SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES OF BALANTA ANCESTORS' ANCIENT SPIRITUALITY APPLIED TO MY VISIT TO EGYPT AND MY MARRIAGE: A CASE STUDY ON MY SECOND ANNIVERSARY

“These are for you and your wife. They are for health and prosperity.”

- Adel Mohamed Ahmed, Nubian salesclerk at the Papyrus Museum, 49 Pyramids Street in the Merit Center El Bazar at the Giza Pyramid complex, presenting me and my wife two turquoise scarab talismans.

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Today, October 10, 2019, is the second anniversary of my marriage to the love of my life, Zhou YuTong. Our marriage became somewhat famous and you can read about that story here.

Recently, my wife and I traveled to Heliopolis, Egypt in order to compete in the 1st International Masters Swimming Championships. The purpose of traveling all the way to Egypt to compete in this event was more than just athletic. It was spiritual. I explained it in the article, A Swimmer’s Race:

“On September 28, 2010, I received my genetic DNA results from African Ancestry. My paternal DNA was a 100% match with the Balanta people in Guinea Bissau. Since then, I have researched my Balanta ancestry and discovered that they originated in East Africa.  Haplogroup E1b1a is a direct basal branch of Y-chromosome haplogroup E-V38 which originated in the Horn of Africa about 42,300 years before the present. Further research showed that these ancestors of mine migrated down the Nile River and settled a place called Wadi Kubbaniya in modern day Sudan around 18,500 BC.  Research also showed that they continued to migrate down the Nile River and established the first city called Nekhen. By 3200 BC, they had migrated into what is called Upper and Lower Egypt and settled the first areas called Nuits or Nomes. The first Nuit/Nome was called Ta-Seti. The 13th Nuit/Nome that my ancestors settled was called Iunu. In the Bible, it is called “On”. The Greeks called it “Heliopolis” and today, the city is called Cairo. 

 

On October 4-5, 2019, the Heliopolis Sporting Club in Cairo, Egypt will be hosting the 1st International Swimming Masters Championships. Now you can understand why competing in this event is so important to me. For the first time, the world’s best Masters Swimmers are going to compete in Africa, in the very city that my ancestors founded. It is important to me that one of the descendants of the city’s original founders – me – not only competes but wins. To be honest, I get upset whenever I see that the “African Swimmer of the Year” is in fact, of European origin. This year, Ed Acura gained attention with his short movie, A Film Called Blacks Can’t Swim. I want to make my contribution, my statement, that not only can blacks swim, we can win! I think it is important that one of the champions at this inaugural competition, is a black swimmer. I think it can inspire a new generation of young swimmers as well as adult swimmers on the continent of Africa.”

 

I accomplished my mission, winning six gold medals for my ancestors and honoring them on the podium. According to the media,  Siphiwe Baleka’s Sorcery Dominates the 1st International Masters Swimming Championships

“It wasn’t his performance in the pool, however, that received the most attention. All eyes were on Baleka because he painted his body in traditional African decorations. Perhaps this was the first time that anyone had ever displayed such African culture in the history of competitive swimming. When asked why he did this, Baleka said, ‘DNA testing shows that my Balanta ancestors were the first people to settle in what is called Egypt today long before the pyramids were built. I wanted to honor them.’” 

Siphiwe on podium in Egypt.jpg

So, what does this have to do with my marriage and ancient spirituality?

After the competition, on our last day in Egypt, we went on a tour. We had already been to Khuti, The Great Pyramid designed by Nu-Er-nub-Ari and mistakenly attributed to Pharaoh Khufu, and we had already visited the Egyptian Museum. Now, on the last day, after visiting Khuti and Hu (The Sphinx) for the second time, we stopped at a papyrus museum at 49 Pyramids Street in the Merit Center El Bazar at the Giza Pyramid complex. Here, I met Adel Mohamed Ahmed and this is where the story takes a turn.

