ancestry

Return to Khuti Part 2: The Mesintu and Anu Ancestors of the Balanta

In Return to Khuti: The Great Pyramid and Balanta we learned that the Great Pyramid is properly called “Khuti” and was built by the old Stellar Cult people of Egypt, the followers of Horus called Mesinu, who were descendants of the earlier Mesenti/Mesintu, or followers of Horus Behutet. Now we are going to learn about the conflict with the Mesintu and why our Balanta ancestors migrated from the Nile Valley just prior to the conquest of Menes (Narmer) and the establishment of the first dynasty in Kemet (Egypt).

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Excerpt from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 1:

The Mesintu Blacksmiths and Cult of Horus at Edfu

 

“Metals were introduced into Egypt in very ancient times, since the class of blacksmiths is associated with the worship of Horus of Edfu and appears in the account of the mythical wars of that God.” “The earliest tools we possess in copper or bronze date from the Fourth Dynasty.” (Gladstone on “Metallic Copper, Tin and Antimony form Ancient Egypt,” in the Proceedings of the Biblical Archaeological Society, 1891-92, pp. 223-26).

“…. Copper, tin, and antimony were known to these ancient Egyptians from the earliest times of their Totemic Sociology, thousands of years before the Stellar Mythos, at which period of time the Pyramids of Gizeh were built.”

Maspero is right in associating the blacksmiths with Horus of Edfu.

As I have stated, the Kavirondo Nilotic Negroes work in iron, and also in copper, and amongst these people their blacksmiths are called Yothetth. There is a separate caste called “Uvino,” and amongst the Gemi tribe the blacksmiths were formed into a religious secret society, and still possess all the myths of Horus of Edfu. Horus I was the great chief in their Hero Cult, and “the Chief Artificer in Metals, “i.e. he was recognized as the Chief Hero of this clan or secret society.”

It was these ‘blacksmiths’ – men who knew how to smelt iron ore and to forge the metal into weapons of offence and defense – who formed themselves into the ‘big clan of Blacksmiths,’ having Horus as their astronomical Chief, that came up from the South to the North in pre-dynastic times, and , having conquered the Masaba Negroes and the Nilotic  Negroes (Balanta ancestors), who were then the inhabitants of Egypt, established themselves in Egypt, making Edfu their chief city and center. They possessed the knowledge of working in metals, brick-making, and pottery. . . . They could not but meet with success when warring, because they were armed with superior weapons; troops armed with weapons of iron must be successful against those armed with weapons of flint. The Egyptians called these ‘followers of Horus’ Mesintu or Mesinti, which I believe was the original name for all those tribes, and which may now be applied to the Masai group.  As we know, Horus was their deified God, and as Edfu became their center, he was styled “Lord of the forge city,’ The Great Master Blacksmith. It was here that they first built a sanctuary or temple which was called ‘Mesnet” The hieroglyphic here proves that these people were those belonging to the Masai ancestors.”

Article JE 34210 in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Pre-dynastic period. It is likely that this knife was not used in daily life, but rather for religious purposes.

Article JE 34210 in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Pre-dynastic period. It is likely that this knife was not used in daily life, but rather for religious purposes.

Now, my sons, reconsider what Credo Mutwa (the last living sangoma, or traditional Bantu healer, to undergo the thwasa sangoma training and initiation) has said: “the Watu-Tu-Tsi and the Masai – the Children of the Dragon (according to legend, spawned by the evil serpent with the sole purpose of oppressing and destroying the Bantu).”

In the book, Black Arabia & The African Origin of Islam, Wesley Muhammad writes,

“Even S.O.Y. Ketia, in a number of meticulous studies, found that:

‘The peopling of what is now the Egyptian Nile Valley, judging from archaeological and biological data, was apparently the result of a complex interaction between coastal northern Africans, ‘neolithic’ Saharans, Nilotic hunters, and riverine proto-Nubians with some influence and migration from the Levant. The major variability of early ‘Egyptians’ is thus seen to have been mainly established in the proto-predynastic period by the settling of all these people.’”

Thus, there was a mix of various different people in the Nile Valley area where the ancient ancestors of the Balanta lived. Coming into contact with these different groups of people created conflicts. Diop continues in “Political and Social Evolution of Ancient Egypt”:

“The political unification of the Nile Valley was effected for the first time from the south, from the kingdom of Nekhen in Upper Egypt. Narmer’s Tablet, discovered by Quibell in Hierakonpolis, retraced its various episodes.

