Sheikh Anta Diop: A Critical View of Africa In the Twenty

Library of Congress
ISSN 1554-0391
SHEIKH ANTA DIOP: A CRITICAL VIEW OF AFRICA IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
François N. Muyumba
Indiana State University
Terre Haute, IN 47809
Sheikh Anta Diop: A Vision of Africa in The 21st Century
For us the return to Egypt in every domain is the necessary condition to
reconcile African civilization With history...Egypt will play the same role
in the rethinking and renewing of African culture that ancient Greece and
Rome play in the culture of the West. (Diop)
I.
INTRODUCTION
Sheikh Anta Diop’s classical African Studies has given a significant
importance to the foundations of the global African study and research commonly
referred to as Africology. Defined as the scientific studies of Africa and African
people and their cultures throughout the world, Africology has appeared in the
last thirty years under different labels such as African Studies, Black Studies,
African-American Studies, African Studies, Egyptology, and Pan-African Studies.
Among its outstanding contributors and tenors are John Henry Clarke, former
professor at Hunter College, Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies
(1984); and Molefi Kete Asante’s Kemete Afrocentricity and knowledge (1990),
Ivan Van Serbia’s Nile Valleys Civilizations (1985) and Egypt Revisited (1989),
without neglecting Basil Davidson’s Africa In History (1990), and Ali Mazrui’s,
The Africans (1986) and others who have enriched all of us with their translations,
interpretations and analyses of Diop’s classical works on Ancient Egypt. As
Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies (1993) observes,
“One of the most important challenging developments in
Black Studies since the decade of the 60’s is the emergence in
the 80’s of incre4sed intellectual and academic stress on the
Study of Classical African \Civilizations, especially Egypt.
Classes on Egypt in Black Studies departments and programs
have increased and include history, culture, art, literature,
language, religion and ethical philosophy.” (Karenga, 1993: 50)
Diop stands tall as a towering tree in a huge and thick forest of classical scholars.
He remains by himself a symbol of scholarly resistance and self-indulgence that
was determined to challenge through systematic study analysis and presentation
of new contrary evidences to the chronic distortions injected into the history and
culture of Africa by classical western studies as well by the explorers and
colonizers. His Africa-centered study of Egypt is just that, and needs not be
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categorized by any other label. In his analysis Egypt is a classical African
civilization.
In this present study, Diop is regarded as being a Pan-African nationalist
in the truest sense. In his major works, Civilization or Barbarisms, he outlines a
series of arguments for the African character of Egypt and its importance to
African and world history.
First, Diop argues, “…evidence of physical anthropology –i.e.—
iconography, melanin dosage tests, osteological (bone) measurements and blood
group tests, reveal a definite Africanness of Egypt” (1989:9). Secondly, he further
presents linguistic evidence that proves that Egyptians identified themselves as
“kmtyw or kemetiu—Black people. This word stems from “km”—the Ancient
Egyptian word for dark or black. Diop posits that European writers such as
Aristotle, Appoll0dorus, Strobe, Diodorus, etc., deliberately distorted the meaning
of “km” as black. Eurocentric writers preferred to use “Rmt” and Kmt., which
they translated variously as “people of the country of black” or people of the
black land or fertile land (Diop, 1989:20).
Thirdly, Diop used the eyewitness accounts found in reports of Greek and Latin
writers who described the Egyptians as having defiant hair, bold lips, and thin
legs, all characteristics of Africans (Diop 1989:167). Fourthly, Diop offers the
Biblical evidence, which states that the sons of Hem were Kush and Misraim; for
example, the Jews, he asserts, lived side by side with Egyptians and did not have
any interest in misrepresenting their African ethnicity (Diop 1989:22). Fifthly,
Diop argues that cultural similarities prove the African character of Egypt. These
characteristics included major common elements shared with other African
cultural practices such as circumcision, divine kingships, totemism, matrilineal
focus, cosmogonies, architecture and musical instruments, and religious practices
(Diop, 1989:22 and 1974:53).
Diop points to the linguistic affinity of ancient Egyptian with the Wolof
language spoken in the Western African country of Senegal on the bank of
Atlantic Ocean. He argues that Wolof speakers are Black Africans and should not
be ignored, especially as a greater number of their lexical items etc are shared
with ancient Egyptian, or language of the Nile. It also possible to argue that
Egyptian is not Semitic in origins; it displays an underlying structure that has a
non-accidental relationship to African languages. (Diop, 1989:23). Furthermore,
Diop offers artistic evidence by presenting Egyptian sculpture and painting to
expose the prototypical Africanoid features of the ancient Egyptians and their
similarities to some Nubians. Since Africa has been recognized as the first home
of humankind, the existence of minor and sharp differences in skin tone and bone
structures are all self-explanatory. (Diop) Finally, Egypt is also geographically
located within Africa. Historical efforts to remove Egypt and Ethiopia from
Africa, and place them elsewhere is regarded by Diop as the motivating reason
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why he concluded that the return to Egypt in all fields is a necessary condition to
achieve three mains goals:
To reconcile African civilizations with history, by for example, ending
the great falsification of African Human history.
