Australian Aboriginal Sacred Rock Art-gctid23568

[Oju]

Australian Aboriginal Rock Art

These reproductions of rock art from Australia are from The Native Tribes of Central Australia by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen [1899]. Although these images are clearly in the public domain, if you use them please respect their sacred nature.

These paintings depict totemic inhabitants of the Australian landscape in the 'dreamtime'. They constitute part of a text, the meaning of which is esoteric knowledge only known to Aboriginal elders. Beyond that we can't answer any questions as to their meaning or significance.

As outsiders, we can also appreciate these paintings as sacred art of the most sophisticated nature. Although the Australian Aborigines may have been impoverished by Western standards, their culture has an unbroken history dating back tens of thounited snakesnds of years. An observer from another planet might well conclude that the Aborigines have the highest level of culture on Earth on the basis of this art.









Images of Australian Rock Art from The Native Tribes of Central Australia by
Baldwin Spencer [1860-1929] and F. J. Gillen [1856-1912]. [1899]

[Oju]

"Around the beginning the Ancestral Beings rose from the folds of the earth and stretching up to the scorching sun they called, "I am!" As each Ancestor sang out their name, "I am Snake", "I am Honey Ant", they created the most sacred of their songs. Slowly they began to move across the barren land naming all things and thus bringing them into being. Their words forming verses as the Ancestors walked about, they sang mountains, rivers and deserts into existence. Wherever they went, their songs remained, creating a web of Songlines over the Country. As they travelled the Ancestors hunted, ate, made love, sang and danced leaving a trail of Dreaming along the songlines. Finally at the end of their journey the Ancestral Beings sang 'back into' the earth where they can be seen as land formations, sleeping."    
   
Semon Deeb, Jinta Desert Art


Aboriginal Art
   

Aboriginal art really involves story telling, myths, rituals, sorcery, and magic, where the artist describes their Dreaming, the stories of creation, their beliefs, and their spirituality. The strong relationship between the ancestral beings of the 'time before time', the Dreamtime, with the landscape and every living creature they created forms the basis for this art. The ancestral spirits came to a land devoid of features and created everything -- the rivers, hills, plants, animals, people, and the relationships between people and animals. When finished, they changed into landforms, animals, stars, or other objects. To the Aboriginal people, the past is still alive and will remain so into the future.

   
yankee hat rock shelter - namadgi national park, act


bradshaw painting - kimberley
 

wandjina - el questro wilderness park, kimberley, wa
 

hunter, dynanmic figure tradition - ubirr, kakadu national park, nt
 

thylacine - ubirr, kakadu national park, nt
 

white man with two pistols - delamere, nt
 

anbangbang gallery - nourlangie rock, kakadu national park, nt


Aboriginal Rock Art

Aboriginal rock art is more than 40,000 years old, a time span five times greater than the age of the Egyptian pyramids. Was this transition to creativity due to new capacities for abstract thinking and complex speech or did greater social and economic complexity produce our first information revolution? Recent discoveries suggest that artistic ability did not evolve, but appeared explosively. Rock art gives us descriptive information about social activities, material culture, economy, environmental change, and myth and religion.

One problem with obtaining such information is identifying the subject. Is that a tortoise or an echidna in the top photo? The images can also be distorted from reality due to religious beliefs. Is that a real human figure in the third photo or a mythological being? Direct dating of rock art is notoriously difficult. In the Kimberley, Aborigines claim that the oldest art, the Bradshaw paintings, were made by the birds that pecked the rocks until their beaks bled and painted the images with their tail feathers. The ancestral creators can be found on rock walls from the huge mouthless Wandjina figures of the Kimberley east to the giant Gangi Nganang of Keep River National Park to the large creation figures of the Victoria River.

