By Cheikh Anta Diop – Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology: 1st

Description

Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who was involved in the freedom and nationalization movements in Africa. He wrote a number of books, such as Precolonial Black Africa , Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology , Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State , etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1981 book, “[This book] is a further contribution to the work that allowed us to elevate the idea of a Black Egypt to the level of an operational scientific concept. For all the writers who preceded the ludicrous and vicious falsifications of modern Egyptology, and the contemporaries of the ancient Egyptians (Herodotus, Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo, and others), the Black identity of the Egyptian was an evident fact that stood before their eyes, so obvious that it would have been superfluous to try to demonstrate it… for us the new, important fact is less to have stated that the Egyptians were Blacks, as one of our principal sources, the ancient writers, already did, than to have contributed to making this idea a conscious historical fact for Africans and the world, and especially to making it an operational scientific concept: this is where our predecessors did not succeed.” (Pg. 1-2)

He explains, “those desiring to learn more of the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians should look for the above-mentioned factors in the truly autochthonous ancient population, and not in foreign mummies, Ptolemaic, Greek, or others… A pure race does not exist anywhere, but one eagerly refers to the Whites of Europe and the Yellows of Asia: in the same way we refer to the Blacks of Egypt.” (Pg. 3)