2. To enable Africans to build a body of modern human sciences.
3. To renew African Culture.
1.
It is possible to conclude that far from diversion of the past, Diop saw the casting
of a scientific examination toward Ancient Egypt as an opportunity to conceive
and build an African cultural future. “Thus, having recovered Egypt, Egypt will
play in a recovered and renewed African culture the role that the Greco-Latin
ancient past plays in western Culture.” (Diop 1987).
As for me, Diop’s legacy to African scholars is a challenge to not only
prove otherwise wrong assumptions and judgments by those who have the power
to water down everything African, but also for them to reconsider the rejected
Africa’s traditional and cultural continuum from the banks of the Nile to the
banks of the Niger, the Congo, Limpopo, Zambezi, Kasai, Lualaba, Orange, and
why not Mississippi and Ohio.
In this discussion, my attempt is to briefly outline Dr. Sheikh Anta
Diop’s critical vision of Africa in the 21st Century by examining his global
contribution to the classical study of Africa and its impact on his projections for
the present and future of the continent, its peoples, and their place in the world.
This discussion is based upon the following five general assumptions:
1. Diop’s classical works on Egypt constitute a logical progression of
Pan-Africanist Dream to bring back Ethiopia and Egypt within the
African culture, civilizations and history.
2. Diop’s scientific methods dissect the past in order to determine the
meaning of the present and its destiny.
3. Diop’s vision for the future is influenced by the knowledge that the
relevance of the past is determined by the actual reality of the moment.
4. The African philosophy and way of life predispose Africans to live in
harmony with their present, and the past in anticipation and
preparation for a better tomorrow.
5. Contemporary Africa is the most binding reality of the moment to the
Ancient Egyptian civilizations and cultural experiences to the future.
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II.
DIOP’S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND VISION
Diop’s classical studies of Egypt is preceded only by Robert Alexander
Young’s Ethiopian Manifesto, David Walker’s Appeal (Sterling Stuckey, 1972),
and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which
called for a return to things African in the 1920’s. All of these works form
undeniably the ideological foundation of African nationalism that rose first
simultaneously in Africa itself during the resistance to enslavement, and
colonization, and in the Diaspora as a vigorously anti-slavery sentiment and then
resulted in the abolitionist movement.
Robert Young published the Ethiopian1 Manifesto in February 1829. His
work expressed his deep concern over the status, role, and significance of the life
and experience of the African people throughout the world. What stands out about
Young (1829) is that he was religious to the point of being oracular. As Sterling
Stuckey (1972), puts it,
“ [Young is in] the same class with Nat Turner not only because he had
envisioned the coming of a black Messiah--incontestable expression of
African nationalism--but also because there are references to signs and
seasons which remind one of the slave preacher of South Hampton
County, Virginia.” (Stuckey 1972:8).
However, like Diop, Young introduces us to the earliest formulations of
the imperative task of re-assembling the severely [displaced], oppressed and
degraded Africans so they can become a people and a nation in themselves (ibid).
For Young (1839) “...all people of African ancestry [are] Africans irrespective of
their place of birth, their social class, or their wealth and power.” African
consciousness and Pan-Africanism stand as componential ingredients of Young’s
brand of Nationalism. It represented a bold and bullish resistance movement
where assertions of nationhood amplified a claim to sovereignty, human dignity,
and equality in a World without the Organization of African Unity, the United
Nations, and where there were no UN declarations of Human Rights, nor civil
rights for Africans anywhere!
1 Basil Davidson, has corroborated that the term Blameless Ethiopians, referred to
Kushites, Nubians, or Sudanese, etc. who lived outside Egypt. In the truest sense of
nationalism, no one was indeed called African, unless one was being compared to the
alien. (Davidson, 1995:34). The same still applies today, It is rarely for a Yoruba men
to respond to the question, who are you? by saying that I am Nigerian. No he will most
likely respond I am Yoruba!
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Young’s concerns are furthermore part of continuity of oracular leadership
found in brave sons and daughters of Africa who, like Simon Kimbangu, a farmer
from the Kongo Ethnic group in the Belgian Congo, who did not wait for the good
time to rise in 1930s, some hundred years after Young, to proclaim that Christ had
appeared to him, and has assigned him to a mission to cure the sick. Simon
Kimbagu preached that Christ had revealed Himself to him and Christ had given
him the power and wisdom to cure the afflicted and uplift the spirits of the poor
and oppressed Congolese masses that God loved. Simon Kimbangu himself
constituted a clear refutation of Belgian colonial mission that justified King
Léopold notion that Colonization could bring civilization.