In Western Arnhem, Aborigines distinguish between the oldest rock art known as Mimi Art, younger images of the ancestor beings when they entered the landscape, and more recent pictures created by their people. Aborigines maintain that that the Mimi people inhabited the land before the Rainbow Serpent created the Aborigines. The Mimi people painted small dynamic images, taught the Aborigines how to paint, hunt, sing, dance, and talk, and then became spirit beings. Archeologists have placed the many styles in a chronological sequence delineated by environmental changes and historic events. In western Arnhem, archeologists recognize three periods: Pre-Estuarine (drier climate, extinct animals like thylacine), Estuarine (rising sea levels, marine fauna like barramundi and salt water crocodiles, Rainbow Serpent), and Freshwater (freshwater fauna like magpie geese, goose feather adornment). Images of freshwater fauna showing internal anatomy (X-ray style) appeared in the last 3,000 years. More recent pictures record contact with Macassans and later eureurasiaans (e.g., boats, guns). Likewise, there are material changes as boomerangs are replaced by composite spears and broad spearthrowers, which, in turn, are replaced by long spearthrowers.

Aboriginal rock art sites are dynamic representing an accumulation of images over thounited snakesnds of years. This makes it difficult to understand the site in a chronological sense for each generation may repaint and reinterpret the images and, thus, renew the life and spirit of the country. One of the most prolific and well-known Kakadu rock painters was Najombolmi (c.1895-1967), who repainted the famous Anbangbang gallery at Nourlangie Rock in 1964, probably Australia's most famous rock art panel. For additional information, see Aboriginal Art and Culture, Aboriginal Art Online, Arnhem Land Rock Paintings, Australian Rock Art Research Association, Bradshaw Foundation, Dating Arnhem Land Rock Art, International Rock Art Research Team, Kakadu National Park, Michael Barry's Rock Art Page, and Rock Art.

http://www.lonker.net/art_aboriginal_1.htm
 

Analysis of Rock Art


Specific approaches to the analysis of prehistoric art are both numerous and varied. Similarly, there are many different ways of classifying rock art analyses. However, at the most general level rock art analyses can be divided into two broad categories - 'Descriptive' and 'Comparative' - and these will be discussed separately. The rationale for making this distinction is that it is a useful device for overviewing a huge literature. The analyses in each general category also share underlying assumptions and problems, and these can be illustrated by a relatively limited number of case studies, rather than an exhaustive (and exhausting) review of the world literature.

http://www.une.edu.au/archaeology/WorldRockArt/analysis.php

[Oju]

Traditional Aboriginal Art Symbols

   
Traditional symbols are an essential part of much contemporary Aboriginal art. Aboriginal peoples have long artistic traditions within which they use conventional designs and symbols. These designs when applied to any surface, whether it is on the body of a person taking part in a ceremony or on a shield, have the power to transform the object to one with religious significance and power. Through the use of ancestrally inherited designs, artists continue their connections to country and the Dreaming.

For example, body decoration using ancestral designs is an important part of many ceremonies. In central Australia inherited designs are painted onto the face and body using ochres ground to a paste with water and applied in stripes or circles. The modern paintings of the Central and Western Desert are based on these designs. Some of these symbols are:

Traditional Aboriginal Art Symbols
Central and Western Australia

Symbols used in Papunya Central Desert art -
from "Papunya Tula" by Geoffrey Bardon

While the most commonly used symbols are relatively simple, they can be used in elaborate combinations to tell more complex stories. For example, a Water Dreaming painting might show a U shaped symbol for a man, sitting next to a circle or concentric circles representing a waterhole, and spiral lines showing running water. The painter is telling the story of the power of the waterman to invoke rain. Further symbols will add to the depth of meaning. Today it is common for artists to refer to the 'outside' story which they provide for the general public, while the painting retains an 'inside' story accessible only to those with the appropriate level of knowledge.

Dots are one of the conventional symbols widely used and for many non-Aboriginal people these are what give Central and Western Desert art its distinctive character. Dots may represent many things - including stars, sparks or burnt ground. The base or floor of any Aboriginal design or painting is the preparation of the earth, or the ancestor being's involvement with the earth.

