10,000 BCE: (Niger-Congo Monotheism — The Belief in a Single Creator God Going Back to Probably the Earliest Speakers of Niger-Congo Languages in Parts of Ma…

10,000 BCE: (Niger-Congo Monotheism — The Belief in a Single Creator God Going Back to Probably the Earliest Speakers of Niger-Congo Languages in Parts of Mali in Around the Tenth Millennium BCE, the Comparative Cultural Evidence Strongly Favoring This Conclusion Because the Belief Was Nearly Universal Among Niger-Congo Peoples Right Across the Continent and Only Among Niger-Congo Peoples, the Name *Nyambe Reconstructable to at Least the Proto-South Volta-Congo Language of the Sixth Millennium BCE, Derived from an Earlier Verb Meaning “to Begin”): Among Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, the belief in a single Creator God goes back to probably the earliest speakers of Niger-Congo languages, proposed to have inhabited parts of Mali in around the tenth millennium BCE. The comparative cultural evidence strongly favors this conclusion, for the straightforward reason that in recent ages this belief was nearly universal among Niger-Congo peoples right across the continent, and only among Niger-Congo peoples. While a word for the Creator God cannot yet be reconstructed all the way back to the proto-Niger-Congo language, a name — *Nyambe — can be reconstructed for this Being at least as far back as the proto-South Volta-Congo language of the sixth millennium BCE. The noun derives, fittingly, from an earlier verb meaning “to begin.” The name of God among hundreds of millions of Africans — Nyambe, Nyame, Nzambi, and all its reflexes across the vast Niger-Congo-speaking world — is a word that means, at its root, “The Beginner.” The One Who Starts Things. The linguistic reconstruction cannot yet push the word all the way back to proto-Niger-Congo, but the universality of the belief among Niger-Congo peoples and its absence among non-Niger-Congo peoples makes the conclusion almost inescapable: this was a belief that the earliest Niger-Congo speakers carried with them when they began their expansion from Mali in the tenth millennium BCE, and their descendants carried it with them to every corner of the continent that Niger-Congo languages reached. When a Yoruba worshipper in Nigeria invokes Olodumare, when a Zulu speaker in South Africa acknowledges uNkulunkulu, when a Kikongo speaker in the Congo basin calls upon Nzambi — they are all, at the deepest level, invoking a conception of divine unity that their linguistic ancestors formulated twelve thousand years ago in the grasslands of Mali. Monotheism was not revealed on Mount Sinai. It was conceived in West Africa, millennia before Moses was born.