by

                                                           Mama Zogbé, Chief Hounon-Amengansie, M.Ed

 

              Why No African-American/Diaspora Family should be without the Tchamba

 

 

 

          

                           Tchamba Shrine Augusta, GA,

   The Return of the Divine Slave Ancestors to the Diaspora

BRIEF INTRODUCTION:

 

 

 

            

             The history of the African is not culturally static and ethnically fragmented as western historians have mistakenly assumed.  The western anthropological interpretation of  African history has relegated her entire cultural and spiritual evolution to little more than remote, tiny village tribal kingdoms, that never evolved beyond petty border skirmishes, “fetish worship,” and inter-ethnic warfare.  The history of both matriarchal and patriarchal Africa has never been properly revealed. In truth,  Africans have been migrating out of Africa and erecting magnificent kingdoms influencing the civilization of humanity for thousands of years.   Since the beginning, the African sacerdotal spiritual orders were the dominate religions of the ancient world bar none.

 

             Africa’s matriarchal sacerdotal traditions have been so completely suppressed and destroyed that even Africans have lost memory of them.  However, as East Africa ‘s glory began to wane, making her vulnerable to devastating invasions from her Assyrian, Turkish, Greek and Roman enemies, the wholesale enslavement of Africans which began with the selling-off and enslavement of its matriarchs who refused to submit to Africa’s evolving  patriarchy, continued unabated.  In the religion of Vodoun, whose continuous span across time extends to ancient Ionia (Afro-Greece), and Afro-Rome, the ancestral Sibs (denominations) were established to pay homage to these lost ancestors who now found themselves enslaved in the foreign lands which they once ruled and were highly regarded.       Specialized deities who’d accompanied the Africans in their slave journey were also honored. 

 

             What is also little discussed is the historical reality that when Mohammedan, patriarchal Islam began its  hostile descent into North Africa, the  selling and enslavement of Africans began first with these newly converted Fulani  (Berber) Africans. The Fulani are documented to be some of the oldest Africans in Africa, their heritage extending to every major location throughout the ancient world, to include India, Greece, Rome, Turkey etc.,. They are known to have interbred, and culturally intermixed, and were absorbed by many African ethnic groups either through warfare, or their enslavement of them to the Arab traders.  Some of the first groups that were sold into slavery were the ancient Fulani matriarchal, sacerdotal women of whose kingdoms had been on the decline throughout the ancient world, and who adamantly refused to convert (as millions of their fellow men)  to Mohammedan, patriarchal Islam.

 

              As a result, some of the first and oldest ancestral orders created to honor the ancestors and deities of the enslaved Africans began with them in the East, eventually making its way to West and Central Africa.  It is also for this reason that the ancestral slave orders of the Vodoun are matriarchal and one can only receive this initiation through a female Tchamba priestess.  The continuity of Africans enslaved across the ancient and modern world, whose ancestors are re-established and honored in indigenous religions across Africa, also include African-Americans, many of whom possess little knowledge of their existence or their spiritual birthright to these ancient ancestral traditions.  Few realize that their own enslaved ancestors have returned to one of the oldest sacerdotal orders known today  in West African Vodoun as  Mama Tchamba. A spiritual tradition first established during ancient times as a result of the sale and forced enslavement of their earliest ancient mothers and fathers. What few in the Diaspora also do not realize is that many of their ancestors who were captured and enslaved in the West had already descended from these ancient ancestral slave Tchamba Sibs (denominations) long before their arrival in America!  The history of their great-great-great mothers and fathers never have been passed down to them as a result of its interruption during the Trans-Atlanta Slavery.

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