Amongst the artists of the Central and Western Desert art movement of the last 30 years, Johnny Warangkula was the first to use dotting as the background for his paintings. Because of the brilliance of his work, other painters adopted his style and conventions. As the Papunya painting movement developed in the 1970s, dotting was increasingly used to obscure meanings and to hide some of the symbolism that was not meant to be exposed to the un-initiated. It is therefore ironic that the technique of using dots, that many Western people regard as characteristic of contemporary Central and Western Desert art, should have as a major function the obscuring of meaning.

Rather than reveal their secrets to the marketplace, the artists developed ways of avoiding or hiding the sacred. The dots, which became markedly more prominent in Papunya painting from 1973, are thought to have been crucial. Dick Kimber identified them in 1981 as a prime means of 'eliminating some elements used on some sacred objects', while Judith Ryan has characterized them as 'masking', even 'camouflage'. For a further discussion of the use of dots, including some controversy over their interpretation, see the article by Tim Bonyhady Papunya Art - Papunya Stories.

http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/symbols.php

[Oju]

Dreaming and the Dreamtime


The Dreaming is a term used by Aborigines to describe the relations and balance between the spiritual, natural and moral elements of the world. It is an English word but its meaning goes beyond any suggestion of a spiritual or dream-related state. Rather, the Dreaming relates to a period from the origin of the universe to a time before living memory or experience - a time of creator ancestors and supernatural beings.

This time is also called the Dreamtime, when the Rainbow Serpent moved across the land and the Wandjina were active in the clouds and skies.

These creator ancestors formed the features of the land and all living things and also set down the laws for social and moral order. The Dreaming, as well as answering questions about origins, provides a harmonious framework for human experience in the universe - and the place of all living things within it.

Each Aboriginal person's totem and Dreaming is determined by the place in the landscape where the mother feels her first signs of being pregnant. At this place, the unborn person receives the spirit of a totemic ancestor - for example honey ant, possum, goanna or water - and the Dreaming connected with the place.

This harmony between human existence and other natural things was expressed by Silas Roberts, first Chairman of the Northern Land Council, in this way:
Aboriginals see themselves as part of nature. We see all things natural as part of us. All the things on Earth we see as part human. This is told through the ideas of dreaming. By dreaming we mean the belief that long ago, these creatures started human society. These creatures, these great creatures are just as much alive today as they were in the beginning. They are everlasting and will never die. They are always part of the land and nature as we are. Our connection to all things natural is spiritual.

Features of the landscape are the most visible signs of the past activities of ancestral beings. The ancestral beings led lives much as Aboriginal people have for generations, but on a grander scale - and with grander consequences (see Howard Morphy's book). Waterholes or the entrances to caves resulted where they emerged from the earth. Where they held great battles, hills resulted from their bodies and lakes formed from pools of their blood.

The ancestral beings also left a record of themselves and their actions in the form of a rich variety of art. During their epic journeys, the ancestral beings sang and performed ceremonies, made engravings or paintings on rock and in caves and left sacred objects. In northern Australia, these songs are handed from generation to generation, together with the body designs that were first painted on the chests of the ancestral beings.

Aboriginal peoples living in different parts of Australia trace their origins directly from these great ancestral beings. When present-day Aboriginal people walk through their country, they are continually reminded of the presence of the creator beings. This happens not only through the features of the landscape but also through songs, paintings and ceremonies.

The Dreaming system of beliefs and philosophy has different names depending on the language of the speaker. The Pitjantjatjara and related desert peoples call it Tjukurrpa, the Kimberley peoples call it Ngarrankrni and the Anmatyerre and related peoples call it the Altyerre.

'Dreaming' is often used to refer to an individual's or group's set of beliefs or spirituality. For instance, an Aboriginal Australian might say that they have Kangaroo Dreaming or Honey Ant Dreaming, or any combination of Dreamings pertinent to their 'country'. Many artworks are visual representations of the symbols associated with the artist's dreaming.

