Customer Reviews

Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop (Great African Thinkers, Volume 1)

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This book , edited by Ivan Van Sertima, offers a fascinating, informative and erudite introduction to the life and work of Dr. Diop. This book contains a number of important essays by Dr. Diop. There are contributions from Dr. Charles Finch, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Leonard Jeffries, and a host of others.
The book also gives us very useful summaries, assessments and reveiws of Diop's monumental life's work. There are numerous excellent extended interviews with Dr. Diop. We learn of Dr. Diop's visit to the US. There are numerous illustrations.

One is amazed, as Diop explains and demonstrates that his native language, Wolof, is genetically related to the language spoken by the ancient Black Africans we now call "ancient Egyptians". Diop also points out the underlying unity of African culture,which has for so long been denied and obscured by dogmatic European/American intellectual formulations.
The attempt to separate ancient Black Egypt from the rest of Black Africa
rest on a deliberately distorted and perverted use of the historical records. To take Egypt out of Africa is to engage in myth making and the setting up of modern intellectual taboos that can only be challenged by offending the Gods of Westen Orthodoxy. Diop took up this challenge and struck death blows to Euro-centrism.......and oh how they laughed,screamed,slandered, sneered and finally grew silent, tense and weary. Facts are stubborn things!
The book will allow you to study how African scholars, such as Dr. Diop, are telling their own story, free of any intellectual masters.
There is a lot of informatiom crammed into this book of 387 pages.
The contributors give various perspectives and interpretations of Diop's work and comment on how Diop's work has changed the writing of the history and culture of Africa .

I applaud the editors, Dr. Van Sertima and Larry Williams, for this master work in English on the life and work of Cheikh Anta Diop.
If studied seriously, one can learn a lot from this book.

This book is a must have for those on the path to enlightenment, as it relates to the original people on the planet. You will not be disappointed. Both Dr. Diop and Dr. Hillard are sorely missed, but their spirits live on...

Cheikh Anta Diop, recognized for his precedent-setting scholarship as an anthropologist, Egyptologist, historian, linguist, political statesman, physicist, and sociologist, is An astute,scholarly researcher and historian of the authentic anthropological history of people of African descent who was very much ahead of his times in the multi-disciplinary fields of anthropology, archaology, genetic anthropology, to name just a few. When honored at Morehouse College with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters and speaking in the Chapel dedicated to Dr. King, Dr. Diop stated: I subscribe to the teachings of Martin Luthr King, Jr. wholeheartedly. They are teachings that are aimed at unifying and reuniting kindred peoples. What I have to say here today i to reinforce the links that unite us and all people across the world." And as indicated in the biographical notes, "Dr. Diop traveled incessantly, lecture4d widely, and was cited and quoted voluminously. He was the 'pharaoh' of African studies."