Cheikh Anta Diop

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Book Cover The African origins of civilization

Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December 1923- 7 February 1986) was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, and staunch defender of the world view known as Afrocentrism, which places emphasis on the human race's African origins and on the study of pre-colonial African culture and its connectedness to the rest of the peoples of the world. He has been considered one of the greatest African historians of the 20th century by some, and a racialist scientist by others. ^{[citation needed]} On 7 February 1986, Diop, who by now was regarded by many as the modern pharaoh of African studies, died in his sleep in Dakar. Diop is survived by a wife and three sons.

1 Early Life and Career
2 Research
3 Life works
4 Bibliography
5 External links

[edit] Early Life and Career

Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Diourbel, Senegal.His early education was in a traditional Islamic School. At the age of 23, he went to Paris in 1946 to become a physicist. He remained there 15 years, studying physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie’s son-in-law, and ultimately translating parts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof. In the 1940s, the study of African history was dominated by Europeans who considered Africans 'people without a past'. Diop also mastered studies of African history, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology, economics and sociology as he armed himself for the task of setting the historical record straight.

[edit] Research

In 1951, Diop submitted a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Paris where he argued that ancient Egypt had in fact been a Black African culture. The thesis was rejected, but over the next nine years, Diop reworked the thesis, adding stronger evidentiary support, and in 1960, he succeeded in the defense of his thesis and was awarded the Ph.D. degree. Five years earlier, the thesis had been published in the popular press as a book titled “Nations nègres et culture” ('Negro nations and culture'), proving very successful and making him one of the most controversial historians of his time. He eventually earned 5 PhDs.

After 1960, Diop went back to Senegal and continued writing. A radiocarbon laboratory was established with the University of Dakar (which was later named Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar after his death), and Diop was made its head. He had said, “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.” One of his important works published in journals is the dosage test—a technique developed by Diop to determine the melanin content of the Egyptian mummies. This technique was later adopted by the U.S. forensic department to determine the racial identity of badly burnt accident victims.

In 1974, Cheikh Anta Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo, where he presented his theories to other specialists in Egyptology. He also wrote the chapter about the origins of the Egyptians in the UNESCO General History of Africa.

[edit] Life works

Diop's first work translated into English, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, was published in 1974, revealing his views to a much greater audience. In this work, he claimed that archaeological and anthropological evidence supports his Afrocentric view of the Pharaohs being of Negroid origin. The academic world as a whole does not accept Diop's theories, although many do, but they continue to raise important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research.

The very last archaeological discoveries by the Swiss Charles Bonnet on the site of Kerma shed some light on the theories of Diop. Even if the Afrocentric view may be as flawed as another race-centric view, and even if there are many mistakes in the work of Diop, one has to acknowledge the core of its oeuvre—that European archaeologists before the Decolonization might have understated the possibility of Black civilizations.

The European Africanists schools (all tendencies mixed) were unanimous in rejecting, more often without examining, the fundamental theses of Cheikh Anta Diop relating to the cultural unity of Africa to the migrations that, taking their source from the original neolithic basin had ended up in the present peopling of the continent; to the continuity of the national historical past of Africans.

[edit] Bibliography

English translations:

The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology
Precolonial Black Africa
Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State
The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity
Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946-1960
The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script