History I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

Professor Mhoze Chikowero, History 49 A, UCSB 2024

Lecture Two

Cheikh Anta Diop, African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?

Who was Cheikh Anta Diop?

Born in 1923, Diop was one of greatest scholars to emerge in the African world in the 20th century. Diop was a leading historian, physicist, chemist, anthropologist, linguist, and Pan-African scholar-activist of Africa. He was also a keen political thinker and organizer who shaped the African world on the continent and the diaspora, leading to the rise of the Afrocentric school of thought, now synonymous with such names as Professor Kete Asante of Temple University, etc.

He utilized his command of these numerous disciplines to intervene in and reshape thinking about foundational questions regarding the history of Africa and the world—that is, the origins of human civilization.

His thesis

Utilizing interdisciplinary methods, Diop uncovered new evidence and re-read ancient writings to posit with unprecedented and unimpeachable clarity the thesis that ancient Egypt—Kemet—is not only a Black African civilization, but also, in addition, that this was the origin of human civilization.

A second aspect of his thesis is that ancient Egypt is part and parcel of African ancient civilization, undivided. In his words: “The history of Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt.”

Writing in an age of comfortable imperialism—both political and intellectual, Diop’s work had a serious political implication. Thus wrote the leading scholar of Africa, John Henrik Clark:

“All African people, everywhere, are closer to a better understanding of their history and destiny because of the personality and work of Cheikh Anta Diop,” a scholar-activist dedicated to science in the interest of his people.

The story of a book

As with pathbreaking works by many other luminary scholars in a world infected by racist ideas, Eurocentrism, and epistemic and cognitive oppression, Diop struggled to find a publisher in the western world, where he started his intellectual journey. Other authors similarly impeded include Frantz Fanon, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Mhoze Chikowero, etc., why is this? Because ideas can change the world; they can destroy or empower a people. Diop’s ideas turned on the head ideas that formed a foundation of the European subjugation of Africa, their world, their humanity, and their foundational shaping of the world.

Why did the European world feel threatened by his ideas?

The world as presently constituted is a white man’s world—conceived, birthed and nurtured by the white man in his white image. The European man presents himself as the creator-god of the world. Everything in the world—in fact, the world itself, starts and ends with him. An African origin of human civilization thus upset his cart of apples—which is his cart of unearned power.

So both author and his ideas had to be discredited, silenced and suppressed, and the magnificence of a people’s achievements stolen, and credited to somebody else. This is what we call epistemic colonialism. The substance of the grand heist is evident in everyday deployment of this history—where Egypt is claimed as a white European civilization, outside of the geographical and intellectual part of Africa—in research by western scholars, in popular films, world history syllabi, and western popular imagination.

But for this grant intellectual theft of a people’s heritage, identity and pride, Diop would not have to write this book, restating the glory of African civilization.

Basil Davidson , that honest British historian of Africa, observed the otherwise unnecessary truth:

“But isn’t Egypt… quite simply a part of Africa? The civilization of Pharaonic Egypt, arising sometime around 3500 B.C. and continuing at least until the Roman dispositions, has been explained to us as evolving either in or less total isolation from Africa or as a product of West Asian stimulus. On this deeply held view, the land of the Nile appears to have detached itself from the delta of the Mediterranean on a course veering broadly towards the coasts of Syria. And there it apparently remained, floating somewhere in the seas of the Levant, until Arab conquerors hauled it back to where it has since belonged.”

Q: Who is with Davidson here? How has Egypt been taught to you? What has been the place of Egypt in your education?

Fortunately, Cheikh Anta Diop has had good company—numerous African and non-African scholars who have sworn to find out and uphold the truth: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, etc.

Unfortunately, it is the dilemma of European myths passed as history that forced Diop to take forays into the depths of not only Egyptian history, but also the writings of European authors who were unencumbered by these prejudices, and repeatedly straddle the stretches of Southern African history to show to deaf ears that “the Nile River was the world’s first cultural highway, stretching four thousand miles into the body of Africa, bringing culture and people out of the heart of Africa who gave stimulus to Egypt and constantly renewed its energy,” thus linking it with the rise of ancient Ghana in the west.

Diop had to demonstrate that “history cannot be restricted to the limits of ethnic group, nation, or culture. Roman history is Greek, as well as Roman, and both Greek and Roman history are Egyptian history because the entire Mediterranean was civilized by Egypt; Egypt in turn borrowed from other parts of Africa, especially Ethiopia.”

Concerning the Mediterranean, which was already under Egyptian influence, Diop demonstrates that this was initially peaceful, coming into the African world through Greek scholars like Herodotus, one of many European students of Africa.

