Knowledge uniquely available in Africa
Marian Zeitlin, Director, GENSEN Living & Learning Center

Ancient human culture has no DNA enabling us to decode it. It is often irretrievably destroyed by social evolution. While we can imagine how we would have lived in certain spacial configurations and with certain basic resources, and with the intimacy that these human scale environments make possible, we can't re-experience or recreate them.

Many elements of our universal past may persist unchanged in Africa's remote villages, because of severe environmental constraints. These include geographical isolation caused by the Sahara desert, deficiencies in species capable of domestication, infrequent and deficient rainfall, fragile soils, and virulent tropical diseases and in some environments chronic hunger caused by an insufficient food supply. Many rural African lifestyles predate the stratification of society and the development of private ownership of material goods as we know it.

Despite numerous cultural differences catalogued by anthropologists, many if not most of the superstitions and spiritual beliefs common across the world today still survive in earlier versions in Africa, from the original meaning of being "bathed in the blood of the lamb," to black cats, sacred groves, stone circles (see picture of senegambian stone circles) and reincarnation. These beliefs exist in Africa not as fragments of mythical oral or written history, but as parts of complete bodies of knowledge that explain their origins and the logic leading to their continuing manifestion. I have found this only in Africa and not in villages in Pakistan, China, Indonesia and other countries in which I have lived and worked, where the successive beliefs of past layers of civilization have errased -- not folk rituals as such -- but the knowledge of their origins and deeper meanings. Historic periods of occupation by conquoring cultures also have destroyed the confidence of village communities in their ability to affirm and create truth through direct communication with the invisible world of their ancestral beliefs -- apart from the religious truths of the world religions .