Simon Kimbangu would thus become a definite challenge to Belgian
Colonial authority as he strove to become a symbol of resistance to white only
religious leadership. In essence, Simon Kimbangu became one with the question
of silent majority which wondered why God in His infinite and magnificent
wisdom would have chosen the white man to serve as His messenger to Black
race? Ali Mazrui (1986:152-153) observes, “Such worries have sometimes
affected Christian Africans from generation to generation. But in the case of
Simon Kimbangu’s followers, the answer was at last clear. This prophet was at
least African; this messenger was Black.” Today’s Kimbanguist theology is not
merely an effort at Africanizing the massage without necessarily Africanizing
the messenger. Kimbanguist Theology does not promote the cross as much as
other Christian communities do. Here the cross plays a significantly modest role
than it does in the Catholic Church for instance.
The huge Kimbanguist Temple at Nkamba2 has no cross inside the
building. To that extent the Temple appears startlingly un-Christian within.
(Mazrui 1986:153). The implication here however is the mystical apprehension
over the Almighty’s own warning about the use of graven image and idolatry?
Some other use of the cross may turn it into graven image. Here perhaps, is the
clue why Kimbagu was promptly arrested and severely punished. Simon
Kimbangu spent almost as long as a time (1921-1951), as Jesus Christ himself
spent on Earth.
It is thought that Western Christian missionaries for whom Kimbangu
became a nationalist threat against their dogma and well refined evangelical
apparatus probably instigated the arrest of Kimbagu by the Colonial authorities.
Kimbangu like Robert Young, Nat Turner and more modern nationalist leaders of
African Christian Churches Movement, could not shrink from arrests and
imprisonment by the colonial authorities. Many, such young men and women,
confronted long injustices and died in colonial prison, becoming themselves
martyrs to their followers.
2 The original home village of Simon Kimbangu in Lower
Congo province, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Simon Kimbangu was in his seventies when he died in 1951. Today,
Kimbaguist Church has spread all over the Central African region with a vast
number of Primary and Secondary Educational institutions, and a vast array of
Higher education Institutions. In the DRCongo alone, it boasts a significantly
larger following of some five to six millions people. Kimbanguism lives on and
will continue to manifest its presence through its dynamic, indigenous and yet
nationalist Christian Church services to the God and Africa. Already the
Kimbanguist Church is where women and men have been ordained to preach and
teach the Gospel even before most Western sponsored missionary churches had
begun to train and ordain women into the priesthood. This was as revolutionary as
the Independence Movement of the late 1950’s, the Civil Rights Movement of the
early 1960s, and their socio-economic and political implications for both Africa
and the Diaspora.
David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, published
also in 1829, supports and complements Young’s ideas, which even today stand in
the realm of African nationalism. Walker’s Appeal contains the most allembracing African nationalist formulation of the 18th century. Reprinted three
times, Walker’s Appeal influenced Henry Higherland Garnet some twenty years
later. Garnet reorganized and republished it together with his Address to the
Slaves. Despite its call to “...the people of color to rise up and destroy their
oppressors,” the Appeal is nevertheless an authentic
African nationalist formulation that may have disturbed and offended
many integrationist leaders of the time. Nevertheless, Walker’s nationalism
reflected and projected the African nationalism of later years, including Marcus
Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party. A revival as
well as an awakening of a sort took place among the people to struggle for their
own freedom and liberation.
For Sterling Stuckey (1972), David Walker as well had called for the
establishment of a black nation. In early writings in the Freedom Journal, Walker
had declared, “our sufferings would have come to an end, in spite of all the
Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents
among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves”(1972). Like Diop in the
late 20th century, David walker saw Education as the vital weapon for any
oppressed person. He asserted that “learning originated with [our] ancient
ancestors, the Ethiopians and the Egyptians (Stuckey, 1972:10.).
The redemption of African civilizations, culture, history, and languages is
at the core of Diop’s undying obsession with ancient Egypt. As Walker and
Young, Diop’s classical works, make a poignant point that the Ethiopians and
Egyptians were indeed Africans. He is motivated by a nationalist search for the
true identity of a people who, by their achievements in arts, sciences, health,
cultures and languages resemble more closely the contemporary Africans who
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live now far away from the Nile valley. In other words, Africans everywhere will
never experience peace and freedom as long as they leave their historical past to
distortions and falsification.
Like Moses among the enslaved Biblical Jews, Diop sought to rescue and
reconstruct the civilizations of Africa that suffered from Eurocentric efforts to
distort, discredit, and forge their own characterization of Africa. In fact, Diop is
incensed by the claims made without scientific proofs of any kind to legitimize
European generalizations concerning African history and civilizations. His
research findings have been able therefore to confront the Eurocentric views with
new historical evidence .His scholarship is not only evidentiary, it also frees and
corrects these distortions, and empowers African scholars and people to reexamine the true meanings of their historical past.
III.
THE PAN - AFRICANIST IDEOLOGY AND DIOP’S VISION
OF ONE AFRICA
Two other important men who might have had impact on Diop include
Martin Delany and WE.B. DuBois. According to Sterling Stuckey (1972)
“before the emergence of Delany into national prominence, no recognized
ideology, of black nationalism had placed as much emphasis as he on the need for
black people to have land to set aside for purposes of establishing their own
nation outside the boundaries of America. (Stuckey 1972: 22) Delany’s pan
African ramblings can be seen into the type of emigration philosophy he
espoused. His position seems to have been predicated on dissatisfaction with
American life that was not much greater than that of other ante-bellun
emigrationists. Stuckey (1971º, conveys the sense of discouragement, the
realization that the condition of American Blacks will never change. Stuckey feels
that Delany’s almost total absence of faith in the possibility of the black man’s
winning freedom in America grew out of his belief that the whole history of white
people had been toward crushing the colored races wherever found. It becomes
possible to consider Delany's Pan-africnist throbbing as founded in this
dissatisfaction. For example, when he joined African Civilization Society
organized by Garnet’s, his first act was to lead a movement to purge the
organization of white officers. “This position,” observes Stuckey, “...was
consonant with the percepts, if not the actions of every important Black
Nationalist of the period.”(Stuckey, 1972:23). In “The Political Destiny of the
Colored Race,” Delany presents the view that his people should plan carefully to
emigrate to the West Indies and to Central and South America (Stuckey 1972: 24)
He foresaw a racial cleavage of apocalyptic proportions, and argued that just as
other peoples had special traits, so too did Afro-American, by emphasizing the
desirability of people of color cultivating their aesthetic and spiritual qualities.
He referred to the need for black people to develop and build upon their special
gifts so that they might not only further nationalist goals but “instruct the world”
as well (Stuckey, 1972:25). Martin Delany stands above all alone in providing us
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with a fuller dimension to blackness. He gives blackness more attention than his
contemporaries, and became as such one of the truest nationalist.
W.E.B. DuBois was an n other of Diop’s predecessors. Professor DuBois, in his
now famous book The Soul of the Black Folk, predicted that “ the Problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of Color- Line or racism.” DuBois did not call
it just racism and/ or something more powerful, he reduced it to the color line.
One has to remember that Dubois would become one of the co-founders and
organizers of the early Pan-Africanist Congresses held in Paris, Brussels, New
York, and Manchester. Together with Henry Sylvester Williams, Georges
Padmore, and Marcus Garvey, the ideas of truest African nationalism took roots
and became part of the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. All through the twentieth century, DuBois could not be ignored, and as
matter of fact, his earlier writings could also very well have influenced young
Diop to examine the reference to Ethiopia and Egypt within the epistemological
content of liberation literature that was slowly but surely budding.
Diop stands as an activist student of history. He could not have afforded
the luxury to remain inactive among African students who were forming student
organizations in France, and whom became followers of such movements as
Negritude, or followed closely the Cuban Movement known as Negrism. For
example Diop is conscientiously critical of the Negritude Movement. He admired
Aimée Cesaire more than his compatriot Leopold Cedar Senghor. It is absolutely
clear that nothing could have escaped Diop’s eyes, especially as the Negritude
Movement, the most important literary milestone, would influence many of his
peers. For him, Aimee Cesaire was one of the most important contributors to the
genre of Negritude he preferred. With regards to Cesaire’s Negritude, Diop
observes that:
Cesaire thus wrote about how the Black world lives, feels, and suffers. He
attached importance to the differential psychology of Africans, blacks as opposed
to Europeans. The poetry of Cesaire, and his literary creation, is centered on the
oppressive conditions of colonialism. Militant action was attached to the new
form of poetry among black intellectuals. Cesaire’s poetry was definitely not an
abstract literary effort but was rooted in the suffering of Africans, blacks. (Diop
1974: 119)
Elsewhere, Diop’s methodological approach to historical and cultural
studies includes the advantage of the visual elements in reconstructing
consequential comparative studies. As a true painter and poet, Diop’s” past,”
becomes more prominently relevant through his systematic application of the art
and sciences of re-discovery. This is accomplished through his systematic and
scientific method of comparative study. He looks at the specific similarities and
differences that characterize the images, sculptures, and facial features of ancient
Egyptians to the contemporary Africans. Like the Aimée Cesaire he has described
above, Diop distinguishes a true basic Africological imperative where Africa
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becomes the central piece and core of theory, methodology, and/or the
paradigmatic strategy.
For example, contrary to Senghor’s almost mythological Africa, For Diop
Africa must be a real, artistic evidence of Egyptian sculptures and paintings to
show what is considered prototypical Africanoid features of the ancient
Egyptians. He then proceeds to identify for example, significant similarities not
only to Nubians, but also to the present day’s Yoruba, Kuba, Luba, Wolof,
Ashanti, and Zimbabwean figures. Diop (1989) argues that African cultural
similarities prove once for all, that the Africanness of the Egyptians is indeed a
scientific pan-africanist nationalist evidence to support and confirm Kwame
Nkrumah’s political determination in the 1950s to bring back Egypt and Ethiopia
into Africa.