To understand the story of Egypt, it is important to understand what other Africans say about it. Ethiopians, as Herodotus wrote, said Egypt was one of their colonies, which was brought to them by the deity Osiris. Herodotus repeatedly referred to Egyptians as being dark-skinned people with wooly hair, with the same tint of skin as the Ethiopians.

By the time of Herodotus’ visit (484-425 B.C.), Egypt’s Golden Age was over, having suffered several invasions—many Kushitic invasions coming from within Africa in 751 B.C., and the Assyrian invasions from Western Asia (so-called Middle East), starting from 671 B.C. Yet in spite of these invasions, Egypt was still identifiably Black by the time of Herodotus’ visit.

And this is Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), summing up the view of the ancient writers in his The Dawn of Civilization:

“By the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, the Egyptians belong to an African race which first settled in Ethiopia on the middle Nile, following the course of the river they gradually reached the sea.”

Yet, if Egypt is a dilemma in white historiography, it is a created historiography, as John Henrik Clark points out. The gist of the dilemma is that most western historians falsely whitened Egypt. To do this, they had to ignore a trove of works by other western historians, such as Gerald Massey’s Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World (1907), and his The Book of Beginnings, and The Natural Genesis. Other writers with heads properly screwed on include A.H.L. Heeren (1833), Politics, Intercourse, and Trade of the Carthaginians and Ethiopians, and Count C.F. Volney’s The Ruins of Empires (1797).

Another author, E.A. Wallis Budge, states:

“The prehistoric native of Egypt, both in the old and new Stone Ages, was African, and there is every reason for saying that the earliest settlers came from the south.”

Budge adds: “There are many things in the manners and customs and religions of the historic Egyptians that suggest that the original home of their ancestors was in a country in the neighbourhood of Uganda and Punt.”

Another set of ancient scholars, Diodorus Siculus and Stephanus of Byzantium:

“The ancient Ethiopians, or at any rate the Black people of remote antiquity, were the earliest of all civilized peoples, … and the first civilized inhabitants of ancient Egypt were members of what is referred to as the Black race, who entered the country as emigrants from Ethiopia.”

Last citation, Volney:

“It was then, on the borders of the Upper Nile, among a Black race of men, that organized the complicated system of worship of the starts, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture; and this first worship, characterized by their adoration under their own forms and national attributes, was a simple proceeding of the human mind.”

These facts were a given when these white historians were writing, yet their more recent counterparts ignored these perspectives and invested lots of their energy into falsifying the historical interpretation of Egypt.

Numerous, more recent scholars have built on these observations, including Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Dubois, Willis N. Huggins, and Charles C. Seifort.

Diop illustrates with clarity the paradox of colonized knowledge production by highlighting the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, which has the biblical Ham cursed, turned black and driven south to become the ancestor of the Black races—for what? For “seeing the nakedness of his father.” Yet, on the other hand, the same Ham is whitened whenever one seeks the origin of civilization, because there, in the south, he is inhabiting the first civilized country in the world. It must not belong to him.

Whence came the Egyptians?

We have established the southern origins of the Egyptians, who gradually moved north in response to their changing, drying environments, following the Nile—a life-giving watercourse. This was a movement that was adaptive, responding to the needs of the local environment. As the two desert locales on either side of the Nile limited what resources were available to them, habitation along the narrow, fertile valley required expert technique in irrigation and dam building, precise calculations to forecast the river’s inundations and their consequent implications on cultivation, planting and harvesting. It also entailed the invention of geometry to delimit the reach of the flood waters, and new ways of farming the long strips of land, leading to the innovation from the hand-held hoe to the ox-drawn plough. These inventions wouldn’t make sense in the land-locked interior. Scientific and technological invention moved in accord with the environment.

It was here, on the banks of a river that gifted life to the people, that Africans interpreted the behaviors of the land, the river, and the cosmos that the people developed complex systems of self-representation in the broad catalogue of deities that each aligned with their varied elements—from the capricious flood waters, the movement of stars, the sun, and their relationships with agricultural cycles. These representations were in the people’s own image, or in the images of their animal world, as seen in deities with heads of different animals. As in broader Africa, each deity held the people’s fate in a particular way. They were anu—vanhu (in the name still applied in Southern Africa)—people.

Here is Amélineu, attesting to these inventions after his reading of the Book of the Dead and Texts of the Pyramids:

“These Anu [humans]… were an agricultural people, raising cattle on a large scale along the Nile, shutting themselves up in walled cities for defensive purposes. To these people we can attribute, without fear of error, the most ancient Egyptian books, The Book of the Dead and the Texts of the Pyramids, consequently, all the myths or religious teachings. I would add almost all the philosophical systems then known and still called Egyptian. They evidently knew how to use metals, at least elementary metals. They made the earliest attempts at writing, for the whole Egyptian tradition attributes this art to Thoth, the great Hermes, an Anu like Osiris, who is called the Onian in Chapter XV of The Book of the Dead and in The Texts of the Pyramids. Certainly the people already knew the principal arts; it left proof of this in the tomb of Osiris, and in those sepulchers objects have been found bearing the unmistakable stamp of their origin—such as carved ivory, or the little head of a Nubian girl found in a tomb near that feline head—all documents published in the first volume of Fouilles d’Abydos.”

This point needs no overemphasizing. But something about source materials needs pointing put.

Egyptians left us their thoughts on rock slabs, such as what historians have called Narmer’s Tablet, key in analyzing the story of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. Many of these writings were unearthed in the South, in the temples of Sudanic Kush/Meroe.

The south is not an unimportant outpost in the origination of human civilization in Egypt: it was the source, not just of the rich black soils that fertilized the valley for agriculture, but also an important abode for many of its deities, including Amon/Amun, Osiris and Isis. During the multiple times that Egypt was attacked by the people of the sea (Indo-Europeans and others from the north and west), it was Meroitic Sudan that would liberate and protect it, restoring the threatened monarchical system. The south is also a broad canvas for deciphering the wellspring of Egypt’s cultural constitution. The system of animal totems, circumcision, deification and ritual death of the king, etc, familiar in Egypt, form a core of the cultures of the south, all the way to South Africa. At various points of its weakness, Kush/Sudan provided rulers for Egypt. I must quote Diop here to demonstrate the value of the south to the life and survival of Egypt:

“Whenever the nation was threatened by an invasion of Whites from Asia or Europe via the Mediterranean, whenever such incursions disrupted national life, the political power migrated to the south, toward its ancestral habitat. Inevitably, salvation, in other words, the reconquest of political power, reunification, and national rebirth were achieved through the efforts of the legitimate Black dynasties indigenous to the south.”

This threat from the north manifested at various points through the millennia, including from the branded whites that some Pharaohs had developed a habit of pressing into their service laboring in the delta lands. Such people were the only slave class in Egypt—often branded, and they sometimes were inducted to serve as mercenary soldiers defending the nation from the increasing rebellions against the monarchies or from across the seas. Often, such captives were trained and redeployed back to their homelands to govern as vassals in favor of Egypt. This created constant risk of infiltration, rebellion and invasion. “So it was as a prisoner of war, transformed into a slave, chained and branded, that the white man first entered Egyptian civilization,” writes Diop (p.213). This would become a key conduit for the successive invasions and eventual conquest of Egypt by the various hordes from the seas.

Egypt and the Peopling of Africa

We shall discuss, in subsequent lectures, the theme of intra-African mobilities. But here, it is important to point out that many Africans from across the continent often point to ancient Egypt as their origin, while Egyptians pointed at local origins. Many Yoruba (west African), Dogon (west Africa), Bakuba (central Africa) and Karanga (Zimbabwe) legends of creation identify either Ethiopia or Egypt as their cradle. Indeed, Karanga means “children of the sun,” and their ritual retso cloth is designed to represent the steps of the pyramids. The latter idea gives credence to the common cosmology that identifies an afterlife associated with divine deities and the life-giving force of the sun, stars and the moon. Diop traced a long catalogue of clan names and other, common names that ancient Egypt shares with the broad African world. In the pre-colonized African world, when a king dies, they were mummified and hidden in mountain caverns—ninga, the principal purpose of the pyramids in Egypt. Also, politically, Egypt belonged within the continent’s cultures with the monarchical system, which was often seen as divine.

Stepped retso cloth that Southern African hunters, healers and spirit mediums to commune with the cosmos.

This map is one way to read ancient Egypt in its proper African continental context. By following the river down south, against the current, you get to the wellsprings of the civilization. The historic role that Kush/Meroe played in buffering Egypt is what South Sudan is playing today in checking the constant pressures of southward Arab expansionism that is spawning genocides in Sudan.

Amun’s temple in Meroe:

Left: observation stones, and right: water tanks and baths at Amun’s temple, Meroe:

Figurines discovered at the Royal Bath, 3rd Century B.C. Pay attention to the hairstyles.

Concluding remarks

Diop’s work is foundational in setting straight the history of Egypt, Africa and the world. It deconstructs and corrects the deliberate ruination of African achievement, which ruins have held back Africans mentally as part of the manufactured inferiority complexes. It enables us to throw into the trash can the nonsensical notions that Africa needed a supposed civilizing european hand to develop, because development—driven by indigenous African ideas, has never been a foreign concept to Africa. The problem that we now have to grapple with becomes different—why, and how, did African regress from this magnificence?

See you next week, but before then, please engage with the primary source (“Be a scribe”), and The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu that I shared on Canvas. These materials are key to ground our theme more solidly. There is more material for those who would like to conduct their research on this subject. Just ask.

Best,

MC

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