Nekhen Map.JPG

The capital of the united kingdom was transferred to Tjenu (Thinis) near Abydos. This was the period of the first two Tjenu (Thinite) dynasties (3000-2778). By the Third Dynasty (2778-2723), centralization of the monarchy was complete. All the technological and cultural elements of Egyptian civilization were already in place and had only to be perpetuated. . . . Petrie affirmed that this dynasty, the first to give Egyptian civilization its almost definitive form and expression, was of Sudanese Nubian origin. It was easier to recognize the Negro origin of the Egyptians when the initial display of their civilization coincided with an unquestionably Negro dynasty. The equally Negro features of the protodynastic face of Tera Neter and those of the first king to unify the valley, also prove that this is the only valid hypothesis….

‘With administrative centralization in the Third Dynasty,’ writes Jacques Piernne, ‘there was no longer any noble or privileged class.’ However, the clergy, guardian of the faith that established the king’s authority, was a corps apart, well organized and relatively independent. Until then it had exercised its spiritual guardianship at the coronation of the king in the temple at Heliopolis. But, to make his power absolute, the king clashed with the clergy. From then on he renounced the Heliopolis coronation and had himself crowned in his own palace at Memphis. He proclaimed the principle of his omnipotence by divine right, added ‘Great God’ to his titles, and was free from any human control. The advent of the Fourth Dynasty, with the Giza pyramids, showed that the monarchy had reached its zenith.

Thereafter, the regime again evolved toward feudalism. The courtiers constituted a special corps of dignitaries which would make itself hereditary by usage, and soon by right. The cycle just described was twice more repeated almost identically and the history of ancient Egypt was to end without ever developing into a republic nor creating true secular thought. The feudal system that had just triumphed with the Fifth Dynasty reached its peak with the Sixth. It then engendered general stagnation in the economy and the administration of the State in urban as well as rural areas. And the Sixth Dynasty was to end with the first popular uprising in Egyptian history.

Obviously, division of labor on the basis of craftmanship already existed. The cities doubtless were active centers of trade with the eastern Mediterranean. Their idle poverty-stricken masses would take an active pat in the revolt. The mores of the nobility created a special class of men: servants contracted for varying tenure. The text describing these events shows that the country had plunged into anarchy; insecurity reigned, especially in the Delta with the raids by “Asiatics”. The latter monopolized the jobs intended for Egyptians in the various workshops and urban building yards.

The wretched of Memphis, capital and sanctuary of royalty, pillaged the city, robbing the rich and driving them into the streets. The movement soon spread to other cities. Sais was temporarily governed by a group of ten notables. The situation throughout the city was poignantly described in that text:

‘Thieves become proprietors and the former rich are robbed. Those dressed in fine garments are beaten. Ladies who had never set foot outside now go out. The children of nobles are dashed against the walls. Towns are abandoned. Doors, walls, columns are set aflame. The offspring of the great are thrown into the street. Nobles are hungry and in distress. Servants now are served. Noble ladies flee hungry and in distress. Servants now are served. Noble ladies flee… [their children] cringe in fear of death. The country is full of malcontents. Peasants wear shields into the fields. Man slays his own brother. The roads are traps. People lie in ambush until [the farmer] returns in the evening; then they steal whatever he is carrying. Beaten with cudgels, he is shamefully killed. Cattle roam at will; no one attends to them . . .

Each man leads away any animals he has branded. . . . Everywhere crops are rotting; clothing, spices, oil are lacking. Filth covers the earth. The government stores are looted, and their guards struck down. People eat grass and drink water. So great is their hunger that they eat the food intended for swine. The dead are thrown into the river; the Nile is a sepulcher. Public records are no longer secret.’

Apparently, the poor, at least for a time, retained the position thus acquired, for economic life and trade regained their normal course; wealth reappeared, though no longer in the same hands: ‘Luxury is widespread, but it is the poor who now are affluent. He who had nothing, possesses treasures, and the great flatter him . . .’

