Black Education / Schools : The African Superhighway of Wisdom

Omowale Jabali

The Cosmic Journeyman
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Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages. The systematic methods of morphology, phonology and typology have been the tools par excellence in bringing to light similarities in African languages. The principle and most well established tool of the trade is the comparative method. There is however a limit to the comparative method in which all comparatists seek to avoid: language contact. If two or more cultures are in regular contact with each other due to trade, conquest or other reasons, vocabulary (and other innovations) is bound to be shared between languages. In order for the comparative method to be effective, one must eliminate all possibilities of borrowings and this makes it difficult when we try to reconstruct a proto-language from unrelated cultures who share a large amount of lexical items. A second limitation to the comparative method is that it is very good at telling you “what” about a lexeme, but it does a poor job at telling you “why.” For instance, the Niger-Congo stem -ni- means “soul, spirit and self.” One would ask, “How does the soul relate to the self?” How does the root soul extend to become identified with the self, then a person (mani), then to a king (ani) and then to a character in the Egyptian book of Coming Forth by Day (Ani)? How does Ani of the Book of Coming Forth by Day relate to the Zulu Ena? When the term ni left Africa for Europe and became the word animus (from whence animal derived), how did this relate to totenism in ancient cultures? What did animals symbolize? In order to answer these questions correctly, you can‟t simply analyze vocabulary from a dictionary: you have to be a part of a living tradition that explains the expanded meanings of these liturgical terms.
Africa‟s system of education is two-fold: 1) you have a revealed front-view of information given to the public and 2) you have a concealed back-view which is reserved for initiates. The information given to those initiated is not given to the lay public and definitely not to any anthropologists. You have to earn the information you seek and being from Oxford university will not get you access to this information. It has been reported by people such as Amadou Hampate Ba that priests are required to lie to those who are not willing to go through the trials and tribulations the normal citizens had to go through to obtain that information. This is why I regard little the information given by historians, anthropologists and linguists who have not been initiated into African systems of thought because they lack the insight, or I should say, they do not possess the keys which unlock the secrets of African cultures. In regards to ancient Egyptian civilization, when it comes to its development and influence, you basically have two schools of thought in the African-Centered community. The first school assumes that the Nile Valley is the cradle of African civilizations and that all, or most of the cultures of Africa can be traced to the Nile Valley. Some posit that the present-day cultural similarities are “fossilizations” of ancient Egyptian culture. The second school of thought posits that there were even older civilizations in Africa, that due to extreme weather conditions in North Africa, it forced the people of the first civilizations all across to migrate all over Africa causing a population explosion in the Nile Valley in which ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilization is the result. Due to foreign invasions and other strife, over the 3000 years of “alleged” Egyptian history, some groups began to leave the Nile Valley seeking more peaceful conditions and went back into the interior of the continent whose descendents established the modern cultures we see today. As a result of my years of research on the subject, I say it is a bit of both theories with more weight on the later. The question is, how do you account for all of the so-called Egyptian “fossilizations” in language, iconography, and religious practices all across the continent of Africa; and in some respects the world? If the cultures that we can prove have affinities with ancient Egyptian civilization are in fact remnants of ancient Egyptians, then why do we not see a replication (in full) of ancient Egyptian society in modern times in Africa? A greater question that historians fail to ask is, “If pharaonic Egypt is the result of the assimilation of African cultures over time into one political unit, what ideas are „Egyptian‟ and what ideas are indigenous to the area?” Maybe this example will make it clearer for the reader. The Edfu text instructs us that a wave of Heru kings from the south of Ta-Meri conquered what is now Egypt and established the first dynasties. It is physically and theoretically impossible to conquer a people if there are in fact no people there to conquer. In other words, the Heru kings conquered an already established civilization with human beings residing there that had their own customs, languages and histories. What‟s most unique about Ta-Meri is that instead of replacing the cultures that existed in the conquered areas, they in-fact incorporated the native cultural ideas into the grander political culture we know today as Ta-Meri. So if this is indeed the case, we are right in asking what is native and what is not? If Egypt was the “New York” of Africa at the time, and the result of the rise of Ta-Meri is based on the influx of peoples from all over Africa, did the people all of a sudden lose ties with their ancestral homes? Did the people all of a sudden forget about where they came from and the routes to get back there? If people travelled from all over the known world to study in Egypt, did ALL of them not return back home to share what they learned? This poses a dilemma for historians because one cannot logically imply that ALL of the “fossils” that remains in modern African cultures are natively Egyptian. What if some of those concepts are preserved in certain modern cultures because they are in-fact the originators of the ideas and practices in which the ancient Egyptians incorporated into their society? One should be asking, why were there so many “gods” in ancient Egyptian society that served the same functions over time as other “gods”? Why do you have upwards to 10 words in the Egyptian language that represent the same concepts: for example, “to be” or “to exist” or words for “man” and “people.” The answer to these questions is that there was a continent wide sharing of information in ancient times. For some reason historians are of the mind-set that the Egyptians stayed in one spot and did not travel to LEARN. If some do concede that some Egyptians left Egypt, they do it on the contention that they set off to conquer or teach: never to learn from others. Those of us who are familiar with how indigenous education works on the continent of Africa knows that this cannot be the case. As the Bairu proverb states, “A child who has never left home says my mother is the best cook.” In other words, it is by travelling and learning under various teachers that one gains wisdom. This is true today as it was 8000 years ago. What historians may not be familiar with is the fact that in Africa, there is a tradition of cross continental education that has existed since before pharaonic times. Because of this tradition, the Africans have established “intellectual trade” routes that Dr. Kykosa Kajangu calls “The Super Highway of Wisdom” that wisdom seekers travelled to gain knowledge of the world and beyond. This super highway of wisdom still exists today and I posit that this is why you see identical philosophies and motifs across Africa and the world in general. Another misconception posed by anthropologists is that things like mountains and deserts were “barriers” for travel among African people. We are to believe that Europeans can survive in mountains and caves in the Caucuses, and brave the ice deserts in the arctic, but Africans do not have the fortitude to traverse the deserts of Africa to see a relative across the continent: the same people who left Africa to populate the earth? We come to find out that this is not the case and in fact is an insult to our intelligence. I was told about this super highway of wisdom about 10 years ago by an elder master teacher. He informed me at the time that he can go anywhere in Africa and speak to elders who all learned a secret language in which they could speak to each other. This teacher of mine has been initiated into four African sacred societies that I know of. He is most active in the Yoruba system of Ifa. He informed me of some other things which I will not divulge here. Needless to say, he introduced me to an ancient practice of education that despite extreme colonial pressures, it has not been broken. I can say today definitively that this highway does in fact exist and it is the reason why Nommo of the Dogon is found among the Zulu. It is how the Kongo Dikenga became the Four Moments of the Sun in ancient Egypt. It is how the god Itn became Itongo in South Africa. I speak about this today because we do have initiated scholars who have written about this superhighway of wisdom and it is through their writings that we will get a better understanding of exactly what it is and how African cultures influence each other to this very date. This will also put a stumbling block to those historians who claim there was no contact between Egyptians and other Black African nations. It will also explain why you find certain teachings in one area of Africa and not in the other. I can tell the reader this from the jump; Africa‟s education system is hands on. You cannot simply read a lot of text books and get a handle on indigenous knowledge. As Amadou Hampate Ba states, “it is a living tradition.” Nature is the text book and there are certain things you can witness in nature in one location, that you cannot witness in another. This is why one must travel to experience the phenomenon in its natural environment. There are certain constellations that are not visible in certain parts of the world that you must travel there (at least back in the day) to witness. Certain herbs only grow in one spot. Certain “spirits” are native to certain environments and you must be initiated into how to properly interact with those spirits. This is why the system was set-up. At some point people became familiar with each other and who were great teachers or what not. Obviously they had to keep record of where these people were located. I have always posited that some of the stories of Egyptian texts aren‟t stories, but maps to find certain teachers. This is why “Amen” would be a certain God of “this” area as opposed to some other God who is native to another area. It is all codification. Do you think they paid attention to the stars because they were trying to tell time? Or were they trying to get back home from a certain area? This is just something to think about. Before we move forward we must define what the super highway of wisdom is. This work will primarily just be quotations from scholars who are initiates of African systems speaking about the super highway of wisdom: Credo Mutwa of South Africa, K Bunseki Fu-Kiau of the Kongo, Amadou Hampate Ba of Mali, Priest Apetu of Ghana, Kykosa Kajangu of the Kongo, and Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig of Burkina Faso. It is Dr. Kykosa Kajangu who is responsible for coining the term, “the superhighway of wisdom.” Kajangu provides us with the best definition of the African Super Highway of Wisdom that I have found in print and it is his definition that will guide our study. In his book Wisdom Poetry (2006:131) he states: I call [the] ―superhighway of wisdom‖ the network that makes it possible to establish a dialogue of mutual enrichment among wisdom traditions. No single person is the mother of wisdom; it takes the sweat and tears of countless sages working together over thousands of years to build a wisdom tradition. Even when it is well built, a wisdom tradition cannot flourish alone for it needs to engage in dialogue with other wisdom traditions. It was for this end that ancient African wisdom traditions built a super highway of wisdom, which is still open to this day. (emphasis mine) Kajangu asserts that in order for a wisdom tradition to thrive, it must engage in dialogues with other centers of wisdom. In ancient, and present, times, people had a hunger for knowledge and would travel the globe to get it. On pg 133 Kajangu further states that: In the old days, wisdom seekers were constantly on the road looking for sages from whom to learn. Early we discussed possibly why African cultures have the same symbolism and concepts in their religious teachings. Most historians posit that this is the result of a common ancestral culture in which all of the modern African cultures developed. These are the ones who posit that the common ancestral culture was that of the Nile Valley. As Dr. Kajangu will inform us, the reason why there are common motifs is because of this superhighway of wisdom in which
they have been exchanging ideas for millennia. In his unpublished dissertation titled Beyond the Colonial Gaze (2005), he goes on to state: The various wisdom traditions in Africa have similar sacred arts because they have engaged in dialogues of mutual enrichment for thousands of years. It is possible to use the sacred arts to build a ―super-highway‖ of pre-Western modes of thought and being that can aid post-postcolonial scholars [initiated scholars] in their efforts to develop compelling theories about the field of indigenous African wisdom traditions. (emphasis mine) The most detailed account of this tradition, however, comes from Amadou Hampate Ba in his article titled The Living Tradition in UNESCO‟s General History of Africa Vol.1. He provides for us the ins and outs of this practice and it gives us some insight on how it was carried out in ancient times. His citation is going to be a bit lengthy, but it is necessary so that we get an accurate understanding of the dynamics and purpose of this method of education. As we will see, Hampate Ba echoes many of the sentiments stated by Kajangu. Amadou Hampate Ba discusses the life of a doma, or traditionalist, in the societies of the Fulani and the Bambara. He affirms the notion that one does not become wise by only learning in one‟s own village and why he must travel to gain more knowledge. He goes on to state (1976:194): Generally speaking, one does not become a doma-traditionalist by staying in one‟s village. A healer who wants to deepen his knowledge has to travel so as to learn about the different kinds of plants and study with other masters of the subject. The man who travels discovers and lives other initiations, notes the differences or similarities, broadens the scope of his understanding. Wherever he goes he takes part in meetings, hears historical tales, and lingers where he finds a transmitter of tradition who is skilled in initiation or in genealogy, in this way he comes into contact with the history and traditions of the countries he passes through. One can see that the man who has become a doma-traditionalis has been a seeker and a questioner all his life and will never cease to be one. The African of the savannah used to travel a great deal. The result was exchange and circulation of knowledge. That is why the collective historical memory in Africa is seldom limited to one territory. Rather it is linked with family lines or ethnic groups that have migrated across the continent. Many caravans used to plough their way across the country using a network of special routes traditionally protected by gods and kings (…) Upon arrival in a strange country travelers would go and ‗entrust their heads‘ to some man of standing who would thereby become their guarantor, for ‗to touch the stranger is to touch the host himself.‘ The great genealogist is necessarily always a great traveler. While a dieli [djele, griot] may rest content with knowing the genealogy of the particular family he is attached to, for a true genealogist – dieli or no – to increase in knowledge he has to travel about the country to learn the main ramifications of an ethnic group and then go trace the history of the branches that have emigrated. African Proverbs that deal with the Super Highway of Wisdom A child who has never left home says, “my mother is the best cook.” The child who travels far excels the elder of old time Those who have seen very little talk too much But those who have seem a great deal cannot find words to explain what they have gone through
