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. He has been considered one of the greatest African historians of the 20th century.
Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Diourbel, Senegal. His early education was in a traditional Islamic School. At the age of 23, he went to Paris in 1946 to become a physicist. He remained there for 15 years, studying physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie’s son-in-law, and ultimately translating parts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof. Diop’s education included African history, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and sociology.
In 1951, Diop submitted a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Paris in which he argued that ancient Egypt had been a Black African culture. The thesis was rejected. Over the next nine years, Diop reworked the thesis, adding stronger evidentiary support. In 1960, he succeeded in the defense of his thesis and was awarded the Ph.D. degree.
In 1955, the thesis was published in the popular press as a book titled Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture). It made him one of the most controversial historians of his time.[3]
After 1960, Diop went back to Senegal and continued writing. The University of Dakar established a radiocarbon laboratory to aid in research of which Diop was named chairman. (After his death the university was named in his honor: Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar.) He had said, “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”
Diop published his technique and methodology for a dosage test in scholarly journals. Diop used this technique to determine the melanin content of the Egyptian mummies. Forensic investigators later adopted this technique to determine the “racial identity” of badly burnt accident victims.
Some critics have argued that Diop’s melanin dosage test technique lacks sufficient evidence. They contend the test is inappropriate to apply to ancient Egyptian mummies, due to the effects of embalming and deterioration over time.
In 1974, Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo, where he presented his theories to other specialists in Egyptology. He also wrote the chapter about the origins of the Egyptians in the UNESCO General History of Africa.
Diop’s first work translated into English, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, was published in 1974. It gained a much wider audience for his work. He claimed that archaeological and anthropological evidence supported his view that Pharaohs were of Negroid origin. Some scholars draw heavily from Diop’s groundbreaking work, while others in the Western academic world do not accept all of Diop’s theories.Diop’s work has posed important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research.
Diop showed above all that European archaeologists before and after the decolonization had understated and continued to understate the extent and possibility of Black civilizations.
The Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet’s discoveries at the site of Kerma shed some light on the theories of Diop. They show close cultural links between Nubia and Ancient Egypt, though the relationship had been acknowledged for years. This does not necessarily imply a genetic relationship, however. Mainstream Egyptologists such as F. Yurco note that among peoples outside Egypt, the Nubians were closest ethnically to the Egyptians, shared the same culture in the predynastic period, and used the same pharaonoic political structure. He suggests that the peoples of the Nile Valley were one regionalized population, sharing a number of genetic and cultural traits.
Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.
Biased scholarship on Africa
Diop’s statements on bias have largely proven true. When he wrote in the 1950s, 1960s and somewhat in the early 1970s, the field of African scholarship was heavily influenced by racial type analysis epitomized in the works of Carleton S. Coon. Coon used racial rankings of inferiority and superiority, defined “true Blacks” as only those of cultures south of the Sahara, and grouped some Africans with advanced cultures with Caucasian clusters.Based on Coon’s work, the Hamitic Hypothesis held that most advanced progress or cultural development in Africa was due to the invasions of mysterious Caucasoid Hamites. Similarly, the Dynastic Race Theory of Egypt asserted that a mass migration of Caucasoid peoples was needed to create the Egyptian kingships, as slower-witted Negro tribes were incapable.
Modern physical anthropologists, and linguists such as Joseph Greenberg, have discredited these theories and approaches, as well as Coon’s racial types. Diop’s early condemnation of European bias in his 1954 work Nations Negres et Culture, and in Evolution of the Negro World (See quote below) has thus been supported by later scholarship.
A 2004 review of DNA research in African Archaeological Review supports some of the criticisms of Diop. It found that some European researchers had earlier tried to make Africans seem a special case, somehowdifferent from the rest of the world’s population flow and mix. This seemed to apply in matters both of evolution and gene pool makeup. The reviewers found that some researchers seemed to have shifted their categories and methods to maintain this ‘special case’ outlook.
- “The conclusion one is led to after an epistemological analysis of the extant evolutionary models and theories is that ideological considerations are at work here. The implicit goal on grounds of a naive hierarchical racialism is to make of Africa’s population a special case in the world’s genome bank. Consider, for example, the ideological switching of Nei and Roychoudhury. The authors first argue “preliminary studies of blood group gene frequencies suggest that the genetic distance between Caucasians and Japanese is no closer than that between Caucasians and Negroes” (Nei and Roychoudhury, 1972, p. 435). Yet some years later, the same authors argue, “African populations are genetically quite different from other populations. Therefore, it is likely that the first evolutionary splitting of humans occurred between the African and non-African populations” (1993, p. 938)… There are even novel theories that seek with similar ideological considerations to split modern humanity during the late Pleistocene into anatomically modern and behaviorally modern humans.
