Part Two. The Maternal ≠ {Mother + Child}: Relational Ontology and the Mattering of Black Lives (Planetary Futures)

Abstract

This chapter proposes that the 25 million slaves exported from subSaharan Africa and trafficked in and across the Atlantic brought with them a relational ontology conveyed through a bodily maternal imaginary and carried by the mSymbolic (Chapter 2). This ontology had earlier been transported to Eurasia and North Africa with the first wave of out-migration from the continent ~70,000 ago; in the Neolithic era, paternity-seeking violences emerged, prying apart the relationality of the bodily maternal to grow itself its own Symbolic, one imagined through an ontologizing of possession {Mother + Child}. It is through these ontological contradictions that white supremacy and racialized capitalism would find itself nearly five millennia later. While those enslaved in Atlantic and transatlantic slavery lost access to the cultural geographical particularities of the mSymbolic they had known (e.g., specific material ecologies of a language), the relationality of subSaharan linguistic and life-making practices remained legible, especially call and response, the embodied artfulness of different cultural forms of speech, and an appreciation of maternal-social practices (the mSymbolic). Beyond language per se, new trans- and meta-modalities of life-making spoke themselves into existence, producing an mSymbolic of post-Anthropocenic proportions.

Introduction

Chapter 2 explored the idea of maternal alienation as a violence of cultural-linguistic (Symbolic) and ontological proportions that unfolded unevenly across late Neolithic Eurasia and North Africa and grew itself through slavery. Maternal alienation was theorized as an effect of ‘paternity-seeking,’ a spatialized bodily drive to ascertain and value paternity that emerged with semi- and fully sedentary agriculture at a time when higher fertility rates were needed to accumulate surplus. Chapter 2 traced the alienating process in part through figural changes in statuary across the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic eras (Chapter 2, Fig. 2.1). Epipaleolithic statuary is made up nearly entirely of the ‘bodily maternal,’ a typically pregnant body depicted with a rounded belly and full breasts; head, limbs, and extremities are, by comparison, diminished in size and/or detail. This emphasis, and the much earlier and contemporary use of red ochre in subSaharan cultural and artistic contexts, speaks of the bodily maternal’s ability to speak of its own dyadic, generative capacities. Drawing on the work of subSaharan philosophers, Oyěwùmí (2015) refers to the dyadism of this ‘being’ (ontology) as relational ontology. Within the dyadic, life is understood as an indivisible, generative twoness unrelated to the singularities of genitalia or ‘sex’. Chapter 2 suggested that this dyadism came from the precarity of HG lives, causing relationality to assume cultural-linguistic proportions, the mSymbolic.

Paternity-seeking grew by replacing the dyadic with the singularities of possession. It cut the bodily maternal imaginary into two proprietary instrumental parts (singularities), a reduction represented by the unequal equation: the maternal ≠ {Mother + Child}. This cutting can be seen in Neolithic statuary which, for the first time, featured the Child as a separate entity at the breast of the Mother (Fig. 2.1c). Chapter 2 argues that this was impelled by anxieties over the substantial mSymbolic losses suffered by HGs in relation to the hunt. That is, the drive to be and have the bodily maternal came from the mSymbolic losses that hunters suffered with the transition to farming. This inability to recognize or address these losses led to paternity-seeking’s expansion into slavery, which produced the doubly (spatially) alienated enslaved maternal, {{Mother + Child}}. The Name of the (paternity-seeking) Father—which unfolded through marriage, monogamy for women only (MFW,O), veiling, seclusion, and, later, slavery, concubinage, and racialized supremacy—was thus compensatory. Set up to ensure and safeguard paternity-seeking, it operated through a Symbolic of possession that produced precarities of environmental proportions, millennia before the steam engine’s invention or nuclear fall out, two events often identified as the stratigraphic underpinnings of the Anthropocene. Chapter 2 shows that the deathliness associated with the Anthropocene was never planetary or stratigraphic. Rather, it appeared in a myriad of death-driven (maternally alienated) constellations, supremacy’s technologies geographically accelerating paternity-seeking’s effects.

This chapter leaves aside Eurasia and North Africa to explore that region where the mSymbolic began and where it was sustained for thousands of years after its erosion elsewhere: subSaharan Africa. For hundreds of thousands of years, until roughly 3000 BCE, the subcontinent remained the exclusive domain of foraging and hunting (HG) groups whose extraordinary tenure resulted in an mSymbolic unparalleled in diversity, resiliency, and strength. These characteristics became especially important as farmers and pastoralists from outside the region in-migrated just before and during the making of the Sahara Desert.

The chapter proposes that the 25 million persons trafficked through the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades effectively brought the mSymbolic and its relationality (relational ontology) into contact with the non-relationality of the Symbolic whose paternity-seeking violences had been shored up greatly through supremacy. The conditions within which the enslaved found themselves ironically incited the mSymbolic to assume meta|trans cultural, meta|trans geographical proportions. Given the varied provenance of the enslaved, the mSymbolic did not grow through the particularities of language or kin (there were exceptions) but through the relationality and patterning of call and response. To the degree that this took place within and through the interstices of supremacist life, its freedoms were contradictory.

I begin with a brief overview of archaeological evidence that suggests that, as early as 500 BCE, external forces from southern Libya entered subSaharan Africa for the express purpose of slave raiding. The Islamic slave trade that followed Libya's demise, took over and grew the kingdom's transSaharan trade routes, over the next millennium exporting ~10 million subSaharan Africans from here and from ports along East Africa's coast. The magnitude of these exports had much to do with how Blackness was racialized as the ineradicable mark of paganism. This regional overview provides a comparative segue to a discussion of what made the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades so different. To get a sense of what subSaharan African life looked like prior to the introduction of slavery, the chapter turns, first, to the relatively new field of ancient DNA analysis (aDNA). Recent findings suggest that subSaharan HGs migrated across remarkably long subcontinental distances for tens of millennia, later circulating within different smaller areas, even during two major migrations that took place ~11,600 and 5200 years ago. The first involved Southwest Asian pastoralists from, and beyond, Arabia who settled in North Africa at a time when the Saharan region had grown lush and green (the Green Sahara).

A second migration took place as the Green Sahara was desertified, the desert helping to block expansionary forces within the Fertile Crescent. It involved proto Bantu-speaking peoples from the borderlands of Nigeria-Cameroon as well as pastoralists from northeastern Africa. Both had to navigate the rainforests of the Congo River basin, the second largest river basin in the world. The unfamiliarity of the environment may be why they came to rely on the mSymbolic resources of HGs, in the process creating highly diverse and blended forms of foraging, farming, and pastoralism (Max Planck Institute 2020; Koile et al. 2022). The flexibility of these interactions is briefly explored through the paleolinguistic work of Jerome Lewis on the Mbendjee ‘language’ of the Ba Yaka, a HG group that migrated into the Congo River basin tens of millennia ago. His work shows the remarkable relational capacities of the Ba Yaka language, suggesting ways that the mSymbolic may have traveled. The linguistic capacities of the drums are likewise shown to have worked relationally across HG, pastoral, and farming lives, which becomes important in the context of the Black Atlantic diaspora. The latter is considered in relation to batuko, a drumming event held in fugitive slave communities in Cape Verde, the first Black Atlantic context of plantation slavery. Batuko helped locate, grow, and sustain a maternal-social (mSymbolic) of meta|trans cultural proportions. I end by drawing on analyses of Black Twitter and the Black Syllabus Movement, which suggest that the mSymbolic has been traveling at an accelerated pace across the Black diaspora and into other marginalized communities. The latter is addressed briefly in the Epilogue, where the diasporic inspiration and work of the young Palestinian rapper from Gaza, MC Abdul (b 2009), is introduced. All of this generativity is creating spaces within which the Symbolic of whiteness is rendered uninteresting, if not unintelligible.

I begin with a prelude that explores how The extent of the doubly alienated slave maternal, {{Mother + Child}}, expanded in the ancient and modern worlds, creating slave markets in towns and cities around the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas. This allows for a discussion of what made the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades different and to theorize supremacy as a Symbolic means of maternal negation and disavowal, {{Mother + Child}}, carried out under the racialized cover of Blackness.

Prelude

Yaya ruwa? Lokacinsa ne. (How is the rain? It is the time for it.)

Yaya ruwa? Yayi gyara. (How is the rain? It heals.)

Traditional Hausa call and response exchanged during the rainy season in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, an eco-relationality at ontological odds with the transAtlantic and colonial projects. Cutting across this ontological grain, the British colonial administration in Nigeria installed metal gongs in colonially strategic places (like the railway and mines) to be struck on the hour, interpelating the ‘native’ into a paternity-seeking universe built on non-relational abstractions (singularities).¹ This ‘cutting’ is not unlike that which the British accomplished by installing ‘rabbit proof’ fence lines across Western Australia, disrupting the relationality of aboriginal dream tracks (Introduction). That this eco-relationality withstood 2,000 years of slavery speaks to the longevity and strength of the mSymbolic in subSaharan Africa.

The Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades unfolded nearly five millennia after slavery’s invention, drawing on pre-existing geographical elaborations of ‘race’ for different paternity-seeking ends (Chapter 2). The ancient Libyan kingdom of Garamantes (~1000 BCE to ~500 CE) was the first to slave raid subSaharan areas west of the Nile River valley, not long after Libyan rulers had (briefly) ruled Egypt. (Egypt had been slave-raiding along the Nile River valley south of the first cataract since the mid-Third Millennium.)² Drawing on hearsay, the Greek historian and geographer Herodotos (~484 BCE – 425 BCE) wrote in his Histories that the Garamantes kingdom used horse-drawn chariots in their slave-raiding efforts, evidence of which has since been found in area rock paintings (Fentress 2011). Within the kingdom, the enslaved (what Chapter 2 refers to interchangeably as the Children of Other Mothers or COMs)—were used to build what may have been the largest irrigation infrastructure in the world, the foggaras. These were deep, artesian channel ways, modeled after the ancient Persian qanats, which were invented earlier in the First Millennium and introduced into Egypt following its conquest by Persia in 525 BCE. Over six centuries of scorching heat and sun, those enslaved dug 600 foggaras to depths between 30’ and 130,’ the channels extending for hundreds of miles, punctuated by 100,000 or so clean-out shafts, tunneled vertically to meet the surface. Through the expenditure of these lives, 30 billion gallons of water were extracted for irrigation purposes, making it possible to cultivate barley, the (very thirsty) date palm, grapes, olives, sorghum, millet, wheat, and the grasses on which domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, and later, horses and camels fed (Beaumont 2011; Mattingly 2017; World Archaeology 2005; Wilson et al. 2020; Mercuri et al. 2013; Werner 2004).

The Garamantes oases made possible by the foggaras, allowed the kingdom to deploy additional slaves in the mining of an especially plentiful regional resource: Salt. A precipitate of lakes that had dried up after the Sahara Desert formed, salt held special value for those who had none. This was especially true for those de-centralized subSaharan groups living along the Niger River bend (West Africa) who willingly exchanged it for gold, ivory, and agricultural produce. Garamantian merchants likewise transported salt, along with dairy products and meat, northward across the Sahara to Roman North Africa in exchange for cereals, amphorae of olive oil, and artisanal goods. The slave-derived wealth provided by irrigation and salt made Garamantes into a hub of transSaharan trade. As Ancient Rome increased its demand for slaves, the slave trade became more important to the Garamantes economy. Those captured consisted mostly of women and children, all slaves forced to walk across the Sahara Desert to the North African coast. From there, some were taken eastward toward Cairo and other ancient Egyptian slave markets, while others would be taken to additional North African markets along the Mediterranean, from where some would be exported to Rome (Mattingly 2017; Mattingly et al. 2015; Liverani 2000a, 2000b).³

Herodotos referred to those whom the Garamantes enslaved as Troglodytae which, in ancient Greek (τρωγλοδύτης) literally means, “one who dwells in holes” or more interestingly, a ‘hole’ (τρώγλη) ‘I get into’ (δύω). Over the next 1000 years, Greek and Roman writers revised the geography and features of the Troglodytae, in each instance citing characteristics suggestive of the exotic, if not non-human (c.f. Murray 1967).⁴

In 642 CE, as part of the Prophet Muhammad’s jihad, Arab Islamic forces attacked and conquered Egypt, from there moving westward to take over the Garamantes Kingdom, which was in decline. Arab (and, subsequently, Berber) merchants expanded their interests along all transSaharan trade routes, using camel caravans (the camels could number in the thousands) to exchange Saharan salt for West African gold, ivory, and, increasingly, slaves. Over the next 1000 years, the Islamic slave trade exported between 6 and 7 million subSaharan Africans through these trade routes, several million more exported from coastal ports along East Africa’s Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to markets in southern Arabia, Persia, Indonesia, India, and, even, China (Van Kessel 2006; Rao 1973; Prasad and Angenot 2008; Suzuki 2020). The East African slave trade intensified greatly over the ensuing centuries as Omani Arab merchants settled in Zanzibar and Pemba in the late seventeenth century. While initially their profit came from the slave trade, by the early nineteenth century, it came from their investments in slave-based clove plantations (Sheriff 1987; Crisp 2020). The impetus for eventually seeing all subSaharan Africans as enslave-able (and, even, irredeemable) was based on an initial premise: Pagans were potentially enslave-able, if they did not convert to Islam or pay a ‘pagan’ tax. Over time, however, these options were dissolved as paganism and Blackness were made to stand for one another. Black/paganism became (im) moral equivalents, a congenital defect that made conversion to Islam irrelevant to achieving freedom (Segal 2001; Mazrui 2005; Mattingly et al. 2015, 2017; La Rue 2021; Hunwick 2006; Hunwick and Powell 2009).

The codifying of slavery that began in prehistoric Mesopotamia and Egypt and expanded across ancient Eurasian worlds, like Greece, Rome, India, Persia, and China, thus became racialized with Islam, allowing the transSaharan slave trade to burgeon.⁵ For more than 700 years, enslaved subSaharan Africans were trafficked in city and town markets around the Mediterranean, Baltic, Aegean, and Black Seas, where they would have met slaves captured from other places and by nonMuslims. “During the eighth through tenth centuries” for instance, “slaves were traded from eastern Europe and the Baltic to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dnieper and Volga river systems, the Carolingian empire, and Venice” (Barker 2021, p. 100).⁶ Indeed, the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades overlapped with Eurasian and North African slaving practices for 200 or so years. Between 1530 and 1780, for instance, Barbary slavers (North African corsairs) captured more than 1.25 million persons from the coastal towns and villages of the British Isles and Western and Central Europe. Millions more were taken from the Eurasian steppes, with two million persons (slavs) taken from Eastern and Central Europe, alone, especially Ukraine.

The most lowly of slaves worked in the fields, rowed in ship galleys, or carried out domestic household duties. Others of higher rank served the reproductive capacities of Islamic states and, less so, the Catholic Church. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had set up a taxation system requiring Christian parents in Eastern, Southern, and Southeastern Europe to deliver a male-child as a slave for the state. Once in Ottoman custody, the youth were converted to Islam, circumcised, and trained as Janissaries, an elite infantry corps dedicated to ensuring the safety of the Sultan on the battlefield. Imperial ‘Black’ (subSaharan) and ‘White’ eunuchs likewise filled high administrative and political positions. Their spheres of influence were determined partly by the racially ‘sexed’ nature of their castration: Whereas both groups had their testicles removed, only the ‘Black’ eunuch underwent a penectomy, most dying as a result of the operation from hemorrhaging or infection (see Junne 2016; also, Alexander 2001; Davis 2001; Kolodziejczyk 2006; Jankowiak 2017). ‘Black’ subSaharan women had no similar means for achieving power. Most would have carried out domestic household tasks and, in light of DNA patterns, gave birth to children whose paternity would not necessarily be known. Slavic women, by contrast, were sought after by elite Ottoman men as concubines. These were specially enclosed, secluded, veiled slave women, some of whom became quite powerful.⁷

While slavery had existed for millennia across Eurasia and North Africa, a number of factors made Atlantic and transAtlantic slavery qualitatively different and accelerated the rate of ‘Black’ life’s degradation, depletion, and de-humanization. This included: the enormity of the numbers enslaved; the hugeness of the geographies involved; the exclusive emphasis on production; and the economic intensity and expansiveness of international competition driving it (c.f. Blackburn 1997). This immensity was facilitated by happenstance. Spain had accidentally ‘discovered’ a massive ‘unclaimed’ continent, extending from north pole to south. This discovery was had been made possible by contemporaneous, nearly simultaneous, and sudden breakthroughs in Portuguese shipbuilding, navigation, and instrumentation, all of which allowed them for the first time to sail past Morocco’s Cape Bojador and down the western coast of Africa. In circumventing by sea the land-based routes of the transSaharan slave trade, the Portuguese were able to divert slave supplies to the coast, making the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades possible. 

But it also had to do with how the productivism of plantation life and the seemingly unlimited slave supply prior to 1807 intersected to deflate the value (lower the market price) of the Mother, that is, enslaved girls and women with the potential to bear Children. Pregnant women were less productive before and after giving birth and when they breastfed or tended to a child. The infant, meanwhile, produced no value, and small children barely any (see Williamson and Cain 2023; Paton 2004). It was therefore more cost effective for planters to purchase a new (preferably male) Child than to expend plantation resources ‘growing’ one. Those subSaharan girls and women who were purchased (at a reproductive discount) and became Mothers accordingly suffered extraordinary violence. Besides depriving them of the rest needed with pregnancy and before and after giving birth, or the time to breastfeed or care, planters assumed the paternity-seeking right to (brutally) discipline the (Black) Child, withhold from them proper sustenance, and sever their connection to their Mother through premature death, illness, or sale (e.g., Morgan 2004; Eiland 2020; Mintz n.d.; King 2011, 2019; Douglass 1845). Thus, the double alienation of slavery (Chapter 2) was accompanied by a sadism, which negated the presence and realities of the maternal body while simultaneously disavowing that negation took place. A further and especially extreme example of this can be seen in the context of a Black woman becoming pregnant as a result of being raped by a member of the white planters class, with neither therape nor the pregnancy and Child recognized as such. The sadism involved is expressed here as, {{Mother + Child}}.

This pairing of negation and disavowal was largely anathema to domestic slaveries of the past in which reproduction was what was usually most valued. Accordingly, young  girls and women of child-bearing age typically cost more than their enslaved male counterparts. If a slave woman was taken by her owner to bear ‘his’ child, her status not uncommonly rose. She would probably also be enclosed, secluded, and veiled as a ‘concubine,’ ‘privileges’ that removed her from general, sexualized circulation (Chapter 2). Additional privileges might extend to the concubine’s Child. Supremacy’s productivism brooked no such ‘privileges.’ The outlawing of the slave trade in 1807 in the UK, France, and the US cut off certain continental slave supplies (the Portuguese would continue slave trading for decades), forcing productivist interests to take a more active interest in reproductive matters.⁸ Doctors were invited onto plantations to attend to pregnant slave women; slave ‘breeding’ began in earnest; and some level of relief from field work was provided, prior to and after birth (WPA 2004; Sublette and Sublette 2016).⁹

The scale of bodily and territorial conquest made possible by the historic levels of sea-faring happenstance (Spain's accidental ‘discovery’ of the Americas) and coincidence (overlapping Portuguese innovations and geopolitical shifts in Europe) allowed for the fantastical, geographical, paternity-seeking conceit of ‘race’: that a good portion of a vast subcontinent’s population could be alienated and claimed in the Name of the Father, to be shuttled to a similarly claimed and immense (continental) area simultaneously being alienated, its population subjected to perhaps the ultimate form of anti-maternal violence, genocide. It is through the geography of this conceit that the anxiety-ridden desires of supremacy swelled and organized. This can be seen in Pope Nicolas V’s 1452 bull, which gave Portugal special rights over the slave trade, and his 1455 bull, which declared that “all Sub-Saharan Africans henceforth be held in perpetual slavery” (LDHI, n.d.; my emphasis). His status as Holy Father or ‘pope’ (derived from the Latin and Greek, papa and pappas, respectively) points to how the paternity-seeking Symbolic worked through a Church fixated on virginity (see https://www.vatican.va/holy_father/index.htm). Similar paternity-seeking is seen in the “Reason” claimed by various Fathers of the Enlightenment (some of whom fashioned sciences to justify racial supremacy) and by the Founding Fathers of the US, identified and lionized as such in the early twentieth century. (Eze, 1997; c.f. Bernstein 2009; Schactman 2014). One paradox of supremacist paternity-seeking is that the racialized negation|disavowal of the {{Mother + Child}} disappears the manifesting of life that make paternity evident. Contrast this with the paterfamilias of ancient Rome, where the familias came to refer to the entirety of a household-estate, slave and free rendered familial by their shared status as property under the Father.

The apparent contradiction of seeking paternity while disavowing its manifestations can be partly thought through using the story of Athena’s birth, at least that version that is considered here. In it, Zeus, the ancient Greek allfather and god of sky and thunder, becomes anxious after learning that his consort, Metis, is pregnant. It had been foretold that “she might bring forth something stronger than his thunderbolt” (Evelyn-White 1914, II 929s–929t). After seeking other godly advice, Zeus decides to disappear Metis by eating her. Metis’ pregnancy nevertheless continues to progress inside Zeus’ belly, a paternal enclosure within which she eventually gives birth to her daughter, Athena. Afterward, Metis takes her daughter to live with her in Zeus’ head, causing Zeus such excruciating pain that he calls on Hephaestus, the god of fire and blacksmiths who, to relieve the pressure, cracksi open his head with an axe. This is when Athena emerges as if born for the first time, this birth subsuming (Dunea 2012). Metis’ bodily “generative powers” into the allfather's conceiving head Arthur (1982, p. 77).

The supremacist abstractions of paternity-seeking in Atlantic and transAtlantic slave plantation contexts similarly subsumed the presence and multiple labors of the Black maternal, its generatively claimed as paternity's conceiving own. Unlike Athena, the Black Child was bodily negated (used up in labor) and disavowed, its manifesting disappeared into the accountancy of the ledger.

Climate Change, Migration Events, and Foraging in the subcontinent

Over the past twenty years or so, scholars in and outside archaeology have been engaging in new international multi- and inter-disciplinary work on the African past, the results helping to un-do longstanding Eurocentric interpretive frameworks and assumptions about the continent.¹⁰ Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis was recently made possible after finding that the inner ear bone of humans often remained intact for many millennia after other bones had degraded under sustained hot and humid conditions. The finding resulted in new rounds of bone sampling and pathbreaking insights (e.g., Xue 2018; Sawchuck et al. 2022). Much of this work is being done by members of an international research consortium made up of more than 40 archaeologists and geneticists who are revisiting the oldest known subSaharan skeletal remains to harvest and re-sequence genomic data. Their work shows that subSaharan HGs migrated exceptionally long distances for more than 75,000 years, producing the world’s oldest long-distance trade routes, perhaps as early as 50,000 years ago. Finding out about this long-distance trade has helped to contextualize for those new technologies found in the archaeological record and used to distinguish between Africa's Middle and Late Stone Ages.¹¹ The intense interactions generated through this trade also help to account for why populations there are the world's most genetically diverse and disease (Lipson et al. 2022).¹²

Other aDNA analysis suggests that HGs stopped migrating as much ~18,000 years ago for reasons unknown, thereafter settling into somewhat distinct territories. The stability of this settlement pattern is important when considering two dramatic and inter-related periods of climate change and migration. The first has to do with the African Humid Period (AHP), ~11,600 ago, which was occasioned partly by shifts in the earth’s rotational axis and by the end of the last glacial maximum. Rainfall increased tenfold, producing fluvial networks of lakes, rivers, and streams. Vegetation flourished, and megafauna (like the giraffe, hippopotamus, elephant, and zebra) in-migrated and grew in number (Leroy 2020; Skonieczny et al. 2015; Armstrong et al. 2023). These conditions were additionally favorable to pastoralists in Southwest Asia who ~8000 BP began migrating back onto the same continent that their ancestors had left tens of millennia earlier (Chapter 2). They brought with them practices and skills from Neolithic Eurasia as well as domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle. As they interacted and admixed with foragers and hunters indigenous to the area, a somewhat genetically coherent group emerged, the Amazigh (Berbers). Over  time, their activities displaced HG as a distinct way of life (Prendergast et al. 2019; Cheddadi et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2020).

