Cheikh Anta Diop

Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.

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.

Quotes

• The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder, which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world.
  • Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology

• Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the “true Negro,” which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of “Negroids,” Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity.”
  • Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality

The African Origin of Civilization : Myth or Reality

Antériorité des civilisations nègres: mythe ou vérité historique? (1967) and Nations nègres et culture (1954), as translated from the French by Mercer Cook (1974)

• Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization.
  • p. xiv

• The ancient Egyptians were Negroes. The moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world.
  • p. xiv

• Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent debtor, that Black world is the very initiator of the "western" civilization flaunted before our eyes today.
  • p. xiv

• Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.
  • p. xiv

• Contrary to the legend, the Negro king was not, and had never been, a despot with unlimited powers. ... His mission was to serve the people wisely and his authority depended on his respect for the established constitution.
  • p. 23

• Already during the Middle Ages, the memory of a Negro Egypt that had civilized the world had been blurred by ignorance of the antique tradition hidden in libraries or buried under ruins. It would become even more obscure during those four centuries of slavery.
  • p. 24

• The Europeans looked down on the Black world and condescended to touch nothing but its riches.
  • p. 24

Quotes about Cheikh Anta Diop

• The most daring book yet written by a Negro and one which will without question play an important part in the awakening of Africa.
  • Aimé Césaire, regarding Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture) (1954).

• Pharaonic Egypt is an African civilisation, developed in Africa by Africans”: what seems obvious today – except, perhaps, for Nicolas Sarkozy and his “monkeys” – has long been passed over in silence, or even openly denied by the Egyptology developed in European laboratories. We owe it to the scientist, historian, anthropologist and politician Cheikh Anta Diop for having given what belongs to Africa back to Africa.
• Cheikh Anta Diop’s contribution is to have thrown a spanner in the works and forced scientific circles to consider this question more carefully if only to try to contradict it”. “Today, no one denies the strong African influence on the constitution of the Egyptian civilisation, nor its ancient settlement from the sub-Saharan belt, at the time of the rise of the monsoons towards the North, around 10,000 BC.
  • Laurent De Saint Perier Cheikh Anta Diop, the man who gave the pharaohs back to Africa

• It is worth noting that the idea of Diop regarding the African origin of human civilization was not confirmed by most scientists, neither during his lifetime nor after his death. The emergence of new scientific disciplines, such as paleogenetics, which studies the DNA in the remains of ancient organisms, enabled modern researchers to shed some light on many controversial issues, including the origin of the bearers of the ancient Egyptian civilization, which was neither the most ancient nor the only one on Earth. Pockets of civilization emerged in different regions of our planet and developed independently of each other until a certain point in time.
  • CHEIKH ANTA DIOP: THE GREAT THINKER AWAKENING AFRICAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS