Philip Ochieng
5 August 2007
opinion
Nairobi — Because I no longer live or work in Nairobi - having retired from daily journalism- I don't visit the bookshops as often as I should. No wonder it took an American to draw my attention to a book of historic importance in those shops .
The American had read a piece of mine in The EastAfrican in which I attempted to link Maasai religion to that of ancient Sumeria via the Nilotes (Cush and Egypt) and Canaan. Yet I never cited Kipkoeech araap Sambu's overwhelming evidence. Why? Simply because I had never heard of him.
Here I do not set out to review The Kalenjin People's Egypt Origin Legend Revisited: Was Isis Asiis? I am interested more in the circumstances of its publication. Why was a book of such significance to Africa published quietly in an African city and sneaked into its bookshops without a single word of publicity?
Kipkoeech's is probably the most comprehensive rejoinder by an African to Europe's historiographical habit of depicting Africans as having always been receivers of ideas and technologies from Europe or - as David Hume, Georg Hegel and Hugh Trevor-Roper have alleged - as incapable of making any history on their own.
With tendrils which bind together all the five continents, Kipkoeech's book shows unassailably that the Nile valley was the source of practically all of Eurafrasia's religio-moral thought-systems, including especially the theistic Judaeo-Christo-Islamic super-system.
Sub-titled A Study in Comparative Religion, it is a straight jab at, for instance, John Man, the Englishman who, in a book called Alpha Beta, perpetuates the age-old European and completely false claim that all of the world's intellectual vocabulary - including the names of our academic subjects - are to be traced only back to the Hellenic Greeks.
Yet Robert Graves, for instance, can show him - in The Greek Myths - that even the word "Greek" (Graikoi) - meaning "Worshippers of the Grey Goddess" - is purely Nilotic in origin. This worship of the creator Goddess is the nub of Kipkoeech's story.
Whether you call her Asiis (Kalenjin) or Aset (the Sudanic Luo) or Ast (the pharaonic Copts), she is the essence of the Nilotic monotheon - whose plethora of divine manifestations appear to the uninitiated as "many gods" and "many goddesses".
This is what has led Europe to the profoundly mistaken idea that African religion was decidedly polytheistic and to the claim that "monotheism" was a Jewish invention. On the contrary, it was the Nilote Akhenaten - known in Exodus as "Moses" - who gave his Aten (Aton, Adon, Adonis, Adonai) monotheon to his Israelite slaves.
There was only one Deity, Asiis, whose name the Hellenes corrupted into Isis. The Canaanites called her Astarte or Asherah, the Israelites Astoreth or Esther, the Akkadians Ishtar, the Vedic Indians Iswara or Usha and the Gauls Oestre or Easter.
Spreading out of the Nile, she dominated religious thinking from the Limpopo to the Dnieper, from the Hwang-ho to the Shannon, from the Irrawady to the Senegal and, beyond the great sea, to the Arkansas and the Orinoco. As the "Morning Star" (Venus), Ast was also the origin of such celestial words as "aster", "Sterne", "etoile" and "star" itself.
Kipkoeech traces a thousand other "Greek" terms to purely Nilo-Hamitic origins. One of the most interesting is"Logos", which is clearly derived from the Kalenjin "Logooi" - "the Word" which, as St John affirms, "was with God" and which, in Nilotic lore, was what the creator Deity uttered to call forth the universe.
But let me not tell it all. You must read it personally. But, again, the question is: How could the publisher send such a book to the shops without informing Kenyans, other Africans and, indeed, the whole world?
Does it make even commercial sense? Kenya and Africa do not have any deep reading culture. In the newspaper trade, we have to use all sorts of tactics - we call them "gimmicks" - to coax and cajole people into reading our titles.
Almost no Kenyan ever makes it a habit to visit the bookshops. Had I not drawn the editor's attention to Kipkoeech's book, the Sunday Nation would never have done the much it did to publicise it. A book like that demands heavy publicity in the run-up to its publication.
Moreover, since it is a book with important global ramifications, I would suggest to Longhorn to publish it anew in league with a number of international houses with global circulation networks and to organise lengthy reviews in the transnational newspapers to draw the world's attention to it.
And, in the same process, the book should be given a new, more punchy - a far less wordy - title. It also suffers from certain dictional, grammatical and syntactical problems which a good editor should clean up. Otherwise, I fully recommend the book to Kenyans, Africans and other citizens of the world.
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