Just where do the Tswana people come from? In a 2007 exhibition, the National Museum and Art Gallery traced them back to 11 AD Cameroun. On the basis of her 15-year research, Merapelo Letebele traces them even farther – ancient Egypt. Her research is quite extensive and has yielded a lot more information than is possible to reproduce here but first let us establish her credentials.
A journalist by training, Letebele has worked for Sunday Standard, Botswana Guardian/Midweek Sun and The Botswana Gazette. Some 15 years ago, she began a personal quest to discover knowledge “that had previously been hidden from us.” One pathway led her to explore the Out-of-Egypt idea and she came to the realization that “the majority of what we think we know is mere belief.” Her ongoing research has revealed cultural parallels between pre-colonial Tswana culture, those of ancient Egypt and the laws found in the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers of the Old Testament. Resources permitting, she plans to start documenting her findings – which will necessarily entail a trip to Egypt and such ancient cities like Nowe, the famous Thebes – now called Luxor. She strongly believes that Nowe is the “Lowe” of Setswana folklore.
Received wisdom is that the name of one of Botswana’s main Tswana tribes, Bakwena, comes from kwena (crocodile), being the animal that this tribe totemically venerates. Letebele’s research points to a different source to explain the origins of kwena the name and totem – a still existing Egyptian town called Qena.
“The name Qena bears a striking resemblance to kwena, the Setswana word for crocodile,” she says.
In antiquity, Qena was famed for its crocodile cult temples and “a sizable cache of mummified crocodiles was discovered by archaeologists in a series of rock-hewn tombs” in the town. In making this connection, Letebele tells the story of an Egyptian god called Sobek, whose the cult may have been active in Qena.
“Sobek is represented as a crocodile either in its form or as a human with a crocodile head. The cult of Sobek was probably one of the earliest in ancient Egypt.”
Via elaborate deductive reasoning that incorporates phonetics, Letebele has established a link between Sobek and a Setswana name – Thobega which she says refers to an “obscure ancient Tswana god that nobody now knows much about.”
She explains about this god: “The existence of strong oral tradition referencing or at least a remote recall of a now derelict Tswana deity named Modimo Phatshwa abounds in older generation Batswana. A colonial-era missionary called J. Tom Brown identified this deity as Thobege-a-Phacwa, a one-legged god. The one-legged god of ancient Egypt was called Min. This name has come to us as Menwe. During the Middle Kingdom, Min was syncretized with Horus (Hurutshe) as the deity Min-Horus. Up to this day, both Thobega and Menwe are familiar names of the Bahurutshe kings.”
She uses similar method to establish a link between Sobek and two Setswana cultural practices expressed as seboko and sereto. She notes that anthropologists and other social scientists working among the Batswana have always been fascinated by the latter’s totemism – which they likened to animal worship in ancient Egypt. Batswana call a totem seboko or sereto.
Letebele says that seboko possibly comes from Sobek and may well have originally referred to the representation of the crocodile cult exclusively: “The crocodile cult has held sway over the ancient Egyptian mind at different rates of influence since pre-dynastic times.”
As regards sereto, she begins with a description of an old Egyptian writing convention for royal names that was known as “serekh.”
“The king’s name would be written inside a square or otherwise rectangular frame, and a falcon would be drawn on top of the enclosure. This whole representation was called a serekh. I think that somewhere between the decipherment and translation of Egyptian text, the spectrum of scholars held on to serekh, while our ancestors simply called the idea and representation of a king’s name sereto. Since the ancient Egyptian god Horus was regarded as the last god to rule mortals here on earth, almost all of Egyptian pharaohs saw themselves as his representation and hence they drew a falcon on top of the frame that contained their names to show that they considered themselves as followers of Horus and sometimes, his sons. When the merging of Horus and Sobek occurred, the two ideas of sereto and seboko – as references to divine kingship – also merged as can still be seen in Tswana culture today.”
