With a dialogue track in French and Wolof, English subtitles, and an original score by the jazz musician Randy Weston, Ousmane William Mbaye’s biographical documentary on the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop is not only well filmed and edited, but is most useful historically and educationally. This documentary urges viewers to reflect on the boundaries between science and history, geography and identity, political context and intellectual research. One of the sons of Cheikh Anta Diop, Cheikh Mbacké Diop, served as the scientific advisor. Laurence Attali’s skillful editing of historical material such as photographs, newspaper headlines, and archival footage links the present to the past with both clarity and creativity.
Since this documentary is very much a Senegalese project, much attention is devoted to the little-known locations of Cheikh Anta Diop’s early education. We also get an external view of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, and a major avenue in Dakar that has been named after the famous scholar. On the whole, Mbaye’s biography becomes a journey in space and time that captures the meaningful details of growing up in a state of constant subordination.
Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) was a brilliant student from an early age who completed his baccalaureate degree much earlier than his peers. In 1946 he enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he studied with the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard and the anthropologist Marcel Griaule and worked in the laboratory of the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In the course of his studies Diop translated Einstein’s theory of relativity into the Wolof language, thus pioneering cross-cultural dialogue and mutual respect and countering the French colonial stereotype of the uneducated African.
A participant in the very first demonstrations against French colonial rule in Africa and Indochina, Diop finally received his doctoral degree after multiple rejections of his thesis due to its anticolonial slant. The film then traces his career, book after book, conference after conference, in Dakar and Cairo, in Guadaloupe and the United Sates, in Niger and Cameroon, as Diop becomes a world-wide yet controversial celebrity charged by UNESCO with major responsibilities for developing the African intellectual discourse for the rest of the world.
Diop was an anthropologist and a scientist who studied, among other topics, evolution and Darwinian natural selection with a focus on Africa. Diop battled throughout his life against Eurocentric assumptions, proposing, among other innovative ideas, that the origins of humankind were in Africa rather than Greece. The documentary includes a shortened version of a 1985 television interview conducted in Atlanta, Georgia, in which he presented his ideas. The regions of Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa, he explained, were the cradle of the first six proto-human specimens. Since these proto-humans appeared near or below the Equator, their skin contained a high melanin content, which is also nature’s way of providing protection from the sun. The first five specimens did not survive. Only the sixth phenotype was fully human in a way we would recognize, with a developed brain capable of language, thought, and art. This black Homo sapiens eventually moved beyond Africa to Europe, where skin color mutated to accommodate the cold European climate. This indication of race, therefore, emerged relatively late in human evolution in response to geographical migration.
Diop was also an Egyptologist who used Egypt as a linguistic case study to demonstrate etymological similarities between modern Wolof and the ancient hieroglyphs. The title of the documentary, Kemtiyu, means black in ancient Egyptian and in today’s Wolof. Once he returned to Senegal from Paris in 1960 he spent the rest of his life measuring the melanin content of Egyptian mummies with the goal of assessing the climatic conditions of Egypt. Diop’s application of the so-called carbon-14 dating method, or “radioactive dating,” to the biology of melanin allowed him to prove that the ancient Egyptians had a dark skin coloring.
Overall, Mbaye’s documentary demonstrates that Diop’s work is much more complex than many may have assumed and that in comparison to better-known writers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, this interdisciplinary scholar has not received the full attention he deserves in the postcolonial classroom. We hear testimonies throughout from family members, friends, and colleagues, although Mbaye takes an explanatory rather than a celebratory approach to Diop’s biography. We also hear from one of his opponents, the biological anthropologist Alain Froment from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, who rejects Diop’s evolutionary arguments and instead holds to notions of national and racial purity based on biometric evidence. The film’s presentation of this ongoing controversy reminds the viewer that science is not always infallible and objective; its conclusions change over time, and research findings can be influenced by cultural biases.
Diop’s story overall is an example of intellectual courage. Passionate about his topics, he asked new questions and denounced the ways in which European science is still shadowed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism. Diop’s ideas still struggle for recognition, yet they also inspire new generations of educators and students. Although the film is largely discursive, one poetic sequence stands out. A large flock of small birds sits in an orderly fashion, like diligent students in a classroom, on the telephone wires of an urban environment; later on, we see one bird flying alone in the sky. This avian iconography makes its point subtly and effectively. Diop spent most of his life stretching his wings and flying solo above the intersection of several disciplines, but today he has many followers who come together and admire his exploration of broader horizons.
In the end, Mbaye’s documentary tells the story of someone who paid a high personal price to rewrite singlehandedly the entire intellectual history of a whole continent. In one of the film’s interviews we learn that Diop’s favorite activity as a young boy involved trapping a vulture—a detail suggesting that the evocative bird imagery in fact had a literal basis. At the opening of the film Mbaye presents an interesting visual contrast between the horizontality and stability of the opening long take and the dangerous verticality of the following sequence in which the young Diop, after seemingly releasing his prey, hangs off the bird’s feet for a short thrilling ride in the air. Early on, Diop imagined his future path: he knew that he would fly in the face of convention and soar high. Despite the difficulties of his career and his inability to vanquish the forces of oppression, this is the image that remains with us.
