182 Abibisika (Black Gold) Points

Rank: Unranked Obibini

‘THE IRONY OF CERTAIN “SYMBOLS OF RESISTANCE” AS ACTUALLY BEING SYMBOLS REPRESENTING THAT WHICH WEAKENS RESISTANCE AND FOSTERS SPIRITO-CULTURAL DECENTREDNESS IN AFRIKA’

By ThT. Itumeleng Makale (Independent Afrikan Sovereignist-Race Vindicationist Scholar).

06/06/2022

Symbols owe their significance, height and depth to a culture that embodies and what that culture defines as the utmost excellence and luminosity. They (symbols) further owe the position of prestige accorded to them to what the cultural milieu that emanated them defines as sacred. This is part of a whole value system that is spirito-culture-specific proper! People develop culture to existentially express and register to both themselves and the world how they have conceived of their own nature which set of norms, values, creeds and principles which by intellection they formulate to articulate their self-concept and their centre point in the world.

I have stated the above as the backdrop of what I am now bringing to your attention. How do we re-centre Afrika back to her essence, re-Afrikanizing, unshackling from irrelevant and dislocating cultures, religions and educational philosophies and their systems while continuing to find our expression with the Euro-Asian Abrahamic and intellectual tradition that have, by far, proven to be divorcing us from life and our dynamic balance and centre point as Afrikan people. We continue to walk around with and take pride in European spirito-culture-centric symbols denoting opulence and height of epistemological ambition, and sacredness, by Euro-Asian Abrahamic (Judeo-christian, within this article’s context) standards, but claiming to be about reorienting our existence by remarrying it to our root essence, spirito- culturally expressed, as a people.

If you a an Afrikan and take pride in wearing symbols and hoisting flags of decentredness, you clearly give credence to their origin and the ascription of sacredness the history and culture defining them brought them to you.

How do colors and emblems with symbolisms and images not contained in our Afrikan indigenous cultures, and which have no mythological and cosmological foregrounding in our intellectual and spiritual traditions be worn, with flags reflective of them, be our psycho-spiritual impetus for our rise and ascension back to our former glorious Greatness as a Race? Colors and emblems giving credence to the tools of our cogno-spiritual dissonance, menticide and castration?

And Ethiopia was a nation that we were exhorted, by some “liberation movements” to look to for the prototype of Afrikan liberation, independence and sovereignty?

I stumbled over the information below. Kindly confirm if my questions are not misplaced and irrelevant, family – kindly confirm if my sanity is still intact.

“The colors had historically been used by the Ethiopian Christian church prior to their adoption as the colors of the state for unknown reasons, but likely due to them being easy to produce and common in the Ethiopian landscape. Two French travelers in the 19th century, Ferret and Joseph Galinier, noted “red, green and yellow are the main colours of manuscript illuminations.”

– CHOJNACKI, S. “Some Notes on the History of the Ethiopian National Flag.” Journal of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1963, pp. 59. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41965698

– P. V. Ferret and J. Galinier, Voyage en Abyssinie dans les provinces du Tigre, du Samen et de l’Ambara (Paris, 1847-48), II, 390

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Flag of the Ethiopian Empire with the Lion of Judah (A SYMBOL OF THE SOLOMONIC dynasty dating back to medieval times), also known as the imperial flag (?–1936, 1941–1974). (Emphasis mine to highlight the flag’s Judeo-christian/Abrahamic symbolism and origins)

– Vlajky a znaky Etiopie” [Flags and emblems of Ethiopia]. Vexilolog (in Czech) (8). 2003.

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“Ethiopia has traditionally identified its green-yellow-red national flag with the rainbow that, according to the book of Genesis in the Bible, God set in the heavens after the Flood. Pennants of those three colours had been displayed before the first official flag was established by Emperor Menilek II on October 6, 1897; his flag bore on the yellow stripe the first letter of his name in Amharic script. Later the imperial coat of arms—consisting of the “Conquering Lion of Judah,” a lion holding a staff topped by a cross with ribbons in the three national colours—appeared on the flag when it was used for official purposes. The lion symbolically asserted that Emperor Menilek I had been the son of the Queen of Sheba and the biblical King Solomon. The first legal definition was given to the lion flag in November 1932, soon after the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. It remained in use until the overthrow of the empire in 1974”.

– Whitney Smith

Former Director, Flag Research Center, Winchester, Massachusetts. Author of Flags and Arms Across the World and others.

Other Encyclopedia Britannica Contributors

Thinley Kalsang Bhutia

Grace Young

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica