The second offering relates to the practice and practical knowledge sustained and performed by traditional/indigenous healers on the continent and in the diaspora. As a sonic offering we continue down the Nile, into the spiritual world. While direct reference is made to the epistemic culture of the Dogon and its schema in regards to the concepts of words and knowing, this correlates closely to that of the BaKongo secret societies and secret knowledge which was accessible to the community via the traditional healers. In these societies, ancestral and spiritual knowledge and theory was guarded by specially designated persons who could guide the sick or the seeker through various spiritual stages of awakening.

When speaking of awakening, wisdom and organic medicine embedded in cultural practice, it is important to note that for Ancient and rural Africans today, nature cannot be separated from human life, and thus balance within one's own human life suggests a balance with nature's biotic and abiotic matter or the microbiome also known as ‘kokoro’. The azinganga, izinyanga, sangoma, shaman, priest, herbalists or ‘bush-doctor’ are therefore, within the local contexts of their practice, tasked with navigating to the deeper realms of nature, the psyche, the community and the necessary remedies for the various conditions.

Against the notion that much of Ancient Afrikans gained all of its deep wisdom and technology from Kmt alone, which diffused this knowledge from Kmt to the rest of Afrika, we seek to show that the practice of making bush medicine, herbal medicine, botanical knowledge has its own genealogy and tradition within a larger Afrikan matrix.

We seek to re-enshrine and re-invoke the oath of Nkisi-Imhotep established at the crossroads of indigenous organic medicine and technology towards the ultimate benefit and life of human beings. The Afrikan program of healing, related to holistic treatments, takes into account those sense experience and non-sensory factors which play a role in physiological imbalance.

As it is stated in ancient times, illness begins in the gut or the belly, and since the belly is the core of one’s body and a receptor of the food one eats, we should think of health as tied closely to the consumption of food.
This is where developments of the Afrikan world and its advancements in areas of knowledge, production and creation in all fields and those novel fields still unnamed, should be taken seriously and consulted with for the purposes of regaining balance.

In respect to consulting with one's ancestral ways, the name of an Ancient Aba-twa people of Mali, the Tellem, can be expressed as a concept of humility, and ethical reciprocity with those living and transitioned ancestors. This closely relates to this sonic offering since it links to a site of the Dogon people in the Bandiagara escarpment who have an ancestral shrine/grave/temple complex which recognises and honours the first people who inhabited the area before the arrival of the Dogon People.

Tellem is a form of ancestral veneration through the edification of the archive of those who come before but are ultimately ahead. The respect and humility shown then to the principles and advancements of one's local, regional and spiritual ancestors inform what constitutes ‘maa-kheru’ accounts of Afrikan knowledge.

By calling on the ancestral voices, who hold keys to various Afrikan technologies and methodologies, we seek to illustrate that our practical knowledge is rooted into the earth and cannot be divorced from it.


As we continue our journey down the River Nile we find ourselves making our journey from Ta-Khent to the seat of knowledge and learning in the largest temple and educational complex in the entire ancient world. We thus move past Buhen, Pelaka, Kom Ombo and Aswan, sites to which we will return, past the great most ancient and select of places, nestled between.

In Kush we return to the home of Heru of his Mother of the South, which is found all the way in Wawat, the Kushite Nile. We float upstream beyond the Atabara, as we flow down the Blue or the White Nile meeting the various autochthonous peoples who maintain their values and institutions such as that of the yik of the esteemed Dinka and Nuer people, which gave life and communion to the people it served. We also come across the Ag῾azəyän who erect tall megaliths as libations to the ancestors connected to the moon. The Ag῾azəyän of D’mt would fashion a large number of tekenu or obelisks dedicated to ancestral rulers, the moon and/or the sun, in greater volume than that has been found in Kmt which they called hawelti. While at Lake Hora Bishoftu, we find Kushitic Agaw and Oromo ancients who read from the entrails, the thanksgiving, the fury, the reservedness and tempestuousness as varying aspects of the Creator from the Great Blackness from which we all emerge, in the zep-tepi found in the first and foremost of Ethiopian roots.

From the grand temple of Saqqara where Djoser and Imhotep once stood and pronounced many wise and veiled things, caught in the papyrus fibres of remembrance and continuity. We once again thank the ancestors for the wisdom they have freely shared as we stand amidst a great field of wombs of creation, that is, on Earth as it is in the Heavens.