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| FEATURE ARTICLE |
| Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe | Monday, February 27, 2006 |
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CHEIKH ANTA DIOP: A CELEBRATION
heikh Anta Diop and W.E.B. Du Bois were jointly awarded the 1966 prestigious African World festival of arts and culture prize for scholars who had "exerted the greatest influence on African peoples in the 20th century". Diop�s scholarship benefited immensely from his impressive multidisciplinary studies in France between 1946 and 1960. He was a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, historian, linguist, anthropologist and Egyptologist.
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Diop was born in Caytou, close to the commercial town of Diourbel, S�n�gal, on 29 December 1923. S�n�gal was then under the political and military occupation of France. Diop studied locally for his early education and his teachers variously recalled that he was an "intensely studious student" who was fascinated by science � particularly the science of origins, as he would indeed demonstrate most profoundly in later life in his studies and copious publications on Kemet. In high school, he had written a term paper about the origins of the Wolof people and their language which was later published in a 1948 edition of the Paris-based journal Pr�sence Africaine (included in the collection of Diop�s essays published in 2000 entitled Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946-1960).
In 1946, at the age of 23, Diop left Caytou for Paris to study physics at the Sorbonne. He soon expanded his studies into history, anthropology and linguistics as he embarked on a doctoral thesis on the Kemetic civilisation, focusing particularly on its origins, the crucial epochs of its 5000 years of development, and impact on subsequent civilisations, especially the Greek. Five years later, Diop completed his thesis. Contrary to the dominant scholarly and popular cultural opinion at the time, Diop demonstrates in his research that Africans, Africoid peoples, were the indigenous peoples of Kemet who built the civilisation that has been a marvel to the world ever since.
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Three zones of inquiry are important in Diop�s exploration of, and conclusions on the Africanity of Kemet prior to the era of foreign conquest and occupation carried out by the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs during the Classical Age, and later on by the Ottomans, France and Britain. In his examination of the key cultural features of the people of Kemet such as language, religion, kingship system and government, and physical traits and characteristics, Diop shows that these were generally similar or corresponded to those found elsewhere in Africa at the time. These were noticeable particularly in the south of Kemet (central and east Africa) or the "lands of the long-lived Ethiopians" as historian Herodotus describes the rest of Africa, or the "land of the gods" as the people of Kemet themselves referred to their southern neighbours. As Diop demonstrates, the "land of the gods" was indeed the gestating crucible for the civilisation that subsequently triumphed at the bank of the River Nile. Just as in most of Africa during the period, Kemet was governed by a divine kingship that was regulated by an ancient matriarchal system. Kemet shared identical or similar gods, goddesses, totems, and several symbolic religious practices (circumcision, being a notable example) with many parts of Africa including those in the western part of the continent (3500 miles away) that were not territorially contiguous to its frontiers.
Against the background of the Kemetic experience, Diop illustrates these trans-regional features of African philosophical and religious heritage in a series of evocative empirical references across the continent, ranging from S�n�gal, on the west coast, to Kenya, in the east, and from Kemet, in the north, to South Africa. Appropriately, he begins this comparative survey by focusing on the importance of water in the African creation stories. In Kemet, the "abyssal water" or nun represents the "raw material" which is the precursor of the universe, life itself, and all creation. It is from "abyssal water" that ma�at, the famed moral code that deliberates on, and projects society�s quest for "truth, justice and balance", emerges. Similarly, "primordial water" plays a prominent feature in the creation stories of the Dogon (where it is called nummo), Wolof (where it is called nwl), Bambara, Akan and several other peoples in west Africa, as well as those in the Congo basin of central Africa, and peoples in the east and south of the continent. For Diop, this continent-wide sharing in cosmogony, with the antecedent and centrality of the Kemetic legacy, is crucial in presenting his thesis of a "cultural unity" of Africa, which he elaborates with rigour in his L�unit� culturelle de l�Afrique noire, 1959 (later translated into English as Cultural Unity of Black Africa, 1978). Pointedly, Diop associates the age long practice of circumcision amongst Africans as "integrated in [this] general explanation of the universe [or] cosmogony." The link here is that the newborn child shares an androgynous "essence" with the primordial creative force until the excision performed at circumcision on the former eventuates the gender signification considered vital for its parental role on reaching adulthood.
Another prominent investiture in the all-Africa shared cosmogony is totemism. In Kemet and the rest of Africa, the serpent has played a potent symbol, albeit contradictorily, in this regard. As a totem, the serpent represents at once the template for the end of all life forms and life�s own transformative capacity that yields to its continuation in an eternal realm. Noticeably, the pharaohs of Kemet and monarchs in several western and southern African states in subsequent epochs wore the carving or some form of inscription of the serpent on their crowns. Other high profile trans-regional totems in Africa include the cat, which symbolises creativity and longevity, and birds such as the hawk and falcon, which allude to the defence and preservation of the state. And parallel to this preservation is the preoccupation to safeguard the reigning monarch, which gives rise to the "vitalistic" concept and the practice of the "ritual killing" of the monarch across Africa. As in Kemet and elsewhere on the continent, Diop argues, the monarch is "supposed" to possess the "greatest life force or energy." It is believed that if this force were to decline either through ill health or old age, it could have catastrophic consequences on the people and the state. In the past, a "weakened" monarch was literally put to death but changes, overtime, modified this imperative into an outcome more symbolically expressed or exercised. The monarch would hence undergo a "ritual death" ceremony of "revivification" to restore their "vitalistic" pre-eminence: "the monarch [is] supposedly rejuvenated [during the ceremony] in the opinion of [the] people and [is] once again deemed fit to assume [their] function." Besides Kemet, many African peoples including the Yoruba, Igala and Jukun in the west, Baganda in the east, and Nubia and Hutu in central Africa, practise the "ritual killing" ceremony of "revivification" for their monarchs.
Motherhood, phenotype, non-debtor
For Diop, the key institution that defines and rationalises social existence in Kemet and the rest of Africa is matriarchy. Diop theorises that matriarchy evolved from the dominant position of agriculture in Africa and the central role women played in its development. This resulted in a socio-political economy, which Diop describes as a "southern cradle" civilisation. Here, the woman, who exercises a robust economic power, is primary and not an "appendage" of the man. She "transmits political rights. This derives from the general idea that heredity is effective only matrilineally." Motherhood is revered. As a result, a societal consensus which emphasises a complementary gender relation within the home and outside � in the occupations and the workings of the state � is the norm or the goal expressly sought after, exemplified, for instance, in Igbo history, as the distinguishing scholarships of Kamena Okonjo, Ifi Amadiume and Okwuonicha Femi Nzegwu attest. Gender complementarity in society is also enhanced by the sheer multitude of mutually shared gods and goddesses which define, regulate and empower the religious and spiritual life of female and male alike. In the wake of the Muslim/Arab invasion of northern and later western Africa (beginning from the 7th century AD), however, the age long African matriarchy begins to be dislodged as the invaders entrench a patriarchal social relation consistent with what Diop describes as a cardinal feature of the "northern cradle" civilisation of the Euro-Asian World.
Finally, on the characteristic physical traits and phenotype of the people of Kemet, they were like other African peoples: "black-skinned, woolly-haired� flat nose, prominent lips, spindly legs�" � recurring descriptions that Diop is keen to quote directly from Greek scholars such as Herodotus and Strabo who visited and studied Kemet, philosopher Aristotle, poet Aeschylus and historian Diodorus, as well as from those much earlier on who had travelled, lived and studied in Kemet before returning to Greece to work. These include the long list of what makes up the Who�s Who in Greek science, history and philosophy such as Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, Thales, Euclid, Eudoxus, Eratosthenes, Solon and Lycurgus. These scholars variously acknowledged the debt of their scholarship to Kemet including the description of their hosts and teachers in the same vein that an Africoid in the 21st century would be so profiled. "Without exception, so far as surviving texts can show," observes historian Basil Davidson, "every Greek thinker of the Classical Age looked to Egypt for inspiration and guidance, and accepted the cultural primacy of Egypt." This acknowledgement also extends to Greek religious and spiritual life as Herodotus affirms that the "names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt" and Homer reminisces in his Iliad on the annual feast given by African gods for all the gods of the world:
For Zeus had yesterday to Ocean�s bounds
Set forth to feast with Ethiop�s faultless men,
And he was followed there by all the gods�
Diop therefore insists that the African World does not "present� itself in history as an insolvent debtor." He summarises the impact of Kemet on Greece and other spheres of human history as follows:
Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurian materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science. One needs only to meditate on Osiris, the [Kemetic] redeemer-god, who sacrifices himself, dies, and is resurrected to save mankind, a figure essentially identifiable with Christ. A visitor to Thebes in the Valley of the Kings can view the Moslem inferno in detail (in the tomb of Seti I, of the Nineteenth Dynasty), 1700 years before the Koran. Osiris at the tribunal of the dead is indeed "lord" of revealed religions, sitting enthroned on Judgement Day...
Yet, Kemet was no isolated African phenomenon, a flash-in-the-pan in an historical landscape! Kemet emerged from the "lands of the gods", itself evolving from the "complex interior womb of the African motherland." Following the overrun of Kemet by a succession of external invaders, the essential embodiments and institutions of the kingdom "retreated" south to Nubia from where they survived until the 16th century as three functioning states.
The relationship between the Kemetic civilisation and the civilisations that would emerge in west Africa (3500 miles away) at the beginning of the last millennium, offers Diop the opportunity to contribute to another arena of African scholarship � this time on the subject of migration and the extensive range of correspondences and affinities that exists between the cultural heritage of Kemet and those of west Africans as we have already shown here. Focusing on the first half of the last millennium in his book on the region entitled L�Afrique noire pr�coloniale, 1960 (English translation: Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States, 1987), Diop carries out an illuminating comparative study between the leading west African post-Kemet "successor" states and leading European states of the era. Utilising such indices as the relative levels of social production, nature of state organisation, access to/accumulation and distribution of wealth, treatment of peoples (particularly national and racial minorities) and tolerance for varying religions and belief systems, Diop establishes that these African states were either comparable or well in advance of their European contemporaries. The importance of this study cannot be overstated considering that within a century after the end of the epoch of its focus, west Africa was the target of the catastrophic European enslavement and exportation of millions of Africans to the Americas and elsewhere, the prelude to the ultimate European conquest and occupation of the whole of Africa.
Diop left France for home in 1960 soon after S�n�gal�s restoration of independence at the end of the French occupation. He became the director of the radiocarbon laboratory of the African institute at Dakar University where he continued his work on Kemet and the rest of Africa. He participated in the historic 1974 UNESCO-sponsored international symposium on Kemet where his paper on the origins of its people (see UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. II, 1981) is a distinct summary of his research and publications on the subject. Also in 1974, Diop published Les Fodements �conomiques et culturels d�un Etat f�d�ral d�Afrique Noire (translated into English in 1987 as Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State) which sketches the enormous extent of African capacity for reconstruction, despite centuries of conquest.
Evidently, Diop�s scholarship has inaugurated a new school in the study of Africa and its peoples which breaches the restrictive contours of "African Studies" whose epistemology has been largely content with the codification of the West�s overall evaluation of European World-African World relations in the past 500 years. Diop�s, instead, is a scholarship of interrogation, retrieval and redirection; it is African-centred: "African peoples and interests [are] viewed as actors and agency in human history rather than as marginal to European historical experience," as theorist Molefi Kete Asante has succinctly put it.
Diop has had a tremendous impact on African scholarship subsequently. Several African World scholars in varying disciplines in Africa, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere now consider "African-centredness" as paramount in their methodology. Diop died in 1986 and the Dakar University where he worked for 26 years was renamed Chiekh Anta Diop University in his memory.
Professor Ekwe-Ekwe's new book, Biafra Revisited, is published in May 2006