Physical variability of the African people
Diop consistently held that Africans could not be pigeonholed into a rigid type that existed somewhere south of the Sahara, but they varied widely in skin color, facial shape, hair type, height, and a number of additional factors, just like other human populations. In his “Evolution of the Negro World” in Presence Africaine (1964), Diop castigated European scholars who posited a separate evolution of various types of humankind and denied the African origin of homo sapiens.[19]
| “ | But it is only the most gratuitous theory that considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognizing as white-only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular—the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as the two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude that maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race | ” |
Critics of Diop cite a 1993 study that found the ancient Egyptians to be more related to North African, Somalian, European, Nubian and, more remotely, Indian populations, than to Sub-Saharan Africans.. Diop always maintained that Somalians, Nubians, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all part of a related range of African peoples in the Nilotic zone that also included peoples of the Sudan and parts of the Sahara. He said that their cultural, genetic and material links could not be defined away or separated into a regrouped set of racial clusters.Critics of this study in turn hold that it achieves its results by manipulation of data clusters and analysis categories, casting a wide net to achieve generic, general statistical similarities with populations such as Europeans and Indians. At the same time, the statistical net is cast much more narrowly in the case of ‘blacks’, carefully defining them as an extreme type south of the Sahara and excluding related populations like Somalians, Nubians and Ethiopians,as well as the ancient Badarians, a key indigenous group.
It is held by Keita, et al. that when the data are looked at in toto without the clustering manipulation and selective exclusions above, then a more accurate and realistic picture emerges of African diversity. For example, ancient Egyptian matches with Indians and Europeans are generic in nature (due to the broad categories used for matching purposes with these populations) and are not due to gene flow. Ancient Egyptians such as the Badarians show greater statistical affinities to tropical African types and are not identical to Europeans. As regards the key Badarian group, a 2005 study by anthropologist S. O. Y. Keita of Badariancrania in predynastic upper Egypt found that the predynastic Badarian series clusters much closer with the tropical African series than European samples.
Diop’s theory on variability is also supported by a number of scholars mapping human genes using modern DNA analysis. This has shown that most of human genetic variation (some 85–90%) occurs within localized population groups, and that race only can account for 6–10% of the variation. Arbitrarily classifying Masai, Ethiopians, Shillouk, Nubians, etc., as Caucasian is thus problematic, since all these peoples are northeast African populations and show normal variation well within the 85–90% specified by DNA analysis. Modern physical anthropologists also question splitting of peoples into racial zones. They hold that such splitting is arbitrary insertion of data into pre-determined pigeonholes and the selective grouping of samples. Diop’s objections to how data on African peoples was being manipulated has thus been supported by the work of several modern scholars, using modern DNA analysis.
Diop and the African context
In summary, modern anthropological and DNA scholarship repeats and confirms many of the criticisms made by Diop as regards to arbitrary classifications and splitting of African peoples, and confirms the genetic linkages of Nile Valley peoples with other African groups, including East Africa, the Sahara, and the Sudan. This modern research also confirms older analyses, (Arkell and Ucko 1956, Shaw 1976, Falkenburger 1947, Strouhal 1971, Blanc 1964, et al.,). This same modern scholarship however in turn challenges aspects of Diop’s work, particularly his notions of a worldwide black phenotype.
- Perhaps Diop’s greatest achievement is his insistence in placing Nile Valley peoples in their local and African context, drawing a picture of a stable, ancient population deriving much of its genetic inheritance from that context, as opposed to attempts to split, cluster, subdivide, define and regroup them into other contexts. Such a vision of inherent unity and continuity, ironically, is also supported in part by modern mainstream Egyptologists such as Frank Yurco:
| “ | Certainly there was some foreign admixture [in Egypt], but basically a homogeneous African population had lived in the Nile Valley from ancient to modern times… [the] Badarian people, who developed the earliest Predynastic Egyptian culture, already exhibited the mix of North African and Sub-Saharan physical traits that have typified Egyptians ever since (Hassan 1985; Yurco 1989; Trigger 1978; Keita 1990.. et al.,)… The peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of East African Ethiopia and Somalia are now generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various hair and craniofacial types) but with powerful common cultural traits, including cattle pastoralist traditions (Trigger 1978; Bard, Snowden, this volume). | ” |
(F. Yurco “An Egyptological Review”, 1996)
Source: Wiki
