That is a fact which has been observed, not the fruit of imagination. Nor is it a miraculous, inexplicable fact. Accordingly, the historian need not be astonished by it; his role ought to be that of seeking out and presenting plausible explanations for such phenomena.

The same question could be asked about the Greeks as compared with the rest of Europe. After their early contact with the world to the south and cultural exchanges with Egypt and Crete, they escaped barbarism in the twelfth century and became civilized between the twelfth and fifth centuries B.C. With the Etruscans, they remained the only civilized people in all Europe. The other European peoples, farther away from the southern cultural centers, remained steeped in barbarism until the Middle Ages, with the exception of the Latins, who also became civilized by contact with the Etruscans and Greeks.

Obviously, instead of regarding Greek civilization as an unusual and more or less miraculous phenomenon, we can easily explain it by placing it in historical and geographical context. A similar explanation can also be given for Egypto-Nubian civilization.

Concluding the first part of Nations negres et culture, I emphasized that Egyptian civilization did not indicate any racial superiority, but was almost the result of a geographical accident. It was the special character of the Nile Valley that conditioned the politico-social evolution of the peoples who migrated there. The extensiveness of the floods of the Nile forced all the inhabitants of the valley to fact the annual event collectively, to regulate their whole life in its smallest details on the inundation. To survive, each clan had to rid itself early of its selfishness. When the flooding began, no clan was able to meet the situation alone; each need the others’ assistance, the solidarity of all clans for the survival of the community. These were the working conditions that soon led the clans to unite and favored the rise of a central authority to coordinate all social, political, and national activity. Until the invention of geometry, none of the material and intellectual activity of the Egyptians was done for its own sake. In its beginnings geometry was an invention enabling them to locate scientifically the exact boundaries of each inhabitant’s property after the floods. Nowhere was dependence on the geographical setting and the way of life so close. This imperious necessity seems to explain, at least in the essentials, the anteriority of the Egyptians and Nubians on the road to civilization. 

All other peoples, Black of White, who were subjected to less stringent living conditions requiring a less formal collective action, attained civilization later than the Egyptians. Accordingly, why should it be surprising that certain Blacks and certain Whites became civilized while others were in barbarism? Peoples placed in more favorable conditions are civilized earlier than others, whatever their color, independently of their ethnic identity, and that is all. 

Source: Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, pg. 241-2. 1955.