The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
In the European Renaissance of the 14th to the 17th Century Christian theology was the hegemonic knowledge discipline, any form of thought that did not pay homage to the theological was disqualified as pagan and gentile sensibility.
What became called the “Age of Reason” from the 17th to the 19th Century was later to be called the age of the Enlightenment where knowledge and thought were secularised and God was killed symbolically, faith was abolished and scientific reason was inaugurated as the real way of achieving truth and meaning in life. Reason dethroned faith. The 19th Century in particular saw the invention of the categories of knowledge and meaning making namely the Social Sciences, the Human Sciences and the Natural Sciences as dominant academic disciplines.
What the enslavers and the colonialists brought as knowledge and meaning making to the Global South were disciplined and disciplining knowledges designed to produce docile and desirable slaves and colonial subjects. Born on the 29th of December 1923, in Senegal, Cheik Anta Diop was to be one of the most prominent African thinkers to overturn Eurocentric intellectual disciplinarity and pioneer decolonial research methodology. The present worldwide Afrocentric school of thought that is championed by Molefi Kete Asante owes its roots and provenances in the archive and canon of Cheik Anta Diop whose stubborn argument dwelt on the “African origins of civilisation.”
Besides Molefi Kete Asante, fire eating African intellectuals and decolonial thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiongo and Chinweizu owe a large part of their critical consciousness and philosophical sensibility to Cheik Anta Diop, who did not only challenge the colonisation of Africa but also went on to give a torrid time to the post-independence government of Negritude philosopher Leopold Sedar Senghor that he accused of tyranny and eliticism, treacherous abandoning of African sensibility for Eurocentricism. During and after colonialism, Cheik Anta Diop became an intellectual and political dissident. Cheik Anta Diop is one African thinker who left the Euro-American academic disciplines in tatters, and threw Eurocentricism itself into destitution with his courageous discoveries and arguments.
Against Colonial Intellectual Provincialism
The way academic disciplines discipline and domesticate the minds of students and scholars is cruel. Once one is a historian, they are formed to see nothing in the world except history. Similarly, once one is trained to be a geographer the entire planet and existence are observed and experienced in geographic terms. Academic disciplines become rigid and imprisoning intellectual provinces that confine the thoughts of students and scholars, strict intellectual maps, borders and boundaries are erected that narrow the mindsets of scholars to small departments of thinking.
As a result, present scholars of the Global South, limited and compromised by the provincilising effect of colonial academic disciplines cannot invent new insights but regurgitate and reproduce what the colonialists produced, they become expert literature reviewers whose erudition is measured on how well they remember and repeat what the colonialists taught.
In a feat of serious epistemic disobedience and struggle against disciplinary decadence, Cheik Anta Diop rebelled against the colonial academic disciplines. Students of African literature remember Diop as a poet from whose desk the famous pulsation poem “Africa” came. It is Diop who sang Africa my Africa.
Africa, Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs,
Africa of whom my grandmother sings. Beyond poetry, Cheik Anta Diop became a compelling mathematician, historian, philosopher and chemist. He refused to allow his mind to be provincialised and domesticated by the colonial academic disciplines of the elightenment, he trespassed disciplinary boundaries from the social sciences, through the humanities to the natural sciences.
Today’s accomplished intellectuals in the present Euro-American model of the university in Africa are thoroughgoing disciplinarians who look at life and the world through one disciplinary eye and have one disciplinary answer for all the questions of life and the human condition that arise. Did they not say that when one’s only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail?
In the Library of Cheik Anta-Diop
Even as he was not so beloved by the Senegalese post-independence regime; the University of Dakar was fittingly renamed Cheik Anta Diop University, tellingly demonstrating his compelling intellectual and political influence. The first PhD research that Diop completed was meaningfully titled “The Cultural Future of African Thought,” a dissertation that raised alarm on the dangers of globalisation to African history and knowledge.