Coming to Egypt, I had hoped to make a connection with Nubian people. I knew that their community was located in Aswan and further south. Still, surely, there must be some Nubian people somewhere in Cairo. However, in the city of 22 million people, I saw 99% Arabs. Having read a ton of John Henrik Clarke and Chancellor William’s The Destruction of Black Civilization, as well as a ton of other books on the subject, I saw first hand how this place, Egypt, formerly called Kemet, originally the home to various “black” people, had been invaded by foreigners, and that the entire history of Egypt is the story of how these foreigners attacked and waged a relentless war against these black peoples, and succeeded in taking their land while pushing the black people south into Nubia. For me, seeing all these Arabs in the place that my ancestors originally settled, making a ton of money on tourism to visit the Pyramids that black people built, hurt my spirit.

After watching a demonstration on how my ancestors were the first to create paper from the papyrus plant, I walked around the museum looking at different items. I found a gold chair and asked a man in the store how much it cost. “It’s about US $2,500,” Adel said.

“If I sit on it, do I have to buy it?” I asked him while already sitting in it. He laughed. This was the first conversation I had in Egypt with a black man.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Nubia”, he answered. And with that we launched into a conversation about where we come from. He told his story. I told mine. We bonded. And then he said, “My grandfather told me, ‘You are Nubia. We have the roots in maybe Ethiopia and also Guinea Bissau.” Now, in Volume I of my book, Balanta B’urassa, My Sons, Those Who Resist Remain, I document the seven migrations of the Balanta ancient ancestors to and from the Nile Valley prior to 322 B.C. On page 40 I wrote,

“First, since the Balanta E1b1a1 DNA comes from the E-Vs8 Y-chromosome haplogroup which originated in the Horn of Africa 42,300 years before the present, then that means our family history starts in the Horn of Africa and NOT in ‘The Old Land’ near modern day Cameroon (according to Bantu Historian Credo Mutwa). This suggests that our family started in East Africa, migrated to The Old Land, and then migrated back into East Africa and then back to West Africa and finally to Guinea Bissau. Is this possible?

Consider again the statement, haplogroup E in general is believed to have originated in Northeast Africa and was later introduced to West Africa from where it spread around 5,000 years ago to Central, Southern and Southeastern Africa with the Bantu expansion.”

You can imagine my surprise and fascination with the fact that in a city of 22 million people, I meet one Nubian person who tells me that his grandfather told him that his Nubian roots came from both Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau!

That was the first “sign”.

After making our purchases, Ahmed handed me two turquoise scarab beetles, explaining that these were to bring my wife and I health and prosperity.

This was the second “sign.”

Siphiwe and Tong at Pyramids 1.jpg

In discussing how Totemism and the Cult of Motherhood was created in Volume I of my book, Balanta B’urassa, My Sons, Those Who Resist Remain, on page 186 I quoted Dr. Yosef ben Jochannan, explaining,

“The dung beetle hibernates, goes into the manure of a donkey, horse and the cow, only animals with grass manure. And that beetle remains in there for twenty-eight days; you know that particular beetle died in your mind. And when the beetle finally comes out, what better symbol will you have than the resurrection? . . .  Thus, the beetle became the symbol of resurrection. Of course, the religion itself has started then. Just imagine you’ve got to go back 1000 years and see your woman giving birth to a baby. . . . As you are standing there and this baby comes from the woman’s organ. You witness this . . . . You can’t perceive that you have anything to do with this 10,000 or 5,000 years ago. Witnessing the birth of that baby sets you thinking. You immediately start to transcend your mind, and you also start to attribute this to something beyond. Thus, you start to believe. You start to wonder, why is it here? Where did it come from? And where is it going? Because you are now experiencing birth! But your experience is coming from a woman. Thus, you start to pray, and the woman becomes your Goddess, your first deity. She becomes Goddess Nut, the goddess of the sky; and you become God Geb, the god of the earth. You suddenly see the sun in all of this and you realize that when the sun came the light came; and when the sun went, the light went; when the moon came you saw a moon in there and you don’t see any light because the light is not shining on it. So, you see there is a God, at least there is the major attribute of God because you realize when that doesn’t happen, the crops and the vegetation don’t come.

You also realize that the sun and the moon make the river rise and the Africans recording these factors created the science of astronomy and astrology. Astrology, having nothing to do with your love life. Astronomy is the chart of the scientific data of the movement of the planet and the sun and so forth, to the movement of each other. Astrology is a physical relationship of astronomy, the water rising at the high tide and that is what the ancients spoke about and the division of the two disciplines. . . .

