Diop, Sankara and the Revolutionary Lineage of the Confederation of Sahelian States

The “southern and northern cradle” is how the brilliant anthropologist, nuclear physicist, chemist and historian, Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, names his theory on the central differences in the development of Africa and Europe. His focus? A theoretical explanation for the development of private property in Europe vs the collective stewardship of land in Africa. The theory is the underpinning of Diop’s 1959 book “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity.” In the historically grounded theories of the southern and northern cradles, Diop sets up a pathway for a planned economy and federated state for all of Africa to be understood as an indigenous solution to European imperialism, rather than an importation of a European political structure to address a European based problem. The proof of Diop’s intentions are visible in his vision for a federated state “Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State” which came the following year, 1960 (both books were published in English in 1978 and this is discussed below). I am curious why this highly politically interested historical analysis is named as if its only focus is anthropological. The naming fundamentally under describes that at which we’re looking and contributes to it being miscategorized as an Afrocentric historical text rather than an African historical materialist correction of Friedrich Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” the classical historical materialist theory of the State and the basis of Vladimir Lenin’s “The State and Revolution.”

Further contributing to an under-recognition of Diop’s work is Dr John Henrik Clarke’s Introduction to the 1978 Third World Press (TWP) edition. Although Diop plainly names his interest in an African historically based theory of the state at both the book’s opening and near its close as he very intentionally focuses on Friedrich Engels’ work on the State, Dr. Clarke omits this discussion entirely. Instead, Dr. Clarke focuses only on his close friend’s analysis of the role of women in African history and culture. TWP’s selection of Dr. Clarke to write the Introduction, even though Clarke was outspoken in his view that Marxism was not a useful or needed tool for African liberation, is not that surprising considering Third World Press’s Founder Haki Madhubuti’s engagement with Marxism at this time. This was an unfortunate period in which Madhubuti was in a conflict with Amiri Baraka that began in 1974 when the Congress of African People became a Marxist Leninist Organization. This is unfortunate because in ignoring the crux of Diop’s dialectical and historical materialist argument for a reexamination of the role of the State in African liberation, the Introduction missed an opportunity to lift up Diop’s unique historical-political-cultural framing and align it with actual socialist revolutionary movements of that moment including, the Black Panther Party, Walter Rodney and the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, Maurice Bishop and The New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, to name a few. A disservice to the supposed objective of African Centeredness. How do we imagine we are going to have African centered schools all throughout a country without control of the State, the end of imperialism and the suppression of the European capital class?

The aspirations to an African ideological purity pursued in African centeredness is not one found in either the choices of the vast majority of African people or the minority that is African Traditional Religious (ATR) practitioners in the West. I offer the latter example because, along with capoeiristas, African-Brazilian martial artists, Black ATR practitioners have dedicated the most time in the U.S. to recovering and practicing Africanity on a daily basis. Rather than an ideological purity, Diop is pointing to an African ontological cohesion, a cohesiveness in understanding what life is at its root, its unlimited interrelatedness rooted in a shared historical experience going back millenia, rather than a biological or race basis. African Ideological purity is not the objective of an Africana ontological perspective. Inside the continent, African peoples borrowed from one another across borders and, later, outside of the continent, from European and Arab people post invasions and occupation.

Relying on my experience in ATRs and capoeira, fundamental to an Africana ontology is a willingness to borrow and use what works, rather than focusing on proving an African provenance, or source of an idea or practice in order to use it. It is this ontological unity of seeing the interrelatedness of life, and thus the collective stewardship of land, rather than its separateness and the development of private property, that Diop is arguing for in the Cultural Unity of Black Africa. It is the seeing of this interrelatedness that allows spirituals, jazz, hip hop, fraternity and sorority stepping, to qualify as African despite the fact they also pull in some aspects of the hegemonic European culture. Yes, the options available are due to capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, and, as such, all of these forms carry aspects of that capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, and are worthy of criticism and improvement. However, rejecting Marx in the pursuit of being African only conceals its opposite, replicating within Black culture the European ruling class’s false claims to historical purity. Third World Press’s skipping over what is the crux of the argument does a great disservice to Diop’s work in that it contributes to our missing what Diop is offering in “Cultural Unity.” Going back to this text 30 years after I first read it and seeing how much I underlined this Introduction, I see how this Introduction contributed to my missing what is the actual focus of this text.

However, grounding ourselves in what is actually taking place in the material world rather than simply ideas, exciting events are taking place. The CES, the Confederation of Sahelian States, which consists of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, and inspired by the Marxist-Leninist, Burkina Faso revolutionary President, Thomas Sankara, among others, is aligned with Diop’s work on the need for a Federated State. Tellingly, Sankara spoke to Diop’s importance in his opening speech at the International Symposium for the Creation of the Black Institute April 21,1986. I will close with Sankara’s comments on Dr. Diop who had just passed:

“First and foremost, I would like to pay a much deserved tribute to Cheikh Anta Diop. At the time when we were working to organize this symposium, when he was on our list in the place that he deserves, among the personalities of the Black world, the great defender of African people, of Black people, the eminent man of culture, the professor Cheikh Anta Diop passed away in Dakar. All of Africa mourned him and still mourns him. All of intellectual and cultural Africa laments his death, and the scientific world observes with a deep bitterness the void he leaves. If it is normal and fair to pay all the venerable tributes that this great African, Cheikh Anta Diop, deserves, it would hardly be enough to mourn him. One does not cry for great men. Cheikh Anta Diop was a giant. The best tribute that we could give him is to commit ourselves to continuing with the same courage, the same sincerity, with the same skills the work he undertook with so much love and respect for Black people and Black civilizations. And, we sincerely think, in this solemn moment of the symposium that we will begin soon, that the Black Institute, through its ideals, is the perfect place to pay homage to him, to preserve him from being lost, from transfiguration, and from forgetting—the image that the modern world must keep of him.”

Love and light to the memory of Dr Cheikh Anta Diop and Thomas Sankara. Long life and expansion into a Federated Africa to the Confederation of the Sahelian States!

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