For examples of dreaming stories, see the excellent Web site set up by the Australian
Museum at http://www.dreamtime.net.au/

http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/dreaming.php


The Dreamtime

   
The Dreamtime is a widely used, but not well understood, term describing key aspects of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and life. Following is an extract from an book by Geoff Moore. "Myth, Mystery and Meaning of the Dreamtime". It explores the Dreamtime through elements of philosophy; psychology; spirituality, lore and secrecy that were the basis of the beliefs and practices of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. He is the facilitator of the Australian Aborigines History and Culture Research Project.


Dreamtime Origins


"The Aborigines learned about the origins of the tribe through their Dreamtime creation myths, that told of the significant actions of the creators. The myths were the basis of Aboriginal society and were responsible for providing certainty about existence. They contributed to their survival and it is beyond dispute that they survived for thounited snakesnds of years. The Australian aborigines believed that the land they occupied was once vacuous - empty. This belief was a source of great mystery to them. It was also a great truth that was known with absolute certainty, because the ancestors had said this was the way things once were. Then, during what has become known as the Dreamtime, the land, the sky above and all they contained were formed by the actions of supernatural and mysterious beings.

"The concept of the Dreamtime was first researched by Spencer and Gillen in their study of the Arunta (Arrernte) tribe of Central Australia. They came to understand the words Alchera and Aldjeringa, as identifying a 'creative period'. Other tribes had words in their language for the same concept. As communication between the Arunta people and the non-Aboriginal scientists improved, it became apparent to them, that the aborigines understood the Dreamtime as a beginning. Here it is pointed out that there is a significant difference between Aboriginal thinking and that of others. In particular the belief that the Dreamtime is a period on a continuum of past, present and future.

"Aboriginal people understood the Dreamtime as a beginning that never ended. In one sense it was the past, the sacred past. But as Spencer and Gillen found, the word Tjurjunga was also associated with the Dreamtime. Tjurjunga identified a category of belief and action. A concept that will become more obvious as we proceed through this book. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that Tjurjunga identified the belief that the Dreamtime never ended.

"The Dreamtime itself has been explained in a number of ways. Various explanations refer to creators who were mysterious and supernatural beings. They include references to men and women 'just like us' who had the ability to shape-change into animals and other fauna; creators such as the Rainbow Serpent and also All-father and All-mother figures. There have also been references to the creators as heroes and heroines. The essential point is that each tribe had a collection of Dreamtime creation stories. In other words there were desert, mountain, alluvial plains and seacoast Dreamtime stories.

"Land itself was an icon because of the spiritual basis on which it was created and the fact that some of the creators continued to live in the land, or in the sky above watching over them. Broadly speaking they told of creative actions that resulted in the formation of the earth, the sky above and all they contain. Every hill, water hole and tree, every animals, bird and marine life along with every other living creature and natural phenomenon was believed to have come into existence in the Dreamtime.

"It was during the Dreamtime that the creators made men and women, decreed the laws which all must obey - their behavior to one another, the customs of food distribution, the rules of marriage, the rituals of initiation and the ceremonies of death which must be performed so that the spirit of the dead would travel peacefully to his or her spirit-place.

"Although the Aborigines believed that the Dreamtime was a beginning that never ended, some of their stories told them that the mythical creators disappeared. Here it is tempting to say that they believed that at an inexplicable point of time the Dreamtime ended, but this is not what they aborigines believed. They believed that the creators disappeared from the sight of mere mortals, but continued to live in secret places. Some lived in the tribe's territory in rock crevices, trees and water holes. Others went up into the sky above as heavenly bodies. Others changed into (or perhaps became) natural forces such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning."

http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/dreamtim.php

[Oju]

Art, Land and the Dreaming

   
Art is a central part of Aboriginal life and is intimately connected to land, law and religious belief. Connection to a person's home land is deeply felt. Mick Dodson (former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Justice Commissioner) has expressed this powerfully:

To understand our law, our culture and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world, you must begin with land. Everything about aboriginal society is inextricably woven with, and connected to, land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown that land up. We are dancing, singing, and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves.

