Learning, Wisdom, and The African World Experience

Let me begin by saying hello to the followers of this blog...This is Serelle McPherson...  As you may already know this blog is set up so that the members of my group in my Freshman Seminar class can share our views on the lectures that we will be hearing in the upcoming weeks.

The lecture that we heard today was titled:

Learning, Wisdom, and The African World Experience

The speaker for this lecture was the incredible Dr. Gregory E. Carr, one of the faculty members at Howard University.

"To be academic is to be African."

He started off this divine lecture with the thought that life, culture and learning all started in Africa. Dr. Carr advised the class as young people of African descent, that it is our duty to stop believing that our history began with slavery, because we have so much more than that. We also have to believe that it is our right and privilege to live our lives with the expectation that we will be immortalized through our actions and speech. In ancient African times, there were certain beliefs that were cherished that we have to get back to, such as having a respect for the old and the "medew law", which means "staff of old age" (training your replacement). "To educate is to transfer life." This means that we have to lead by example and walk in "Iwa- l'aiya", moral and righteous way of life that maintains itself.

Dr. Carr then went into teaching some symbols and vocab words that I'm sure more than half of the class had never heard. One of these symbols, however was one that I had seen a few times before. It is a version of the picture shown above, a man with a bird for a head, which I learned today is the representation of knowledge or intelligence. His name is Dehuty and he is the illustration of the ideal man. He invented letters, which helped to create words. His wife, sister, and friend, Seshat, represents the ideal woman and she is responsible for the invention of numbers, which lead to the studies of mathematics, architecture and measurements. (picture to the right). 

The reason I really enjoyed this class is because Dr. Carr came in with the intent to teach and inform. He spoke with such enthusiasm and passion, that you could tell that the words he spoke, he believed and lived. He often went on tangents, but I respected it because it just meant that he had a lot of info in his head that he wanted to share. Of all the years that I have been under the teaching of African history, it has never been presented to me in such a fashion. Dr. Carr made me wish that the class was actually longer so that I could learn more.

Below I have listed some of the vocab words that I was introduced to today.. hope you find them as interesting as I did...

1. sedjem "listen"
2. ma'at "truth"
3. Medew Nefer "good speech"
4. seba/ sebayt "teach/ teachings"
5. sedi "educate"
6. Iwa Pele "good/ right character
7. Iwa- l'ewa "oneness of character with beauty"
8. sankofa "go [and] get it.