Théophile Obenga

Théophile Obenga is a professor emeritus, formerly at San Francisco State University, in the Africana Studies Center. He was born in 1936 in Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa (today in the Republic of the Congo).

Obenga is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism. In 2009 he publicly promoted Denis Sassou Nguesso as presidential candidate for the Republic of the Congo.

Obenga holds a PhD in Letters, Arts and Humanities from Montpellier University, France. He contributed as part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program, to the writing of the General History of Africa and the Scientific and Cultural History of Humanity. He was, until the end of 1991, Director General of the Centre International des Civilisations Bantu (CICIBA) in Libreville, Gabon. He is the Director and Chief Editor of the journal Ankh.

From January 28 to February 3, 1974 at Cairo, Egypt, Obenga accompanied Cheikh Anta Diop as Africa's representatives to the UNESCO symposium on "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script".[1]

Contents

Linguistic ideas

Obenga has advocated a number of ideas such as a "Negro-Egyptian" language family (négro-égyptien), which includes all languages of Africa, an approach which he shares with Cheikh Anta Diop.

This idea has been criticised by other scholars as politically motivated pseudolinguistics.[2][3] Other works by Obenga have been criticized as based on a confusion of race, cultural identity and political agenda.[4]

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ "Theophile Obenga, Ph.D.". Department of Africana Studies, San Francisco State University. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~afrs/obenga.html. Retrieved 21 November 2011. 
  2. ^ L'argument linguistique chez Cheikh Anta Diop et ses disciples, Pp79-102, éd Karthala, Paris 2000. Henry Tourneux, Les langues africaines et l'égyptien
  3. ^ "A theory elaborated by Rev. Trilles (1912, 1931) in the early 20th century claims an Egyptian origin for the Fang population, its language and its culture on the basis of its oral tradition, and several linguistic, cultural and physical traits. This theory has become very popular, especially among Black African scholars, and often takes a strong ideological dimension as it accuses (white) Egyptologists of falsifying ancient History. Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga are major advocates of this school of thought. Similar claims have been made by other Bantu-speaking populations (cf. Basaá, A43a). (…) Guthrie (1948), Hombert & al. (1989) and Medjo Mvé (1997) have given evidence that Fang presents all the traits of a regular Bantu language: "There is absolutely no evidence of a non-Bantu substratum." Patrick Mouguiama-Daouda, Jean-Marie Hombert, Lolke Van der Veen, 'Aspects of linguistic diversity in western Central Africa' Laboratoire "Dynamique du Langage", UMR 5596, Lyon Languages-and-Genes/poster/VanderVeenAbstract.pdf -
  4. ^ « Il devient cependant manifeste que, avec la parution en 1974 de l’étude « Les 20 ans de Nations Nègres et culture », Théophile Obenga tombe dans le piège de l’équation race – culture – identité considérant qu’un substrat culturel homogène est nécessairement lié à un substrat ethnique homogène ; se sentir africain signifie se sentir Noir et partager le système de valeurs de la race. » Simona Corlan Ioan, « L'Imaginaire Dans les Constructions identitaires. Le Cas de l'Afrique Noire», N.E.C. Yearbook 2000-2001, p. 205 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Cahiers d'études africaines, 1991, n°121, p. 202 charges Théophile Obenga with "profiting from the concept of cultural identity built on a genetic heritage expressed in the use of language in order to construct a regional political unity" (« mettre à profit le concept d'identité culturelle émanant d'un patrimoine génétique qui se manifeste par l'usage d'une langue, pour bâtir une unité politique régionale »)

See also

External links