In 1981 I interviewed the world-renowned Egyptologist, Professor Cheik Anta Diop, in his small and cramped office in his laboratory in Dakar, Senegal. He had gone to secondary school in Dakar before going to France for higher studies and research. While at school he was so brilliant that he scored distinction grades in all Arts and Science subjects.
Because he wished to study all subjects, arranging examinations for him was a nightmare for school authorities, for he had to run from finishing sitting one examination to starting another. It is this brilliance that made the French colonial authorities take him into their exclusive laboratory for conducting secret research into nuclear power in Paris.
His contemporaries in Paris included the poets Aime Cesaire (from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean) and Leopold Sedar Senghor his fellow Senegalese. Both were also studying in exclusive schools for training future France’s elite. Anta Diop recalled always hearing Cesaire, Senghor and their other mates from France’s colonies, discussing the subject of Africa’s cultural dignity.
They were very animated by a study done by a French anthropologist about cultures of ethnic groups in the Brittany region of France. The fact that anthropologists could also study ethnic groups in France, and not only the “backward” peoples of Africa, fired Senghor’s imagination.
The group invented “negritude” as a cultural reality whose essence it was their responsibility to reconstruct by looking back into the depths and genius of Africa’s rural communities and empires. Their enthusiasm jolted him into asking what role his field of nuclear science research could do in the effort to reclaim the cultural and historical dignity of black Africans. His quest led him to the museum of natural sciences and civilisation in Paris.
A special treasure was held there waiting to be given speech by his genius. Bodies of the rulers of ancient Egypt had been looted by Napoleon’s troops when they invaded Egypt and were brought to be housed in the museum. It occurred to him that he could intervene in the struggle between Greece, Rome and Germany for the dignity of mothering Western civilisation by being the creators of the civilisation of ancient Egypt.
Those who wished to see Greece as the source of European civilisation run into the problem of philosophers and scholars of Ancient Greece all reported to have travelled to Ancient Egypt to learn Mathematics, Medicine and Philosophy as well as architecture and forms of government. It seemed so patently obvious to Anta Diop that since the Nile flowed down from the plateau of East and Central Africa into the Mediterranean Sea, it may very well be that the civilisation of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had been built by peoples who came down the River Nile and settled in its Delta.
To settle this question he decided to use his techniques of nuclear science research to study the skins of the ancient Egyptian mummies. The Egyptians had developed the science of stopping human bodies from decomposing. And so it is that Cheik Anta Diop proposed this subject for his doctoral thesis. It’s very subversive potential was immediately obvious to his professors. They raise many obstacles. To overcome them he went back to his secondary school habit of hopping from one intellectual field to another.
And so it is that he studied the history of Egypt in relation to the countries on the coast opposite its Mediterranean coast. He studied Ancient Egyptian writing, the Hieroglyphics, Anthropology and classical Greek language and literature. He needed to protect his thesis from attacks from any of these disciplines.
He also studied blood types of various races in order to be able to assert that only black Africans had the B+ blood group that he found in the skins of the Pharaohs. Moreover, he could assert authoritatively that only black Africans shared the chemical called melanin which he found in the skin samples of the Egyptian mummies.
His doctoral thesis became a zone of intense intellectual warfare between him and his French professors. But they had to bend to the brilliance of his case and the integrity of his scientific findings. In 1972 Unesco convened an international conference in Cairo, Egypt, of world renowned scholars of Egyptology, to hear and possibly refute Cheik Anta Diop’s thesis.
Its title was The Negro Origin of civilisation. Anta Diop came to the battle field accompanied by his research collaborator and student, Theophilus Obenga, from Central African Republic. The Organisation of African Unity at its 1966 conference in Dakar honoured Cheik Anta Diop for his contribution to affirming the dignity of the black African. He had asserted 'that Europe was a zone of barbarism while Black Africa held a flourishing civilisation in Ancient Egypt for three thousand years before the birth of Christ and which gave education to Europe and Western civilisation'.
He was well ahead of Leakey’s affirmation that man began his journey into history from East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge. It was one thing to prove a scientific truth in far away Paris and later Cairo; it was another to mention the subject in French colonies and former French colonies. The notion that the ancestors of those who rule France, the Gauls, were not the source of civilisation but were even behind Greece and Rome in learning it from an Ancient Egypt that was ruled by black Africans, was too shocking and humiliating to be allowed to be uttered, written or read.
Empires need their golden lies to justify the domination of its subject. Cheik Anta Diop dared to deny and subvert this glorified lie. As a politician, Leopold Sedar Senghor understood the limits of his power when confronted with the wrath of the rulers of France. He followed instructions not to allow Cheik Anta Diop to teach in any educational institution in Senegal. Rulers of other former French colonies followed his wish. Cheik Anta Diop was not allowed to lecture in their universities, including those in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Congo.
