On an eddy of a wind rising from the breath of the world, a bold dream rides: to reanimate the mythologies of Africa and seed the earth with the knowledge of its gods, so that they might be as storied as any Olympian.

An audacious dream—unspeakably beautiful—it has captured my heart. It speaks my name, because, haunted by the vacuum left by the dismantling, demonization, and erasure of the mythologies and moral architectures that once ordered African lives, I conceived a return of those stories. As new storms of injustice, othering, and exploitation threaten to break over the lives of people of sub-Saharan African descent worldwide, I have begun a restoration of those pantheons and the power they augur.

In classrooms today, children can name the gods of Mount Olympus, but even African children struggle to name the Orisas, Yoruba sky worlds, or Igbo covenant trees. This is no accident: Africa’s mythologies and their oral legacies have been largely dismissed.

Erasure ensued, engineered through epistemic severing, labeling African mythologies primitive, sacred artifacts “ethnography,” never literature or philosophy. Their Western counterparts were preserved and offered pedestals, with degrees in Classics, syllabi on Latin, Norse, and Sanskrit texts, yet no African parallels in major institutions.

The “twin evils” fractured memory, not just borders. Slavery severed roots and names. Colonialism disrupted continuity, connections, and kin. For Africa and its diasporas, myth is history’s metaphorical twin—distorted, misreported, but still alive—calling for reframing. Mythologies are how civilizations narrate themselves, with values and traditions derived from them. Obscured and fragmented, these systems encoded ecological insight, ethical frameworks, medical knowledge, and technologies of care. In losing them, we are bereft not only of Africa’s stories but also of the infrastructure of African genius and morality.

This is the purpose of The Afrodeities Codex, my mytho-literary project reconstructing African cosmologies. It is born of the bold dream to bear witness to the grandeur of Africa’s mythic past. It rests on this belief: African mythologies deserve the same cultural platform long granted to European pantheons, with Sango as well-known as Thor.

No more a call to worship than the Classics is a call to genuflection; this is an invitation to reclaim ancestral systems of ethics, law, and collective care encoded in mythology.

Some African mythologies survived, but in fractured forms. While there is living practice across the diaspora and rural communities in Africa, it is uneven and viewed as superstition, not sacred infrastructure; cultural aesthetic, not civic memory; backwards, not foundational. This positioning reinforces the narrative that Africa had no symbolic systems of worth. Restoration is a refusal of extinction and a demand for parity.

From the Dahomey cosmos to Ife’s origin stories, African mythologies predate Greek myths by more than 1,000 years. The gods governed the heavens, rivers, markets, fertility, and morality, serving as connective tissue across language and geography. Pan-regional deities such as Mami Wata, masquerades, festivals, and initiations functioned as performative mythical archives. Their loss engendered the disappearance of spiritual literacy and communal frameworks of reciprocity and interdependence.

Reanimation is an ethical response to that loss: for Africans whose ancestral disconnection has been institutionalized; for diasporans seeking to mend the ruptures of displacement; and for a global public long offered European myths as cultural inheritance, while African mythology remains exoticized trivia.

Precolonial Africa did not separate myth from medicine, law, or mathematics. The Ishango Bone holds a 20,000-year-old mathematical code—likely cosmological. The Timbuktu manuscripts spanned astronomy, medicine, and ethics, often written in poetic, symbolic forms that infused the sacred into their logic and structure. Myth was method, teaching counting, healing, and living in balance.

While no one prays to Zeus, his name and legend live on as cultural capital. African gods, by contrast, are rarely granted intellectual legitimacy—a clear colonial consequence. Reanimation will restore mythologies as frameworks of memory, morality, and meaning. The Codex is a design response to design decisions, such as the systems preventing African cosmologies from functioning as knowledge, canon, and source code; school curricula that omit African mythology entirely—academic gatekeeping denying its philosophical seriousness; publishing markets that aestheticize but don’t invest; and AI systems trained on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian models while excluding African data. .

Mythologies are narrative bones, their lessons, ligaments of knowledge that once bound symbolic, ethical, and spiritual architectures, some of which endured in river names, encrypted rituals, and diaspora religions. The Orisa reborn in Candomblé, Vodou, and Santería. Ancestral codes in Nsibidi’s visual grammar preserved by Ekpe societies. Myth encrypted in ritual, memory, performance, flickering in fragmentary echoes, awaiting reassembly.

African cosmologies were carried into visual symbolic systems—Nsibidi, Adinkra, Ge’ez—deeply layered, mytho-linguistic tools, transmitting memory, law, and diplomacy that were maps of intellectual sovereignty. Rebuilding legibility across literature, scholarship, and public imagination is the purpose of the Codex; showing what once was ordered and can be again is essential to changing political relations and reducing anti-Black racism. The Codex is archival but also canon-making.

Cultural moments such as Black Panther, Black Is King, and Afrofuturism revived a possibly fleeting interest in African cosmologies, but attention does not equal depth, nor interest restoration.

The Afrodeities Codex offers repair, not gesture, an intellectual infrastructure to reintroduce African mythologies as full systems of knowledge: complex, evolving, essential.

Even if these cosmologies had no contemporary application— and I believe they do—they still deserve rescue, preservation, and light for what they represent. Their vanishing stems not from irrelevance, but from colonial violence and systemic neglect, the consequences of which are absurdities such as the narrative that Africa had no writing, that African thought was primitive because it was oral, claims belied by feats like Lalibela’s rock-hewn churches, Aksum’s stelae, or the great earthworks of Sungbo’s Eredo.

Reanimation begins with naming the erasure, enumerating the losses, then rebuilding, with reverence, intention, and invention. From Nok figurines to the stone cities of Great Zimbabwe, myth was never abstract. It was etched in form and inhabited matter. Now, it is a bridge back to the African spine of the world’s story.

Mythology migrated, moving through music, drum codes, ritual, and chant. Griots were living archives, oral historians and poetic diplomats who transmitted myth not just as story, but as score—lyrical, rhythmic, instrumental. Their performances carried prophecy, law, and lineage, echoing across trade routes and migrations. Myth became a shared symbolic tableau, gods governing rivers, ancestors walking beside the living.

Uncredited, European fables, folklore, and fairy tales echo African motifs: talking animals, tricksters, shapeshifters, the traveling musician, and the uncanny power of music.

You can hear the echoes still, in Afrobeat lyrics, spiritual jazz, and ceremonial rhythms from Bahia to Brooklyn. Mythology is the subtext of the conductor’s score. It must now become the foreground, the heartbeat of the dream, no longer just the echo.

Yes, the wind is carrying it still. The dream rides on. The Codex continues.