Category — Culture

Somewhere along the way, I developed an interest in the origins of words, probably as a result of exposure to the classical, so called ‘dead’ languages, Latin and Sanskrit. This was never a serious pursuit but I found it quite entertaining to discover remnants of older cultures, especially non-European ones, emerging from my use of English. I suspect that any way for a Black boy to throw off the yoke of Euro-think, was a subconscious joy…a rather small, personal victory.

Back in the 80’s, my word hobby received a weekly boost when National Public Radio aired a series with wordsmith and poet, the late John Ciardi. If you’re interested, a few podcasts from the series have been reposted on the NPR website. No matter what I was doing on Fridays, I found time to listen in on him to get my weekly fix. Some of those sessions hold a prominent place in memory, continuing to inspire. For me, the older the origin, the truer the meaning. Discovering the origins of a word is like archeology or time-travel. However, I don’t ‘need no’ fedora like Indiana Jones or an imagination like H.G. Wells, just pajamas (where does that come from?…oh it’s Persian!), a fast Net connection and Wikipedia, Google or the OED online (Oxford English Dictionary). By the way the word ‘fedora’ comes from ‘Fédora’, a popular French play by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) that opened 1882, in which the heroine, a Russian princess named Fédora Romanoff, was originally performed by Sarah Bernhardt, actress and notorious cross-dresser.

Here are a few discoveries:

Copacetic, (or copasetic or sometimes, as in Black vernacular, ‘copastetic’) meaning ‘very acceptable’, ‘just fine’. ‘Everything is copacetic’.

According to Ciardi, copacetic originates in the Hebrew phrase ‘(ha) kol beseder’, (literally ‘all in [the] order’) meaning ‘everything is alright’. The Seder or ‘order’ is the ritualistic retelling of the Exodus annually for Pesach (Passover).

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Ignite, meaning to ’set on fire’. Virtually every dictionary will tell you that ignite and its derivations originate in the Latin ‘ignis’ or ‘fire’.

However it actually comes from PIE or the Proto-Indo-European language and cultures associated with it. The root of ignite emerges from the Vedic culture of India, thousands of years older than Rome. In the Indian classical language, Sanskrit, ‘agni’ or ‘fire’ is both a noun and a deity. Agni is the god of fire, lightning and the sun.

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Lufthansa, the German airline, is a combination of two words from the Sanskrit, ‘lupth’ meaning ‘air’ or ‘invisible’ (’luft’ is ‘air’ in German) and ‘hansa’ meaning ’swan’. When the air service first started, the aircraft they employed were pure white, resembling huge white swans as they disappeared into the distance.

Lufthansa Airlines logo

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Abracadabra (sometimes spelled Abrakadabra) is a word used as an incantation or theatrically by stage magicians.

The original Hebrew and later Aramaic was either ‘avda kedavra’, which means, “what was said has been done,” or ‘avra kedavra’, which means “what was said has come to pass.” Over time, it was corrupted to its current pronunciation with the replacement of both “v” sounds with “b” sounds (b and v can be interchangeable in Aramaic).

More recently, it was an incantation to be used as a cure for fevers and inflammations. The first known European mention was in the 2nd century CE (Common Era) in a poem called ‘De Medicina Praecepta’ by Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla, who prescribed that the sufferer from the disease wear an amulet containing the word written in the form of an inverted cone.

Abracadabra as an amulet

Of late, we hear ‘Avra Kedavra’ in the Harry Potter series of books as a killing curse, but this is a gross debasement of its original intent. The original Hebrew ‘avara kedavara’, in a religious context, describes the matter-producing, life-giving utterance of G-d that created the Universe.

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We are inundated with words of African origins, but true to form, etymologists that study the roots of Indo-European languages typically overlook them, assuming that little of African origin is of real substance. So we are left with commodity words like banjo (Bantu), banana (Wolof), coffee (Amharic), jazz (Mandinke), jamboree (Swahili), mojo (Fulani), okra (Igbo) and many others.

In my research, I found one extraordinary African concept marginalized to a criminal degree. Before being sullied by Europeans, the word nigger (originally pronounced ‘en-jer’) was revered as the ‘divine epithet’ of the ancient Egyptians, who called themselves Kemites and their land ‘Kemet’, the ‘Black Land’ or ‘Ta-Merri’, the ‘Beloved Land’. N-G-R (’en-jer’), a word without vowels like many classical languages such as ancient Egyptian or biblical Hebrew, was the word for G-d. In Kemetic society, the word for ‘nature’ which is interchangeable with deity, was ‘N-Y-T-R’ (’net-jer’). Pronounce ‘net-jer’ then ‘nigger’ and one hears a clear, but problematic connection.

