Quotes from Cheikh Anta Diop

Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.

Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.

Only a loyal, determined struggle to destroy cultural aggression and bring out the truth, whatever it may be, is revolutionary and consonant with real progress; it is the only approach which opens on to the universal. Humanitarian declarations are not called for and add nothing to real progress.

In the Nile Valley, civilization resulted from man's adaptation to that particular milieu. As declared by the Ancients and by the Egyptians themselves, it originated in Nubia. This is confirmed by our knowledge that the basic elements of Egyptian civilization are neither in Lower Egypt, nor in Asia, nor in Europe, but in Nubia and the heart of Africa; moreover, that is where we find the animals and plants represented in hieroglyphic writing....

If modern civilization should disappear today, but leave libraries untouched, survivors could open almost any book and perceive immediately that persons living south of the Sahara are called "Blacks." The term "Black Africa" would suffice to indicate the habitat of the Black race. Nothing similar is found in Egyptian texts. Whenever the Egyptians use the word "Black" (khem), it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the Blacks.

By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, 'Tarikh es-Soudan' cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…

In the Lake Debo region (in Mali, on the Niger), pyramids are also found, and these were dubbed "mounds," as might be expected. This is the usual procedure in the attempt to disparage African values. In contrast, there is the reverse procedure consisting of describing a clay tumulus—a real mound—in Mesopotamia, as the most perfect temple that the human mind can imagine. It goes without saying that such reconstructions are generally mere wishful thinking.

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...

If the African anthropologist made a point of examining European races "under the magnifying glass," he would be able to multiply them ad infinitum by grouping physiognomies into races and subraces as artificially as his European counterpart does with regard to Africa. He would, in turn, succeed in dissolving collective European reality into a fog of insignificant facts.

Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists, and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence, the understanding of African society.

there are no fruitful speculations outside of reality.

Pharaoh Chephren (circa 2600 B.C., Fourth Dynasty), who built the second Giza pyramid.

Yet the documents at our disposal allow us to do that practically without any break in continuity for a period of two thousand years, at least insofar as West Africa is concerned. Therefore, it had become indispensable to unfreeze, in a manner of speaking to defossilize that African history which was there at hand, lifeless, imprisoned in the documents.

Egypt's prestige abroad was so intact that the "King" of Tyre declared: "All industries came from Egypt and all sciences first shone forth there" (cf. Pirenne, II, 505).

La conscience morale de l'humanité progresse, lentement mais sûrement...