Legend of Godumo-dumo: a myth unpacked (Part I)

L M Leteane | Friday November 25, 2016 17:46

However, a fearless boy called Mosimane wa Sankatane (‘Boy Who Does Not Retreat’ i.e. fearless boy) immobilised it from inside with his spear, split its belly, and managed to free everyone. Now, is this mere myth, nonsense?  What we must note is that whereas other cultures could record in writing events that occurred in great antiquity, we in Africa relied on oral traditions. This, however, is a means subject to greater distortion and embellishment as it passes from story teller to story teller. But if one looks carefully enough, one can see that we in Africa have exactly the same legends. An even greater ring of authenticity is when one legend logically continues where the other left off. We have such a case with the legend of godumo-dumo. It continues where the Myth of the Pickaxe, translated by Samuel Kramer, leaves off. Of course, in relating an event, people often dwell on what most fascinated them, leaving out the essential background to the tale…and this is what I will be attempting to now fill in when relating the well-known Legend of Godumo-dumo.

Now, every nation or race or tribe in the world speaks of gods (ba-dimo). This, I have discovered, is a term that has long lost its original meaning. As the Setswana term still betrays, it actually meant ‘Those from Up High (i.e. the skies, the heavens)’, not ‘unseen, departed spirits’. Indeed, I have unbundled the long and convoluted mystery of the gods over many months in this column, and for lack of space will only summarise them as real, technologically advanced beings of history who fled to Mars, their famous N’ibiru (Na-hibiru meaning ‘the Reddish One’ and indeed befitting the Red Planet), before the Mother-of-all-Life, a planet I call ‘Old Earth’, but named ‘Tiamat’ by Sumerians, was knocked from one orbit to another in a collision with a giant comet later named after Marduk, a Babylonian god.

After residing in Mars for eons, their new home planet was also devastated by a cosmic incident that stripped it of much of its atmosphere and crust, as scientists corroborate. With harsh conditions setting in in Mars, it was time for a group of their pioneers to investigate resettling on Earth, which they had long abandoned That is when they became the ‘Anunnaki’: [Those who] from the skies (a nu) came to settle (nna) on Earth (Ki). Meantime, those remaining in Mars had to relocate underground where they could better contain any precious, generated oxygen.

As one of the world’s most ancient texts, the Babylonian Atra Hasis reports, the first activity they needed to do to kick-start civilization, here on New Earth, was to begin mining. But after toiling for thousands of years, Anunnaki miners rebelled as shafts became deeper and more difficult to mine. That is when their foremost scientist and second-in-command, Enki, proposed upgrading one of the primitive hominids – Cro-Magnon man – and create a new hybrid that will work in the mines and relieve the gods of toil. But like all hybrids, he was sterile, so ‘birth-goddesses’ had to keep on receiving laboratory grown foetal implants and then birthing the LU.LU (mixed creature: ‘lo (se), lo (se): i.e. ‘lo-lo’.

But soon the birth-goddesses, too, began to complain about their strenuous work and so, against Enlil’s wishes (who was Earth’s number one), Enki created a fertile LU..LU; the Mo-ata (Procreating One’ – called Ata-mo in Hebrew…which always puts mo after, not before, the noun. Linguistically, he was also a-tamo, ‘the Wet (i.e. sperm-producing) One’: tamu-sa is ‘squeeze fluid out of; in Setswana; and also the le-ehe (the egg): now l’ouef in French (or basically le-efe as h and f are interchangeable linguistic phonemes): the famous ‘Eve’. Enlil was angry and confiscated the pair to E-di-Ene, the Place of the Gods. But Enki, a ‘snake’ in Enlil’s eyes, taught the pair how to procreate and when Enlil found out, banished the pair to ‘dig the ground (do mining) ‘whence they came from’ (i.e. in Africa). There they toiled for millennia.

Now, as the Earth tilts and wobbles, in my books I show how this results in occasional serious flooding as an Ice Age melts from when the Earth duly recovers from its greatest tilt-angle away from the sun. It was in such flooding conditions that the legend of godumo-dumo took place. Now, the fertile Lulu was based in Africa, called the ‘Abzu’ (literally: ‘Black Depth’), where the ‘underworld’ (i.e. deep underground shafts) were found. So, as flooding struck the northern regions of the world (fortunately, perhaps, in the south, Antarctica is the only large land-mass near the polar regions), the daunting task of reclaiming the land became too much for the Anunnaki,  who were again threatening rebellion. Fearing a repeat of the same ugly situation that had earlier prompted the creation of the hybrid Lulu, Enlil  demanded Lulus from Enki, Lord of the Abzu. Enki refused, saying he needed them for the vial process of mining, But Enlil needed to make a firm decision very quickly—or face rebellion. So he made clear his intention to take them by force if necessary. Enki’s response was to conceal them all in an underground bunker. But no one was going to stand in Enil’s way; he devised a large ‘earth-splitter’ with ‘horns’ (handles) – called a ‘pick-axe in the epic – to hack his way into the bunker. Says the epic: The Anunnaki stepped up to Enlil, Black-Headed-Ones they were demanding of him; for [the sake of] Black-Headed-Ones [he needed] to send a ‘pick-axe’, there to be wielded.  It was in the context of this tense impasse, that the legend of godumo-dumo was born, as we will see next week.

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