In many African languages particularly the Niger-Congo language family, words that connect with people, gods and groups often begin with ‘n’. For instance, the word ‘Nkosi’ in Xhosa (South Africa) is ‘god’. The word ‘Ndaba’ in Zulu (South Africa) is ‘council or gathering of elders’. ‘Negus’ in Amharic (Ethiopia) is ‘emperor’.

In this context, the study of word origins becomes significant. By knowing who I am, racist remarks and racial epithets become impotent. Every time someone uses ‘nigger’ to refer to a Black person, they are actually calling that person ‘god’.

Teach this to your children. It makes a difference.

As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumors abound and many voters have their facts about the candidates all wrong.

Did he really say ‘Nigra’? Check out the comment 26 seconds into the clip.

Now the world gets to see attitudes I’ve experienced most of my life as a citizen of ‘the greatest nation’.

My musical tastes are eclectic, lending to having grown up in the Jim Crow world of the 50’s and 60’s and to my exposure to many cultures during times abroad in the 70’s. Among my favorite genres are rhythm and blues, jazz, rap and world music because they most closely represent the significant cultural influences in my life.

If I am pressed to commit to such a thing, I’d have to say my all-time favorite band is Deep Forest, the collaboration of French musicians Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet. They compose a new kind of world music, sometimes called ethnic electronica, mixing ethnic with electronic sounds and dance/chillout beats. Their sound has been described as ‘ethno-introspective ambient world music’. Their debut album, Deep Forest, mixes New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from Zaire, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti and the Sahel.

Recently I discovered a favorite track from the first album posted on YouTube. Play Night Bird as you read further.

The haunting yet pleasing yodeling is from a group of young Baka women from the Ituri Rainforest that stretches across Cameroon, Congo and parts of Burundi. They were recorded by an ethnomusicologist working in Burundi in 1967 and this is their formal greeting for guests.

In the few decades since these incredible voices were recorded, the Baka (or Aka or BiAka or Mbuti or ‘pygmies’, as they are known) are disappearing at an alarming rate. As a result of encroachment, destruction of habitat, slavery and the Congo Civil War (2003), their numbers have dwindled to less than 30,000.

Rather than viewing them as ‘primitive’ (and thus valueless) as we in the West typically do, why not learn from these very old peoples? And, old they are, having a high predominance of L1, the oldest genetic haplotype on Earth.

One thing I learned is that Baka fathers spend more time in close contact to their babies than in any other known society. Baka fathers have their infant within arms reach 47% of the time and have been described as the ‘best Dads in the world.’ It has been observed that they pick up, cuddle, and play with their babies at least five times as often as fathers in other societies. It is believed that this is due to the strong bond between Baka husband and wife. Throughout the day, couples share hunting, food preparation, and social and leisure activities. The more time Baka parents spend together, the greater the father’s loving interaction with his baby. Would that I’d spent more time cuddling and playing with my son.

It’s difficult to accept that these incredible voices may be silenced in our lifetime. Please recognize that the destruction of their culture is happening concurrently with others the world over and that losing any one of these ancient cultures is losing a part of our collective selves.

For those who’ve been asking me to summarize what I study in grad school, here is a very brief definition of my view on Pan-African studies.

Because it had its beginnings as organized resistance to colonialism, Pan-Africanism is a political vehicle intended to alleviate the economic and social damages of slavery and disenfranchisement. This political impetus has resulted in African national independence, the Civil Rights movement in the United States and other successes in the Diaspora.

However, as expressed by its intellectual and cultural proponents, Pan-Africanism has evolved from a purely political manifestation into a dynamic philosophy that investigates and reconstructs African historical authenticity, espouses the validity of African worldviews and seeks to reestablish the African and her descendants to eminence in the world community. It is a philosophy representative of the African’s historical, social, cultural, psychological and technological experience and, as such is a deep reservoir of answers to age-old human questions. As human endeavor, Pan-Africanism is not limited to the construct of race. It is a body of thought with the potential to instruct those of us with the visible genetics typically associated with Africa and those of us without them.

My Home, Your Home

In the Blink of an Eye

Worldwide some 300 million people retain strong identities as members of indigenous cultures, cultures rooted in their own history, their own languages and attached by memories to their particular places on the Earth. These cultures are old and represent much of the collective experience and intelligence of humanity. And yet, increasingly their voices are being silenced, their unique visions lost in the firestorm of change, conflict, globalization and encroachment from societies that marginalize those different from themselves.

National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis has done as much as anyone else on the planet to celebrate the diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures. In this speech given at TED 2003, he gives us a glimpse of his deep experiences among the extraordinary peoples he’s encountered…the very ones disappearing right in front of our eyes.