Pictures of Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986)
Great Black Leaders: ancient and modern, page 141-143
Out of the South
The late Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese scholar who first went to Paris in 1946 to become a physicist. He remained there 15 years, studying physics under Frederick Joliot-Curie, Madame Curies son-in-law and ultimately translating parts of Einsteins Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof. 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. He developed an investigative method that was comparative, eclectic and Afro-centric. Ultimately his arguments in favor of an African or Negro origin of Egyptian civilization won widespread international support by virtue of his erudition and brilliance and the logical force of his ideas, and with him appears a whole new school of African historiography. The following elucidation of evidence owes much to the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, who died last year.
The first line of evidence in favor of an African origin of Egyptian civilization comes from the Egyptians themselves. They called their land Kamit, i.e., the Black Land, and their own name for themselves was Kamiu, which translates literally as the Blacks. Their word for the African lands to the south of the was Khenti-Khentiu denoting the Sudanic peoples who lived there-and this is also their word for first foremost, beginning, origin, chief.
Furthermore, the Egyptian word for east is the same as their word for left and their word for west the same as their word for right. This makes sense only if the Egyptians oriented themselves southward and looked in that direction for the land of their origins. No people coming from north of Egypt would have oriented themselves in this way-particularly since Egypts location in the northern hemisphere lends itself more naturally to a northward orientation. Further evidence is found in the Egyptians anthropomorphic representations of the passage of the sun across the heavens, in which the boat of the sun begins its morning or eastern ascent on the left side of the sky-goddess Nut-who thus is in a southern heaven despite Egypts northern hemisphere location.
Moreover, whenever Egyptian inscriptions refer to Egyptian origins, the land of Punt-present-day Somalia and northern Kenya-is pointed to as the ancestral homeland. One word for inner Africa, yau, is the same as their word for old, making inner Africa the old country of immigration. Inner Africa also was Ta-Neter, the Land of the Gods. Everything about the interior of Africa evoked in the Egyptians a sense of awe, reverence and nostalgia.
Additional evidence of Egypts origins comes from the genealogy of Noah in Genesis. Noahs three sons are Ham, Shem and Japeth, the ancestors of the three main branches of humankind known to the biblical writers. Ham is indubitably the ancestor of the black race; his name comes from the Egyptian kam meaning black. His sons are Misraim (Egypt), Cush (Ethiopia), Canaan (Palestine) and Phut (Punt or East Africa). Though allegorical on one level, the Old Testament writers were accurately reflecting known ethnic relationships of antiquity by placing the Egyptians in the black or African branch of humanity.
Finally unequivocal statements on the subject come from the Greek writers of antiquity. Herodotus-an eyewitness-makes the most definitive statement when he compares the Egyptians, by virtue of their black skin and woolly hair, to the Colchians and Ethiopians. There are nearly a dozen other surviving references in Greek literature to the race and color of the Egyptians, from writers as diverse as Aeschylus, Aristotle and Strabo, and they unanimously confirm the remarks of Herodotus. The fact that the Egyptians were black and African was so completely self-evident to the ancient Greeks that it was a commonplace seldom worthy of special notice.
Cheikh Anta Diop was the first to challenge the older description of ancient Egyptians as a dark red or Mediterranean race. As Diop pointed out, many peoples throughout Africa have a reddish-brown complexion-including the modern-day Masai of Kenya. Diop was also the firsts to propose a systematic study of the melanin content of Egyptian mummy skin. His own investigations had shown that mummies contained concentrations of that dark pigment entirely comparable to that of sub-Saharan Africans. As for Falkenburgers craniometric studies, Diop demonstrated that many skulls from sub-Saharan Africa meet the Mediterranean criteria of Falkenburgs schema-in effect invalidating the whole premise.
The last issue that Diop disposed of, in collaboration with his Congolese linguist colleague, Theophile Obenga was that of language. At a landmark symposium in Cairo in 1973, Diop and Obenga showed beyond all doubt what Budge had affirmed nearly 50 years earlier: that Egyptian was fundamentally an African language. The Semitic elements in the language come from late borrowings and, as the noted linguist Joseph Greenberg has attested, from the Semitic languages own origin in the northeast African group. The Cairo symposium marked the beginning of the end for scholarship that sought to deny Egypts African origin.
An African Renaissance
The Diopian thesis broke like a tidal wave upon the bulwarks of conventional Egyptology. It occasioned two kinds of responses: (1) absolute silence or (2) shrill rebuttal, and this pattern continues to the present. But in 1980 Bruce Williams, of the University of Chicagos Oriental Institute, discovered artifacts-originally recovered in 1962 prior to the opening of the Aswan Dam-from a pharaonic kingship in Nubia (northeast Africa) 300 years before the first Egyptian dynasty. With that discovery, the Afrophobic Egyptology born of the 19th century has become a scholarship in retreat.
For Diop and those who have followed him, the study of Egpyts place in African history is fundamental to the African renaissance he envisaged, much the ways the rediscovery of the values of Greek civilization gave impetus to the European Renaissance of four centuries ago. It demands a wholesale reassessment of African and world history. Already the imaginative scholarship of Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University has brought forth important evidence of an Egyptian presence in pre-Columbian America in 800 B.C. and perhaps even earlier. Heretofore unsuspected connections between ancient Africa and other civilizations are emerging. Our vision of the past, which informs our present and guides our future, is undergoing a radical revision. The consequences of this can be expected to have a profound impact on succeeding generations.
