Théophile Obenga


Théophile Obenga is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism and an Afrocentrist.

Background

Obenga was born in 1936 in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo.
Théophile Obenga has studied a wide variety of subjects and has obtained a wide range of degrees. His degrees include:
Théophile Obenga holds the Ph.D. in Letters, Arts and Humanities from Montpellier University, France. He is a member of the French Association of Egyptologists and of the African Society of Culture. He contributed as part of the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization program, to the 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 in Libreville, Gabon. He is the Director and Chief Editor of the journal Ankh.
From January 28 to February 3, 1974 at Cairo, Egypt, Théophile Obenga accompanied Cheikh Anta Diop as Africa’s representatives to the UNESCO symposium on “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script.” This meeting remains one of the single most important and famous defenses of African intellectual and historical integrity in the modern era.

Linguistic theories

During the 1974 UNESCO Cairo symposium, The peopling of ancient Egypt and the deciphering of the Meroitic script, Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga were among its participants. Adding on to Diop's Black Egyptian hypothesis, Theophile Obenga focused on linguistics. Obenga criticized Joseph Greenberg's method, and he sought to prove that the Egyptian language is genetically related to languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Obenga analyzed typological similarities in grammar as well as examined the word forms of ancient Egyptian and numerous African languages such as Wolof. He considers the similarities between Egyptian and the languages he analyzed to be greater than the similarities between the Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian languages, which Greenberg grouped together as the Afroasiatic languages.
Obenga proposes three major language families for Africa:
Obenga’s Negro-Egyptian language family is composed of: