Where did the Black populations go? When we expounded, in Nations negres et culture, the thesis of a Negro Sahara, we encountered considerable hostility from those who considered themselves experts on the subject. Today, with the recent discoveries of Henri Lhote, refutation is no longer possible. In the section of Nations negres et culture on the peopling of Africa from the Nile Valley, the route from Egypt to the southwest now assumed special significance. In fact, it passes just south of Tassili N’Ajjer, where Lhote made the most important find of cave paintings of the century, after that of the Lascaux cave. This find enables us to affirm that, contrary to the ideas imposed on the world by scholars for 150 years, Egyptian cultural influences spread for thousands of kilometers in the direction of Black Africa. Tassili N’Ajjer was probably only one stop, located 3,000 kilometers (some 1,875 miles) from the Nile Valley. Those paintings establish an evidence link between Egypt, the Sahara, and the rest of Black Africa. It is certain that Nubia also was a great center for the diffusion of cultural influence from the Nile Valley, a kind of hinge between Egypt and other parts of Black Africa…

Let us point out that there are artificial mounds in the region of the Niger Delta, not pyramids, as the author thinks. [We report this] not because of any desire “to disparage African values,” but because a pyramid is a mass of well-defined form, while the mounds are on a round or oval base and in a roughly hemispheric shape. The former are found especially in Egypt, Nubia, and Central America; the latter, in Black Africa and Europe.

I know, from experience, that the Serer tombs, called m’banar, were orignally perfect cones; with time the construction materials settle and the tomb takes the shape of a mound…The tombs of the ancient emperors of Ghana, as described by Arab authors, have become mounds. No one disputes that. The tombs of the Askia are veritable pyramids. But this question is really of secondary importance, for one cannot see how the essence of a pyramid, to speak in the Platonic sense, could be more noble than the essence of a cone.

As for calling the signs engraved on the baobabs in Diourbel hieroglyphics, the author [Diop] is not back home and is familiar enough with the question, I suppose, to judge for himself whether writing is really involved (and the oldest inhabitants can inform him) or whether, as seems likely, these are simply graffiti engraved on the soft bark.

I went back to the foot of the baobab. I was quite disappointed because I hardly recognized the signs that I easily identified during my childhood; the bark of the baobab had developed since then. A little boy and girl passed by and enlightened me. They helped me to locate the signs which, as a matter of fact, are riddles, ideograms: a kettle, a sword, a goatskin, a camel’s foot, a string of prayer beads, and so on, memorializing the visit of a great religious leader of yesteryear, presumably the Prophet. If Mauny returns to the site one day, he will find no problem in being informed as I was about those signs; their meaning is not yet lost.

It is not writing in the phonetic sense of the word, but a series of drawings. The fact that this practice dates from the post-Islamic epoch tends to suggest that it reflects ancient habits about to disappear. On the baobab, along with the prayer beads, sword, and camel’s foot, there was an inkstand and even a pen; so Arabic writing was known, but is absent from the bark of the baobab. This is similar to the attitude of Njoya, the sultan of Cameroon who, although a Moslem, utilized hieroglyphic writing, perhaps because of ancestral tradition, excluding Arabic characters, to take a census of the population of his kingdom, to transcribe all the literature, the oral tradition, and the history of his country.

Source: Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, pg. 255. 1955