African Culture verses Spirituality

Written by Maleke Montshiwagae

The system of white supremacy and black inferiority through tools such as Christianity has been successful in rendering the memory of the black people incapable of remembering that spirituality is a crucial component of the African culture.

The South African pocket Oxford dictionary defines culture as an intellectual and artistic achievement or expression. With this definition in mind, the writings in the corpus hermeticum and hermetic traditions illustrates that the Egyptian hermetic writers put on paper the experience of the interior liberated knowledge, which one writer G.R.S Mead understood to be the distillations of profound spiritual and psychological experiences. It is important to note that these were not philosophical tracts but a communication of interior and visionary reality. The hermetic writings did not have allocated writers and hence were all anonymous because they believed that anything written through this inspiration of true wisdom was actually written by the divine intellectual power or the God of wisdom, and also that personal credit was not in line with the pursuit of spiritual matters. This was the culture of the immemorial hermetic communities in Egypt, Africa. An example of these African writings is captured below:


''Upon a time while my mind was meditating on the things that are, my thought was raised to a great height, while the physical senses of my body were held back—just as are the senses of men who are heavy with sleep after a large meal, or from fatigue of body.

I thought I heard a Being more than vast—in size beyond all bounds—called out my name and say: "What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know?"

And I said: "Who art thou?"

He answered: "I am Shepherd of Men, Mind of all-Masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I am with thee everywhere."
And I replied: "I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God.

This (I said) is what I desire to hear.

"He answered me: "Hold in thy mind all thou wouldst know, and I will teach thee."

And with these words His aspect changed; and straightway, in the twinkling of an eye, all things were opened to me. And I saw a limitless Vision: all things turned into Light—sweet, joyous Light. And I became transported as I gazed....(Poemandres, v.1-4)''


Pocket Oxford dictionary continues to define spiritualism as a belief in, and supposed practice of communication with the dead, especially through mediums. One of the core understandings by Africans now and in ancient times is that, life is composed of the physical and spiritual realms in which the spirit continues to live eternally after death or in the afterlife. This point is clearly brought through in the hermetic writings were the understanding was that, the physical body formed a limitation to the spirit and which leads to unconsciousness, the body as a limitation forms a confinement from which the spirit must be liberated.


It is therefore not surprising to find African spiritual guardians and graduates like the Sangomas in the black communities being able to communicate with our ancestors in the spiritual realm into which their[ancestors] spirits have been liberated, this ability is made possible and imparted by the intellectual divine power or God. If Sangomas were to write down their interior and visionary experiences, they would produce writings similar to the hermetic writings and I would imagine that our Christian faith fellows would also refer to those writings as God inspired, which in fact would be the case as that is exactly how African culture understands and declares it!

It is also an established fact that these wisdom manifestations were the true inspirations to the bible even though not acknowledged as such for reasons of oppression of the black race by hiding away this truth from them. The transferring of this knowledge to the Bible is well known, this happened because the Jews spent a significant amount of time in Egypt and adopted these writings to suit their culture but now presenting it as if it was theirs. The Romans and Arabs were too exposed to this great knowledge, the Greeks even considered the black Egyptians the fathers of their world.

It is therefore evident that spirituality emanates and inherently manifest from the African culture, it cannot be possible to separate the two.