Amadou Hampate Ba instructs us that sages used to travel great distances to learn and that this system integrated people from across the continent. This is very important because those who do concede that some travel took place in Africa, they claim that Africans did not travel outside of their immediate area to do so. Hampate Ba clears that up for us. Due to colonialism, Africans have had to keep quiet about this ancient practice because of fear of death by imperial powers. Dr. Fu-Kiau in his work African Cosmology of the Bantu Kongo tells us about how the once open schools of initiation had to go underground after Europeans came into the Kongo. He states: Because of their closed door policy to the non-initiated [biyinga], colonial powers decreed these institutions as dangerous to the survival of colonization. Consequently, these institutions were destroyed without taking into consideration their social, cultural, educational, spiritual or moral values. Many of their unyielding leading masters [ngudia-nganga] were executed or jailed for life. The remaining masters took these institutions underground for hundreds of years for fear of reprisal from both the colonial and religious powers.‖ (Fu-Kiau 2001:128-129) This statement is very important because scholars have argued that these “secret” institutions did not exist. But more so this affirms a practice that has been going on since pharaonic times. For when invaders penetrate into African societies, the priesthood always goes underground in an effort to preserve the teachings and the culture. Amadou Hampate Ba in Aspects of African Civilization: Person, Culture, Religion (1972) confirms this practice in Mali as he notes: As we have seen, African knowledge is a global knowledge, a living knowledge, and it is because the old people are themselves the last depositories of this knowledge that they can be compared to vast libraries whose multiple shelves are connected by invisible links which constitute precisely this "science of the invisible", authenticated by the chains of transmission through initiation. In the past, this knowledge was transmitted regularly from generation to generation by rites of initiation and various forms of traditional education. This regular transmission was interrupted because of an external, extra-African action: the impact of colonization. The colonial powers arrived with their technological superiority, their own methods and their own ideal of life, and did everything in their power to substitute their own way of life for that of the Africans. Just as one never seeds fallow ground, the colonial powers were obliged to "clear" the African tradition to be able to plant their own tradition. Thus from the outset the Western school began to do battle with the traditional African school and to hunt down the keepers of traditional knowledges. This was the époque when all healers were thrown in prison as "charlatans" or for "practicing medicine without a license." It was also the era when children were prevented from speaking their mother tongue in order to shield them from traditional influences, to such an extent that at school, a child who was caught speaking his mother tongue had to wear a board called a "symbol" on which was drawn the head of a donkey, and he was not allowed to eat lunch. …During the colonial period, transmission by initiation, which used to take place on a great holiday and at regular intervals, sought asylum by going underground. This also happened in ancient Egypt and is why some of their teachers spread across the continent: to preserve Egyptian teachings. This is why ancient Egyptian concepts are not openly displayed in Africa. On a continent where Christianity and Islam have forced their way into societies and taken over traditional roles, it is understandable why certain aspects of the ancient traditions are kept secret from the public and uninitiated anthropologists. Some things are reserved for the priesthoods. The Egyptian priesthoods are not dead: they simply have new names. One can go to Arusha in Kenya right now and find elder women writing Mdw Ntr in the sand. In certain priesthoods in West Africa, after a certain amount of years in the priesthood, you learn the fundamentals of Mdw Ntr. What was once an open system has now been driven underground where only a few have directly and indirectly written about these practices. Credo Mutwa, in Indaba my Children, talks about how the priesthood had to go underground when the Europeans came into South Africa. Not only that, he states they were doing a practice that they have done before – thousands of years ago with the Phoenicians. In describing the nature of the priesthood, and how the priests spread all over central and south Africa, he states that (1964:555-6): When the White Man came to Africa, bringing Christianity with him, the Custodians of the Belief urged the chiefs and chieftainesses of the tribes to resist the ‗Strange Ones‘ and their alien creed. But when the Bantu were finally defeated they did what they had done nearly three thousand years before when the Ma-Iti (Phoenicians) invaded the lands of the tribes: to ensure that the Great Belief would not die, they selected a number of men, and women, from every tribe and binding them by a series of High Oaths, they told them everything there was to know about the Belief. There are so many High Legends to remember and so many stores of holy men, chiefs and witchdoctors that no human mind can hold all these and yet remain sane. A custodian elect had to know so much that there was the great danger of forgetting many things, leaving what could be remembered in an inaccurate or distorted form. There was only one way to solve this problem. The Great Knowledge was divided into many parts and subdivisions. Men were then chosen from different walks of life – blacksmiths, woodcarvers, medicine men, and others from each tribe. The blacksmiths were told everything about the history of metal-working in the lands of the Bantu, the characteristics of the various kinds of metal and how to recognize the minerals from which these can be produced. They were told all the legends appertaining to metal and the rites and ceremonies a blacksmith must perform, and what laws he must obey, and why. The Chosen Blacksmith was under High Oath and sworn to secrecy, commanded to impart all this knowledge to his sons, and they to their sons, without adding or subtracting a single word. The same thing was done to the Medicine-men, the Tribal Narrators, the Woodcarvers and so forth. Then, in every tribe the High Custodian formed a Hidden Brotherhood of High Custodians (Secret Society) whose duty it was continually to watch the Chosen Custodians ensuring that they had not forgotten anything, allowed nothing to leak to strangers, and imparted to chiefs and certain elders, and Indunas what they were required to know. The Hidden Brotherhood was also there for all the Chosen Ones to Report to annually for additional checks, clarification, confirmation, and to receive new knowledge acquired in the meantime. The Hidden Fraternity also met in places where the young Chosen Ones were made to take oaths when they assumed duty. The most important obligation was to swear never to reveal the identity of any one of the High Hidden Ones, who were given (and still are given) the reverence and the respect of a Lesser God. This is very critical information. The most important thing is the affirmation that a body of knowledge is dispersed across the continent (in fragments) and that in secret these priests meet to discuss priest business. This will be supported by high priest Apetu from Ghana further below. But for now we will review another quote from Mutwa which establishes in ancient times (and to this date) a grand BANTU culture in which these ideas were shared. He informs us that: Among our somewhat varied early mythological legends there are versions reporting that the Tree of Life brought forth many different kinds of men. Some were big with ugly faces like that of a hippopotamus, and who walked on all fours. Others could fly like bats and yet others crawled like snakes. One day the Great Spirit tested all these different kinds in a variety of ways – in racing, fighting and numerous other endurance tests – and all these were won by muntu, the ‗two-legger‘. About these legends anon. Now the common stock, the ancestral tribe from which all the Negroid tribes of Africa sprang, was known as the Batu, or the Bantu. Legends say that this stock lived in the ‗Old Land‘. According to all African folklore all our culture and religions were born in this Old Land‘. This was far back in the bone and stone ages.
Where was this ‗Old Land‘? It is there where the ―Old Tribes‘ are still found today – the Watu Wakale. These incorporate all the tribes of the land of the Bu-Kongo right up to the southern parts of the land of the Ibo and Oyo (Nigeria). These tribes belong to the basic stock of all such tribes who identify themselves with the prefix Ba. They are the Ba-Mileke, Ba-Mbara, Ba-Kongo, Ba-Ganda, Ba-Hutu, Ba-Luba, Ba-Tonka, Ba-Saka, Ba-Tswana, Ba-Kgalaka, Ba-Venda, Ba-Pedi, Ba-Sutu and Ba-Chopi. The southern offshoots – the Ba-Pedi, Ba-Venda, Ba-Kgalaka and Ba-Tswana – are the oldest Bantu tribes south of the level of the Limpopo and their histories within these regions go back to a thousand years BC. All these tribes are direct offshoots of the great Ba-Ntu nation that lived in the ‗Old Land‘, as a properly organized tribe, a full 4,500 years ago, reckoned according to the genealogies. The Ba-Mileke of the Camerouns is so old that these tribesmen still speak the language their witchdoctors call „spirit talk‟, which came down to us {the Zulus} through the Ba-Kongo and the Ba-Mbara. We use this language when communicating with the very old spirits of the „Ancient Ones‟. This language is actually the language of the Stone Age – the first efforts by man to speak. It consists largely of grunts and guttural animal sounds in which the words we use today are faintly distinguishable. Mutwa confirmed one of my elders sayings of their being a priestly language among the elders on the continent. Mutwa doesn‟t discuss how wide spread this language is and only regulates it in the quote above to Cameroon and the Kongo. Chiekh Anta Diop also confirms the notion of a secret language among the elders of the Kabompo district of Zaire in Civilization or Barbarism. He states (1991:320): The Woyo have a hieroglyphic writing system, the study of which has been recently undertaken by a Belgian ethnologist, according to Nguvulu Lubundi. In Zambia, an Austrian researcher, Dr. Gerhard Kubik of the Vienna University‟s Institute of Ethnology, has recently discovered ideograms called Tusona, of a philosophic meaning that are known only by the old men who speak the Luchazi language in the Kabompo district; he is in the process of studying them. Therefore it is not by chance that a statuette of Osiris was found in situ in an archeological layer in Shaba, a province of Zaire. Master Naba of Burkina Faso was an initiated healer who travelled the world teaching African science and philosophy and set up a school in Chicago called The Earth Center. Master. Naba passed away in the summer of 2008. Before he died I had a chance to interview him and he brought out some information, again that was taught in sacred circles, that confirmed Mdw Ntr was not a spoken language; just a written language. As Dr. Boulos Ayad Ayad asserts (http://www.copticlang.com/cl-two-systems.php): Chain has presented a copious and detailed study and has indicated that the Egyptian language is not a spoken language is so far as it is basically derived from Coptic, assuming that Coptic is the origin, and that the Egyptian language was used by the priests and the scribes in their written work only. This means that the Egyptian language is the language of the Egyptian who spoke in Coptic and who used this language for scriptural purposes only. This Egyptian language was only known to scribes and totally unknown to the public. However, on Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig‘s website, he discusses the nature of the Dogon that is real instructive for us in this paper. He states:Contrary to popular belief, the Dogons are not just a small tribe that lives in Mali; Dogons are composed of many different bloodlines that represent the elite of the Pharaonic society. Dogon bloodlines include the families of: Naba (healers/priests), Woba (farmers), Yonlis (guardians of the kingship), Kediou (builders), Mende (blacksmiths), etc. These bloodlines can be found in tribes such as Gourmantche, Chibisi, Dogomba, Farafara, Sonike, Germa, etc. The Dogons once lived in the Nile Valley, but migrated inland during the invasion around 400 BC. Today, the Dogons can be found living by the bend in the Niger River. The name ―Dogon‖ comes from the word ―dogou‖, which means land. The Dogons are considered the “landlords” of Africa and their culture aims at preserving the Earth and everything that lives on it. The Dogon culture has remained uninterrupted since the time of the Pharaohs. The Dogons can be seen as Kemetic people who, during the periods of invasion, migrated so that their culture and spirituality could be kept pure. Due largely to the facts that the Dogon culture now resides in a land-locked area and that the Dogon possess deep spiritual knowledge, the culture has been preserved from colonial interruptions and influence. This cultural and spiritual preservation also is the result of very strong and strict rules of initiation (the mode by which initiation knowledge is passed from generation to generation.) The recent works The Science of the Dogon and Sacred Symbols of the Dogon by Laird Scranton definitely confirms this statement. What‟s interesting about this quote is the notion, again, of priesthoods separated by occupation, that belong to one larger priesthood (called the Dogons), which echoes in a similar manner as expressed by Credo Mutwa of the Zulus. By studying Dogon society you get a real sense of what pharaonic culture was like. They are in fact ancient Egyptians and their sacred symbols confirm it. To confirm that this practice of travelling for knowledge is not only a west and central African thing, we will again quote Mutwa who informs us of his own travels and initiations all across Central, East and South Africa. In his book Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies and Mysteries, he tells us that (1996:18): After I had ended initiation under my grandfather and under my mother‘s sister Mynah, I wanted to learn more, so I went to Swaziland and studied there under great healers while earning a living both as a healer and as a laborer and sending money back to my father and the rest of my family. From Swaziland I went to Mozambique, which was then under Portuguese control, and there I studied under Mombai traditional healers and under Shangon sangomas and Tsonga nyangas. There I learned even more than I had learned under my grandfather. I went on to Rhodesia – today called Zimbabwe. Wherever I went in Africa, there I knelt before great teachers and I learned. I discovered how insignificant my Western education was, and how inadequate and how false in many aspects – especially where knowledge of Africa is concerned. There are several things that the astute reader should be asking him/herself. The first question is, “How did he know where to go to find certain teachers to learn under?” How did he meet the challenge of language differences in these respective countries? How were his experiences similar or different in these ports along the super highway of wisdom? Did he take what he learned in all of these places and taught members of his own society?
These are very important questions to answer. It is impossible to visit all of these countries for initiation to study and NOT share terms and concepts. One only goes through initiation because one feels that the wisdom gained through the experience is valuable in a practical sense, for everyday practical purposes.

http://nkwankala.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html
 
Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages.
http://nkwankala.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html


This article [below] is truly superb and very very informative, did you write it brother?
Isn't ANYONE who genuinely believes they are not programmed
graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE?


The African Superhighway of Wisdom

Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages. The systematic methods of morphology, phonology and typology have been the tools par excellence in bringing to light similarities in African languages. The principle and most well established tool of the trade is the comparative method.

There is however a limit to the comparative method in which all comparatists seek to avoid: language contact. If two or more cultures are in regular contact with each other due to trade, conquest or other reasons, vocabulary (and other innovations) is bound to be shared between languages. In order for the comparative method to be effective, one must eliminate all possibilities of borrowings and this makes it difficult when we try to reconstruct a proto-language from unrelated cultures who share a large amount of lexical items.

A second limitation to the comparative method is that it is very good at telling you “what” about a lexeme, but it does a poor job at telling you “why.” For instance, the Niger-Congo stem -ni- means “soul, spirit and self.” One would ask, “How does the soul relate to the self?” How does the root soul extend to become identified with the self, then a person (mani), then to a king (ani) and then to a character in the Egyptian book of Coming Forth by Day (Ani)?

How does Ani of the Book of Coming Forth by Day relate to the Zulu Ena? When the term ni left Africa for Europe and became the word animus (from whence animal derived), how did this relate to totenism in ancient cultures? What did animals symbolize? In order to answer these questions correctly, you cant simply analyze vocabulary from a dictionary: you have to be a part of a living tradition that explains the expanded meanings of these liturgical terms.

Africa
s system of education is two-fold: 1) you have a revealed front-view of information given to the public and 2) you have a concealed back-view which is reserved for initiates. The information given to those initiated is not given to the lay public and definitely not to any anthropologists. You have to earn the information you seek and being from Oxford university will not get you access to this information.

It has been reported by people such as Amadou Hampate Ba that priests are required to lie to those who are not willing to go through the trials and tribulations the normal citizens had to go through to obtain that information. This is why I regard little the information given by historians, anthropologists and linguists who have not been initiated into African systems of thought because they lack the insight, or I should say, they do not possess the keys which unlock the secrets of African cultures.

In regards to ancient Egyptian civilization, when it comes to its development and influence, you basically have two schools of thought in the African-Centered community. The first school assumes that the Nile Valley is the cradle of African civilizations and that all, or most of the cultures of Africa can be traced to the Nile Valley. Some posit that the present-day cultural similarities are “fossilizations” of ancient Egyptian culture.

The second school of thought posits that there were even older civilizations in Africa, that due to extreme weather conditions in North Africa, it forced the people of the first civilizations all across to migrate all over Africa causing a population explosion in the Nile Valley in which ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilization is the result.

Due to foreign invasions and other strife, over the 3000 years of “alleged” Egyptian history, some groups began to leave the Nile Valley seeking more peaceful conditions and went back into the interior of the continent whose descendents established the modern cultures we see today.

As a result of my years of research on the subject, I say it is a bit of both theories with more weight on the later.

The question is, how do you account for all of the so-called Egyptian “fossilizations” in language, iconography, and religious practices all across the continent of Africa; and in some respects the world?

If the cultures that we can prove have affinities with ancient Egyptian civilization are in fact remnants of ancient Egyptians, then why do we not see a replication (in full) of ancient Egyptian society in modern times in Africa? A greater question that historians fail to ask is, “If pharaonic Egypt is the result of the assimilation of African cultures over time into one political unit, what ideas are „Egyptian and what ideas are indigenous to the area?”

Maybe this example will make it clearer for the reader. The Edfu text instructs us that a wave of Heru kings from the south of Ta-Meri conquered what is now Egypt and established the first dynasties. It is physically and theoretically impossible to conquer a people if there are in fact no people there to conquer. In other words, the Heru kings conquered an already established civilization with human beings residing there that had their own customs, languages and histories.

Whats most unique about Ta-Meri is that instead of replacing the cultures that existed in the conquered areas, they in-fact incorporated the native cultural ideas into the grander political culture we know today as Ta-Meri. So if this is indeed the case, we are right in asking what is native and what is not? If Egypt was the “New York” of Africa at the time, and the result of the rise of Ta-Meri is based on the influx of peoples from all over Africa, did the people all of a sudden lose ties with their ancestral homes? Did the people all of a sudden forget about where they came from and the routes to get back there?

If people travelled from all over the known world to study in Egypt, did ALL of them not return back home to share what they learned? This poses a dilemma for historians because one cannot logically imply that ALL of the “fossils” that remains in modern African cultures are natively Egyptian. What if some of those concepts are preserved in certain modern cultures because they are in-fact the originators of the ideas and practices in which the ancient Egyptians incorporated into their society?

One should be asking, why were there so many “gods” in ancient Egyptian society that served the same functions over time as other “gods”? Why do you have upwards to 10 words in the Egyptian language that represent the same concepts: for example, “to be” or “to exist” or words for “man” and “people.” The answer to these questions is that there was a continent wide sharing of information in ancient times. For some reason historians are of the mind-set that the Egyptians stayed in one spot and did not travel to LEARN.

If some do concede that some Egyptians left Egypt, they do it on the contention that they set off to conquer or teach: never to learn from others. Those of us who are familiar with how indigenous education works on the continent of Africa knows that this cannot be the case. As the Bairu proverb states, “A child who has never left home says my mother is the best cook.” In other words, it is by travelling and learning under various teachers that one gains wisdom. This is true today as it was 8000 years ago.
What historians may not be familiar with is the fact that in Africa, there is a tradition of cross continental education that has existed since before pharaonic times. Because of this tradition, the Africans have established “intellectual trade” routes that Dr. Kykosa Kajangu calls “The Super Highway of Wisdom” that wisdom seekers travelled to gain knowledge of the world and beyond.

