Continuity, Discontinuity, Invention, Reinvention of African Aesthetics or Cultural Memory and Change: Glocal and Diaspora Perspectives

The question of aesthetics, memory, and changes in Africa are raised from several perspectives. A few European scholars alleged Africa did not have a past and could not produce aesthetics, material or immaterial resources to share with the world, for its past was empty, and a-historical. Unfortunately, these scholars’ arguments influenced history, justified colonization, slavery, and their multidimensional violence. This paper gives a quick survey of these moments and underlines false accusations against Africa. Contributions from scholars from the South such as Mudimbe, Mbembe, Bhabha, and Appadurai attested spectacular results combining findings from archaeologists, historians, art historians, anthropologists, linguists, culturalists, musicologists, and philosophers in interdisciplinary studies. Africa has always been a vibrant cultural continent that colonization and slavery defiled. Borrowing Apter’s question about “what should be done” concerning all findings on African aesthetics Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 3, p. 203-224, 2020 204 and history, the text invites scholars to push ahead in their quest of communications, comparisons, originalities drawn from the distant African past, adapted to local, global, Diaspora’s dynamics, and glocal perspectives. It is time to stop accusations and complaints on the past for turning to documented global visibility.


Introduction
It is quite challenging to get a coherent and continuous thought narrative line when writing about a topic that turns around "continuity and discontinuity" as human thoughts develop continuously from one departure point (APPIAH, 2013). The narrator and his audience or the writer and his readers are called to keep in mind the main features that characterize the linear progress interrupted from place to place in what is labeled discontinuity. Let us consider that a good pretext for getting into the material discussed in this paper should be found in the development of argumentation based on the stuff that is all around people in Africa, and its contribution to the actualization, continuity, discontinuity, or (re)invention of aesthetics. In the same veins, the aesthetics of narrative genres, bodies, sounds, words, and other cultural facts, evolution considerations, and changes also impose different lines on the eyes of a careful and trained observer. Loesberg (2005, p. 160) and Gonzalez (2015, p. 97-116) look at aesthetics as a concept that reveals experts' vision of beauty given into untranslatable discourse distinct from other ways, but also as a universal experience open to all people for the comprehension of human experiences. Other scholars expand aesthetics to African music, music instruments, dances, songs, poetry, storytelling, crafts, basketry, pottery, woodcraft, metal craft, architecture, painting, decorative designs, beads and jewelry, dress, textiles, hairstyle, and cosmetics (SHAVA, 2015). In the same veins, Ayotunde Isola Bewaji (2015), Ranta (2015), Kapchan (2007), Touré (2018), and Ododo (2001) also insist on African aesthetics and its myriad multiform expressionism that shows the multiplicity of beauty in opposing the Sacred and the Profane. Aesthetics permit to move to the source of beings, female and male, through different archetypes. The concept "aesthetics" extends to realities, spaces, performances, festivals, and celebrations that include masquerades, social justice, and artistic symmetries to find in fabrics and occupied spaces.
Neither continuity, nor discontinuity, on the one hand, or invention or re/invention, on the other, may be justified and explained if they are not (con)textualized. However, it is quite significant to raise questions from the beginning to find out how they come about and can be perceived. The primary challenge to face all along the present text turns around proving the existence of a reality denied for many long years. It is also about challenging other scholars who have attacked and denied African artistic creativities, historical dynamic, social identity construction without getting deep into social dynamic proofs. That is why, the main exercise to undertake will have to reveal details that prove the contrary to the statements that claim the inexistence of aesthetics, and the historical growth of African communities.

The Negation of African Historical Productions and Aesthetics
Many sources could be useful for the illustration of creativity, continuity, invention, and reinvention in Africa. The first one and the most significant refusal of African productivity and memory conservation is referring to historical, philosophical, and social sources. It comes from Hegel's 1899 course of Philosophy of History that points out: At this point, we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical changes in it -that is in its northern part -belong to the Asiatic or European world… What we properly understand by Africa, is nature, and which had to be presented here only as the threshold of the world's history (HEGEL, 2001, p. 117).
The above quotation has been used in many different ways, and many scholars have found there a ridiculous denial to Africa of its existence and fibers that make its being. The negation of a part of the world with its long history and traditions also denies it the capacity to have aesthetic production possibilities. Such denial stands in itself for an invention, i.e., a confirmation that Africa is something else than what it is. It is an invention of chaos, and total absence, for as a Latin maxim notes, "Ex nihilo nihil fit or out of nothing, nothing comes" (COETZEE, 2003, p. 23). Hegel invented Africa from his understanding that posited that the continent was absent from world history.
Hegel's denigrations also continued all along the African colonial times. For example, Ricardo Roque's article: "Razor's edge of Portuguese Imperial Vulnerability in Angola", illustrates how Africans were denied any dignity. They were rather posted at the center -the heart -of a burning hell ready to swallow any "civilized" foreigner who would dare pass there and would be exposed to burning fires unless they were born as specific, exceptional, and heroic beings narrating their epic stories. Thus, early at the beginning of the twentieth century (1902), the army officer capitão-mor (chief captain) of Moxico in Angola, Artur da Fonseca Cardoso, was assigned to fight the Ovibumdu who had revolted against the Portuguese. Land communication issues due to a total absence of road networks and lack of railway that will come only many years later are presented as an illustration of Africans' hell life. Only heroic and blessed figures from Portugal were able to face such a world and could transform it into a paradise. A journalist, who visited the place where Fonseca was, described it in words that could not leave any doubt on the evil nature of Africa and Africans: Those "remarkable aspects" were put together in a narrative that mythically imagined colonial Moxico as mysterious but terrible, inviolate but deeply frightening. In Moxico the empire was at the edge of being swallowed up... Travelers were imminently at death's door. Only heroes, black savages, animals, and natural entities could eventually survive the dangers of this infernal land. ... "Only those who traveled across the cursed dust of those jungles, of those bits of lonely savannah can say what Africa is. The mysterious, barbarian, and terrifying Africa." She continued, naming Moxico the "African heart," "isolation in all its horror". (ROQUE, 2003, p. 112-113).
The text above is an example of how the colonial discourse does not make any possible doubt on the absence of spaces for the African creativity of aesthetic activities.
Any other invention (or only its recognition) is fundamentally epistemological and would settle and unsettle the episteme. Consequently, Hegelian discourses are running the risk of being reducible to the point of ignoring other people's contributions. Today, many scholars, thanks to archaeological studies, have understood the long past of Africa and its contributions to the world. The African continent has never been isolated. On the contrary, it has a rich antiquity with the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Reactions to the Denials of Africa
Jarrassé (2009) helps the readers interested in African art to avoid any confusion of the kind that Boas produced or others essentially coming from the North. Important testimonies are present in archeological vestiges all around the continent. One of these places is Tassili in Nigeria. Its excavations offer remembrances that testify of the presence of art in evolution dating from the tenth century BC. The vestiges show naturalist styles with beasts that are in motion. Shepherds are shown leading pastoral life and moving towards the Nile (JARRASSE, 2009). The testimonies also bring about camels that participated in pastoral and agricultural life around the beginning of the Christian era. It is also in Nigeria, precisely at Nok, that archeological works excavated clay pots in 1931 and wellrefined human statues in 1943 dating from the first century BC. On another location called Ife, still in Nigeria, were discovered realist Yoruba men and women paintings dating back from the third century BC. Realist faces, symmetry, anatomic proportions, face serenity, and wax used for getting different effects on the material produced. It was also possible to track influences up to Egypt, Ethiopia, and quite early influences from the Arabic Middle East. It is worth mentioning that all these discoveries testify of art production well before colonization, and above dynamic art that kept changing over time. Jarrassé (2009) gives artistic sources shedding light on other parts of Africa for showing how art, aesthetic values were present and quite dynamic. The Dogon of Mali, the Yaka, Songye, Kongo, Luba, Kuba, Chokwe of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all offer different aspects of African art and include other disciplines such as theater, poetry, music, wall painting, waving, and architecture (RANTA, 2015;ODODO, 2001;ANDINDILILE, 2016). African art and artifacts give anthropological opportunities for finding much about people and their creativity.
