WHEN a false hypothesis is pushed and accepted as truth, only facts and evidence can counter it.
The fields of science and anthropology are based on logically analysing the environment and what is found beneath it respectively. Therefore, when the mind challenges a theory, one often seeks scientific and anthropological proof to convince him or her otherwise.
Black people have had their history, identity and culture shrouded in lies.
What was deemed sacred by our ancestors is considered sacrilegious in Western religion and education — for example, the remembrance of our ancestors and the observation of festivals associated with them like mapira.
The colour of our skin has been ridiculed and deemed primitive, ugly and even cursed.
Although the times of slavery and colonisation seem to have come to an end, the mindset of many blacks remains scarred by stigmatising theories that have subconsciously led to deeply engraved identity crisis and inferiority complex among many.
As a people that have been unjustly prejudiced, it is up to us to redeem our high self-esteem which has been lost to self-hate and envying whites.
This can be seen by the way Western dressing, grooming, religion and so on remain desirable standards in black nations that are now supposedly free.
The long-term or permanent emigration of blacks to the lands of their former enslavers and colonisers and the consequent brain drain are other proofs of this self-hating and envying whites.
There have been some success stories, when black ‘Messiahs’ have risen and awoken large numbers of blacks by way of debunking the oppressive Western theories with scientific and historical evidence.
These include Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Ben Ammi in the US.
Hearing recordings of such men speak and scrutinising the evidence and references they presented in their speeches leads the listener to question certain dogmas and restore in themselves love and black pride. But it is the work of researchers in the fields of science and anthropology which facilitates the resource of information to those who seek it.
If a discovery is made and published, it lies dormant till individuals like the above named find it and cause it to spread like a wild fire.
One such individual who was prominent in knowledge and wisdom, and specialised in the fields of science and anthropology, is Cheikh Anta Diop. If false and oppressive theories were tumours, men like Diop would be the surgeons to remove them.
Diop was a tall and dark black man from Senegal. He spoke fluent Wolof and French and could understand but opted not to speak English.
He was also Muslim and understood Arabic. His work was invaluable in that he was behind the exposure of certain empowering findings that were previously unknown to blacks.
He was an educator, physicist, politician, historian and anthropologist.
He led the anthropological department at a university in Senegal. He wrote numerous books and appeared on interviews in French but translated to other languages such as English. His work was well-embraced in Europe and the US and he was acknowledged as one of the world’s leading researchers in his field.
We shall now focus on some of the irrefutable findings that were shared by Diop. He taught and provided evidence that proved mankind had one origin in the blackman and woman of East Africa.
Diop said nature does not strike twice and all diversities of species is from one archetype. For human beings, this archetype is the blackman and woman.
He based this understanding on the fossil remains of East Africa which are all of blacks and are much older than human fossils found anywhere else on earth.
This would be supported by genetics which has also identified East Africa as the origin of mankind and the earliest living humans with the largest genetic variety as blacks, particularly the Khoi and San people known as Bushmen.
Diop presented pictorial evidence of the fossil findings in his books and lectures.
The skulls that were unearthed and preserved by anthropologists throughout the world were well-known to him.
He taught that all the skulls, whether African or European showed that they belonged to the same species.
All the skulls have an identical anterior lobe. The skulls found in Asia, Africa and Europe all show that this anterior lobe had developed long before people migrated to other lands from Africa to eventually manifest as other races.
This debunked the theory that says black people have smaller brain size than whites and are thus intellectually inferior.
It also debunks the theory that humans of different races have different origins.
This was further supported by the field of genetics which found that humans of all races are at least 99,5 percent similar to any other human as far as genes are concerned.
The polycentric theory which said whites had independent origins to blacks was Eurocentric. It was popular among evolutionists because it gave way to the assumption that whites had superior intellectual capacity to blacks, unlike the monogenetic theory which proves that all humans have the same origins and the same intellectual capacity. Diop taught that the fossil remains of humans found in Asia and Europe are much younger than those found in Africa.
The Grimaldi skull found in Africa only differs from the Cro-Magnon skull found in Europe because the latter went through climatic adaptation in the glaciation period.
Diop also exposed the fabrications that were made by some anthropologists and geologists with the intent of suppressing black greatness and promoting white supremacy.
These include Dawson’s Piltdown man which was an attempt to pass off orangutan teeth attached to a human cranium as fossil evidence of pre-sapiens that independently originated from England.
Diop was instrumental in letting the world know that an English professor proved that it was a fabrication at the British Museum in the mid-1950s.
Besides this, Diop played a crucial role in letting the world understand that ancient Egypt was a black civilisation.
Again he provided pictorial evidence taken from monuments in Egypt.
He taught about the dynasties of the house of Egyptian kings called Pharaohs.
He showed their black phenotype and that of other nationalities that the Egyptians knew and painted.
He taught that great Egyptian architecture was there 2 200 years before the Greek civilisation began.
Carbon dating showed that some artefacts depicting Egyptians as blacks were from as far back as 3300 BCE.
In the 20th dynasty, during the rule of Ramses III, the Egyptians were still wholly black, and even up to 400 BCE.
The non-blacks in Egypt are merely foreign settlers from the Greek, Roman and Turkish empires.
Diop exposed information about the erosion of the sphinx through wind and sand.
He also taught that the structure and other things like paintings were tempered with by Napoleon in the close of the 19th Century. According to Diop, the negroid nose of the sphinx, which is a typical Bantu feature, is currently in the British Museum.
Diop depicts ancient Egypt as a cradle of diplomacy, prophethood and civilisation.
Even the imperial initiative was birthed in the time of Amenhotep who united 111 states and made them part of the Egyptian Empire. Diop also went further to discuss the spouses and mothers of the historical figures of Egypt, for example, Nefertari, a queen who had six daughters and whose husband introduced monotheism and banned idolatry a long time before the time of Moses.
These facts prove that Africans always knew God and they revered and respected their women. Besides Egypt, blacks were prominent and dominant in antiquity everywhere else.
But the Egyptian civilisation stood out to Diop because to blacks, it is equivalent to the Greco-Roman civilisation.
It is our history and therefore our heritage and no one can take that from us.
Diop passed away in 1986 at age 62.
His work is like a Bible for Afro-centrists. The Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar was built and named in his honour.