Many have perhaps forgotten that Egypt and Ethiopia had been claimed by
Europe that regarded Africa as incapable of producing the Civilization of the
Pyramids. Among many of cultural practices Diop lists the most commons
characteristics including: circumcision, divine kingships, totemism, matrilineal
focus, cosmogonies, architecture, language etc. As far as Diop was concerned
“Far from being a diversion in the past, a look back toward ancient Egypt is
probably the best way to conceive and build [Africa’s] cultural future” (Diop,
1989:22).
Diop does thus solve my troubles with Zairian painters and of course a
majority of African artists, scholars, and historians. We tend to always be
preoccupied with the past without knowing why. Jean Paul Sartre, the French
existentialist philosopher, has often complained about “Faulkner’s Benji”, an
African character in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. {Benji is the
white son of an aristocratic family} Sartre (1956), questions why Benji does not
deal with the present or the future, he is only preoccupied with what has already
taken place. He moves backward toward the future, always looking back. He must
as well be dead, says Sartre!
Perhaps the answer to the Benji’s puzzle Diop however counters by saying
that once rediscovered; Egypt will play [an important role] in a reconceived and
renewed African culture, the same role that the Greco-Latin ancient past plays in
the Western culture. For Diop, Antiquated Africa provides the structural
foundation of scientific research that is sufficiently capable of retrieving the
stolen “Africa History.” (Diop, 1987: 124).
Since the 1960s, African scholars have emerged from the womb of the
Western academies in Europe, the United States and in the continent of Africa
itself. There is no doubt that Africological students and intelligentsia, are like the
contemporary African artists who have found their fame and successes by
focusing their eyes and minds on the rearview mirror. They attempt to understand
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what they have left behind, and sometimes they have so much focused on that
past that it has become the end-in itself.
African cultural signposts are no longer readily recognizable. For
example, Ivan Van Sertima, Diop, Buchanan, Clarke, Karenga and Molefi Asante,
and other have greatly contributed to the development of the fields of
Contemporary Africological studies in the Diaspora, and I submit that they will, if
they are prepared, play major roles in the development of, and adaptation of
Africological approaches and strategies by continent as well as by the world at
large.
However as African scholars and activists tremble at the discovery of the
controversial and irrefutable evidence that Africans were never so dormant as to
become the primitive men and women who, according to Mudimbe, 1988, existed
primarily in the Eurocentric and colonialist
“Epistemological ordering which, silently but imperatively, indicate the
processes of integrating and differentiating figures within the narrative
sameness; on the other hand, the excellence of an exotic picture that
creates a cultural distance, thanks to an accumulation of accidental
differences, namely, nakedness, blackness, curly hair, bracelets, and
strings of pearls.”3
Africologists must ask why it is that Africans, as the original human
beings who by the virtue of their humaneness could not afford to be without a
struggle, and would lack a record of their interactions with their rich
environment? Have almost disappeared. As the earliest creators and innovators of
human family, culture and civilization.
IV.
DIOP IN HISTORY
It is erroneous to fail to recognize and honor the legacy of Dr. Sheikh Anta
Diop especially by continuing to discover many important aspects of his overall
contribution to the reconstruction of the African past and its place within today’s
world. Diop’s seminal works while helping in the discovery of lost, stolen and
betrayed history, calls upon scholars and followers to remain vigilant so that the
past may not escape from them as it almost happened during the long centuries of
enslavement and colonization. Diop (1978) calls upon Africanists to be mindful of
the necessity and importance of the economic and cultural basis for a Federated
State of Black Africa.
3V.Y. Mudimbe. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1988,p9
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This vast and compelling task for which Maulana Karenga often cautions
that Africans have to tackle the problem in small and manageable pieces. Like
Kwame Nkrumah, Diop as a Pan-Africanist scholar envisioned the rise of Africa
to the sovereignty of a ”United and Federated States of Africa.” Certainly Diop’s
leaning toward socialism and the fears of capitalism sometimes influenced these
hopes and aspirations for a united Africa. For example Diop (1987) was
apprehensive about France’s determined attempt to assimilate Algeria. He
complained that:
“We are still not free, however, even after this Loosening of
bonds, we will never be allowed to Select a political and social regime
different from those of the Western World without running the risk of
having to fight or seeing ourselves overthrown by intrigues”(Diop,
1987:31).
As a man belonging to the privileged class of committed nationalists, such
as David Walker and Robert Alexander Young, W.E.B. DuBois and others, Diop
dreamed of a day when Africans from across the world would be united into a
nation of their own. He was critically embarrassed by the slow pace of the
fulfillment of the promise of the Pan-African Movement. Since 1958, the specter
{possibility?} of African unity had made only a very limited progress in certain
specific domains of economic, cultural, academic, and social life.
Within the scope of a federated Africa, Diop (1978) did not fail to
anticipate the rise of regional power, such as exhibited recently by Nigeria within
ACOWAS, and the potential for small states such as Rwanda and Uganda to be
used by the Western oligarchies to create troubles for the nationalist governments.
