Tristan Graham | July 2nd, 2021
From as early as kindergarten, children learn history in classrooms all across the world, but do they learn important aspects of Black history? In Western civilization, in particular, those telling history frequently bend it in their favor. Unfortunately, few challenge or even acknowledge the bias that exists. As a result, students fail to truly confront the teachings presented to them. They don’t question that the people writing their textbooks may have a political agenda. They don’t recognize that their teachers have their own biases which they integrate into the curriculum. However, there are important figures who challenge narrow, Western-based understandings of past events. These heroes provide valuable insights into the Black history currently untaught in many schools.
Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) was a prominent scholar in pre-Colonial pan-African culture formation and a fierce advocate for a unified African nation. He was a vocal and passionate scholar for African social and historical self-sovereignty, with a focus on Egyptology. Above all, he worked to prove the country’s Black African heritage.
Groundbreaking Work and Studies
Diop was born in Senegal to a Wolof family and attended a customary Islamic school matching his family’s Muslim religious practice. After receiving his undergraduate diplomas in Senegal, he moved overseas to attend the University of Paris, Sorbonne.
While there, he pursued several disciplines — physics, history, mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, art history, and anthropology. Of those, he earned multiple degrees in mathematics, physics, history, and philosophy. Later, after spending his initial schooling in the sciences, Diop eventually found his home in the humanities. He focused on the landscapes, developments, and sociality of classical-period Africa, a time of dynamic revolution and cultural emergence. His work, with the main focus on pre-colonial Africa and the origins of humanity, contributed greatly to burgeoning theories on the development of African civilization and its contributions to the world. Specifically, Diop focused on Egypt and its Black African history — investigating its developments before the colonial systems of oppression and appropriation came into power.
The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality was Diop’s first work. After its English translation and publishing in 1974, the book garnered a wide audience. Diop proved that archaeological and anthropological evidence supported his view that Pharaohs were of Negroid origin. As a result, some scholars drew heavily from Diop’s groundbreaking work, while others in the Western academic world did not accept all of his theories. Regardless, Diop’s work has posed important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research.
Diop demonstrated that European archaeologists before and after the decolonization had understated and continued to understate the extent and possibility of Black civilizations and thus, Black history. Most notably, he argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that superseded the varied development of different ethnic groups.
The Battle for Black Egypt
Diop contended that Egyptian civilization has more in common with African cultures rather than European ones. Specifically, a history of circumcision, totemism, and matriarchy which are frequently seen throughout Africa, but rarely found in European cultures. For example, circumcision has commonly been associated with Muslim and Jewish cultures and is still practiced all over the world, but its origins are from within the borders of Africa. What’s more, in Egyptian civilization, property and leadership often passed through the mother’s side, which was not the case in Europe during ancient times.
“Most of the ideas that we call foreign are oftentimes nothing but mixed up, reversed, modified, elaborated images of the creations of our African ancestors, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, dialectics, the theory of being, the exact sciences, arithmetic.”
Cheikh Anta Diop
These obvious differences in culture and practice are further evidence of the falsification of history, an exercise that Diop recognized had never stopped. In ancient times, it was believed that Egyptians came from Ethiopians, but beginning in the 1800s scholars began to distance themselves from the thought of black Egyptian civilization. For instance, they assumed that any blacks found in Egypt at that time period were slaves to the white civilization. This was an unsurprising course of action given the cultural landscape of imperialization during that time period. A common theory of the era proposed Egypt was first colonized by Libyans, lighter-skinned people from the west of Africa. But scholars like Diop fought to provide much-needed clarification and facts regarding the Black cultural history of the regions.
The Cultural Identity of African Peoples
Diop attempted to demonstrate that the African peoples shared certain commonalities, including language roots and other cultural elements like regicide, circumcision, totems, etc. He insisted that these formed part of a tapestry that laid the basis for African cultural unity, which in turn could assist in challenging colonialist belief systems. His cultural theory attempted to show that Egypt was part of the African environment as opposed to incorporating it into Mediterranean or Middle Eastern venues.
These concepts are laid out in Diop’s Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in Culture and Development, and The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. Diop’s comparison of prevailing cultural models is as follows:
Southern Cradle-Egyptian Model
1. An abundance of vital resources
2. Sedentary-agricultural
3. Gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature with a spirit of justice
4. Matriarchal family
5. Emancipation of women in domestic life
6. Territorial state
7. Xenophilia
8. Cosmopolitanism
9. Social collectivism
10. Material solidarity – alleviating moral or material misery
11. The idea of peace, justice, goodness, and optimism
12. The literature emphasizes novel tales, fables, and comedy
Northern Cradle-Greek Model:
1. The bareness of resources
2. Nomadic-hunting (piracy)
3. Ferocious, warlike nature with a spirit of survival
4. Patriarchal family
5. Debasement/enslavement of women
6. City-state (fort)
7. Xenophobia
8. Parochialism
9. Individualism
10. Moral solitude
11. Disgust for existence, pessimism
12. Literature favors tragedy
Revealing Misconceptions of Matriarchy
According to Diop, Swiss scholar Johann Bachofen utilized Greek literature to deduce that matriarchal systems began with “barbarism” and “sexual promiscuity,” and that marriage and matriarchy evolved and were built on women’s supremacy (Diop, 1989, p. xi). But Diop challenged this conclusion and fought against others similar to it, especially those of anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan. Morgan proposed that there were stages in the history of marriage and family in which “barbarian peoples” practiced matrilineality and matriarchy – they had primitive “promiscuous intercourse”—whereas monogamy and patriarchy were practiced by “civilized” people—Romans and Greeks (Diop, 1989). Diop claimed that both Bachofen and Morgan’s theories were racist and mirrored their European views on family structure. Instead, Diop defined matriarchy in terms of social organizations, women’s groups, and family affiliations, but he did not define matriarchy as a society dominated by women.
Clarifying the African Social System
Diop proposed that the genesis of the notion of matriarchy was related to how the environment influenced a certain social system. In particular, he discussed two world geographical zones: North and South, and theorized that matriarchy evolved in the Agricultural South (Africa). In this case, women oversaw the house and kept the food. Women worked in agriculture while males hunted, and a woman’s influence was dependent on her economic contribution to the social structure. Conseqeuntly, the mother was revered and wielded unrestricted power. The authority of motherhood was represented in African religions, as well as in African spiritual or magical powers. Diop supported his views on matriarchy by mentioning various African Queens and their accomplishments (I.e., Nefertiti).
Conversely, Diop claimed that patriarchy arose in the North (Indo-European civilization) because of the wandering character of groups. To emphasize, women were forbidden from public roles and influence in this system; “a husband or parent possessed the authority of life and death over a woman” (Diop, 1989, p. xii). Diop also proposed that patrilineality entered African civilization with the arrival of Islam in the 10th century. According to Moroccan chronicler and traveler Ibn Battuta, even after Islam had arrived in Africa, African Women who lived in the 14th century Mali Empire lived equally amongst their male counterparts. Battuta expresses shock at how free and equal the women were compared to the Arab world.
In conclusion, Cheikh Anta Diop was a champion of and for African history. He devoted his life and brilliant intellect to proving the critical role Black Egyptian people played in the development of arts and sciences, dispelling long-held ideas that Africans contributed little to nothing of importance to humanity. For this reason, Diop along with others are essential sources regarding the size and scope Black history.
In June 2021, Tristan Graham released his first book The Thoughts Of An Unchained Mind.