“The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974) is a book by Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese Egyptologist. It makes the case that both mankind and civilization started with black people. It argues that Ancient Egypt was largely Black African in race and culture during the first 2,000 years of its civilization.
Diop’s model goes like this:
- Homo sapiens began in Africa and began as black people. It was as black people that they spread over Asia and Europe, taking the place of the Neanderthals.
- The rise of different races: Over time black people in northern Eurasia became light-skinned and began to look like the people who live there today.
- Between -3000 and -1500, the region stretching from North Africa through the South West Asia to India became civilized: Egypt, Canaan, Elam, Indus, etc. People were dark-skinned, like they still are today in Ethiopia and southern India. The Bible calls them the sons of Ham. The Greeks saw them as Ethiopians of one sort or other.
- After -1500 this region has become whiter over time as wave after wave of light-skinned barbarians over thousands of years have come down from the north. In India people were separated into light- and dark-skinned castes. Elsewhere they have mixed more thoroughly.
- Egyptian civilization spreads north of the Sahara to Western Europe by way of Greece and south of the Sahara to West Africa by way of Nubia.
I have written a post on each chapter:
- Diop: What were the Egyptians? – the ancients saw the Egyptians as closely related to the Ethiopians
- Diop: Birth of the Negro Myth – where the idea that black people are incapable comes from
- Diop: Modern Falsification of History – how European scholars in the 1800s began to distance Egypt from the rest of Africa
- Diop: Origination in the Delta? – Egyptian civilization did not start in the Delta
- Diop: An Asian Origin? – civilization did not come from Mesopotamia
- Diop: Egyptian Race Seen by Anthropologists – there is no proof from science that Egyptians were mostly white when civilization arose there
- Diop: Arguments for a Negro Origin – Ancient Egypt was rooted in African culture, not Asian or European culture
- Diop: Arguments Against a Negro Origin -Diop knocks these down
- Diop: Peopling of Africa from the Nile Valley – particularly from the country now called Sudan
- Diop: Evolution of Ancient Egypt – mostly about the whitening of Egypt
- Diop: Contribution of Ethiopia-Nubia and Egypt – the idea of “the Greek miracle” is rooted in a white racist reading of history
- Diop: Reply to a Critic – replies to French historian Raymond Mauny of the Sorbonne
- Diop: Early History of Humanity: Evolution of the Black World – how mankind started out black and stayed that way for a long time
Even apart from how right or wrong Diop is, the book is an excellent account of how whites twist history and science for their own ends and why blacks need to write and know their own history.
See also:
Kwamla made the following comment on this thread. It got stuck in the spam filter and for some reason I cannot move it out, so I am cutting and pasting it in:
Abagond,
This an excellent contribution to fully understanding and appreciating the contributions of Black/African peoples in the formation and construction of civilisation world wide…
There is widespread ignorance, denial and mis-information in this area. Due in no small part to the role racism and the defunct ideology white supremacy has played in the de-construction of human society and how we understand our ourselves.
There is still much more to be revealed in this area of study as much of my own research has begun to uncover…
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Thanks Abagond I was wondering what had happened to that!!!
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^ The MAN is trying to keep Kwamla down! That’s why he’s stuck in the spam filter! It’s comment Cointelpro!!!
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@King,
Its strange I know there was definitely something going on. I tried posting that comment several times but it said it was already posted – so it was not accepting duplicate comments!!!
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AHA! Like I said!!!
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Fight the powah! 😀
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Nice article
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Whitewashing of Egypt’s black history.Diop’s findings are controversial, there is so much history that has been removed, denied and disrespected in regard to Africa and it part in of human civilization.
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In Joseph Conrad’s Illustrious Book: The Heart of Darkness, European Sanglant Barbarism was bluntly exposed sadically and shedding light as well on Europe’s perdurant ungratefulness toward Africa. For instance, the Majority of France’s economical hegemony emanate from Francophone Africa. Yes indeed Black Francophone Africa liberated France from the hands of the Nazis whilst France’s hero De Gaule was in exile in England. As Dr. Chinua Achebe decried it in: Things fall apart and in the other hand Dr. Cheick Anta Diop in his: The origin of Blacks in Civilisation or even in Civilisation or Barbarism. As illustrated in this brief video presentation by Leonardo Mulaja: (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fKNuMYXjQEk)
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May we remind these Racist European Legislators of today and Anti-Africans par excellence: that it is through the Blood, Sweat and Wounds of our Forefathers and Grand Fathers’Sale that Great Cities such as: London, Liverpool, Manchester, Lille, Marseille, Amsterdam, Roterdam just to name were built yet today we Africans have to go through humiliating screenings to get a Visa to Europe? Absolute European Parochialism!
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It is as well true that the most dangerous people are not laymen but rather intellectuals who twist unethical the true information and fetter them so as to undermine the altruism in this case how the Europeans virtued to ensure tjayt all irrefutably and indelible contributions of Africa be erased. Pseudo intellectualism because as matter of facts: the first ever university is Alhazar in Cairo Egypt, the second AlQawayiri in Marakech -Morrocco and the most prestigious Timbuktu in Mali, a country that had the richest ever man on record: Emperoro Kanka Moussa who on pilgrame passing via Egypt donated half of a ton of Gold. What about the fact that AIDS with all promiscuity of Europeans who hate condoms does not spread as in Africa? Pythagoras, Socrates, Ptolomeo, Hippocrates were some rejects from Alexandria who pillaged Egyptian Libraries and took them to Greece. And as of matter of fact, the Incas, Aztecs and Maya before Christ had already drawings of Black People. What about the several Pyramids of Egypt? The majestous buildings of Monomotapa? The captivating Tchokwe, Bakuba, Baluba, Lunda, Kongo Masks?
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@ Leonardo Mulaja
Thanks for mentioning Kanka Moussa aka Mansa Musa Emperor of the Malian Empire at its height.
Abagond, you’ve done a post on Abubakari II. Would you consider a post on Mansa Musa? In 2012, Emperor Mansa Musa was listed as the richest person in history with an estimated net worth of 400 billion dollars.
His pilgrimage to Mecca was a major event in the Muslim world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mansa-musa-worlds-richest-man-all-time_n_1973840.html
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@ Afrofem
I have no immediate plans to do a post on Mansa Musa but I am bound to do one on him sooner or later.
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@Abagond
I look forward to reading it whenever it gets published.
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What’s so special about Mansa Musa? He was a dumb black guy with too much money who spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, on the wrong type of people because he was insecure.
Malik Ambar was way more interesting. He started out as a slave and rose to Peshwa (prime minister). He married his daughter to the king he had placed on the throne, killed said king and his favorite Persian wife for talking sh*t about him, built a city now called Aurangabad, engineered the water works for said city, pioneered the use of rockets as weapons of war in India, kept the Deccan from the clutches of the Mogul emperors, starting with the great Akbar and kept the European powers in check! He even established a tax system based on how productive the farmer’s land was. Not bad for a little black boy from Oromia!
Abagond will not do a post on Ambar because he won’t be able to show that whites thwarted him.
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@ gro jo
“He was a dumb black guy with too much money who spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, on the wrong type of people because he was insecure.”
LOL! Good point.
I’ve read writers and historians who blamed Mansa Musa’s ostentatious pilgrimage to Mecca for helping to destroy the empires of West Africa. Their reasoning is that he revealed the enormous wealth of West Africa and invited Arab and later European plunder that continues to this day.
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@ gro jo
Considering how the Oromo are treated at this point in history, Malik Ambar’s story would be interesting to read and study.
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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Great book! It blew my mind with the information.
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[…] Myth vs Reality at the University of Cape Town (UCT): Are ‘materialist’ black South African students shunning ‘biological’ and conservation-related subjects? […]
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