cc X TCheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician famous for his theory that the Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans. Okello Oculi remembers a series of meetings he had with Anta Diop in the 1980s.
‘Today’s youth of Africa are lazy,’ lamented an angry, frustrated and contemptuous Professor Cheik Anta Diop. He expressed this view in 1980 during my first interview with him in his research laboratory in Dakar. That laboratory was funded for him by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. It was in reality a glorified prison in which President Leopold Senghor had locked him up by ordering the University of Dakar not to allow him to teach students and hold seminars. Senghor also denied him a visa to travel out of Senegal and the French government had reinforced the prison by pressurising former French colonies not to allow him to teach and give public lectures and seminars in their countries.