Water

Water is perhaps the single most important liquid in the world. Composed of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen (H20), it is not possible for any form of life to survive without it. Water covers about three quarters of the Earth's surface and makes up roughly the same portion of the human body by mass. This liquid dominated the physical, social, and spiritual environment of ancient Africa. It still does in most of Africa today, as well as in African communities outside of the continent. In the African world, from as early as ancient Kemet [Page 705]to the present, water, in the form of primeval water, has been at the center of the explanation of the origins of existence. In this world, water is the ultimate cleansing agent, both internally and externally. It is also the ultimate agent and symbol of spiritual purification and a most important offering to the Creator, to other divinities, to the ancestors, and to other cosmic forces that are propitiated by libation and other rituals. In Africa, if humans cannot live by the proverbial bread alone, it is even more certain that all life, human or not, in its physical, social, and ritual aspects, will perish, swiftly, if there is no water.

Figure 1A Kassena baby's first bath with cold water serves as both a ritual awakening and a way to stimulate its circulation.

Source: Carol Beckwith/Angela Fisher.

The ancient African fluvial environment had a profound impact on the African spiritual system, which in turn impacted back on African humanity by giving order, meaning, significance, and higher purpose to daily life. Nowhere is this more dramatic and obvious than in Kernet. It is here that the River Nile and an imaginary underground river, of which the Nile was undoubtedly the archetype, respectively ordered and regulated the life of the living and that of the Dead and, in fact, profoundly influenced all existence and all conceptions of existence.

The Nile is the longest and one of the most dominant rivers in the world. It runs for more than 4,000 miles from south to north through East Central and North East Africa, from its source in the region of the Great Lakes to its estuary on the Mediterranean; from the place of the beginnings of humans through to the places of the beginnings of civilization, in Kush, also called Ta-Seti, literally “Land of the Bow” or Nubia. People as well as progress also flowed northward, following this waterway along its valley from the heart of Africa. The Nile was the world's first transcontinental cultural highway. But it was not only water, people, and their culture that this river has [Page 706]carried as it arose in the highlands of Africa and journeyed across varied terrain to empty itself into the Mediterranean. There is another gift. Fertile silt, eroded from upland, has always been transported in its yearly floods and deposited in places that would have been part of the largest desert in the world but for this annual replenishing nourishment from the longest river in the world.

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