Despite the mobility of these newcomers, aDNA data indicate that not many ventured into the subcontinent and that, conversely, few subSaharan HGs migrated northward into the Green Sahara. The respective geographical stability of these groups helps to account for why the subcontinent became a site for the most diverse set of HG practices in the world. New archaeological work in Mali suggests, for instance, that as early as 9400 BCE, certain HGs there began cultivating wild edible grasses rather than domesticates, thus securing food while conserving ecological resources. These foragers also fired pottery for utilitarian purposes, a skilled activity in which European HGs never engaged, though foragers in East Asia did so millennia earlier. Vestiges of these practices continue in Mali today. Certain groups of women seasonally gather wild grasses for consumption and sale, while others are known for their pottery (Huyescom 2014, 2020; Johnson 2018, p. 5).

The second major climatic event saw the (re)desertification of the Green Sahara sometime between 5200 and 3600 BP. While some pastoralists and farmers found ways of living in the desert (tapping into artesian water sources, for instance), most out-migrated, leaving a much less densely populated area behind. The great breadth and width of the resulting Sahara Desert had an unintended ontological effect: it dampened the predatory expansion of ancient Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia into the subcontinent and the Symbolic violences with which it was associated (see Xue 2018). Hence, the violences of ancient Egypt’s first standing army, which formed at about the same time as the Sahara Desert did, channeled themselves along the Nile River Valley and, further north, into the Levant and Mesopotamia, parts of which it would conquer.¹³

The elaboration of the mSymbolic within an exclusively HG context began to change as two groups began winding their way southward into the subcontinent from West and East Africa, respectively. In-migration from East Africa took place between 4500 and 1200 BP, new details of which have come, in part, from a second massive, international research undertaking in archaeology and archaeogenetics (Wang et al. 2020; but also, Prendergast et al. 2019). The research suggests that North African pastoralists moved into the subcontinent along several different routes, including ones along the Nile River, through southern Ethiopia, and possibly through eastern Uganda. What their research makes clear is that HGs interacted regularly and complexly with pastoralists—and from a position of strength. Given the limits of this paper, I do not address how the mSymbolic traveled through pastoralism, focusing Instead, on the larger stream of Bantoid-speaking migrants from the Grasslands (savannah) of the Nigeria-Cameroon borderlands.

The Introduction of Farming into SubSaharan Africa and an Expanding mSymbolic

Proto Bantu-speaking (non-cereal) farming populations began moving southward from the Grassfields around ~3300 BP, not long after the Sahara Desert reached its maximum. Those who eventually reached lands amenable to cereal farming had, first, to navigate through the Congo River basin, the world’s second largest, extending across much of Central Africa. The earliest migrants left from the southern border of Cameroon and traveled southward into the rainforests of West Central Africa, moving along savannah corridors, before turning eastward. Thirteen different migration streams peeled away from the main west–east axis of movement, through the breadth of the basin. Most of these breakaway streams moved southward, several traveling into East Africa’s Great Lakes region and the Indian Ocean coast. By 1000 CE, the Bantu inhabited virtually all areas of the subcontinent, except for the southwest. Along the way, they would generate more than 420 distinct Bantu languages (Grollemund et al. 2015).

Recent multidisciplinary work shows that these migrants engaged flexibly with the places in which they settled, especially early on. The first migrants that traveled through West Central Africa, hunted, fished, and foraged as well as farmed, their knowledge of non-farming activities presumably enriched by relationships with local HG populations (Grollemund et al. 2023; Prendergast et al. 2019). A second wave of migrants, which left for East and South Africa a millennium later, were unable to engage as intensively or as easily with HGs who, by now, had forged stable connections with pastoralists that had in-migrated earlier (e.g., Culley et al. 2021). Grollemund et al. (2023) suggest that this second wave of Bantu migrants did not bring farming skills with them or naturally gravitate toward farming; rather, they invented farming as a social niche for themselves. For them, there is no linear, permanent, or complete Bantu ‘transition’ to farming. Instead, the¹⁴:

‘[t]ransformations’ from food collecting to food producing, or from no metals to full engagement with metals, were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers [HGs they met]. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers.

The relationships with these ‘firstcomers’ were intense, aDNA analyses showing significant genetic admixing between HG, pastoral, and Bantu populations. The cultural exchanges indicate that the mSymbolic did not disappear but migrated and grew through relationalities sustained by the knowledge that HG had of the local environment (Vicente and Schlebusch 2020). Paleolinguistics provides important tools for understanding how the mSymbolic moved through HG communities in the Congo Basin, many of whom admixed with the Bantu. The relational openness of subSaharan life-making refuses the universalizing narratives of Eurasian ‘progress’ where surplus accumulation is an inexorable and natural process that displaces foraging and leads, eventually to the competitive violences of civilization and the making of ever larger cities and states. 

Paleolinguistics and the mSymbolic

African paleolinguistics, a relatively recent field, is providing evidence for how the mSymbolic played out in the languages of subSaharan HGs. Jerome Lewis’ work in the Congo Basin with an HG community known as the Ba Yaka is pathbreaking. The Ba Yaka speak Mbendjee, a ‘language’ made up of multi-mediated sounds relayed through richly textured forms of call and response. These involve (among other things): hundreds of secretive hand signs; whistle sounds; ‘speech of four eyes’ (two persons who drop vowel sounds as the personal, profound, sensitive, or secretive nature of their conversation increases); animal vocalizations; reading and deploying animal and plant signs; context-bound ‘code’-switching in the presence of danger or for privacy-sake; incorporating words and speech patterns from other group’s languages when talking about them; and so on. Mbendjee picks up on what is in the world, texturing and playing with it dyadically, opening up to new sound-worlds within and beyond the singularity of the ‘human.’ Having no set lexicon or rules, it renders the world relationally ‘subject’ and, in so doing, frustrates the rules of normative linguistics. This frustration has prompted Lewis to re-think Mbendjee, as a “tool for establishing and maintaining social relationships with anything and anyone that might respond” (my emphasis; Lewis 2009, p. 240; see also Lewis 2013, 2014, 2021). Mbendjee is thus suggestive of an mSymbolic, carried and driven by the relational.

Lewis’ insights allows him to more fully entertain the perceptual acuity and musicality of Mbendjee. He writes that “[j]ust as dancing is the most sophisticated form of walking, singing is the most sophisticated form of talking. So, singing and dancing are the most inclusive and encompassing [when considering] all the forest’s inhabitants” (2009, p. 252). Mobilizing research from brain imaging and the cognitive sciences, he draws attention to hemispheric differences in non-musical and musical speech, the former drawing on the left hemisphere while the latter draws on both.

The relationality of Mbendjee works against the possessiveness of the non-relational or singular, something cultivated from birth onwards. Infants nurse on-demand, that is, when they want to. Prior to weaning, infants are carried in a sling along the side of the maternal body, allowing them to reach out and partake whenever they decide to do so, an arrangement that does not require the mother’s attention. Likewise, the child decides when they will leave the breast, the mother thereafter repositioning them in the sling to nestle against their back (Hewlett 2013, p. 65). Children are also free to sleep in whatever domicile they choose and to engage freely with the worlds around them. Hewlett (2013, p. 68) notes that as a result of these relational freedoms, by age ten, Aka children “have acquired most of the knowledge and skill necessary for life in the forest: how to net-hunt, fish, gather plants, honey, prepare food, take care of babies, build huts, make baskets and medicines for illnesses…[They] come and go as they please, travel to other camps, work or not work, begin sexual activity, build their huts, get their teeth pointed, receive scarifications for beauty.”

Adult camp members are also free to stay, return to, or leave a camp without having to give an explanation, since It is not the singularity of the ‘person’ that is valued or trusted, but relationality itself.¹⁵ Learning is similarly an open process that takes place through various kinds of play. It is inappropriate and unwelcome for anyone to presume they ‘know’ some singular thing that can then be singularly relayed, a position that forecloses the infinite possibilities of relational knowing. Young or inexperienced hunters learn, instead, by accompanying older hunters, watching and listening with care. Learning likewise comes from the storytelling of experienced hunters who regularly congregate in public to rehearse the details of a hunt. The rich relational conveyances of Mbendjee speech (the spoken word, movement, mimicry, joking) bring those listening into the hunt multi-dimensionally, introducing the sounds and signals that were used, the landscape features they encountered, their judgment calls, successful and unsuccessful.

This ethic of openness is cultivated not only through encouraging means, as indicated above, but through disciplinary ones. Those who feel they have been personally injured have access to a public vetting and resolution process, which begins when the injured party walks and speaks at some distance from others to signal that they have something to say. Once the vetting begins, those who are present engage with the person through orchestrated, simultaneous, and overlapping responses, affirmations, and interjections.

In cases where the camp feels an injury, those who have carried out the injury are collectively disciplined. Lewis tells the story of someone who tried to hide and stockpile sustenance as a kind of ‘surplus.’ Given that possession and ownership separate the individual from the relational, curtailing the sociality of freedom, camp members set out to disrupt the situation. This they did by asserting their collective right to ‘share on-demand,’ a principle that guides daily life and dictates that sustenance belongs to everyone. In this case, camp members visited and took from his stockpile, dissolving both surplus and individual (the singular). In another case, a hunter continually (if indirectly) championed his ‘own’ hunting skills, which were, in fact, considerable. Other camp members understood this as a desire, by him, to be recognized as someone superior in some way and, thus, of singular importance. Camp members refused this identification in two ways: First, camp women declined to cook any meat he brought to them; and, secondly, camp members (especially women elders) re-enacted his ‘superiority’ whenever he was nearby, a kind of public ridicule which, eventually, caused him to leave.

The intensity of relationality that registers in subSaharan HG speech (only one example of which is described here), the unparalleled tenure of inhabitants in the subcontinent, and the unprecedented breadth and duration of prehistoric subcontinental trade and migration help to explain why subSaharan languages are the most complex in the world. This complexity was first documented in a pathbreaking 2011 study of 504 languages spoken worldwide. It found that languages spoken in the subcontinent call on the largest number of phonemes (distinct sounds), with phoneme numbers declining outward with distance to the continent. The smallest number of phonemes was recorded in the last place to be inhabited by humans, in this case, South America. The results of this study established that languages did not develop independently in many regions at the same or different times (polygenesis), but that language began entirely in the subcontinent, differentiating with out-migration from the subcontinent, beginning some 70,000 years ago (Atkinson 2011).

Lewis’ assertions of just how open Mbendjee is are shored up by a similarly pathbreaking multidisciplinary analysis of 7000 languages spoken worldwide. Using new computational phylogenetic methods, an international team of researchers found western linguistic paradigms of language-making to be exaggerated. Most of these assumed that cognitive patterning of the brain is what universalizes the rules of language. The team found this perspective to be “hugely oversold,” averring instead, that language-making is relationally, culturally driven (Salleh 2011, np; Dunn et al. 2011).¹⁶

Language, the Maternal, and Drumming

In black Africa it is music that completes the speech act by transforming it into a verb, this superior invention of man is what makes him a divinely creative force. (Senghor 1964, p. 238)¹⁷

What is interesting to me… is the ongoing resistance to knowing about Africa… There is, I suggest, an unwillingness to lift the veil that now enshrouds Africa, a fear that doing so might have a civilizing effect on the discourse of the West, thus depriving its practitioners of one of their most cherished sources of fantasy and imaginative play. (Agawu 1995, p. 384)

To separate dance from music [the talking drum], is like separating a pregnant woman from the baby in her womb. (Utoh-Ezeajugh and Nwafor 2015, p. 31)

In 1995 in “The invention of ‘African Rhythm’,” Ghanese musicologist, semiotician, and music theorist, Victor Kofi Agawu, drawing on the work of Mudimbe (1988) and Hountondji (1983), offered a trenchant critique of the coloniality of most scholarship on ‘African’ music. He located the origins of this in an analytical framework that surfaced in the 1950s, which conflated ‘African music’ with ‘African rhythm.’ Thus, the continent became a monolithically ‘rhythmic’ one that stood in stark contrast to an equally essentialized ‘non-rhythmic’ West. The grossness of this reduction, Agawu noted, could only come if those involved had not actually engaged with musicians locally and in local languages. If these scholars had engaged, they would have known that (in the linguistic contexts with which Agawu was familiar and that were widely studied) there is no concept or word for ‘rhythm’.¹⁸ The conflation permitted what he calls a “metonymic fallacy”: Anyone could theorize about ‘African music’ (as-rhythm), even if their work was limited to a single case study or two. Rather than addressing the power differential that made such colonial theorizing possible, Agawu instead argues against the limitations of this scholarship on its own terms. Most importantly, this conflation gives the impression that there is nothing at all that might be analytically compared. This conclusion, he argues, comes from the fact that colonial era research was most often accomplished without ever having analytically engaged local musicians.¹⁹ If they had done so, their own methods would have compelled them to see that the Ewe (the music with which Agawu is especially familiar) have a range of concepts related to rhythm that speak to “stress, duration, and periodicity” (389). Thus, rhythm:

is not a single, unified, or coherent field, but rather one that is widely and asymmetrically distributed, permanently entangled… with other dimensions. Ewe conceptions of rhythm often imply a binding together of different dimensional processes, a joining rather than a separating, an across-the-dimensions rather than a within-the-dimensions phenomenon. Rhythm, in other words, is "always-already" connected. (388)

That the Ewe understand the rhythmic to be “always-already connected” is, I would argue, an ontological assessment that speaks of a relationality in keeping with the mSymbolic.²⁰ Agawu’s corrective insinuates that thinking differently (epistemology) requires valuing (ontologizing) differently, a way of thinking that colonialism’s (non-relational) way of being was set up not to do.

