African Personality of the Month July 2026
Cheikh Anta Diop
History and science · Senegal
The Senegalese scholar who put Africa back at the centre of the ancient world's history, and built the laboratory to test his own claims.
The Citation
Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) argued, against the scholarship of his time, that the civilisation of ancient Egypt was African in its people and its culture. He set out the case in Nations nègres et culture (1954), a book that reshaped how a generation of African historians read their own past.
He did not ask to be taken on trust. Trained in physics as well as history, he founded a radiocarbon dating laboratory at IFAN in Dakar, so that African researchers could date their own evidence. Senegal's leading university, the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, now carries his name.
The African Mail honours him posthumously for insisting that Africa's history be written from African evidence, by African scholars.