Indeed, Diop saw federated Africa as a place where African historical unity could
flourish and where African historical and cultural consciousness could be easily
cultivated once again. His confidence in the present-day Africans in the continent
and the Diaspora is clear, and he posits them, as the most likely true aborigines
who are in no way invaders from other continents. He cites on-going scientific
studies by Leakey and others, which confirms Africa as the cradle of humanity,
and negates the hypothesis that outlanders may have inhabited the African
continent. In order to emphasis this position, Diop points to Black civilizations
and he posits Black Africa’s civilizations as the first civilizations in the world,
since the development of Europe had been delayed by the last Ice age--a matter of
a hundred thousand years (Diop, 1987:3).
Diop also predicted and cautioned Africans to remain eternally vigilant by
observing that:
“...Europe which by itself colonized nearly all the globe, might well take
umbrage when it reaches the end of its delusions and clearly understand it
has lost all its former colonies. European unification in that case might be
based on bitterness, as suggested by certain flare-ups of Neo-nazism (1959
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Christmas, and the after Berlin Wall Fall 1990). Europe might as well turn
in upon itself and adopt a neonationailism encompassing all of Western
Europe.” (Diop, 1987:18).
The quest for African unity becomes an imperative, especially in face of the
intensifying aspirations and demands for the European Unity Organization, or the
European Economic Community. The European Economic Community. Diop
calls upon African scholars and Policy makers to remember that the European
unity was built by their decision at the 1884-85 Berlin conference where the
division of Africa was certainly established. These ties grew strong as Europe
adopted racist, and exploitative policies that they applied across Africa as part of
their colonization. Such policies were to end with the arrival of political
independence, but as it is clearly demonstrable, Europe has re-organized and
constitutes today a formidable economic power approaching the power of the
United States and the former Soviet Union. For this, Diop cautioned even then
“We cannot go on running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The
African countries, in the years ahead, will be forced progressively to strengthen
their organic federal ties while ridding themselves of the remains of those that
bind them still to their former “mother countries”(1987: 16).
Recent development of the EEC, and the establishment of a European
Parliament with all powers to regulate the institutionalization of the "Euro"-currency--, confirms Diop’s fear that Europe will unite so as to form a united
front against the weak African states. Diop would have been very discouraged
today by the tragedy of genocide that hit Rwanda in 1994, and whose
repercussions are behind the so-called Africa ‘s World War I in the Congo. This
war of aggression by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, has become a covert activity
supported and sponsored by the same Western powers that had attempt to dig and
carry away all the uranium that existed in the Belgian Congo. Diop had predicted
that Africa in the year 2001 will be weaker and divided if it does not become
urgent to African people and their governments to unite.
V.
DROUGHTS, FAMINE AND THE FUTURE
Diop conceptualized the problem of periodic droughts and hunger that
affect Africa today. Africa, being the real breadbasket, especially in its center,
should be able to provide for its population (1987:12). He furthermore recognizes
that Africa lost between 100 to 200 millions of its people to slavery, and advanced
the notion that “...Africa has an imperative duty to apply a systematic policy of
intensive repopulation in optimum time.” Black Africa he continues contains
sufficient sources of natural energy, raw materials, and foodstuffs to feed and
sustain such a population (1987:19). He critically cautioned Africa to watch
closely positioning by some Western powers with regard to the population
growth. He saw the potential danger of a demographically empty-pot independent
Africa, as a real problem facing African nations in the twenty- first century.
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Indeed Diop would be incensed by current international attitudes toward the
spread of AIDS and HIV in Africa, because even then, he had originally criticized
the “Malthusian Approach,” taken by certain powerful nations to deny economic
assistance to African countries, which do not agree to reduce the birth rate
(1987:19).
Today, Diop’s voice resounds still loudly in the desert of the academic
community, and his prophetic cautions need to be unquestionably debated, and
carried forward by the Pan-Africanist scholars. He must remain relevant to this
generation in order to meet the need to re-examine the past in light of its
unrelenting reflections upon the present and the future. For instance, African and
African-American Studies should become a field where the raging debate is a
reflection of the struggle for space within the academy. African universities at
home and abroad have to adopt and further develop the study, research and
analysis that would enhance understanding and appreciation of African histories
in the continent as well as in the Diaspora.
The revisionist view and the claims by the conservative nationalists that
present Africa have no relevance in the African-American Studies and must be
debated, but also put to rest because we have to behold to what Jean Paul Sartre
calls “the past without.” This is a past that is phenomenal in all of us; it is what
prompts all humans to decisive rational reasoning, thinking, and acting. The past,
in this context, is history, but history without culture is always a veil of the past
even a recent past.
