So ends a long day
lights switching off as I go
no one to tell night
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Monday, August 22, 2016
The Olympics: Hera, Heroes and Heroines
No one can take the hera from the hero, or the heroine, but the one who must perforce be the one. Only the hero can so mangle the hera that it disappears. I think it's Philip Ochieng', the doyen of African (and so, yes, Kenyan) columnists and essayists, who, in our time, rediscovered this linguistic and social fact. Hera, Ochieng' points out, means Love. Hero, let us add, means, even today, "to love". The hero, then, is, like one Mourinho, "the special one" by virtue of being loved for his exploits -- for the amazing things he's done before everyone's eyes. Hera (the all-powerful God-Mother of Greek mythology) and hero go back a long historical and genealogical way, as Ochieng' tells us, and as we will presently see.
Ochieng's insight into what Hera meant, and means still, comes easily to him on account of his own mother-tongue, in which the word is as ever-present today as it appears to have been for the authors of the Greek epics, who took it 'literally' and don't seem to have had a clue about the underlying meaning. Still, it must have been an epiphany of sorts (a one-of-a-kind aha! moment, indeed) for him the day he first realized, as all of European writing hadn't over all the millennia past (for Dholuo wasn't an integral part of it), the meaning, at once hidden and obvious, of that simple and overwhelming word: Hera. I think, I have come to believe now, that certain words are living fossils which we use or hear without knowing it; that is, without realizing just what kind of richness, of meaning and of times past, breezes through and envelopes our lives because of them.
READ: Philip Ochieng' (2011) "Love and Sacrifice for mankind are what make a hero"
Let me add and reiterate the following to what I said a moment ago: It is the love (hera) spawned by great deeds that becomes the hero or heroine -- who is the doer of the very same deeds that bring out the love. The hero's (heroine's) deeds it is that cause the selfsame hera to be. Likewise, the one sure thing that will degrade the love is the flipping, somehow, of the heroic deed into a gross misdeed, into a villainy. Into a disgrace. It is when the hero goes rogue before the adoring public. The more noxious the deed -- becoming a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, a notorious thief, or a peddler or user of illicit substances, an 'imbecile', for example -- the greater the degradation.
But flipping is not the only way. Carlyle, as we will see, implies that there are potentially as many heroes and heroines as there are planets and moons and stars and constellations and galaxies in the expansive sky. So some kind of periodically changing rank-order imposes itself, and both jostling for position and attention to the flux is ever present, as time flies. New shooting stars flash their presence(s). Memory fades and, as, attention expands and narrows and expands again, and familiarity and that same 'Olympian' spirit create conditions for other heroes and heroines -- and even villains.
[Alas, the back page of today's edition of The Standard features this glaring headline "Hero or Villain?" in reference to Asbel Kiprop, one of Kenya's great athletes. You may wish to read it as a coincidental illustration of the point I'm making here. But there was no villainy there, truly. A momentary loss of the fighting spirit, for sure; but not a whiff of bad intent, or bad faith. Still, heroes are supposed to be immune to loss of nerve. But those looking for villainy at Rio2016 need go no farther than America's Ryan Lochte's post-competition behavior in Rio. Yet even that is not as scandalous as all the news we've been hearing lately of sports heroes turned pariahs for being exposed as doping 'champions' -- as users of illicit performance-enhancing drugs]
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In his Lecture III on heroes, in that section focusing particularly on the hero as poet, Thomas Carlyle remarks, in ways that are far from inconsistent with the posited affinity between hera and hero -- or, as Carlyle intimates earlier in Lecture I, between (hero)worship and heroic Divinity (=Wuotan = Divine Movement = Odin) -- that:
Now, the Teutonic word Wuotan (= movement) rings loud bells in the, so to speak, Nilotic ear: Wuot(h)an(e) = "Let me see you walk" (literally), or "Walk, so that I may believe -- what I see" (figuratively). So does Odin (= sealer/sealed; or "one whose abode is, for earthlings, sealed still -- as a farthing"). Here, perhaps, is how it all began, all this lexical 'connectivity', according to Ochieng's distillation of the pertinent histories:
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The latest edition of the Olympic Games, Rio2016, came to a ceremonious end only hours ago, on Sunday, August 21, 2016, to the great relief of Brazillians of all walks, one supposes. Time for further reflection , then.
