Lessons from Cheik Anta Diop

‘Today’s youth of Africa are lazy,’ lamented an angry, frustrated and contemptuous Professor Cheik Anta Diop. He expressed this view in 1980 during my first interview with him in his research laboratory in Dakar. That laboratory was funded for him by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. It was in reality a glorified prison in which President Leopold Senghor had locked him up by ordering the University of Dakar not to allow him to teach students and hold seminars. Senghor also denied him a visa to travel out of Senegal and the French government had reinforced the prison by pressurising former French colonies not to allow him to teach and give public lectures and seminars in their countries.

Cheik Anta Diop was a super-brilliant student at the secondary school in Dakar. He enrolled in courses in the arts and sciences. During final examinations it was arranged that he could move from the end of one exam in a subject to start one in another subject. On a typical day he could run from an examination in physics to geography and then to mathematics, getting his rest often only while walking or running to the venue of the next examination. At the end of the day he would score distinction in each subject.

It was no surprise that the 1940s French colonial government would recruit him as a research scientist in its secretive nuclear research laboratory. He was a contemporary of Aime Cesaire, the legendary black poet from Martinique, and Leopold Senghor. He would, Anta Diop told me, sit and hear them debating about how to use culture to fight colonial racism and the dehumanisation of Africa.

The school of Negritude was being born. He felt the need to be part of this animated movement which drew in more and more students from Africa and the Caribbean. From the US came the impact of the great scholar and a founding father of Pan-Africanism, W.E.B. Dubois. He organised a Pan-African conference in Paris that drew in students, scholars, anti-colonial activists and intellectuals from English-speaking black communities. His own response was to challenge himself to use nuclear science research to promote the status of Africa and black people in world history.

Anta Diop decided to conduct research on the skins of Egyptian mummies held in a museum in Paris in order to test the blood group of the Pharaohs and the level of melanin in their skins. He, however, realised that sceptical scholars and politicians who use knowledge as a weapon would demand that he demonstrate competence in anthropology, ancient history, the hieroglyphics (ancient Egyptian writing) and linguistics. For a man with a record of multidisciplinary scholarship, all of these requirements were not challenges, but a new frontier of intellectual thrill. It was not long before Cheik Anta Diop came up with an earth-shattering doctoral thesis. Its message was simple. Writings by Greeks such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus and others, stated that they had studied in Ancient Egypt. Euclid and Pythagoras derived their mathematics from Ancient Egyptian algebra and geometry developed by Ancient Egyptian mathematicians had been used to build the great pyramids. From his laboratory Cheik Anta Diop showed that the Pharaohs were black Africans due to the melanin in their skins and the blood group they share with today’s black Africans.

His thesis sent French scientists into a great panic. It took over four rounds of his defence in front of scholars at the Academy Françoise in Paris before they broke down and submitted to his superior scholarship and scientific truth. To demonstrate to France that their ancestors, the Gauls, were living at primitive levels while the Pharaohs were building a civilisation on high scholarship and scientific and philosophical imagination, was a profound and fatal challenge to the justification for barbaric and neo-genocidal French colonial rule in Africa. French officials could not tolerate the broadcast of this scientific work across Africa. And that is when Cheik Anta Diop’s troubles with Senghor, the favorite of French politicians, began and remained rooted.

In 1987 we witnessed a demonstration of muscular French opposition to Cheik Anta Diop. As part of the celebration of Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize for Literature, the governments of Nigeria and France collaborated with UNESCO to hold in Lagos a ritual of solidarity with other African writers. France bought air tickets for writers from the so-called ‘Francophone’ African countries. UNESCO and Nigeria hosted those of us from Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Uganda. I incited Chinwezu, a scholar of Ancient Egyptian poetry and politics, to join me to draft a resolution that urged all African countries to integrate into textbooks in their educational systems the writings of Cheik Anta Diop, particularly his book ‘Negro Origins of Civilisation’. Behind the scenes, we pulled over to our side Professor Onoge, the chairman of the communiqué session. It was a fatal error to team up with Chinwezu. He was associated with bitterness against Egypt and her Arab allies for supporting Nigeria in the war to beat Biafra. Nigeria’s diplomats were quick to associate our linkage of Wole Soyinka’s achievement with that of Cheik Anta Diop as treason through the back door. The French were brutally crude. They ordered all Francophone writers to sit huddled together. A woman from the French embassy stood facing them to ensure that none of them voted in support of our resolution. Among those she herded was a writer from Senegal who was old enough to be her father. Later, he avoided me after that moment of disgrace.

In a third interview in 1983, Cheik Anta Diop was bitter but remained dignified and combative. He had translated Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ into Wolof language, thereby debunking Senghor’s claim that Africans cannot think in scientific and logical format.

Senghor had banned the teaching of local languages in Senegal’s educational system. The Americans borrowed from Cheik Anta Diop and brought in Peace Corp volunteers who had been taught to be fluent in Wolof before arriving in Senegal and won instant friendship among the people. He resented the lack of the study of Ancient Egypt by African historians and archeologists despite the fact that the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) had honoured him for his historic recovery of honour in world civilisation for black Africans.

He began to put his hope on scholars from the African Diaspora, particularly African-Americans, to push this task forward. When Senghor left office in Senegal to ‘go home to France’ (as the leading newspaper, Le Soleil, put it on its front page), Cheik Anta Diop was released from over 20 years of intellectual imprisonment and Franco-Senghor intellectual genocide. When in 1989 I visited the mainly African-American campus of Atlanta University, students wore T-Shirts that proclaimed that the architecture of the White House in Washington, DC, was borrowed from the genius of black African Pharaohs. Cheik Anta Diop had arrived as an intellectual hurricane across the US.

Why tell the story of Cheik Anta Diop? I wish to celebrate a recent salute to the scholarship of Professor Toyin Falola by the authorities of the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded a prize of $10,000 for the high quality of research and writing he has given to the world of knowledge. At a time when moral degeneration in Nigeria is lucrative for crooks from Australia, the US and Europe, who travel to Nigeria to make money by decorating wealthy Nigerians with bogus doctorate degrees at ‘convocation’ rituals inside dingy rooms in a Nigerian town, it is most inspiring to know that there is an African scholar who is dedicated to honourable, intensive and high quality research and production of knowledge about Africa and for affirming the intellectual dignity and complexity of knowledge that Africa has produced down the centuries. As Cheik Anta Diop would say, Falola is a rebuke to all other African scholars for being lazy.

As those who have had undergraduate education in the US should know, the subject known as ‘The History of Western Civilization’ is a primary root of intellectual growth. A key component of it is a racist claim that Greek and Roman roots of ideas and intellectual productivity had no African ancestry and debt. It is a claim that over the years made Germans feel barbaric and excluded from being seen as contributors to this civilisation. The sense of self-confidence and self-respect that ownership is meant to instill in the youth of the elect is a lesson that should direct African scholars to deepen and vigorously broadcast African ownership of Ancient Egypt.

African archeologists must rush into the valley of the Nile for sustained excavations of Ancient Egyptian tombs. The current situation in which American, German, Russian and French archaeologists have come to own the excavation of treasures of Ancient Egypt is utterly irresponsible and born of laziness and self-exclusion from recovering a vital history. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) must be pressurised by Africa’s scholars to set up a special fund for this project. Taju would urge no agonising; but rather the taking of action.

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* Okello Oculi is executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
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