In these veins, there is a need to focus attention on Kant's comprehension of anthropology that refers to the social and moral bases of knowledge in social contexts. Mudimbe's attack against Hegel's statements also goes against the concept "invention" itself, for from an epistemological perspective invention cannot re "invent" itself without being the original episteme, repetition or a reconfiguration impossible to imagine (MUDIMBE, 2016). By denying Africa any participation in history, i.e., also in aesthetics, its attackers implicitly recognize its presence and its activities that they purposefully ignore in refusing a simple exercise that would send them to "the Archaeology of Knowledge" 1 and to "the invention du quotidien". 2 In many ways, the critiques have made a preference for the "Invention et Reinvention", 3 that would leave free their imagination, i.e., the relocation capacity of other people within original metaphysical locations. Seeing it beyond deconstruction, Wagner (2016, p. 621-643) looks at the "invention tradition" which, in cultural studies, would "settle and unsettle" epistemes with the potential to put everything into question but never offer the minimum clue for novelty or discovery as such.
Achille Mbembe enriches the debate about ideas developed on Africa in bringing in what he calls the invention of the "Negro," i.e., the presentation of Africans as once again imagined, but never as they are. In the interview that the scholar gave to Catherine Portevin for a 2014 publication, he comes back on the concept "Negro" and its invention. He asserts that the North builds pre-established relations for its psychologically unjustified auto-satisfaction. In addition, the North puts itself in a position located on one side and the others, on the other side. The big gathering includes the New World, continents, and biological species whose destiny depends fully on the analysis, definitions, and considerations that the North filters and channels to the world. Unfortunately, according to Mbembe, that kind of reinvention process would go as far as to reinforce in the "others" the understanding and acceptance of racially, socially, or economically pre-established norms from the same North (MBEMBE, 2000;MAJEFE, 2000;OGUDE, 2012, MBEMBE, 2017.
To stop the critical identification process through the individual decisions of the North, Fanon advises that the Africans forget about the North and start a more objective process. For the application of Fanon's suggestion, Gordon (2004, p. 74) proposes Africans to get rid of epistemological colonization and initiate "dialectics of recognition" in being "actional", i.e., leading re-creations based on their analyses and understanding. Otherwise, with a lack of such effort, life would become like an everlasting urban life of Johannesburg. Violence, anxieties are present in an "Afropolitan" Urbanity or cosmopolitan urbanism that heralds how the 21 st century is a place where racism continues to change every day in the reproduction of concepts channeled from the North and recycled at will (PORTEVIN, 2004, p. 27;MBEMBE, 2002, MBEMBE, 2001, MBEMBE, 2017. Perceived as a new kind of colonization and bigotry, the above racism takes new forms and produces cancerous metastases in the social body while renewing in different ways fights from a distant past. In a place like Johannesburg that Mbembe has observed and studied, a concept such as "Negro" would include new categories absent from its earlier categorizations. With such racialization process, Mbembe joins other scholars such as Bhabha. For them and O'Connor (2003, p. 217-243), post-post-colonialism pays attention to visual and cultural practices concerning identity and place only to find out that the word "post" does not announce temporal boundaries, but rather a spatial territory. It also announces land occupation sharing understanding with transnational cosmopolitanism and globalization in reproducing the same social preoccupations lacking local imagination (MBEMBE, 2000(MBEMBE, , p. 1-16, 29, 2001BHABHA, 2004;APPIAH, 2003;MBEMBE, 2017).
Mudimbe's faith in the distant history of Africa and its artistic contributions to the world is the main subject of his writings (KRESSE, 2005). For, even unwritten, Africa was already part of the world as proved through the antiquity of Egypt and its many contacts with the southern parts of the continents, and many incursions in the Oceans Atlantic and Indian, and the Mediterranean Sea (STAHL, 2014). In this vein, Cheikh Anta Diop (2012) developed theories over the years; he led with proofs the entire world to look at its origins in Africa and the critical roles of civilizations that sprang out of Egypt and their development in other parts of the world. The entire African history and civilization have links with aesthetics, oralities, and philosophy that do not leave any doubt about the beauty and the grandeur of the continent. African cultures should be approached through "nonreductive multiplicity" reconfiguration, that would reflect entire generation's social fabric, interactions, and projections perceived in specific historical and cultural circumstances (STAHL, 2014, p. 9-10).
