Izanami giving birth to Kagutsuchi / Fire - Shikanda.net

Although most of the species mentioned in this Table are not highlighted in the Nkoya
clan context, elephant and beehive are, and the turner element so conspicuous among
the Nkoya (Sheta) appears here under a different light. There appears to be considerable
South Asian influence among the Nkoya royal families: in those circles, personal
names circulate that have no Bantu etymology and that appear to have come straight
from the major Indian epic the Mahabharata (e.g. Skanda / Shikanda, and Mangala),
there are very many close parallels with Indonesia and in general Buddhist South East
Asia (iconographic detail suggests especially a link with South East Asian mainland
Buddhist in the 13th century CE) which I have analysed elsewhere and which may
well have been passed, on their seaborne way to East Africa, via Ceylon and the
Indian coast. Nkoya royal traditions trace their origin to a distant land to the North
East, ‘Kola’, which may well be South or South East Asia; the word tiger in Table 10
is ‘kola’ in the original Vedic language. There are other indications of a possible
direct, overseas link between South Asia and the Nkoya: the worldview and cosmogony
of the Munda-speaking peoples on the Gulf of Bengal contains interesting parallels
with that of the Nkoya, e.g. in flood and tower stories; these however turn out, on
closer scrutiny, to be so widespread that they are hardly reason to suppose that their
occurrence among the Nkoya can only attributed to South Asian influence in relatively
recent times, i.e. in the early second millennium CE. By and large, I prefer to
explain the close parallels between the Nkoya clan nomenclature and the East and
South Asian element systems in terms of an Upper Palaeolithic connection through
the Back-into-Africa migration, but we need to be aware of a much more recent and
direct, seaborne alternative.
Meanwhile we must realise that, in addition to an element system that may date back
to the Upper Palaeolithic and have a transcontinental distribution, clan nomenclature
in sub-Saharan Africa may also have other sources. For instance, among the Ashanti
twelve different clans are distinguished, 73 just like in Ancient Israel twelve different
tribes were distinguished, and in both cases the underlying systematics appear to be
those of the zodiac, which was established in Ancient Mesopotamia in the course of
the second millennium BCE, and in the first millennium became a standard model for
dividing the ecliptic (the apparent but unmistakable path of the great luminaries Sun
and Moon, and of the visible planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn,
across the heavens) in all literate civilisations of the Old World; from the Mediterranean,
zodiacal notions penetrated deeply into Africa (cf. Pâques 1964), and no doubt
influenced Ashanti social classification.
73 Stricker 1963-1989; Rattray XXXX
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