So, the first cycle of Egyptian history ended with the collapse of the Old Kingdom. It had begun with the feudalism that preceded the first political unification.; it closed in anarchy and feudalism. Monarchy sank into feudalism without being directly attacked. In fact, the principle of monarchy could not have been gravely threatened. Perhaps there were a few timid attempts at self-government in the Delta cities, as at Sais. But this was probably a temporary solution dictated by the suddenness of the crisis and the lack of public authority that followed the invasion of the Delta by the Asiatics. Cities on the invasion route were abruptly compelled to assure their own safety as the faced the common enemy. Confronted by this situation, the former provincial governors in Upper and Middle Egypt set themselves up as independent feudal lords, freed henceforth from any royal overlordship, though they did not ever question the principle of monarchy itself. On the contrary, each in his own way was trying to be king; they called themselves kings of their own regions. Apparently the bureaucratic apparatus, which weighed so heavily on the poor, along with royal absolutism, was the main target. . . . After that revolution, all Egyptians had a right to the ‘Osirian death,’ the privilege of survival in the hereafter, previously reserved for the Pharaoh as the only one with a Ka, a soul, in the sky.

Item JE 40679, Third Triad Statue of Menkaure in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. 4th Dynasty, Old Kingdom, Valley Temple of Menkaure, Giza. King Menkaure with Hathor and the Goddess of the nome Cynopolis

Item JE 40679, Third Triad Statue of Menkaure in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. 4th Dynasty, Old Kingdom, Valley Temple of Menkaure, Giza. King Menkaure with Hathor and the Goddess of the nome Cynopolis

Two facts, however, must be noted. The discontent was strong enough completely to disrupt Egyptian society throughout the entire country. But it lacked direction and coordination, the strength of modern movements. That would have required a level of popular education incompatible with the possibilities and forms of education at the time. Above all, it was the size of the territory that overcame the insurgents. The country was already unified, and royalty could take temporary refuge in the surrounding provinces, if only in the guise of an embryonic feudalism. The sack of Memphis shows that the monarchy could have been definitely conquered and swept away if the Egyptian kingdom were reduced to the size of a single city comparable to the Greek city-state.

In reality, whatever may have been the ‘virtues’ of Egypt’s social organization, it finally created. . . . intolerable abuses and uprisings . . .”

Finally, Chancellor Williams has this to say:

“ [The Anu] refused to accept the cult of Hours that dominated the Nile delta. They, therefore, formed a ‘second nation’ in Upper Egypt [Nubia] and established their national religious shrines at Omnos, Thebes, Thinis and Napata.”

And now my sons, a concluding observation. Our Balanta ancestors, a mix of Bantu and Sudanese origins, traveled from the foot of the Mountains of the Moon and traveled along the river until they reached Wadi Kubbaniya around 17,500 BC.  About 5000 BC they started migrating, some going west all the way to Lake Chad and then following the Niger River and others. Known as the Anu, going north to Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), where they established the first city in human history.

When the traditional ANU culture OF THE BALANTA ANCESTORS became violated with the concepts of leadership and inequality, and faced with the weapons of the murderous Mesintu and cult of Hours at Edfu, our Balanta ancestors chose to migrate to unpopulated areas to continue their egalitarian way of life.

Those who remained in the land of Ta-Meri revolted against the Pharaoh. Thus, it was literally our ancestors, as indicated by the DNA markers E3a*-M2 (also called E1b1a), E-V38, M1 and L0a1 in the Balanta, who created civilization, the first city and the culture of the first dynasty in Kemet.

However, from the perspective of our Balanta ancestors, the establishment of Kemet was not the great and glorious achievement that everyone seems to make it. In fact, it was the END of our great and glorious achievement. That is why they left.

Now you can understand Dr. John Henrik Clarke when he said,

“The early Africans, in building great river civilizations, built a concept which they did not call religion, though your religions came out of them. They called it ‘spirituality’. What they created was a concept of a Force of the Universe, that was much larger than denominations, much larger than the one-dimensional things that eventually man called religions. It had gone beyond the narrow concepts that we live under right now. And it is difficult for you to understand, but that age was man’s highest spiritual and moral age. And that by seizing upon this age, mostly by foreigners who did not understand the original African creation, the spirituality of man regressed, and did not leap forward, but regressed. They organized into pockets and gave it names. But before the African gave it a name but practiced it as a great force of the universe, it was then when it had its greatest value. And foreigners picked out of it little pieces and departmentalized it into religious pockets and started war between one pocket and another, then broke the pockets down into something called denominations, then started war between one denomination and the other”

Now you understand why Credo Mutwa says,

“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. When eventually this nation broke up into the various tribes the Great Belief had taken such a strong hold on the souls and minds of people that they were completely lost without it."

