Cheikh Anta Diop 1923 – 1986

Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and political philosopher who argued for the African origin of ancient Egyptian civilization and for the cultural unity of black Africa. His doctoral thesis, eventually published as Negro Nations and Culture, and his subsequent works contended that the recovery of an accurate African past is the precondition for African intellectual and political liberation. He founded the radiocarbon laboratory at the University of Dakar that bears his name and remained throughout his life a leading voice for Pan-African scientific and cultural autonomy.

Cheikh Anta Diop was born at Thieytou in central Senegal in December 1923 into a Wolof Muslim family. He took his secondary education at Saint-Louis, came to Paris in 1946 to read for a degree in physics and chemistry under Frédéric Joliot-Curie and a degree in philosophy under Gaston Bachelard, and submitted his doctoral thesis on the African origins of ancient Egyptian civilisation to the Sorbonne in 1951. The thesis was rejected; he rewrote it three times and finally defended it in 1960 before a panel that included Jean Devisse and André Aymard. From 1961 he directed the radiocarbon-dating laboratory of the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) at the University of Dakar.

His books include Nations nègres et culture (1954), L'Afrique noire pré-coloniale (1960), Antériorité des civilisations nègres: mythe ou vérité historique? (1967), Parenté génétique de l'égyptien pharaonique et des langues négro-africaines (1977), and Civilisation ou barbarie (1981). He led the Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises, the Front National Sénégalais, and from 1976 the Rassemblement National Démocratique, all opposition parties he founded.

Diop argued that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilisation continuous with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in language, kinship, and material culture and that Greek and subsequent Western civilisation drew decisive elements from this Egyptian source; his thesis remained controversial in mainstream Egyptology but transformed the African historical imagination. He died at Dakar in February 1986.