In what follows, I play theoretically with the ontological difference that the drum makes as a conduit or relational ‘tool’ of the mSymbolic (as Lewis describes Mbdenjee). Note that there is no archaeological evidence of the drum. The organic materials from which drums are made dissolve quickly with heat and/or humidity. Accordingly, this analysis relies largely on the work of musicologists and paleolinguistics in relation to the cultural material contexts involved. I begin with ‘water drumming,’ something for which Baka women and girl children in the western Congo River basin are known. Ancient DNA evidence suggests that the Baka entered the basin more than 55,000 years ago.

Baka women, adolescents, and children visit the rivers and streams of the basin together when they go dam-and-bail fishing, a labor intensive activity that provides the time–space for community members to catch up with one another and socialize. It is out of the intimacies of these encounters that ‘playing’ the water percussively emerged (see Furniss 2017; Sato 2017). Studies of water drumming have identified a number of techniques for eliciting sound, including using one’s hands to strike the water’s surface or moving the water sideways; bringing the hands percussively together atop or under the water; and clapping the hand onto a forearm. The feet are also important. If pressed into-and-out-of basin sediments, they generate air pockets whose suctioning force creates a bubble that, upon surfacing, emits a gurgling sound. The directional force of the bubble interacts with, and textures, the reverberations coming from the strikes admitted from above. In altering the strength, speed, width, and depth of this interplay, water drummers can change the tuning and melody of the sounds released. For ethnomusicologist, Luis Devin, the relational subtleties and complexity of this music escapes “western classical notation.” His claim is arguably also an ontological one in keeping with Lewis’ and Agawu’s critiques of normative linguistics and the non-relationality of colonial knowledge production, respectively (Devin 2010, pp. 2–4; Devin 2012, p. 1; Duque 2009).²¹

Just as water drumming materialized through already existing relationships with the waters of the Congo River Basin, drumming on instruments made of wood, earthenware, gourds, or calabashes may have emerged in the context of open-fire-related hearth activities of sedentary agriculture and fishing.²² Anthropological insights suggest that the hearth was associated with a range of agricultural activities. One of these involved the ‘pounding’ of grain or boiled tubers in wooden mortars. The mortar and pestle (much easier to use than the grinding stone) varies in size, depending on the kind and amount of foodstuff available and/or being processed (Oyeyemi et al. 2017). Larger ones might be worked by several women, each woman thrusting her pestle, regularly and in turn, into the bottom of the mortar (Fig. 3.1a). The impact produces a richly timbred and methodical thudding sound that reverberates through the ground, syncopating household and village life. Pounding has characteristically been accompanied by ‘pounding songs’ (old or new) that speak of local and worldly things, a public airing of thoughts, or personal and collective grievances.²³ As such, pounding is an invaginated kind of drumming. The materials, technologies, and skills deployed in making and ‘playing’ differently sized wooden mortars are not dissimilar from those used to make and play the all-wood slit drum, on the one hand, or the wooden membranophone (skin-covered drum), on the other.²⁴

Fig. 3.1

(Credit Heidi J. Nast)

Tens of older women-servants of the fifteenth-century palace of Kano, Nigeria, prepare millet for a communal marriage feast to honor the wedding of betrothed princes and princesses that day. The processed grains are sent to the royal concubine quarters where they will be used to cook for hundreds of palace inhabitants and guests. The grain processing ‘tasks’ are choreographed, orchestrated, danced, and sung. a Three women take turns pounding four pestles in one large mortar; one of them works two pestles. A fourth woman strikes the mortar’s outside wall with two drumsticks. b Six women seated in a semi-circle play large, overturned calabashes. Note the variety of play: some strike the calabash directly with their hands; others use drumsticks; while another plays a smaller calabash overturned in a tub of water, another kind of ‘water drum.’ c The flour sifters sit in an adjacent orchestral arena, their own granular sounds cadenced to be in sync with the rest. The lull at the end of a song is punctuated by joking and laughter, one or more players subsequently  beginning various songs, one of which will be  taken up by the group.

The containers created to carry, store, or serve raw foodstuffs, cooked foods, and water similarly grew in linguistic importance as they were made into drums. Containers would have included gourds and calabashes (which women grew, hollowed out, and dried) as well as earthenware cooking pots (Fig. 3.1b). Anthropological evidence suggests that, in most subcontinental cultural contexts, the making of cooking-related containers emerged out of concerns for feeding, the latter associated with the dyadism of a maternal imaginary, not the singularity of the Mother. While in many subSaharan pottery-related traditions, the large earthenware pots used for cooking are made by those who have born children, many pots are made by men (see also, Gijanto 2014).

The first archaeological evidence of fired earthenware in Africa comes from Mali near the Niger River bend and dates to ~9400 BCE (Huyescom et al. 2009; Huysecom 2014, 2020). Earthenware of a similar age has been found along the Nile River valley and, about a millennium later, during the African Humid Period, across the central Sahara (above). The impermeability of earthenware made the boiling of food possible which, in the subcontinent, was carried out on open fire hearths. (This, in contrast to Eurasia, where cereal grains were milled and then baked inside enclosed kilns.)²⁵ Boiling allowed for more kinds of foods to be eaten and for more of the food’s calories to be absorbed. Boiling additionally allowed sedentism to coalesce around aquatic resources (Haaland 2009).

The imaginary maternal ‘holding’ of containers and the vital transformational processes facilitated by the cooking pot would become part of the drum. If carved, adapted, or fitted appropriately, for example, the mortar, cooking pot, container, or bowl can be made to speak as a drum, extending their linguistic potential beyond the metaphorical (“the pot as womb”) to language, which is where the mSymbolic travels. Certain drums speak of the bodily maternal metaphorically, like the breasted drums of the Asante (Akan) Ntan of Ghana (Fig. 3.2).²⁶

Fig. 3.2

(Credits a, b Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY; c Public Domain)

a Ashanti (Akan) ‘mother’ or lead Ntan drum played by only the most exceptionally trained and skilled drummers. Ntan refers to musical events held in the 1930s and 1940s in popular clubs and on social occasions in colonial Ghana. The breasted drum conveys the dyadic power of the bodily maternal and the maternal nature of Akan speech b Ashanti kettle drum played in similar contexts. The dyadism of the caryatid on the left speaks to the immediacy, generativity, and relationality (relational ontology) that is feeding, not the singularities of {Mother + Child}. The dyadism of the caryatid on the right speaks to the generativty of writing, the pen’s relational traces on paper birthing the new. c Late nineteenth century, 43″ high, a-ndëf drum associated with a-tëkän, a Baga institution of maternal solidarity for those who have experienced pregnancy and childbirth. An acephalous group (having no centralized leadership), the Baga migrated from central to western Guinea in the sixteenth century to resist Islamic conversion. Carved from a single piece of wood, the a-ndëf is played by ‘mothers’ and (at times) cross-dressing men. Until relatively recently, brides danced with baskets on their heads (the figure at the drum base), onlookers throwing rice into the baskets, relationally seeding their futures. The French suppressed these traditions, while simultaneously fetishizing Baga material culture, exporting so much of it that it nearly disappeared. In the late 1950s, Muslim missionaries raided Baga villages, cut down sacred forests, and tortured those who refused Islamic conversion, the subsequent post-colonial state outlawing Baga practices.

The word Ntan refers to musical-dance performances led by the (Ntan) drum, which is characterized by a carving style that emerged during the colonial period (1920s through the 1960s). Prior to this period, the same breasted drum existed, but was not as elaborately carved or decorated. Ntan performances were of various kinds. One, in particular, involved performers ridiculing those who had worked with colonial administrators and who, upon returning to the villages, assumed a ‘haughty’ attitude. Dancers performed this by exaggerating “how they walk with their walking sticks and umbrellas” (Disphoria 2015). This satire is important in that many Ntan participants were rural farmers compelled by colonial powers to grow cocoa for export and were, hence, prevented from assuming such airs. Ntan drumming-dancing events were organized for other social occasions as well, such as funerals and the odwira festival (Disphoria 2015). The respect shown to the breasted drum (it was always placed center stage), and its ability to speak to the conditions of life under colonial rule, show that the breasts were not talking about ‘sex’ or the singular (Mother), but about the generative (maternal) nature of speech. The call and response that registered through Ntan ensembles obtained likewise in the rich and thickly textured iconography carved into the drum’s surface, carvings that only the most skilled artisans could do. For locals, this iconography referred to common proverbs and stories that, like the drum, called and drew them together.

The metaphorical extension of the bodily maternal through the breast and womb (a relational site where sound appears) can similarly be seen in idioms of the drum. Across many parts of the subcontinent the ‘mother drum’ is the one that leads a drum ensemble or that is used to send messages. The latter were made and/or played to reproduce the tonal speech patterns of many African languages. Colonizers referred to drums used specifically to speak as a ‘talking drums’ something to which the Ibibio composer and musicologist Samuel Ekpe Akpabot (1986) takes exception. For him,

the ‘talking drum’ as used … by western musicologists and observers, is very misleading indeed. This term, to an average European unused to African traditions, conjures … a false picture of Africans with bulging muscles banging away at huge drums which are supposed to send messages across bush country. …[While it] is true that some African talking drums were used for this purpose… there are many talking drums that have entirely different functions. The fact is that all African drums talk. (19)

Africans understand, by contrast, that

… all drums used in African music talk. The hourglass drum talks, the pot drum talks, the calabash drum talks and the wooden drum talks; the difference between them is in what they say and the way they say it. The wooden drum with two tones talks more eloquently than the [ceramic] pot drum which also has two tones; and the hourglass drum produces more gradations of color in its speech than the calabash drum with its dry sound. It is here being suggested that future researchers use the terminology talking drums to refer to African drums collectively and identify any drum under discussion specifically by name; in this way any looseness in terminology will be avoided. (55; my emphasis)

The injunction that scholars call drums by their (local) names is critical. So, too, I would argue, is recognizing the maternal designation given to the largest lead drum of an ensemble as well as to those drums used to reproduce the linguistic tonalities of speech (e.g., Akpabot 1986, p. 27). Akpabot’s impatience with the exoticization of the ‘talking drum’ points to the ontological limits of the paternity-seeking Symbolic, that sees the world in terms of singularities that can be possessed and/or that possess their own ‘properties’ (c.f. Rahn 1996). The Symbolic speaks itself through the thoughts of the Massachusetts merchant and traveler, Sparhawk (1886), for instance, who wrote to the editor of the Scientific American about the all-wood slit (“talking”) drum he heard being played all along the riverine coastal area of Guinea. He is clearly impressed. Yet, the ontological boundaries of the Symbolic prevent him from seeing the slit drum as anything other than a scientific feat of ‘African Telegraphy,’ the formal title of his letter. He takes special pleasure in specifying the number of miles across which the drum can be heard: 3. The main part of the letter is a ‘DIY guide,’ informing readers of the materials, measurements, tools, and techniques they will need to make their ‘own’ slit drum. Not unlike Zeus, Sparhawk reduces the livingness of the drum into something conceived and born by the (paternity-seeking) head.²⁷

Good (1942), a missionary son of a missionary father posted to the village of Bulu in Cameroon, is similarly limited when describing the village’s large, all-wood ‘talking’ drum as a ‘wireless.’ Framing it thus, he cannot see the intimacies that drum and drummer make. The most poignant of these has to do with the ‘drum name’ that village drummers bestowed on each villager at a certain point in their life. The name consists of a short sentence or phrase that relays something special about the person that everyone in the village would know. It is also humorous, the humor not spoken for its own sake, but as a means of enjoining the dyadic socially through play. The drum names assumed special collective significance each morning, when the slit drum ‘mother’ saluted each of the village ‘children,’ in turn, by their drum name. While Good points out the distress that villagers felt if their drum name was accidentally not called, his location within the Symbolic makes it impossible for him to appreciate the social intimacy involved social intimacy, His incomprehension is especially telling when relaying the drum names that the village drummers had bestowed on him and his father. He was named, “You walk alone, where are your brothers?”. And his father's was called, “Going, going, going, what are you going to look for?” Instead of sensing the subversiveness and irony of their play, he seems puzzled. 

Prior to the colonial era, transAtlantic slave ship captains are thought to have occasionally brought a ‘mother’ drum on board to compel slaves to dance for exercise. This alienation of the drum's relational (maternal) power shows how the paternity-seeking Symbolic could hold the mSymbolic hostage, the relationality of its drum speech cut into possessable and, now, opposing parts (Fig. 3.3a). Such splitting likewise assumed significance for those slaves who chose not to eat as a way of refusing their fate. Ship captains forced their hand by weaponizing the speculum oris, a metal device invented in Europe to keep open the mouths of dental patients. For those refusing food, it became an anti-maternal device, prying open their mouths for force-feeding (Fig. 3.3b; see Stanley-Niaah (2010) for the ways that dance was at times used for culturally affirming resistance on these same ships). The contrast between how the mSymbolic generated difference through the new (the generational) versus the Symbolic’s production of difference through splitting can be seen in the context of certain Bantu-speaking farmers in Nilotic Uganda. Upon moving to the area, they appear to have taken up drumming practices of foragers there, which centered on the Atimu, a long wooden drum with a membrane of reptile skin. This was used for special ceremonies. Otherwise, a ‘family’ of six drums was played, the largest of which was the ‘mother,’ the four smallest constituting ‘children,’ an imaginary congruent with the larger agrarian family.²⁸

Fig. 3.3

(Credits a © The British Museum. b New York Public Library image digitization for unrestricted use)

a The oldest documented African drum in the US. An Akan drum used during the Middle Passage to compel slaves (COMs) in the cargo hold to come on deck to ‘dance’ for exercise. This instrumentality cut into the maternal imaginary of the drum. The drum would later find its way to an ‘Indian group,’ which replaced its old skin membrane with one made of deer skin. The British physician and ‘collector,’ Hans Sloane, purchased it from a white Virginia settler in 1753, subsequently bequeathing it to the British Museum. b This negation of the mSymbolic accorded with the desecration of its dyadic inspiration: the mouth, a place of nurturance as well as speech. During the Middle Passage, many slaves drew on the maternal power of this place, refusing to eat the instrumentalities that the slavers put before them. Like the drum, in such cases, the mouth was held hostage, taken over (possessed), and violated. Using a mechanical instrument invented for holding open the mouths of European dental patients, the speculum oris was deployed to pry open and violate the maternal relation of feeding.

Given the life-threatening exigencies of slaving and colonialism, the mSymbolic importance of drumming came to speak more insistently of communal protection-as-care. Drums were played to relay information slave raids and (later) the whereabouts and activities of colonial actors. Speaking about the drum after Cote d’Ivoire’s independence in 1960, Esther Dagan (1993, p. 202) recalls how:

numerous Baule chiefs showed me hidden drums that had not been played for many years. Even after their independence, drummers were still afraid to touch them because of the punishment they would have had to endure. In 1960 a Bete chief told me that in 1947 a French tax collector shot a drummer after realizing he had warned surrounding villages of the collector’s imminent arrival. To avoid tax paying, the men who had understood the drummed message had fled the villages.²⁹

The dyadism or pregnancy of the drum was not the only means through which the bodily maternal spoke itself. It also appears in the small, ‘pregnant’ draft furnaces used for iron smelting in Zimbabwe, a pregnancy repeated in other smelting traditions. These were sculpted and hollowed out of clay to appear figurine-like. Most of its volume consisted of a pregnant belly, scarified accordingly, with no head or feet. Above the belly were breasts and, below, a birth canal into which the bloom and ore were deposited. With repeated use, the furnaces become the largest ceramic statuary of the subcontinent (Killick 2015; Chirikure et al. 2016; Mapunda 2011, 2013; Mtetwa et al. 2017). The imaginary of these smelters is not about sex, but about the generative and liminal. While in Zimbabwe, it is mostly men who work the smelters, this is not an absolute. Depending on the situation and available knowledge, women, and, even, children can help the smelters give ‘birth’ (Mayanga and Chirikure 2017; Mtetwa et al. 2017).³⁰

The earliest archaeological remains of subSaharan smelting date to ~2500 BCE. Unlike the singularizing standards through which Eurasian smelting and smithing would come to be organized and transmitted, subSaharan smelting was eco-relationally fluid. HGs, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and farmers all invented ways of smelting and smithing in keeping with local needs and resources, creating the world’s most regionally diverse array of smelting technologies (Holl 2020). Moreover, the majority of smelted iron was not smithed to make implements of war. Rather, smiths mostly created implements for farming and ritual military purposes. With Islamic, Atlantic, and transAtlantic slavery, their skills would be put to use forging slave retraints, shackles, and chains.

The most important iron product was the hoe, a generative site of coupling whose forces accumulated over time. This accumulation was recognized in the chiefly staffs that smiths made by vertically stacking and forging worn down hoes on top of one another, a practice that recognized the power, presence, and vitality of the ancestors. The hoe’s relationality likewise can be seen in its use as a form of currency in the settling of a ‘bride price.’ Here, the life-making force of the hoe was seen as equivalent to that of the bodily maternal.

The Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades brought the Symbolic and mSymbolic into precipitous contact, putting certain ontological contradictions into productive play. Unlike the Symbolic, which had unfolded in Eurasia over millennia at the mSymbolic’s expense (Chapter 2), the mSymbolic had circulated for millennia longer in subSaharan Africa, growing itself through foraging, hunting, agricultural, horticultural, and pastoral means. Atlantic and transAtlantic slavery commonly brought together persons whose linguistic and cultural differences made it impossible to communicate. It is here, I suggest, that the relationality of the mSymbolic, rather than its specific linguistic contours worked as its own communicative device, allowing a bridge across which meta|trans cultural-linguistic competencies could emerge.

Batuko, Cape Verde, and the mSymbolic

Atlantic slave commerce between subSaharan Africa and Portugal was the needle that threaded slavery into the Americas. It started with a string of Portuguese navigational and shipbuilding innovations that made it possible for ships to sail past Cape Bojador, Morocco. The first such voyage took place in 1434 with a mandate to find sources of gold that could be diverted to Portugal, allowing the monarchy to disrupt or compete with the transSaharan gold trade. Ancient travelers had only the vaguest of idea of what existed south of North Africa (called “Libya” at the time), which they referred to as ‘Ethiopia,’identifying its inhabitants as ‘Black.’³¹ Over the next 70 years, Portuguese navigators continued southward on a collective voyage of ‘discovery’. Hugging the coast, they mapped out the bulge of West Africa, the north–south axis of the Central African coast, and the Cape of Good Hope, around which they turned to travel northwards, similarly staying close to the coast before sailing eastward across the Indian Ocean to India. These journeys gave Portugal a strategic advantage over other European nations. In 1441, well before circumnavigation had been achieved, a few Portuguese merchants ventured along the coast of Mauritania where they carried out a one-off slave raid. More organized attempts to engage in subSaharan slave trading began after Portugal claimed, and established a trading post in, Cape Verde in 1456, an archipelago of ten islands located some 300 miles west of Senegal. From here, Portuguese merchants explored trading possibilities along the Upper Guinea coast and up the rivers that emptied there, establishing trading ‘factories’ there. The Portuguese used these trading relationships to register demands for slaves, with other European commercial interests quickly following suit. All this on the heels of another remarkable ‘discovery’: the Americas, where the decimation of indigenous peoples would drive the expansion of the slave trade further down the coast to Angola and, further still, to Mozambique. 

The first slave populations that the Portuguese purchased were put to work on cotton plantations built on the Cape Verdean islands of Santiago and Fogo by slave labor. Later, highly skilled cotton spinner (women) and weavers (men) were enslaved and brought to these same islands to establish a textile industry. The weavers worked on narrow looms to produce 5″–6″ wide cloth strips, some threads of which were dyed blue, an exotic color at the time. Blue dye came from processing the (West African) kola nut and, later, indigo that the Portuguese brought from India for plantation planting. The cloth strips were made to vary in quality and design, depending on the intended market, and were not sold as such. Rather, six strips, 2 yards in length, were stitched together to form a single piece of fabric 1 x 2 yards in size, called a pano. Throughout the 1500s and, again, in the middle decades of the 1600s, the pano became a central part of the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trade, used as both commodity and as a form of monetary currency. To wit, Portuguese plantation owners in Brazil purchased immense numbers of the lowest quality cloth to clothe their workers and indigenous peoples, while  those of the highest quality (often woven with Portuguese or Moorish designs) were used to pay African elites for slaves. (e.g., Kriger 2009; Liberato 2009; Perreira 2015). In Cape Verde slave women tied the pano around the waist as a sash.

The labor-intensity of cotton production meant that as the textile industry grew, the enslaved population did, too. In 1582, the combined population of Santiago and Fogo reached 15,708 persons, only 10% of whom were ‘white.’ This profit-driven rise in population density worsened the suffering that accompanied the islands' normal drought cycles, an exacerbation that has continued into the present (Moran 1982). Another 2.5% were ‘free Africans,’ mostly the daughters of coastal elites whom single Portuguese merchants had married to gain a strategic trading advantage. More important, were the bi-racial sons that these marriages produced who were expected to take strategic advantage of their blood ties to elite African households to grow their father's slaving interests. This they did, becoming a special class of merchants, known as landcados, whose preferential access to African textile-related knowledge allowed them to build a formidable textile industry in Cape Verdew. The lancados' integration into elite African families gave them additional privileges, too. To wit, other European interests were not only required to go through the lancados for permission to trade in the Upper Guinea coast; they also had to buy from them a significant number of panos.

Batuko is a genre of drumming-music and dance that fugitive slave women in Santiago created and performed in secret and that other slave women from Santiago and other parts would take up. The pano was central to its performance. Santiago had both the largest slave, and fugitive slave, population, the latter living mainly in the island’s mountainous interior.³² The cultural and linguistic diversity of these populations, as was the case elsewhere, might have presented insuperable social barriers had not the relationality of the mSymbolic provided its own ontological intelligibility, allowing the mSymbolic to re-grow in more expansive ways. Central to this relationality would have been the patterning of call and response, something legible across subSaharan linguistic divides. This was carried not only in spoken word but in dance and music, including drumming, clapping, and song. This was certainly the case with batuko. The designation, batuko, derives from the Portuguese words for drum (batuque) and drumming (batucada), this nomination itself opposing Portugal’s (and the Church’s) disdain for and suppression of subSaharan drumming—even if they did not ban the practice outright. Call and response operated in various ways. In the first of batuko’s two musical movements, for example, the lead singer (kantadera) sings a melodic verse that the other singers repeat back, a practice that does not necessarily require participants to speak the same language (Moretto 2018; Hurley-Glowa 1997). This ability of call and response to carry difference would have helped as enslaved populations in Santiago worked to create the Portuguese-based ‘meta’ language of Kriolu. This was the oldest of Cape Verdean ‘creoles’ and the most ‘African,’ containing the greatest number and most linguistically diverse array of African loanwords.

