An Overview of Prophet Neb Naba’s Influence
Spotlight: An Overview of Prophet Neb Naba’s Influence
When death takes away a person dear to us, we observe that nature runs its course - the sun shines as it always did; the river runs as it always did; and clouds cross the sky as they always did. When death takes away a person dear to society, the society drowns out nature: it broadcasts the history of that soon-to-be-forgotten-and-replaced person - corporation magnate, president, general, or other hero. Now, when death takes away certain other people, society itself changes. The passing of the prophet Neb Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig in 2008 was such an event, and already we are witnessing some of the changes his life has made on various branches of knowledge. In this introduction, I present a few footprints of this unparalleled thinker.
CONTEXT
At the Cairo conference of Egyptologists in 1974, Theophile Obenga from Congo and Cheikh Anta Diop from Senegal pulled the sheets over a field of research that had been Egyptology. These two researchers announced that the writing system then called hieroglyphics couldn’t possibly have been of European origin because many plants and animals used in that script aren’t found in European climates but around the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and lands neighbouring it. This type of rigor (reliance on only incontrovertible evidence) was advance notice of the coming of Maakheru (Truth Teller) Naba, prophet of the Kemetic traditions. Besides incontrovertible evidence, Diop and Obenga also relied on linguistic analysis (Obenga wrote and read Classical Greek): Naba would arrive later on field as a native speaker of Medu (Hieroglyphs). The Diop-Obenga participation at the Cairo Conference banished speculators from research into the origins of the civilisation of the Pharaohs.
Suddenly, much misunderstood activity by European conquerors made sense - contextual sense. Why, for example would the English go to war to oust the French (Napoleon) from the Valley of Kings (Egypt)? The Valley had none of the things that drove Europeans into looting frenzies: spices, plant drugs - the analogs for coffee and oil in our day. And why, even just earlier, had Napoleon’s military contingents included over one thousand engineers, scientists, linguists, and pharmacists? To see the connection, consider the Rosetta Stone which gave France the edge in research that had been ongoing since one Greek Alexander entered the Valley of Kings. Under the loud and dizzying frenzy to occupy the region ran a strong but well guarded conviction that the Valley of Kings held knowledge advanced beyond that of the well armed robbers of traditional monuments. The English wanted to loot their share of artifacts which they knew would cast light on their own search for the knowledge that powered the civilisation of the Pharaohs. Discovery of the Rosetta Stone convinced these looters of monuments that Medu, the language of the Pharaohs, would at last reveal the knowledge they sought. The defeat of the French in 1801 gave Britain the Rosetta Stone but not, literacy in the hieroglyphs. Then came Maakheru Naba speaking Medu and the world heard the language. The result has been this current revolution, this paradigm shift in how we all think about humanity’s past. Naba has banished the notion prehistory.
PHILOSOPHY - Major Changes
What Naba calls paradigm shifts used to be called scientific revolutions, meaning the kind of change that brings along nothing from a previous stage of understanding or practice - technology. These pre-Naba paradigm shifts limited themselves to segments of knowledge like biology, politics, engineering, and psychology. Naba has enlarged its scope so that it applies throughout cultures everywhere. It is rendering previous conceptions of the world, history, creation, theories and all previous modes of explanation obsolete. Consider the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with good and evil, with ethics and morality, with judgments about right and wrong actions, etc. He has established as an essential procedure requiring that thinkers ask where any notion comes from. He introduced The Book of Divine Ordinances (also known as The 77 Commandments) as the origin, source and reference for all systems that guide people towards the good. No alternative text anywhere is comprehensive, and all draw their injunctions directly or indirectly from values stated in this document. Where reigning religious paradigms have inculcated that we become good by doing good deeds, the Ordinances teach that we become good by not committing these evils in any situation. Being good by not doing evil is a paradigm shift. In addition, Naba declared humans to be inherently victims of whatever they are exposed to. Once you have been exposed to an experience, you cannot un-know it later. It is in your history indelibly. So reading The 77 Commandments just once places them in your history permanently. This is significant because once you know, you become responsible for this exposure since you cannot say later in any context that you did not know that being angry violates a commandment. This is a huge shift that those hanging onto the Ten Commandments or the forty-two or the other reduced commandments must make once they have seen the 77. Our awareness of the existence of The 77 Commandments has just increased our responsibilities. All of us!
Psychology - Exposure
Psychology has sustained a long-running debate over whether nature or nurture defines you. We need not say much here, as in earlier examples above, the paradigm he brings changes our thinking in every field. That is why earlier notions cannot survive: they would contradict, corrupt the new paradigm. Naba exposes one feature of the human mind that disrupts everything we had accepted about it. The human mind cannot create or invent anything. By design, it enables us to imitate, copy, regurgitate, but it does not enable us to introduce anything new into existence. This has to be one of the most radical consequences of this Kemetic paradigm because libraries the world over (and now the ubiquitous internet) are saturated with examples of human invention. Invention is something we all have been conditioned to strive to do, and the current culture thrives on the energy we divert towards inventing new things as all around us rise products announced as new and improved, their manufacturers continuously nudging people in every market to upgrade their possessions. He reveals much more about the mind than the reigning paradigm ever knew.
