Cheikh Anta Diop Quotes on Knowledge
Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), the Senegalese historian, physicist, and Egyptologist whose The African Origin of Civilization (1974) and Civilization or Barbarism (1981) gave African studies one of its most ambitious twentieth-century works of cultural-historical synthesis, defended the case that ancient Egypt belonged to the broader cultural sphere of black Africa and that the philosophical, scientific, and political achievements of the Egyptian inheritance are accordingly part of the patrimony of the African continent. The framework grounds Diop's broader project of African epistemic sovereignty and the recovery of the historical knowledge that the colonial library had systematically displaced.
Quotes
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Attributed to Cheikh Anta Diop:
“African history must be rewritten by Africans themselves.”
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Attributed to Cheikh Anta Diop:
“Knowledge of the past is the precondition for liberation.”
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Attributed to Cheikh Anta Diop:
“Science is not the property of any single civilization.”
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“Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology”
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. -
“Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization.”
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