Furthermore, Karenga (1980, 1988, and 1993) echoes Diop when he
observes that, we cannot be without “having been,” we cannot project into the
future when we do nothing today. Karenga (1980) says in fact “History is the
struggle and record of humans in the process of humanizing the world.” But,
Karenga does not end there; he in fact claims that, African or Black history, then,
becomes “the struggle and record of Africans in the process of Africanizing the
world, i.e. shaping it in their own images and interests.” (Karenga 1993: 70)
Generally the African ontological thought process suggests that the past is
not of yesterday, it is of the present. The present is the product of yesterday, thus
the future depends heavily on today. This conceptualization contradicts Jean Paul
Sartre’s assumption that “It is by human reality that the future arrives in the
world. The future, like the past, does not exist as a phenomenon of that original
temporality of being itself”(Sartre, 1953, 180). The present of which African
ontology speaks is the on - going authentic African presence. It is neither the past
of the African artists, scholars, or researchers. The past is not only what was;
instead it is what is intertwined with the present. Indeed, I am not blinded by this
analysis. It is easier to focus on that temporary past, but it is very important to
show that we cannot all be the artists who refuses to deal with the present,
because it is either too sensitive or dangerous, and then opt to look and promote
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the past even to the point of neglecting or failing to recognize its bridging legacy
to the present.
VI.
CONTEMPORARY AFRICA AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN
STUDIES
It is in the contemporary images of Africa that Africologists and
Afrocentrists fail miserably to account for the benign neglect of the continent. The
twentieth Century has ended with a big bang that has not been heard by many.
Africans are compelled to probably revert to their rearview mirrors. The final
years of the twentieth century have seen a much weaker Africa than the one of the
African independence days. There are more countries without stable governments,
there is a lack of good medical and health facilities, and the modicum of social
services and institutions that had sustained the people have become insufficient to
meet the growing needs of developing urban communities, to say less of the aging
populations in Africa’s rural communities. African people have and are always
looking not only for the past, but they are also searching for themselves. It is
critically difficult to discover one’s past when one cannot discover oneself first.
One ponders whether or not Africans have completely failed to realize that the
past has served them well, that contemporary Africa is a showcase for the
contradictions that are symbolic of our continuing struggle to Africanize the
world even as we are Europeanized, Asianized, Arabized, and indeed might I
admit, we are struck by never ending violence, corruptions and ethnic cleansings
of all kinds. The dynamism of these forces has engendered, if not invented a new
Africa (Mudimbe, 1988: xi). Despite the colonial legacy and its lingering impact
upon the various aspects of African life, society, and environmental relationships,
contemporary African Continent emerges from it all as an undeniable showcase of
socio-political, economic and cultural underdevelopment. It is the actual
extension and output of the colonialism that Cesaire (1972) qualified as:
The great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too
late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which
that contact was brought about; that Europe began to propagate at a time
when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and
captains of industry, (Cesaire, 1972:23)
There are more urban centers in Africa than people would like to admit, but they
are nowhere equipped to receive the large flows of new residents that they have
reluctantly received in the past forty years. Some of these represent some of the
world’s vastest gatherings of multiethnic and diverse populations and constitute
evidently new and never observed before geopolitical communities with no less
than five to ten millions people. Africa’s urban development issues and their
urgent demands for scarce resources have escaped the scrutiny of Afrocentrist
scholars, activists and critics, especially when one examines the level and
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intensity of marginalisation and de-emphasis called for by the other significantly
pressing urgencies promoted by the scholars. Consider for example the impact of
the May 17 and 18, 2001’s Storm and its impact in Kinshasa, Congo as reported
by G.Diana:
Kinshasa is under the shock with a fifty dead and many more hurt by the
continuation of the torrential rains that have fallen on the city. A moving
ceremony of mortuary evening, then burial has taken place under the
direction of the governor of the city, Mr. Christophe Muzungu. After this
disaster, the hour is to the questioning of the one to the others. What has
arrived to Kinshasa was avoidable. Unfortunately, [the international
African communities did not respond with help or assistance of any kind,
and] Congolese have such a short memory that they forget immediately
after the misfortune and the danger that monitor them daily. (G. Diana,
May 20, 2001, http:// www. Groupelavenir. Com/ Future-Daily/ pageforefinger. Htm page-forefinger.htm)
Even more pressing urgency comes from haunting reflections of a growing
inclination to posit the study of the Ancient Egyptians as a priority while we
neglect the impact of colonialism, and the need to respond massively to the
present crises. Needless to say, that Africa ought not to blame anyone because of
its people’s limitations, especially self-imposed ones, that affect its scholars and
imposes upon them the heavy burden to look at the world community through
selective lenses and to focus primarily on survival scholarship works.
Truly, the “present” parading before us covers both Sartre’s past, which
has no meaning in absence of the imposing African presence--a human reality
with its entire unhealthy demeanor in front of a decaying, if not dying continent.
In the past twenty years I’ve seen Africa neglected and bypassed by the
investments that should help it to meet a better future. Diop prophetically warned
that that Africans cannot afford to ignore or attempt to ignore neither the Ugandan
tragedy of the 1970s nor the Rwandan genocidal killings of the 1994, by merely
focusing on the romances of ancient Egypt as simply a source of cultural
inspiration and resource in the reconstruction of tourist market.