Our ancestors left Ta-Meri and Ta-Nihisi again during the invasion of the Hyksos, whom our ancestors called ‘the ignoble Asians,’ after the end of the Middle Kingdom from 2500 BC to 2333 BC according to the old chronology and 1675 BC to 1600 BC according to the new chronology. From the first migration out of Ta-Nihisi and Ta-Meri in Nubia and Kemet to the last, there were thirty -three dynasties in Kemet lasting more than three thousand years. However, our concern is with those that left, for it is from them that we are descended.

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Colossus of King Senwosret I.JPG

NOTE: BE CAREFUL OF STUDYING HISTORY WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE. AFRICAN AMERICANS LOST THEIR ANCESTRAL IDENTITIES DURING THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE. MOST HAVE NOT TAKEN GENETIC TESTING TO IDENTIFY THEIR ACTUAL ANCESTORS. IN THEIR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY, THEY OFTEN ATTACH TO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO AFRICA. KEMET, OR EGYPT, IS A GREAT EXAMPLE. NOT KNOWING HOW TO READ HIEROGLYPHICS, NOT STUDYING ACTUAL KEMETIC HISTORY FROM THEIR OWN ANCESTRAL PERSPECTIVE, THEY TEND TO GLORIFY THE ‘GREAT’ ACHIEVEMENTS AND ALL THINGS RELATED TO EGYPT WITHOUT KNOWING THAT THEY COULD BE GLORIFYING THEIR HISTORICAL ENEMIES. THE LESSON IS: KNOW THYSELF AND BE DISCRIMINATING IN WHAT YOU STUDY AND PROMOTE. IF I DIDN’T KNOW ANY BETTER, I WOULD HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE GREAT KING SENWOSRET AS IF THAT WERE A CREDIT TO MY ANCESTORS …..

A Swimmer's Race: https://myswimpro.com/blog/2019/08/06/a-swimmers-race/

This post is guest-written by MySwimPro Ambassador Siphiwe Baleka. Support his swim at the 2019 International Swimming Masters Championships in Cairo, Egypt by donating to his GoFundMe page.

DON'T LET THEM FOOL YOU! BLACKS CAN SWIM. WE HAVE ALWAYS SWAM. AND IT SAVED OUR LIVES THE FIRST TIME WE ENCOUNTERED THE PORTUGUESE.

Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s account of the Portuguese’s first arrival in the land of Guinea (in the land of the Balanta), 1445 AD

"And therefore he armed a very fine caravel, and the captaincy of this he bestowed on his nephew, named Alvaro Fernandez, whom the Infant had brought up in his household,.... And he was not to hinder himself by making raids in the land of the Moors, but to take his way straight to the land of the Negroes.... From thence they went forward until they passed Cape Verde, beyond which they decried an island (Goree). . . . Thence they went forward to the spot where the palm tree is . . . . And when they were near to the Cape as it might be a third of a league, they cast anchor and rested as they had arranged; but they had not been there long when from the land there set out two boats, manned by ten Guineas, who straightaway began to make their way direct to the ship, like men who came in peace....from this it seemed to them that they could easily capture them. And with this design there put off six boats with thirty-five or forty of their company prepared like men who meant to fight....And the Guineas stayed some way off until one of their boats took courage to move more forward and issued forth from the others towards the caravel, and in it were five brave and stout Guineas, distinguished in this respect among the others of the company. And as soon as Alvaro Fernandez perceived that this boat was already in position for him to be able to reach it before it could receive help from the others, he ordered his own to issue forth quickly and go against it. And by the great advantage of our men in their manner of rowing they were soon upon the enemy, who seeing themselves thus overtaken, and having no hope of defense, leapt into the water while the other boats fled towards the land. But our men had very great toil in the capture of those who were swimming, for they dived like cormorants, so that they could not get a hold of them;"

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As one of the greatest Balanta swimmers that ever lived, I am calling on my Balanta family for some support. Please read this article and make a contribution to my Blacks Can Swim and Win campaign. I want to honor our Balanta ancestors who came from the Nile Valley where they first learned to swim! We have raised $2,380 of the $3,000 fundraising goal. https://www.gofundme.com/manage/blacks-can-swim-and-win

On October 4th and 5th of 2019, I hope to compete in the most important swimming race of my life. This race is more important to me than the 1989 Illinois High School State Swimming Championships in which, as the #1 seed in the 200 I.M., I ended up finishing fourth.

It is more important than the YMCA National Championships and the Junior National Championships in which I made the finals in every event that I swam but failed to win any event. More important than the 1991 and 1992 Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming League Championships where I swam on winning, record-setting relays and made the All-Ivy League Team in the 100 Freestyle.