Aboriginal people, when speaking in English of this connection, often refer to land as "country". Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has described 'country' in this way:

  "People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. .country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart's ease."

An excellent source to explore the relationship of two Aboriginal communities with their country - the Gunditjmara nation of south west Victoria and the Kutjungka of north western Australia - is the Lore of the Land CD-ROM and associated Web site.

Aboriginal art takes many forms. Traditionally it was made for purely cultural reasons and was only able to be created or viewed by people initiated to the proper level of knowledge or understanding. More recently, there has emerged work that has been made consciously to be seen by the non-initiated or for commercial purposes. However, irrespective of whether the art is for private ceremonial purposes or is for the public, it remains inspired by the traditional marks and symbols from the Dreaming. The materials used are varied and have ranged from rock engravings and paintings through works on bark, wooden sculpture to ephemeral paintings on sand, on human bodies and on headdresses or other materials.

A Yanyuwa man from the Gulf of Carpentaria (Mussolini Harvey) has described the link between body painting and the Dreaming:

"In our ceremonies we wear marks on our bodies, they come from the dreaming too, we carry the design that the Dreamings gave to us. When we wear that Dreaming mark we are carrying the country, we are keeping the Dreaming held up, we are keeping the country and the Dreaming alive."


   Nearly all Aboriginal art can be related to landscape and some paintings and designs do represent explicitly the physical relationship between different features of the landscape. However, Aboriginal paintings should be seen primarily as maps of conceptual relationships that influence the way the landscape is seen and understood. When Aboriginal paintings do represent specific features of landscape, they show them in their mythical rather than their physical relationship to one another.

As well as its essential spiritual and symbolic character, Aboriginal art increasingly has a social and political dimension. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, leader of the Gumatj people, has clearly expressed the importance of art to contemporary Aboriginal culture:

  We are painting, as we have always done, to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it. We paint to show the rest of the world that we own this country and the country owns us. Our painting is a political act.

http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/land.php


New Art Works from Aboriginal Art Online
 
http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/latest.php


Bark Painting


Bark painting by Aboriginal people is a long tradition, perhaps extending back thounited snakesnds of years. The earliest eureurasiaan record of Aboriginal bark painting was by the French artist N M Petit, who travelled with N T Baudin to Tasmania from 1800 to 1804, and recorded the drawings found on a bark shelter over a grave.

Other early records describe painted bark shelters in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW. One example from Victoria painted prior to 1876 is now in the Museum of Victoria. These examples were drawn with charcoal, and painted or scratched onto smoke-blackened bark. Most of these records suggest the use of barkpainting as a part of everyday life, but there are also examples of ceremonial and mortuary paintings.

In northern Australia, paintings on bark shelters in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land were stylistically similar to rock shelter paintings. They were used to illustrate stories which were told to young people during the long hours of the wet season when people were confined to the shelter. Painted bark baskets were used in Melville and Bathurst Island mortuary ritual, and bark coffins and bark belts were painted in northeast Arnhem Land.


Collection of Aboriginal bark paintings


The first bark paintings collected by eureurasiaans from these areas were cut from existing bark shelters but subsequent planned collecting field trips involved commissioning artists to paint on portable rectangles of bark. For example, Baldwin Spencer was the first to commission bark paintings at Malangangerr (Oenpelli) in 1912 and subsequent collectors sought to obtain similar examples. In Milingimbi, Rev T T Webb encouraged bark painting from the late 1920s. At Yirrkala, Reverend W Chaseling encouraged the production of bark paintings for sale from 1935.



Historic bark paintings collected by Baldwin Spencer in 1912

Contemporary bark paintings reveal important cultural subjects and stylistic techniques, but their form also betrays the history of influence by collectors. Prior to the Second World War anthropologists and missionaries were the main collectors. Reverend A Dyer collected at Malangangerr and Groote Eylandt between 1920 and 1930, Norman Tindale at Groote in 1922, W L Warner at Milingimbi from 1926 to 1929, N F Thompson at Milingimbi and Yirrkala through the 1930s and 40s, and F Gray and F Rose at Groote Eylandt between 1938 and 1945. C P Mountford and R M and C H Berndt made substantial and systematic collections across Arnhem Land in the late 1940s, and at Port Keats on the western coast of the NT, collections were made by W E H Stanner and K Kupka in the late 1950s.

In subsequent years demand for the paintings grew and mission shops became their primary outlet. The federal government established a centralised marketing company in 1971 and from 1973 the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council made funds available to communities for the establishment of community arts centres and for grants to employ arts advisers.

Maningrida, Ramingining and Katherine also became important centres for marketing bark paintings from this time. Today bark painting is an important industry particularly for people from the Kimberley, among the Tiwi and for artists in Arnhem Land.
Regional styles of bark painting

Kimberley bark paintings very closely resemble the rock art of the region. The primary subject consists of representations of the Wandjina creator beings associated with wet season thunderstorms. The images consist of large faces with rayed headdresses. They are sometimes shown wearing shell pendants but often have little other body detail.

Bark paintings from Port Keats in the Northern Territory are particularly interesting in that they reveal a combination of figurative images reminiscent of both eastern Kimberley and Arnhem Land work and a geometric tradition related to desert styles. Some paintings derive from designs found on secret[ch65533]sacred objects with their oval shape and concentric circle patterning. Other paintings may show landscapes and the ancestors responsible for creation.
The Tiwi of Bathurst and Melville Islands paint highly coloured crosshatched and dotted non-figurative designs. Such designs are also painted on bark baskets (tungas), carved ironwood sculptures and many other material culture items which feature in Pukumani mortuary ceremonies. There are also early records of white pipeclay paintings in bark shelters in the region.    


Tiwi tunga (bark basket)

Western Arnhem Land bark paintings are closely tied to rock painting and are characterised by figurative representations against a background of plain red ochre. The figures are often filled in with 'X-ray' motifs which show the figure's internal organs. At one level the images simply reveal important cuts of meat but they can also be read to show sacred objects or landscape created by the figure. Artists paint a variety of fantastic figure forms including the transforming shapes of creator beings such as the rainbow serpent or the exaggeratedly thin human forms of 'mimi' spirits.

Central and eastern Arnhem Land bark painting relates closely to body painting traditions and the designs found on ceremonial objects. The emphasis is on complex compositions, and figures are shown against a background of intricate crosshatched designs which indicate the clan associations of the subjects. The composition identifies relationships between the ancestral beings depicted and, by extension, between features of ancestrally created landscape. The images can be read as maps of clan lands or as charts which reveal the activities of the ancestors that, through their actions, created those lands.

Groote Eylandt bark paintings are distinctive in the way figures are shown against a black background. More recent works reveal a concern for narrative subject matter and filling the background with crosshatched designs. Macassan seafarers regularly visited Groote Eylandt to collect trepang and many bark paintings from this area depict representations of the Macassan prau.

Text by Dr Luke Taylor, AIATSIS - reproduce with permission from the Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia.


Bark Painting Techniques


The bark used for bark paintings is cut from the stringybark tree (Eucalyptus tetrodonta). The bark is cut from the tree during and immediately after each Wet Season when it is moist and pliable, starting in December and going through until April or May. It must be free of knots, splits or termite damage.



The painter cuts around the trunk, through the bark and then tears off a rectangular piece. When first removed, the bark is rough and curls round, still holding the shape of the tree, and needs to be smoothed and flattened out. The outer layer is roughly trimmed with an axe and the bark is then scraped until smooth.    