The above "nonreductive" perception can be enriched with Bourdieu's understanding of fields, capital, habitus that ensure the continuation of social practices and heritage. Skills, knowledge and social order would thus move in time with organizations, "social" classes and the advantages due to community interactions for generations. Nevertheless, society is not hermetically closed. It opens to novelty that it adopts through social interactions, and appropriation (BOURDIEU, 2002;LISAHANTER, 2016, BROWN, 2000. Socialization includes inside trained members who figure out barriers for the people considered as outsiders. Social dynamics also come out in aesthetics conductive lines and ideas that reinforce cohesion and the celebration of the same values (COMAROFF, 2012a, p. 5-12;COMAROFF, 2012b, p. 131-131).
Reactions came early to show that Africa was a vibrant artistic continent that was misjudged because many explorers did not take an interest in cultural facts but were running after lands to give to their respective countries. Henceforth, their attention did not go at first to the artistic richness that covered different African regions. Only their later publications depicted the places known for specific skills in art productions, architecture, and tool productions with the use of various metals. Kumbi Saleh the capital of gold and iron revealed big temples built in the desert whereas of Ethiopian greatness shined through decorative arts. Monomotapa architecture in Zimbabwe and pharaoh's temples in Egypt still expose to the world architectural styles not found elsewhere in the world (BLIER, 2015, p. 66-80, 155-200;BOISDUR DE TOFFOL, 2002).

The Main African Oral Tradition Aesthetics Heritage to Share with the World
After the short survey here above written, it is time to look at what oral traditions may offer to enrich this topic. The unwritten communication strategies that were used in many African countries can still be exploited and shared with the world. Finnegan (2012), Verbeek (2003Verbeek ( , 2007aVerbeek ( , 2007b, Bial (2004, p. 226-230), and Ebeogu (2017, p. 21-32) present specific features that illustrate aesthetics outcoming from interactions involving artists and their audiences. It is striking the critiques how the narrator is not sharing the final aesthetic product, but gets the audience input through different participations to have the artistic presentation.
First, it is worth mentioning that the producers of African oral traditions behaved in many cases as though they were mediums. It is in that environment mixing consciousness and unconsciousness that the artist takes distance from ideological positions or from defending one cause or another that would be out of artistic competences. Oralities behave as a medium that enabled artists to deliver messages and beauty canons.
Secondly, oral traditions made their particularity in their presentation as actual performance. The public was highly concerned at all the steps. In addition, the public itself, musician, music instruments, and the settings participated in the production of a good performance. That world also attached much importance to visual resources that worked for both the narrator and the public.
Thirdly, African performances all along years incorporated a capacity for the actualization and re-actualization of their contents, objectives, communication strategies, and participation. In that way, the antiquity has continually been transformed, and the role of the narrator adapted to the environment. However, at the same time, a persistent substratum that digs into the distant past keeps the essential links with what Mudimbe addresses as the archeological past (MUDIMBE, 2016;PERNET, 2006, FRAITURE, 2012. Fourth, the concept folklore, for instance, includes many literary genres that are communicated with different techniques. Poetry, epics, lyrics, panegyric, elegiac, songs, religious texts can be used at various social moments and are often associated with given opportunities. They attempt as much as possible to reproduce the distant past through mimesis, and theatrical performances. Artists could work differently to achieve the aesthetics they needed to reach. However, whereas the climax is usually in the middle of a narrative in the western traditions, many local productions placed the narrative peak to the end of the story (FINNEGAN, 2012, p. 222, 329, 369). Such presentation of stories comes within an antiphonal form requesting responses from the public that participates in narrative production.
Fifthly, a close observation of distant African oral traditions indicates that different artistic styles are present and adapt to ages, genders, and needs. Babies have their share with songs and music that were essentially lulling them, or slowly bringing them to understand the adult world in which they will be growing. However, adults are exposed to a much more complex language that requires different mental associations, and the use of concepts adapted to social events. Characters include animals, monsters, and humans whose presences in narratives keep particular stress on the amplification summarizing the main ideas and lessons to take from the oral tradition presented (FINNEGAN, 2012).
