Every man in your life's like the river Nile.

In the Meantime

THIS WORLD WILL ALWAYS continue to go on… despite all of our frustrations, fears, depressions and hopelessness. Regardless of how lonely, destitute, desperate or confused we may be, this world will go on. It does not matter if one is suicidal or psychotic, with thoughts of killing himself while taking the lives of anybody else that happens to be sharing the same space at the same time, this world will continue to go on.

LONG AGO IN ANCIENT TIMES, when the trees and animals still spoke of the secrets of the universe, there lived a very special tribe of baobab trees known to the world as the Atifu- neferu-nita: the beautiful trees of the Earth. These trees were very sacred and very old. They kept the mysteries of the people.

In Burkina Faso, the Mossi tribe read energy through cowrie shells. The Gourmatche tribe does readings through the Earth. The people from Poo would read energies through the calabash full of water. Through these readings, they can tell you the future, the present and the past. It teaches us that in life there is no problem without a solution. Only we are the ones that do not know where and how to find the solutions.

On a day that coincided with this year’s Kemetic new year and The Earth Center’s annual pilgrimage (another tradition started by Master Naba in order to reconnect the world with its ancestral home), the Ouagadougou M’TAM School, with the presence of elder brothers and sisters from the United States, graduated two students who answered the call of their ancestors by sacrificing themselves for months to acquire initiation into this knowledge in order to live according to their own traditional values and renew contact with them.

Each year when February comes back around, the mainstream American culture somehow manages to get away with promoting "black awareness" through learning, remembering, and celebrating "black history," while continuing to promote the same exact "black heroes" and "black history milestones" over and over again.  But as unfortunate as it may sound, the origination of black history month really only has room for the acknowledgment of the history of blacks from the point of enslavement to the present.

Our traditional cultures are rich with knowledge and wisdom.  The continent of Merita (Africa) provides an exceptional example of this heritage due to the ability of its traditional cultures to withstand assimilation into an industrial or consumer society.  Despite worldwide recognition of the importance of these cultures, a hypocritical position is taken by those that herald these cultures yet condemn their practices. 

In the M'TAM education system, we say that the difficult part is not learning something new. The hardest part is saying goodbye. As initiates, our first priority is the paradigm shift that must take place. For this, we will have to say goodbye to many of the habits, values, mentalities, and even people in our lives. In the colonial world, we have been conditioned in a certain way that enables others to control us. The individual in the modern society has simply been hijacked and is being led to his own destruction without even knowing it.