Erased People of the Black Land

The Erased People of the Black Land: How the UNESCO Verdict on Kemet Still Echoes Today

BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE

In 1974, a historic confrontation took place in Cairo under the auspices of UNESCO — one that would redefine the question of African civilisation forever. On one side stood the celebrated Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, alongside his Congolese colleague Theophile Obenga. On the other stood a delegation of Arab and Eurocentric Egyptologists determined to defend the long-held narrative that ancient Kemet was not Black and not African in its identity.

The debate was not an academic contest alone; it was a battle over the soul of history. It asked a question that went to the root of African identity: Who were the ancient Egyptians — the Kemetians — whose civilisation formed the cradle of human knowledge?

1. The UNESCO Symposium of 1974: The Case for the Black Origins of Kemet

The meeting was convened under the title “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script” — part of UNESCO’s broader General History of Africa project. It was meant to reconcile long-standing disputes about race, language, and civilisation in ancient Egypt.

Cheikh Anta Diop arrived in Cairo not only with linguistic evidence but with genetic, anthropological, and cultural data that tied ancient Kemet to the wider African continent. His arguments were precise, methodical, and devastatingly simple:

  • The hieroglyphic term Kemet (km.t) literally meant “The Black Land”, a reference not merely to the soil but to the people themselves.
  • The Kemetian language, when analysed grammatically, revealed its kinship with Wolof and other sub-Saharan tongues.
  • The physical anthropology of mummies, along with artistic depictions and burial customs, aligned perfectly with indigenous African features and practices.

Diop’s colleague, Theophile Obenga, further expanded this argument through comparative linguistics, demonstrating that ancient Kemetian was part of the Negro-African linguistic family, not Semitic. The Arab and European delegations, long comfortable in their narrative of a “Caucasian” Egypt, were forced for the first time to answer to evidence they could no longer dismiss as conjecture.

2. The Verdict: UNESCO Recognises the Africanity of Kemet

At the end of the symposium, the conclusions were unequivocal. The Final Report of the UNESCO Symposium (Cairo, 1974) stated:

“All the linguistic, cultural, and anthropological evidence points to the fact that ancient Egyptian civilisation was an African civilisation, developed by African peoples in the Nile Valley.”— UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. II, 1978

And further:

“The ancient Egyptians were not white people who came from the Near East; they were Black Africans, whose civilisation radiated outward into the Mediterranean world.”
— UNESCO, Final Report: The Peopling of Ancient Egypt, Cairo 1974

This was not a symbolic victory. It was a recognition that the civilisation of Kemet — the very root of mathematics, architecture, and philosophy — was African in origin, African in essence, and African in continuity.

3. The Persistence of Denial: The New Face of Colonial Revisionism

Yet, despite this historic affirmation, the Arabisation of the narrative continues. The descendants of Arab settlers who came into Kemet and renamed the land Egypt centuries after the fall of Kemet still claim to be “the Kemetians” of antiquity. They have replaced the Kemetian tongue with Arabic and replaced the African pantheon of gods with the imported theology of Islam.

If the Arab inhabitants of Egypt today were truly the descendants of the Kemetians, why did they erase the Kemetian language — the very vessel of their so-called ancestors’ thought? In all of history, no civilisation ever abandoned its mother tongue unless through conquest or extermination. Colonisers may impose their languages — as the Europeans did across Africa — yet the indigenous languages survive in hybrid form:

  • Nigerian Pidgin blends English with Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo.
  • Haitian Creole fuses French with Fon and Kongo.
  • North African Arabic dialects preserve Berber and African structures.

But in Egypt, no such linguistic syncretism occurred. The Kemetian language vanished completely, replaced wholesale by Arabic. Such total erasure is not the mark of peaceful assimilation; it is the footprint of genocide — cultural and biological.

4. The Unspoken Genocide

If Arabisation had been a mere migration or intermarriage, the Kemetian tongue would have persisted beneath Arabic, just as Yoruba persists beneath English in Nigeria or Berber beneath Arabic in Algeria. Instead, we find silence. No living descendants speak the hieroglyphic or its later Coptic evolution as a native tongue.

In the science of Psychextrics, this is psychologically implausible. The brain does not erase its linguistic roots; it adapts, layering new tongues atop older ones. The total disappearance of Kemetian language from Egypt, therefore, is evidence not of natural evolution but of deliberate eradication. A civilisation was not only conquered; it was linguistically wiped out.

This is why to accuse modern scholarship of “Egyptocentrism” is disingenuous — for there are no Egyptians in the historical sense. Those who now claim the title are descendants of Arab conquerors whose empire displaced an entire people. What remains of Kemet today are its monuments, its papyri, and the African nations that still echo its spirit in art, indigenous governance, and spirituality.

5. The Religious Motive Behind the Erasure

It is no coincidence that Islam — the State religion of modern Egypt — contains some of the most explicit condemnations of Pharaohs and polytheism. The Qur’an portrays Pharaoh as the archetype of arrogance and disbelief, the one who defied God. For a religion that defines itself in opposition to Pharaoh, to inhabit the land of Pharaoh required either conversion or cleansing.

Thus, the only logical explanation for the complete displacement of Kemetians is religiously motivated genocide. A monotheistic faith that recognises non-Muslims as kafir (“unbelievers”) could not coexist peacefully with the polytheistic guardians of Ma’at. Where Islam spread peacefully elsewhere in Africa, it left the indigenous language intact. But in Kemet — the symbolic capital of polytheism of the entire African continent — coexistence was impossible. Only elimination could secure control and legitimacy over the land.

As European colonialism later swept through Africa, the visible evidence of that earlier genocide was buried under layers of revisionist history. The myth of “Arab Egypt” became institutionalised in schools, museums, and international diplomacy. The victors wrote themselves into antiquity, while the vanquished were written out of existence.

6. Diop’s Legacy: The Revival of Historical Truth

Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga did not merely win an academic debate; they reopened the gates of historical consciousness. Their victory at UNESCO marked the first official recognition that Africa is the cradle of civilisation, and that the Nile Valley was its axis.

To revive the name Kemet today is not to indulge in romanticism or Egyptocentrism — it is to correct an ongoing falsification of identity. The erasure of Kemet was not an accident of time; it was the result of conquest and denial. Reviving its name is therefore an act of justice, an act of restitution.

As Diop himself declared:

“To restore the African personality to its full stature, we must restore to Africa its historical consciousness, for a people without a past is a people without a future.”
— Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilisation or Barbarism (1981)

Conclusion: Restoring the Voice of the Black Land

The Arabisation of Kemet was not assimilation — it was substitution. And substitution is the language of conquest. Those who claim descent from Kemet must first reclaim its tongue, its gods, and its moral architecture of Ma’at before they can claim its name.

The revival of Kemet as the name of the continent is not nostalgia; it is reclamation. Just as Diop and Obenga reclaimed truth from distortion, so must Africa reclaim her name from the ruins of conquest. The question is not whether Kemet belongs to us — it is whether we are ready to belong again to Kemet.

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Kemet Revived