In those days the students would come and read for their education. There were no books to take home, there were no publishing houses like now. You had only one book and most of the subjects were taught orally. . . . So the pre-dynastic period was the period of the introduction of religion, of mathematics and science, engineering, law, medicine and so forth.”

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So now that you know the story, let’s analyze my experience according to the 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors

1.    The purpose of traveling to Egypt was to honor my ancestors who were among the original inhabitants of the area. This was significant because, according to Principle #4  - “The spirits of the first ancestors, highly exalted in the superhuman world, possess extraordinary force inasmuch as they are the founders of the human race and propagators of the divine inheritance of vital human strength.”

 

2.    On the first day of my visit, I returned to Khuti, the great pyramid, and Hu, the Sphinx. On the second day I visited the Egyptian Museum. This brought me into direct contact with the oldest objects on earth that were possessed by my ancestors. This was significant because, according to Principle #21 – “The fact that a thing has belonged to anyone, that it has been in strict relationship with a person, leads the Bantu to conclude that this thing shares the vital influence of its owner. It is what ethnologists like to call ‘contagious magic, sympathetic magic”; but it is neither contact nor ‘sympathy’ that are the active elements, but solely the vital force of the owner, which acts, as one knows, because it persists in the being of the thing possessed or used by him.”

 

3.       At the 1st International Masters Swimming Competition, I competed while decorated with the traditional body painting of Nubians engaged in competition. The media described this as “Sorcery”. This was significant because, according to Principles #2 and #3 – “Bantu behavior is centered in a single value: vital force. The Bantu say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity. Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God, to the spirits and to the dead, as well as of all that is usually called magic, sorcery or magical remedies. The Bantu will tell you that they go to a diviner to learn the words of life, so that he can teach them the way of making life stronger.”

 

The body painting is a kind of “word of life” to make my vital force energy stronger in the same way that a soldier, wearing a uniform, feels the pride of his country, thereby making him a stronger, tougher, more determined soldier. In addition, Principle #12 -  “In what Europeans call ‘primitive’ magic there is, to Bantu eyes, no operation of supernatural, indeterminate forces, but simply the interaction between natural forces, as they were created by God and as they were put by him at the disposal of men.”

 

Finally, it was significant because of Principle #22 – “The ‘kilumu’ or ‘nganga’, that is to say the man who possesses a clearer than usual vision of natural forces and their interaction, the man who has the power of selecting these forces and of directing them towards a determinist usage in particular cases, becomes what he is only because he has been ‘seized’ by the living influence of a deceased ancestor or of a spirit, or even because he has been ‘initiated’ by another ‘kilumbu’ or ‘nganga’.”

 

4.    I won six gold medals. Why is this significant? In Volume II of Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain, I quoted Chancellor Williams, saying,

“The African masses caught it from all directions as their own leaders progressively became ‘Caucasian’ Hamites and Semites, and as many who were unmistakably full-blooded Africans became as predatory as were their known enemies. It appears that from time immemorial, stark greed, the desire for wealth, has overridden all humane considerations. Greed has served as a kind of anesthesia, deadening humane sentiments and breaking the bonds of affection that relates man to man. Greed was triumphant in Egypt from ancient times down into our own century. Egypt was the major slave exchange center in Africa. Nubia (the Northern Sudan) was not only the chief source of supply for slaves, who were marched up the Second Cataract, but it was also the main source of gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, precious stones of many kinds, ebony and animal skins. These goods enriched Egypt in her expanding international trade. A hostile Egypt now stood between the black world and international commerce.”

This is significant because the very reason gold is sought after around the world is because of its vital life force energy – whereas over time just about anything else will erode and decay, gold will retain and preserve its vitality. This is why it is used for currency – it retains its value over time. By winning six gold medals, I symbolically returned this vitality to the ancestors from whom it was stolen and for which they had had suffered constant invasion from foreigners.

 

5.       Nearly two years ago, I married Zhou YuTong from Liuzhou, China. This is significant because Principles #2, #5, #6 and #11 explains the purpose of marriage - ““Bantu behavior is centered in a single value: vital force. The Bantu say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity…. In the minds of Bantu, all beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man…. Supreme happiness, the only kind of blessing, is, to the Bantu, to possess the greatest vital force: the worst misfortune and, in very truth, the only misfortune, is, he thinks, the diminution of this power…. One force will reinforce or weaken another. This causality is in no way supernatural in the sense of going beyond the proper attributes of created nature. It is, on the contrary, a metaphysical causal action which flows out of the very nature of a created being. General knowledge of these activities belongs to the realm of natural knowledge and constitutes philosophy properly so called. The observation of the action of these forces in their specific and concrete applications would constitute Bantu natural science.”

