Istwa Nou

Across the societies that speak Nilo-Saharan languages, the divine is understood as a single pervasive Spirit Force. Anthropologists working in a range of these communities settled on the word Divinity for it. The names used follow a consistent pattern: they tie Divinity to the sky, and through the sky to rain and often to lightning. People do call on particular named spirits for help, and they understand those spirits as manifestations of the one Divinity rather than as separate beings with standing of their own. Western theology has a term for exactly that relationship between the one and its appearances, hypostasis, and it took several centuries of argument to arrive at it. The Nilo-Saharan conception traces back to the ninth millennium BCE. It is a complete system with its own internal logic, and it sits alongside the Creator God of the Niger-Congo tradition as the second monotheism worked out in Africa long before comparable ideas surface anywhere in the Middle East.

Around the seventh or sixth millennium BCE an idea of the divine held by Nilo-Saharan speakers passed to their neighbours in the Horn of Africa, communities speaking early languages of the Cushitic branch of the Afrasian family. From there it moved again, into many of the Omotic-speaking peoples of the southern Ethiopian highlands. It displaced the older Afrasian henotheism, in which a clan gives its allegiance to a god of its own, almost everywhere it went. A few Omotic societies in the far southwestern highlands kept the older system, and their survival is how the change can be dated at all. The timing is what makes this worth recording. There were no written records, no long-distance trade routes, no missionaries and no empires. Religious systems were still crossing the deepest divisions in African linguistic geography and rebuilding the beliefs of whole regions. The tools that recover this are comparative linguistics, reconstructed vocabulary and the distribution of leftovers. Nothing else reaches that far back.