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.

Ani (Armenian: Անի) is a ruined and uninhabited medieval Armenian city-site situated in the Turkish province of Kars, near the border with Armenia. It was once the capital of a medieval Armenian kingdom that covered much of present day Armenia and eastern Turkey. The city is located on a triangular site, visually dramatic and naturally defensive, protected on its eastern side by the ravine of the Akhurian River and on its western side by the Bostanlar or Tzaghkotzadzor valley. The Akhurian is a branch of the Araks River and forms part of the current border between Turkey and Armenia. Called the "City of 1001 Churches", Ani stood on various trade routes and its many religious buildings, palaces, and fortifications were amongst the most technically and artistically advanced structures in the world.

At its height, Ani had a population of 100,000–200,000 people and was the rival of Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo. Long ago renowned for its splendor and magnificence, Ani has been abandoned and largely forgotten for centuries.

Frances Cress Welsing (born March 18, 1935 in Chicago) is an African American psychiatrist practicing in Washington, D.C.. She is noted for her "Cress Theory of Color Confrontation", which explores the practice of white supremacy. She is the author of The Isis Papers; The Keys to the Colors (1991).

Cress Welsing states that a system is practiced by the global white minority, on both conscious and unconscious levels, to ensure their genetic survival by any means necessary. According to Cress Welsing, this system attacks people of color, particularly people of African descent, in the nine major areas of people's activity: economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war. Cress Welsing believes that it is imperative that people of color, especially people of African descent, understand how the system of white supremacy works in order to dismantle it and bring true justice to planet Earth.

In The Isis Papers she postulates the melanin theory, a hypothesis that has been called pseudoscientific and black supremacist, that white people are the genetically defective descendants of albino mutants. She posits that because of this defective mutation, they may have been forcibly expelled from Africa, among other possibilities. Welsing proposes that, because it is so easy for pure whiteness to be genetically lost during interracial breeding, light-skinned peoples developed an aggressive colonial urge and their societies dominated others militarily in order to preserve this light-skinned purity. Welsing ascribes certain inherent and behavioral differences between black and white people to a "melanin deficiency" in white people. Welsing proposes what she calls a "functional definition of racism":

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."