More important than the legendary inaugural Harvard -Yale -Princeton (HYP) tri meet that we (Yale) won to clinch the Ivy League title. More important than the 1991 US Open in which I failed to qualify for the 1992 US Olympic Trials by 0.8 seconds.

And more important than the USMS National Championships in which I have won thirteen individual titles or the 2017 FINA Masters Swimming World Championships in which I won four silver medals.

What swimming competition can be more important than any of those?

Let me explain. This is not your typical swimming article because my story is not a typical swimming story.

Two things have dominated my life: swimming and race(ism). I was born and raised in the all-white subdivision of Boulder Hill, in Oswego, Illinois. My family was one of two black families in the community. In 1976 when I was just five years old, a book was published called Roots: The Saga of an American Family. That same year, a blonde hair, blue-eyed boy and his friends called me a racial slur and hit me with a broken metal bar from the bicycle rack (we later became teammates on the football team in high school). The book was made into a TV movie in 1977 and viewed by 130 million people in America, including myself.

After Roots came on television, I did not want to go to school. This was the first time I became aware that there was a difference between black people and white people. And the white people were more powerful. This is called white supremacy. As a result, black people were made to feel less important, less intelligent, and inferior. Somewhere inside me, I felt ashamed, but I also felt that I would prove that I am not inferior.

In 1978, a lifeguard at the Boulder Hill Civic Center named David Stevens saw me playing with the other kids and asked me to swim across the pool. I did, and then he asked me to do it again but this time on my back. I did that and he told me to come to the pool the next morning at 7:00 am. And just like that, I joined the Oswego Park District Lil’ Devils Swim Team. I hated the cold water, but I now earned the coveted red and white striped speedo swimsuit that all the swim team members wore. I was “on the team.”

The following year, I was winning all the summer league races and setting team records. Whatever inferiority complex that racism was fostering, swimming was doing the opposite. Swimming races gave me confidence, a sense of achievement and pride. It also made me feel accepted. Everyone on the team was happy when our relay won or our team won and I was included in that happiness. Coach Dave, who later qualified for both the US Olympic Swimming and Triathlon Trials, instilled in me the desire to work hard in the pool and become the best I could be.

In 1980 I joined the Aurora YMCA Sharks swimming team in order to swim all year. By 1981 I was the Illinois YMCA State Champion in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 1:00.68. Around that same time, at school we were reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Naturally, I identified with the heroes of the story, and so when the teacher asked who wanted to read the parts of Tom or Huck, I rose my hand. One of the students in the class said, “You can’t be Huck. You have to be N***** Jim”.  Can you imagine being the only black kid in class and reading a book which uses this racial slur more than 200 times? These were the kind of onslaughts to my psyche that I suffered everyday as a kid. But everyday I also went to swim practice. For me, the pool was an equalizer. If you were fast and you were helping the team win, you were respected and liked. My teammates were my friends. Ironically, in a sport that, at that time, was mostly all-white (and mostly still true today) I never felt out of place or inferior. 

After winning several events at the age of 14 at the Ohio Valley Championships in 1985, I gave my first interview to a newspaper.  The article stated, “An articulate youngster who smiles easily, Blake has no problem explaining his decision to forgo the more traditional sports that black youngsters participate in. ‘I play all the sports, but I like swimming the most. It’s just fun, especially when you win. It’s a good way to stay in shape. Besides, all my friends swim… Swimming is probably what I am best at. I get more satisfaction out of it, I want to get a scholarship, that’s the first thing.’”

Two years later, just days before my 16th birthday, on April 6, 1987, Al Campanis told Nightline anchorman Ted Koppel that blacks can’t swim because we lacked buoyancy. 

That year I was ranked in the top 16 in the nation in the 100 freestyle. The success in the pool sustained my esteem, earned me status among my peers, and created opportunities for me. In 1988, the swimmers at the Illinois Swimming State Championships voted me to be one of their two athlete representatives to United States Swimming. My senior year in high school, I was recruited by scores of NCAA Division 1 schools. I applied to just six schools – Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, The University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia. I was accepted at all six. Was it because I was super smart? Probably not. I graduated only 9th in my class of just over 300 students. My SAT verbal score was in the 85th percentile, my math score was 91%. I did a little better on the ACT test, scoring in the 97%. That’s not enough to get you into those schools. Why did they accept me? It was because of the swimming. But it was also because of my race. Division 1 caliber black swimmers were a rarity – just a handful of us at the time like Tim Jackson and Byron Davis. Accepting me, these schools got a two-for-one: a great swimmer and a diversity-quota-filling black student. Here, the intersection of my swimming and my race, helped me.

