The pharaohs were black: How one scholar reclaimed Africa’s past

Cheikh Anta Diop advocated a single federal state of Black Africa and fought colonialism with his books

“One can no longer see ‘darkest Africa’ set against a ‘deep dark past’,” wrote Senegalese historian and philosopher Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986), one of the key figures in Pan-Africanism. His words resonate like a manifesto that proclaims: Africa was a center of civilizational development long before the arrival of Europeans. Diop believed that the narrative of an*”underdeveloped continent” *was just a political construct, and dedicated his life to debunking this myth.

Under French rule

Cheikh Anta Diop was born on December 29, 1923, in the village of Thieytou, Senegal. By that time, the territory had been under French control for several decades. The French conquest of Senegal spanned two and a half centuries, beginning with the establishment of the first trading post in Saint-Louis in 1659.

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By the end of the 19th century, the entire territory of modern Senegal was under colonial rule. In 1895, it became part of French West Africa, an administrative entity stretching from the Atlantic coast to Lake Chad.

The French administration implemented a policy of ‘assimilation’, aiming to transform local elites into conduits of the metropole’s cultural expansion. The ‘*white man’s mission’ *revolved around introducing the ‘savages’ to French culture – however, not as ‘citizens’ with equal rights, but merely as ‘subjects’ benefiting from the ‘benevolent’ influence of culture. Only those who adopted the metropole’s culture were labeled ‘developed’ and granted access to civil society. Diop would later rise against this cultural imposition.

The region where Diop was born boasted rich intellectual traditions. From the 11th to 15th centuries, the territory of present-day Senegal was a major crossroads of interaction between the West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, as well as the states of the Wolof, Serer, and Toucouleur peoples. The region thrived thanks to trans-Saharan trade, agriculture, and pastoralism. Mosques were built, and intellectual centers sprang up around them.

‘Governor’s Palace of Saint Louis, Senegal’ by Auguste Victor Deroy, Le Tour du Monde, 1882. © Legion-Media / Alamy / Old Books Images

Spiritual roots of the brotherhood

Diop was named after his uncle, Cheikh Anta M’Bake. His family belonged to the Mouride brotherhood, which Diop regarded as the only independent Muslim brotherhood in Africa.

Tariqa (from Arabic tarīqa, meaning ‘path’) is a Sufi spiritual tradition that unites murids (disciples) around the marabout (their spiritual guide). Resistance to European colonization catalyzed the formation of new tariqas (Sufi orders) in Africa, including the Mouride brotherhood. It was founded in 1883 by Amadou Bamba Mbacké – a relative of Diop. Amadou Bamba was born in the village of Mbacké into a family of a marabout from the Qadiri order, the oldest order in Senegal.

Men of Baye Fall play and dance with the women of the community and sing ‘Dukat’, Mbake, Senegal, April 22, 2003. © Yoray Liberman / Getty Images

The French colonial authorities viewed Amadou Bamba and the Mourides as a threat. The influence of his persona and the brotherhood was so significant that colonial administrators feared a potential jihad. As a result, he was arrested and exiled – first to Gabon, then to Mauritania, and later placed under house arrest in Senegal until 1912. Diop’s uncle faced a similar fate, being expelled from Senegal to Gabon.

The Mourides managed to overcome repression and form a union that was influential both in the religious and economic aspects. A love for work was among the brotherhood’s ideological foundations, and it also shaped Diop’s views.

People gather to commemorate the spiritual rank believed to have been attained by Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of the Mouride Sufi order, during his exile by the French colonial administration, in Touba, Senegal, August 13, 2025. © Cem Ozdel / Anadolu via Getty Images

Clash with the metropole

Diop first studied at a Quranic school, then graduated from the University of Dakar, and later from the Sorbonne. In 1946, at the age of 23, he left for Paris. He studied not only the humanities but also developed an interest in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Diop combined his studies at the Department of Higher Mathematics with the study of Egyptology and Linguistics at the Department of Philosophy.

Diop’s teachers included the leading thinkers of the era: historian Henri Lhote, ethnologist Marcel Griaule, and physicist Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The wave of decolonization had already begun, but had not yet gained full force. The ideas that had driven colonization still dominated Parisian educational institutions at the time – for example, the ‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’ (1853-1855) by Arthur de Gobineau, who laid the foundations of racial theory.

Arthur de Gobineau. © Legion-Media / Alamy / Abbus Acastra

In the late 1940s, Diop co-founded the journal Présence Africaine – a publication that provided African scholars with a platform for public debate denied to them by academic journals.

It was in this journal that Diop first published his essay ‘A Linguistic Study of the Ouolove: The Origin of the Language and Race of the Valaf’, dedicated to the history and culture of his native people. The journal became a space for testing Diop’s ideas about the ‘*African origins of civilization’ *and the significance of Ancient Egypt. He first spoke about the need to use and develop African languages in his article ‘When Can We Talk About an African Renaissance?’

Presence Africaine cover. © Wikipedia / Présence Africaine / Fair use

What is Afrocentrism?

