Sons of Ham

I first heard about Africans being the 'Sons of Ham' while reading Barbara Kingsoliver's Poisonwood Bible, which is a story about missionaries from Mississippi and Georgia who went to the Belgian Congo (later Zaire and now Democratic Republic of Congo) around the time of its independence in 1960. It became one of my favorite books while in high school because I went to DRC before reading the book. The book retells some of the racist attitudes the white Christians had against their congregations and how the missionary father faltered with the church while his daughters got to know the Congolese. One of the daughters mentioned that her church called the Africans the 'sons of Ham,' and this term comes from a story about Noah after he built the ark and saw the rainbow. Here is the passage:

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Jaspheth (Ham was the father of Canaan). These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth. Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." he also said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave." (Genesis 9:18-27)

There had been several interpretations for this passage, including the insinuation that 'seeing his father's nakedness' was an allusion to Ham sleeping with Noah's wife and thus begetting Canaan. During the Middle Ages, the Church developed different theories, including one that sins had darkened the 'Sons of Ham.' Part of this idea came from the mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) who claimed to have seen a dark cloud falling onto the sons of Ham so that they lost their whiteness. Christian theologians discredited this theory in the 1800s because the curse feel on the Canaanites, whom the Romans had completely scattered by 149 BC. Nevertheless, the theory that Africans were the cursed descendants of Ham became widely accepted in European churches during the slave trade of the 1700s and 1800s in order to justify the colonization and subjugation of the continent. Today, I have never heard anyone mention this theory seriously because it is complete nonsense. In fact, I believe that almost no Christian group has accepted this theory unless they were trying to colonize Africa.

While I was looking through my Scottish cousins' family bible with all the signatures of our descendants as they filled out the marriage and birth pages in the beginning of the book, I found the map that I've posted here. This map shows the 'probable settlements of the descendants of Noah,' and the 'descendants of Ham' are in Africa. I'm not sure who the exact publisher is or when it was published, but I believe it was published in Edinburgh before 1901. I found it fascinating to see this page because the map is incredibly racist and theologically inept. It is an incredible primary source of racist colonial sentiments and of how Christians can warp the Bible for their own purposes. Yet somehow the map got put into the Bible.