>A Legacy of Genius-Cheikh Anta Diop
>

>
>By Herb Boyd Managing Editor, The Black World Today
>
>New York City--During a recent gathering of African and Diasporan 
>intellectuals at the Schomburg Center, Senegal's minister of foreign 
>affairs, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio invoked the name and legacy of his 
>countrymen, Cheikh Anta Diop several times. For Gadio, Diop was the 
>embodiment of the conference's purpose and mission: the organization a 
>world conference of African and African Diaspora scholars and leaders to 
>discuss the "Contributions of Intellectuals to the Edification of the 
>African Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development" (NEPAD).
>
>Two words-union and intellectual-were integral to Professor Diop and his 
>dream to create a united Africa and his singular pursuit of knowledge that 
>made him one of the most versatile thinkers the world has ever seen.
>
>Diop, whose greatest strength lay in linguistics, according to Dr. Ivan Van 
>Sertima, was born in Diourbel, Senegal, December 23, 1923. He left his 
>village for Paris in 1946, where he continued his studies in advanced 
>physics. But the enterprising young scholar was soon deeply immersed in the 
>issue of race origins and the seminal significance of African civilization.
>
>"He had started out in pure science and then concentrated on physics, but 
>as he grew more aware of how profoundly bias European and Euro-American 
>scholarship was when dealing with Africa, he decided to study Egyptology," 
>said esteemed griot Jan Carew, recalling Diop's evolving social 
>consciousness and cultural awareness. "...His professors at the University 
>of Paris did everything possible to discourage him, but he persisted."
>
>Of this transformation, Diop said: "I began my research in September, 1946 
>because of our colonial situation at that time. The political problem 
>dominated all others." As noted Africanist James Spady observed, Diop's 
>first known publications appeared in Presence Africaine in 1948 and was 
>entitled "Origins of the Wolof Language and Race." "This two-part essay," 
>Spady explained, "included extracts from an Etymological Dictionary 
>compiled by Diop." Following this article was one "When Do We Speak of An 
>African Renaissance?" Clearly, at the very beginning of academic research, 
>he was exploring topics that within a few years he would master and expand 
>like few scholars before or after him.
>
>During an interview with Dr. Charles Finch, Diop recounted some of the 
>early motivations that influenced his quest for knowledge and identity. "My 
>desire to know my history, my culture, my personal problem (that is, my 
>desire to become fulfilled as a person) led me to history."
>
>
>Along with his scholarly pursuits, Diop was keeping one foot fully planted 
>in the burgeoning African student movements in Paris. "With his African 
>consciousness fully awake," Professor Asa Hilliard asserted, "it was not 
>possible for (Diop) to sit as a passive recipient of the culture bound 
>teachings of his professors in graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris." 
>Soon, given his passionate activism and political savvy, he was a prominent 
>leader in the African Democratic Assembly. From this position he was 
>instrumental in helping to organize the first Pan-African Student Congress 
>of English and French Students. "His scholarship led him to activism in the 
>political arena," Hilliard concluded.
>
>Diop experienced his first serious slap of academic rejection when he 
>proposed the topic of his doctoral dissertation. What he sought to prove 
>was the centrality of Egypt to Africa's main cultural strands, that the 
>ancient Egyptians were black, and that Egypt was the mother of world 
>civilization, preceding Greece. There was nothing profoundly unique about 
>this proposal, as Van Sertima has pointed out, "What was new was the 
>formidable competency in many disciplines that he brought to bear to 
>establish this thesis on solid, scientific foundations."
>
>When this door was slammed in his face, another one opened for him and his 
>dissertation was published in 1955 by Presence Africaine under the title 
>"Black Nations and Culture," which brought him universal acclaim and 
>recognition. This publication, Diop explained in an interview with Carlos 
>Moore, was a departure from the philosophy of Negritude, which held sway 
>over militant African intellectuals of the previous generation. As he 
>conceived it, the poetry of Aime Cesaire and the other proponents of 
>Negritude, had sufficiently broached the psychic realm of black 
>subjugation. "My efforts were geared towards the restoration of the 
>linguistic and historical personality of black Africans," Diop declared.
>
>The success of "Black Nations and Culture" earned him other publishing 
>opportunities; it also made Diop an attractive guest lecturer and panelist 
>at a number of significant assemblies of scholars. In 1956, he was a 
>participant in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held 
>in Paris. Three years later he was a speaker at the second Congress held in 
>Rome. It was Diop's presentation at this conference that caught the 
>all-seeing eyes of Dr. John Henrik Clarke. "My curiosity grew concerning 
>this new voice in the African wilderness of historiography," Clarke 
>enthused. From this introduction to Diop's scholarship, Clarke set out to 
>get his work published for wider distribution. And when he later visited 
>Dakar, he made it his business to meet with him at Diop's radiocarbon 
>laboratory that he had established in 1960.