SOCIOLOGY - Laws
Sociology is a newfangled field for research into the relation between society and its individuals. Here too, belief in progress is settled, and the hunger for new things, for inventions is all but settled also. And behind this hunger for the new lies the related belief that through our inventions, we are advancing, progressing. Inevitably fostering the idea that previous stages of humanity (including the period of our own parents) were less developed, more backward, less intelligent. And yet there is the contradictory phenomenon of conquering territory in order to acquire the advanced knowledge demonstrated in its earlier inhabitants. What does it say about continuous claims today in Europe and the Americas that they are more intelligent today than their Ancestors were? This ought to prove, as Naba says, that “we are underestimating human intelligence if we pretend that society has not solved the question of the relation of the individual to society”. At the root of the problem lies our confidence in laws. There are today societies which trust their laws to protect everyone, and also trust those who carry out the laws to never violate them. Naba says that such a system simply never worked. Others have dismissed the laws solution for identical reasons (example, even Rome’s own Jubenal who asked: “Who will guard the guardians?”), but Naba presents the objection to laws side-by-side with The 77 Commandments, Divinely crafted laws that always work. Presenting both gives the thoughtful reader a pause to assess the alternative being offered.
We may now look deeper into the distraction of progress. The belief today that we are somehow progressing implies that we have come to a place our Ancestors weren’t knowledgeable enough to reach. Naba announces that perfection (including in knowledge) was attained hundreds of millennia ago. Compared to human laws, The 77 Commandments cannot be anything but perfection. Improving them is impossible, seeing (by our laws), how far short we fall already.
Socio-psychologists do not answer the question whether the conditions of your birth define you completely (nature) or whether your nurture (environment, experiences - in short, what you were exposed to) determines who/what you develop into. Now Naba enters the scene and declares that the human being is the product of its exposures (experiences). What is left is verification; confirmation.
ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE
Naba’s impact here is on defining what counts as perennial questions, which he calls unanswered questions. One of them is how the world/universe came into being. Naba answers that it was created, citing the oldest Cosmogony known to humans, the Cosmogony of Uast which predates the Christian Bible by over 45,000 years. Yes, that answer settles the issue for all fields interested because rival explanations turn to be nothing but imitations, attempts to copy that original Cosmogony. This is true given Naba’s other dictum that human brains are not designed to create or invent. The Gods involved in the creation of this universe have one quality lacking in the Gods of later Cosmogonies - the Gods of Uast came into the world before humanity did and created all other Gods exhibited in Uast. This fact makes the later Gods outside the Kemetic Cosmogony Gods thought up by humans. By definition in the new paradigm, Gods whom human preceded into the world are demons (the original Greek word for a “God” invented by humans) . The very simple-looking idea that Gods are beings who precede humans into this world is a shift in paradigms. We are witnessing the arrival of an era where thinking will shun speculation and look for roots, springboards in received knowledge rather accept guesswork. Indoctrinating guesswork returns us to the age of entertainers known as gladiators. Today’s philosophical scene is nothing but an updated Roman arena, a stadium, a gladiatorum where random gladiators disguised as thinkers take the stage to do battle with each other not just to entertain, but to distract people from investigating battles that would benefit them, like the internal and perpetual battle to not break those 77 Commandments.
DIVINATION - Bayuali
In colonial astronomy, Earth is considered a living planet while the Moon is a dead one; but what makes Earth a living planet is just its component life forms - plants, animals, and others without which Earth is just as dead as the Moon. The paradigm Naba exposes us to explains a perpetual interplanetary dialogue that cosmic bodies use to share information with each other, information they use to fit themselves into the cosmic order, that is to maintain their positions among other cosmic bodies. Naba explains the method planets use to carry out this dialogue: they use two channels called Bayuali and Yennu. The term Bayuali also refers to a technology which Kemetic priests use to read the energies in the Bayuali channel. So far, readers who know about scientific assumptions will already see that the new paradigm shares hardly anything with the one in place. Planets being self-aware? Communicating with each other? The scientific paradigm would dismiss this until Naba mentions a technology for reading the language of this cosmic dialogue. Then it’s over as one realises that the new paradigm has just exposed the colonial (scientific) paradigm as an explanatory model that dismisses observable realities because it lacks the requisite testing instruments. It might also help to remember that Bayuali technology is the reference, the source that is partially imitated in our time by the forms of divination known as geomancy. The special logical appeal of Bayuali-based explanations is that Earth’s energies exert a greater force on its guest lifeforms (us, for example) than do cosmic bodies farther away from Earth.
