Maat the Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept by Mario H

Chapter 9 Maat The Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept By Mario H. Beatty The Djehuty Project African-Centered Think Tank and Research Institution • I am a listener: I hear Maat and ponder it in the heart.1 • Anyone attempting to write on the African world-view has to approach his subject with much humility, realizing that rather than teaching Africa anything by his writing, he is trying to learn from tradition.2 • I am because we are; since we are, therefore I am.3 • If we are to defend our (Western) culture and its basic values to the death—and a death that might destroy the entire human race—we certainly need to know precisely what we are trying to preserve.4 nowledge of African history and culture is essential in the process of Kreflecting upon the nature and purpose of our lives and how to conduct them in the best interests of African people. The significance of the echoing 1.1 have made an independent analysis of this portion of the Stela of Antef using Hieroglyphic Texts from Egyptian Stelae, etc., in the British Museum, vol. II (London, 1912) pi. 23. See Appendix A, p. 241, for a descriptive analysis of this passage. 2. Alexander Okanlawon, “Africanism—A Synthesis of the African World-View,” Black World (July 1972): 41. 3. See John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1970), 141. 4. Shepard B. Clough, Basic Values of Western Civilization (New York: Columbia Univer sity Press, 1969), 3. 211 A frican W orld History Project—Preliminary Challenge unison of African scholars in unmasking the pejorative subjectivity of much of Western discourse relative to African people and renouncing an unobtainable objectivity in historical interpretation is not to be underestimated. For African historiography, this has meant the recognition of a legitimate place for values in historical interpretation in tandem with scholarly and rigorous investigation. For us, then, history becomes the living past, not a detached and reified thing to interpret. The idea of pursuing an objective historical truth for its own sake with a detached indifference to a commitment to preserve and perpetuate culture and community is alien to the African world view. The ancestors speak to us and through us, yet as Ptahhotep affirms “no one is bom wise.”5 Our task is to listen, learn, and study the wisdom of our ancestors and ponder it in our hearts in order to guide the restoration of our ancestral legacy and derive usable truths from it. Maat is a concept that is fundamental in understanding the Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) and hence the African world view. Embedded in Maat are a number of critical assumptions about the nature of the cosmos, society, the person, and their inextricable interrelatedness which are in stark contrast and, indeed, alien to the narrative of Western Civilization. Thus, in translating Af rican concepts into modem European languages, we must strive to go beyond literal appearances to understand the cultural substance and mental processes that spoke these concepts into existence. In explaining Maat, this means going beyond the definition of it as truth, justice, righteousness, and universal order to provide some sense of what African people meant by these notions because they do not even remotely parallel the Western sense of these terms. Two of the above quotations, one representing a Western point of view and the other representing a fundamental assumption of African people, speak to this dynamic and have tremendous implications for how we interpret these concepts and, more importantly, how we use them to interact with other cultures. When African scholars juxtapose the African notion “I am because we are; since we are therefore I am,” against the Western Descartean notion “I think, therefore I am,” more is suggested than a mere difference of values. They also allude to how a culture perceives reality.6 Thus, in the West each 5. Zybnek Zaba, Les Maximes de Ptahhotep (Prague: Editions de L ’academie Tchecoslovaque des Sciences, 1956), lines 41,19; Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Litera ture, vol. I, The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 63. 6. The point I want to convey here is that / and we suggest more than what a culture val ues. More importantly, they allude to the “patterns for interpreting reality” by a culture. Wade Nobles defines culture as “a scientific construct representing the vast structure of language, .be havior, customs, knowledge, symbols, ideas, values, matter and mind, which provide a people with a general design for living and patterns for interpreting their reality.” See Wade Nobles, “The Reclamation of Culture and the Right to Reconciliation: An Afro-centric Perspective on 212 M aat: Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a C oncept person is fundamentally seen as an /, a conscious entity set off from the cos mic order and social community. If this is the logic of the culture, then con cepts are created to guide the culture toward manipulating reality to conform to this image. Shepherd Clough sets this task for himself in his work Basic Values o f Western Civilization. He discusses major values of Western culture such as “the end of man is man,” materialism, the glorification of progress, and tech nology in order to make Western peoples conscious of the cultural matrix that they must preserve, perpetuate, and defend, even if it means the destruction of “the entire human race.” The substance of this view is not an anomaly even though it may be concealed under such seemingly altruistic terms as national pride, national interest, patriotism, and humanitarianism. In the modem era, Western culture continues to view African history and culture as exhibiting an intractable illness of barbarism, the return to which must be prevented if Afri cans want to take advantage of the fruits of civilization and progress. African people fundamentally understand the world in terms of we, in terms of the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of the Creator, cosmos, society, and the person. This view determines what we see as truth, how we see truth, and how we act upon the world with this truth. This we is not to be misunderstood as a humanizing mission, nor is it to be reduced to a balkanized mentality that frowns upon interaction with other human cultures. We must be politically astute enough to recognize that we must self-consciously protect and defend the sacredness of African history and culture in the face of en emies who are equally, if not more, committed to preserving the sacredness of something different that has absolutely nothing to do with humanizing the world and who have no problem erasing African traditions in the process. Thus, we implies nothing less than the cultural unity of Africa, Pan-Africanism, and nationalism.7 The above form of historical inquiry has an honorable and respectable lineage among African people. These scholar/activists have shown that the question of intellectual and cultural allegiance is always present in historical interpretation. For my purposes, I want to use Maat as a springboard to speak to this issue which Maulana Karenga refers to as the “modem Maatian” dis course that must involve a unique “transcendent dimension” to speak to the Developing and Implementing Programs for the Mentally Retarded Offender” (reprint, Oak land, California: The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture, 1982), 44. Herein, my use of I and we speak to both a culture’s “general design for living and patterns for interpreting reality.” 7. The power of the concepts of the cultural unity of Africa, Pan-Africanism, and nation alism is in their ability to see African people holistically and to use this knowledge politically as a springboard to provide a vision of African liberation that transcends the geographical bor ders erected by the European concept of nation-state. 213 African W orld History Project—Preliminary C hallenge contemporary condition of African people.8 Hence, my discussion of Maat in its historical context will be admittedly more narrative than descriptive. I will provide a rudimentary, symbolic presentation of Maat to fill a visible lacunae in the literature focusing on how various scholars have conceptualized Maat and the practical implications of their interpretations relative to the question of intellectual and cultural allegiance.9 Maat A Symbolic Presentation and the Problematic of Translation A major strength of the African world view is its ability to at once distinguish aspects of reality without arguing for separation. African people create rich metaphors and symbols in order to convey “dramatic presentations of truth seeking and revelation of truth.”10 These symbols reveal a profound and mul tilayered knowledge of the universe that illuminates and uncovers the unity between their lives, their natural environment, celestial phenomena, and the Creator. Indeed, as Asante affirms, “we can never know all aspects of the symbol. It is unlimited, infinite.”11 Yet these symbols both represent and re flect how African people see reality and how they convey and transmit this knowledge. The sense of we, the sense of interrelatedness, interdependence, and interconnectedness, is intrinsic to Maat. This is precisely why Maat cannot be encapsuled or rendered properly by any Western parallel term.12 The necessity to translate Maat as cosmic order, truth, justice, righteousness, harmony, bal ance, and reciprocity in the English language profoundly reflects the frag- 8. Putting Maat in soci-historical context, Karenga states that “there is nothing in Maatian ethics historically which justifies going beyond socially-sanctioned norms.” Therefore, the contemporary condition of African people calls for a “transcendent dimension” to Maat for it to be applicable. See Maulana Karenga, “Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study of Classical African Ethics,” vol.

Load more