Makeda (34 page)
Since she, as often as not, spoke in figurative terms, I hadn’t immediately taken her point. I described to her the ubiquitous print of a painting I’d looked at most of my life, a print that hung on the wall of practically every church I’d ever been in.
“That’s nothing like the image of Jesus I have in my head,” she’d said. Then she’d found with her fingers the Book of Daniel. “Listen to this, son,
The hair of his head like pure wool.
Pure wool. Doesn’t sound like the hair you saw in your picture, does it? The Bible has his hair more like mine, don’t you think?”
Thus, because of what she had come to believe about who Jesus, in life, really had been, and the regard in which the Bible’s Jesus had held the Ethiopians, she had little difficulty harmonizing her Christian faith with her several African faiths. She had come to see them all as virtually one and the same.
“The Akân people say,
If you want to speak to God, speak to the wind.
God is everywhere and not just in a church or some fancy building. Jesus believed the same thing. The first Christians never had a building.”
My grandmother had the Apostle Paul as her biblical authority for this. She had read to me from the Book of Acts what Paul told the Athenians:
God who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.
“So, son, you won’t need to talk to my headstone in order to talk to me. I won’t be there. I’ll be in the air and the Earth. I’ll be in the leaves of the trees. I’ll be in the stars that light the African heavens. I’ll be watchin’ over you and your family. My spirit will always be close enough to touch and protect you all. So, do not grieve for me. My body will die, but my soul will live on. For my soul cannot die. Always remember that my soul is the spark of God in me.”
Nine days later, she died at home in her sleep. I had been alone with her during the hours that wound quietly down. I sat by her bed in the dark and watched her smooth mahogany face. The lids of her eyes were closed. Her hair was dressed out in silvery whorls that sprayed like a rainbow across the bright white pillow that cradled her motionless head. Her visage under the moonlight bore the gentle mark of mystical insight.
Her soul poised to break from the failing flesh, I heard from her lips an expiry of small, faintly audible wordlike sounds.
“Azudlozi lingayi ekhaya.”
I moved close to her ear and whispered, “Grandma, I …”
She slowly opened her sightless eyes and spoke to me for the last time. “The spirit never forgets the way home.”
I gently pressed my cheek to hers. At the touch of her warm skin, I experienced a sensation of karmic
envelopment
— her final gift to a grateful and loving grandson—the parting embrace of her immortal soul.
When I was a young man—even for a time after my grandmother first told me of her Dogon dream story—I believed that every life was finite and subject to nature’s one merciless implacable equalizer: time. That all living things were termed to one birth, one passage, one death. That life was little more than a brief, occluded, misunderstood affair, spent forward on currents of mystery and hopeless illogic. I had fastened all focus upon what I believed to be the permanent wall of the impermanent flesh.
I no longer believe this. My grandmother lives—and I know this.
Six weeks ago, almost fifteen years after her death, I completed the manuscript and retained an agent in New York to shop it around for me. It was sent to seven publishers. Within a month, four of them had rejected the book with a single-sentence form letter. A fifth wrote courteously that,
Though interesting, it is not the kind of work that our house publishes.
The sixth publisher answered,
While your grandmother’s reincarnation dreams are believable generally, the idea that a tribe in Africa might know something about astronomy is not.
The last publisher to be heard from, a small house in lower Manhattan, accepted the manuscript and agreed to publish it within the coming year.
Everyone in our family knew well how long I had labored to fulfill this final obligation to my grandmother.
The book
, as we had for years come to call it, had developed something of an ethereal presence in our home—a soft comforting awareness of some remembered ratifying greatness that gave us health and hope and foresight enough to understand the relative seasonality of our people’s contemporary adversity.
Of what consequence is a brief mortal moment against the affirming weight of the ages?
When I called Michäelle to tell her the good news from the publisher, she became so excited that I worried for the health of my soon-to-arrive first grandchild. Michäelle told me then that the baby’s middle name would be Giselle after Jeanne’s mother, and that the baby’s Christian first name would be Makeda.
I
n the ancient texts and holy books, the great black woman is referred to in many places and by several names.
