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The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder, which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world.

— Cheikh Anta Diop

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More quotes by Cheikh Anta Diop

The Europeans looked down on the Black world and condescended to touch nothing but its riches.

The ancient Egyptians were Negroes. The moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world.

Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.

Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent debtor, that Black world is the very initiator of the "western" civilization flaunted before our eyes today.

Already during the Middle Ages, the memory of a Negro Egypt that had civilized the world had been blurred by ignorance of the antique tradition hidden in libraries or buried under ruins. It would become even more obscure during those four centuries of slavery.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Cheikh Anta Diop (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.