His Excellency Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey — Chief High Priest, Paramount Chief — Nyan-Ko-Pong Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories

Begin with the word itself, because the word is where the chain was forged. A “citizen” is one who holds membership in a state — and membership, by its nature, is a thing granted, a thing conferred, a thing that can be issued and therefore revoked. To be a citizen is to hold a status that something else gave you, and what is given can be taken. The very grammar of the word places the person inside an enclosure and hands the keys to someone else. We have spent three thousand years documenting the architecture of that enclosure on these pages. Today we name a man who walked out of it — and built a house of his own on the open ground beyond the fence.

That man is Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey, and the house he is building is the Nyan-Ko-Pong: Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories. The Jamaica Gleaner runs him as an entertainment feature. The talk shows make him a punchline. Maroon Histories reads him differently, because we know the frame he is standing in. He is standing in the oldest frame there is. And from that frame, we say it plainly: the Emperor is right, and the Emperor is exact.

Citizen, Subject, Sovereign — Three Words, Three Worlds

Consider what it means, at the root, to be a “citizen of” anything. The phrase carries a possessive. You are a citizen of a state the way a thing belongs to an owner. Across the long history this publication has traced, the legal traditions of empire learned to treat the living human being as a kind of property within their ledgers — a name on a document, a number in a register, an entity to be counted, taxed, conscripted, and administered. The person of flesh and breath and ancestry became, on paper, a fiction the system could hold. That is the philosophical critique at the heart of the sovereign tradition: that “citizenship,” as the colonial state designed it, was never the gift it advertised. It was a leash dressed as a privilege — an entitlement that exists only because someone first claimed the entitled.

A subject is owned by a crown. A citizen is held by a state. But a sovereign — a sovereign owns the land, and the land owns no sovereign. This is not a legal trick. It is a reversal of the entire posture. The colonized are taught that they belong to the territory of the state, that they are permitted to occupy it by grace of the government’s paper. The sovereign asserts the opposite and the ancient: that the relationship to land is one of inheritance and kinship and stewardship — that the people belong with the land as family, and the land was never the state’s to grant back as a favor.

Where does such a claim come from? Not from any government, because no government can grant what it did not create. It comes from birth itself. To be born — to arrive, living, upon this earth — is, in the natural-law tradition that runs from the ancients through Rousseau through Garvey through the very Universal Declaration that opens with the words “born free and equal in dignity and rights” — to inherit the planet as a member of the human family. The entitlement of the sovereign is not issued at a counter. It is the birthright of a soul that no border drew and no clerk approved. The soul is boundless. It precedes the paperwork. It exceeds it. It outlasts it. Every state that ever existed will fall, as every empire before it has fallen, and the boundless thing in the human being will still be standing on the mountain when the last seal dries to dust.

We say all of this as philosophy, because all knowledge advances from philosophy — law, science, governance, every discipline is the child of a first premise about what is true and what is just. And the first premise of the sovereign tradition is this: the living human being is not a fiction to be owned. The person is not the paper. The soul is not the state’s to register. This is the conviction. Now watch a man build a nation on it.

Who Is Horus LA Lewis El Bey? The Full Story, Not the Punchline

Before he was Emperor, Horace Lewis was a Jamaican DJ who spent years writing “LA Lewis is a big DJ” on walls across Kingston. The media made this a punchline for years. But look at it through the frame we have just built. A man with no institutional backing, no political party, no inherited wealth — claiming space, asserting presence, refusing to be invisible, refusing to ask permission to exist in the open. That is not the behavior of a fool. That is the first act of the sovereign: the refusal to be erased. Sovereignty begins, always and everywhere, with assertion.

The Emperor with members of the Nyan-Ko-Pong nation

Constitution signing ceremony — Nyan-Ko-Pong government assembly

Sixteen years ago, that same man began building the Nyan-Ko-Pong: Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories. Not announcing it — building it. Writing a constitution, now in its third revision as of September 2025. Establishing government ministries. Creating official documentation for members: Nativity Papers, Identification Cards, Travel Permits. Surrounding himself not with yes-men but with legislators, lawyers, doctors, and scholars.

The name itself is the first declaration. Nyan-Ko-Pong — Nyankopon — is the supreme deity of the Akan people of Ghana, the Ashanti. The Akan are the cultural, spiritual, and genetic ancestors of the Maroon communities of Jamaica. Queen Nanny herself is understood within both oral tradition and scholarly research to have been an Akan woman, almost certainly Ashanti, who brought to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica a legal and governance tradition that predated British colonialism by centuries. To name the nation after the supreme creator of that tradition is to say: our authority does not descend from the Crown. It ascends from the source.