In Matthew 12:42, Christ says of her,
The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and shall condemn; for she came from the uttermost parts of the Earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon …
The ancient Greeks called her the
Black Minerva.
In the Koran, the Muslim writers made reference to her as
Bilqis
.
In I Kings 10:1-10 and II Chronicles 9:1-12 of the Bible, she is described as the
Queen of Sheba
.
In the Ethiopians’ most sacred book, the
Kebra Nagast
, she is known to her own people as:
Makeda
The Dogon people’s millennia-old knowledge of the Sirius star system was first described to English-language readers in 1976 by Robert K.G. Temple in his book
The Sirius Mystery
, which was published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press.
Wrote Temple, “The Dogon also know the actual orbital period of this invisible star (Sirius B), which is fifty years … The Dogon also say that Sirius B rotates on its axis, demonstrating that they know a star can do such a thing.”
Robert Temple is an American-born writer who lives in England. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In the thirty-five years since Temple’s book was published, no credible challenge has been lodged to the Dogon people’s age-old comprehensive understanding of the cosmos.
It wasn’t until 1995 that Sirius C, the star that for countless centuries the Dogon people have called “Emme Ya, the sun of women,” was detected by French astronomers Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent.
Three significant real-life figures presented as fictional characters in Makeda’s story have had over the years an important influence on my writing and sociopolitical thinking:
I met Kofi Asare Opoku at a conference on Paul Robeson held nine years ago at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania where he was, at the time, serving as a visiting professor. Professor Opoku, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on African traditional religions, holds degrees from Yale University Divinity School and the University of Ghana. Besides
West African Traditional Religion
(1978), Professor Opoku has authored several other important books on African religions and culture, including
Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa
(1975) and
Hearing and Keeping: Akan Proverbs
(1997).
In 1970, Walter J. Leonard, a black assistant dean at Harvard Law School, persuaded the Ford Foundation to fund a small number of postgraduate research fellowships for African-Americans aspiring to work and study in Africa. I was fortunate enough to be one of the brand-new research program’s fellows. Invited in the summer of 1970 to Ford’s New York offices to brief us before our departures for several African countries (mine for Tanzania) was John Henrik Clarke, the compelling Pan-Africanist black American writer, historian, and Hunter College professor. The meeting that summer at Ford marked the beginning of a relationship between me and Professor Clarke that would last until his death in 1998 at the age of eighty-three.
In 1964, at the age of twenty-three, I read
The Negro in the Making of America
by Benjamin Quarles from cover to cover in two sittings. The book made an indelible impression on me, as did his
Blacks on John Brown
and the eight other black history books authored by the chairman of Morgan State University’s history department. Professor Quarles died in 1996 at the age of ninety-two.
I am especially appreciative that
Makeda
has been chosen as the first book to bear Akashic Books’ new Open Lens imprint. For this I owe a special thanks to Marva Allen, Marie Brown, Janet Hill Talbert, and Regina Brooks, as well as to the publisher, Johnny Temple, of Akashic Books. All of you have been unstintingly helpful in bringing this project to fruition. My thanks also to Jacqueline Bryan of St. Kitts who typed my handwritten manuscript.
My muse, my wife and dearest friend, Hazel, whom I’ve loved for twenty-eight years, I thank for caring so passionately, not only about
Makeda
, the book, but about the general social wellness of the entire African world family.
If you wish to contact Randall Robinson, write to him at [email protected].
African Ark
by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher
A History of Ethiopia
by Harold G. Marcus
Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern,
edited by Ivan Van Sertima
General History of Africa: Ancient Civilizations of Africa
by the UNESCO International Scientific Committee. Editor: G. Mokhtar
Past Lives: An Investigation into Reincarnation Memories
by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick
Precolonial Black Africa
by Cheikh Anta Diop
Richard Wright: The Life and Times
by Hazel Rowley
The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
by Basil Davidson
The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
by Chancellor Williams
The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy
by Manley P. Hall
The Sirius Mystery
by Robert K.G. Temple
“Un Système Soudanais de Sirius,”
Le Journal de la Société des Africanistes,
Volume 20, Part 1, by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen
West African Traditional Religion
by Kofi Asare Opoku
West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850
by Basil Davidson