The first time I ever heard the term Original African and that Yoruba was its largest group was in Prof Olikoye Kuti article on AIDS.
It was mentioned in the first paragraph and had a such a profound effect on me that am not sure I even finished the article before researching the term.
In linguistics, I realized that African populations were categorised into 3 or 4 groups. There was the Afro-Asian languages described as African languages mixed with either Arab (Hausa-Fulani) or Greeks (Amhara in Ethiopia). These group accounted for less than 30% of the African population.
Then there was the Khoisan language of the pygmies hunter gatherers defined by clicking sounds that account for less than 5%.
If you have Afro-Asians defined as the mix of African and Asian, you would have expected that there would be an Original African group, but instead it was called the Niger Kongo ethnolinguistic group.
First of all, the geographic space Niger-Kongo doesn’t fully account for the speakers of the language, especially the East and South Africans that belong to the same family of languages.
The last group, Nilo-Saharan has been disputed as a dustbin of languages created by Greenberg to include languages whose origin or makeup can’t be fully decided if they had been mixed with Asiatic or other external influences or languages.
It would appear that Africans are prevented from laying legitimate claims to their fatherland. We have Indo-European languages, Austronesian languages, Native American languages but no Original/indigenous/Native African language. Why?
From my experience of living in the Western world, I knew other races claim to feel uncomfortable when Africans assert their identity. They interpret being pro-Black as being anti-White and racist.
I was shocked when a Yoruba man on a forum recently voiced his uneasiness in using the term Original African which he termed as racist. What is racist in me acknowledging my roots?
After further research I came to the conclusion that the social construct of Original Africans was purposely averted by the academia and powerful interests, because they feared the type of my reaction that made me dig deeper and realize that all Original Africans, deceptively called Niger Kongo ethnolinguistic group, came from the same source and were merely a continuum of dialects.
It showed that the Volta-Benue subgroup was what evolved into the Benue-Congo subgroup that spread all the way to South Africa.
With this understanding many linguists came to the conclusion that all Negros came from Nigeria but were shouted down by mainstream Eurocentric historians that demanded physical evidence like skeletons, knowing fully well that skeletons don’t survive the acidic soils of the rainforest.
The hypothesis was rubbished and pushed to the back until genetic anthropology came with the same conclusions.
To show the deliberate attempt to confuse Africa identity, the Western Academia hid the fact that Yorubas had the oldest DNA and how the dynamic spread and even included genetic statistics of a non-existent group called Lemande to surpass that of Yoruba. Even though the Yoruba DNA was passed as the base DNA to the International HapMap Project conducted to study diseases.
This is same devious tactic employed in linguistics when they wrongly included some groups like Fulani and Swahili in the Niger Kongo group to confuse us, despite their clear Arabic mix.
This was rejected by Yoruba scholars during FESTAC 77 and they went about accusing Yorubas of intellectual ethnic cleansing. How it is ethnic cleansing to point out the fact that we don’t speak the same tonal language peculiar to Original Africans, nor does Swahili have a base, or paramount monarch. Like Hausa, it was pidgin Arab devoid of Original African cultural linkages and institutions.
Once the definitive explanation of our Africaness becomes common knowledge, it was capable of deciding the core of Afrocentrism and uniting all Original Africans against European and Arabic imperialists that thrive on divide and rule, which is only possible due to our ignorance promoted by the meaningless incomplete term of Niger-kongo.
The term Original African is a powerful definition and social construct essential to developing a true and viable African identity. It connotes what is the basis of our language, our culture and history.
My identification is not conceited against Afroasians, who derogatively call Original Africans Kaffir, Keferi, pagans etc based on their perception that we are people without Abrahamic dogma or blood.
However, they are not considered racist. It is we, who make a simple statement of fact that is considered racist and intimidating.
Well, the Original African genie is out of the bottle and will be disseminated to provoke thoughts about our origins, linkages and aspirations and breed unity and brotherly love between the original African Niger Kongo language family.
We are not in the business of exploitative discrimination of the Western Nations, but just stating that there different origins in Africa – Afro-Asian and Original African.
While all Original Africans trace themselves to a single origin, Afro-Asian groups are unrelated and products of different waves of Arabic/Asiatic cultural and military imperialism.
Though some Eurocentric friendly Negroes might label it offensive, it must be said that Afroasians took sides of their Euro-Asians cousins during colonization. They handed over the greatest number of Original African groups to the European colonists – the West African Afro-Asians, the Fulani, handed over 300 Original African groups of the Middlebelt to the British, while the British treated Afro-Asians differently to Original Africans. This discrimination between Afro-Asiatic and original African groups date back to ancient Egypt.
In East Africa, the Zanibar Arabs handed over the coast to colonizing Europeans illegally, while the Afro-Greeks of Ethiopia did not only hand over original Africans but grabbed territories themselves.
So please to those who say Original African terminology is divisive, we Original Africans didn’t instigate the categorization, we are only giving the category allocated to us a better name.
Afro-Asiatic groups continuously single out original Africans for constant attack through their herdsmen. Just like the European enslavers, they don’t differentiate between Yoruba, Igbo or Igala but deal with us all as Niggas or Kaffir whose lives or culture are not valued like Whites or Arabs.
For Black people to have racial parity, it must articulate and promote itself as a cultural platform to assume global racial parity. Not supreme but a first among equals.