This super highway of wisdom still exists today and I posit that this is why you see identical philosophies and motifs across Africa and the world in general. Another misconception posed by anthropologists is that things like mountains and deserts were “barriers” for travel among African people.

We are to believe that Europeans can survive in mountains and caves in the Caucuses, and brave the ice deserts in the arctic, but Africans do not have the fortitude to traverse the deserts of Africa to see a relative across the continent: the same people who left Africa to populate the earth? We come to find out that this is not the case and in fact is an insult to our intelligence.

I was told about this super highway of wisdom about 10 years ago by an elder master teacher. He informed me at the time that he can go anywhere in Africa and speak to elders who all learned a secret language in which they could speak to each other. This teacher of mine has been initiated into four African sacred societies that I know of. He is most active in the Yoruba system of Ifa. He informed me of some other things which I will not divulge here. Needless to say, he introduced me to an ancient practice of education that despite extreme colonial pressures, it has not been broken.

I can say today definitively that this highway does in fact exist and it is the reason why Nommo of the Dogon is found among the Zulu. It is how the Kongo Dikenga became the Four Moments of the Sun in ancient Egypt. It is how the god Itn became Itongo in South Africa. I speak about this today because we do have initiated scholars who have written about this superhighway of wisdom and it is through their writings that we will get a better understanding of exactly what it is and how African cultures influence each other to this very date.

This will also put a stumbling block to those historians who claim there was no contact between Egyptians and other Black African nations. It will also explain why you find certain teachings in one area of Africa and not in the other. I can tell the reader this from the jump; Africas education system is hands on. You cannot simply read a lot of text books and get a handle on indigenous knowledge. As Amadou Hampate Ba states, “it is a living tradition.”

Nature is the text book and there are certain things you can witness in nature in one location, that you cannot witness in another. This is why one must travel to experience the phenomenon in its natural environment. There are certain constellations that are not visible in certain parts of the world that you must travel there (at least back in the day) to witness. Certain herbs only grow in one spot. Certain “spirits” are native to certain environments and you must be initiated into how to properly interact with those spirits. This is why the system was set-up.

At some point people became familiar with each other and who were great teachers or what not. Obviously they had to keep record of where these people were located. I have always posited that some of the stories of Egyptian texts arent stories, but maps to find certain teachers. This is why “Amen” would be a certain God of “this” area as opposed to some other God who is native to another area. It is all codification.

Do you think they paid attention to the stars because they were trying to tell time? Or were they trying to get back home from a certain area? This is just something to think about. Before we move forward we must define what the super highway of wisdom is.

This work will primarily just be quotations from scholars who are initiates of African systems speaking about the super highway of wisdom: Credo Mutwa of South Africa, K Bunseki Fu-Kiau of the Kongo, Amadou Hampate Ba of Mali, Priest Apetu of Ghana, Kykosa Kajangu of the Kongo, and Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig of Burkina Faso. It is Dr. Kykosa Kajangu who is responsible for coining the term, “the superhighway of wisdom.” Kajangu provides us with the best definition of the African Super Highway of Wisdom that I have found in print and it is his definition that will guide our study.

In his book Wisdom Poetry (2006:131) he states: I call [the] ―superhighway of wisdom the network that makes it possible to establish a dialogue of mutual enrichment among wisdom traditions. No single person is the mother of wisdom; it takes the sweat and tears of countless sages working together over thousands of years to build a wisdom tradition. Even when it is well built, a wisdom tradition cannot flourish alone for it needs to engage in dialogue with other wisdom traditions.

It was for this end that ancient African wisdom traditions built a super highway of wisdom, which is still open to this day. (emphasis mine) Kajangu asserts that in order for a wisdom tradition to thrive, it must engage in dialogues with other centers of wisdom. In ancient, and present, times, people had a hunger for knowledge and would travel the globe to get it. On pg 133 Kajangu further states that: In the old days, wisdom seekers were constantly on the road looking for sages from whom to learn.

Earlier we discussed possibly why African cultures have the same symbolism and concepts in their religious teachings. Most historians posit that this is the result of a common ancestral culture in which all of the modern African cultures developed. These are the ones who posit that the common ancestral culture was that of the Nile Valley.

As Dr. Kajangu will inform us, the reason why there are common motifs is because of this superhighway of wisdom in which they have been exchanging ideas for millennia. In his unpublished dissertation titled Beyond the Colonial Gaze (2005), he goes on to state: The various wisdom traditions in Africa have similar sacred arts because they have engaged in dialogues of mutual enrichment for thousands of years.

It is possible to use the sacred arts to build a ―super-highway of pre-Western modes of thought and being that can aid post-postcolonial scholars [initiated scholars] in their efforts to develop compelling theories about the field of indigenous African wisdom traditions. (emphasis mine) The most detailed account of this tradition, however, comes from Amadou Hampate Ba in his article titled The Living Tradition in UNESCOs General History of Africa Vol.1.

He provides for us the ins and outs of this practice and it gives us some insight on how it was carried out in ancient times. His citation is going to be a bit lengthy, but it is necessary so that we get an accurate understanding of the dynamics and purpose of this method of education. As we will see, Hampate Ba echoes many of the sentiments stated by Kajangu. Amadou Hampate Ba discusses the life of a doma, or traditionalist, in the societies of the Fulani and the Bambara. He affirms the notion that one does not become wise by only learning in ones own village and why he must travel to gain more knowledge.

He goes on to state (1976:194): Generally speaking, one does not become a doma-traditionalist by staying in ones village. A healer who wants to deepen his knowledge has to travel so as to learn about the different kinds of plants and study with other masters of the subject. The man who travels discovers and lives other initiations, notes the differences or similarities, broadens the scope of his understanding. Wherever he goes he takes part in meetings, hears historical tales, and lingers where he finds a transmitter of tradition who is skilled in initiation or in genealogy, in this way he comes into contact with the history and traditions of the countries he passes through.

One can see that the man who has become a doma-traditionalis has been a seeker and a questioner all his life and will never cease to be one. The African of the savannah used to travel a great deal. The result was exchange and circulation of knowledge. That is why the collective historical memory in Africa is seldom limited to one territory. Rather it is linked with family lines or ethnic groups that have migrated across the continent. Many caravans used to plough their way across the country using a network of special routes traditionally protected by gods and kings (…) Upon arrival in a strange country travelers would go and ‗entrust their heads‘ to some man of standing who would thereby become their guarantor, for ‗to touch the stranger is to touch the host himself.‘

The great genealogist is necessarily always a great traveler. While a dieli [djele, griot] may rest content with knowing the genealogy of the particular family he is attached to, for a true genealogist – dieli or no – to increase in knowledge he has to travel about the country to learn the main ramifications of an ethnic group and then go trace the history of the branches that have emigrated.

African Proverbs that deal with the Super Highway of Wisdom A child who has never left home says, “my mother is the best cook.” The child who travels far excels the elder of old time Those who have seen very little talk too much But those who have seem a great deal cannot find words to explain what they have gone through Amadou Hampate Ba instructs us that sages used to travel great distances to learn and that this system integrated people from across the continent.

This is very important because those who do concede that some travel took place in Africa, they claim that Africans did not travel outside of their immediate area to do so. Hampate Ba clears that up for us. Due to colonialism, Africans have had to keep quiet about this ancient practice because of fear of death by imperial powers. Dr. Fu-Kiau in his work African Cosmology of the Bantu Kongo tells us about how the once open schools of initiation had to go underground after Europeans came into the Kongo.

He states: Because of their closed door policy to the non-initiated [biyinga], colonial powers decreed these institutions as dangerous to the survival of colonization. Consequently, these institutions were destroyed without taking into consideration their social, cultural, educational, spiritual or moral values. Many of their unyielding leading masters [ngudia-nganga] were executed or jailed for life. The remaining masters took these institutions underground for hundreds of years for fear of reprisal from both the colonial and religious powers. (Fu-Kiau 2001:128-129)

This statement is very important because scholars have argued that these “secret” institutions did not exist. But more so this affirms a practice that has been going on since pharaonic times. For when invaders penetrate into African societies, the priesthood always goes underground in an effort to preserve the teachings and the culture.

Amadou Hampate Ba in Aspects of African Civilization: Person, Culture, Religion (1972) confirms this practice in Mali as he notes: As we have seen, African knowledge is a global knowledge, a living knowledge, and it is because the old people are themselves the last depositories of this knowledge that they can be compared to vast libraries whose multiple shelves are connected by invisible links which constitute precisely this "science of the invisible", authenticated by the chains of transmission through initiation.

In the past, this knowledge was transmitted regularly from generation to generation by rites of initiation and various forms of traditional education. This regular transmission was interrupted because of an external, extra-African action: the impact of colonization. The colonial powers arrived with their technological superiority, their own methods and their own ideal of life, and did everything in their power to substitute their own way of life for that of the Africans.

Just as one never seeds fallow ground, the colonial powers were obliged to "clear" the African tradition to be able to plant their own tradition. Thus from the outset the Western school began to do battle with the traditional African school and to hunt down the keepers of traditional knowledges. This was the époque when all healers were thrown in prison as "charlatans" or for "practicing medicine without a license."
It was also the era when children were prevented from speaking their mother tongue in order to shield them from traditional influences, to such an extent that at school, a child who was caught speaking his mother tongue had to wear a board called a "symbol" on which was drawn the head of a donkey, and he was not allowed to eat lunch. …

During the colonial period, transmission by initiation, which used to take place on a great holiday and at regular intervals, sought asylum by going underground. This also happened in ancient Egypt and is why some of their teachers spread across the continent: to preserve Egyptian teachings. This is why ancient Egyptian concepts are not openly displayed in Africa.

On a continent where Christianity and Islam have forced their way into societies and taken over traditional roles, it is understandable why certain aspects of the ancient traditions are kept secret from the public and uninitiated anthropologists. Some things are reserved for the priesthoods. The Egyptian priesthoods are not dead: they simply have new names.

One can go to Arusha in Kenya right now and find elder women writing Mdw Ntr in the sand. In certain priesthoods in West Africa, after a certain amount of years in the priesthood, you learn the fundamentals of Mdw Ntr. What was once an open system has now been driven underground where only a few have directly and indirectly written about these practices.