The second PhD that Diop attained asked the question “Who were the Pre-Dynastic Egyptians?” a research project that dug into the ancient history of Africa, this particular dissertation had to be published as a book and a series of articles as no examiners could be found for it, white expert historians and anthropologists of the time recused themselves for fear of endorsing Diop’s radical Afrocentric history of Africa and the risk of embarrassing themselves trying to dispute the rigorous scholarship that he exuded, Diop was no easy intellectual opponent to have, he was a combative and thorny interlocutor.
“The Areas of Matriarchy and Patriarchy in Ancient Times” became the third PhD project that Diop successfully completed, followed by the fourth and last “Comparative Study of Political and Social Systems of Europe and Africa: From antiquity to the formation of modern states,” in which Diop examined the social and political history of the entire world, deciphering similarities and differences, and establishing common human traits among peoples of the planet, exposing the crime of racism and the classification of human beings according to race.
In the archives of the prestigious College de France, in France where Cheik Anta Diop taught, he is listed as an expert in Nuclear Chemistry, an erudite authority in physics, linguistics, anthropology, economics, sociology and Egyptology. In Senegal he is remembered with reverence as having ably translated Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity concept into his Wolof mother tongue. Even as he made himself comfortable with the many disciplines and subjects of the world academy, Cheik Anta Diop was infamous for questioning these subjects, overturning their foundations and challenging their deeply held assumptions. To the encyclopedic mind of Cheik Anta Diop, no subject or academic discipline was holy, all theories and concepts could be challenged and falsified.
Intellectual and Political Philosophy
One of the most forceful arguments of Cheik Anta Diop, one that is now being circulated in the global academy like commonsense, is that world civilisation began in Africa, contrary to Eurocentric claims. That Africa is not only the cradle of mankind but also the birthplace of civilisation is now taken like a proverb. Cheik Anta Diop fought with European and American anthropologists, historians and sociologist to erect the argument and get it to achieve the currency and purchase that it presently holds. In intellectual combat and argumentation, Cheik Anta Diop was a one-man majority, who used is multi-disciplinary and undisciplinary width of knowledge and depth of understanding to demolish challengers.
Cheik Anta Diop believed that Africans were the same people, cultural and historical divisions were minimal and meaningless, it is the colonialists that emphasised the differences, amplified and magnified them to divide and rule Africans. Africa was one place and therefore African unity was not a political dream but a natural truism.
Cheik Anta Diop found it stupid, that Senegal and the whole of Africa exported natural resources, Africans were supposed to export finished goods to maximise gain for Africans. These radical economic propositions got him into trouble with the Senegalese post-independence regime that jailed him on the one hand and also tried without success to co-opt him into its ranks until he died on 7 February 1986.
The narrowness of reading, fragility of understanding, and shallowness of memory and laziness of mind that is found in present African scholarship is even more depressing when compared to the homework and intellectual foundations that were done and set by African thinkers like Cheik Anta Diop, Africans who collapsed and compressed the entire planet in their studies. Behind him, visible up to this day, Diop cultivated and left multitudes of Diopean young scholars that continue with his archeology of knowledge. In today’s African academy, leaders of Afrocentric schools of thought are not really motivators and cultivators of young talent, but haughty Pharisees and Sadducees of the academy who crush young talents with bitter and prohibitive critiques and demotivate rather than motivate students, undertakers of thought who bury young potential and wish to remain as the only one that ever read, thought and intellectualised.
Today’s professors teach by punishing or laughing at and even condemning the work of undergraduates, using their established weight to discourage the emergence of new African thinkers, turning the universities into cemeteries of young minds. A large part of the home work of decoloniality in the present university in Africa is to cultivate ways of teaching and scholarly mentorship that are free of the cynicism, contempt, conceit and venomous bias that senior scholars levy on students, preventing the emergence of stubborn minds that can challenge Eurocentricism, the way Cheik Anta Diop did and continues to do through his enduring works.
Decolonially thinking, away with Herodian teachers, lecturers and supervisors that daily order the slaughter of young unique talents to prevent succession in the colleges and universities. Talents like Cheik Anta Diop emerged from under the weight of colonial white academics, today’s young scholars have to navigate the weight of cynical and conceited black intellectual disciplinarians, high priests who abandon mentorship and pass magisterial judgements on the works of infants.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
