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This article, given life to a great extent by the "King Tut" craze of the 1970s, addresses the controversy regarding the "race" of the ancient Egyptians. It does so, however, not by interrogating the concept of race, but by simply inquiring into whether nonarchaeological, nonphysical anthropological evidence exists suggesting origins of the ancestors of present-day Africans in Egypt. A critical contention of the article is that mainstream Egyptology has failed to make the connection between contemporary Black Africa and ancient Egypt because its methods, steeped in positivism, assume that historical artifacts in themselves can furnish answers to questions of provenance without prior assumptions revolving around a particular provenance. At the very least, the methods have unjustifiably excluded from consideration contemporary Black Africa as the home of the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Consequently, Egyptologists have characterized ancient Egyptian as an Afro-Asiatic language and failed to recognize its substantial Kiswahili-Bantu substrate, a failure that has resulted in many improperly transcribed hieroglyphs. Convinced that ancient Egyptian was substantially a Bantu language, I have been able not only to trace some names of its kings back to the ancient Nile Valley but also to link two words in Egyptian religious practice to traditional African religious practice. These measures, added to the alternative names for Egypt unearthed by my analysis of the existing terms in the literature suggest strongly ancient Egyptian ancestry of many people in southern Africa a provenance in ancient Egypt of a substantial number of Zambians.

A central argument of this article is that Isaiah Berlin's notion of cultural pluralism can be described as relativistic, and that he should not have repudiated the relativism, but simply defended it as part of the reality of the global constellation of cultures. Berlin's relativism emerges into a more generous light, in which radical differences among cultures occupy centre stage. Focusing on cultural relativism and its possible sources in Berlin unveils the neglected role that his famed concept of 'negative' liberty plays in assuring the distinctiveness of individual cultures and shared humanity, both of which constitute cultural pluralism. I conclude that Berlin's notion of cultural pluralism is relativistic based not only on substantive evidence, but also on a more realistic definition of the concept. Moreover, his conception of cultural pluralism and in particular its relativism highlight the subjects of cultural identity and autonomy in a world of immense power imbalances among nations and peoples.

The application of Isaiah Berlin's "two concepts of freedom" to Zambian concepts of liberty show that negative freedom is not necessarily true freedom. The differences between negative & positive freedom are first discussed. Next, Zambian conceptions of freedom are shown to be a negation of the condition of slavery, with slavery & freedom depicted in specific status & status terms. Slavery is conceived of as lacking the status of a free person as well as consisting of a social death. The historical context of colonialism & slavery in Zambia is next related. With the end of colonialism, national independence became linked to individual freedom in Zambia. Self-rule became linked to the status of being fully human. Furthermore, social freedom was constructed in the perception that the state merged with society. As Berlin argued that negative freedom is true freedom & that this occurred at the level of the individual, the example of Zambia shows this is incorrect by linking national & individual freedom. T. Noland