 

The point of marriage is to find another person that consistently increases your vital force energy and for whom your vital force energy increases theirs, and then have children together. This is a happy marriage. It ensures that the greatest amount of vital life force energy remains perpetually in one’s posterity. One can now understand the real and spiritual danger of being in a toxic marriage. Since I fulfilled my debt to the ancestors by giving them two sons from a woman of African descent, I was free to find a wife that provided the greatest increase to my vital life force energy.

 

Though generally speaking, Balanta distrust for foreigners was so strong as to preclude marriage with them, Walter Hawthorne notes in his book about the Balanta that, “Through the institution of marriage, tabancas formed powerful alliances with one another. This is certainly the case today and appears to have been historically. Indeed, Armando Moraes e Castro mentioned the practice in a 1925 report about Balanta: ‘Among them there is a very curious custom. If two families are enemies, they make peace by exchanging their children in marriage…. Of particular importance in the ear of the Atlantic slave trade, marriage served to cement bonds of trust between neighboring tabancas.’”

 

6.       On the last day of my journey to Egypt, a Nubian, a direct descendant of the ancient bloodline, gave me two turquoise scarabs. This is significant because of Principle # 5 - “In the minds of Bantu, all beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man.” This is why Albert Churchward, in his book The Origin and Evolution of Religion, writes of my ancestors, “the next stage in the evolution of these Nilotic Negroes was so-called Fetishism – Magic, which may be considered further development of their Sign Language, and should be defined as a reverent regard for Amulets, Talismans, Mascots, Charms, etc. . . . To these Negroes this ‘Fetish’ or ‘Charm’ represents a visible symbol of Magical Power to influence the elemental or ancestral Spirits;

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Now we can put all of this together and understand the meaning of my experience in Egypt. Two years ago, today, I married my wife, Zhou YuTong. I promised to love her, cherish her, care for her and protect her for the rest of my life. My intention was to propose to her on the podium after becoming the World Champion in the men’s 45- 49 age group at the world championships, thereby proving that among men my age, I had more vital energy or power in my field of endeavor, than any man alive in the world. Unfortunately, I only managed to achieve four silver medals, and had to settle for having the second most amount of vital energy among my peers in the world. Nevertheless, I proposed, and she accepted. On this day, two years ago, we got married.

Some people criticized me for having a “mixed” marriage as if marrying another non-white (Chinese) person was the same as marrying a white person and thus, a beneficiary of white supremacy. However, I remind such critics that when the Balanta were fighting for their freedom and independence against the Portuguese, Amilcar Cabral, in August of 1960, led a delegation to the People’s Republic of China and it was the Chinese who were the first to give the Balanta freedom fighters weapons and military training. It is often said that in the time of need, you learn who your friends are.

When asked why I wanted to marry Zhou YuTong, a woman who did not speak my language and whose language I did not speak, whose culture was completely different, I could only reply, “She increases my vital energy.” That is just something you feel, you know it when you have it. For two years, our peaceful home-life and my increased vital energy allowed me the two most productive years of my life. Among other things, I published nine books, three of them on the history of the Balanta people. So it was not a coincidence that after completing my books on Balanta and traveling to Egypt to offer them to the ancestors, along with the six gold medals, I should end up in a museum dedicated to the history of paper-making by my ancestors, to be approached by a Nubian man who presented me with the two turquoise (the color of the swimming pool) scarabs (symbols of eternal life) as gifts expressly for me and my wife.

Here I was, after absorbing so much vital life force energy, being presented with the blessings of my ancestors, an acknowledgement that my offerings had been accepted. Perhaps you can begin to understand now the magnitude of the amount of vital life force energy, according to the Great Belief of My Balanta Ancestors’ Ancient Spirituality, contained in the scarab talisman which my wife and I now wear. Whether you think such talismans and charms are mere superstition or not, I have attempted to present a studied analysis of the application of spirituality to real experience. This has nothing to do with Religion.