba people. At the time, there was some dispute as to whether they are of Arab or Jewish origin. Curiously enough, Parfitt does not solve the mystery.
"Sadiki stood at the epicenter of the storm of sound, directing its movement. He had an overpowering regal air, and looked arrogantly around him. Suggestively he moved a foot. Then a hand. His body followed and, positioning himself in front of one of the drums, he danced, like David before the Ark, pausing to blow the ram's horn similar to the shofar that had once been blown in the Temple of Jerusalem."
That may well be true. But, the Lemba's insistence on circumcising their male offspring in contradistinction with the other ethnic groups they live among is as much a Muslim phenomenon as it is Jewish. Moreover, the fact that Parfitt claimed to trace the Lemba's fabled city of Semma to the Yemeni region of Hadramaut, only serves to confuse and complicate the matter further. What becomes clear, though, is that the Lemba are of Semitic origin. They seem to have emigrated from southern Arabia to southern Africa at a very distant and indeterminate date.
Whether the Lemba people are of Arab or Jewish origin becomes inconsequential simply because they might well be both. The intriguing question that is not explicitly answered by the author is whether they emigrated from southern Arabia to southern Africa before or after the introduction of Islam to Yemen.
Parfitt begins his story in southern Africa, but it only really gets going with his visits to Israel, Egypt, Ethiopia and Yemen. "Professor Chaim Rabin had mentioned Shishak during our conversation in Jerusalem and Daoud had later quoted the famous passage from I Kings: 14 about his ransacking of the Temple: 'In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak, the King of Egypt, attacked Jerusalem. He carried off treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.' But there was no actual proof that Shishak had carried off the Ark."
An Egyptian monarch on the march, Egyptian artifacts adored by the ancient Israelites, Africans venerating Biblical symbols of Hebrews, claiming to be one of the lost tribes of Israel?
And why, come to that, was Yemen rather than Egypt or Ethiopia, the true original homeland of the Lemba people? All these people are under the spell of the Sacred Drum, the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
Towards the end of his book, Parfitt does not even pretend to answer the question posed in the title. The Lost Ark of the Covenant we learn is a sacred African tribal drum, the ngoma. Moreover, making distinctions between Africans, Arabs and Jews appears weirdly anachronistic.
All people are African since Africa is the original homeland of mankind. All civilisations originated in Africa. Arabia is the closest geographical area to Africa. Yemen is the closest part of Arabia to Africa.
The Tomb of Hud, the Prophet of God, is in Yemen's fabled Hadramaut region, the homeland of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
The City of the Dead, the Protocols of the Priests, the Moses Gene and the First Cataract are all episodes in this most fascinating work by Trevor Parfitt. In the chapter entitled the City of the Dead, the author describes a scene that could be in central Africa. Actually he says that it is reminiscent of the Biblical tale depicting the flight of the children of Israel from Egypt.
"The widow faltered in her dance and tossed her head. The dust rose up around her fine ankles like a small cloud as she descended on the drummer. A victorious look on her face, she lifted the drum above her head and started playing it herself. Dancing and playing. Triumph in her eyes."
The dance is intrinsically African. Yet it depicts a Biblical scene. "I was sitting in the shadow of the tomb watching the pantomime. I had wanted to imagine the days before the appearance of the Ark in the world, to understand what may have given me more enlightenment than all my walks around the pyramids and building sites of ancient Egypt. The scene before my eyes reminded me of something I had almost forgotten, something I had read without paying much attention to, years before when I was a student. I was reminded of the victory dance of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses and Aaron."
The words of the Bible ring in the reader's mind. Israel, Arabia (the Sinai) and Africa come into play.
"Then his elderly sister Miriam takes the stage. Like Maryam here in the City of the Dead, she had a drum ( tof ) in her hand -- an instrument that the Israelites had encountered and adopted for their own purposes in Egypt -- and started to dance, no doubt triumphantly. As the woman strutted in front of the emaciated slaves, one can imagine the gestures she made in the direction of Egypt."
Parfitt's imagination is odd on a number of levels. There is a lot to Parfitt's book that is also peculiar to those with a special interest in Africa and its own unique history and status in the contemporary world. That necessitates Parfitt's retelling much of the well-worn stories of the Old Testament. "They all appeared to be under the spell of the drum." Africans, Israelites, Egyptians and Yemenis all appear to be under the spell of the mesmerising African drum.
"My mind flashed back to the scene that had been enacted following the Israelites' deliverance. Did the tired, brutalised slaves sit round like this as they prepared to flee into the wilderness of Sinai?"
Parfitt expertly charts the history of the drum, and delves into the reasons behind its significance to people around the world. The Sacred Drum has a primeval appeal. It is sacrosanct just like the Ark of the Covenant. "Did the drum have the same magnetic appeal for those desperate men as it had for these desperate tomb-dwellers of the City of the Dead?" Maybe it is so.
