Ethiopianism

Some of the ideas Garvey presents in the lessons from the School of African Philosophy are also similar to thought current in the Ethiopianist movement in Jamaica of the same period and to his own "African Fundamentalism." The idea of finding antecedents of Egyptian civilization in ancient Ethiopian culture---including the view that Ethiopians were the architects of the pyramids and of the Sphinx---is one such common link. The "leprosy" theory of Caucasian racial origin that Garvey presents in lesson 12 was also an ideological strain of Ethiopianism. By 1937, when Garvey taught the first course in African philosophy, the identification of the white man as a leper had become a part of emergent Rastafarian doctrine in Jamaica, which drew upon the older Ethiopianist reference to the Bible's Numbers 12:10, wherein Miriam becomes leprous---"white as snow." Garvey taught that Adam and Eve and their progeny were black and that Cain was the first leper, stricken white as a punishment by God for the murder of his brother, Abel. Garvey differed from Ethiopianist teachings when he claimed that Tutankhamen and other Egyptians were black people who enslaved the Hebrews. For many adherents of Ethiopianism, people of African descent-enslaved and subjected to dispersion from their ancestral African homeland---were strongly identified with the Jews; indeed, some believed that black people were actual descendants of the Jews who had experienced slavery. "The Negro must be [the] original Children of the Sun, of Is-Ra-El," declared the Norfolk Journal and Guide in 1924, "as the Lord appears to make an opening for them where none appeared to exist."