The January 26th, 2015 issue of Sports Illustrated told the rest of my collegiate swimming story.  That article also told another part of my story, how I had an identity crisis and left Yale and traveled around the world. Describing that experience, I told Jon Wertheim, author of the article, “I didn’t feel like I knew who I was. I didn’t know my history. Like a lot of African-Americans, we don’t know our past. All of a sudden, connecting with my ancestral heritage became very important.”

So, I traveled to Ghana, Benin, and Togo. I lived in Ethiopia for a year. According to Wertheim, Yale swimming coach Frank Keefe “recalls meeting Blake for lunch that semester and doing a double take when his former star walked into the diner. ‘He was a Rastafarian,’ Keefe said. He said that he wanted to be the national swim coach of Ethiopia”. It was true. When I went to Ethiopia in 2003, I discovered that the Gihon hotel in Addis Ababa had an Olympic-sized swimming pool with no water in it. At altitude! Immediately I thought of the boys I saw at Lake Tana, the source of the Nile. They grew up around water. They were natural swimmers. What if I took them and trained them to become the world’s best long-distance swimmers? I did not think this was a crazy idea. They had already proved they were the best long-distance runners. All I had to do was get a group of boys from eight to ten years old and coach them for the next twenty years. They had the advantage of living and training at altitude. I planned to fund it by offering high altitude training camps in this “exotic” location for American college swimming teams which are allowed one foreign trip every four years. I met with the Ethiopian Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture and discussed my idea. In my mind, if Michael Phelps really wanted to go to the next level and transform the sport of swimming – taking the poorest country in the world, and making black, Ethiopians the best swimmers in the world – he would help me finance this.

In 2007, I returned to South Africa. While there, a council of elders explained to me that whenever a “son of the soil” returns home after a long journey, he receives a new name. Having journeyed far and long, the person returns as a “new” man, thus requiring a “new” name. The elders told me that while I was on ancestral soil, my ancestors required that I have an ancestral name that they could call. Thus, the elders gave me the name “Siphiwe” which means “gift of the creator” and the surname Baleka which means “fast” and “he who escaped”. This was profoundly important to me. In the movie Roots, the main character Kunte Kinte, when brought to America, was stripped and tied to a post where he was whipped until he gave up his name and acknowledged that his new name was “Toby”, the name given to him by the slave master.

At Yale, where I started to study African American history, I learned that most slaves took the names of their slave masters. All of a sudden, my birth name, Anthony “Tony” Blake, started to really bother me. Why did I, a black person, have a Spanish or Italian first name and an English surname when I am neither Spanish, Italian or English? Why, now that I am “free”, did I continue to use the foreign names of slave-owners? This was part of my identity crisis that started back in 1977 when I watched the movie Roots. Thus, when I returned to the United States, I had my name legally changed to Siphiwe Baleka in order to honor my ancestors.

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 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.

As a boy, I wanted to be a professional athlete.  However, there was no opportunity for professional swimming back then. That is changing. Swimmers like Michael Andrew are making a living traveling around the world and competing. This was my dream. It still is. Just because I am a 48-year old Masters swimmer doesn’t mean I have to give up on this dream. I, too, can travel around the world and compete and try to prove I am the fastest in the world. However, right now, there is no money in Masters Swimming. There’s very little sponsorship and definitely no prize money. But we have to start somewhere. I’m going to need help. 

I have already made arrangements to travel to Guinea Bissau this December. It will be the first time in 269 years that anyone from my family has returned to reconnect with our Balanta relatives. This is a true, Alex Haley Roots’ type reunion for me. Honoring the ancestors is one of the most important aspects of Balanta culture. The only thing that could make this year even better is if I could also return to my family’s most ancient and original ancestral homeland and honor them by doing what I do best – compete in and win a swimming race. 

To do this, I need to raise a little money. Please go to my GoFundMe page and make a contribution. The meet organizers have promised that if I bring five swimmers with me, they will pay my in-country expenses, so if you would like to join me, please contact me and let me know.

I want to thank MySwimPro for supporting me, sponsoring me, and helping me to truly be a MySwim “Pro”.

Sincerely,

Siphiwe Baleka