The Africa War I (1998-2004) whose consequential outcome is the record
high-four million of Congolese who lost their lives. This reflects the impeding
doom of wars in Africa for which Diop cautioned even then Burundian, Rwandan,
and Ugandan armed forces to tune down desperate aspirations to disrespect ethnic
and international conventions and engage into cross-borders disputes against their
neighbors. Rwandan genocide of 1994 makes Diop stand out even more on his
prophecy. The civil war in Sierra Leone, the growing number of child-soldiers,
and multiplying numbers of refugee’s camps in Sudan and throughout Africa, are
begging for actions research that should characterize the Africa-centered research
Movement. Afrocentrists and Africanists must not forget nor ignore their
forebearance to the present African predicament.
Current scholarship,
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government policies, educational programs and activist agenda must no longer
ignore the relevant questions and issues of the day.
Consider for instance the recent discoveries by Boyce Rensburger (1995)
that shows that Africans who lived about 90,000 years ago in what is today
Democratic Republic of Congo, were more advanced in their carving of animal
bones into spear points, and used these sophisticated weapons to hunt animals or
catch fish, (Washington Post, April 28, 1995), today however, African scholars
must not ignore that conditions created by the present wars will for ever impact
the future of the African people everywhere, despite the fact that they may have
originated from external sources or from internal lack of good political leadership
and good governance. Diop insists that African should remain vigilant and
mindful of the needs to take the present realities into account. His classical and
outstanding scholarship corroborate the irrefutable evidence that present Africans
in the continent and in the Diaspora should learn more from their past and take the
necessary actions to avoid falling backward.
The significant point made by Alison Brooks’ findings (1995) is not only
that Contemporary Africans do not matter in this equation of self-rediscovery, it is
however that Africans reached a higher level of sophistication about 75,000 years
before such sophistication appeared in Europe, Asia, and Australia, and that
contemporary Africans can still recover their lost identity if they struggle to
redefine themselves. My argument, is whether or not one can accurately predict
the future of Africa?
Indeed because of its status as the cradle of human
civilization, Africa and Africans everywhere, bear a heavy burden and obligation
to account for the present state of its people and for their future on this planet.
The future, as defined by Sartre, is never a true reality because it is
dependent upon the authentic reality of the moment. That is an atomically modern
Africa has since some 125,000 years ago emerged and is indeed within a
continuum that cannot easily be broken and or disrupted, even though slavery,
colonization, apartheid and post-colonial dictatorships cannot be ignored? I stand
with Ali Mazrui when he observes that, individual like the President Jomo
Kenyatta of Kenya, saw the coming and the outgoing of colonialism in Kenya.
Africa and Africans believe in stern test of will reflected by Martin Luther King
Jar’s overcoming capacity, endurance, tenacity, and never-ending desire to
survive. Indeed all of these are goof characteristics but they will fail us in a world
of haves and have- nots, a world based on sheer political economy of power of
guns.
No one in his right mind would have believed that Burundi, Rwanda and
Uganda could one day dare to invade and occupy the Northern and Eastern
Regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo as they did from 1998-2003! No
one could have predicted the day when the rebels in Sierra Leone would be well
armed enough and well organized to succeed in holding 500 UN soldiers hostages
for almost two months. However, the proxy wars rage on in Africa, where there
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are no ten commandments, no Human rights charter, no health services to assist
the victims of the wars, epidemic diseases, hunger and economic
disfranchisement.
VII.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
It is certainly not the purpose of this paper to recreate the same conditions
of life and experience, as they used to be. It is however, important to try and
estimate the forces that have and are transforming the context of interactions
between the environment and the people. Frantz Fanon (1963) in The Wretched of
the Earth reminds us that forcible entry of any kind into any country can cause
disruptions and lead to distorted views of reality and loss of national
consciousness. The Republic of South Africa today, is not what it was in 1980’s,
nor is the United States of post –September 11, 2002 the same as the United
States of the Reagan years. Aimee Cesaire, Senghor, DuBois, Fanon and other as
peoples and scholars, influenced Diop himself. Nevertheless, as Van Sertima puts
it, the pictures of living Africans compared to the pictures, paintings, and carvings
of the past establishes the continuity of the people of the Olmec Civilization, and
even Sheikh Anta Diop is honored.
The African past has indeed a role in completing the image of what
Africans are today before it can extend that image into what Africans ought to
become. Our present reality is rationally defined by what we have been and are
doing. The success of all our formulations and the quality of our planning for
development, will be measured by the quality and quantity of our abilities and
capacities to rediscover and adapt the wisdom, methods, technologies and
strategies already generated by our forefathers and foremothers whether we call
them Ethiopians, Egyptians, or simply Africans. The African past must be
translated into understandable concepts, ideal Values and principles that constitute
the foundation of the present-day agencies for change and development. African
scholars and researchers everywhere cannot sit still looking backward and hoping
that things will remain as they have always been. Nothing is any longer
guaranteed for anybody, there is only a place for those who dare to risk the little
they have today in preparation of tomorrow’s greatness. There remains however a
major challenge for current scholars, teachers, businesspersons and ordinary
citizens, and leaders in Africa and Diaspora: What would be the legacy of the
present Africans to the future generations?
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