"Once they were safely on the Sinai side, the drum was used to sound out a rhythm of deliverance, victory, and hope." By the time I read this paragraph I had an uneasy feeling that Parfitt was so taciturn about the true nature of his search that he actually sounded quite garrulous.
"And miraculously it was hope that I now saw etched on the faces of the Sudanese builders. They had forgotten their weariness and poverty. The hashish had hit, and they were under the spell of the drum. It seemed to me that in some way I could not define I had been given a glimpse into the past."
Daoud, the "loathsome little Copt", as the author constantly refers to him, signifies the pathetic creature who denies his very African roots. Yet Daoud, too, like his Biblical namesake David, dances to the magical beat of the African drum.
"Almost certainly the Ark was taken away from the Jerusalem Temple before the Babylonian conquest in 587 BC. It could have been much earlier, perhaps during the reign of Manasseh, perhaps even during the reign of Rehoboam. Given the circumstances of the day, Egypt would have been one fairly obvious place to take it, and had it been taken to Egypt, the island of Elephantine would have been a very good option, perhaps the best option. Graham Hancock was not the only one to conclude that it might have come up-river to Elephantine -- the magic island."
Fact or fiction, we do not know. Trawling through the Biblical stories about the Ark of the Covenant made me yearn to read Prafitt's version of the enchanting tale.
Even more spine-tingling was the author's take on the Arab angle. "Other Arabic texts spoke of a 'wooden chair'-like object being carried into battle (as a guarantor of victory) and venerated by the Shia in the early years of Islam, apparently in conscious imitation of the Ark. But there is nothing to say that this 'wooden chair' was not actually the Ark itself, for the Ark was also a chair, as it was the throne of God," the author notes, indicating that Islam, too, has its own version of the sacred Ark.
"But what excited Daoud most, and in turn excited me, was a passage from Wahb Ibn Munabbih that claimed that the children of Israel were still marching with the Ark at the head of their armies long after the death of King Solomon. According to him, the Ark had returned to the old peripatetic life it had had before it was incarcerated in the Temple. If stories about a 'wooden chair' being carried into battle in the early days of Islam had any substance, the tradition of an active Ark had been brought up to relatively recent times."
African, Arab and Hebraic -- what could be more perplexing and yet profoundly both purposeful and meaningful?
The Moses Gene, too, is a most bewitching story. What purposes precisely does it promote? And, whose interests does it render? Does it help the Africans, the Arabs or the Israelis to inch closer together? "In the pedigree of the Lemba there is a surprise. Most of their genes -- blood groups, enzymes and the like -- unite them with African peoples around them. However, those on the Lemba Y chromosome have a different origin. On a family tree of the world's male lineages the Lemba are linked, not with Africans, but with the Middle East. The Lemba legend of their origin contains a hidden truth," Parfitt quotes Professor Steve Jones, an outstanding geneticist at University College, London and author of In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny (1966).
So Africans and Jews are of the same stock?
"According to Jewish tradition, only males from this direct line going back to Aaron could be permitted to serve as temple priests and as servants of the Ark."
Yes, the priests, the shamans, the repositories of ancient traditions count. Like the Ark they are the storehouses of prehistoric truths. "Priestly status is transmitted exactly in the same way as the Y chromosome."
The chapter entitled Protocols of the Priests elaborates on the theme in a most peculiar fashion. And, so does The Moses Gene. "The Y chromosome passes from father to son and that is the only way it can be transmitted. Priestly status passes from father to son. You cannot be appointed or promoted to the priesthood -- you are one if your father was one."
Prafitt also suspected strong Falasha and Lemba connections. Both are metal-working African people known for their industriousness and their connections with the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. And so are the people of Yemen.
"According to Islamic tradition, the people of Ad were the great-grandchildren of Noah and were chastised by Hud for their decadence, polytheism and wealth. The Hud of the Quran can almost certainly be identified with the biblical Eber, the great-grandson of Noah's son Shem. Eber is the origin of the word 'Hebrew' (ibri) and Hud is a word that is derived from the Arabic word for Jew (Yahud). Qbr Hud was probably the centre of some pre-Islamic Judaic cult."
The people of Hadramaut, Prafitt discovered, believed in an ancient association between the tomb of the Prophet of God, Hud, in present day Hadramaut and the legend of the Ark. And, so what is the moral of the story? A sartorial strategy for survival would not have suited the lost tribes of ancient Israel in Africa, or the wastes of southern Arabia, for that matter. The very notion of an heirloom, on the other hand, inspires great loyalty from a people on the run.
Parfitt came to that conclusion and he managed to articulate his thesis with feeling. There is a good side, I am sure, to the notion of a Hebraic priestly caste wandering across Arabia and then crossing over into Africa's vast expanses of predator-infested savanna, impenetrable equatorial jungles, impregnable mountains and waterless deserts. More visible is the dark side to the story.
"I thought to myself that the word Arca in Latin, from which the English word Ark is derived, is also the origin of the English word arcane: esoteric, mysterious. Is there anything that is not mysterious about the Ark?"
By Gamal Nkrumah