Batuko renders the dyadic (maternal) legible in other ways, too. The event space, for instance, is defined by the semi-circular placement of the drummers, a partial perimeter extended by other members of the ‘ensemble’ (batukadeiras) and attendees. Dancing takes place within the perimeter’s interior, with one (or two) dancers occupying it at any one time, entering and leaving through the perimeter’s partial opening, tracing out movements redolent of birth.³³ The event begins when one (or two) dancers, feeling stirred by the drumming and singing, stands up and enters the interior. Their pano (waist sash) has been untied, one end in each hand, allowing them to move the sash along their hips as they dance or, toward the end, to gently pull another dancer (by her hips) into the ring. During the call and response part of the singing, the dancer sways her hips by shifting her weight from one leg to the other on the downbeat. During the second movement, when the drummers begin loudly striking the same polyrhythmic beat and the singers begin singing in unison, the dancers start percussively to move their hips in sharp, staccato movements referred to as the ‘turn’ or torno, which the pano helps visually to define. The torno is not about ‘sex,’ but a celebration of life. With the rest of the body hardly moving at all, the intensified drumming and focused chorus draws attention to the hips, and by association, those bodily maternal parts associated with life-making and birth. The dance lasts about ten minutes and is repeated until all of the dancers have danced, which can take many hours. Batuko welcomes anyone into its circle to dance, its imaginary getting everybody to ‘turn.’

Nearly 30 years ago, the cultural researcher and former Cape Verdean Minister of Culture and Communication, Leao Lopes (1995), relayed a first-hand account of batuko as told to him by a participant and attendee. The account speaks to how batuko’s (‘meta’ linguistically rendered) imaginary of life-making flowed through that of pottery-making’s. Linguistic, historical, and ethnographic data suggest that enslaved Mande (Malian) potters introduced the artisanry of pottery-making to the island. Recall that the oldest known archaeological remains of subSaharan pottery are located in Mali and date back to ~9400 BCE; and that subSaharan pottery-making extended the ‘holding’ involving in the cooking, containing, and distributing food through the pottery drum. The Santiago manifest a desire to plumb the maternal in how they work the pot from the inside-out, starting with a circular block or column of kneaded clay. The potter begins by opening (Lopes 1995, p. 37):

a cavity in the center of the block using her clenched right fist while holding the piece with her left hand. The right hand pulls from inside out and the walls grow upwards, taking the form projected for the object.

As in Mali, the pottery is not fired in a closed kiln, but in large, open air, firing pits, which is where the story recounted by Lopes begins.

The narrator of the story is a woman who has just arrived at a special batuko event being held to celebrate the communal firing of pottery in a large open firing pit. The pots are piled on top of, and stacked up around the perimeter of, a massive fire. The drumming and singing of batuko has already started, the participants occasionally stepping out to help decorate the as-yet unfired pot, to add manure and straw to the fire, or to place straw inside the pots. At one point, she asks where “Mama” is, “one of the great animators of the community of potters” and is told that she is coming soon (Lopes 1995, p. 39). Impatient, she sets off to Mama’s house, high up on a nearby hill, where she finds her working on a large, 20″ high, maternal clay figurine whose lower body starts at the hips. After finishing it, the potter balances it on her head and makes her way to the event. Or, as the narrator explains,

she dragged me down the hill toward the fire in a great explosion of satisfaction. The other potters in the batuku circle welcomed Mama, giving her the pano cloth to tie around her hips and forcing her to the center. The vibrancy and ecstasy of that woman as she merged into the batuku rhythm was indescribable in its magical and penetrating harmony. (p. 40)

For the narrator, it seems as if the figurine had itself “received the rhythm of life from its creator; then after growing tired, it was set to rest on a large rock… [T]he following day the unfired clay doll would be kneaded together with larger quantities of clay for the production of everyday jars and pots…” (Lopes 1995, p. 40). What is especially interesting here is how the clay figure is un-made by ‘kneading,’ its granulation bringing that which has been already generated into the new. This un-making shows the unimportance of the figurine’s integrity. That is, its form is not a singularity to which (as potential symbol) it would presumably point—as in the case of the Eurasian fertility goddess-figurines (Chapter 2). This inter-generational flow speaks to the fractal nature of the bodily maternal imaginary and how it socially speaks (mSymbolic).

This granularity is perhaps nowhere more evident than in pano that, when rolled up and placed between the legs, became the batuko drum. This fabric drum held protective functions, permitting the pleasures of drumming’s physicality and movement, while dampening its sounds and helping celebrants to evade detection. (Today, the sound is amplified by wrapping the panos in plastic bags). Thus, the already considerable fluidity (doing and un-doing, coupling and un-coupling) of the African ‘wrapper’—a similar cloth flexibly deployed as an article of clothing, a sling for carrying an infant, a container for carrying goods, or a shroud for burying the ancestors—expanded. Batuko grew the mSymbolic. Whereas the pano operated as money-currency within the slave trade, batuko gave the pano a relational currency, a means of bringing the social into maternal relation. This relationality is in keeping with how the dyadic coupling of warp and weft in subSaharan looming and dyeing practices was imagined in terms of life-making and birth (Omatseye and Emeriewen 2013; Nast 2008; Renne 1995).

Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader that helped Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau gain independence, implicitly recognized the ontological power and source of this currency distinction, theorizing it through the lens of ‘culture’ and Black Marxism. For Cabral, it was through ‘culture’ and language that the alienating forces of whiteness operated most effectively. After emancipation in 1858, for instance, ‘whiteness’ continued to exercise itself, sustained by the fact that the term referred to all Cape Verdeans who had at least one parent from Portugal. Thus, all those of ‘mixed race’ identified as ‘white’ and benefited (and expected) from the privileges it had, for hundreds of years, bestowed. Identifying fundamentally as ‘Portuguese,’ ‘white’ Cape Verdeans would not benefit from nationhood, in that it would involve enfranchising those considered Black and African. Recognizing the uphill battle involved in confronting ‘whiteness’ head on, Cabral centered on finding cultural ways of re-signifying Blackness, a process referred to as ‘re-Africanizing’ (Serequeberhan 2023).³⁴ The idea of laziness and vagrancy carried by the racist epithet badiu, for instance, was reworked into fugitivity, a position of strength, courage, and daring to which batuko and the pano were likewise tied. Badiu, batuko, and pano hence became maternal devices, means by which to socialize the maternal (insinuate the mSymbolic), and weaken the Symbolic, by making it less legible and attractive.

The Mattering of Black Lives and the Maternal #Hashtag

Black Twitter is both news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one. Black Twitter is a multiverse, simultaneously an archive and an all-seeing lens into the future. (Parham 2021a, np)

On 27 October 2023, exactly one year after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Zoe Thomas (of the Wall Street Journal’s Tech News Briefing) interviewed a number of persons who had participated in growing Black Twitters’ relevance and power. This included April Reign whose now famous #OscarsSoWhite amplified a ‘joke’ made by white comedian Neil Patrick Harris as host of the 2015 Academy Awards. The joke had to do with welcoming everyone to an event he averred would “honor Hollywood's best and whitest.” Reign’s tweet went viral, in part, she says, because of how Twitter works:

Instagram was more visually-focused. Facebook is not one where you can have really a conversation with everyone… [Y]ou have to choose who your friends are… Being a member of Black Twitter meant that my post would be seen by Black media outlets, initially. And since we're having a conversation about marginalized communities with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, it made it easier to have that conversation because I knew who my community was, I knew who I was talking to. (Thomas 2023, np)

The maternal-social (mSymbolic) nature of the hashtag can be seen in how it has circulated to recognize the realness of Harris’ remarks in relation to those left out and to grow and diversify that recognition through the Black community.

Craig Watkins, a scholar of Black digital life, uses the idea of ‘power’ to think about the racialized differences he has witnessed in the deployment of digital technologies. Appearing briefly in an episode of Say It Loud about BlackTwitter (Dungey and Ngugi 2019), Watkins distinguishes between ‘power users’ and ‘powerful users,’ the terms of which resonate with the ontological and Symbolic distinctions being made, here. ‘Power users’ navigate digital platforms (in this case, Twitter) to figure out how best to leverage their capacities for the sake of personal advantage or gain. By contrast, ‘powerful users’ value the technology as a means of “building-with” others. Watkin’s (2019), Don’t knock the hustle, shows just how invested Black digital life is in this kind of building. In a 2021 lecture, he spoke of “this sense of creativity…that African Americans have brought to their use and deployment of social media” and the politics that follow from the way they “engage digital platforms” (McCullough and Petri 2021, np; my emphasis).³⁵ The politics to which he refers includes the many #hashtag-driven social movements and activisms that Black Twitter energized, particularly that related to the viral circulation of #BlackLivesMatter following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. Feminista Jones (2013) argues that the activism that Black Twitter generated is akin to that of the Underground Railroad.

In 2021 Jason Parham, senior writer for Wired, published the first chronicle of the Black Twitter community, “A People’s History of Black Twitter, Parts 1, 2, and 3,” on the occasion of Twitter’s 15th year anniversary. These three parts featured passages taken from discussions he had with a number of Black intellectuals, writers, academics, and other creatives instrumental to Black Twitter’s making. Parham’s aim was to create “a kind of record of Blackness—how it moves and thrives online, how it creates, how it communes—told through the eyes of those who lived it” (Parham 2021a, np). Through these conversations he identified two distinct shifts in how the platform was put to use, allowing him to create a Black Twitter timeline made up of three parts. He calls the first, Coming Together (2008–2012). This is when Black Twitter was finding and elaborating itself as a safe and entertaining community space. “We didn’t know what other people were thinking before Twitter. It was groundbreaking” (Jenkins in Parham 2021a, np; c.f. Manjoo 2010). Black celebrities, especially musicians, also entered the space, engaging readily with other community members, one-on-one. Celebrity interactions made “the rest of the world” realize “that we did things in groups” (Jenkins in Parham 2021a, np). This emphasis on identifying and finding community changed in 2012, when George Zimmerman killed “our beautiful boy down there—Trayvon Martin” (Babumba in Parham 2021b, np). Black Twitter was the first digital space to take an interest in the killing, to register outrage, and to recognize the pain of “this mother, Sybrina Fulton, who had been calling in [to a radio show] to just try and get some national recognition around this man who had killed her son.” It was only “Black people who were outraged about what was happening to this mother down in Florida” (Rivera in Parham 2021b, np). “All of a sudden we as Black Twitter and a community were able to put the heat and the pressure on them” (Weatherspoon in Parham 2021b, np).

Rising Up (2012–2016) refers to those years when the #hashtag began to be used more coherently for the purposes of politically mobilizing the Black community against anti-black racism. Political activism swelled after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, which is when the hashtag BlackLivesMatter became viral. #BlackLivesMatter energized an anti-racist movement of national and international proportions, growing with each of the police killings that followed, including those of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. “[F]ueled by hashtags” “a national movement for racial justice…caught fire” (Parham 2021b).

For Parham, additional priorities surfaced in 2016, the year Trump was elected president, inaugurating a time he calls, Getting Through (2016–2021). Generational differences in sensibilities appear and marginalized groups begin creating hashtag campaigns to confront misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia in and outside the Black community. To Parham’s elaboration could be added the Black Digital Syllabus Movement, which “taps into the amplifying power of Black Twitter and Black digital culture to bridge the gap between pop culture, politics, and scholarly work and spread contextualized, curated lists of important Black works” (Williams 2020, p. 493). In this case, the #hashtag is used to gather and grow content to build up the Black community and to work against anti-Black racism. This is a contrast with how “syllabi for college courses have typically been crafted by the demographic that dominates the professoriate—white men” (Williams 2020, p. 496). Circulated additionally through other Black digital media, the syllabi are re-making what and how we know, from the outside-in, helping “to dismantle hegemonic pedagogical structures,” especially in the classroom (Clark 2020, p. 223). For Williams (2020), the syllabi register “a form of digital resistance praxis” and “actively subvert the ‘invisible college,’ the figurative network of majority-white scholars whose normative works characterize public framing of U.S. racial politics” (Williams 2020, p. 223).