   To flatten the bark, a fire is first made and burned down to hot coals of the right temperature. The wet bark is placed on the coals and pressed flat, with the outside rough surface in contact with the heat. Most of the moisture is driven out and the bark slowly unbends. The surface to be painted does not come into contact with the fire. The bark is then pressed flat for several days under weights. Finally, sticks are tied tightly across both ends with string in order to prevent warping. The surface is then ready to be painted.

The bark painters of Arnhem Land mainly work with four basic colours: red black, yellow and white, although sometimes the primary colours are mixed to give a pink, orange or grey. Red and yellows come from a variety of iron ochres including hematite, ironstone and limonite. White is generally gypsum or pipeclay and black is made from manganese ore or charcoal. The pigments are ground finely and mixed with water and vegetable fixatives. The most common natural fixative is the gum or resin from local trees. Nowadays the artists more frequently use a commercial acrylic binder.

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

Ojú, mo «ë«ë rí i«ê ñlá yìí! Ó dára púpö. N kò tilë mæ pé irú ìmö báyìí wà l'órí ayélujára! Wàá mú kí ibi ayélujára yìí sunwön lôpölæpö o!

Ojú, I'm just seeing this great work you've done! It's most BlackCellent. I didn't even know that this type of info was available on the net! You will make this site most invaluable!

Obadele Kwame

[Oju]

[ch390 wrote: kyeame Kwame]Ojú, mo «ë«ë rí i«ê ñlá yìí! Ó dára púpö. N kò tilë mæ pé irú ìmö báyìí wà l'órí ayélujára! Wàá mú kí ibi ayélujára yìí sunwön lôpölæpö o!

Ojú, I'm just seeing this great work you've done! It's most BlackCellent. I didn't even know that this type of info was available on the net! You will make this site most invaluable!

Obadele Kwame

Medase for the words of encouragement Obadele.
It's an honor to serve our Kmtyw people. I'm doing
something I love, so it truly doesn't feel like work to
me. It's mandatory that I do my part. Our people
deserves it.

Abibitumi Kasa is the Kmtyw Liberation Institute.
WE must always share that Kmtyw wisdom, culture
and history with our people.

Abibitumi Kasa Resource Center will be the best Kmtyw
resource center that there is online. That is our vision,
and we will make it a reality, with the help of the Ancestors.

Kmtyw Liberation is not a joke, it's a matter of life or death
for our people. Let's help liberate our people, by giving them
the best Kmtyw centered education possible. This is the
ultimate goal of Abibitumi Kasa Kmtyw Liberation Institute.

Peace & Blessings of Kmtyw Love Always!

Oyu!

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

Ojú wrote:

kyeame Kwame link=1164614369/0#5 date=1164695169]Ojú, mo «ë«ë rí i«ê ñlá yìí! Ó dára púpö. N kò tilë mæ pé irú ìmö báyìí wà l'órí ayélujára! Wàá mú kí ibi ayélujára yìí sunwön lôpölæpö o!

Ojú, I'm just seeing this great work you've done! It's most BlackCellent. I didn't even know that this type of info was available on the net! You will make this site most invaluable!

Obadele Kwame

Medase for the words of encouragement Obadele.
It's an honor to serve our Kmtyw people. I'm doing
something I love, so it truly doesn't feel like work to
me. It's mandatory that I do my part. Our people
deserves it.

Abibitumi Kasa is the Kmtyw Liberation Institute.
WE must always share that Kmtyw wisdom, culture
and history with our people.

Abibitumi Kasa Resource Center will be the best Kmtyw
resource center that there is online. That is our vision,
and we will make it a reality, with the help of the Ancetors.

Kmtyw Liberation is not a joke, it's a matter of life or death
for our people. Let's help liberate our people, by giving them
the best Kmtyw centered education possible. This is the
ultimate goal of Abibitumi Kasa Kmtyw Liberation Institute.

Peace & Blessings of Kmtyw Love Always!

Oyu!

I think you're my twin! L:DL

Obadele