For the twenty years that Senghor ruled Senegal (1960-1980), Cheik Anta Diop was not allowed to lecture at the University of Dakar. The laboratory he used, he told me, which did carbon dating for archaeologists and geologists from all across Africa had been donated to him by the government of Sweden due to pressure by scientists in that country.
The gravity of this matter would be manifested in 1976 during the Festival of Black Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria. Although it was being funded by the government of Nigeria, Senghor and his French allies fought to prevent Cheik Anta Diop from presenting a paper at the Colloquium on black civilisation. He was too lethal to French cultural and ideological diplomacy to be allowed to infect others.
In 1986 Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. As part of sharing his honour, the governments of Nigeria and France combined with Unesco to assemble poets, novelists and dramatists from all across Africa to hold a celebration in Lagos. I joined hands with Chinwezu (a Nigeria scholar and public intellectual) and Professor Onoge (a Marxist Sociologist) and drafted a short resolution which called on ministries of education in African countries to integrate Cheik Anta Diop’s writings into school curricula and ensure the easy availability of his books.
The French delegation was so infuriated by this initiative that they lined up all the writers whose air fare they had paid to vote against the resolution. Voting by secret ballot was not acceptable. The Nigerian government delegation was not too enthusiastic about irritating France over a matter which Soyinka himself was probably indifferent to. We lost the vote.
With regards to Uganda, which claims the source of River Nile, it is perplexing that its premier university Makerere has shown little interest in Egyptology. Cheik Anta Diop was never mentioned; never invited to present lectures or seminars. Distinguished archaeologists who made their name while conducting research from Makerere, including Merrck Posnansky, ignored the very lucrative field of digging up ancient tombs of the Pharaohs.
It is hard to believe that they were not aware that museums in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York – to take a wide geographical and transcontinental sweep – were competing vigorously over acquiring and hosting the latest finds from excavations into these tombs. The Pharaohs practiced a habit which is widespread in Africa (from contemporary Benin in Nigeria to Buganda Kingdom) which holds that when a ruler dies she or he travelled with the things and persons that served her or him to the afterlife (what Professor Ali Mazrui had called “After Africa”).
In pyramids we were led into in 1971, during a visit to Cairo, we could see beautiful paintings of giraffes, hippos, ducks, butterflies, birds which populated a Pharaoh’s environment, as well as household goods). Women and servants were buried with the Pharoah to continue providing service as she or he travelled to “After Africa”. In Buganda those who prosper under a Kabaka often had those items of wealth “looted” or shared by others as soon as it is known that a Kabaka had died (or “the drum had burst”).
American universities have invested enormous research funds in analysing pharmaceutical drugs used by Ancient Egyptians. They have studied seeds and other agricultural products found inside pyramids. They have studied mummies in search of clues to diseases that afflicted Ancient Egyptians.
It is amazing that none of these American universities on the forefront of this field of research (including the University of Chicago where Professor Apolo Nsibambi and the later Professor Gingyera Pinycwa studied), have sought to build similar capacity at Makerere University in the last 50 years of Uganda’s independence. Cheik Anta Diop showed me sketches of women’s hair styles he photographed from inside Pyramids and other sources. Women’s facial marks for beauty, colour and modes of dress were, he insisted, traceable to Ethiopia and East Africa, including the Great Lakes region.
He was convinced that while Ancient Greek scholars, like Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and others, wrote about their days as students in Ancient Egypt and affirmed that black Africans were the rulers, mathematicians, architects and religious thinkers of that Egypt, later European scholars were forced by economic interests associated with slave trade across the Atlantic to hide such writings and attributions. Racism against Black African power rose after the 17th Century.
The celebration of Uganda’s independence at 50 should be marked by terminating this silence. I recall visiting Atlanta University in 1989 after attending a conference of the American branch of the African Studies Association. I was struck by black female students wearing T-Shits with quotations taken from Cheik Anta Diop’s writings. As one student told me “Can you imagine how proud I am to know that the architecture used to build the White House where our Presidents work and live is taken from the Ancient Egypt ruled by black people?”.
The psychological income held inside Cheik Anta Diop’s work is enormous and explosive for rebuilding pride inside minds of Africa’s youths everywhere. That power is now widely called “soft power” in the world of global diplomacy.
Ugandans and Africans everywhere tasted it when a young lad with a skinny body but hugely dramatic wit ended the London marathon race to the tape with Uganda’s national flag billowing above his glowing face. Cheik Anta Diop was probably also cheering knowingly from “After Egypt-Africa”. Makerere University must honour Uganda and Eastern Africa by investing in studies of Egyptology, including joining in conducting archaeological excavation across Egypt’s Nile valley and desert.