Unmasking Hegemonic Monotheism: An Africalogical1 Assessment via Indigenous Afrikan Cosmology by Ahati N. N. Toure, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Africana History and Africana Studies Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy Delaware State University, Dover, Delaware
[email protected] Abstract This essay comparatively examines the monotheistic conception of the Judaeo-Christian god Yahweh and West Afrikan conceptions of The God and of the divinities or gods. Patterned after Akhenaton’s (Amenhotep IV) construction of the neter Aton, the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh possesses the characteristics of a divinity and not The God, according to priestly authorities and scholarly evidence in the Yoruba, Akan, Ewe, Ga, Kemetic, and Judaeo-Christian traditions. The evidence examined further suggests that a proper definition of both Judaeo-Christian and Islamic monotheism in Kemetic and West Afrikan terms is one-divinityism. This term signifies the promotion of a single divinity as superior to all other divinities, which are dismissed as false gods. One-divinityism (monotheism) also contends that the championed divinity is, in actuality, the universal supreme force, or The God, as comprehended within the West Afrikan priestly traditions. 134 The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.3, no.10, September 2010 1 Molefi Kete Asante has argued that the discipline of Africalogy (or Africana Studies) is by definition “the Afrocentric study of phenomena, events, ideas, and personalities related to Africa.” Importantly, he observes, the “mere study of phenomena of Africa is not Africalogy but some other intellectual enterprise. The scholar who generates research questions based on the centrality of Africa is engaged in a very different research inquiry than the one who imposes Western criteria on the phenomena.” See Molefi K.