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Thursday, July 24, 2025

AFRICAN HISTORY MONTH AND MAAT

by

Aiyegoro Ome
2456 days ago
20181102

African His­to­ry Month (some­times called Black His­to­ry Month) is ob­served dur­ing No­vem­ber in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

It is al­so cel­e­brat­ed an­nu­al­ly dur­ing Feb­ru­ary in the Unit­ed States, Cana­da and some Caribbean coun­tries, no­tably Ja­maica, Guyana and An­tigua/Bar­bu­da. In the Unit­ed King­dom and the Nether­lands it is ob­served in Oc­to­ber.

In an ar­ti­cle, “Bring­ing Maāt, De­stroy­ing Is­fet: The African Di­as­po­ran Pres­ence in the Study of An­cient Kmt,” Dr Asa Hilliard ap­plied a Kemet­ic (read Egypt­ian/African) prin­ci­ple to the study of African His­to­ry.

He said that the prin­ci­ple called Maāt was the fun­da­men­tal guid­ing idea, val­ue and di­vine pur­pose of Kemet­ic so­ci­ety. Its op­po­site was Is­fet, which means false­hood, dis­or­der and in­jus­tice.

He em­pha­sised that truth and bal­ance must be rig­or­ous­ly ap­plied to the schol­ar­ship about Africa and Africans. “Tru­ly open di­a­logue brings Maāt and de­stroys Is­fet. More mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary, mul­ti-racial, mul­ti-na­tion­al meet­ings of schol­ars are re­quired if Is­fet is to be ban­ished and Maāt re­stored.”

The prob­lems that Africans face in Trinidad are To­ba­go are le­gion. We are en­ter­ing the mid­point of the In­ter­na­tion­al Decade for Peo­ple of African De­scent (ID­PAD), we have an on­go­ing cam­paign for Repa­ra­tions for Slav­ery & the Slave Trade and Na­tive Geno­cide, nei­ther of which are among the pri­or­i­ties of the present Gov­ern­ment.

What Dr Hilliard and oth­er schol­ars have stat­ed about this African prin­ci­ple is al­so im­por­tant for un­der­stand­ing the eth­i­cal foun­da­tion of Egypt, the African civil­i­sa­tion, which came north­ward out of Nu­bia.

Theodor­us von Baaren said that “Maāt rep­re­sents truth and or­der, her do­main in­cludes not on­ly the or­der of na­ture but al­so the so­cial and eth­i­cal or­ders...Not on­ly must man live ac­cord­ing to Maāt but al­so the gods must live by her truth and or­der; ac­cord­ing to Egypt­ian texts Maāt is the food by which the Gods live.”

Dr Theophile Oben­ga, au­thor of “African Phi­los­o­phy of the Pharaon­ic Pe­ri­od” and “An­cient Egypt and Black Africa,” con­clud­ed that “It is through Maāt that we can trans­form our­selves to build a new African world or­der.”

Maāt was rep­re­sent­ed in an­cient Egypt as a god­dess. She was re­gard­ed as the wife of Thoth (di­vine in­tel­li­gence) and the daugh­ter of Ra (the name giv­en to the sun).

Maāt was said to be dear to all the Egypt­ian gods, them­selves, be­cause she was the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their high­est ide­al. Her hu­man devo­tees were so wide­spread in Egypt that there was no cen­ter which could be claimed as the source of her ven­er­a­tion.

The sym­bol for Maāt was an os­trich feath­er, which rep­re­sent­ed the “light­ness of truth.” The fig­ure of Maāt is shown ei­ther with the feath­er on her head or with the feath­er for a head. In one hand she holds a scep­tre and in the oth­er an Ankh, sym­bol of life.

The Egyp­tians un­der­stood that the Pharaoh or King kept Maāt’s or­der when he as­cend­ed the throne. He was seen as a shep­herd who placed the de­vel­op­ment and pro­tec­tion of his coun­try­men above every oth­er con­sid­er­a­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the Egypt­ian’s fi­nal judge­ment, the soul en­tered the Hall of Dou­ble Jus­tice. With­in the Hall there was a scale, on one side of which was placed the feath­er, the sym­bol of Maāt. The soul of the de­ceased was placed on the oth­er side of the scale and the per­son’s life was then weighed ac­cord­ing­ly.

The soul of the de­ceased African then was re­quired to re­cite the 42 pre­cepts of the Neg­a­tive Con­fes­sion, in­form­ing the gods that the per­son had lived ac­cord­ing to Maāt.

The Con­fes­sions were the moral code of Egypt­ian so­ci­ety. The Pharaoh Akhen­aton, first leader to con­cep­tu­alise One God, was a devo­tee of Maāt. He gave him­self a per­son­al code of be­hav­iour “Ankh-em-Maāt (“Live in Truth).”

These teach­ings in­flu­enced oth­er peo­ples through­out the Near East, even­tu­al­ly emerg­ing among the He­brews, by way of Moses, a for­mer Prince of Egypt, in the laws now called the Ten Com­mand­ments.


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