Cheikh Anta Diop

It was 1946, in Paris.

A young Senegalese man of twenty-three arrived in the city. He had come to study.

His name was Cheikh Anta Diop.

He was born on December 29, 1923, in Thieytou, near Diourbel, in Senegal. His family was Wolof and Muslim, of the Mouride brotherhood.

As a child, he learned the Qur'an at a traditional school. Then he passed the colonial baccalaureate.

In Paris, he began with advanced mathematics. Then he moved to philosophy. In 1948, he earned his degree. In 1950, two diplomas in chemistry.

In 1951, he registered a thesis topic under Marcel Griaule. His question: who were the predynastic Egyptians?

In 1954, he published Nations nègres et culture. In it, he argued that ancient Egypt had been peopled by Black Africans.

Diop became one of the most controversial historians of his time.

In 1959, he published L'Unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire.

He did not stop at books. In 1953, he met the physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. From 1957, he worked in nuclear physics, in the laboratory Joliot-Curie ran at the Collège de France.

In 1960, he finally earned his doctorate. The French university granted it, it is said, with reluctance.

In 1966, in Dakar, at the Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire, IFAN, he founded a carbon-14 dating laboratory. He ran it until his death.

That same year, he received a prize at the first World Festival of Negro Arts.

Then came Cairo. From January 28 to February 3, 1974, UNESCO gathered scholars there to debate the peopling of ancient Egypt.

Diop's theses were debated there. Reactions ranged from strong objections to enthusiastic support.

He sat on UNESCO's scientific committee for the General History of Africa. He wrote its chapter on the origins of the ancient Egyptians.

His ideas were fiercely debated. Scholars have criticized his sources, his notion of race, his comparisons of languages. Others have defended him.

But the historian Ogot put it this way: Diop wrested Egyptian civilization from the Egyptologists and restored it to African history.

In 1981, he became a professor of ancient history in Dakar. In his last book, he called for "a new African consciousness."

In 1985, in Atlanta, in the United States, a day was celebrated in his honour for the first time.

On February 7, 1986, Cheikh Anta Diop died suddenly in Dakar. He was buried in Thieytou, the village where he was born.

The next year, in 1987, the University of Dakar took his name.

Diop came from Wolof culture, not from Ubuntu. But his work echoes Ubuntu without merging with it: it ties each person to their own people, and to those who came before.

Every student who walks into Cheikh Anta Diop University today passes beneath his name.

The name of the man who called for a new African consciousness.