Summer Study Abroad Kemet, Day Fourteen — Dr. Greg Carr

• If I ruled the world
• Id free all my sons
• Black diamonds and pearls
• If I ruled the world
• And then well walk right up to the sun
• Hand in hand
• Well walk right up to the sun
• We wont land
• Well walk right
• up to the sun
• Hand in hand
• Well walk right up to the sun
• We Won’t land…
•    
•        Nas (Featuring Lauryn Hill), If I Ruled the World

I’m never ready to return to the United States.

I never am after traveling to Africa, especially with students and what Baba Ayi Kwei Armah would call the “companions” of common purpose. 

I never am when reflecting on the fact that our best thinkers have increasingly been siphoned off to the intellectual and cultural cul-de-sac of explaining our African humanity to societies set up on the premise that we lacked humanity. That our best thinkers have increasingly been trained, especially after desegregation, to create brilliant analyses of “blackness” that empty into individual praise and advancement, leaving more and more of their kindred to suffer unchanging oppression.

We prepare to return to America tomorrow, to a country run by a White Supremacist cabal supported by millions of terrified, xenophobic enablers, resisted by millions more and still an ongoing hostage situation for still millions more Aboriginals (First Nations people which includes the Spanish-speaking original inhabitants of the settler state’s southwest) and Africans.

There is nowhere in the world that is free of human problems. Here on Elephantine Island, home of the original center of Ancient Kemet’s trade with inner Africa, we have talked at length with the modern Nubian descendant’s of those who maintained and renewed the Kemetic state from what is now the Sudan and Ethiopia. They face racism here in ways both familiar and unfamiliar to their cousins in the United States. As Du Bois once wrote, “the color line belts the world.”

With a moleskine full of jotted notes, I’ll be posting more thoughts on the days we have been here in the days ahead. In the interim, I’ve been reading through some of my blog posts from previous journeys. We initiated Howard’s Summer Study Abroad in Kemet in 2008, the year after Asa G. Hillard III (Nana Baffour Amankwatia II) made transition here in the Nile Valley during our Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations conference. We have returned many times since, and will continue this journey annually.  We are part of a genealogy and a practice that demands it. One that Asa, Yosef ben Jochannan, Jacob Carruthers, William Leo Hansberry, Alain Locke and so many others undertook, inherited and renewed. We will not be the weak link in the chain, one that extends backward to far antiquity and forward to our complete liberation.

Below is a post from 2009 and the second Study Abroad Kemet journey. The students who travelled that year are now professors, lawyers, farmers, community activists and many other things besides.  The fullness of our collective efforts has not been communicated. Coming back to the deteriorating racial politics of a re-forming settler state, we have a renewed purpose. Part of that purpose is to remind ourselves that we work to create the world we wish to live in. 

[Aswan, Upper Kemet, Sunday, August 9, 2009]: As our bus hurtled back toward Elephantine Island and the hotel Saturday afternoon, we still had miles (kilometers here) to go before we slept, though we had met a 2:30 a.m. wake up call and departed by ferry for the bus caravan to Abu Simbel at 3:30 a.m. Since the beginning of our journey, and without sacrificing punctuality, we have emancipated time from the tyranny of the clock, and are the better for it intellectually and emotionally. Who has classes, after all, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights after a dozen hours spent travelling to, climbing into, through, over and around ancient temples and tombs in African summer weather? We do, it seems.

 Abu Simbel. Barely twenty miles from the border between Egypt and the Sudan. Ramses IIss single most impressive monument: two temples, one to the primary Netcher of his era, Amun Ra, and the other built on behalf of his wife, Nefertari, to the glory of Het-Heru. A love story set in stone, and at once a commentary on how to unify a state around a single shared idea: the Great House. In the wake of the 40 year old Black Power/Black Studies movement and the study tours of Egypt by African-Americans that it sparked, the country should have by now rendered the sight of two dozen Black folk with cameras, pens, pads and studious expressions commonplace. Still, we arrest the attention of tourists and temple guards alike.

 Ramses has emerged, with The Memphite Theology, as a particularly helpful subject informing our consideration of The Politics of Translation and The Challenge of Intellectual Integrity. Friday night we spent a spirited class session examining the parallels between the account of Ramsess struggle with the Hittites and their allies during the epic Battle of Kadesh and Christian allegory in the Bible. The uber-Pharaoh is frequently saddled with the speculative label of being The Pharaoh of the Exodus. If there was an Exodus and if it happened under Ramses, all the more evidence that the Abrahammic religions are extended riffs on a Kemetic melody. As we read passages from Ramsess plea to his father Amun to assist him and examined his dogged reproaches for seemingly being abandoned, the light in several students eyes shone: it was, after all, the Gethsemane and Golgotha pleas of Christ, two thousand years before, not to mention David and Goliath, Joshua at Jericho and Gideon, just for starters.