Kemet, Commicracy, and the Lost Correction of Human Governance
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Long before colonial disruption, long before Arab invasions from the East, and long before Europe assembled the bureaucratic machinery that now dominates global governance, Kemet stood as the fountainhead of both governance and spirituality for the known world.
It was not merely a civilisation among others; it was the continental nucleus through which knowledge, moral order, and institutional logic radiated outward—first to Africa, then to Asia, the Levant, and Europe.
What Kemet offered the ancient world was not simply monumental architecture or esoteric spirituality. It offered a complete civilisational grammar: a way of organising power, labour, morality, and social responsibility in balance. This grammar did not separate governance from spirituality, nor economy from ethics. It understood society as a living organism governed through commissioned responsibility, moral oversight, and reciprocal obligation—what we now identify, with conceptual clarity, as Commicracy.
1. Priesthood, Balance, and the Misreading of Governance
Central to Kemetic governance was the priesthood of Ma’at—not a ruling class, but a moral-judicial advisory institution tasked with maintaining balance between the Pharaoh, the councils, the economy, and the people. The priesthood did not issue commands in the bureaucratic sense; it interpreted harmony, imbalance, and ethical deviation. Pharaohs ruled, but they did not rule alone. Their legitimacy depended on alignment with Ma’at, as interpreted by the priesthood and reflected in social stability.
This structure was profoundly misunderstood by later civilisations. Both Western and Arabian civilisational traditions misinterpreted Kemetic priesthood governance as an early form of bureaucracy—as rule by offices, scripts, and hierarchies. In truth, Kemetic governance was not rule by desks, documents, or rigid offices. It was rule by commissioning: authority flowed from responsibility, not position; from moral function, not administrative permanence.
Yet when fragments of Kemetic knowledge travelled outward—through trade, migration, conquest, imitation, and ultimately through pilgrims—what was transmitted was form without philosophy. The moral-reciprocal logic of governance was lost, and what remained were institutions stripped of commicratic spirit, gradually hardening into hierarchical, impersonal bureaucracies.
2. Aye and the Commicratic Correction
It was during the late 18th Dynasty, under Aye—first as Vizier and later as Pharaoh—that Kemet underwent a profound internal correction.
Aye recognised a growing danger: the ossification of authority, the risk that governance could slide from moral commissioning into rigid command. His reforms did not abolish institutions; they re-oriented them. Authority was re-anchored in function, contribution, and ethical accountability, rather than lineage or positional dominance. Economic life increasingly reflected cooperative obligation over extractive accumulation. Governance became more power-reciprocal, more relational—more commicratic.
This was not an abstract reform. It was a lived restructuring of social order that reverberated across Africa. From this period onward, African ethno-governed communities increasingly organised themselves around councils, elders, palaver systems, shared labour, and moral arbitration—all expressions of commicracy in local form.
Kemet functioned as the continental nucleus of this logic. From across Africa, individuals were commissioned by their communities to undertake pilgrimage to Kemet—not merely as religious travellers, but as civilisational envoys—where they studied governance, medicine, architecture, geometry, agriculture, and the sciences of balance. Upon returning, these individuals reintegrated their acquired knowledge into their own societies, to be reintegrated into communal life, adapting Kemetic principles to local conditions.
Through this process, African societies developed cooperative economic structures grounded in reciprocity, shared responsibility, egalitarian ethics, and communal provision—what may accurately be described as Africa’s original form of socialism.
This is the historical root of African-socialism: not State socialism, not Marxist redistribution, but cooperative economic life grounded in reciprocal responsibility.
3. Horemheb and the Lost Transmission
The tragedy of history is that Aye’s commicratic correction did not endure within Kemet itself.
With the succession of Horemheb, a military ruler, governance shifted decisively away from commissioned reciprocity toward centralised command, legal rigidity, and enforced order. The military logic eclipsed the moral-commissioning logic. Kemet’s internal link with the rest of Africa weakened, and its role as a living civilisational teacher diminished.
As a result, the West and the Arab world never received the commicratic correction. They inherited institutional shells—law, administration, priesthood-State fusion—but not the ethical architecture that animated them. Over centuries, these shells hardened into bureaucracy: impersonal procedures, desk-rule, hierarchical authority, and social stratification justified through credentials, offices, and class.
Africa continent, by contrast, retained what Kemet abandoned.
4. Why Africa Remained Commicratic
Across the continent, African societies continued to organise governance as ethno-governed, morally supervised, and communally negotiated systems. Chiefs ruled with councils. Elders arbitrated through dialogue. Labour was cooperative. Justice was restorative. Authority was relational, not absolute.
Colonial administrators mistook these systems for “primitive sub-bureaucracies” because they lacked rigid hierarchies and written codes. In reality, they were sub-commicracies—locally adapted expressions of the same civilisational logic that once governed Kemet.
This explains a crucial divergence in world history:
- Non-African societies evolved into bureaucratic civilisations, obsessed with hierarchy, procedure, and control.
- African societies preserved commicratic social order, even when stripped of power, territory, and sovereignty through imported systems.
This is not a weakness. It is an unrecognised civilisational asset.
5. Edward Blyden and the Affirmation of African Difference
This insight was powerfully articulated by Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the earliest and most profound African philosophers of modernity. As cited in Judson M. Lyon’s Edward Blyden: Liberia Independence and African Nationalism, 1903–1909, Blyden insisted that Africa’s future did not lie in mimicking Western science, politics, or institutional forms.
Blyden affirmed the cooperative, egalitarian, and morally grounded uniqueness of African social organisation. He urged Africans not to exhaust themselves imitating Western norms, but to refine their own civilisational strengths—particularly in morality, communal responsibility, and social balance.
What Blyden imparted philosophically, commicracy now articulates structurally. The commicratic culture embedded in African ancestral tradition constitutes positive human stock-assets—ethical, social, and organisational resources that remain viable for modern governance if properly reclaimed and updated.
Conclusion: Toward a Modern Reclamation
The task before Africa is not to invent a new system from scratch, nor to perfect borrowed republican models that sit uneasily atop ancient ethno-governed realities. It is to recover, formalise, and modernise its commicratic inheritance.
Commicracy is not nostalgia. It is civilisational continuity. By recognising Kemet as the fountainhead of governance and spirituality, by understanding how its commicratic correction was lost to the world but preserved across Africa, and by heeding Blyden’s call to refine rather than imitate, Africa can articulate a governance philosophy that is both indigenous and future-ready.
In doing so, Africa does not merely reclaim its past. It offers the world a long-overdue correction to the failures of bureaucracy itself.
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