>
>Meanwhile, as he did in his student days, Diop found a way to pursue his 
>research and continue his political activism, which took a dramatic turn in 
>1964 when he established his second political party the Senegalese National 
>Front. The party was deemed illegal and he was promptly arrested. 
>Undaunted, he would persist and throughout his lifetime he would be 
>involved in opposition parties.
>
>In 1966, the First World Black Festival of Arts and Culture held in Dakar, 
>Senegal honored Dr. Diop and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois as the scholars who exerted 
>the greatest influence on African thought in twentieth century. For many 
>aspiring black thinkers, they represented the twin towers of African 
>achievement.
>
>Another important milestone in Diop's career occurred in 1974 when he and 
>Congolese Egyptologist and linguist Theophile Obenga upset participants at 
>the UNESCO conference with their paper "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt" that 
>contended the Egyptian language was African and that it was related 
>genetically to a family of African languages. In effect, Diop had 
>resurrected his doctoral dissertation, giving it new luster in a different 
>venue. But like his appearance two years earlier in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, 
>the reception to his ideas was mixed, though his genius was never in doubt.
>
>The culmination of Diop's multidisciplinary endeavors, the pinnacle of his 
>accomplishments came in 1980 with the publication of "Civilization or 
>Barbarism." It was, said Dr. Leonard Jeffries, "the final contribution to 
>the reconstruction of African and world history from an Afrocentric 
>perspective." The book's subtitle was "An Authentic Anthropology," and it 
>exemplified the full range of Diop's interests, delving substantially into 
>antiquity, Egyptology, paleontology, archeology, linguistics, history, 
>physics, mathematics, politics, and philosophy, to mention only the most 
>prominent topics.
>
>Among his objectives in this magnum opus was African unity and the 
>insertion of Africa in the primacy of world history. Also, "Today each 
>group of people, armed with its rediscovered or reinforced cultural 
>identity, has arrived at the threshold of the post-industrial era," he 
>wrote at the close of the book's Introduction. "An atavistic, but vigilant, 
>African optimism inclines us to wish that all nations would join hands in 
>order to build a planetary civilization instead of sinking down to 
>barbarism."
>
>It was also in this impressive volume that Diop elaborated on one of his 
>main and most controversial thesis-"...that the first inhabitant of Europe 
>was a migrating Black: the Grimaldi Man. Diop stressed that Grimaldi had 
>evolved to near human status before venturing from Africa to populate the 
>globe. "There is no other variety of homo sapiens that precedes the 
>Grimaldi Negroid in Europe or in Asia," he concluded.
>
>When Diop received an honorary doctorate from Morehouse College in 1985, 
>his speech contained advice that President Wade would do well to utilize as 
>he galvanizes the upcoming conference of scholars in Senegal in December. 
>"We must reconstruct a new Afro-American cultural personality within the 
>framework of our respective nations," Diop offered. "Our history from the 
>beginning of mankind, rediscovered and relived as such, will be the 
>foundation of this new personality."
>
>In the autumn of his days, Diop continued to work diligently in his 
>laboratory, always seeking innovative ways to interpret reality, 
>continuously devising fresh questions with the hope of finding intriguingly 
>new answers. His tirelessly inquiring mind and energetic optimism finally 
>ran its course one night in Senegal. On February 7, 1986, the incomparable 
>Diop expired.
>
>Diop's legacy not only resonates in proposed conferences designed by a 
>current crop of intellectuals, it also abounds in scholarly works like one 
>authored by Aaron Kamugisha in a recent edition of Race & Class, a 
>publication of the London-based Institute of Race Relations. Kamugisha goes 
>to great length to show the impact Diop had on the controversy of whether 
>or not the ancient Egyptians were Africans. "A historical survey of thought 
>on Egypt and African that minimizes or distorts Diop's contribution is 
>refuted by the very 'objective' evidence claimed in the past to discredit 
>him."
>
>Only Diop's words can be the last: "The African who has understood us is 
>the one who, after the reading of our works, would have felt a birth in 
>himself, of another person, impelled by an historical conscience, a true 
>creator, a Promethean carrier of a new civilization and perfectly aware of 
>what the whole Earth owes to his ancestral genius in all the domains of 
>science, culture and religion."
>
>

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