Sixth, concerning language, proverbs, riddles, tone, rhythm, and gesticulations participate in the organization of a particular genre reserved for a group. When rightly applied with the use of an explicit language, social functions appear as the artists become more and more important in their society and fill social roles. Proverbs are mainly known for their shortness, a few words put together to communicate a message that goes far beyond the simple words. They are accumulated throughout the years as experts bring about more from different fields related to social life, historical experience, gender, oral narratives, and population waves (VERBEEK, 2003, 2007a, 2007b, VANSINA, 2004. The combination of the six orality related points here above mentioned quickly have made their participation in the modern world writing through outstanding African writers. Anonymous producers have, in following the techniques here above pointed out, reached out to the entire the continent and far beyond where the works and artistic techniques influence famous artists. They easily borrow neighbors' techniques and include them in their artistic productions (VANSINA, 2003, p. 455, VANSINA, 2004. It is crucial that scholars, and especially artists, still pay much attention to the distant African past to get from it details that would contribute to the world development in different fields indeed and not only literature. The African Diaspora has gone around the world bringing the same artistic production strategies, samples, and enriching them with new contacts and findings (APPIAH, 2013).
Writers such as Tutuola, Achebe, Ekwensi, Soyinka, and Chimamanda have been able to capture oral resources and slowly adapt them to the writing requirements, aesthetic obligations, and literary canons (OGAGA, 2014, p. ix-xxx). Other artists have also drawn much inspiration from oral traditions and have very quickly grown out in the Nigerian film industry expanding in Africa and far beyond. Tsaaior and Ugochukwu (2017, p. 276) underlines similarities between artists from the distant past and the producers of different artistic productions in Nigeria and all around.

Artifacts (Mwana Pwo, Mulapu, Chijikaji, Katoyo), 4 and Aesthetics
Hegel's theories here above mentioned early in this text have shown their limitations and nullity as far as the targeted African aesthetics are concerned, on the one hand, and the African and African Diaspora Aesthetics dynamics are considered, on the other. This section will focus on field cases that are testimonies against Hegel's Tabula Rasa theory, as an illustration of a vast ignorance of African capacities in many disciplines and social areas.
Mwana Pwo masks have been for many centuries among the Chokwe! They are believed to represent the original beauty of the Chokwe women and their high social status even though men only carve them at the Mukanda camp of initiation and put them on the initiation exit day. Those masks display different features attributed to women, such as their different sessions of initiation.
However, a close observation of the "Mwana Pwo" leads to discovering a few other different things that have come with time. For instance, it is not the same powder complexity that is used in all masks. There is much change due to new knowledge and use of more plants, roots, and clays. In the same veins, a simple look at the hair shows much change related to the complexion of simple natural material. It is not surprising to find out that today the hairstyles that most African women use have many common features with these masks. Aside Mwana Pwo, other masks also carved from much imagination and reproduction of cosmological understandings construct a divine hierarchy that the masks represent under the leadership of Mulapu, the royal mask that portrays local social philosophy, and strategies for survival within an environment exposed to temporal dangers (ODODO, 2001). These artifacts participate in resistance strategies towards imposed modernity and quickly lead to the production of multiple modernities (APPADURAI, 2013;MBOG, 2007;GIDDENS, 2006, p.128-140;OTTO, 2005;QUIJANO, 2007).

Festivals and New Masks
The above section shows us that creativity, imagination, philosophy, and questioning the past, the present, and the future, have always been present in African communities. They had to think about their social organization and make sure social order can survive from one generation to another. Pierre Bourdieu's distinction and field theories apply here, as members of the African society were busy ensuring that future generations continue using the wisdom of the past. Bourdieu's scholarship includes theories that offer assistance for the comprehension of the concept "perpetuation" applied to community life; social values' preservation, class formation, identity construction, and the capacity to keep independent even though, at the same time, a slight opening is operated as far as a few novelties are concerned (BOURDIEU, 2002;REED-DANAHAY, 2002, BROWN, 2000. Questions related to the Sacred have taken specific stress regarding religious organizations and the understanding of the Divine versus the Profane. However, most communities have demonstrated that the distance separating the Sacred and the Divine is not big at all. Mimesis produced with local aesthetic presentations also keeps moving in time and adapting to social environments and needs through religious and customary symbols (ELIADE, 2005). A cultural dynamic from around the world draws attention on significant global fluidities and shifts in which the global diaspora plays a significant role (APPADURAI, 2013).

The African Diaspora
In many ways, African Diaspora(s) have followed the above lines in trying to (re)create itself. In many ways, the Diaspora is at first the result of the same treatment reserved to the locals in their home country. It reaches the new state in conditions that force it to question its presence and be in comparison with the inhabitants of the place (SANCHEZ, 2005).
