Translation a Cultural Ting! An Exercise in Pan-Afrikan Translation

In Cheikh Anta Diop’s Transdisciplinary Legacy (2026) · Chapter 12

The Jamaican language is usually filed under “creole” or “patois” — a label that quietly reduces it to a black remix of English and buries its Niger-Congo grammar. This chapter builds a different frame: Pan-Afrikan translation, a method that puts Afrikan languages — including the contact languages of the diaspora — in conversation with each other on their own terms. Using Jamaican as the medium, it reads Classical Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) grammar through the diaspora, and shows the Afrikan ontology underneath both.

What Pan-Afrikan translation is

Working from Ama Mazama’s Afrocentric paradigm, the chapter treats Afrikan language as a project with a liberatory purpose: it dissolves cultural dislocation, transmits positive Afrikan values, and standardizes Afrikan languages across the continent and its diaspora. Pan-Afrikan translation is the method built to do this — a mode of translation where the cultural unity of Afrikan language, across time and space, drives the interpretation of Afrikan texts.

Three tenets keep it honest: the languages in conversation must be Afrikan (including contact languages like Ebonics); the material must be drawn from Afrikan cultural and historical contexts; and any commentary must locate the languages within an Afrikan frame. A Jamaican translation of a Yoruba proverb qualifies; a Wolof translation of a Greco-Roman text does not.

Ebonics: one language family, not many patois

Ebonics — Robert Williams’ term for “Black Sounds” — reframes the diaspora’s contact languages as ethno-national relexifications of the Niger-Congo system, and the chapter extends the term to continental contact languages too. On that basis it proposes a regional typology: Fi Mi Langwij Dem for English-relexified Ebonics (including the Caribbean, Afrikan American, and continental groups like Nigerian Naija and Cameroonian Kamtok), and Lang Yo Pa Mwen for the French-relexified equivalents, such as Haitian.

The typology isn’t just naming — it’s evidence. Jamaican’s possessive fi mi/fi wi, its post-nominal plural marker dem, and its prepositional sentence structure are all continuities from Niger-Congo grammar. The chapter also distinguishes lexical continentalisms (direct borrowings, like Igbo unu/wunna for “y’all”) from ebonicized ones (reworked forms, like yai waata, “eye water”, for tears).

NoteThe chapter uses the Jamaican Language Unit orthography, the spelling “Afrika” after Afrikan orthography, and glosses Classical Kemetic text (Medu Netcher, “Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics”) directly against Jamaican and Akan-Twi.

Saa na wɔte: “that’s how they are”

Indo-European grammar assumes an equational sentence needs a copula — a “to be” verb — because of what the chapter calls a Eurocentric assumption of fundamental alienation. Afrikan equational sentences don’t work that way: they juxtapose two elements directly, and that juxtaposition itself communicates a situation of being. Jamaican Dem gud (“Are you okay?”), we yu de (“where you are”), and wa yu niem (“what’s your name”) are all classified this way rather than as “zero-copula” deviations from an English norm.

Central to this is the Jamaican a-element, a lexical continentalism traced to the Akan na phrase and mirrored across West Afrikan Ebonics — Kamtok, Krio, Naija — as well as in Medu Netcher’s pw and ntf constructions. Reading the Kemetic identity statements through the Jamaican A Dat Mi Se (“It’s me!”) and Eniting A Eniting (“Everything is Everything”) patterns clears up a syntactic ambiguity that Egyptologists have read as one construction, when it is really two: an affirmative identity statement and an interrelated one, distinguished by where the independent pronoun sits.

Dem taim ya, dem taim de: an Afrikan verb chart

Afrikan time is cyclical, not a straight line from past to future — and the chapter builds a verbal typology, Saa Berɛ Yi ne Saa Berɛ No (“this time” and “that time”), around that premise, using Akan-Twi terms for the categories and Jamaican phrases for the subcategories. It’s offered as a corrective to John Mbiti’s Sasa-Zamani paradigm, which borrowed the term zamani from Arabic-derived Kiswahili rather than an indigenous Afrikan source.

The chart tracks an action from eventuality (wa wi apm, “what eventually happens”) through approach (wa go apm) and ongoing activity (waa gwaan) to the unmarked general-fact verb (wa dem se), then across into the completed and anterior aspects of “that time” (don nuo, wa did gwaan). Applied to Medu Netcher, the same categories explain features Egyptology usually handles with tense labels — including why the Kemetic verb of knowledge, like its Jamaican and Akan counterparts, defaults to a stative, unmarked form: knowledge is understood as the direct result of learning, not an ongoing action.

Three deep-thought concepts, made familiar

Building on Theophile Obenga’s work on Kemetic philosophy, the chapter takes three concepts — wnn (“unen”, to exist), ḫpr (“kheper”, to become), and rḫ (“rekh”, to know) — and reads them through Jamaican. Unen, a reduplicated form of “to be”, lines up with the Jamaican reduplicated verb de-de; both express what the chapter calls existential thereness — the idea, drawn from Akan spirituality, that achieving permanence (becoming an ancestor) means achieving a stable, continuous “being there”.

Kheper, covering being, becoming, and transformation, doesn’t map onto one Jamaican word — it takes several: apm (“to happen”), gwaan (“to go on”), ton (“to transform”), and facilitative verbs like kom and kyari (“to bring about/bring forth”). That spread across process verbs and facilitative verbs is itself the point: Jamaican expresses the same Afrikan understanding of becoming that Kemetic compresses into a single root.

Eniting a eniting.

Jamaican — “Everything is everything”

Terms used in the paper

• Pan-Afrikan translation A mode of translation where the cultural unity of Afrikan language, across time and space, drives the interpretation of Afrikan texts.
• Ebonics The contact languages of the Afrikan diaspora and continent, understood as relexified ethno-national continuations of the Niger-Congo language system.
• Saa na wɔte The Afrikan equational sentence system, where direct juxtaposition — not a copula — expresses a situation of being.
• Continentalism A direct grammatical or lexical transfer from an indigenous Afrikan language into an Ebonics language, as distinct from a general “Afrikanism.”
• Saa Berɛ Yi ne Saa Berɛ No An Afrikan verbal typology organized around cyclical “this time” and “that time,” offered as a corrective to Mbiti’s Sasa-Zamani model.