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Théophile Obenga (born 1936 in the Republic of the Congo) is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism. Obenga is an Egyptologist, linguist, and historian.
Obenga was born in 1936 in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. [1]
Théophile Obenga has studied a wide variety of subjects and has obtained a wide range of degrees. His degrees include:
Théophile Obenga holds a Ph.D. in Letters, Arts and Humanities from Montpellier University, France. He is a member of the French Association of Egyptologists (Société Française D’Egyptologie) and of the African Society of Culture (Présence Africaine). He contributed to the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program consecrated to writing of the General History of Africa and the Scientific and Cultural History of Humanity. He was, until the end of 1991, Director General of the Centre International des Civilisations Bantu (CICIBA) in Libreville, Gabon. He is the Director and Chief Editor of the journal Ankh. From January 28 to February 3, 1974, Obenga, Cheikh Anta Diop, and numerous professors from Egypt and Sudan were Africa's representatives to the UNESCO symposium in Cairo on "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script".
During the 1974 UNESCO Cairo symposium, The peopling of ancient Egypt and the deciphering of the Meroitic script , Cheikh Anta Diop and Obenga were among its participants. [2] [3] [4] Adding on to Diop's African origin of ancient Egypt model, Theophile Obenga focused on linguistics. [2] [3] [4] Obenga criticized Joseph Greenberg's mass comparison method, for its inability to prove genetic relationships among languages. He cited the work of Istvan Fodor who also criticized Greenberg's multi lateral comparative analysis. [5] Obenga through the usage of the historical comparative method sought to prove that the Egyptian language is genetically related to the majority of the languages in Africa. [2] [3] [4] Obenga analyzed typological similarities in grammar as well as examined the word forms of ancient Egyptian and numerous African languages such as Wolof [2] [3] [4] and discovered that the similarities between the ancient Egyptian language and the African languages he analyzed to be greater than the similarities between the Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian languages, which Greenberg grouped together as the Afroasiatic languages. [2] [3] [4] Obenga revealed 101 putative cognates in African languages classified in different families by Greenberg. These languages share the same word across the length and breadth of the continent. According to Kambon, the sheer spatial and temporal depth involved makes the notion that these terms were borrowed from one language family to another highly unlikely. These lexical commonalities point to a common ancestral proto-language from which they are all descended. [6]
Obenga proposes three major language families for Africa: [7] [8] [9]
Obenga developed Cheikh Anta Diop's Paleo African language family as Negro-Egyptian. This family is composed of: [7] [9]
Rules of historical linguistics “Historical linguistics” or even “historical genetic linguistics” consists of a diachronic perspective of the study of languages aiming to account for the dynamic nature of linguistic phenomena. To do this, this scientific discipline mobilizes descriptive data made available by synchronic linguistic studies (lexicology, phonology, morphology, grammar, etc.), by comparing them from one language to others (or from language to language). within a corpus previously determined through the empirical observation of a few similarities. This comparative approach aims, according to him, to test said similarities, in order to know if they are “fortuitous”, “borrowed”, “convergent”, or even “inherited”. In the group of languages considered, only the regular character of inherited linguistic properties would constitute the “genetic relationship” common to these languages. In other words, according to Obenga, we should only speak of “genetic kinship” common to languages, on the one hand if they present inherited similarities between them; on the other hand if the regular evolution in time and space of said similarities can be highlighted by the method of historical linguistics. Although initially developed within the framework of the study of so-called Indo-European or Semitic languages, according to Emile Benveniste, historical linguistics can also be applied to other languages of the world; whether they were called "exotic", "primitive" or "without history". [10] Théophile Obenga, believing that the "ultimate goal of this linguistics is to be able to carry out a general classification of all known human languages", undertook - following Cheikh Anta Diop [11] - to apply the method of historical linguistics to “Negro-African” linguistic phenomena.
The Lebu are an ethnic group of Senegal, West Africa, living on the peninsula of Cap-Vert, site of Dakar. The Lebu are primarily a fishing community, but they have a substantial business in construction supplies and real estate. They speak Lebu Wolof, which is closely related to Wolof proper but is not intelligible with it.
Afrocentrism is a worldview that is centered on the history of people of African descent or a biased view that favors it over non-African civilizations. It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.
Doumbi Fakoly is a Malian writer.
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
Cheikh Anta Diop University, also known as the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, is a university in Dakar, Senegal. It is named after the Senegalese physicist, historian and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop and has an enrollment of over 60,000.
Mzee Jedi Shemsu Jehewty, also known as Jacob Hudson Carruthers, Jr. was an African-centered historian and educator.