In Minas Gerais (Brazil), for instance, a close observation of the Congado de Rosario groups gives an opportunity to find connections with Africa as poetics and aesthetics display much of the same questions and quests for new developments. The same poetics also disclose how these groups re-created their environment, and primarily how they could develop as independent bodies (GREEN, 2015). Their strategies vis-à-vis Portuguese forces at first and then concerning all dominant groups (and gender balance) have emerged in the same ways African Communities had organized resistance against forced modernity and foreign influence. The most crucial resistance consisted in integrating cultural and religious practices of the opponents in the enslaved populations, thus leading to the re-creation of the African Brazilians in a world that also carries a backbone going as far back as to ancient Africa. Well observed, many countries, especially in North and South Americas, have accepted and adapted African music to their respective social growth, styles, and aesthetics (GREEN, 2015).

Mudimbe, Mbembe, Bourdieu, Apter
The scholars here above have helped us to understand how the process of continuity, discontinuity, invention, and reinvention of African aesthetics, ideologies, and cultural spaces can be understood in the recent past going as far back as the beginning of colonization (and giving resources for going far in the distant past). Local African communities in Africa and the Diaspora have followed the same strategies given the fact that they have had to face the same external forces and the same questions.
In addition, we can understand how Mudimbe looks at the meaninglessness that any understanding of invention of Africa will include because the African society, in general, has always faced its destiny and organized its temporal life concerning the Sacred, the Profane including social facts, and the aesthetics underlining different dynamic, progressive lines (MUDIMBE, 2006(MUDIMBE, , 2016ELIADE, 2005). Raising questions about invention and reinvention concerning Africa and its aesthetics may seem useless, for aesthetics always get into a dynamic of continuity and discontinuity, continuity keeps moving ahead while including a few novelties as the growth of society comes with new needs.
It is, however, time that the debate and the discourse on African past based on the condemnation of the colonial forces and scholarly sources move ahead. It is evident as shown in this text that Africa has always been a vibrant continent. What Apter (2007, p. 15-31) already reveals in a simple question is of great use for that purpose, and for figuring out what could be done for the future. His paper's title "Que Faire?" rightly suggests what should be done. It is about finding new questions and collaborative debates regarding global arts, aesthetics, and creativities. We will demonstrate in many ways how Africa and the African Diaspora are independently continuing, discontinuing, inventing and reinventing aesthetic strategies that build new bodies that link the local and global through the concept glocal (ROUDOMETOF, 2015). Any local success in arts, new aesthetics, and new communication strategies are easily shared with other artists from around the world (APPADURAI, 2013). Seeing the African aesthetics and its displacements throughout Africa, its Diaspora and through Apter's question here above mentioned can but lead to the observation of a transmutation, moving signs, images, finally changing them into narratives, a meaningful structure within other social phenomena and life details (HOBSON, 2012, p. 9-37).

Conclusion
It is high time we stop even though the discourse will continue its way. We need to remember that thanks to V.Y. Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe at first, we have been able to focus the topic on a discussion that has been going on for many years. A debate about African aesthetics can be slippery for it can be a way either to justify oneself, or to deepen hatred against those who in the past put on the market theories that did not bring much consideration to an entire continent, Africa.
Although it is essential to know about that distant past and its repercussions on these days in many disciplines and human contacts, we believe that better strategies can be found to still deal with the same questions differently. Instead of arguing how injustices done to the world have caused so much pain, we believe it is time to point out the truth in its dynamics. African aesthetics have inspired the world, and they still link to the world.
Nowadays, new technologies have brought facilities that make the world a place where actions, movements, sharing skills, and knowledge quickly move from one corner to the next without any limitation as Appadurai's book incessantly points out. Under the new configuration resulting from multimedia and new shared interests, the cultural facts once believed to be primitive have come on the front of the global scene and are shared with the entire world. In addition, African aesthetics have now reached a level that not only shows that they have a distant history, but also that they are connected with the world. Africa and its Diaspora have much to offer, and their contribution to the world will keep growing as they keep digging from their distant past. Meanwhile, they will generate different mechanisms of rejuvenation while retaining a stable connection with their historical origins.