Credo Mutwa, in Indaba my Children, talks about how the priesthood had to go underground when the Europeans came into South Africa. Not only that, he states they were doing a practice that they have done before – thousands of years ago with the Phoenicians.

In describing the nature of the priesthood, and how the priests spread all over central and south Africa, he states that (1964:555-6): When the White Man came to Africa, bringing Christianity with him, the Custodians of the Belief urged the chiefs and chieftainesses of the tribes to resist the ‗Strange Ones‘ and their alien creed. But when the Bantu were finally defeated they did what they had done nearly three thousand years before when the Ma-Iti (Phoenicians) invaded the lands of the tribes: to ensure that the Great Belief would not die, they selected a number of men, and women, from every tribe and binding them by a series of High Oaths, they told them everything there was to know about the Belief.

There are so many High Legends to remember and so many stores of holy men, chiefs and witchdoctors that no human mind can hold all these and yet remain sane. A custodian elect had to know so much that there was the great danger of forgetting many things, leaving what could be remembered in an inaccurate or distorted form. There was only one way to solve this problem.

The Great Knowledge was divided into many parts and subdivisions. Men were then chosen from different walks of life – blacksmiths, woodcarvers, medicine men, and others from each tribe. The blacksmiths were told everything about the history of metal-working in the lands of the Bantu, the characteristics of the various kinds of metal and how to recognize the minerals from which these can be produced. They were told all the legends appertaining to metal and the rites and ceremonies a blacksmith must perform, and what laws he must obey, and why.

The Chosen Blacksmith was under High Oath and sworn to secrecy, commanded to impart all this knowledge to his sons, and they to their sons, without adding or subtracting a single word. The same thing was done to the Medicine-men, the Tribal Narrators, the Woodcarvers and so forth.

Then, in every tribe the High Custodian formed a Hidden Brotherhood of High Custodians (Secret Society) whose duty it was continually to watch the Chosen Custodians ensuring that they had not forgotten anything, allowed nothing to leak to strangers, and imparted to chiefs and certain elders, and Indunas what they were required to know.

The Hidden Brotherhood was also there for all the Chosen Ones to Report to annually for additional checks, clarification, confirmation, and to receive new knowledge acquired in the meantime. The Hidden Fraternity also met in places where the young Chosen Ones were made to take oaths when they assumed duty. The most important obligation was to swear never to reveal the identity of any one of the High Hidden Ones, who were given (and still are given) the reverence and the respect of a Lesser God.

This is very critical information. The most important thing is the affirmation that a body of knowledge is dispersed across the continent (in fragments) and that in secret these priests meet to discuss priest business. This will be supported by high priest Apetu from Ghana further below. But for now we will review another quote from Mutwa which establishes in ancient times (and to this date) a grand BANTU culture in which these ideas were shared.

He informs us that: Among our somewhat varied early mythological legends there are versions reporting that the Tree of Life brought forth many different kinds of men. Some were big with ugly faces like that of a hippopotamus, and who walked on all fours. Others could fly like bats and yet others crawled like snakes. One day the Great Spirit tested all these different kinds in a variety of ways – in racing, fighting and numerous other endurance tests – and all these were won by muntu, the ‗two-legger‘.

About these legends anon. Now the common stock, the ancestral tribe from which all the Negroid tribes of Africa sprang, was known as the Batu, or the Bantu. Legends say that this stock lived in the ‗Old Land‘. According to all African folklore all our culture and religions were born in this Old Land‘. This was far back in the bone and stone ages.

Where was this ‗Old Land‘? It is there where the ―Old Tribes‘ are still found today – the Watu Wakale. These incorporate all the tribes of the land of the Bu-Kongo right up to the southern parts of the land of the Ibo and Oyo (Nigeria). These tribes belong to the basic stock of all such tribes who identify themselves with the prefix Ba.


They are the Ba-Mileke, Ba-Mbara, Ba-Kongo, Ba-Ganda, Ba-Hutu, Ba-Luba, Ba-Tonka, Ba-Saka, Ba-Tswana, Ba-Kgalaka, Ba-Venda, Ba-Pedi, Ba-Sutu and Ba-Chopi. The southern offshoots – the Ba-Pedi, Ba-Venda, Ba-Kgalaka and Ba-Tswana – are the oldest Bantu tribes south of the level of the Limpopo and their histories within these regions go back to a thousand years BC.

All these tribes are direct offshoots of the great Ba-Ntu nation that lived in the ‗Old Land‘, as a properly organized tribe, a full 4,500 years ago, reckoned according to the genealogies. The Ba-Mileke of the Camerouns is so old that these tribesmen still speak the language their witchdoctors call „spirit talk, which came down to us {the Zulus} through the Ba-Kongo and the Ba-Mbara.

We use this language when communicating with the very old spirits of the „Ancient Ones. This language is actually the language of the Stone Age – the first efforts by man to speak. It consists largely of grunts and guttural animal sounds in which the words we use today are faintly distinguishable. Mutwa confirmed one of my elders sayings of their being a priestly language among the elders on the continent.

Mutwa doesnt discuss how wide spread this language is and only regulates it in the quote above to Cameroon and the Kongo. Chiekh Anta Diop also confirms the notion of a secret language among the elders of the Kabompo district of Zaire in Civilization or Barbarism.

He states (1991:320): The Woyo have a hieroglyphic writing system, the study of which has been recently undertaken by a Belgian ethnologist, according to Nguvulu Lubundi. In Zambia, an Austrian researcher, Dr. Gerhard Kubik of the Vienna Universitys Institute of Ethnology, has recently discovered ideograms called Tusona, of a philosophic meaning that are known only by the old men who speak the Luchazi language in the Kabompo district; he is in the process of studying them.

Therefore it is not by chance that a statuette of Osiris was found in situ in an archeological layer in Shaba, a province of Zaire. Master Naba of Burkina Faso was an initiated healer who travelled the world teaching African science and philosophy and set up a school in Chicago called The Earth Center. Master. Naba passed away in the summer of 2008. Before he died I had a chance to interview him and he brought out some information, again that was taught in sacred circles, that confirmed Mdw Ntr was not a spoken language; just a written language.

As Dr. Boulos Ayad Ayad asserts (http://www.copticlang.com/cl-two-systems.php): Chain has presented a copious and detailed study and has indicated that the Egyptian language is not a spoken language is so far as it is basically derived from Coptic, assuming that Coptic is the origin, and that the Egyptian language was used by the priests and the scribes in their written work only.

This means that the Egyptian language is the language of the Egyptian who spoke in Coptic and who used this language for scriptural purposes only. This Egyptian language was only known to scribes and totally unknown to the public. However, on Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig‘s website, he discusses the nature of the Dogon that is real instructive for us in this paper.

He states:Contrary to popular belief, the Dogons are not just a small tribe that lives in Mali; Dogons are composed of many different bloodlines that represent the elite of the Pharaonic society. Dogon bloodlines include the families of: Naba (healers/priests), Woba (farmers), Yonlis (guardians of the kingship), Kediou (builders), Mende (blacksmiths), etc.

These bloodlines can be found in tribes such as Gourmantche, Chibisi, Dogomba, Farafara, Sonike, Germa, etc. The Dogons once lived in the Nile Valley, but migrated inland during the invasion around 400 BC. Today, the Dogons can be found living by the bend in the Niger River. The name ―Dogon comes from the word ―dogou, which means land.

The Dogons are considered the “landlords” of Africa and their culture aims at preserving the Earth and everything that lives on it. The Dogon culture has remained uninterrupted since the time of the Pharaohs.

The Dogons can be seen as Kemetic people who, during the periods of invasion, migrated so that their culture and spirituality could be kept pure. Due largely to the facts that the Dogon culture now resides in a land-locked area and that the Dogon possess deep spiritual knowledge, the culture has been preserved from colonial interruptions and influence.

This cultural and spiritual preservation also is the result of very strong and strict rules of initiation (the mode by which initiation knowledge is passed from generation to generation.) The recent works The Science of the Dogon and Sacred Symbols of the Dogon by Laird Scranton definitely confirms this statement.

What’s interesting about this quote is the notion, again, of priesthoods separated by occupation, that belong to one larger priesthood (called the Dogons), which echoes in a similar manner as expressed by Credo Mutwa of the Zulus. By studying Dogon society you get a real sense of what pharaonic culture was like. They are in fact ancient Egyptians and their sacred symbols confirm it.

To confirm that this practice of travelling for knowledge is not only a west and central African thing, we will again quote Mutwa who informs us of his own travels and initiations all across Central, East and South Africa. In his book Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies and Mysteries, he tells us that (1996:18): After I had ended initiation under my grandfather and under my mother‘s sister Mynah, I wanted to learn more, so I went to Swaziland and studied there under great healers while earning a living both as a healer and as a laborer and sending money back to my father and the rest of my family.

From Swaziland I went to Mozambique, which was then under Portuguese control, and there I studied under Mombai traditional healers and under Shangon sangomas and Tsonga nyangas. There I learned even more than I had learned under my grandfather.

I went on to Rhodesia – today called Zimbabwe. Wherever I went in Africa, there I knelt before great teachers and I learned. I discovered how insignificant my Western education was, and how inadequate and how false in many aspects – especially where knowledge of Africa is concerned.

There are several things that the astute reader should be asking him/herself. The first question is, “How did he know where to go to find certain teachers to learn under?” How did he meet the challenge of language differences in these respective countries? How were his experiences similar or different in these ports along the super highway of wisdom? Did he take what he learned in all of these places and taught members of his own society?
These are very important questions to answer.


It is impossible to visit all of these countries for initiation to study and NOT share terms and concepts. One only goes through initiation because one feels that the wisdom gained through the experience is valuable in a practical sense, for everyday practical purposes.
 
Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages.
http://nkwankala.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html


This article [below] is truly superb and very very informative, did you write it brother?
Isn't ANYONE who genuinely believes they are not programmed
graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE?


The African Superhighway of Wisdom

Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages. The systematic methods of morphology, phonology and typology have been the tools par excellence in bringing to light similarities in African languages. The principle and most well established tool of the trade is the comparative method.

There is however a limit to the comparative method in which all comparatists seek to avoid: language contact. If two or more cultures are in regular contact with each other due to trade, conquest or other reasons, vocabulary (and other innovations) is bound to be shared between languages. In order for the comparative method to be effective, one must eliminate all possibilities of borrowings and this makes it difficult when we try to reconstruct a proto-language from unrelated cultures who share a large amount of lexical items.

