Cheikh Anta Diop

Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Caytou, Senegal, in December 1923, into a Wolof aristocratic family. He took two doctorates at the University of Paris — the first in 1960, after a decade of rejection by examining committees unwilling to credit his thesis — and worked across history, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and politics with an erudition that has not been matched in his discipline since.

His central scholarly contribution was the demonstration, drawn from melanin testing of mummies, linguistic analysis of Wolof and ancient Egyptian, art-historical comparison, and the testimony of classical Greek and Roman writers themselves, that ancient Egyptian civilization was founded by Black African peoples continuous with the populations of the Nile Valley and the African interior. His major works — *Nations Nègres et Culture* (1954) and *The African Origin of Civilization* (1974) — restored a continuity of cultural inheritance that two centuries of European colonial scholarship had erased.

Beyond the academy, Diop founded a political party in Senegal, the Rassemblement National Démocratique, built and directed the radiocarbon-dating laboratory at the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire in Dakar — the first such laboratory in sub-Saharan Africa — and argued throughout his life that African political unity would follow only from a recovered confidence in African intellectual inheritance. In 1966 the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar named him, jointly with W. E. B. Du Bois, the African writer who had exerted the greatest influence on twentieth-century thought.

He died in his sleep in February 1986, in Dakar, at the age of sixty-two. Cheikh Anta Diop University, now the largest in Senegal, was renamed for him the year of his death. He is honored here as the scholar who returned a continent's history to the people from whom it had been taken.