Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volumes 1
All humans are born equal, with complete freedom of choice and action. When the ancient Balanta ancestors grew in number and began to live in the same place with other people, a few restrictions were accepted by common consent, over time. These restrictions were based on their Great Belief and they are few in number and very easy to understand. They are:
You must not injure or kill anyone.
You must not steal or damage things owned by someone else.
You must be honest in your dealings and not swindle anyone.
These are the only limitations on every human being that is born. Today, these restrictions are called “Natural Law.”
This ancient time in our ancestor’s history, going back to the emergence of the haplogroup E-V38 42,000 years ago, has been described by historian John Henrik Clarke:
“This was one of the greatest ages of spirituality known in the history of the world. It was probably one of the highest moral ages known to man. And man did not use the word ‘god’ at all. I am not talking about a godless age, I am talking about an age when man accepted a spiritual force of the universe so all-conclusive that it included everything, and man did not say, ‘Only man has a soul’, he said, ‘all living things has a soul, including the cockroach.’ And he wouldn’t step on a cockroach because the cockroach has a soul. And he wouldn’t cut down a tree without having a ceremony because a tree has life and a tree has a soul. Western man began the stupid concept that only human beings has soul. Western man, in his soulless-ness, began the concept that only certain people with certain faces with certain color, has soul.
Now, three or four thousand years before (the white man) wore a shoe or lived in a house that had a window, …. You hadn’t come in contact with him at all …. When you had your own spirituality in tact … you, meaning African people, had created a spirituality that said every living thing has a soul…. And this form of spirituality included everything, and included a law, the law of opposites, which to simplify it, was the law of complementarity, that you complimented everything. That if you had a female, you had to have a male, or vice versa…. What I am saying is that (our ancestors) laid the basis for basic humanity and the basic laws of the universe.”
Credo Mutwa, the the last living sangoma, or traditional Bantu healer, to undergo the thwasa (sangoma training and initiation), and who wrote a book called Indaba, My Children also describes this period in our ancient history:
“The Ba-Ntu, or the Ba-Tu, were the founders of our culture and our religion. And being a solid, uniform nation they were at peace for thousands of years. They were not ruled by chiefs, but by a High Council of the Mothers of the People – that is, all the Witches and Sybils over the age of forty. At this time the Strange Ones, the Phoenicians, or Ma-Iti, who came some five to six hundred BC, and the slave-raiding Arabs were things of the distant future.
The Ba-Tu were at peace among themselves and because a High Curse was laid upon any person who stole as much as a single grain of corn from his neighbor, crime was totally unknown. There were warriors-elect who stationed themselves along trading routes at regular intervals, to protect travelers and traders against attack, not by human beings, but by wild animals. Man, in Africa at least, had not yet thought of offending a fellow man, physically or otherwise.
The ruling Council of the Mothers of the People used magic and naked intimidation to exercise control over all the people. These people had no fear of death; they knew it as something inevitable which had to come sooner or later, and capital punishment had no meaning whatsoever. The Mothers of the People also knew that corporal punishment infuriates, challenges and hardens the average criminally inclined human being and encourages him to become more cunning. Thus, they kept war and crime away from their land with the one medium that impresses the average human being – witchcraft.
Tribal historians today still sigh for those days when there was only one race of man and the Spirit of Peace walked the land – when every man woman and child, yea, every beast felt the soothing protection of the soft-eyed, infinitely wise Mothers of the People.
This was the first and last instance in the whole record of the Black People of Africa when pure witchcraft and black magic were used, not to terrorize people, but to keep peace in the land. For hundreds of years peace reigned in the land of the Ba-Ntu and in this atmosphere of peace the Great Belief was born.”
By the time our ancient Balanta ancestors migrated down the Hapi (Nile) River into Ta-Nihisi (also called Nubia and Upper Kemet/Egypt), they were living besides other groups of people. Conflict emerged between the ancient Balanta ancestors called “Anu” and a group called “Mesintu”. When the Mesintu created weapons from iron, they created a secret society and a religion based on this knowledge, and they became known as the “Followers of Horus at Edfu”. For the first time in our history, not everyone was considered equal. This new “ruling” class created a culture based on a monopoly of “power” that violated the Great Belief. Ultimately, this conflict resulted in an invasion by Menes (also called Narmer), which established complete authority and formalized the new society, the first dynasty in Egypt, based on force.
Limestone head, thought by Petrie to be Narmer in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London
Narmer’s Palette depicting the conquest in 3100 BC.
Over the next 1,500 years, the system of rule by force developed in Egypt and spanned seventeen dynasties. Historian Cheikh Anta Diop explains,
“It is important to first show that by the sixteenth century B.C., the XVIITH Egyptian Dynasty, under Thutmose III (1504-1450 B.C.) in particular, had effectively conquered the whole eastern Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus, the Cyclades, etc.) and all of western Asia (Hatti, or the Hittite country, Mittanni, Amourrou, Kadesh, Syria, the country of Akkad, and Babylonia).
