
Manuscript page from the Kebra Nagast
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When I tell people that I do research on early modern African literature or medieval African literature, there is often a perceptible pause as people try to process this information. “Huh?” I can hear them thinking and they are right. Officially, African literature from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century doesn’t exist. As we all know, if you type something into Google and you get zero hits, it’s official, it doesn’t exist. (This is the new reality of the real—it must be virtual to be authenticated.)
But, in fact, Google be damned, pre-nineteenth century African literature does exist. Further, this African literature is vast and varied, far beyond the ability of one person to do justice to in a lifetime, much less in one presentation like this. Whatever limits you can imagine to these African literatures, they exceed them. Medieval and early modern Africans created literature not just in Europe but also on the African continent; not just orally, but textually; not just in African languages, but in European languages; not just for European consumption, but for their own consumption; and not just in diaries and letters, but in epics and poetry. Yet, no book of literary scholarship has yet addressed this literature.
Given the short time I have today, I cannot do much to introduce you to this literature beyond the handout. I also cannot talk much about my larger project of looking at how these African texts from before the nineteenth century might have shaped European debates and literature or the ways in which European authors were sometimes possessed by alternative, African discursive regimes and then produced possessed texts that circulated, as contagious objects, in European centers, altering European representations and identities....
Today, instead, I am going to talk about a text from the 1300s. It is written in an indigenous African language using an indigenous African alphabet about an indigenous African woman. It is perhaps the most important text you have never heard of....
In the fourteenth century, Ethiopian scribes recorded the holy text of the Kebra Nagast (The glory of the kings). Written in the ancient Ethiopian scholarly language of Ge’ez, this thick volume articulates Ethiopian narratives of origin, parts of which were told for many centuries before the fourteenth century and parts of which are a refashioning of various biblical texts. Elaborating on an anecdote found in the Old Testament, the Kebra Nagast devotes forty chapters (of over one hundred total chapters) to describing how the Ethiopians took the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites, became the chosen people of God, and started a new Zion. It also argues that Ethiopia’s three-thousand-year–old line of emperors are descended from the tenth-century BCE King Solomon and an Ethiopian woman, called Maqeda or Candace, or the Queen of Sheba. In a direct strike at the heart of three world religions, the Ethiopians claim the queen as their own and recast her at the center of global history. |
This remarkable Ethiopian narrative about Solomon and Sheba must be “one of the most powerful and influential national sagas anywhere in the world,” writes the historian Edward Ullendorff. This narrative has enabled a seven-hundred–year dynasty (the Solomonic dynasty), has been retold continuously for maybe a millennia, is still widely believed by tens of millions of modern Ethiopians, and was written into the Ethiopian constitution of 1955 as historical truth. Tens of thousands in the African diasporic religion of Rastafarianism also believe in the Kebra Nagast’s message of a black Israelite savior. Wild speculation about Ethiopia and the location of the Ark of the Covenant continues in books, films, and literally tens of thousands of web pages. It would not surprise me if, two hundred years from now, the Kebra Nagast was as well-known a sacred text as the New Testament or the Bhāgavata.
I am not going to talk today, however, about whether the Kebra Nagast represents real historical events or holds eternal spiritual truths. My interest today is in representation. That is, how does the medieval Kebra Nagast represent the Queen of Sheba and might its portrayal of gendered power have shaped medieval European representation?
When considering the circulation of the Kebra Nagast in Europe, it is important to remember how different the medieval Ethiopian text is from the medieval Islamic and Jewish texts about the Queen of Sheba, which Europeans might have also heard.... The medieval Islamic and Jewish traditions feature a foolish, humiliated, and powerless queen who submits to a magically empowered king.... They focus on the queen’s lack of womanliness (her hairy legs) and on her lack of sophistication (in mistaking a mirror for a pool).... Both suggest that she is descended from demons, is uncivilized, has no sense of propriety, and is intentionally, if unsuccessfully, seductive.... In stark contrast, the African Christian tradition centers on an African woman, one who is beautiful, wise, virtuous, wealthy, and powerful.... She is not demonic but pure, not naïve but wise, not subordinate but free. Neither the Jewish nor the Islamic tradition presents her as more powerful than Solomon. In the African Christian tradition, she is...
Examining this medieval African text has suggested that a closer engagement with such indigenous literature is essential if we are to begin to understand the complex ways in which African women have negotiated power on the continent and the extraordinary ways in which their representation and power may have possessed the representations of Europeans. Further, researching and teaching these texts may help extinguish ideas of Africa as a place where women are most oppressed and most in need of European libratory projects. Certainly, so long as these important literatures of medieval and early modern Africa remain not just overlooked but largely invisible, their contribution to global thought will be lost. I hope this talk has been a contribution to ending that invisibility.
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