This book will remain a classic as long as there are men and women in this world and as long as the West persists in its history of patriarchy, racism and imperialism.
Prof. Ifi Amadiume, author of Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations.
Cheikh Anta Diop in Cultural Unity achieved a major breakthrough in separating the social and political development of the Indo-European world from Africa. His major thesis is that a matriarchal social system is more given to producing a holistic society as the mother represents nurturing, love, family cohesiveness and an ethics of compassion. On the other hand, patriarchy produces separation of the sexes, war, violence, the reproduction of the family unit above filial attachment to the state. In African Origins of Civilization, through deconstruction Diop shows the anthropological disinformation propagated by the dominant European view, and in Cultural Unity Diop asserts that the African matricentric society generates social balance rather than imbalance, promotes cohesiveness rather than division, adheres to principles of moral behaviour rather than deceit and destruction.
The Cultural Unity of Black Africa is a profound contribution to the universal store of knowledge in that it situates the geographical and cultural origins of patriarchy and matriarchy in Europe and Africa respectively, and shows that social systems evolve out of specific climatic and environmental factors.