SPIRITUALITY - Ka’at Ibi
Ka’at Ibi is the Kemetic discipline of assessing with the heart and mind in order to come closer to the nature of the Divine. As humanity’s original form of meditation, Ka’at Ibi is now resonating with all meditation schools, yet less than three decades ago, the concept did not exist for those living in Europe and the Americas. Now that it is part of our consciousness online, it is being mis-represented as just a variation of known meditation systems and then reduced to just techniques, mechanical how-to. Far from it, but this is inevitable: some new knowledge fits into the knowledge you already have in your bag; so you add it there. These early observers of Ka’at Ibi are doing the same thing. They will eventually find that if they wish to use the new knowledge, they must first empty their bag - toss out its their current paradigm and replace it with the paradigm the Prophet is using. I mean throw out their basis for everything they already think they know. Having to reconsider everything one knows about “meditation” is already an impact of the appearance of Ka’at Ibi on the intellectual-spiritual scene in our time.
CULTURE - Language
The concept of colonisation has never taken root in the minds of masses of people across the globe, in spite of the volumes written about it in the Americas, Asia, and Meritah during the 1960s; nor was it understood by leading thinkers in the Americas; nor was it a focus of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. or of others - even though Patrice Lumumba, Toussaint l’Ouverture, Kwame Nkrumah, Dedan Kimathi, Jomo Kenyatta, and others battled it directly in their days. Naba has singlehandedly imprinted the concept and reality of colonisation on the minds of today’s thinkers. Among developments to watch will be the impact of Naba’s insights on students of all previous activists including Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Kwame Nkrumah, Paulo Freire, Sekou Toure. Some researchers are (mistakenly) seeing Naba as a step-up from Fanon. All these men misunderstood the colonisation as a system that could be improved, reformed. Mistake: it functions in a paradigm that feeds on the loyalty of reformers. Naba has got people to rely on performing as much linguistic analysis themselves as they can in order to cope with political substitutes for the solution needed - exit from the colonial paradigm for human communities that oppose the Divine Model.
Naba already has left an impact on intellectual orientations. His requirement that people think to survive is leading people to analyse words to unlock meanings, to analyse symbols to expose meanings, to analyse behaviours to expose meanings. Naba has raised the bar on the minimum required to be vigilant in a colonised society. Take a name like “Melanesia”. Not being vigilant explains why the vast bulk of mankind sees this word and does not think “black Asia” or “the Asia inhabited by Africans”. After all, they so named the Americas to describe it to each other.
CULTURE - TIME DIVISION
Naba’s writings on time are deepening their initial impact on minds that now perceive the Gregorian calendar as unreliable. As he says, you cannot unknow. Knowledge traps you - forever. We know that calendars are tools for living, each calendar serving its own goal. Now we know about the Sidereal Calendar and its ten-day week, about its replacement and the current seven-day week; the original holy days and the origin of modern holidays; the cycle of the Sirius star and the origin of the leap year; the spiritual dimension of time and the stars as houses of Gods; the origin of the astrological signs... etc., and we know the reasons for them being replaced, which are solely political. Because this knowledge has already trapped us, we have no choice but to deal with the consequences of knowing more or better than we did before. In the case of the Sidereal Calendar, the impact has been immediate, like bringing light into a dark room.
CULTURE - Method
Before Naba, many wrote about culture, but none with the precision and concise characteristic of Naba. Across the internet, people are noting the brevity in which he expresses volumes while making sense. Many volumes have been written about the primacy of Kemet over Mesopotamia, but none of these volumes settled the issue because counter volumes rose up to dilute the issue. That is because speculation has been part of everything in the “library” of today’s knowledge. Naba’s authority lies in the accuracy of his concise explanations, a quality that has earned him the appelation “the undomesticated thinker” from readers outside the initiation.
SPIRITUALITY - Good and Evil - Corruption
In The Kemetic spiritual system, “isfit” or corruption is anything that spoils or tarnishes the purity of a human being whose goal is to approach or get closer to the Divine World. Any substance that the body eliminates is corrupt, i.e., waste, dead skin, hair, etc. Kemetic initiation teaches that positive quality in anything attracts humans. As with all concepts or values Kemetic, you confirm by inspecting or meditating (using the mind and heart). The Book of Divine Ordinances also known as The 77 Commandments exhibits the qualities to avoid if we wish to avoid corruption. But what links the concept of corruption to the early impact Maakheru had on the world he just left? As the Kemetic paradigm he introduced for living out our lives alters our perspective, so does his focus on the concept corruption, which he introduces in such a way that the word “sin” has now lost any impetus it ever had. The word corruption is elegant - it makes the use of “sin” or any other word unnecessary. As with the word prehistory earlier, Naba changes our use of the word corruption into a major departure from the norm with a shock effect it originally lacked.
It has been less than ten years since Naba passed on which is too soon for anything close to an assessment of his full impact on human knowledge. It usually takes upwards of fifty years after a great thinker passes to understand his legacy. In Naba’s case, it will take longer; but already, changing the direction is clear. His work is sweeping away entire modes of thinking to be replaced by modes currently unknown by minds outside the Kemetic paradigm.