If you find the Kwena-Qena connection mind-boggling, then you certainly need to learn Letebele’s interpretation of Bakwena’s tribal poem whose first line is “Ke dikolobe tsa ga Mhete-a-Mogale.”
“Mhete was a name of three pharaohs who ruled Egypt during the Middle Kingdom,” she says, referring to Amenemhet. “Personally, I have no trouble seeing that the mention of Mhete alludes to any one of the pharaohs of the 12th dynasty who are credited with having merged Horus (Hurutshe) and Sobek (seboko or Thobega) together. It was quiet common from ancient Egyptian to make deity composites at that time.”
For centuries, Africans have used performance traditions to record their history. In listening to a popular Dipina le Maboko song called Kgomo ya Maru, Letebele co-related the lyrics with an Egyptian myth about the Heavenly Cow. According to an Ancient Egyptian text, when the creator God, Ra, was fed up with sins and the rebellious humans on earth, he retreated to the sky on the back of a cow called Nut. Letebele is convinced that this Heavenly Cow is the “kgomo ya maru” (cow in the clouds) of Tswana folk songs.
Even more interesting is the story of the tribe that Bakwena separated from: Bahurutshe. We know “Hurutshe” to have come from the name of a kgosi of a Tswana tribe. Conversely, Letebele’s theory is that Hurutshe comes from an Egyptian god called Horus who was represented as a man with the head of a falcon or as a falcon proper. In ancient Egypt, most deities were represented as both distinct individuals and composites – which was why during one historical episode, Sobek was merged with Horus. The latter’s worshippers were known as “Followers of Horus.” Letebele believes that Hurutshe is a “Tswanalized” version of Horus.
“Today, Bahurutshe have the phofu (eland) and tshwene (baboon) as their totems. Oral traditions point to a time in antiquity when Bahurutshe venerated the eland exclusively under what scholars call the Baphofu Confederacy. Considering that the idea of a confederacy connotes an alliance of tribes or Tswana-style states, one wonders whether the members of the Baphofu Confederacy originally had different totems or not. This question arises because I have noted that some of the tribes that are purported to have voluntarily exited the Confederacy interestingly have animal totems that have affinities to important and lesser ancient Egyptian deities.”
Letebele asserts that considering that Horus was represented by a falcon (segodi), that bird may have been the original totem of his followers and possibly explains where a Bahurutshe village in Botswana (Mankgodi) gets its name.
“In Egyptian literature, there existed another falcon god whose name is often translated as sopdu, sepodu or sopedu,” she says. “Owing to the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs did not use vowels, sopedu and segodi look like linguistic strangers. However, a little imagination can substitute all the three vowels and come within an inch of sniffing a cognate for segodi.”
She adds that just as in the case of Qena\Kwena, there still exists a city in present-day Egypt that had a name that sounds almost like tshwene – Syene. The city has been renamed Aswan and motifs of baboon reliefs abound in it.
Letebele is well aware of the fact that “as a lay historian, I am dabbling in and encroaching on a water-tight realm of exclusive scholarship spanning across multiple disciplines.” Naturally, racism is one part of the problem; the other, as she points out, is that “most scholars who made careers, money and a name for themselves out of any academic body of knowledge would not like all their hard work and beliefs revised or changed drastically.” In Egypt itself, world-renowned Egyptologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, has stated that claims that Ancient Egyptians were black are untrue.
Still, some professional historians have called for scrutiny of links between ancient Egypt and black Africa. One is Dr. Chisanga Siame, a Zambian who questions the uncanny resemblance of a Chibemba word, Katunkumene and its variants (like the adjective uku tunkumana) name with the name of a 14th century Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun. He recalls a neighbour habitually chastising her children with “I told you to go to the store for me, but you are just standing there like Katunkumene.” The latter makes sense when one considers the many statues of Tutankhamun. Like Letebele, Siame has done extensive work that demonstrates phonetic and morphological similarities between Chibemba and the languages of ancient Egypt.
