The culmination of over thirty years of multidisciplinary research, Civilization or Barbarism is the late Cheikh Anta Diop’s final contribution to the reconstruction of African and world history from an Afrocentric perspective. Here he broadens the project that he began in The African Origin of Civilization, which has profoundly influenced thinking about Africa around the world. Diop offers a critical challenge to orthodox scholarship’s interpretation of Egypt as a White civilization, which arose during the nineteenth century to reinforce European racism and imperialism. Amassing evidence from the linguistic to the archaeological, from the historical to the philosophical, he demonstrates that Egypt was a Black civilization and that Blacks are the rightful heirs to Egypt’s proud legacy. Moreover, he shows through superbly detailed documentation that Greek civilization, long revered as the birthplace of Western thought, owes a substantial debt to Egyptian ideas and accomplishments. Massive in scope and containing more than seventy-five illustrations, Civilization or Barbarism will be recognized by general readers and scholars alike as an unprecedented effort to restore Africa’s past and its place in world history.