Lastly, Parham points to how this period evidenced a growing awareness of, and dissatisfaction with, how mainstream media and culture were regularly mining Black Twitter for creative content, what was stolen winding up being, “quickly incorporated into ads and TV shows with white people making money off of it” (Clayton in Parham 2021c, np). The relationality of the Black Twitter universe means that this is not simple ‘theft,’ as conceived of in private property terms. Rather it violates the integrity of the relationality through which those ‘things’ are made. For Dungey and Ngugi (2019, np),

[t]here’s a sense of pride and elevated status associated with the ability to effectively execute a culturally significant piece of content… I mean that’s why we get so hyped to add our two cents on a popular Black Twitter hashtag. We want to be part of a larger group, gain acceptance, and have our experiences affirmed by our peers. And we do this in layers! Adding visuals like gifs, memes, and video clips to create one big cultural inside joke.

Such thievery is part and parcel of what has been theorized, here, as the possessiveness of the Symbolic (Father). Unable to be maternal (dyadic), the Symbolic encircles life-making to claim it proprietarily as its own. That it is jealousy that motivates this theft is hinted at by Mayard (in Parham 2021a, np) who notes that, “When we come into a space, everyone is trying to figure out how to measure up next to us. And that is a lot of what causes resentment for our presence.”

Parham’s “People’s History” and the writings of many other Black scholars about Black Twitter make plain that the hashtag, as used within Black Twitter, is a relational (ontological) device whose circulation opposes the non-relational possessiveness of the mainstream (Symbolic). The mSymbolic (social maternal) power of the hashtag is likewise manifest in its relation to “Black signifyin’,” a concept coined by scholars in the 1970s and 1980s and theorized at length by Henry Louis Gates (1988) in The signifyin’ monkey. As music theorist Robert Walser points out, signifyin’ “works through reference, gesture, and dialogue to suggest multiple meanings through association… [S]ignifyin’ respects contingency, improvisation, relativity—the social production and negotiation of meanings” (in Jenkins 2019, p. 392; my emphasis). Against the “master tropes” of European literature and rhetoric, Gates explains, is “the slave's trope, the trope of tropes … subsum[ing] other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony … and also hyperbole, litotes, and metalepsis” (in Jenkins 2019, p. 391). Signifyin’ reworks the Symbolic by bending it back onto itself, forcing its contradictions to make contact and thus show (the hilarity of) its non-sense. It granulates (uncouples and de-links) the signifying chains of the Father, drawing on the relationality of call and response to speak a different language that only appears to be the same. By Twitter letting “the Black community do the thing that it does best, which is signifying,” the #hashtag is transformed and becomes transformative (Brock in Parham 2021a, np). Whereas it was designed to function as a conveyance of the proprietary and singular (e.g., information relayed about things), signifyin’ re-ontologized the hashtag to make it into a circulatory system of holding, incubating, energizing, growing, and building-with.

On 27 October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. He subsequently fired thousands of employees, monetized the platform, and changed the rules of membership and verification. In the 12 hours following his takeover, Twitter experienced a nearly 500% increase in the use of the n-word, while the steep rise in anti-semitism caused Israel’s director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau to use the Twitter platform to register a complaint (Harris 2023). Many in the Black Twitter universe started backing away from the platform for these reasons and “because of the lack of verification and the lack of clarity about whose account is real and what information can be trusted” (Clark in Thomas 2023, np). As a professor of journalism, Clark has been struck by how Musk’s proprietary takeover of a company “so central to communication across people and countries and groups…[could] completely rearrange those relationships” (Clark in Thomas 2023, np). While Musk’s Symbolic position as owner-subject has given his “take-over” cultural heft, the level of drama involved would not exist if the hashtags of Black Twitter had not feathered something radically, relationally new. Just as the racialized theft of Black culture cannot be interpreted as a simple, singular violation, the relational rearrangements to which Clark refers are not simple mechanical ones, but the result of relationality itself being cut.

The mSymbolic capital that Black Twitter grew has not been captured or enclosed, its relational fluidity finding itself in safer relational elsewhere. The most substantial of these to date is Spill, an app that two former Twitter engineers created as a safe digital space for Black and LGBTQ+ users. It launched in mid-June and within three days of Musk placing restrictions on reading, it had 130,000 new members (Harris 2023). A deep blue oceanic wave now moves across the spill.com homepage with an invitation to be placed on Spill’s waiting list. Significantly, the founders, Alphonzo (Phonz) Terrell and DeVaris Brown, “met during orientation on their first day working at Twitter. They didn’t know that just a few years later they’d be building a social media platform of their own. ‘We were the only two Black guys in there, and we were like, ‘Hey, we’ll be friends!’” (Silberling 2022).

For Terrel, Black Twitter emerged out of the problems that Black people face, asserting that caring about Black Twitter was inseparable from caring about Black People. Accordingly, within Spill, “we have to care about Black people and really be thinking about how we're putting solutions in place and holding space for community and addressing a lot of the issues that Black Twitter raised to the surface that may not have gotten attention before. Then, I think, we're really doing it justice” (Terrel in Thomas 2023, np; see also Jones 2019).

The Ontological Mattering of Black Lives

The relationality of the mSymbolic is not foreign to human life. It is its evolutionary basis (Chapter 2). It is through the ‘maternal’ imaginary that the dyadism of recognition, comfort, play, and care have been made possible. The maternal relation is ontogenetically tied to our prematurity at birth. It is psychically imprinted through years of vulnerability during which there are unremitting ‘demands-for’: demands to be picked up, fed, played with, comforted, conveyed, and brought to safety. Relationality lies at our psychical core (Chapter 2).

In the Eurasian context, the paternity-seeking Symbolic worked ontologically to enclose and cut the generative into proprietary pieces. TransAtlantic slavery (re)introduced relationality’s social (mSymbolic) force, paradoxically growing it into transcultural diasporic proportions. The mattering of Black life that unfolded over millennia within the African subcontinent and the bare life of slavery that grew it further is the future. Its performative persistence is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Black ballroom culture where the Black maternal assumes very real and fantastical proportions. Like the hashtag, it is a place where the home as house is built relationally anew (Moore 2018).

The streaming of Black creativity emerging globally in a myriad of ways suggests that there are ways for dissolving whiteness by making it irrelevant, insignificant. For whiteness to begin un-doing the violences of itself, it has to acknowledge that negation of the Black maternal lies at the Symbolic’s core. The mSymbolic is the post Anthropocene, circulating beyond the ‘cenic’ through the Black Outdoors. Its trans|meta cultural elaboration through Atlantic and transAtlantic slavery and post-slavery Black life speaks to futures already (being) made. For whiteness to confront itself, it has to confront the multiple layers of maternal alienation in which it is invested and the trenchant sadism of Black maternal negation on which it depends. Recognizing the relational power of signifyin’ is one place for whiteness to start; that many messages have been sent to a whiteness that must be un-done before it can read.

Epilogue: Palestine

The derivative desires driving paternity-seeking are being spent. On a not so distant horizon is a Symbolic that has nothing to say and no one able to invest in it. The numbers of those alienated and split apart by poverty and war are staggering, depressing normative levels of market access and making foraging a reality across colorized worlds. Yet, this is a world that the Black diaspora has long known and ontologically navigated through an mSymbolic tucked, perhaps, into the discomfort of what W.E.B. DuBois called ‘double consciousness,’ a honed and painful ability to live and signify in two distinct worlds that only appear to take up the same space (DuBois 1909, pp. 3–5, 178, 202). It lies at the root of the “Black Prophetic Fire” that Cornel West (2014) articulates in conversation with the German scholar, Christa Buschendorf, through the lives of six Black radical thinkers, visionaries, and activists, from Ida B. Wells and Du Bois to Malcom X and Martin Luther King.

The racialized, globalizing nature of contemporary human and planetary devastations and the political economic infantilization of entire populations are giving the mSymbolic greater license to travel. Rap and hip hop have been an especially powerful currency. The relationality of its stories and storytelling has reverberated and grown between the Black diaspora, Africa, and many subaltern beyonds, generating and inter-generating across vast populations alienated and split apart by a Symbolic of poverty and war. A ‘simple’ example of this can be seen in the work of MC Abdul (b 2009, aka Abdulrahman Al Shantti), a Palestinian inspired to rap at age six by Eminem’s song, “Not Afraid.” In 2020, he wrote and performed, “My Only Way to Voice.” In the ‘official’ video, he stands alongside age-mates in the rubble of Gaza as he begins: “Seen 3 wars in my lifetime and I’m only 11. I didn’t ask for this fight but I thrive 24/7. Wanna go out and provide, give my family a choice. No one recognizes rap but it’s my only way to voice.” Stanzas 3 to 5 are similarly embedded:

With images of rubble, buildings torn to pieces

My plan is reconnect the love we’ve seen enough of evil

I’m wishing for my dreams, so I can make a difference

My brother finds it hard to speak—with music, he can listen

So many obstacles we face each day

We like to play hide and seek, I guess we have to play it safe

So this is my redemption, calling out to the universe, every single word,

give Palestine hope one day they'll be heard

I, wanna see the children play, going out day by day

Never gonna feel more pain, just wanna see more gain

Our lives can be the same

Wanna see the NBA, wanna see Lebron James play

 No more bullets that spray

Show the world out there this kid got game

This kid got game… (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3842544322431768)

Two months after the Israeli siege of Gaza, MC Abdul wrote and performed “Let it Rain,” a title perhaps inspired by Eddie James’ song of the same name. It opens with, “Born under siege, a place where you can't leave. Smoke's in the air, so it makes it hard to breathe.” In the official video, he walks through the bombed out remains of Gaza, in one stanza calling out to Gil Scott Heron’s, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Even then and there, his lyrics speak of relationality’s power.

It's hard to come up with the right rhymes, I don't know what to say

I start to cry when I write mine, it happens every day

A lot of death in my lifetime, all I do is pray

This is my story from the sideline, this life is not a game

I want to call my momma, I hope she charged her phone

Hope my brother's not alone

Hope that one day they'll be grown

This is genocide, but this time it is televised

Don't believe all that you see, cause they're be telling lies

I count my blessings, not the problems

From the bottom, where the robbers acting violent

Killing toddlers, bombing us with helicopters

They seeing me on a TV and they calling me the monster?

That only makes me stronger

 ★ Chorus ★

This is me against the world

So I'm doing it for the world

This is me against the world

So I'm doing it for the world

(Stanza’s 3–5 in “Let it Rain,” released 23 December 2024)

This rendering of relational ontology goes against the grain of Rose, Bissell, and Harrison’s (2021, p. 3) understanding that, “relational ontologies leave little space to admit finitude and the problems that the nonrelational poses.” This assessment is indeed true if thinking outside the trenches. MC Abdul and others speak to the untenable luxury of that position which, like the stratigraphy of the Anthropocene, strands us in a Symbolic of the singular, unable to imagine otherwise.

Notes

• 1. (Author’s translation). Despite the abstract nature of the metal gong, time again becomes relational once it is incorporated into Hausa. Whereas previously, the term for ‘time’ was (lokaci, ‘the time [of]’), to ask of colonial time became, A karfe nawa yanzu?: How many gongs have there been? The latter remains relational, however, in that it points to the sounds that the British created and compelled the Hausa to hear; the thing used to make the sound, the gong itself; and, to the striking action required.

• 2. These groups changed over time and included Kushites, Nubians, ‘Ethiopians,’ Libyans, and so on. From the outset, Egyptians had racialized understandings of those they enslaved that incorporated elements of color (bronze, white, black), the language spoken, and their cultural habits (Redford 2006).

• 3. As Liverani (2000b, np) notes,

  This long-distance trade was based on salt, which was critical for preserving meat and other foods and for human consumption. Salt was exported from the Saharan and subSaharan regions, where it is found in dry lake basins, to tropical Africa, which is almost completely lacking in salt. The Garamantes exchanged salt for gold (in the upper Niger basin), slaves, and exotic goods, which were transported to the Mediterranean coast and traded to Egypt for manufactured products—such as the glass and metal artifacts found in the royal tombs at the Garamantian capital, Germa.

• 4. Goedicke (1974), in his examination of an ancient Pharaonic text (Urk IV, 5, 4), erroneously (if incidentally) suggests that the idea of the ‘troglodyte’ precedes Herodotus's time by some 1000 years. The relevant passages are those extolling Pharoah Ahemose (1550–1525 BCE) two ruthlessly successful and successive military campaigns. The first involved expelling foreign (Levantine) rulers occupying northern Egypt, while the second asserted Egyptian hegemony over Nubia and its gold mines, its defeat partly registering in the taking of large numbers of slaves. Goedicke uses the phrase “Nubian troglodytes” to refer to the southerners, rather than, “Nubian bowmen,” which is how the hieroglyphics identify them, the Nubians being renown for their archery skills (Lichtheim 2006, 13). This seemingly arcane detail is important in that it shows how the citational practices around a single scholar's (in this case, single) work can, in-itself, operate as a racializing force.

• 5. As Blackburn (1997) explains, the racialization of religion began in ‘Latin Christendom’ much earlier.

  Recent aDNA analysis of the ‘ethnicity’ of the predominantly Muslim Swahili peoples living along the East African coast is complex and began with the Islamization of the area in about 1000 C.E. The male ancestors of elite Swahili people were a mix of approximately 83% south Asian (about 90% of that Persian, and the rest Indian). Initially Persian and, later, Indian and Arabian men married into African families for trading purposes, creating a genetically diversified population and 17% African. The female ancestors were less of a mix—appearing to be 97% African, and 3% south Asian. (Female analyses were based on DNA from mitochondria, that are passed down by the mother, and for males it was DNA from Y chromosomes, which come from the father.)

• 6. Barker (2021, p. 100) goes on to document how the vicissitudes of competitive paternity-seeking through war shifted the loci of slave-raiding and markets, Thus, by “the thirteenth century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. People enslaved in the Baltic now tended to be traded westward rather than eastward; people enslaved in eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into Italian, Mamluk, or Ottoman hands; and people enslaved in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans”.

• 7. A study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century slavery in the Black Sea region relays some of the tremendous political and economic complexities involved:

  Apart from the state and its functionaries (emins, miiltezims, etc.), numerous Ottoman merchants throughout the empire made profits on the slave trade. Besides the Black Sea ports and major trade centres such as Istanbul, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus and Cairo, smaller towns had separate slave markets as well, to mention only Xaskovo, Nova Zagora and Kazanlik in Bulgaria. In Istanbul alone, no less than 2,000 people, men and women alike, were making their living by engaging in the slave trade as merchants, brokers, apprentices, gatekeepers, watchmen and so on. While in the sixteenth century most of the slave dealers had been Jews, in the following period this profitable profession was apparently dominated by Muslims. (Kolodziejczyk 2006, p. 155)

• 8. Spain and Portugal continued bringing slaves (illegally) from West Africa to plantations in Cuba and Puerto Rico for decades after the slave trade was banned in the UK and US (see Àlvaro 2022).

• 9. This was not always and everywhere the case. In 1807, the British introduced into its Caribbean holdings a slave ‘apprenticeship’ system that effectively forced pregnant women and women with many children to work even harder than they had in the past. Those who took time off to breastfeed their children or who did not wean their children when ordered to do so were forced to walk the treadmill, placed in solitary confinement, and ordered to do hard labor (see Paton 2007).

• 10. Chris Knight’s Introduction to the co-edited volume The Cradle of Language (Botha and Knight 2009) presents an early overview of this ‘un-doing’, for which reason I include an extended passage, here:

  The prevailing “human revolution” theory saw modern language and cognition emerging suddenly and nearly simultaneously throughout the Old World [Europe] some 40 to 50 thousand years ago. This “Great Leap Forward” for humanity (Diamond 1991) was depicted as a cognitive transition based on a neural mutation yielding syntax and hence true language … When modern Homo sapiens evolved in Africa some 200,000–150,000 years ago, according to this theory, our ancestors were modern only “anatomically”; mentally and behaviorally, they remained archaic. Only when such humans began migrating out of Africa—triggering the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe—did the “leap” to cognitive and behavioral modernity occur. Over the past decade, it has become apparent that this notion was an artifact resulting from a Eurocentric sampling of the fossil and archeological records (Mellars et al. 2007). Recent studies by archeologists working in Africa have shown that almost all the cultural innovations dated to 50,000–30,000 years ago in Europe can be found at much earlier dates at one or another site in Africa. Blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, logistic hunting of large game animals, long-distance exchange networks—these and other signs of modern cognition and behavior do not appear suddenly in one package as predicted by the Upper Paleolithic human revolution theory. They are found at African sites widely separated in space and time, indicating not a single leap but a much more complex, uneven but broadly cumulative process of biological, cultural, and historical change… (pp. 1–2)

• 11. Evidence of long-distance trade mainly consists of obsidian (used in making lithic tools) being found in places far from its source areas.

• 12. This 2022 study was carried out by an international team of 44 archaeologists and geneticists who harvested and sequenced genomic data from the oldest known subSaharan skeletal remains. East African DNA was found in southernmost South Africa; South African DNA was found in Ethiopia; and Central African DNA was found everywhere.

• 13. Middle Kingdom (2040–1782 BCE).

• 14. See also, Kahlheber et al. (2009) and Wang et al. (2020).

• 15. This is not to say that these freedoms are without emotional consequence, especially for contemporary couples facing unprecedented levels of precarity (see Lewis 2014, 2016). Yet, even in the context of uncertainty and divorce, there is a certain egalitarianism. Hewlett (2013, p. 176) notes that, in cases of ‘divorce,’ there is no gender bias, Aka women and men are equally entitled to initiate the process. The main grounds for divorce have typically been feelings of betrayal that follow when a partner pursues a conjugal relationship with someone outside the camp.

• 16. Their conclusions are worth repeating here (Dunn et al. 2011, p. 82):

  What the current analyses unexpectedly reveal is that systematic linkages of traits are likely to be the rare exception rather than the rule. Linguistic diversity does not seem to be tightly constrained by universal cognitive factors specialized for language. Instead, it is the product of cultural evolution, canalized by the systems that have evolved during diversification, so that future states lie in an evolutionary landscape with channels and basins of attraction that are specific to linguistic lineages.

• 17. En Afrique noire, c’est la musique qui accomplit la parole et la transforme en verbe, cette invention supérieure de l’homme qui fait de lui un démiurge. This passage and Lewis’ English translation of it is from Lewis (2009, p. 252).

• 18. Agawu cites the West African languages of the Ewe, Tiv, Vai, Hausa, and Mande.

• 19. As Agawu (1995, p. 386) declares: A determined researcher could easily show that the sum of isolated experiments in rhythmic organization found in so-called Western music produces a picture of far greater complexity than anything that Africans have produced so far either singly or collectively. One could, in short, quite easily invent “European rhythm.”

• 20. As Agawu (2016, p. 85) writes: African discourses are secure in their orientation to local usage; they are under no obligation to meet some transethnic standard. The European scheme seeks international, indeed global standing; as with all things colonial, it seeks to control.

• 21. The relationality of water drumming is in keeping with the fluidity and mobility of Baka movements, HG groups not burdening themselves with heavy items to carry. This unburdening is likewise seen in the ephemeral (immediate) use of leaves, grasses, tree trunks, and the earth itself (the earth bow) to engage sound as well as the larger repertoire of music sung to the world around them. Fluidity is also evident in the doubling of the hunting bow as a stringed instrument that hunters play. Afro-Venezuelan women engaged in water drumming, too, stopping only recently after traditions of bathing in the river became obsolete. See Water Drums (2009). (I do not discuss the several other kinds of drums and drumming, which are complexly intertwined with particular kinds of dancing, singing, and rituals) (see Hewlett 2017).

• 22. I am referring, here, to agricultural contexts. A Twi-speaking Asante carver interviewed in 1981, Kawsi Boatend from Akumadan, Ghana, relays that the atumpan (an Asante drum) originated from a felled tree in the forest that a hunter found. The story goes as follows: The great hunter, Akyeampon Tenten, came across a felled yonti tree in the forest, broken into differently sized pieces. The log made sounds without anyone playing it, so he went home, told his wife, and she suggested that he tell the chief. This he did, and the chief sent a group out to investigate the site. They experienced the same thing and quickly returned to report their findings. The chief decided to send the entire village to collect the tree and put it in front of his palace. One day, the log began making its sounds there, too and villagers came excitedly out to dance. For several years, whenever there was bad or good news, the tree would make a sound. After several years, its soundings became much fewer in number. One elder said that the tree should be cut into pieces and skin put on them. This would allow each one to sound and would also make the sound portable. Therefore, up till today, before playing the atumpan, one must utter the name, Akyeampon (Woodson 1983, p. 689).

• 23. Singing similarly obtains in relation to grinding stones, with women who used them for other purposes shifting their movements in regular ways as a means of cadencing a song. Below, are the lyrics to two songs sung by ChiChewa women (Malawi) that speak to the back-breaking work that rural women do, on the one hand, and the desire for a husband who recognizes the value of her and her child, on the other. A third song, sung by ChiMang’anja women in Malawi, speaks to the British drafting of Malawian men into the King’s African Rifles, to fight for the Allies in World War Two. The first line of each song is bolded, while a semi-colon separates distinct lines.

  Pounding grain; Pounding grain makes you cry; Tears drip drip; Drawing water; Drawing water makes you cry; Tears drip drip; Fetching wood; Fetching wood makes you cry; Tears drip drip; Hoeing; Hoeing makes you cry; Tears drip drip.

  A shared husband I don’t want! I want my own; Who looks on proudly as I pound, Not somebody else’s; Who when I pound; Turns his back on me!; I want a beautiful child; Who sleeps on a mattress; In a house with a wooden door!

  I reveal a secret: There are no boys here; They went to Nairobi; To fire guns against Hitler; Oh my, Hitler!; Hitler is on fire!; Mother, mother, even if you mourn:; Mother, mother, even if you boast! (See https://africanpoems.net/survival/pounding-songs/, an archival site for African poetry in more than 3000 languages. Accessed 25 March 2021).

• 24. Mortars could similarly be struck with smaller versions of the pestle (drum sticks) on the mortar’s side or on its bottom, if laid with its convex side up.

• 25. Haaland (2007) makes an interesting observation about the difference that the relative timing of cereal domestication and pottery made in the Neolithic Near East and Africa. Whereas in the former, cereal domestication happened 2000 years earlier than ceramics production, in Africa pottery emerges ~2000 years earlier than cultivated cereals, resulting in very different kinds of imaginaries around pottery and cooking. Recall that the Epipaleolithic kiln in the former Czechoslovakia was overseen by a female shaman, even though the kiln were not used to make utilitarian goods.

• 26. This and many other remarkable Ntan drums were made by the acclaimed Asante sculptor Osei Bonsu (1900–1977), the son of a drummer and carver (Ross 1984). Bonsu was born one year after the British defeated the Asante Empire (1901), exactly 100 years after his namesake, Asante king, Osei Bonsu, came to power (1801).

• 27. Sparhawk (1886, p. 389) explains how anyone can make the drums:

  To the Editor of The Scientific American: The system of sound telegraphy used by the people living on the border of the Gulf of Guinea, is of interest as a primitive solution of the problem of communication through short distances. The instrument is made as follows: Take a log of hard wood about two feet long and about a foot in diameter. Plane off one side longitudinally to a surface of four or five inches wide. In the center of this surface produce mark off an elongated and somewhat distorted Greek cross. The longer arms are placed longitudinally, and occupy about one-third of the plane surface… The instrument is now ready.

• 28. The name of the other drum, which is slightly smaller than the ‘mother’ has not been translated, but may be the ‘father’.

• 29. See also Buganda Royal Music Revival (2019), a documentary about royal Bugandan master musicians who fled after post-independence military forces stormed the palace.

• 30. See also Burka (2016) for a description of women in early Ethiopian smelting.

• 31. Phoenicians, dispatched by an Egyptian pharaoh, circumnavigated the continent some 2000 years before the Portuguese did so—as did Carthaginian sailors. But there is scant archaeological evidence for this and only one known written text.

• 32. There is some linguistic evidence of the importance of batuko within highland fugitive communities, the Portuguese referring to its members as “‘vadios’ (meaning idle, loafing, vagrant),” which in the Santiago creole dialect of Kriolu became badiu (Weeks 2011, np). This term would later become a racist epithet applied to all persons of African slave descent. This was so even after independence in 1975, though more recently those so denigrated have embraced the term with pride, associating it with “rebelliousness, vigor, African-ness, and independence” (Weeks 2011, np).

• 33. This space re-constitutes the terreru or circular grounds of batuko (Moretto 2018).

• 34. See Ferreira (2019) for a compelling analysis of the post-independence theater movement in Cape Verde that drew on Cabral’s calls for re-Africanization.

• 35. See also Watkins (2019).