Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December 1923 – 7 February 1986) was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist.Molefi Kete Asante, "Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait" (University of Sankore Press: December 30, 2007). The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African people that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.Cheikh, Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963); English translation: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (London: Karnak House: 1989), pp. 53–111. Some of his ideas have been criticized as based upon outdated sources and an outdated conception of race. Other scholars have defended his work from what they see as widespread misrepresentation.
Cheikh Anta Diop University (formerly known as the University of Dakar), in Dakar, Senegal, is named after him.
Early life
Born in Thieytou, Diourbel Region, Senegal on 29 December 1923, Diop belonged to an aristocratic Muslim Wolof family in Senegal where he was educated in a traditional Islamic school. Diop's family was part of the Mouride brotherhood, the only independent Muslim fraternity in Africa according to Diop.S. Ademola Ajayi, "Cheikh Anta Diop" in Kevin Shillington (ed.), Encyclopedia of African History. He obtained the colonial equivalent of the metropolitan French baccalauréat in Senegal before moving to Paris to study for a degree.
Studies in Paris
In 1946, at the age of 23, Diop went to Paris to study. He initially enrolled to study higher mathematics, but then enrolled to study philosophy in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris. He gained his first degree (licence) in philosophy in 1948, then enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences, receiving two diplomas in chemistry in 1950.
In 1948 Diop edited with Madeleine Rousseau, a professor of art history, a special edition of the journal Musée vivant, published by the Association populaire des amis des musées (APAM). APAM had been set up in 1936 by people on the political left wing to bring culture to wider audiences. The special edition of the journal was on the occasion of the centenary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and aimed to present an overview of issues in contemporary African culture and society. Diop contributed an article to the journal: "Quand pourra-t-on parler d'une renaissance africaine" (When we will be able to speak of an African Renaissance?). He examined various fields of artistic creation, with a discussion of African languages, which, he said, would be the sources of regeneration in African culture. He proposed that African culture should be rebuilt on the basis of ancient Egypt, in the same way that European culture was built upon the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome.
In 1949, Diop registered a proposed title for a Doctor of Letters thesis, "The Cultural Future of African thought", under the direction of Professor Gaston Bachelard. In 1951, he registered a second thesis title "Who were the pre-dynastic Egyptians" under Professor Marcel Griaule.
In 1953, Diop first met Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie's son-in-law, and in 1957 Diop began specializing in nuclear physics at the Laboratory of Nuclear Chemistry of the College de France, which Frederic Joliot-Curie ran until his death in 1958, and the Institut Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. Diop ultimately translated parts of Einstein's Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof.
According to Diop's own account, his education in Paris included History, Egyptology, Physics, Linguistics, Anthropology, Economics, and Sociology.John G. Jackson and Runoko Rashidi, Introduction To African Civilizations (Citadel: 2001), , pp. 13–175.Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga (Karnak House:1989) 11-155, In Paris, Diop studied under André Aymard, professor of History and later Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris, and Diop said that he had "gained an understanding of the Greco-Latin world as a student of Gaston Bachelard, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, André Leroi-Gourhan, and others".Diop, C. A., The African Origin of Civilization—Myth or Reality: Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974. pp. ix.
In his 1954 thesis, Diop argued that ancient Egypt had been populated by Black people. He specified that he used the terms "negro", "black", "white" and "race" as "immediate givens" in the Bergsonian sense, and went on to suggest operational definitions of these terms.Bulletin de l'IFAN, Vol. XXIV, pp. 3–4, 1962. He said that the Egyptian language and culture had later been spread to West Africa. When he published many of his ideas as the book Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture), it made him one of the most controversial historians of his time.
In 1956, Diop re-registered a new proposed thesis for Doctor of Letters with the title "The areas of matriarchy and patriarchy in ancient times." From 1956, he taught physics and chemistry in two Paris lycées as an assistant master, before moving to the College de France. In 1957, he registered his new thesis title "Comparative study of political and social systems of Europe and Africa, from Antiquity to the formation of modern states." The new topics did not relate to ancient Egypt but were concerned with the forms of organisation of African and European societies and how they evolved. He obtained his doctorate in 1960.