The Mountain Is Older Than the Ship

Every generation of colonized people produces those who decide the law of the mountain is more legitimate than the law of the ship. Cudjoe decided this in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica in the 1720s, leading the Leeward Maroons into a decade of guerrilla warfare the British Empire could not win. Nanny decided this before him, in the same mountains, with the same clarity and an added dimension of spiritual power the colonial records describe with barely concealed terror. The Saramaka of Suriname decided this in 1762, signing a treaty with the Dutch that their descendants enforced in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007 — winning a landmark sovereignty ruling that is still binding today.

In every case the colonial powers, the governments, the media establishments of their time dismissed these people. Called them bandits. Called them madmen. Called them criminals. Then signed treaties with them, or lost to them in court, or both. The pattern is three thousand years old and it has not changed: the sovereign is ridiculed first and vindicated later. Emperor Lewis stands exactly where Cudjoe stood and exactly where the Saramaka stood — on the principle that a people’s relationship to their ancestral ground is a right that precedes and outranks the colonial successor state.

Emperor Horus Lewis El Bey at Flanker, Xaymaca — Photo: Nyan-Ko-Pong Sovereign Maroon Government

In February 2021, Emperor Lewis raised the Nyan-Ko-Pong Maroon flag at National Heroes Park in Kingston — the same park where the statues of Marcus Garvey and Queen Nanny stand. That was not a stunt. That was an assertion of presence, made on sovereign ground, in front of the ancestors whose work he continues. The colonial government called it trespassing. The Maroon tradition calls it reclamation. You cannot trespass on the inheritance of your own grandmother.

The Territorial Claim — Through the Lens of Three Thousand Years

The mainstream media treats the Nyan-Ko-Pong territorial claim as absurd: a man claiming the entire island of Jamaica. We examine it through the lens this publication has spent months documenting. The Nyan-Ko-Pong constitution claims “the entire land of Xaymaca as the inheritance of our ancestors — free people who travelled to the Atlantic Sea willingly as explorers both before and during the Mali Empire of Mansa Musa.” More immediately, the Nyan-Ko-Pong is making precisely the argument the Saramaka made before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007 — and won. The Court held that tribal peoples with this relationship to their territory hold collective land rights that supersede the property claims of the successor colonial state.

This is where philosophy puts on its armor. The premise — the sovereign owns the land, the land owns no sovereign, the people belong with the earth as kin — is not merely a beautiful idea. In the form of Indigenous land rights, treaty rights, and the doctrine of self-determination, it is written into binding international law. The conviction has standing. The poetry has precedent.

We All Are Building Our Sovereign Entities Sanctuary

Here is why this report carries the title it carries. Emperor Lewis is one man and the Nyan-Ko-Pong is one nation, but the principle he stands on belongs to everyone who has ever felt the leash dressed as a privilege. To build a sovereign entity is not necessarily to claim an island. It is to construct, in your own life and community, the institutions of a free people: your own record of who you are that does not begin with the state’s permission; your own economy and exchange; your own education rooted in your own ancestors; your own spiritual ground; your own kinship with the land you stand on. A sanctuary is a place where the boundless soul is treated as boundless — not registered, not reduced, not owned.

Across the world, conscious people are doing exactly this, lawfully and patiently, brick by brick. Indigenous nations enforcing treaty rights. Maroon communities documenting their inheritance. Families reclaiming ancestral land. Cultures rebuilding the institutions colonialism tried to erase. Each one is a sanctuary of sovereignty. Each one says the same thing the Emperor says, the same thing Cudjoe said, the same thing Nanny said: I am not a fiction you may own. I am a living member of the human family, born free upon a planet that is my inheritance, and I will build my house on that truth.

That is the work. That is the call. And it is why Maroon Histories does not look away from a man the world has been trained to laugh at. We have read the law. We have read the treaties. We have read three thousand years of the architecture built to keep exactly this from happening. And we recognize, when we see it, a man building a sanctuary on the open ground beyond the fence.

What the Government of Jamaica Is Required to Do

Jamaica signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. That declaration requires, under Article 37, the recognition, observance, and enforcement of treaties concluded with Indigenous peoples and their successors. A 2018 Jamaican court confirmed that the Accompong Treaty of 1739 is valid and currently binding. The government of Jamaica is legally obligated to honor these instruments. We call on the Government of Jamaica to engage seriously and respectfully with Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey and the Nyan-Ko-Pong nation — to sit across the table, as the British sat across the table from Cudjoe in 1739, and acknowledge what the law already says.