Nope. What I'm saying is that Christianity was familiar prior to the Portuguese incursions of the 15th Century in West Africa. What our ancestors 'accepted' were the spiritual aspects of the religion, same with Islam, since they had been practicing them for a thousand+ years prior. John Henrik Clarke goes into a lot more detail about the subject.
To some of them, certainly, but not most of them, and not in the general sense in which you're extending the claim. Furthermore, most Christianity in West Africa was practiced in the eastern part of the northwest, not the places where slaves were sourced, so its even less relevant for African Americans. I'm familiar with Clarke's arguments, and I have a great deal of respect for him in general (coincidentally, I was watching one of his vids just before I saw your post,) but he is similarly inaccurate for a number of reasons. Islam was much, much more familiar than Christianity, which was almost nonexistent. Especially between the slave coast and the Congo (until the Portugese,) the largest stretch of Africa from which slaves were shipped, there was no real Christian presence ever, even before Islam (which itself wasn't so common in most of that stretch, either, most Muslim slaves coming from Senegambia.)
The second part of this is his argument that the West Africans were practicing religions from which Christianity liberally borrowed, which is also untrue. Those Northeast African and Egyptian beliefs (which I completely agree were influences on Abrahamic religion) were completely nonexistent in Central-west Africa, nor do they have any cognates or shared ancestry with the belief systems in those areas.
I find Clarke's arguments on the matter to be a similar kind of ultimately Eurocentric Afrocentrism as one finds among certain Muslims who make similar claims about Islam's place in pre-slavery African history, both of which also ignore that Christianity and Islam both saw their greatest expansion on the continent during and because of European colonialism. In trying to reconstruct a pre-slavery identity, they both end up relying strongly on a particularly European notion of identity, resulting in European isomorphism rather than something historically accurate. Even Afrocentrists who are interested in native, non-Abrahamic faiths do this sometimes. Nobody really wants to be a pagan... it's one of the final frontiers of Eurocentrism in the area of Black history.
Which part is the lie though? If its the shaka zulu being gay part i cant say either way..But its disingenuous to act like the white man brought homosexuality to Africa.
