My Beauty Best Teacher

In Boing Boing Avi Solomon interviews Laird Scranton who studies Dogon mythology and symbolism. He highlights a number of Dogon-Egyptian correlations:

Dogon granaries in North Africa. Photo: Robin Taylor

Avi: Can you give some significant examples of connection between Dogon and Egyptian words?
Laird: Each key term of Dogon cosmology comes packaged as a kind of bundle that includes: 1) Its pronunciation. 2) At least two logically-disconnected meanings, such that you cannot reasonably guess the secondary meanings simply by knowing the first. 3) An associated cosmological drawing. 4) A relationship to a stage of creation and/or mythogical character within the cosmology.
When proposing correlations between Dogon and Egyptian words, my intent is to demonstrate likely correlations between each of the bundle's elements.
While developing these matching sets of elements, I came to realize that the most consistent matches were to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Wallis Budge, not to the German Worterbuch that is preferred by many modern Egyptologists. The consensus is that Budge's dictionary is outdated and often unreliable — some Egyptologists go so far as to say that Budge could barely read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nonetheless, I realize that it would be unreasonable to suggest that Budge could have been grossly wrong about Egyptian words and yet still somehow in predictable agreement with the Dogon. And so I offer the body of interrelated Dogon words as new evidence to show that Budge must have been substantially correct in his understanding of Egyptian words of cosmology.

And possible connections to the birth of Buddhism:

Avi: How is the Dogon granary related to the Buddhist Stupa?

Laird: Each represents the Grand Mnemonic of their associated cosmologies — a structure whose plan recreates key shapes that relate both to the processes of creation and to the acquisition of civilizing skills. Both are based on the same basic plan, evoke the same series of geometric shapes in the same sequence and assign the same symbolism to those shapes. Both are tied to detailed cosmologies that define the processes of biological and cosmological creation, defined by matching symbols and concepts.

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Image courtesy of Army Of God

This is the first chapter of Army of God, a non-fiction graphic novel about the Lord's Resistance Army that has terrorized the Congo. Based on reporting by David Axe from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010, the comic explores the history of the LRA with eyewitness accounts from captives and those working to stop the destructive militia. Each chapter will focus on a different character and their role in the saga, from diplomats to LRA soldiers to the women and children they capture. The first chapter recounts the Congo's long history of colonialism, corruption, and strife that have set the stage for the conflict of today. The artwork is by Tim Hamilton.

In Boing Boing:

Johannesburg’s Spoek Mathambo (real name: Nthato Mokgata) makes music that blends traditional African sounds with very current electronica, goth, rock and dubstep elements. He’s described it as “township tech” and the result is extremely weird and addictive.

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Jonathan Dotse in IEET:

A 3bute graphic piece

Imagine a young African boy staring wide-eyed at the grainy images of an old television set tuned to a VHF channel; a child discovering for the first time the sights and sounds of a wonderfully weird world beyond city limits. This is one of my earliest memories; growing up during the mid-nineties in a tranquil compound house in Maamobi; an enclave of the Nima suburb, one of the most notorious slums in Accra. Besides the government-run Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, only two other television stations operated in the country at the time, and satellite television was way beyond my family’s means. Nevertheless, all kinds of interesting programming from around the world occasionally found its way onto those public broadcasts. This was how I first met science fiction; not from the tomes of great authors, but from distilled approximations of their grand visions.

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In the Smithsonian

One of Dahomeys' women warriors, with a musket, club, dagger—and her enemy's severed head. From Forbes, Dahomy and the Dahomans (1851).

Historian Robin Law, of the University of Stirling, who has made a study of the subject, dismisses the idea that the Fon viewed men and women as equals in any meaningful sense; women fully trained as warriors, he points out, were thought to “become” men, usually at the moment they disemboweled their first enemy. Perhaps the most persuasive possibility is that the Fon were so badly outnumbered by the enemies who encircled them that Dahomey’s kings were forced to conscript women. The Yoruba alone were about ten times as numerous as the Fon.

... Recruiting women into the Dahomean army was not especially difficult, despite the requirement to climb thorn hedges and risk life and limb in battle. Most West African women lived lives of forced drudgery. Gezo’s female troops lived in his compound and were kept well supplied with tobacco, alcohol and slaves–as many as 50 to each warrior, according to the noted traveler Sir Richard Burton, who visited Dahomey in the 1860s. And “when amazons walked out of the palace,” notes Alpern, “they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell. The sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.” To even touch these women meant death.

... new female recruits were put through extensive training. The scaling of vicious thorn hedges was intended to foster the stoical acceptance of pain, and the women also wrestled one another and undertook survival training, being sent into the forest for up to nine days with minimal rations.

It was this fierceness that most unnerved Western observers, and indeed Dahomey’s African enemies. Not everyone agreed on the quality of the Dahomeans’ military preparedness—European observers were disdainful of the way in which the women handled their ancient flintlock muskets, most firing from the hip rather than aiming from the shoulder, but even the French agreed that they “excelled at hand-to-hand combat” and “handled [knives] admirably.”

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T. DeLene Beeland writing in Plos Blogs:

In America, some fundamental Christians believe that man has a God-given right to use the earth and all its resources to meet their needs. After all, Genesis says so. But across the Atlantic, a different attitude prevails among followers in Ethiopia, which has the longest continuous tradition of Christianity of any African country. Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Churches believe they should maintain a home for all of God’s creatures around their places of worship. The result? Forests ringing churches...[continue reading]

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Simply wonderful guitar technique:via Boing Boing