As far as African teams are concerned, Kenya hasn't done too badly; Ethiopia not quite as well as one allowed oneself to expect. Indeed, a whole new bunch of heroines and heroes, from all over the world, has emerged, and some older ones have endured, for all of us to see and believe and love. The pantheon is large, and getting larger. The most sensational ones this time around include: Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Mohamed Farah, David Rudisha, Elaine Thompson, Jemima Sumgong, Vivian Cheruiyot, Simone Biles, Almaz Ayana, Wayde van Niekerk, Faith Kipyegon, Eliud Kipchoge, Conseslus Kipruto, Allyson Felix and Caster Semenya.
In the modern era, the Olympic Games are where the world's nations come to showcase their sporting talent, and seek its validation on the global stage. Thus, when Iran's Kimia Alizadeh won a bronze medal in taekwondo, the other day, it became the occasion for the country's President, Hassan Rouhani, to gush unabashedly, in a very public way, thus: "My daughter Kimia, you have triggered the happiness of all the Iranians, and particularly of the women. I wish you eternal joy."
But the history of the Olympics has been written essentially by Eurocentric historians. It has, as a consequence, generally traced back to the roots of European civilization -- particularly in the domains of philosophy, literature, 'culture' and 'the arts' -- to ancient, pre-Christian, Greek and Roman civilizations. And they have viewed the Olympics as a decidedly Greek gift to the world, and to humanity. But the official website of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is intriguingly more nuanced than this Eurocentrism, giving room for other streams of thought, as follows (note the allusion to Hera):
The Museum admits that it is difficult to know exactly how the Olympics began. But while numerous versions of origin have been articulated, one constant presumption seems to be that the Olympic idea, at root, was decidedly Hellenic in both conception and execution, even if some of that root was mythical. But it is precisely this version of Greek mythology that Ochieng' seeks valiantly and with much conviction and erudition to debunk.
According to Ochieng', the search for candidates with qualities required for apprentice training for temple service as priestesses was the motivation for launching the races historically associated with the Olympics. The criteria for selection included stamina and speed. Of course, there is an interesting parallel account of the origins of the marathon race, which has nothing to do with this apprenticeship process, and which can be read here. But Ochieng's dramatic assertion is that the history of the Olympics does not begin in Greece, but rather in Africa -- Hera's motherland. More specifically, the Olympic games started not as pure games but as a set of religio-cultural practices, among Nilo-Hamitic groups, which were infused with high-order physicality which, to the outsider, made them akin to games as such. In time, all this was appropriated by a militaristic Hellenic Greece more interested in physical performance and conquests as ends in themselves. As Ochieng' sees it:
READ: Philip Ochieng' (2008) "Racing all began in Africa, the home of the Olympics"
**** **** **** ****
By way of conclusion, here is a video of scenes from the
Closing Ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics:
Updated: August 22nd, 24th, 25th and 30th 2016.
Ochieng's insight into what Hera meant, and means still, comes easily to him on account of his own mother-tongue, in which the word is as ever-present today as it appears to have been for the authors of the Greek epics, who took it 'literally' and don't seem to have had a clue about the underlying meaning. Still, it must have been an epiphany of sorts (a one-of-a-kind aha! moment, indeed) for him the day he first realized, as all of European writing hadn't over all the millennia past (for Dholuo wasn't an integral part of it), the meaning, at once hidden and obvious, of that simple and overwhelming word: Hera. I think, I have come to believe now, that certain words are living fossils which we use or hear without knowing it; that is, without realizing just what kind of richness, of meaning and of times past, breezes through and envelopes our lives because of them.
READ: Philip Ochieng' (2011) "Love and Sacrifice for mankind are what make a hero"
Let me add and reiterate the following to what I said a moment ago: It is the love (hera) spawned by great deeds that becomes the hero or heroine -- who is the doer of the very same deeds that bring out the love. The hero's (heroine's) deeds it is that cause the selfsame hera to be. Likewise, the one sure thing that will degrade the love is the flipping, somehow, of the heroic deed into a gross misdeed, into a villainy. Into a disgrace. It is when the hero goes rogue before the adoring public. The more noxious the deed -- becoming a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, a notorious thief, or a peddler or user of illicit substances, an 'imbecile', for example -- the greater the degradation.
