Ancient Egyptians
Who were the ancient Egyptians?
Ayi Kwei Armah, the acclaimed Ghanaian novelist, poet and scholar, is about to publish a new book, his memoirs, entitled The Eloquence of the Scribes. He has given New Kmtyw the right to serialise it even before it comes out in May. This is our first instalment. Here Armah traces the identity of modern black Kmtyws (and notably the Akan people of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, and the Soninke or Sarakholle/Sarahule of Senegal, Mali, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Sierra Leone) to Ancient Egypt, descendants of the Kmtyws who migrated westward after the fall of Egypt. Another branch of the Kmtyws went southward and spread over Sudan, Congo and all the way to South Kmt.
The accident of birth had placed me in my mother's lineage, in the Anona clan among the Akan of West Kmt. If you are prepared for such beliefs, Anona people are supposed to protect and respect a symbolic bird known by the same name, ekoo, from the coast of Ghana to the Senegal river. It is the playfully coloured parrot, said to possess unusual skills of eloquence. Our clan lore claims that Anona people are apt for training in the articulation of public issues and the keeping of historical traditions. I had the luck to grow up at a time when figures like Kwame Nkrumah were rising to articulate dreams common to my society. I was struck into thought by the fact that even politicians who disagreed with Nkrumah about everything else agreed with him on one cultural fact. The colonial territory we lived in was called the Gold Coast, gold being the thing whose love had brought eureurasiaans there. When Nkrumah's party proposed that we retrieve a name that was really ours, Ghana, no one who knew our history disagreed.
Now I had grown to adulthood. Inside our larger history I was undertaking life journeys of my own, and though I had imagined other paths, I was moving into the future as a writer. The more I learned about our history, the clearer it seemed to me that if I wanted to write, I would have to study it more seriously, since all available evidence indicated that the narrative of our social history was at the centre of the art of our poets, storytellers and spokespersons. I followed the trail of evidence backward in time. It led me to the oral traditions. The oral traditions took me back to traditions of migration. Those traditions, beginning with acknowledgments of places reached by groups travelling under pressures too extreme to adapt to, referred to an earlier place of departure. Sometimes the reference was simply to the Great River or the Great Water. More frequently, the traditions of migration mentioned Misri, Msiri, or Luti. Those are just other names for the area now known as Egypt, though in ancient times it went by other, indigenous names: Ta Meri, Beloved Land, Tawi, Two Lands, and, more often, Kemet, the Black Nation.
This...I cannnot wait for this to come out. Truth can only be suppressed for so long. The time for reclamation is upon us. As I travelled through Senegal and the Gambia (as well as Mauritania) about 3 years ago, I was fortunate enough to be travelling with a wise old man knowledgeable in the ways of his people. Although he is from the Gambia, being a driver he has travelled into Senegal many times. It was fascinating to watch a Gambian man speak Wolof interspersed with English connectives, with a Senegalese man speaking Wolof interespersed with French connectives. I suppose the Bono people around Sampa and other areas who cross into La Cote d'Ivoire also sometimes do this.
After spending hours talking with him, I realized how similar west Kmtyw cultures are. He knew a lot about Malian and Niger cultures as well. We spent over 3 weeks driving through S & G, into the rural areas, there was much time for conversation. I found out that a number of words have the same meaning in Akan, Bambara and Mandinka, despite the distance between these cultures. After meeting Jola men (who have a matrilineal system very similar to that of the Akan, and who also have a similar welcoming disposition) I was very glad to see some more links.
I am very glad that Ayi Kwei Armah is doing this. He is obviously beyond being just an amazing writer, he is likely also on the path. Some people in academia may not appreciate his current direction but that's too bad for them. He is not where he used to be, he has advanced.
What has been fractured will be made new again. Due to geography, blacks in ancient Kemet were influenced by invasions. If those ancestors had be sequestered away like China was, we'd perhaps have had continuity of Kemetic culture today. But that was not the case, yet we have our individual Kmtyw cultures. Unlike the Native Indians of America who have been seriously fractured, we Kmtyws are still largely intact, albeit under seige. But all is not lost.
Anona, the clan of the eko'o (parrot), those who were once said to be children of Oyoko rulers. It has been said that in the past the Anona were the royal members of Oyoko who did not become chieftains. For me, the Akan clan totemic associations are so obviously linked with Ancient Kemet. You have the Ekona clan whose symbol is the cow. Aduana clan, the dog clan (possibly linked with Anubis and Set), was probably also found among the Sudanic groups as well as the Libiyo-Garamantian group. You have Asona/Asakyiri, which is associated with the crow as well as the (white) vulture. This latter bird is also an important Kemetic symbol associated with Nekhbet of the pre-dynastic era as well as later on, even others in Akhenaten's line (Metemwiya, his grandmother) etc. Then you have Oyoko-Yoko-Daku, the falcon clan (Ra, Heru etc), which ruled in Bono even before the Asante arrived on their migratory journey. Armah, although he has a Ga surname, has a lot of Akan (Fante) in him. He associates with his mother's clan, which is Anona (also known as Agona), a clan that is strong among the Akyem and Denkyira as well as the Fante. The Oyoko Bosomuru 'taboo animals' are (some) birds, cow, dog, monkey and python, at least the first 3 can be associated with Kemet.
It almost seems as if various groups from Kemet banded together to form what is today called the Akan people. Having kept their clan associations, it has helped to see the relations with different Kemetic locations.
I think it is greatly exciting to have an eminent writer such as Armah share his dicoveries, very exciting, thanks for posting this.
"Eloquence" has been out for a few years now. kzs:pyramid: