THE MENTAL EMANCIPATION OF AFRICANS FROM THE PARADIGM OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE'S PILGRIMAGE THROUGH THE DESERT IN EXODUS

Abstract

Hebrew people had become a liberated community, a free people, and they should live as such. But these people who left Egypt were not free; they were still in captivity. Although they had left Egypt, the newly freed Hebrew people still carried Egypt in their minds in the form of perceptions, self-definitions, self-reference and conception of realities. The slave mentality became deeply ingrained in their psyches. Jewish scholars claim that the Hebrew people wandered 40 years in the desert to recover their Jewish, Yahweh-centered system of thought. The pilgrimage was an essential component in the recovery and reconstitution of a Jewish identity and practice. In this way, the wanderings through the desert could be considered a kind of decolonial process after the liberation of Egyptian slavery. From this, we want to demonstrate how the desert experience served as a process of liberation (detoxification) of the Hebrew mind from Egyptian corruption, and was fundamental in the formation of radically segregated individuals in a liberated and interdependent Jewish nation. We will make this analysis a proposal for the path that African people can follow to enslave their minds after colonization.