A second limitation to the comparative method is that it is very good at telling you “what” about a lexeme, but it does a poor job at telling you “why.” For instance, the Niger-Congo stem -ni- means “soul, spirit and self.” One would ask, “How does the soul relate to the self?” How does the root soul extend to become identified with the self, then a person (mani), then to a king (ani) and then to a character in the Egyptian book of Coming Forth by Day (Ani)?

How does Ani of the Book of Coming Forth by Day relate to the Zulu Ena? When the term ni left Africa for Europe and became the word animus (from whence animal derived), how did this relate to totenism in ancient cultures? What did animals symbolize? In order to answer these questions correctly, you cant simply analyze vocabulary from a dictionary: you have to be a part of a living tradition that explains the expanded meanings of these liturgical terms.

Africa
s system of education is two-fold: 1) you have a revealed front-view of information given to the public and 2) you have a concealed back-view which is reserved for initiates. The information given to those initiated is not given to the lay public and definitely not to any anthropologists. You have to earn the information you seek and being from Oxford university will not get you access to this information.

It has been reported by people such as Amadou Hampate Ba that priests are required to lie to those who are not willing to go through the trials and tribulations the normal citizens had to go through to obtain that information. This is why I regard little the information given by historians, anthropologists and linguists who have not been initiated into African systems of thought because they lack the insight, or I should say, they do not possess the keys which unlock the secrets of African cultures.

In regards to ancient Egyptian civilization, when it comes to its development and influence, you basically have two schools of thought in the African-Centered community. The first school assumes that the Nile Valley is the cradle of African civilizations and that all, or most of the cultures of Africa can be traced to the Nile Valley. Some posit that the present-day cultural similarities are “fossilizations” of ancient Egyptian culture.

The second school of thought posits that there were even older civilizations in Africa, that due to extreme weather conditions in North Africa, it forced the people of the first civilizations all across to migrate all over Africa causing a population explosion in the Nile Valley in which ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilization is the result.

Due to foreign invasions and other strife, over the 3000 years of “alleged” Egyptian history, some groups began to leave the Nile Valley seeking more peaceful conditions and went back into the interior of the continent whose descendents established the modern cultures we see today.

As a result of my years of research on the subject, I say it is a bit of both theories with more weight on the later.

The question is, how do you account for all of the so-called Egyptian “fossilizations” in language, iconography, and religious practices all across the continent of Africa; and in some respects the world?

If the cultures that we can prove have affinities with ancient Egyptian civilization are in fact remnants of ancient Egyptians, then why do we not see a replication (in full) of ancient Egyptian society in modern times in Africa? A greater question that historians fail to ask is, “If pharaonic Egypt is the result of the assimilation of African cultures over time into one political unit, what ideas are „Egyptian and what ideas are indigenous to the area?”

Maybe this example will make it clearer for the reader. The Edfu text instructs us that a wave of Heru kings from the south of Ta-Meri conquered what is now Egypt and established the first dynasties. It is physically and theoretically impossible to conquer a people if there are in fact no people there to conquer. In other words, the Heru kings conquered an already established civilization with human beings residing there that had their own customs, languages and histories.

Whats most unique about Ta-Meri is that instead of replacing the cultures that existed in the conquered areas, they in-fact incorporated the native cultural ideas into the grander political culture we know today as Ta-Meri. So if this is indeed the case, we are right in asking what is native and what is not? If Egypt was the “New York” of Africa at the time, and the result of the rise of Ta-Meri is based on the influx of peoples from all over Africa, did the people all of a sudden lose ties with their ancestral homes? Did the people all of a sudden forget about where they came from and the routes to get back there?

If people travelled from all over the known world to study in Egypt, did ALL of them not return back home to share what they learned? This poses a dilemma for historians because one cannot logically imply that ALL of the “fossils” that remains in modern African cultures are natively Egyptian. What if some of those concepts are preserved in certain modern cultures because they are in-fact the originators of the ideas and practices in which the ancient Egyptians incorporated into their society?

One should be asking, why were there so many “gods” in ancient Egyptian society that served the same functions over time as other “gods”? Why do you have upwards to 10 words in the Egyptian language that represent the same concepts: for example, “to be” or “to exist” or words for “man” and “people.” The answer to these questions is that there was a continent wide sharing of information in ancient times. For some reason historians are of the mind-set that the Egyptians stayed in one spot and did not travel to LEARN.

If some do concede that some Egyptians left Egypt, they do it on the contention that they set off to conquer or teach: never to learn from others. Those of us who are familiar with how indigenous education works on the continent of Africa knows that this cannot be the case. As the Bairu proverb states, “A child who has never left home says my mother is the best cook.” In other words, it is by travelling and learning under various teachers that one gains wisdom. This is true today as it was 8000 years ago.
What historians may not be familiar with is the fact that in Africa, there is a tradition of cross continental education that has existed since before pharaonic times. Because of this tradition, the Africans have established “intellectual trade” routes that Dr. Kykosa Kajangu calls “The Super Highway of Wisdom” that wisdom seekers travelled to gain knowledge of the world and beyond.

This super highway of wisdom still exists today and I posit that this is why you see identical philosophies and motifs across Africa and the world in general. Another misconception posed by anthropologists is that things like mountains and deserts were “barriers” for travel among African people.

We are to believe that Europeans can survive in mountains and caves in the Caucuses, and brave the ice deserts in the arctic, but Africans do not have the fortitude to traverse the deserts of Africa to see a relative across the continent: the same people who left Africa to populate the earth? We come to find out that this is not the case and in fact is an insult to our intelligence.

I was told about this super highway of wisdom about 10 years ago by an elder master teacher. He informed me at the time that he can go anywhere in Africa and speak to elders who all learned a secret language in which they could speak to each other. This teacher of mine has been initiated into four African sacred societies that I know of. He is most active in the Yoruba system of Ifa. He informed me of some other things which I will not divulge here. Needless to say, he introduced me to an ancient practice of education that despite extreme colonial pressures, it has not been broken.

I can say today definitively that this highway does in fact exist and it is the reason why Nommo of the Dogon is found among the Zulu. It is how the Kongo Dikenga became the Four Moments of the Sun in ancient Egypt. It is how the god Itn became Itongo in South Africa. I speak about this today because we do have initiated scholars who have written about this superhighway of wisdom and it is through their writings that we will get a better understanding of exactly what it is and how African cultures influence each other to this very date.

This will also put a stumbling block to those historians who claim there was no contact between Egyptians and other Black African nations. It will also explain why you find certain teachings in one area of Africa and not in the other. I can tell the reader this from the jump; Africas education system is hands on. You cannot simply read a lot of text books and get a handle on indigenous knowledge. As Amadou Hampate Ba states, “it is a living tradition.”

Nature is the text book and there are certain things you can witness in nature in one location, that you cannot witness in another. This is why one must travel to experience the phenomenon in its natural environment. There are certain constellations that are not visible in certain parts of the world that you must travel there (at least back in the day) to witness. Certain herbs only grow in one spot. Certain “spirits” are native to certain environments and you must be initiated into how to properly interact with those spirits. This is why the system was set-up.

At some point people became familiar with each other and who were great teachers or what not. Obviously they had to keep record of where these people were located. I have always posited that some of the stories of Egyptian texts arent stories, but maps to find certain teachers. This is why “Amen” would be a certain God of “this” area as opposed to some other God who is native to another area. It is all codification.

Do you think they paid attention to the stars because they were trying to tell time? Or were they trying to get back home from a certain area? This is just something to think about. Before we move forward we must define what the super highway of wisdom is.

This work will primarily just be quotations from scholars who are initiates of African systems speaking about the super highway of wisdom: Credo Mutwa of South Africa, K Bunseki Fu-Kiau of the Kongo, Amadou Hampate Ba of Mali, Priest Apetu of Ghana, Kykosa Kajangu of the Kongo, and Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig of Burkina Faso. It is Dr. Kykosa Kajangu who is responsible for coining the term, “the superhighway of wisdom.” Kajangu provides us with the best definition of the African Super Highway of Wisdom that I have found in print and it is his definition that will guide our study.

In his book Wisdom Poetry (2006:131) he states: I call [the] ―superhighway of wisdom the network that makes it possible to establish a dialogue of mutual enrichment among wisdom traditions. No single person is the mother of wisdom; it takes the sweat and tears of countless sages working together over thousands of years to build a wisdom tradition. Even when it is well built, a wisdom tradition cannot flourish alone for it needs to engage in dialogue with other wisdom traditions.

It was for this end that ancient African wisdom traditions built a super highway of wisdom, which is still open to this day. (emphasis mine) Kajangu asserts that in order for a wisdom tradition to thrive, it must engage in dialogues with other centers of wisdom. In ancient, and present, times, people had a hunger for knowledge and would travel the globe to get it. On pg 133 Kajangu further states that: In the old days, wisdom seekers were constantly on the road looking for sages from whom to learn.

Earlier we discussed possibly why African cultures have the same symbolism and concepts in their religious teachings. Most historians posit that this is the result of a common ancestral culture in which all of the modern African cultures developed. These are the ones who posit that the common ancestral culture was that of the Nile Valley.

As Dr. Kajangu will inform us, the reason why there are common motifs is because of this superhighway of wisdom in which they have been exchanging ideas for millennia. In his unpublished dissertation titled Beyond the Colonial Gaze (2005), he goes on to state: The various wisdom traditions in Africa have similar sacred arts because they have engaged in dialogues of mutual enrichment for thousands of years.

It is possible to use the sacred arts to build a ―super-highway of pre-Western modes of thought and being that can aid post-postcolonial scholars [initiated scholars] in their efforts to develop compelling theories about the field of indigenous African wisdom traditions. (emphasis mine) The most detailed account of this tradition, however, comes from Amadou Hampate Ba in his article titled The Living Tradition in UNESCOs General History of Africa Vol.1.

He provides for us the ins and outs of this practice and it gives us some insight on how it was carried out in ancient times. His citation is going to be a bit lengthy, but it is necessary so that we get an accurate understanding of the dynamics and purpose of this method of education. As we will see, Hampate Ba echoes many of the sentiments stated by Kajangu. Amadou Hampate Ba discusses the life of a doma, or traditionalist, in the societies of the Fulani and the Bambara. He affirms the notion that one does not become wise by only learning in ones own village and why he must travel to gain more knowledge.

