The first radical literary entry in our month-long Africa Rising programming is this truly groundbreaking work from Senegalese writer Cheikh Anta Diop that shattered the Western colonial domination of Africa’s published historical canon.

Cheikh Anta Diop’s Precolonial Black Africa defiantly dismantles the bigoted preconceived notions of the African continent being a home to “primitives” or “barbarians”, terms proliferated by imperial Western forces during the long century of repeated colonization efforts. Instead, Diop, considered one of Africa’s most brilliant thinkers and philosophers, grounds the full breadth of African civilization through extensive research and an incredibly expansive scope.

Reaching back through history to the origins of Man up through the modern colonial state, Diop offers a unified vision of African history that is both culturally affirming and heartbreaking because of its eventual capture by foreign invaders.

Unlike European literary history, much of Africa has relied on an oral tradition to transmit stories, fables, folklore, poetry, drama, and proverbs – not to mention the rich legacy of storytelling song and dance – for millennia. And so these historical narratives, having not been grounded in text, were exploited by colonial forces who were able to propagate their own versions of the history with little pushback from Western audiences who weren’t steeped in the vivid and abundant communal ‘orature’ of the African continent.

Diop’s revolutionary work, translated from French (in itself an example of the complicated nature of the inheritance of colonialism) sent shockwaves around the globe for finally staking a native claim to Africa’s storied history.