Jean-Marc Ela was a Cameroonian sociologist and theologian. Working variously as a diocesan priest and a professor, Ela was the author of many books on theology, philosophy, and social sciences in Africa. His most famous work, African Cry has been called the "soundest illustration" of the spirit of liberation theology in sub-Saharan Africa. His works are widely cited as exemplary of sub-Saharan African Christian theology for their focus on contextualisation and their emphasis on community-centered approaches to theology.
Présence Africaine is a pan-African quarterly cultural, political, and literary magazine, published in Paris, France, and founded by Alioune Diop in 1947. In 1949, Présence Africaine expanded to include a publishing house and a bookstore on rue des Écoles in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The journal was highly influential in the Pan-Africanist movement, the decolonisation struggle of former French colonies, and the birth of the Négritude movement.
The question of the race of ancient Egyptians was raised historically as a product of the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy primarily based on craniometry and anthropometry. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture.
Louis-Vincent Thomas was a French sociologist, anthropologist, ethnologist, and scholar whose specialty was Africa. He was the founder of thanatology. After having taught at Cheikh Anta Diop University, he became a sociology professor at Paris Descartes University.
The General History of Africa (GHA) is a two-phase project launched by UNESCO in 1964, producing a volume history of Africa first published in 1981 up to the present.
The Serer religion, or a ƭat Roog, is the original religious beliefs, practices, and teachings of the Serer people of Senegal in West Africa. The Serer religion believes in a universal supreme deity called Roog. In the Cangin languages, Roog is referred to as Koox, Kopé Tiatie Cac, and Kokh Kox.
The Battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune, also known as the Battle of Somb or the Battle of Somb-Tioutioune, occurred on 18 July 1867. It was a religious war between the Serer people and the Muslim Marabouts in 19th-century Senegal and the Gambia, but it also had a political and economic dimension to it: vendetta and empire-building. Fandane, Thiouthioune and Somb were part of the pre-colonial Serer Kingdom of Sine, now part of independent Senegal.
This is a list of states headed by the Serer Lamanes. The Lamanes have a historical, economic and religious significance in Serer countries. The following pre-colonial kingdoms and new states (post-independence) were for a long time dominated by the Serer Lamanic class :
Teigne was a Serer title for the monarchs of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Baol, now part of present-day Senegal. The Kingdoms of Baol and Cayor became intricately linked especially post 1549 when the Faal family came to into prominence, and it was the same family that eventually ruled both Kingdoms with the exception of few interruptions, notably Lat Joor Ngoneh Latir Jobe who was of a different patrilineage.
Amadou Bâ, also known as Doudou Ba, was a Senegalese politician, adjunct to the mayor of Dakar and minister.
Aboubacry Moussa Lam, also known as Boubacar Lam, was born in 1953 and is a Peul Senegalese historian, disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop, who was his primary advisor on his major work, De l'Origine Égyptienne des Peuls, and a professor of Egyptology in the Department of History at the Cheikh Anta Diop University. Lam has been credited with being the most important Diop scholar and being "most helpful and inspiring in defining the nature of the Afrocentric school of thought." Boubacar has been active in seeking to recenter Africans back in their own historical and social context. Lam was also a signatory to an appeal to preserve the Timbuktu Manuscripts. In January 2018, he was listed as a writer and lecturer at Dakar University as well as a participant in the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA)'s and the Global Book Alliance (GBA)'s African Publishers and Other Book Industry Stakeholders Regional Meeting.
Jean-Pierre Makouta-Mboukou was a Congolese politician, academic, novelist and playwright. For his abundant and eclectic work his biographers have called him the “Congolese Victor Hugo” and the “baobab of Congolese literature”.
Boubacar Barry is a Senegalese Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. He was the recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association, and he was selected as the 2016 honorary member of the American Historical Association.
Nioussérê Kalala Omotunde, born Jean-Philippe Corvo, was a Guadeloupean writer, Egyptologist, and specialist in classical African mathematics. He founded the Anyjart Institute of African History based in Guadeloupe, as well as satellite institutes in Canada, Guyana, Martinique, and Haiti. Via his institute, Omotunde worked tirelessly to empower Africans, particularly the Black youth in the diaspora and beyond by teaching African history, origin, and ancestors. Omotunde was also of Project Manager at UNESCO, and was influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop.
This method [of historical linguistics] is well known and has been tested in the establishment of more than one family. The proof has been made that it can also be applied to languages without history whose relationship is noted today, of whatever structure it relates [...] There is therefore no reason to imagine that “exotic” or “primitive” languages require other criteria for comparison than Indo-European or Semitic languages.
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