He goes on to state (1976:194): Generally speaking, one does not become a doma-traditionalist by staying in ones village. A healer who wants to deepen his knowledge has to travel so as to learn about the different kinds of plants and study with other masters of the subject. The man who travels discovers and lives other initiations, notes the differences or similarities, broadens the scope of his understanding. Wherever he goes he takes part in meetings, hears historical tales, and lingers where he finds a transmitter of tradition who is skilled in initiation or in genealogy, in this way he comes into contact with the history and traditions of the countries he passes through.

One can see that the man who has become a doma-traditionalis has been a seeker and a questioner all his life and will never cease to be one. The African of the savannah used to travel a great deal. The result was exchange and circulation of knowledge. That is why the collective historical memory in Africa is seldom limited to one territory. Rather it is linked with family lines or ethnic groups that have migrated across the continent. Many caravans used to plough their way across the country using a network of special routes traditionally protected by gods and kings (…) Upon arrival in a strange country travelers would go and ‗entrust their heads‘ to some man of standing who would thereby become their guarantor, for ‗to touch the stranger is to touch the host himself.‘

The great genealogist is necessarily always a great traveler. While a dieli [djele, griot] may rest content with knowing the genealogy of the particular family he is attached to, for a true genealogist – dieli or no – to increase in knowledge he has to travel about the country to learn the main ramifications of an ethnic group and then go trace the history of the branches that have emigrated.

African Proverbs that deal with the Super Highway of Wisdom A child who has never left home says, “my mother is the best cook.” The child who travels far excels the elder of old time Those who have seen very little talk too much But those who have seem a great deal cannot find words to explain what they have gone through Amadou Hampate Ba instructs us that sages used to travel great distances to learn and that this system integrated people from across the continent.

This is very important because those who do concede that some travel took place in Africa, they claim that Africans did not travel outside of their immediate area to do so. Hampate Ba clears that up for us. Due to colonialism, Africans have had to keep quiet about this ancient practice because of fear of death by imperial powers. Dr. Fu-Kiau in his work African Cosmology of the Bantu Kongo tells us about how the once open schools of initiation had to go underground after Europeans came into the Kongo.

He states: Because of their closed door policy to the non-initiated [biyinga], colonial powers decreed these institutions as dangerous to the survival of colonization. Consequently, these institutions were destroyed without taking into consideration their social, cultural, educational, spiritual or moral values. Many of their unyielding leading masters [ngudia-nganga] were executed or jailed for life. The remaining masters took these institutions underground for hundreds of years for fear of reprisal from both the colonial and religious powers. (Fu-Kiau 2001:128-129)

This statement is very important because scholars have argued that these “secret” institutions did not exist. But more so this affirms a practice that has been going on since pharaonic times. For when invaders penetrate into African societies, the priesthood always goes underground in an effort to preserve the teachings and the culture.

Amadou Hampate Ba in Aspects of African Civilization: Person, Culture, Religion (1972) confirms this practice in Mali as he notes: As we have seen, African knowledge is a global knowledge, a living knowledge, and it is because the old people are themselves the last depositories of this knowledge that they can be compared to vast libraries whose multiple shelves are connected by invisible links which constitute precisely this "science of the invisible", authenticated by the chains of transmission through initiation.

In the past, this knowledge was transmitted regularly from generation to generation by rites of initiation and various forms of traditional education. This regular transmission was interrupted because of an external, extra-African action: the impact of colonization. The colonial powers arrived with their technological superiority, their own methods and their own ideal of life, and did everything in their power to substitute their own way of life for that of the Africans.

Just as one never seeds fallow ground, the colonial powers were obliged to "clear" the African tradition to be able to plant their own tradition. Thus from the outset the Western school began to do battle with the traditional African school and to hunt down the keepers of traditional knowledges. This was the époque when all healers were thrown in prison as "charlatans" or for "practicing medicine without a license."
It was also the era when children were prevented from speaking their mother tongue in order to shield them from traditional influences, to such an extent that at school, a child who was caught speaking his mother tongue had to wear a board called a "symbol" on which was drawn the head of a donkey, and he was not allowed to eat lunch. …

During the colonial period, transmission by initiation, which used to take place on a great holiday and at regular intervals, sought asylum by going underground. This also happened in ancient Egypt and is why some of their teachers spread across the continent: to preserve Egyptian teachings. This is why ancient Egyptian concepts are not openly displayed in Africa.

On a continent where Christianity and Islam have forced their way into societies and taken over traditional roles, it is understandable why certain aspects of the ancient traditions are kept secret from the public and uninitiated anthropologists. Some things are reserved for the priesthoods. The Egyptian priesthoods are not dead: they simply have new names.

One can go to Arusha in Kenya right now and find elder women writing Mdw Ntr in the sand. In certain priesthoods in West Africa, after a certain amount of years in the priesthood, you learn the fundamentals of Mdw Ntr. What was once an open system has now been driven underground where only a few have directly and indirectly written about these practices.

Credo Mutwa, in Indaba my Children, talks about how the priesthood had to go underground when the Europeans came into South Africa. Not only that, he states they were doing a practice that they have done before – thousands of years ago with the Phoenicians.

In describing the nature of the priesthood, and how the priests spread all over central and south Africa, he states that (1964:555-6): When the White Man came to Africa, bringing Christianity with him, the Custodians of the Belief urged the chiefs and chieftainesses of the tribes to resist the ‗Strange Ones‘ and their alien creed. But when the Bantu were finally defeated they did what they had done nearly three thousand years before when the Ma-Iti (Phoenicians) invaded the lands of the tribes: to ensure that the Great Belief would not die, they selected a number of men, and women, from every tribe and binding them by a series of High Oaths, they told them everything there was to know about the Belief.

There are so many High Legends to remember and so many stores of holy men, chiefs and witchdoctors that no human mind can hold all these and yet remain sane. A custodian elect had to know so much that there was the great danger of forgetting many things, leaving what could be remembered in an inaccurate or distorted form. There was only one way to solve this problem.

The Great Knowledge was divided into many parts and subdivisions. Men were then chosen from different walks of life – blacksmiths, woodcarvers, medicine men, and others from each tribe. The blacksmiths were told everything about the history of metal-working in the lands of the Bantu, the characteristics of the various kinds of metal and how to recognize the minerals from which these can be produced. They were told all the legends appertaining to metal and the rites and ceremonies a blacksmith must perform, and what laws he must obey, and why.

The Chosen Blacksmith was under High Oath and sworn to secrecy, commanded to impart all this knowledge to his sons, and they to their sons, without adding or subtracting a single word. The same thing was done to the Medicine-men, the Tribal Narrators, the Woodcarvers and so forth.

Then, in every tribe the High Custodian formed a Hidden Brotherhood of High Custodians (Secret Society) whose duty it was continually to watch the Chosen Custodians ensuring that they had not forgotten anything, allowed nothing to leak to strangers, and imparted to chiefs and certain elders, and Indunas what they were required to know.

The Hidden Brotherhood was also there for all the Chosen Ones to Report to annually for additional checks, clarification, confirmation, and to receive new knowledge acquired in the meantime. The Hidden Fraternity also met in places where the young Chosen Ones were made to take oaths when they assumed duty. The most important obligation was to swear never to reveal the identity of any one of the High Hidden Ones, who were given (and still are given) the reverence and the respect of a Lesser God.

This is very critical information. The most important thing is the affirmation that a body of knowledge is dispersed across the continent (in fragments) and that in secret these priests meet to discuss priest business. This will be supported by high priest Apetu from Ghana further below. But for now we will review another quote from Mutwa which establishes in ancient times (and to this date) a grand BANTU culture in which these ideas were shared.

He informs us that: Among our somewhat varied early mythological legends there are versions reporting that the Tree of Life brought forth many different kinds of men. Some were big with ugly faces like that of a hippopotamus, and who walked on all fours. Others could fly like bats and yet others crawled like snakes. One day the Great Spirit tested all these different kinds in a variety of ways – in racing, fighting and numerous other endurance tests – and all these were won by muntu, the ‗two-legger‘.

About these legends anon. Now the common stock, the ancestral tribe from which all the Negroid tribes of Africa sprang, was known as the Batu, or the Bantu. Legends say that this stock lived in the ‗Old Land‘. According to all African folklore all our culture and religions were born in this Old Land‘. This was far back in the bone and stone ages.

Where was this ‗Old Land‘? It is there where the ―Old Tribes‘ are still found today – the Watu Wakale. These incorporate all the tribes of the land of the Bu-Kongo right up to the southern parts of the land of the Ibo and Oyo (Nigeria). These tribes belong to the basic stock of all such tribes who identify themselves with the prefix Ba.


They are the Ba-Mileke, Ba-Mbara, Ba-Kongo, Ba-Ganda, Ba-Hutu, Ba-Luba, Ba-Tonka, Ba-Saka, Ba-Tswana, Ba-Kgalaka, Ba-Venda, Ba-Pedi, Ba-Sutu and Ba-Chopi. The southern offshoots – the Ba-Pedi, Ba-Venda, Ba-Kgalaka and Ba-Tswana – are the oldest Bantu tribes south of the level of the Limpopo and their histories within these regions go back to a thousand years BC.

All these tribes are direct offshoots of the great Ba-Ntu nation that lived in the ‗Old Land‘, as a properly organized tribe, a full 4,500 years ago, reckoned according to the genealogies. The Ba-Mileke of the Camerouns is so old that these tribesmen still speak the language their witchdoctors call „spirit talk, which came down to us {the Zulus} through the Ba-Kongo and the Ba-Mbara.

We use this language when communicating with the very old spirits of the „Ancient Ones. This language is actually the language of the Stone Age – the first efforts by man to speak. It consists largely of grunts and guttural animal sounds in which the words we use today are faintly distinguishable. Mutwa confirmed one of my elders sayings of their being a priestly language among the elders on the continent.

Mutwa doesnt discuss how wide spread this language is and only regulates it in the quote above to Cameroon and the Kongo. Chiekh Anta Diop also confirms the notion of a secret language among the elders of the Kabompo district of Zaire in Civilization or Barbarism.