In total, according to Thutmose III’s Hymn of Triumph, written in verse and engraved on the ‘poetic stela’ at Karnak, facing Thebes in Upper Egypt, 110 foreign states were conquered and integrated to different degrees into the Egyptian empire. In one year, under Thutmose II, the Egyptian treasury collected 3,500 kilos of gold (electrum), of which nine-tenths came from the tributes paid by vassals. Western Asia was divided into administrative districts placed under the authority of Egyptian governors, charged with collecting the tributes, or annual taxes, that all these defeated and vassal states had to pay to the Egyptian treasury.”
Here, it is important to understand, that our Balanta ancestors, the Anu now called the “Nehesu” who came down from the Mountains of the Moon and settled in Wadi Kubbaniya and then established settlements down the river into what became known as Nubia in the land of Ta-Nihisi and then further down the river into Ta-Meri, had by this time become the defeated subjects of the “Rheth” people (as they called themselves). The Rheth people used our knowledge against us, particularly the followers of Horus at Edfu, people known as Mesnitu, and who used metal-working technologies to create weapons and eventually a system of domination based upon force. Though some people see the establishment of the Egyptian Dynasties as a great triumph of achievement, to our Balanta ancestors, it represents the destruction and fall of our people. This is how our peaceful life ended. We resisted the imposition of authority and the obligation to pay taxes to a leader we did not support. Diop continues,
“Fourteen hundred years before Rome, Egypt created the first centralized empire in the world. . . . One can hardly imagine, today, the degree of centralization in the Egyptian empire and the efficacy of its administration.
‘Royal messengers” went through the different regions of the empire delivering messages from the Pharaoh. The generals were in charge of regularly making inspection tours in the conquered territory. ‘A royal postal service circulates over roads created by the Egyptian administration, staked out with military stations and water tanks for resupply.’ The king maintained personal relations with his vassals and each year made inspection trips throughout the whole empire: the children of vassal princes were taken ‘hostages’ and educated in Egyptian style, at the court of the Egyptian emperor, in order to teach them Egyptian manners and tastes and to assimilate them to Pharaonic culture and civilization.
In addition to the compulsory annual tribute representing the collective tax of the whole conquered nation, evaluated according to its wealth, the vassal owed other types of ‘help’: gifts to the royal messengers, sending slaves (generally women) to the Egyptian king each time the vassal addressed the Pharaoh to ask a favor of him. The Pharaoh could at any moment require money, chariots, horses, compulsory war service; the vassal was constantly under the orders of the Egyptian generals. The Pharaoh judged and arbitrated conflicts between vassals; he could order one of them to arrest a disloyal peer. The vassals enjoyed only internal autonomy; in fact, they had lost their international sovereignty: they could not directly deal with foreign lands. If his territory were invaded, the vassal had to report without delay to his lord, his sun, his god, the Pharaoh. He was declared a felon and beheaded if he separately made peace with an enemy of the Pharaoh. The felonious or supposedly guilty vassal was called to appear before Pharaoh’s court to justify himself, failing which Pharaoh sent a faithful vassal to bring back the guilty one with his entire family in chains.
The Pharaoh, being the incarnation of the divine KA, legitimately (?) exercised the power that he received from the God Amon-Ra, creator of the universe, in order to maintain justice, peace and law among mortals. The theory of individual will as a source of authority never existed in Egypt. All the peoples had to obey Pharaoh Thutmose III, according to the divine will of Amon-Ra, who was not only the national Egyptian God, but God of the whole universe, his creation: that is what is affirmed by the Karnak stela, on which the 110 conquered states are enumerated:
‘I have given you power and victory over all the nations you have conquered the rebel hordes as I commanded, the Earth in its length and its breadth, the peoples of the West and of the East are your subjects, no one was subjected to your majesty without myself having been your guide, so that you would succeed. All the peoples come, bringing tribute to you on their backs, bowing before you as I have ordained.’
This was the philosophy of power that Thutmose III invented in order to create the first true empire in history: ‘The king in the righteousness of his heart, reigns, accomplishing the divine will.’
According to a theory similar to that of the kings of the XVII Dynasty who succeeded in unifying the monarchy at the national level, the Egyptian solar cosmogony was imposed on all the conquered peoples of the empire. . . . Thus, the cult of Amon-Ra, the sun-king became universal and heralded the religious revolution of Amenophis IV (Akhenaton).”
Now here is what Thutmose III’s Hymn of Triumph, written in verse and engraved on the ‘poetic stela’ at Karnak, facing Thebes in Upper Egypt, has to say specifically about the ancestors of the Balanta, the Nehesu living in Ta-Nihisi, Nubia, at the time:
“I have come, I am allowing you to crush all of the barbarians of Nubia; all the way to the people of Put, all is in your hand; I am making them behold your majesty similar to that of your two brothers, Horus and Seth, whom I have joined hands to insure your power.”
Victory Stela of Thutmose III, Dynasty XVII 1479 to 1429 BC, from Nubia (Sudan) Gebel Barakal, temple B 500
Here, then begins the start of the “legal” issues facing Balanta people. Now, for the first time, there are TWO systems of law competing against each other: NATURAL LAW and STATUTORY LAW. Our ancestors left their homeland and headed west to Guinea Bissau some five thousand to three thousand five hundred years ago.
