Rest in Peace – Ahati Kilindi Iyi
Few people have done more in my life time to promote the African Martial Arts than Ahati Kilindi. I was notified today that he recently died, a victim of the Coronavirus in Michigan. Kilindi founded the Ta-Merrian Institute in Detroit, the first school in the US to focus entirely on the study, practice and preservation of the African Martial Arts. Through this institute, he created trips to Africa, training camps, where Americans could travel on a tour of different villages, learning about their Martial Arts and cultural traditions, meeting local fighters, knife makers (who hold an important role in African society), Shaman and village elders.
In the early 2000’s (I believe 2004), we hosted a seminar with Ahati Kilindi at Sage. My student Joe was a very good friend of his, and broached the introduction. Kilindi came with several of his students, and they were hands on throughout the entire seminar, offering little insights and corrections. At one point Kilindi set up a laptop and projector, and we watched a video presentation that he was working on that described the Martial Arts traditions from different regions in Africa. We did empty-hand training, some knife work, and both the Zulu Impe and Naboot stickfighting. He talked about the relationship between these arts and more modern systems like Capoeira and Jail House Rock.
You can get a sense of what these arts looked like in the clip below. This demonstrates some of the empty-hand methods that he taught. He described for us the link between Silat and the African Martial Arts, that the influence of Silat made its way up through Madagascar, along trade routes to the Middle East and beyond.
There are some other clips I have collected from Youtube, one of which includes a section done by Burton Richardson, who was one of the higher level people in the Kali/JKD community to have gone on this trip to Africa with Kilindi. He had the opportunity to learn the Zulu stickfighting method directly from fighters in South Africa. Burton then brought that knowledge home and began to illustrate the strategies and how they could apply to Kali.
This next clip was possibly some of the most important information that he shared with us at the seminar, as it contained secrets to understanding Silat in general. I still teach this material to my students when introducing Silat.
In this interview, Kilindi talks about African history in the Martial Arts, and also discusses the Black Panther film.
If you have a chance to take a look through the rest of the Instagram page, it is worth doing. You can see just what an Hoplologist he was, making comparisons with other cultures and traditions. His loss will leave a huge hole in the Martial Arts community.
https://www.instagram.com/tamerrian/?hl=en