He states (1991:320): The Woyo have a hieroglyphic writing system, the study of which has been recently undertaken by a Belgian ethnologist, according to Nguvulu Lubundi. In Zambia, an Austrian researcher, Dr. Gerhard Kubik of the Vienna Universitys Institute of Ethnology, has recently discovered ideograms called Tusona, of a philosophic meaning that are known only by the old men who speak the Luchazi language in the Kabompo district; he is in the process of studying them.

Therefore it is not by chance that a statuette of Osiris was found in situ in an archeological layer in Shaba, a province of Zaire. Master Naba of Burkina Faso was an initiated healer who travelled the world teaching African science and philosophy and set up a school in Chicago called The Earth Center. Master. Naba passed away in the summer of 2008. Before he died I had a chance to interview him and he brought out some information, again that was taught in sacred circles, that confirmed Mdw Ntr was not a spoken language; just a written language.

As Dr. Boulos Ayad Ayad asserts (http://www.copticlang.com/cl-two-systems.php): Chain has presented a copious and detailed study and has indicated that the Egyptian language is not a spoken language is so far as it is basically derived from Coptic, assuming that Coptic is the origin, and that the Egyptian language was used by the priests and the scribes in their written work only.

This means that the Egyptian language is the language of the Egyptian who spoke in Coptic and who used this language for scriptural purposes only. This Egyptian language was only known to scribes and totally unknown to the public. However, on Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig‘s website, he discusses the nature of the Dogon that is real instructive for us in this paper.

He states:Contrary to popular belief, the Dogons are not just a small tribe that lives in Mali; Dogons are composed of many different bloodlines that represent the elite of the Pharaonic society. Dogon bloodlines include the families of: Naba (healers/priests), Woba (farmers), Yonlis (guardians of the kingship), Kediou (builders), Mende (blacksmiths), etc.

These bloodlines can be found in tribes such as Gourmantche, Chibisi, Dogomba, Farafara, Sonike, Germa, etc. The Dogons once lived in the Nile Valley, but migrated inland during the invasion around 400 BC. Today, the Dogons can be found living by the bend in the Niger River. The name ―Dogon comes from the word ―dogou, which means land.

The Dogons are considered the “landlords” of Africa and their culture aims at preserving the Earth and everything that lives on it. The Dogon culture has remained uninterrupted since the time of the Pharaohs.

The Dogons can be seen as Kemetic people who, during the periods of invasion, migrated so that their culture and spirituality could be kept pure. Due largely to the facts that the Dogon culture now resides in a land-locked area and that the Dogon possess deep spiritual knowledge, the culture has been preserved from colonial interruptions and influence.

This cultural and spiritual preservation also is the result of very strong and strict rules of initiation (the mode by which initiation knowledge is passed from generation to generation.) The recent works The Science of the Dogon and Sacred Symbols of the Dogon by Laird Scranton definitely confirms this statement.

What’s interesting about this quote is the notion, again, of priesthoods separated by occupation, that belong to one larger priesthood (called the Dogons), which echoes in a similar manner as expressed by Credo Mutwa of the Zulus. By studying Dogon society you get a real sense of what pharaonic culture was like. They are in fact ancient Egyptians and their sacred symbols confirm it.

To confirm that this practice of travelling for knowledge is not only a west and central African thing, we will again quote Mutwa who informs us of his own travels and initiations all across Central, East and South Africa. In his book Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies and Mysteries, he tells us that (1996:18): After I had ended initiation under my grandfather and under my mother‘s sister Mynah, I wanted to learn more, so I went to Swaziland and studied there under great healers while earning a living both as a healer and as a laborer and sending money back to my father and the rest of my family.

From Swaziland I went to Mozambique, which was then under Portuguese control, and there I studied under Mombai traditional healers and under Shangon sangomas and Tsonga nyangas. There I learned even more than I had learned under my grandfather.

I went on to Rhodesia – today called Zimbabwe. Wherever I went in Africa, there I knelt before great teachers and I learned. I discovered how insignificant my Western education was, and how inadequate and how false in many aspects – especially where knowledge of Africa is concerned.

There are several things that the astute reader should be asking him/herself. The first question is, “How did he know where to go to find certain teachers to learn under?” How did he meet the challenge of language differences in these respective countries? How were his experiences similar or different in these ports along the super highway of wisdom? Did he take what he learned in all of these places and taught members of his own society?
These are very important questions to answer.


It is impossible to visit all of these countries for initiation to study and NOT share terms and concepts. One only goes through initiation because one feels that the wisdom gained through the experience is valuable in a practical sense, for everyday practical purposes.
 
omowalejabali said:
Much has been accomplished in the field of historical linguistics to demonstrate relatedness between African languages.​

Would you agree that people of African ethnicity in general, Men of African ethnicity in particular [in Africa and the Diaspora which includes the USA] are at fault, aren't WE, in that collectively we have consistently failed [especially over the last 500 years] collectively to organize ourselves intelligently to protect our families, communities and countries; including losing control of Africa, the wealthiest continent on Earth?

Our ongoing failure to organise ourselves intelligently in this blatantly hostile environment is the exact problem the UHURU movement and other Pan African organisations are attempting to address which is why we're constantly being besieged by a diverse array of PALEFACE TROLLS and BLACK TRAITORS, aren't WE?

NOW can you relate to why the more easily spiritually, factually and intellectually challenged of our women don't respect us; illustrating that they don't respect themselves as we cannot make real progress without being together, in that we are STILL mammals, and don't females ALWAYS look to mate and create their families with the best PROVIDERS?

However the chaos in our Countries in Africa and our communities in the USA, Brazil and the rest of the Diaspora shows that we are still making serious mistakes, the worst of which is not being collectively focused on building up our own socio-economic networks and infrastructure, which is what everyone else does as standard, isn't it?

Until we use an updated History curriculum to de-pollute our collective knowledge base aren't we very very likely to remain totally socio-economically dysfunctional from top to bottom; due to our Boulé dominated socio-economic elite [have YOU read Steven Cokely's exposé of these CLOWNS] being even more genuinely CLUELESS than the lower echelons who are usually just AUTOMATONS in any case?

When WE don't program ANY/ALL of our people to consciously acknowledge our African ethnicity as a blessing as opposed to a curse; aren't we extremely unlikely to even begin to fulfil our main responsibility; to deduce and construct the socio-economic vehicles that will allow us to collectively advance and compete with the rest of Humanity in the 21st century?

Shouldn't ALL of OUR school's in general, especially the traditionally Black Schools in the USA the rest of the Diaspora and Africa in particular be teaching an updated History Curriculum highlighting our so diverse but efficiently marginalized contributions to Civilization; thus reprogramming the minds of the people of African ethnicity with our TRUE history [as unearthed by our own historians] as a truly superlative therapy for the trauma of the ongoing African HOLOCAUST, for which both an apology and reparations are STILL missing, aren't THEY?

Aren't WE in the main lost, leaderless and confused, a state the PALEFACE TROLLS this site is afflicted with are very very desperately trying to maintain [whereas anyone of African ethnicity spouting the garbage they so consistently spout would be disrespecting the ancestors and their tortured, mutilated and murdered siblings, or have to be a brain dead AUTOMATON?

Isn't an Afro-centric History Curriculum strategically vital in Africa in general, in the already industrialized South Africa in particular, or won’t their children's knowledge base continue to be as polluted as Ours, could YOU name 10 African monarchs [I still struggle whereas I could name 30 European monarchs easily]?

Wouldn't you agree that the TRUTH is that we peoples of African ethnicity in the USA , the rest of the Diaspora and Africa are all frontline soldiers in a War that has NEVER EVER been openly declared then or now by THESE despicably cowardly Semetic/White PARASITES, just very very efficiently waged/they JUST DO IT?

Nubia/Khemet battled and resisted the Semitic hordes for millennia but from the moment Alexander the Macedonian peasant overran Khemet we've been losing this WAR, with the situation becoming a rout when Augustus [Julius Caesar's nephew, heir and history's greatest VANDAL] deliberately destroyed Khemet's most spectacular Pyramid at Abu Rawash, which you've never heard of, have YOU?

This so deliberate piece of cultural vandalism was done to DELETE DJEDEFRAH from history as this African Pharaoh is now acknowledged as the builder of the Sphinx which honours his father Khufu [who built the Great Pyramid at Giza]; and as exemplified by the murderous carnage in Darfur and the Congo TODAY and the inane stupidity of the way those CLOWNS Goodluck and Zuma allowed Africa’s greatest ever Arab benefactor Gaddafi and his regime to be slaughtered by NATO in 2011, we're still in BIG trouble/losing this WAR, aren't WE?

Wishing this WAR away hasn't worked for the African collective in the USA, the rest of the Diaspora and Africa for the last 500 years because Slavery and Colonialism didn't so much end as evolve into the current reality of White/European socio-economic domination in every area of human activity so why are WE expecting the chaos in our communities and countries to improve in the near future?

Are you denying that the main reason we're still the "VICTIMS" as highlighted by the HOLOCAUST of the last 500 years is the FACT that we have not organized our communities and countries with intelligence and foresight comparable to the other ethnic clans, with most of our so inept leaders not even acknowledging that this WAR is on?

What chance do we stand when our Boulé dominated socio-economic elite [they're 106 years old this year, have you read Steven Cokely's exposé of these CLOWNS] in the USA are completely under the control of our enemies of over 500 years now?

Wouldn't you concede that in a World dominated by intelligently led collectives any group not organized with comparable intelligence is a "Victim in Waiting" who wont have to wait long; and as highlighted by the GRIEF in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan which will be extended as soon as possible to Iran; even when you do there is no guarantee you wont be BULLIED [especially if you're in possession and total control of massive mineral wealth]?

Why haven't the USA and the West punished China 's annexation of Tibet in the 60's like they did Sadamm's of Kuwait ? The answer is simple isn’t it, they cannot bully an industrialized nuclear armed country with a 3 million man army that could be boosted by conscripts to 10 million with minimal effort?

Even more bizarre is our acceptance as people of African ethnicity of the current status quo or are you truly unaware of the fact that ALL over the World including Africa Europeans still LEGALLY own allegedly; all the land and resources they acquired during the looting, pillaging, RAPE of this planet in general, of OUR continent in particular that Colonialism and Apartheid sanctioned as the norm as opposed to the longest list of unacknowledged unpunished Human Rights violations/CRIMES in human history?

Isn’t ANYONE who genuinely believes they are not programmed
graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE!
 

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