Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese writer, historian, and politician who studied the origins of the human race and the pre-colonial African culture. He is considered to be one of the greatest African historians in the 20th century. Cheikh Anta Diop was a nationalist and an advocate for African federalism. His books were largely responsible for, at least, the partial re-orientation of attitudes about the place of African people in history, in scholarly circles around the world.
Diop was born in Diourbel, Senegal on December 23, 1933 to a Muslim Wolof family. Part of the peasant class, his family belonged to the African Mouride Islamic sect. Diop grew up in both Koranic and French colonial schools. Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in Senegal, Diop moved to Paris, where he began his graduate studies at the Sorbonne in 1946 in physics.
Once at the Sorbonne, however, Diop became involved in the African students’ anticolonial movement, where young intellectuals worked for African independence. He helped organize the first Pan-African Student Congress in Paris in 1951 and in 1956 participated in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. These movements laid the groundwork for a growing African liberation sentiment, supported by the ideological arguments of Negritude, Marxism, and Pan-Africanism.
Committed to the richness of African history, Diop’s 1951 Ph.D. dissertation looked into ancient Egyptian history and the influence it had on European culture. At a time when European cultural superiority was the accepted notion, Diop proclaimed that African civilizations were the inspiration and origin of European accomplishments. The Sorbonne rejected his dissertation, yet his work nevertheless received worldwide attention.
When his book Negro Nations and Culture was published in 1954, Cheikh Anta Diop had to face a great deal of skepticism in the academic world in addition to criticism based on racist prejudices inherited from colonialism. Some colleagues accused him of having a multidisciplinary approach that was sometimes chaotic, some others of being influenced in his scientific work by his political activism.
Diop served as a member of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa in 1971 and wrote the opening chapter about the origins of the ancient Egyptians in the UNESCO General History of Africa.
However, it wasn’t until 1974, during the international symposium in Cairo, that the greatest Egyptologists praised his “visionary” theories. Since then, they have been accepted as scientific truths. Partly due to the response to the book, in 1960 Diop was awarded his doctorate by the Sorbonne. He returned to Senegal following independence in 1960 and dedicated himself to teaching, research and politics until his death in 1986.
During this time, he began his political activities by participating in the creation of the opposition party, the Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises (BMS). He was jailed in July of 1962, but then freed without charges in August of that same year. The following year, the BMS was declared to be illegal and dissolved, but a new party was created which was also dissolved by the government of President Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1964.
Diop’s works have influenced generations and continue to inspire the development of African-centred scholarship and the Pan-African movement. Today, Cheikh Anta Diop University (formerly known as the University of Dakar), in Dakar, Senegal, is named after him.
Quotes from Cheikh Anta Diop
“Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists, and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence, the understanding of African society”. – Preface: Precolonial Black Africa
“Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the “true Negro,” which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of “Negroids,” Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity.” ― Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
“European languages must not be considered diamonds displayed under a glass ball, dazzling us with their brilliance”
“Thus imperialism, like the prehistoric hunter, first killed the being spiritually and culturally, before trying to eliminate it physically. The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder, which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world.” – Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology.
“To overcome the tremendous obstacles in the way of the economic unification of Africa, decisive political actions are required in the first place. Political unification is a prerequisite. The rational organization of African economies cannot precede the political organization of Africa. The elaboration of a rational formula of economic organization must come after the creation of a federal political entity. It is only within the framework of such a geo-political entity that a rational economic development and cooperation can be inserted. The inverse leads to the type of results we have witnessed over the years.” ― Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State
