NEGUSTOLONOW

NEGUSTOLONOW is a compound of three pieces and a decision.

Negus is a real title. In Ge’ez and Amharic, ንጉሥ — nəguś — means king, from a root meaning to reign. It was the rank Ethiopian emperors conferred on the rulers of their great provinces, and the word inside nəgusä nägäst, King of Kings, the imperial title Haile Selassie took at his coronation in 1930. It reached English in the 1590s. In English it has led other lives — an eighteenth-century hot wine drink named after a Colonel Francis Negus, by pure coincidence of surname; a word of reverence in Rastafari; and, since Kendrick Lamar’s “i”, a word some people reach for where a slur used to be. The slur and the title are unrelated: the title comes from Ethiopia, the slur from Latin niger by way of Spanish. They only resemble each other in an English mouth. We know this, and we mean the king.

Tolo means star in the Dogon languages of Mali. It is the ordinary word, carried by each of the three names the French ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen recorded near Sirius in the 1930s and ’40s: sigi tolo, star of the Sigui; pō tolo, the fonio-grain star; ɛmmɛ ya tolo, the sorghum-female star. Those recordings are famous, and contested — a later restudy could not find the astronomy in them, and scholars still argue over how much of that cosmology the interviews themselves produced. We are not claiming it as knowledge. We took the plain noun, star, from a named source with a known argument attached to it, and we say so.

We also read the four letters our own way: to only love one. That is ours. It is not a Dogon phrase and not an old one — it is the vow we hear in the middle of the name, and we would rather admit inventing it than pretend to have found it.

Now is the English word, doing the work the Greeks gave kairos: not time as it accumulates, but the moment in which something becomes possible.

Put together: your leader is your servant. That sentence is not from Ethiopia, and we do not claim it is. It is one of the oldest political ideas people have — in Mark’s gospel the one who would be first must be slave of all, and at the last supper the teacher kneels and washes feet; in the Tao Te Ching the rivers rule the valleys by lying below them; in Akan practice a chief who misrules is destooled by the people who enstooled him; in the Roman church the pope’s own title is servant of the servants of God. We build a house named for a king and mean it the way those traditions mean it.