maafa

[n] - A Kiswahili word used to define ‘a tragedy of unimaginable and unspeakable proportions’. It is commonly used within the Diaspora to describe the genocide conducted against Africans during the period described as the ‘slave trade’.

moor

[n] - The word ‘moor’ is said to have come from the Greek word ‘Mauros’ which mean dark. First used by Europeans in 1390, to refer to the Berbers community regarded as the indigenous tribes of Mauretania, an ancient country in North Africa having lived there since 3000 BC and are non-Arabic tribes. Berber is derived from the Roman term for barbarians. Defined as being a dark people in relation to Europeans, ‘moor’ or ‘blackamoor’ was a synonym for ‘Negro’ in the Middle Ages.

Mumbo Jumbo

[n] - Mumbo Jumbo is defined in the 1996 Oxford Concise ’a meaningless or ignorant ritual… a supposed African idol’. Yet the earliest references of Mumbo Jumbo have a spiritual context used to describe an African deity, spirit or person. It is possibly a corruption of words in Mandingo (one version is Mama Dyumbo).

African American author Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo novel, provides the following etymology for the expression: ‘Mumbo Jumbo - Mandingo [Mandinka] ma-ma-gyo-mbo, 'magician who makes the troubled spirts of ancestors go away:' ma-ma, grandmother + gyo, tr ouble + mbo, to leave’.

However in Travels in Africa 1738, explorer Francis Moore wrote of Mumbo Jumbo as ‘an [Mandingo] Idol [of cunning mystery]’, and later again in 1799, Mungo Park, a Scottish surgeon and explorer, was sent out by the 'Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa' described Mumbo Jumbo as ‘a strange bugbear… much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection’. In the 18th century most Europeans dismissed all African deities and religious beliefs as primitive superstition unless documented by a fellow European. Explorers such as Moore and Park regarded any native god as ignorant and irrelevant. Mumbo Jumbo was subsequently deemed to be a nonsensical god invented to scare women. It is likely that this gave rise to its contemporary definition of unintelligible and worthless talk.