Career 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 (GHA). In this chapter, he presented anthropological and historical evidence in support of his hypothesis that Ancient Egyptians had a close genetic affinity with Sub-Saharan African ethnic groups, including a shared B blood group between modern Egyptians and West Africans, "negroid" bodily proportions in ancient Egyptian art and mummies, microscopic analysis of melanin levels in mummies from the laboratory of the Musée de L'Homme in Paris, primary accounts of Greek historians, and shared cultural linkages between Egypt and Africa in areas of totemism and cosmology. At the symposium Diop's conclusions were met with an array of responses, from strong objections to enthusiastic support.
Specific areas of disagreement at the 1974 symposium related to his hypothesis that earliest Nile Valley population were ethnically homogeneous from the Neolithic times to the Persian invasion and the valley was populated uniformly by a movement of black people from south to north. In the view of Egyptian scholar and editor of GHA Volume II, Gamal Mohktar, while acknowledging that Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar ethnic composition" with comparable material cultures, found it highly doubtful that the earliest inhabitants who introduced civilization into the Nile Valley "ever belonged to one single, pure race". Several other participants at the symposium adhered to the view that the earliest population in Egypt largely originated in the Sahara but featured people from south and north of the region that were differentiated by their colour.
Reception Diop's work has been both extensively praised and extensively criticized by a variety of scholars.
Positive reception
African-American historian John Henrik Clarke called Diop "one of the greatest historians to emerge in the African world in the twentieth century", noting that his theoretical approach derived from various disciplines, including the "hard sciences". Clarke further added that his work, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, challenged contemporary attitudes "about the place of African people in scholarly circles around the world" and relied upon "historical, archaeological and anthropological evidence to support his thesis". Clarke later summarised that Diop contributed to a new "concept of African history" among African and African-American historians.
Biological anthropologist S. O. Y. Keita (né J. D. Walker) contended that "his views, or some of them, have been seriously misrepresented" and argued that there was linguistic, anthropological and archaeological evidence that supported Diop's views, as well as stating: "Diop, though he did not express it clearly, thought in terms of biogeography and biohistory for his definitions. He also defined populations in an ethnic or ethnogeographical fashion. Nile Valley populations absorbed 'foreign genes', but this did not change their Africanity".
Stuart Tyson Smith, Egyptologist and professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara, regarded Diop's The African Origin of Civilization, published in 1974, as "A highly influential work that rightly points out the African origins of Egyptian civilization, but reinforces the methodological and theoretical foundations of colonialist theories of history, embracing racialist thinking and simply reversing the flow of diffusionist models".
Guyanese educator and novelist Oscar Dathrone credits Diop as a "unique unifier" in countering the "built-in prejudices of the scholars of his time" and presenting a more comprehensive view of African historical development.
Bethwell Allan Ogot, a Kenyan historian and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume 5, stated that "Cheikh Anta Diop wrested Egyptian civilization from the Egyptologists and restored it to the mainstream of African history".
Esperanza Brizuela Garcia, professor of history, wrote that Diop "was most persuasive among intellectuals of African descent in the diaspora" and was among Afrocentric scholars who had criticised the omission of Africa in the works of world historians. Garcia also added that Diop's work The African Origin of Civilization best represented "Afrocentric critique" but "it does so without a serious engagement with the diversity and complexity of the African experience and offers only a limited challenge to the Eurocentric values it aims to dislodge".
Nigerian historian Toyin Falola called Diop's work "passionate, combative, and revisionist" and "demonstrated the black origins of Egyptian civilisation" in his view.
Firinne Ni Chreachain, an academic in African literature, described Diop as "one of the most profoundly revolutionary thinkers francophone Africa had produced" in the twentieth century and his radio-carbon techniques had "enabled him to prove, on the contrary to the claims of European Egyptologists, many of the ruling class of ancient Egypt whose achievements Europeans revered had been black Africans".
Helen Tilley, associate professor of history at Northwestern University, noted that the academic debates over The African Origin of Civilization still continued but that the "more general points that Cheikh Anta Diop" sought to establish "have become commonplace" and "no one should assume a pure lineage" can be attributed to "any intellectual genealogy because entanglements, appropriations, mutations and dislocations have been the norm, not the exception".