Diop chose to return and work in Senegal to construct African history from the perspective of Africans themselves, rather than through imposed Eurocentrism. Thus, armed with knowledge derived from various academic disciplines, he fought colonialism not only in its external manifestations but also sought to liberate minds.

Afrocentrism is an intellectual and political concept that affirms the primacy of an African cultural and historical perspective in the study of humanity’s past.

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Diop’s reflections on the history of Egypt and its connection to Western Sudan (based on archaeological, linguistic, historical, and geological data), his rejection of demeaning ideas about the ‘primitive’ cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, and his assertion of the independence and primacy of African civilizations, their fundamental significance, and their influence on human development formed the foundations of Afrocentrism.

In 1954, Diop published his first book, ‘Nations Nègres et Culture’. The historian postulated the primacy of African cultures, especially ancient Egyptian culture, in shaping humanity’s cultural heritage. According to his position, civilizations arose on the African continent. *“These first Black civilizations were the first civilizations in the world, the development of Europe having been held back by the last Ice Age, a matter of a hundred thousand years.” *It followed from this that Europe’s civilizing mission and its ‘imposition’ of education were conceptually untenable.

The University of Dakar library building.

“All the classes of Egyptian society belonged to the same Black race”

Diop advanced the thesis that the civilization of Ancient Egypt was founded by black people. Drawing on linguistics and anthropology, the historian argued that the population of Egypt in the predynastic period was Negroid.

“The typically Negroid features of the pharaohs Narmer, 1st dynasty, the founder of the line of pharaohs, Djoser, 3rd dynasty (with him all the technological elements of Egyptian civilisation were already in place), Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid (of Cameroonian type), show that all the classes of Egyptian society belonged to the same Black race,” he wrote. According to Diop, social structures that later spread to other African cultures were first developed in the Nile Valley.

The Pharaoh Djoser, from the Pyramid and Mortuary Complex of Djoser at Saqqara. © DeAgostini / Getty Images

Among his major works, which shed light on the history of the development of African state formations, are ‘Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern State’, and ‘Civilization or Barbarism: an Authentic Anthropology’.

Diop sought to restore the true role of Africa and its peoples in human history and wanted others to recognize Africa’s contribution to world culture. The works of Russian scholars also aided Diop in his scientific research and in confirming his hypotheses. For example, in one of his works, Diop cites Soviet Arabist Vasily Struve.

He wrote, “Since V. V. Struve published the ‘Papyrus of Moscow’, the international scientific community knows with certainty that two thousand years before Archimedes, the Egyptians had already established the rigorous formulae of the area of the sphere: S = 4xR2… Struve writes: ‘Also, we must admit that in mechanics the Egyptians had more knowledge than we wanted to believe.’”

“The history of Black Africa has been written with dates as dry as laundry lists”

Without the liberation of consciousness, the liberation from colonial shackles remains a formality. European colonial systems deliberately alienated the African peoples from their culture and artificially constructed a ‘colonial identity’. They cultivated the idea that the culture of the metropole was Africa’s culture, and denied the existence of a local cultural and intellectual heritage.

Behind this approach, Diop saw the deep mechanism of colonialism. Restoring historical memory was for him part of the national liberation struggle. He wrote, “Until now (1960), 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.”

Defending the idea of cultural continuity among Africans, Diop advocated for a single federal state of Black Africa. The idea for this project was revealed in the 1974 work ‘Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State’.

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The political goal became the main driver of his historical research. Diop pursued three interrelated goals: to dispel colonial prejudices about Africa and restore historical pride to its peoples; to identify common cultural traits that could become the foundation of pan-African unity; and to draw lessons from early political and economic models that would help build a future state.

Diop turned to the experience of the USSR as an example of self-reliant development and of building national identity while preserving local cultures. “It will be possible appropriately to choose one of the major African tongues and promote it to the level of sole governmental and cultural language for the entire continent. It will cover all territorial languages in the same way that Russian is overlaid on the language of each Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union,” he wrote.

Diop vs Senghor

Diop came from an environment that the colonial authorities tried to declare non-existent. A Muslim scholar from a Sufi brotherhood with a centuries-old intellectual tradition, he was able to increase his knowledge and substantiate the untruthfulness of the colonial position.

Long before French administrators declared Africa a ‘dark continent without a past’, strong mechanisms of knowledge transmission based on religious teachings existed throughout Africa and in Western Sudan.

Diop combined scientific and political activities. He founded the opposition Bloc of the Senegalese Masses and became its secretary general. In 1962, the scientist was imprisoned for opposing the pro-French course of then President Leopold Senghor. His party, The National Democratic Rally, was officially recognized only in 1981, after Senghor left office.

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The relationship between the two thinkers was difficult. Diop rejected the doctrine of Negritude developed in part by Senghor. Instead, he advocated an African renaissance based on the development of African languages.

To this day, Diop’s works remain the subject of heated debate and give a powerful impetus to the development of science in Africa. The Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, IFAN), created by the colonial administration, was renamed Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in 1987 in honor of the scientist.