But flipping is not the only way. Carlyle, as we will see, implies that there are potentially as many heroes and heroines as there are planets and moons and stars and constellations and galaxies in the expansive sky. So some kind of periodically changing rank-order imposes itself, and both jostling for position and attention to the flux is ever present, as time flies. New shooting stars flash their presence(s). Memory fades and, as, attention expands and narrows and expands again, and familiarity and that same 'Olympian' spirit create conditions for other heroes and heroines -- and even villains.
[Alas, the back page of today's edition of The Standard features this glaring headline "Hero or Villain?" in reference to Asbel Kiprop, one of Kenya's great athletes. You may wish to read it as a coincidental illustration of the point I'm making here. But there was no villainy there, truly. A momentary loss of the fighting spirit, for sure; but not a whiff of bad intent, or bad faith. Still, heroes are supposed to be immune to loss of nerve. But those looking for villainy at Rio2016 need go no farther than America's Ryan Lochte's post-competition behavior in Rio. Yet even that is not as scandalous as all the news we've been hearing lately of sports heroes turned pariahs for being exposed as doping 'champions' -- as users of illicit performance-enhancing drugs]
**** **** **** ****
In his Lecture III on heroes, in that section focusing particularly on the hero as poet, Thomas Carlyle remarks, in ways that are far from inconsistent with the posited affinity between hera and hero -- or, as Carlyle intimates earlier in Lecture I, between (hero)worship and heroic Divinity (=Wuotan = Divine Movement = Odin) -- that:
"Hero, Prophet, Poet, — many different names, in different times, and places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher; — in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man; that the man be great... The great heart, the clear deepseeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare, — one knows not what he could not have made, in the supreme degree."If I may go back a little to the co-conceptions that Ochieng' was leading us to, I should once again say this: The hero, or heroine, is the embodiment, of such love as Carlyle intimates here -- the embodiment, that is, of hera, of such qualities as are adulated or even "worshiped". But there is a thin line between the body and the qualities. Thus, the hero is the objectification of the love that the rest of the 'community' (the loving-adoring community) feels for the one who earns it by virtue of great and praiseworthy and uplifting acts of courage and sacrifice and high fidelity and achievement and, even, 'disruption'; acts worthy, moreover, of the chronicler's knowing hand and troubadour's refined voice.
Now, the Teutonic word Wuotan (= movement) rings loud bells in the, so to speak, Nilotic ear: Wuot(h)an(e) = "Let me see you walk" (literally), or "Walk, so that I may believe -- what I see" (figuratively). So does Odin (= sealer/sealed; or "one whose abode is, for earthlings, sealed still -- as a farthing"). Here, perhaps, is how it all began, all this lexical 'connectivity', according to Ochieng's distillation of the pertinent histories:
"When, in the fourth millennium BC, the Nilotic Graikoi matriarchs invaded south-eastern Europe and named it “Greece” (a corruption of the word “Graikoi”), they took with them their creator Goddess under such names as Aphrodite, Artemis, Athene, Cybele, Demeter, Eve, Gaia, Hathor, Io, Isis, Maat, Minerva, Nephthys and Venus).
But Hera was her prevailing name when the patriarchal Aryan Hellenes invaded Greece in the second millennium BC, subdued these natives and mythographically caused Zeus, the divine tyrant newly installed upon Olympus, to rape the Goddess and force her into marriage.
It is not coincidental that Hera is so close, lexically, to hero. For, remarkably, while Hera was the personification of love, hera is the word by which the Luo still describe that tender feeling."
**** **** **** ****
The latest edition of the Olympic Games, Rio2016, came to a ceremonious end only hours ago, on Sunday, August 21, 2016, to the great relief of Brazillians of all walks, one supposes. Time for further reflection , then.
