Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/18

Babacar Sedikh Diouf (Serer: Babakar Sidiix Juuf) is a Senegalese historian, author, researcher, campaigner against "Wolofization", a Pan-Africanist, and former teacher. He has written extensively about the history and culture of Senegal, Africa, and that of the Serer ethnic group to which he belong. He usually writes by the pen name Babacar Sedikh Diouf.

Diouf was one of the first (if not the first) to explain the Serer religious significance of the Senegambian stone circles. His work published on July 7, 1980 on the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil became headline news and was picked up by the prehistorian and archaeologist Professor Cyr Descamps and his colleague Professor Iba Der Thiam. Professor Descamps was one of the archaelogisgts who excavated the monuments back in the 1970s. On July 28, 1980, Professor Descamps issued a response to Diouf—thanking him for explaining the significance of the Senegambian megaliths which until then were unknown or undocumented. Some of that included the arrangement of the stones and their religious symbolism based on Serer numerlogy. In his joint paper with Iba Der Thiam – titled: La préhistoire au Sénégal: recueil de documents, published in 1982, Descamps and Thiam republished Diouf's work and reiterated their thanks to him for his work two years earlier.