Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December 1923 in Thieytou, Diourbel Region – 7 February 1986 in Dakar) was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Cheikh Anta Diop University, in Dakar, Senegal is named after him.

Diop was born to an aristocratic Muslim Wolof family in Senegal where he was educated in a traditional Islamic school. Diop's family was part of the Mouride sect, the only independent Muslim group in Africa according to Diop. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Senegal before moving to Paris for graduate studies where he ended his scholastic education.

In 1946, at the age of 23, Diop went to Paris to become a physicist. He remained there for 15 years, studying physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie's son-in-law, and ultimately translating parts of Einstein's Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof.

Diop's education included History, Egyptology, Physics, Linguistics, Anthropology, Economics, and Sociology. While studying in Paris, Diop studied under André Aymard, professor of History and later Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris through which he "gained an understanding of the Greco-Latin world. As a student of Gaston Bachelard, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, André Leroi-Gourhan, and others" Diop "acquired proficiency in such diverse disciplines as rationalism, dialectics, modern scientific techniques, prehistoric archeology and so on." Diop was also "the only Black African of his generation to have received training as an Egyptologist." "More importantly" he "applied this encyclopedic knowledge to his researches on African history."

Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States.

He is best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in the African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".

Van Sertima was born in Karina Village, Guyana, when Guyana was still a British colony; he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry.^{[citation needed]} He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. In addition to his creative writing, Van Sertima completed his undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at SOAS in 1969, where he graduated with honors.^{[citation needed]} During his studies, he learned Swahili and Hungarian.^{[citation needed]} From 1957 to 1959, worked a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964; they adopted two sons.

Marimba Ani (born Dona Richards) is an anthropologist and African Studies scholar best known for her work Yurugu, a comprehensive critique of European thought and culture, and her coining of the term Maafa for the African holocaust.

Marimba Ani completed a BA degree at the University of Chicago, and holds MA and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School University. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, she served as an SNCC field secretary, and married civil-rights activist Robert Parris Moses; they divorced in 1966. She has taught as a Professor of African Studies in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York City, and is credited with introducing the term Maafa to describe the African holocaust.

Ani's ground-breaking 1994 work, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, examined the influence of European culture on the formation of modern institutional frameworks, through colonialism and imperialism, from an African perspective. Described by the author as an "intentionally aggressive polemic", the book derives its title from a Dogon legend of an incomplete and destructive being rejected by its creator.

Bernard Lugan (born 1946 in Meknes, Morocco) is a contemporary French historian and Associate Professor of African history at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, in France. He's also teaching at the French Institute of Defense Studies. He has an academic rank as "Maître de conférences". A specialist of Africa since 1971, he authored many books on the African continent. He was the editor of "L'Afrique réelle".

He studied at the Paris X University Nanterre and edited a thesis (third cycle doctorate) naming "L'Économie d'échange au Rwanda de 1850 à 1914". He also has lived for an extended time in Africa, especially in Rwanda where he has conducted significant research, and has taught African History at the National University of Rwanda. In 1982, he authored a thesis for a state doctorate naming "Entre les servitudes de la houe et les sortilèges de la vache : le monde rural dans l'ancien Rwanda".

Lugan's notable work includes several books on Southern Africa, Morocco and Rwanda including "History of South Africa", When Africa was German and African Legacy, Solutions for a Community in Crisis where he describes how individualism hasn't replaced preexisting loyalties to clans, groups, and tribes. In this book, he rejects what he calls "the victimization paradigm," which says colonial exploitation and the slave trade brought Africa to its knees, rejects solutions based on Western guilt and claim that a correct interpretation of history is necessary for Africans to "build a future on a more solid foundation" and save an African continent ravaged by famine, economic disaster and civil war. He notably proposes a redrawing of national African frontiers in accordance with ethnic groupings and promotes a new type of democracy, more rooted in those native groupings rather than on Western "one man one vote" system.

Alexandre Adler (born September 23, 1950 in Paris) is a French historian, journalist and expert of contemporary geopolitics, the former USSR, and the Middle East. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (2002). A Maoist in his youth and then a member of the Communist Party (PCF), he shifted to the right at the end of the 1970s and has since become close to US neoconservatives, as did his wife Blandine Kriegel (daughter of the communist Resistant Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont). Adler is the counsellor of Roger Cukiermann, chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France).

Born in 1950 in Paris into a German-Jewish family, which survived World War II and the Holocaust, Adler is a history graduate of the École normale supérieure (1969–1974). He directed the Chair for International Relations of France’s Ministry of Defense Interarmy College of Defense (1992–1998) where he remains a professor of higher military learning.