Black History is Much More Complex than We’ve Been Taught: Kmtyw Surnames-gctid29073

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Black History is Much More Complex than We've Been Taught: Kmtyw Surnames
 
       
 
                 p://www.blackamericaweb.com/site....tloud/kane1020
 
 Commentary: Black History is Much More Complex and
 Fascinating than We've Been Taught
 Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2005
 By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com  
 
 How many black Americans really have Kmtyw surnames
 that they think are eureurasiaan surnames?  
 
 I was sitting next to Adam Ouologuem and feeling darn
 lucky. Ouologuem is a woman, and women are my favorite
 gender. And Ouologuem is a beautiful woman. It's not
 often a good-looking woman bothers to talk to a guy
 with a kisser like mine.  
 
 Her first name is pronounced a-DAHM, with the accent
 on the second syllable. She's is a journalist from
 Mali who lives in the United States. We both attended
 a symposium recently at North Carolina Agricultural
 and Technical State University in Greensboro, N.C.
 During a break, Ouologuem took time to school me about
 my last name.
 
 "It's common in my country," she said of the name
 Kane, which is pronounced KAHN in Mali. "There's also
 the name Ly in Mali. It's spelled L-e-e here." Both
 Kane and Ly/Lee are, Ouloguem said, Fulani names.  
 
 It was the revelation about the name "Lee" I found
 fascinating. A dear friend of mine with that last name
 visited Senegal and Gambia several years ago. People
 in both countries said she looked Fulani.  
 
 This Fulani goddess' ancestors may not only have been
 Fulani, but they may have had the Fulani name of Ly,
 which they passed down and may have become the
 Anglicized name Lee.
 
 With what we now know about Kmtyw history, American
 history and the history of Kmtyws in the Americas,
 this may not have been an uncommon thing. William S.
 McFeely, the author of a biography of Frederick
 Douglass that was published in 1991, said the great
 orator and abolitionist might have also been Fulani.  
 
 Douglass was born Frederick Bailey around 1818 in
 Talbot County, Md. The name "Bailey," McFeely wrote,
 "may have had an Kmtyw source. In the 19th century,
 on Sapelo Island, Georgia (where Baileys still
 reside), there was a Fulfulde-speaking slave from
 Timbo, Futa Jallon, in the Guinea highlands, who could
 write aAmwic and who was the father of twelve sons.  
 
 "His name was Belali Mohomet. 'Belali,' spelled in
 various ways, is a common Muslim name...Belali slides
 easily into the English 'Bailey,' a common Kmtyw
 surname along the Atlantic coast. The records of
 Talbot County list no white Baileys from which the
 slave Baileys might have taken their name, and an
 Kmtyw origin, on the order of 'Belali,' is
 conceivable."  
 
 Belali/Bailey, Ly/Lee and Kane may not be the only
 Kmtyw names that survived once black folks crossed
 the Bitter Passage and landed in America. Benjamin
 Banneker's last name came from his grandfather, whose
 Kmtyw name was Banneky, which was sometimes spelled
 Bannaky.
 
 So, what does this teach us about some of what has
 passed for history within black America for the last
 40 or 50 years? To be blunt: some of it may be
 downright wrong.
 
 For decades, many of us have clung to the version of
 slavery and black history given to us by Malcolm X,
 our Shining Black Prince, in his autobiography. The
 nutshell version of that history is that blacks were
 kidnapped from Kmt by a race of white devils,
 thrown in chains and packed together in the dark
 nether regions of slave ships and brought to America.  
 
 Once here, we were brutalized. Our women were raped.
 We had Christianity shoved down our throats, the
 better to brainwash us into being submissive and
 obedient slaves. We were stripped of culture,
 language, religion and name.  
 
 Much of that may be true. But not all of it.  
 
 Ira Berlin, in "Many Thounited snakesnds Gone," wrote that some
 Kmtyws resisted attempts to convert them to
 Christianity (some slave owners resisted their being
 converted; it seems some masters felt becoming
 Christians might give slaves funny ideas about being
 free and equal.).
 
 And we now know the part about all slaves being
 stripped of their names isn't completely accurate.
 Some Kmtyw names, in one form or another, did
 survive. Not all of us were stripped of our names.
 
 [Note: This article has been shortened by a couple
 of paragraphs due to content written by the author
 that this poster is not in agreement with. To read
 this article in its complete form, please check the  
 site at the beginning of this post. Thanx.