Did Africans Write the Bible? - The Africans Who Wrote the Bible: Ancient Secrets Africa and Christianity Have Never Told - Review

Black Issues Book Review, Sept, 2001 by Monica Utsey

A Ghanaian-born scholar marshalls all the evidence of the Old Testament's Akan origins.

In 1919, the Buganda tribe of western Uganda converted to Judaism because of what they perceived as a special relationship between the Jewish people and God as described in the Bible. They began to call themselves "Aba Yua Daya" which means, "I am a Jew." Imagine if they had had a copy of the new book The Africans Who Wrote the Bible: Ancient Secrets Africa and Christianity Have Never Told by Nana Banchie Darkwah, Ph.D. (Aduana Publishing Co., August 2000, $28, ISBN 0-9701900-0-X) Then they would have realized that they were already Jews.

Ghanaian author, scholar, professor and Akan king, Darkwah asserts in his new book that Africans were not only present in the Bible, but were its actual authors.

"What I did was bring what Africa knows and piece it with what America knows to give a full comprehension of the Bible," Darkwah says. "I pieced together the European perspective and the African perspective. Formerly, only the European perspective had been taken into consideration."

The research took more than four years. Darkwah analyzed Egyptian and African history, culture, archeology, religion, and linguistics, as well as Jewish history, biblical history and DNA evidence. His conclusion: The people who today call themselves European Jews are in fact descendants of the Afrim people of Ancient Egypt, and the people who wrote the Bible were Akan, also of Ancient Egypt.

"Most African Americans have suspected that Africans wrote the Bible for a long time, but have not had the evidence to back it up," Darkwah says. That is no longer the case.

Darkwah, whose training and research interests are in the areas of the human brain, language acquisition and literacy, etymologically breaks down more than 15 books from the Old Testament of the Bible to show that these books' names were originally African, more specifically Akan names. He says even the word Israel itself is an Akan word. He points to the story of Jacob in Genesis 32:24-29, where the angel renames Jacob calling him Asrae or the European version, Israel. Asrae, Darkwah declares, is not the name of a nation, but instead means "the first one who visited."

Darkwah goes on to expose many of the popular stories of the Bible as mere fiction, including the Jewish Exodus out of Egypt. He claims that the people who fled Egypt were not Jews, but ancient Egyptians. Page by page, Darkwah forces readers to reevaluate their entire spiritual foundations, which was the whole point for him, too. "There is a quarrel between faith and reason" Darkwah says. "When I was growing up, if you questioned the Bible you were not just blaspheming the preacher or the Bible, but God. But God has helped me to reverse the faith versus reasoning quarrel. Now, I am reasoning into faith. Originally I just had faith. But, as I learned more, I began to reason myself into faith.

"It also gave me a lot of power," Darkwah continues. "People say I am powerful, but it is not me, it's the information I have."

When asked what African Americans and Africans should do with this information, his answer is simple. "Claim it. It will give you the courage and boldness to face the future."

Packed full of enlightening information, this book is not for the casual reader. But those seeking spiritual enlightenment need not fret. Even the novice will walk away with a new light on Christianity.

Darkwah has extended an open invitation to any scholar or religious person who wants to debate him. His next book, The Original Black Jesus and Christian Europe's False White Christ is currently in progress.