As far as African teams are concerned, Kenya hasn't done too badly; Ethiopia not quite as well as one allowed oneself to expect. Indeed, a whole new bunch of heroines and heroes, from all over the world, has emerged, and some older ones have endured, for all of us to see and believe and love. The pantheon is large, and getting larger. The most sensational ones this time around include: Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Mohamed Farah, David Rudisha, Elaine Thompson, Jemima Sumgong, Vivian Cheruiyot, Simone Biles, Almaz Ayana, Wayde van Niekerk, Faith Kipyegon, Eliud Kipchoge, Conseslus Kipruto, Allyson Felix and Caster Semenya.
In the modern era, the Olympic Games are where the world's nations come to showcase their sporting talent, and seek its validation on the global stage. Thus, when Iran's Kimia Alizadeh won a bronze medal in taekwondo, the other day, it became the occasion for the country's President, Hassan Rouhani, to gush unabashedly, in a very public way, thus: "My daughter Kimia, you have triggered the happiness of all the Iranians, and particularly of the women. I wish you eternal joy."
But the history of the Olympics has been written essentially by Eurocentric historians. It has, as a consequence, generally traced back to the roots of European civilization -- particularly in the domains of philosophy, literature, 'culture' and 'the arts' -- to ancient, pre-Christian, Greek and Roman civilizations. And they have viewed the Olympics as a decidedly Greek gift to the world, and to humanity. But the official website of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is intriguingly more nuanced than this Eurocentrism, giving room for other streams of thought, as follows (note the allusion to Hera):
"Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic Games, is in the western part of the Peloponnese which, according to Greek mythology, is the island of "Pelops", the founder of the Olympic Games. Imposing temples, votive buildings, elaborate shrines and ancient sporting facilities were combined in a site of unique natural and mystical beauty. Olympia functioned as a meeting place for worship and other religious and political practices as early as the 10th century B.C. The central part of Olympia was dominated by the majestic temple of Zeus, with the temple of Hera parallel to it."It is widely acknowledged that the first Olympic games were staged in Olympia in 776 BCE. In a publication titled The Olympic Games in Antiquity, for example, the Olympic Museum notes that:
"Everything started in the Peloponnese, in Greece, some 3,000 years ago. Sports competitions were organised at Olympia and were named after their location, hence their name of “Olympic” Games. Nobody knows exactly when they began, but the first written mention of them dates back to 776 BC. It is difficult to know what gave rise to the ancient Games. Numerous versions attempt to explain them. Historically, the Games were created to provide unity to the Hellenic world, which, at that time, was split into city-states which were constantly at war. Mythology is mixed up with history, and the events that happened during this period were often explained as being the consequence of divine intervention."
The Museum admits that it is difficult to know exactly how the Olympics began. But while numerous versions of origin have been articulated, one constant presumption seems to be that the Olympic idea, at root, was decidedly Hellenic in both conception and execution, even if some of that root was mythical. But it is precisely this version of Greek mythology that Ochieng' seeks valiantly and with much conviction and erudition to debunk.
According to Ochieng', the search for candidates with qualities required for apprentice training for temple service as priestesses was the motivation for launching the races historically associated with the Olympics. The criteria for selection included stamina and speed. Of course, there is an interesting parallel account of the origins of the marathon race, which has nothing to do with this apprenticeship process, and which can be read here. But Ochieng's dramatic assertion is that the history of the Olympics does not begin in Greece, but rather in Africa -- Hera's motherland. More specifically, the Olympic games started not as pure games but as a set of religio-cultural practices, among Nilo-Hamitic groups, which were infused with high-order physicality which, to the outsider, made them akin to games as such. In time, all this was appropriated by a militaristic Hellenic Greece more interested in physical performance and conquests as ends in themselves. As Ochieng' sees it:
"In the beginning ... the Olympics were neither “Games” nor “Greek” in any strict sense of those words. First, the races had nothing to do with the “sportsmanship” or “spirit of fairness” which the institution has claimed ever since Europeans reinvented it just over a century ago."
READ: Philip Ochieng' (2008) "Racing all began in Africa, the home of the Olympics"
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Closing Ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics:
Updated: August 22nd, 24th, 25th and 30th 2016.
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